Memory's Daughters: The Material Culture of Remembrance in Eighteenth-Century America (review)

This remarkable book is unlikely to come to the attention of most folklorists, but those who come across it will find it rewarding in some unexpected ways. Susan M. Stabile, an associate professor of English at Texas A&M University, has re-created the physical world of "a renowned literary coterie in eighteenth-century Philadelphia" (dust jacket text), not as broad a geographic area as the subtitle suggests, but, given the depth of the research and interpretation, this overstatement may be easily forgiven.

Stabile explores the lives, works, and relationships of five women—Elizabeth Fergusson, Hannah Griffitts, Deborah Logan, Annis Stockton, and Susanna Wright—whose poetry, essays, and correspondence have survived to document the salon culture in which they participated. But this is not a collective literary biography; the author instead has examined the ways in which these women used their writings to document and interpret their physical and material surroundings.

Stabile methodically and delicately accompanies the reader on a tour of these writers' houses, some of which survive as historic properties while others are rediscovered through poems and letters as sites of memory, history, and knowledge. The result is a very different perspective on everyday life and thought during the late colonial and early national period than is generally understood. Stabile's focus on the house "as a particular, intimate, and material form of remembrance places women at the center rather than the margins of early national history" (p. 9).

Stabile describes the custom of "common-placing," the practice of transcribing into a manuscript book those letters, published materials, or other texts that the writer wished to put into a personal memory archive. The resulting commonplace books served as individually created digests of myriad influences and impressions and are themselves valued as material objects.

An entire chapter titled "Pen, Ink, and Memory" not only details the physical structure of writing implements but also examines the placement of the writing desk and the prescribed posture women were encouraged to adopt while engaged in the writing process. This minute exploration of the writing environment is grounded in firsthand experience as recorded in the diary of Deborah Logan: "I am seated on my own easy chair beside my desk with a stool before me covered by a white square board instead of a table, which serves me as such." This writing surface stands "between the Stove and my little maple desk in the dining room, my favourite seat, where I have Books, work basket, and Pens and Ink at hand" (Logan quoted in Stabile, p. 87).

The primary audience for this book would include those of us who revel in the recovered details of the ordinary lives of past generations. This describes those relatively few folklorists who seek documentation of historical material behavior and, in particular, an understanding of the meaning of intimate objects. And yet, the very approach that Stabile brings to her subject might suggest the usefulness of similarly detailed explorations of the physical and material environments of contemporary subjects.

According to Stabile, "[o]bjects do not inherently provoke association; humans project meaning onto them. Breathing life into inanimate objects, women externalized and physically preserved their fleeting memories" (p. 32). Since all aspects of expressive culture inhabit the physical world, and since the concept of memory is vital to studies of tradition, this book is a useful reminder of the depth of meaning embodied in everyday objects.