21
Susan M. Stabile
Before returning to Philadelphia in 1765 from her year‐long visit to England, poet Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson sent a decorative fan inscribed with a poem, “Wrote to a Lady on the Back of a Fan” to Juliana Ritchie in London. “This small Machine,” she promises, “shall make amends by Art,” for the women’s impending distance:
Accept this Triffle from a Female Friend
Selfish the Motive for to gain an End;
When Western Seas divide us far apart;
Regard this Bauble of Esteem a Mark!
The fan, both machine and art, is also a letter. It travels. Written by one hand and received into another, its inscription invites a response.
Two days later, Ritchie’s poetic epistle arrives, thanking Graeme Fergusson for the “little, fluttering gay Machine.” The simple title, “Answered by a Lady to whom the Fan was Sent,” keeps the gift in motion: iterations of their affection and shared lament in the fan’s metonymic inscription:
At various Forms the Printers Hand;
Has here displayd with Art;
Friendship in the distant Realms shall [draw]
Your Image on my Heart.
(Stabile 2004: 155–157)
Their brief exchange tells a story of transatlantic aesthetic production and exchange over the long eighteenth century. It suggests the overlapping, material technologies of scribal (handwritten poem) and print (printed fan designs) publication. A thing‐poem, the fan is also a “portable epigramme,” an inscribed object designed to move between people, blending “emotion, subjectivity, relationship, and thing,” and mediating proximities of place (across “Western Seas” [London] to “distant Realms” [Philadelphia]) and human emplacement (“Your Image on my Heart”) (Benedict 2007: 193; Fleming 2001: 19). Transcribed after her return into Graeme Fergusson’s commonplace book, Poemata Juvenilia (created over the years 1752–1793), the paired poems are also a rhetorical performance: a mise en abyme, objects containing a small copy of themselves. Quotable, the fan becomes an artifact of a cosmopolitan literary network cemented through rituals of polite sociability and scribal publication. Copied, the poem is a material object that sets the transatlantic gift – and its accrued meanings – in motion: first through correspondence between female friends and then through a commonplace book circulated among the writers, musicians, scientists, and philosophers of Graeme Fergusson’s literary salon.
In this essay, I will discuss the aesthetics of scribal publication from 1750 through the early decades of the nineteenth century by putting handwritten literary manuscripts – particularly commonplace books of poetry – in conversation with analogous British‐American needlework arts, African American pen‐and‐ink etching, and Native American basketry to illustrate distinct communal literacies. As modes of social authorship, these manuscripts and objects are what recent art historians call “portable arts” or “objects in motion” (Bellion and Torres 2011: 101, 104). “We have to follow the things themselves,” suggests Arjun Appadurai in The Social History of Things (1986), for an object’s “meanings are inscribed in their forms, their uses, their trajectories” (5). More than a recognizable aesthetic form or practical use, artifacts carry meaning across time and place. It is their “thingness” that accumulates and shoulders these meanings, which express an object’s changed relationship to humans. Accrued, an artifact’s meaning is “what is excessive in objects,” argues literary critic Bill Brown (2001), what gives it a “force,” “a sensuous presence” of the people they’ve encountered (5).
It is the distinctly sensuous materialities of manuscript production and exchange, therefore, that guide this essay: the situated places (domestic parlors and coffeehouses), technologies (quill, ink, and writing desks), script (or hands), poems (written, copied, and annotated in various hands), and human bodies (postured, working, and performing). Reading these artifacts through the lens of material culture theories, I will show how the cultures of reciprocity through which they move are not simply between people and objects, but between people through objects and objects through people. Materiality, I argue, is vital to understanding the early American literary landscape and how we understand authorship (and its artifacts) beyond familiar paper (and its digitized) variants. Because social authorship (handmade, portable, and communicable) is particularly haptic (cutaneous and kinesthetic), it reflects a sensate world of aesthetic experiences that express and contend within the hierarchies of gendered, raced, and classed bodies – hierarchies that still drive debates over literary canonicity. We, too, should engage the historical artifacts of social authorship with our entire sensorium. Deeper cognition, neuroscience tell us, requires active touch.
