Writing Women in Early American Studies: On Canons, Feminist Critique, and the Work of Writing Women into History

Today's students of early American materials are privileged to have an expanded canon to read, investigate, critique, and theorize about. Perhaps they don't consider themselves privileged, as they attempt to stride across campus carrying survey course anthologies that can weigh in at somewhere between six to eight pounds, but they don't know what it might have been like to have a lighter load and a heavier burden of the encumbrances of the past, the way students of my generation did. We read a canon of British and British American materials written primarily by an elite group of men whose poetry told of the work of being Christians attempting to thwart the devil while facing personal and community losses. Their prose consisted largely of sermons carrying similar messages or seamless-seeming narratives (because of the passages being anthologized) about so-called savage Indian peoples, disorderly women, uncivilizable Africans, murderous Spaniards, and idolatrous French. Although it might sound exaggerated, my catalogue aptly reports the impression an undergraduate—and perhaps especially a female undergraduate—might have received in the 1970s or even the 1980s. Little attention was paid to the continent of North America beyond the British colonists' toeholds on the eastern seaboard, and materials written originally in languages other than English were studied, if studied at all, in comparative literature departments rather than English departments. This curriculum left a rather lopsided, Anglocentric view of "America," a view more like the one that had emerged in the middle to later nineteenth century, during the era of Anglo-Saxonization of American cultural institutions.

This brief meditation on issues in early American literary canon formation will attempt to offer hints for future explorations in early American women's studies. After a summary discussion of the formation of the American literary canon, I take up the ways in which assumptions about that canon were challenged during the latter part of the twentieth century, the place of feminist critique in the development of a revised canon, and what gets lost when we talk about literary studies and canon formation without attempting to take into account the lived experiences of early women. My remarks, then, will focus on the changing canon of early American studies and particularly on the impact of including women's materials into the mix of writings we discuss. But I will also consider the work yet to be done, particularly the ways in which our methods, while they might seem to emancipate women from the silence of the hidden archive, still work to silence women in history if we attend only to the written word.

Of Canons and Critiques of Canons

Like the traditions and the institutions they foster and serve, canons are, of course, formed according to exclusions rather than inclusions.¹ Canons serve to mark the honorary perpetuation, often inscribed as the "destiny," of the (s)elected from the oblivion of the disregarded. This is evident in the very derivation and use of the term "canon" in the English language. The word first served solely in ecclesiastical sites in the medieval era before it entered into usage in secular and legal arenas toward the end of the sixteenth century. In general, during the early modern era, the word "canon" came close to its current usage in discussions of literary history, at least according to the evidence provided by the Oxford English Dictionary, which defines the secular use of the word as "A general rule, fundamental principle, aphorism, or axiom governing the systematic or scientific treatment of a subject; . . . canons of criticism, taste, art, etc."² To form any canon, a body of sufficiently well-respected individuals who are well-placed within institutional or artistic or media arenas needs to reach some kind of consensus about which materials will (or ought to) matter to the given culture they are presumed to represent and to serve.

Canons, along with the traditions and institutions they preserve, are to be celebrated, perhaps if only for their durability. Even those of us who have been involved with the ideological critique of...