Alice Hayes and Mary Penington: Personal Identity Within the Tradition of Quaker Spiritual Autobiography

ALICE HAYES AND MARY PENINGTON: PERSONAL IDENTITY WITHIN THE TRADITION OF QUAKER SPIRITUAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY By Catherine La Courreye Blecki* Recent critics have overlooked the contribution of women writers to seventeenth century spiritual autobiography, especially to Quaker autobiography. Although many Quaker women wrote accounts of their spiritual growth and development, critics rarely discuss their work and instead, confine their analysis to the work of men like George Fox, Thomas Ellwood, and Edward Coxere. If they examine the spiritual narratives of women, they describe their work in passing as illustrations of the conventions of Quaker autobiography. Owen Watkins, for example, mentions the work of three Quaker women in this three chapters devoted to Quaker writers; each time he uses their work as a brief example of the characterisic pattern of Quaker autobiography.1 Critics like Watkins have neglected or undervalued the work of some talented writers , and they have given insufficient attention to the experience of women in the Quaker faith. A careful analysis of the autobiographies of two seventeenth century Quaker women—Alice Hayes (1657-1720) and Mary Penington (1625P-1682)—will demonstrate that they make a literary and historical contribution to the tradition of spiritual autobiography . While Quaker autobiographies are frequently criticized for being vague and for blurring physical and mental detail, these two women were able to convey both the universal and personal *Department of English, San Jose State University. 1. Owen Watkins, The Puritan Experience: Studies in Spiritual Autobiography (New York: Schocken Books, 1972), pp. 161, 169. See also Paul Delany, Brithh Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969). Although Delany quotes extensively from the autobiography of Mary Penington, he does not give her work close critical attention. Even in Luella M. Wright's thorough study, The Literary Life of the Early Friends (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1932), women writers are generally used to illustrate conventions ol Quaker autobiography. My thanks to San Jose State University for a University Foundation Research Grant that helped to finance this study. 19 20QUAKER HISTORY dimensions of their religious experience.2 By using the conventions of spiritual autobiography, they described the universal nature of their conversion, and thus, by their witness, they encouraged other Quakers in their faith. By modifying or altering the conventional organization and style of spiritual autobiography, they expressed the personal reality of their religious experience. Both Quakers and non-Quakers could understand and even empathize with their experience because Alice Hayes and Mary Penington were able to reach the reader's feelings on a universal and an individual level. In his perceptive study on Spiritual Autobiography in Early America , Daniel Shea, Jr., notes that a Quaker writer like John Woolman felt "a moral imperative to remove obstructions between the audience and Truth. Strategies toward union of the autobiographer and his reader might legitimately be employed without dishonor to the Spirit. . . ."3 Alice Hayes and Mary Penington also aimed to unite their experience with that of their readers. Whether their strategies for this union were deliberate or instinctve, an analysi« of their autobiographies reveals that they were successful in finding a common bond between the autobiographer and the reader, which makes their work artistically effective. Their autobiographies are also important social documents because they record the liberating effect that Quakerism had on these women. In an article on the role of women in the religious sects of the 1640's and 1650's, Keith Thomas concludes that it was "among the Quakers that the spiritual rights of women attained their apogee. All the Friends were allowed to speak and prophesy on a basis of complete equality, for the Inner Light knew no barriers of sex."4 Because the Quaker faith encouraged each person to use his or her gifts, women had the sanction and support of the community when they went outside traditional feminine roles and, for example, became preachers. In their accounts, Alice Hayes and 2.Dean Ebner, Autobiography in Seventeenth-Century England (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), p. 120. Ebner does not mention the writings of any women in his chapter on Quaker autobiography. 3.Daniel B. Shea, Jr., Spiritual Autobiography in Early America (Princeton : Princeton Univ. Press, 1968), p. 251. 4.Keith...