Offering a useful interdisciplinary frame for social authorship, material culture studies examines the relationships between maker, object, and user, and how they are situated and embodied experiences. Graeme Fergusson’s thing‐poem and its adaptations especially invite the field’s ongoing interpretative methods in both object biography and embodiment. As Appadurai first theorized, objects, like people, have agency, a narrative life cycle recording changing conditions and meanings over time through human interaction. The term agency shifted to biography in the following decade (as in Chris Gosden and Yvonne Marshall’s 1999 special edition of World Archeology) and persists today (as in Kate Hill’s 2014 collection). Though “biography” suggests a metaphorical materiality (i.e. object as text), the emphasis on lived social life illustrates the physical object’s cultural transformations of use and value – handled, adapted, and interpreted – by humans over time and space.
Rooted in anthropology and sociology, object biography resists the field’s original connoisseurial focus on an object’s physical properties (material, construction, design, and function) divorced from its historical context and interpreted through anachronistic and elite curatorial practices of the 1960s, cemented by Ian McClung Fleming’s “Artifact Study: A Proposed Model” (1974). And it critiques Pierre Bourdieu’s essentializing concept of habitus in Distinction (1986): embedded in social structures and practices produced through taste, objects consequently lack agency. More than inert matter in fixed space, then, objects have communicative power. As Alfred Gell suggests in Art and Agency (1998), things carry information, constitute knowledge, and form social identities.
Similarly engaging material methodologies, literary critics have revitalized discussions in object biography through “thing theory,” investigating how people and things share social worlds, mutually constituting one another.
By the end of the twentieth century, material culture studies turned to what is most material in object study: the human body. Sociologist David Howes has invigorated what he calls “the sensual turn” in the field through his focus on what he calls in The Empire of the Senses (2004) “intersensoriality,” which challenges the Western cultural hierarchy of sight and sound (associated with knowledge) over the other senses (associated with the body). This approach critiques the homogenizing material culture methods through “the phenomenology of the senses” (interpreting a single person’s perception as universally applicable) and builds on more recent scholarship in the history and anthropology of the senses, including Peter Charles Hoffer’s Sensory Worlds in Early America (2005), Mark Smith’s Sensing the Past (2008), Constance Classen’s “Foundation for an Anthropology of the Senses” (1997), and Kathleen Stewart’s Ordinary Affects (2007). A theory of the embodied subject, sense studies insists on our multiple ways of perceiving, feeling, and knowing – on a new way of reading agency in people and things. Coining the term “corpothetics” in “Photos of the Gods” (2004), Christopher Pinney suggests that intersensoriality is an embodied and emplaced aesthetics distinct from a detached, visual engagement with the world. It expands our understanding of place as sensescapes in which we experience shared, inhabited environments through our overlapping senses. Adaptable and moving, our bodies make knowledge, its senses make place: our “lived experience involves constant shifts in sensory figures and grounds” (Feld 2004: 179–180). Always culturally and historically situated, sensescapes determine the changing sensory values and practices that emplace (and displace) bodies by gender, race, ethnicity, and class. Chris Fletcher’s (2004) notion of dystoposthesia, or the incompatibility of bodies to the space they inhabit, provides a corporeal frame for socially marginalized groups’ senses of displacement. Like object biography, embodiment studies extends our attention beyond elite, Western subjects.
