Journeys in New Worlds: Early American Women's Narratives

Some Account of the Fore Part of the Life of Elizabeth Ashbridge

Some Account ofthe Fore Part ofthe Life ofElizabeth Ashbridge Edited, with an Introduction, by DANIEL B. SHEA Elizabeth Ashbridge and the Voice Within Though never entirely unknown to the relatively small audience who have read Quaker autobiography, Elizabeth Ashbridge now makes her appearance to a generation of readers prepared as never before to respond to the significance of her plainspoken yet astutely imagined narrative for the history ofwomen's autobiography .1 That significance may not emerge at first glance, despite or even because of the melodramatic adventures that give the narrative immediate interest: adolescent marriage, followed in quick order by widowhood and parental banishment to Ireland; virtual enslavement as an indentured servant, in America; a more prolonged but no less painful trial as the wife of an alcoholic and abusive husband; cycles of religious seeking and despair punctuated by voices, visions, and temptations to suicide; and finally deliverance, when Elizabeth Ashbridge arrives at a secure faith among the Society of Friends and shortly afterward is informed that she is once again a widow. Abstracted from the narrative interest of such trials, the achievement of Elizabeth Ashbridge as autobiographer may remain indistinct. Since we do not have the original manuscript of her Account, we have access only through the hands of copyists to what she may actually have written, revised, reinstated. The autobiographical persona, although admirable in her endurance, may strike some readers as depending too much for her heroism on a long-suffering passivity. The textual Elizabeth Ashbridge might also appear a creature of male-dominated autobiographical discourse defined, albeit in opposition, by her relation to a series of masters, so that even her final triumph contains an irony: in the end she is delivered into the hands of a master both paternal and divine, a sublimation that only emphasizes patriarchy's dominance over woman's autobiographical act. Perhaps so, by a strict accounting. But Elizabeth Ashbridge is an autobiographer who defeats expectation and overwhelms first surmise. Referentially, her narrative may be "about" a number of things, including, as she herselfwould 1. In a recent doctoral dissertation, Cristine Levenduski has set Elizabeth Ashbridge fully in context. describing the ways in which contemporary "cultural mythologies" about Quakers assured her marginalization and deriving from her autobiography the personal patterns that meshed with the Quakers' sense of themselves as "a peculiar people" ("Elizabeth Ashbridge's 'Remarkable Experiences ': Creating the Self in a Quaker Personal Narrative" [Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, 19891,6-7 passim). 119 o~ O' TN. MEETINGS OF FRIENDS. AND lOME OTHER PLAtli II lPlI~.ZlrlLTAR!lA~ AND ~""EPBRSEl: Figure 3.1 Much of the itinerary Elizabeth Ashbridge was compelled to follow by her husband Sullivan may be traced on this map, which shows Philadelphia at the center of a network of Quaker meetings. Goshen, Pennsylvania, west and north of Philadelphia, became her home after her marriage to Aaron Ashbridge. (From James Bowden, The History ofthe Society ofFriends in America, vol. I [London: N.p., 1850 ].) 120 THE LIFE OF ELIZABETH ASHBRIDGE 121 have insisted, the discovery ofreligious truth. What the narrative enacts, however, is the writer's committed refusal to accept any voice as her own which she has not encountered as central to her own interiority. Her autobiography is at once the product of her status as an American immigrant-vagabond, a Quaker, and a woman. Ifit is true that the autobiographical product, first given to the world in In4 at Nantwich, Cheshire, not far from her birthplace, makes a small circle ofher life, and in language submissive to convention, it is also true that the autobiographical dynamic in which Elizabeth Ashbridge involved herself contained a potential for self-definition which she sought, found, and realized. The terms on which the Quaker autobiographer accepted her task may seem, like Quaker customs and testimonies in general, extraordinarily limiting. What Elizabeth Ashbridge suggests is that boundedness is not bondage, that all writing defines itselfagainst limits, and that the inward space ofautobiography could be a place of discovery for the self-writer who was both a woman and a Quaker. I I Almost everything we know about Elizabeth Ashbridge is derived from her autobiography, although the period from the death ofher second husband, whom we know only as Sullivan, through her marriage to Aaron Ashbridge and her departure for a missionaryjourney to England and Ireland, where she died in 1755, holds promise for further investigation. Given the scarcity of...