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

Over the past decade, a series of remarkable scholarly works have begun to restore to literary history the vital coterie of women writers, expressing themselves mostly in manuscript culture, who flourished in the Delaware Valley around Philadelphia in the late eighteenth century. Key to recuperating this literary network have been Carla Mulford's edition of coterie member Annis Stockton's poetry (Only for the Eye of a Friend [1995 ]), Catherine Blecki and Karin Wulf's edition of Milcah Martha Moore's commonplace book (1997), David Shields's work on manuscript culture in Civil Tongues and Polite Letters (1997), and Anne Ousterhout's biography of Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson (2003). Susan Stabile's Memory's Daughters joins this distinguished company.

Stabile's contribution to this collective act of memory strikes a particularly resonant note in its focus on memory practices. Memory's Daughters explores the material culture of memory as revealed in the works of Deborah Logan, Susanna Wright, Hannah Griffitts, Elizabeth Fergusson, and Annis Stockton, whose intergenerational literary network flourished from the 1760s through the 1830 s. Taking a cue from recent feminist theories of the body, Stabile traces connections between the female body, memory, and diverse material culture practices. Using the women's writings as her most important primary sources, Stabile provides brilliantly insightful readings of many works that are still available only in archives.

Like the commonplace books so critical to Stabile's study, Memory's Daughters is organized thematically. By refusing a chronological or biographical organization, the book displays a rare fidelity to its subject, presenting the world of a literary coterie in all its entangled, collaborative, and recursive complexity. The four generously illustrated chapters gather material from each of the writers, written over a span of fifty years, clustered around the topics of architecture, technologies of writing, souvenirs, and the material culture of mourning.

Chapter one, "The Architecture of Memory," reconstructs beloved domestic spaces of the Philadelphia coterie, arguing that "women adapted architecture's gendered decorum [which associated interior spaces with women] into an artificial memory system entirely indebted to the female body" (30). Domestic spaces, Sta-bile argues, functioned for these women like ancient memory palaces, with each room provoking its own train of association and memory. Through detailed "walking tours" of Logan's Fairhill and Stenton, Fergusson's Graeme Park, Wright's Ferry, and Stockton's Moven, Stabile traces the connections of architecture, memory, and gender, convincingly demonstrating that these women "mapped their lives through intimate domestic spaces and objects" (73).

Spaces devoted to writing and the material culture of writing comprise the subject of chapter two, "Pen, Ink, and Memory." Comparing Deborah Logan's comments on her writing practices to the advice of handwriting manuals, Stabile reveals ways in which real writing practice disrupted attempts to downplay the origins of writing in the body, especially the female body. As she argues, "written memory authorized a woman's body as the site of knowledge" (125). Memory, in Stabile's reading, allows women to bridge the mind/body dichotomy inscribed by the gender system.

This interest in memory as a bridge between mind and body becomes more pronounced in the final two chapters of the book. Chapter three, "Among Her Souvenirs," explores connections among personal memorabilia, the female face, and aging. Portraits, dressing tables, cosmetics, letters, mirrors, fans, miniatures, and silhouettes all attempted to preserve the face, but finally could only record memory and the loss of past selves. By collecting souvenirs, Stabile argues, women "combin[ed] the mnemonic (and cosmetic) arts of preservation" and thus "became artists" (177). While no amount of painting could preserve the face, memory achieved what cosmetics could not.

Such acts of reminiscence culminated in the material culture surrounding death and dying. Beginning and ending with Hannah Griffitts's decades-long practice of annually elegizing her mother, the final chapter, "In Memoriam," explores the elegiac quality of material practices such as the care of the body immediately...