Both object biography and sensory studies overhaul material culture’s structuralist approaches of the 1970s and 1980s, which read objects as texts. All cultural systems, they argued, were languages with ordered and decodable combinations of grammar and syntax. Folklorists and anthropologists interpreted human‐made objects as linguistic signs and referents, which were largely expressions of the unconscious, the deep social structures embedded beneath material surfaces. Though challenging the curatorial anachronisms of the previous decade, they unintentionally flattened distinctions of social, racial, ethnic, and gender traditions by reinforcing anthropologist Claude Lévi‐Strauss’s universalizing claims about “primitive” and “non‐primitive” communication systems beyond their distinct contexts. If cultural literacies are limited to the alphabetic, then we overlook non‐Western subjects, objects, and technologies of knowledge production. And we dismiss the materiality and meaning of objects by mistaking them for texts.
Yet the question persists. How do we interpret the material evidence of the past (manuscripts and artifacts) without losing inscribed aesthetic practices and cultural meanings (embedded in historical sensescapes) when filtered through contemporary technologies?
Object Biography: Social Authorship as Iteration
Scribal publication, or social authorship, was a preferred mode of transatlantic literary production from the early modern period through the long eighteenth century. Too often misrepresented as an intermediate stage between oral performance and printed book, manuscripts were contemporaneous with but distinct from these technologies. Such simplified models of scribal publication – from authors’ controlled distribution, to private and unrestricted copying, to transmissions through professional scribes, and eventually to the printed book – emphasize circulation without considering production aesthetics and practices. While scholars of seventeenth‐century manuscripts in England and its American colonies examine the political and religious contingencies of scribal publication (i.e. the meanings of factionalism, anonymity, and censorship), eighteenth‐century studies emphasizes its sociality. Private letters, commonplace books, and poetry miscellanies were manuscript communications that valued exclusivity as both intimacy and sociality.
Collaborative, handwritten manuscripts created by elite white literary circles in early America enacted what Harold Love (1998) calls “user publication.” Authors circulated draft and fair copies of poems for critique within coteries, whose members, in turn, copied these copies into their own commonplace books, and sent yet other transcriptions through their extended social networks (Blecki and Wulf 1997; Mulford 1995; Stabile 2004). Extant manuscripts frequently show multiple hands attending to a single poem or in commonplace book compilations. Changes are suggested, responded to, and often initiate a companion piece. Poet Hannah Griffitts, for example, sends what she calls a “hasty” (rather than “fair”) copy of her satire of the 1773 Tea Act, “The Ladies Lamentation over an empty Cannister,” to her cohort, Susanna Wright, who writes her response vertically along the poem’s right‐hand margin, blaming Congress for being “so cruel to the whole female World” by denying them “their favourite Potation” (Blecki and Wulf 1997: 247–250). Annis Stockton transcribes Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson’s “Poem on the Death of Mr. Richard Stockton” while Graeme Fergusson copies Stockton’s companion thing‐poems on a toy hand mirror, eliding them in a single title, “With a small glass to a little Miss and a promise of one to her younger Sister” in her commonplace book in 1793 (Mulford 1995: 301–302, 172–174). Nathaniel Evans (Damon) exchanges a verse dialogue with the unmarried Graeme Fergusson (Laura): “Some Lines out of Mr. Pope’s Eloise to Abelard,” “A Parody on The Foregoing Lines, By A Lady, Assuming the Name of Laura,” “An Epistle To Laura, On Her Parody,” “Laura’s Answer,” and “To Laura, In Reply to the Above” (Ousterhout 2004: 109–110). Locating his final reply “below” to the poem “above,” Evans situates their written (and seemingly spontaneous) banter on the same sheet of paper. Such impromptus were common, not only demonstrating spontaneity, but also ready access to paper and pen in shared social spaces. And they emphasize the poets’ engaged sensoria: tasting (tea) and touching (cannister) and looking (mirror) and listening (dialogue).
