Memory's Daughters: The Material Culture of Rememberance in Eighteenth-Century America

Memory’s Daughters reflects a number of recent trends in eighteenth-century scholarship, including ever-increasing interest in material culture, the mundane, interdisciplinary research, and the recuperation of women’s lives and works. The book’s contributions are significant and many. Its ambitious and admirably executed goal is to study the way women created and used domestic material objects in the service of cultural memory. Stabile focuses on a group of women whom she calls “the Philadelphia coterie”:  Deborah Logan, Susanna Wright, Hannah Griffitts, Elizabeth Fergusson, and Annis Stockton. These women created manuscript commonplace books of poetry during a period spanning the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. They are “memory’s daughters” because they “recor[d] what is without history” (7). Stabile suggests that these women’s manuscript works are in some ways more authentic than official, national histories. The virtuoso scholarship here bridges several disciplines, including literary history, gender studies, gerontology, architecture, and rhetoric, as well as material culture in many guises (furniture, toys, fans, mourning artifacts, handwriting, silhouettes, and portrait miniatures). The book makes extensive use of illustrations. Drawing heavily upon unpublished sources, Memory’s Daughters provides a look into heretofore inaccessible realms of eighteenth-century women’s existence and creativity.

Some physical description of the women’s commonplace books would have been a welcome addition, as well as an explanation of how many and what kinds of poems they contain. Particularly because these women’s works are so little known, a general overview may have been a useful way to begin. There is extensive and consistent use of quotations from coterie members, but it would have been fascinating to learn more about the coterie as coterie—that is, to be a witness to their interactions. The women are studied largely one by one rather than as a group.

Various metaphors guide the analysis at different junctures: the museum, the garden, the Georgian house, landscape, and the archive. The latter metaphor plays a particularly important role, as Stabile suggests convincingly that both the house and the commonplace book are a sort of archive. She explains, moreover, that the arrangement of her book is intended to resemble that of a commonplace book (13). More like an archive than a museum exhibit, Memory’s Daughters leaves the reader to make connections, the effort revealing a number of treasures.

Particularly vibrant aspects of the work include the links drawn across disciplines as well as close readings of particular materials practices, for instance, the act of writing, in both its pedagogical and practical aspects—women could mix ink but weren’t taught to cut pens. The chapter on women’s mourning rituals, “In Memoriam,” could be read usefully as a stand-alone piece of scholarship. It ranges from the creepy (description of the putrefaction of corpses) to the lovely (poignant recollections of dear departed friends). Its firm grounding in the material world affords the reader a truly fly-on-the-wall experience. The chapter’s illustrations include photographs of a child’s toy coffin (complete with bemused-looking wooden corpse head peeking out) and a black-bordered invitation to Debra Logan’s funeral.

The book is best suited for scholars in the field rather than for non-specialists or students. It presupposes that readers begin with a solid understanding of key terms like “commonplace book” and “memory palace.” Such an understanding is particularly crucial in that Stabile’s analysis bends and extends the usual understandings of these terms. The book cites theorists who offer a number of different definitions of memory (see pages 32 and 81, for example). The reader may be curious to better understand the fundamental definition of memory that subtends the book, which, in its resemblance to a commonplace book, the author says “mimics the way remembrance actually works” (13). Likewise, one may wonder, is every object a “memory object”? Every place a “memory place”? Stabile aims to “present the [...] distinctly mnemonic [...] aesthetics of early American women’s writing practices” (125). Additional development of this idea would help the reader, who may be likely to understand most any of a wide range of writing practices as mnemonic.

The project offers “a female genealogy of memory” (9). Stabile identifies the traditional stereotype of masculine reason/feminine body, and explains that early modern thinkers sought to demonstrate female intelligence by claiming that women’s knowledge and women’s memory were one and the same. At the same time, her analysis emphasizes the female body as the seat of memory. She writes: “Understanding the female body as a vital site of memory, Memory’s Daughters revives the early modern theories that equated female knowledge and memory” (16). One could be left wondering just where the author stands on the question of this gender stereotype.

The reader may likewise be left wanting to hear more about the gender-specificity of practices being discussed, upon encountering phrases such as the following, cited here in schematic fashion: “Such [...] images would enhance female memory” (23). The Georgian house is a “mnemonic topos for its female inhabitants”; the various rooms “represented the compartmentalized ‘rooms’ in the eighteenth-century woman’s mind” (24). “Women remembered the places they inhabited through their senses” (30). “[T]hese rooms resemble the recessed spaces in the back of the female mind” (80). “Women’s ages [...] are fixed—and irreversible” (143). In all of these cases, one may wonder if the findings would apply equally well to men. Another direction for further study may include learning more about the national specificity of the practices described: did French or British women, for instance, try to capture memory through similar material practices (the use of French sources such as a work by the marquise de Lambert as well as Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie suggests at least some continuity across national lines)?

On the part of those responsible for the material production of Memory’s Daughters, some opportunities were missed to make the book’s ideas optimally accessible to the reader. Titles of the two parts, of the four main chapters, and of the sub-sections are cryptic, as is the Table of Contents, which lists none of the sub-sections. The introduction helpfully offers an overview of each of the chapters (14–15), but these overviews aren’t reprised at the start of each chapter. Topic sentences can be difficult to locate. The following key description connects various elements of the book, but it appears after some forty-odd pages rather than at the outset: “As part of the ars memorativa tradition, the commonplace book employed the same architectural principles as the classical memory palace” (45–46).

Richly illustrated, grounded in the stuff of everyday life, and yielding many pleasures, Memory’s Daughters suggests nothing less than a different way to conceive of (women’s) history.