Strategies for Teaching Elizabeth Ashbridge's Narrative to Reluctant Readers

My title is perhaps unfair to my students. The students who enrolled in my upper-level seminar on Early American Autobiography in Spring 2003 were some of the best I have had: eager, hard-working, good writers. But it must be admitted that they were, if not reluctant, certainly frustrated readers of early American personal narratives. In their weekly online responses to the readings, a pattern of complaint emerged. Students found the language in the narratives difficult, the religious preoccupations remote, and the texts, well, sometimes just boring. But the most common complaint was that these personal narratives did not reveal enough personal details. The week we read selected Barbary Captivity narratives, one student wrote, "I'm becoming accustomed to being disappointed at not learning much about the personalities of these autobiographical writers," and a few weeks later, this same student wrote with mock excitement, "Thomas Shepard tells us his birthday and why he was named Thomas . . . An autobiography with personal details!"¹

When we turned to Elizabeth Ashbridge's Quaker autobiography, Some Account of the Fore Part of the Life of Elizabeth Ashbridge, midway through the semester, students seemed happier. They particularly were drawn to the drama of Ashbridge's personal life and to the memorable character of Sullivan. In their online postings on Ashbridge, two English majors referred to Charlotte Temple (as Daniel Shea does in his introduction to the narrative ["Elizabeth Ashbridge and the Voice Within" 127]), drawing parallels between Charlotte's and Ashbridge's struggles upon arriving in the American colonies. I thus decided to build on students' impulse to connect the narrative to fiction, as a way to get them excited about Ashbridge and, in the process, to help them become close readers of the "self " and the characters she creates in her spiritual autobiography. This approach—reading for action and character in Ashbridge—allowed me to lead students to an interpretation of what Cristine Levenduski, in her 1996 study of Ashbridge, calls the "dual purpose" (61) of the narrative, the secular and spiritual strands in her text.² Without reading secondary criticism as a class, we nonetheless addressed key issues in the narrative about the significance of Ashbridge's rebellions and of her turn toward Quakerism. This approach also gave us a chance to consider the relationship between fiction and autobiography, leading in turn to a more complicated theoretical understanding of the genre of autobiography.

Nellie McKay's essay "Autobiography and the Early Novel," in The Columbia History of the American Novel, helps to frame questions about autobiography and fiction.³ She writes,

In autobiography, there is always a necessary relationship between the life of the subject and the life in the text, but the separations between fact and fiction are not always clear. Literature is less chaotic and infinitely more manageable than life and so imagination more than absolute historical truth grounds the autobiographical text. Undeniably, autobiography is a fictional form—a realization that need not diminish its social, historical, or literary value. For autobiography and fiction together provide complementary strategies for the art of writing the self.

(45)

I have found that students need to be taught to see autobiography in this way, as a "fictional form"—because, in my experience, students more readily want to grant early American autobiography status as history, and then they see the history these narratives represent as distant and dry. They read for details about what happened, but they forget to attend to how the autobiographer tells her story. Students seem to be better readers of autobiography when they use their skills analyzing characters and dramatic action in first-person narratives.

There is plenty of drama in Elizabeth Ashbridge, as almost every critic of her narrative notes. In fact, it is a commonplace in Ashbridge criticism to list her multiple identities, as a way to emphasize the "uncommon Occurrences" (Ashbridge 147) of her life. Etta Madden, for example, catalogues Ashbridge's experiences, which include, Madden writes: "her elopement with a stocking weaver in England at the youthful age of fourteen . . . widowhood within a year; indentured servant hood, which provided...