Because poetry was a social genre that should both delight and instruct readers, moreover, the colonial and early American elite (as neoclassicists and emerging romanticists by the 1780s) wrote in established poetic forms (i.e. ode, eclogue, satire, character, elegy, hymn, epitaph, paraphrase) that upheld the classical aesthetics of order, proportion, decorum, and correctness, on the one hand, and shared sensibility, on the other. Literary correctness, like good manners, was modeled through rituals of politeness. One such ritual was adopting neoclassical cognomens (i.e. Laura, Ardelia, Damon, and Strephon) to craft literary identities within local coteries that continued a genealogy of the transatlantic traditions they imitated. Imitation, or giving old objects new forms and meaning, moreover, was the persisting aesthetic before copyright strictly defined authorship as singular and public rather than collective and private by the end of the eighteenth century in the early republic. Adaptation equaled creativity.
Authorship, then, was not about originality in the modern sense, but about pleasing arrangements of both found and made materials. Early American authors imitated the British neoclassicists (including Anna Seward, Elizabeth Carter, Hannah More, Joseph Addison, Alexander Pope, and James Thomson), who were themselves imitating such classical authors as Horace, Virgil, and Cicero. A list of representative titles from literary commonplace books illustrates performances ranging from imitation to inscription: “An Ode, Attempted In The Manner Of Horace, To My Ingenious Friend, Mr. Thomas Godfrey”; “On Reading Thomson’s Seasons”; “On Reading Eliza. Carter’s Poems”; “On Reading Dr. Beattie’s Hermit”; “Lines Suggested By Lord A Passage In Lord Bacon’s Works”; “Lines Occasioned By Reading Dr. Leyden’s Beautiful Address To An Indian Gold Coin”; “Lines Wrote In Smith’s Theory Of Morals”; and “Lines writ in the Blank Leaf of Dr Youngs Night Thoughts.”
The recent cultural turn in studies of the history of the book, which includes performance and semiotics along with discussions of orality, manuscript, and print (and I would add, their attendant artifacts), invites us to consider scribal publication as a moment of eloquence – crafted, rehearsed, and performed. Because a handwritten text and its social contexts are much more immediate, moreover, closer to the worlds of orality and performance, a manuscript is what Matt Cohen (2009) calls a “publication event,” or “retransmissions beyond the original event.” The multiple copies transcribed by and circulating through coteries accordingly materialize the “communal, mnemonic, and ritualized” nature of manuscript engagements that happen in various modes over time: “each instantiation of a text works discretely and in relationship to simultaneous and past events” (Cohen 2009: 6–7, 15). Think of Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson’s thing‐poem, for instance, as fan and transcript, in this context. A hand‐crafted gift by a 26‐year‐old author (Laura) in 1765 (Iteration 1) becomes an objectless inscription in a commonplace book recorded sometime between then and the book’s last entry in 1793 (Iteration 2), kept by the abandoned and widowed Graeme Fergusson as a memento of her younger self (Iteration 3). An object’s biography.
Such iterations, transformed by changing sensescapes, are epitomized by manuscript commonplace books. As authors and compilers, transatlantic poets engaged in a kind of bricolage, tinkering with the fragments of their material worlds and making them into something new. The literary bricoleur revises the objects he or she collects and arranges according to contemporary aesthetic values and personal choices as the commonplace book accrues (i.e. quotations, poems, essays, letters), reuses (i.e. manuscript and printed extracts – copied, or clipped and pasted), and adapts (i.e. imitations, responses, annotations) existing literature. Discrete, altered, and repeatable, the resituated extracts become rhetorical commonplaces or topoi (“places”). That authors understood these literary pieces as (im)portable and arrangeable objects is evident in the tables of content and running heads (general topics written across the top margins) that often organize a collection. That they understood commonplacing as a form of social publication is apparent in their books’ dedicatory poetic epistles and annotations, in the unfinished pages and later supplements – for example, Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson’s commonplace books gifted to her friends Annis Stockton (1787), the Willing sisters (1789), and Elias Boudinot or Benjamin Rush (1796). Material, visual, and spatial, manuscript commonplace books articulated intellectual and artistic life, produced social knowledge, and generated alternate publics.
