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  • Memory's Daughters: The Material Culture of Remembrance in Eighteenth-Century America
  • Martin Brückner (bio)
Memory's Daughters: The Material Culture of Remembrance in Eighteenth-Century America. Susan M. Stabile. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004. 284 pp.

This original study of literary women and their everyday life remembrances expands significantly our understanding of how collective memories were made in eighteenth-century Anglo-America. The book calls attention to the fact that in recent scholarship the construction of memory has for the most part been considered a public affair. It thus reminds us what we have learned about monumental edifices and their commemorative functions: that innovations in media technology, in particular print, not only enabled the rapid dissemination of news but were responsible for the way in which historical events and figures were remembered; and that the widespread availability of memorable words and symbols morphed specific local memories into general ideas of national patrimony. Following this, it appears as if the construction of collective memories takes place primarily in large scale environments: its agents tend to be identified in terms of momentous events, such as the American Revolution, or public men and their larger than life personas; at the same time, its impact tends to be measured in terms of continental reach or by the way collective memories affected the greatest number of the people.

By contrast, Memory's Daughters argues that for female Americans the making of collective memories was an intensely private affair, inherently physical, and moving at the relatively glacial pace of one individual's lifetime. Exhuming the private lives of five women—Elizabeth Fergusson, Hannah Griffitts, Deborah Logan, Annis Stockton, and Susanna Wright, some of whom had been considered great wits and celebrated hostesses [End Page 387] of literary salons in their younger years, but all of whom spent their last decades in the forced retirement of widowhood or spinsterdom—Susan Stabile reveals an amazing discourse network of "collective reminiscences." This network was developed and maintained by the individual's sensory interaction with the material world, involving the constant production, collection, and circulation of sentimental objects and intimate gestures.

Thus, while previous studies focused on macrostructures, this book engages with the microstructures of remembering in early America. In order to reconstruct the process of memory making, the book engages a highly diversified archive, including diaries, letters, unpublished poetry, architectural blueprints, conduct books from various genres such as medicine or the ars moriendi, and the visual arts. The applied methodological framework is a "genealogical approach to memory making" (5). Memory's Daughters takes its cues from phenomenological approaches to the material world and sensory experiences (engaging, for example, Gaston Bachelard, Yi-Fu Tuan, and Susan Stewart), further linking the terminologies of material culture and museum studies to psychoanalytical and feminist theories of the body. Assuming that women were in general always disempowered, especially in old age, the book acknowledges and convincingly bypasses the poststructural debates over gender and power relations. While it creates a rich and thickly layered historical record, its aim is not to write history. Instead, it proposes a female poetics of collective memory in which the object world that the women tried to preserve not only narrowed the gap between experience and memory but effectively functioned as the material conduit creating memories.

As the four chapters explore the poetics of female memory-making, they examine the way specifically body-related material forms affected not only the sensory experiences but the way these were processed intellectually. Chapter 1 looks at the way in which the five women remembered their living quarters, demonstrating that vernacular architecture served as the repository of a "feminine mode of memory" (14). It compares the Georgian house form, its interior designs, and attached gardens to the trope of the memory house on the assumption that mid-century architects employed a mnemonic approach to their designs (22). It argues that in the same way eighteenth-century architects divided masculine exteriors from feminine interiors, the act of remembering unfolded in a similarly gendered spatial pattern. Moreover, it engendered a kind of architectural topophilia, or [End Page 388] the love of place, whose rhetoric structured daily activities ranging from writing in one...

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