Reading Women: Literacy, Authorship, and Culture in the Atlantic World, 15-18

Chapter 6. Reading and the Problem of Accomplishment

Chapter 6 Reading and the Problem of Accomplishment Catherine E. Kelly In 1789 students at the Bethlehem Female Seminary, arguably America’s most prestigious school for girls, concluded their first public examination with a ‘‘dialogue in verse’’ that summed up their educations. Standing before trustees and town dignitaries, ten speakers enumerated the different branches of their learning, citing the ‘‘uses and delights’’ of each. Not surprisingly, the students first praised reading, which deepened a young woman’s connections to an intimate circle of family and friends, connected her to a larger world, and anchored her in the wisdom of the ‘‘Holy Scriptures.’’ The girls also described their accomplishments : vocal and instrumental music, which generated songs of praise along with the more tactile pleasures of holding the ‘‘sweet guitar’’; drawing, which served as the basis of both painting and ornamental needlework ; and ‘‘tambour work,’’ along with the homelier arts of sewing and knitting. The dialogue confirmed what the examination had already demonstrated, for the audience had listened to two days of recitation, participated in a prayer service accompanied by music and song, and inspected samples of student writing and drawing.1 At the Bethlehem Female Seminary the most prominent ‘‘daughters of Columbia’’ claimed identities as sophisticated and discerning readers, and they did so within an intellectual and cultural context that laid a heavy emphasis on ‘‘ornamental accomplishments.’’ How are we to understand the relationship between reading and accomplishment that obtained at Bethlehem Female Seminary and at scores of other female academies during the founding decades of the American Republic? For the most part, Americanists have cast one as the antithesis of the other. The distance between reading and accomplishment is the distance between the intellectual and the vacuous, between the abstract and the merely mechanical, between power and depen- Problem of Accomplishment 125 dence. If participation in the community of letters offered women a toehold in an emergent public sphere, accomplishments only mired them in domesticity. From this perspective, reading and education more generally signal the promise and the possibility of the American Revolution. Accomplishments register promises betrayed and possibilities foreclosed .2 But these juxtapositions would have made little sense to eighteenthand early nineteenth-century Americans, who generally did not view reading as an alternative to accomplishment, much less as a cure for it. This essay reexamines the relationship between the two by locating women’s reading in the context of their accomplishments and vice versa. By paying close attention to the connections between reading and accomplishment that obtained both in published discourse and at women ’s academies and seminaries, we gain a new understanding of the culture of letters and the culture of accomplishment. More important, we gain a clearer sense of the ways in which reading, especially women’s reading, was embedded in a variety of other polite practices. A close focus on the relationship between reading and accomplishment illuminates the complex and sometimes contradictory intersection of texts, images and objects, and performance that characterized Anglo-America in the long eighteenth century. Just as important, we can see the ways in which cultures of reading and accomplishment together contributed to the contradictory, contested gender dynamics that marked the public sphere and political culture in the early American Republic.3 Reading and Accomplishment in Early National Literary Culture In the enormous published discourse on female intellect and manners that appeared in the years following the Revolution, reading and accomplishment were problematized in remarkably similar ways. There was a broad consensus that the republican woman should possess both education and accomplishment. The problem lay in determining how much and what kind. Writers of all stripes warned of the dangers of excess, of too much reading or refinement. One anonymous writer insisted that although a woman might love reading, she must ensure that she was ‘‘no book-worm, no recluse, no pedant.’’ Another decried the genteel education that produced a coquette who knew only how to ‘‘squeak if not sing. . . . kiss a lap dog with propriety, and . . . faint away judiciously.’’ Indeed, the print culture of the federal period contains a rogue’s gallery of bluestockings and coquettes—women whose misguided educations had ruined them for society, to say nothing of marriage. Too much learning produced a pedant; too much refinement produced a coquette; and too little of either produced a drudge. As the Reverend 126 Kelly John Bennett observed in his popular Letters to a Young Lady...