As material objects, commonplace books are not only emplaced, but structural. Like vernacular architecture, literary commonplaces adapted well‐known continental forms into provincial contexts, building past precedents into new structures. As British architect William Chambers suggests in his 1759 Treatise: “Materials in Architecture are like words in Phraseology, which singly have little or no power; […] yet when combined with Art, and expressed with energy, they actuate the mind with unbounded sway.” Rhetoricians since Quintilian reverse the metaphor, imagining textual arrangements of topoi as built structures, “dwelling places,” or “local habitations” in our memory: a palace, a theater, a garden, a house, an apartment, a recess, or even an arch in which we arrange, store, and move ideas. Called copia, accumulated topoi were a “twofold abundance of expressions and ideas,” according to Erasmus, stored in the mind and varied “in manifold ways by putting them into different forms and figures.” James Beattie figured such ideas as moveable furniture (“tables and couches”) and decorative arts (“statues” and “pictures”) (Stabile 2004: 22–23). Commonplaces, then, were both portable objects and their sites of relocation, their innumerable variations a textual bricolage. Each collected fragment, displaced and emplaced, is a new literary event, reflecting each object’s biography and the author’s agency.
Emplacement: Intimate and Counterpublics of Politeness
The topographical practices of commonplace books, moreover, parallel the public architectural spaces of literary clubs and salons, the oral and aural analogues to manuscript performance. In his groundbreaking work Civil Tongues and Polite Letters (1997), David S. Shields began a new school of literary historians that situated manuscript production in the eighteenth‐century “public sphere.” Drawing on Jürgen Habermas’s influential work on civic culture, where the public sphere comprised a complex network of private discursive institutions, including salons, taverns, coffeehouses, tea tables, and clubs, Shields revises the Habermasian notion that shared reason and disinterested political critique cemented these exclusive societies, which were instead dictated by manners. Self‐selected and voluntary, Shields argues, these institutions (and the literary manuscripts they produced) cohered because of common taste, sociability, and politeness. Up and down the east coast, clubs (i.e. The Friendly Society, The Tuesday Club, Calliopean Society, Belles Lettres Club, and Anacreontic Society) elevated men’s conversation as mark of taste. And heterosocial salons, superintended by women (such as Annis Stockton in Princeton, Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson in Horsham, PA, Margaret Bayard Smith in Washington, DC, Harriet Simon Dale in Charleston, Margaret Lowther Page in Williamsburg), elevated it further. Belletrists, therefore, pronounced their participation in a transatlantic culture of sociability in order to display their privileged rank relative to those of the lower classes.
Joanna Brooks’s (2005) work on black counterpublics (while examining print culture) interjects race as a necessary category for interpreting exclusive literary circles. Any counterpublic, she argues, is disadvantaged and so uses collective discourse and voice. In the face of political disenfranchisement and a sense of public white proprietary control, recently freed northern blacks turned to print publication to articulate both black identity and self‐ownership (72–75, 85–86). In In the Company of Black Men (2001), Craig Steven Wilder extends this emerging print culture to black associationalism in the early republic, which surfaced through secret societies, such as the Prince Hall Society, derived from West African society in order to maintain boundaries of autonomous black expression. Yet this expression also adopted politeness, a social formation of respectability and reform, as a mode of black education and a social networking. Social graces and customs were increasingly important as elite blacks began working with white abolitionists and literature “prepared and reinforced ‘the promotion of the polite’” (Sklar and Stewart 2007: 302).
Thinking about black counterpublics as “intimate publics” (Lauren Berlant’s alternative to the Habermasian public sphere), moreover, opens another theoretical space to consider African American literary production through adapted sociability. In an intimate public, Berlant (2009) argues, “you encounter stories of survival tactics and of what it has meant to survive, or not. It promises the sense of being loosely held in a social world.” Non‐dominant social classes produce intimate publics “that provide the feeling of immediacy and solidarity by establishing in the public sphere an affective register of belonging to inhabit when there are few adequate normative institutions to fall back on, rest in, or return to.”
As intimate publics, African American literary societies proliferated along the east coast during the antebellum period, including the Adelphic Union for the Promotion of Literature and Science (1836) and the African‐American Female Intelligence Society (1835) in Boston; the African Clarkson Society (1829) and Garrison Literary Association (1834) in New York; the Female Literary Society (1831), Edgeworth Society (1837), Library Company of Colored Persons (1833), and The Minerva Literary Association (1834) in Philadelphia; and the Young Men’s Mental Improvement Society (1835) and Phoenix Society (1835) in Baltimore. These societies for polite literature met regularly, performing readings of original and selected works. Because politeness was associated not only with people (decorum in behavior and personal style), but also with objects (of taste, fashion, and design as well as the things of everyday life) and space (domestic and public), the African American societies’ choice of a homosocial public sphere for literary exchange and social reform gave blacks public visibility (through ritualized, oral performances) removed from the spectacles of slavery. They established a form of “publication event,” where their lived experience shifted the sensory ground.
Recent scholarship asks us to reconsider the materiality of race alongside social class in the domestic parlor, too, the feminine equivalent to the coffeehouse. Material culture’s “refinement paradigm” of the 1990s, initiated by Richard Bushman’s The Refinement of America (1993), examined eighteenth‐century cultures of politeness through taste: bodies acting in the daily world of consumable objects in which hierarchical structures of pecuniary emulation secured class privilege. Such objects, folklorist Bernie Herman (2007) argues, were a visual and material vernacular of distinction and sociability. Reading the parlor as a social space, he uses inventories as evidence of how furniture established the conversational qualities of a room: tea tables (the ceremony of teapots and cups, sugar bowl and cream pot, tongs and a slop bowl); desks, books, and framed maps (literacy and commerce); mantel ornaments (elegant display); clocks (elite class leisure); and mirrors (a sensus communis mirroring common interests and natural affections). Family portraits and perhaps even conversation pieces hung on the walls: leisured, white ladies and gentleman in studied comportments surrounded by decorative arts and symbols of their learned accomplishments. Sensibility, like tea, was steeped in social engagement (50, 52, 56–57).
Complicating our understanding of the salon, Jasmine Nichole Cobb (2015b) adopts the trope of the “transatlantic parlor” as a material representation of free blacks subject to nineteenth‐century parlor ideologies of decorum. The parlor was a “contact zone,” she argues, for rethinking blackness in an Atlantic world built upon slavery and reimagining itself in the aftermath of abolition, while providing an imagined continuity of an Atlantic world. Black freedom belonged to the home place: nation, house, and parlor. The room domesticated black freedom, bringing freed slaves under control through display in the visual arts. Though free blacks sat finely outfitted for daguerreotypes to document their self‐possession (a representation detached from slavery’s commerce), they were also lampooned through the transatlantic productions of caricature and lithography. The obverse of the conversation piece, the satires promoted images of “flawed Black domesticity,” the aesthetic price of freedom (202, 196, 113). Most popular was Edward Williams Clay’s Life in Philadelphia series (1828–), 14 aquatint engravings (later lithographs), published and sold in small print shops in 1829–1830, which inspired English reproductions and supplements for more than three decades, reaching their peak of popularity in the 1850s.
Portable, visual arts circulated anxious ideologies of taste in England and the United States through material enactments of sentimentalism. Clay’s “A Black Tea Party” (1833) amplifies the “flawed Black domesticity” necessary to cement white identity (Cobb 2015b: 196). Exaggerating the incongruence between blackness, refined taste, and social mobility, the print ridicules the clumsy imitation. “Miss Rosebella,” dressed in exaggerated finery and jewelry like her guests, superintends her chaotic tea table: pouring scalding tea, which tips over a tea cup, which spills onto the black cat, who sprints from the room as the small boy remarks, “I bery glad I not de cat.” Clay’s satire overlooks the doubled intention of postcolonial mimicry that imitates and camouflages its intentions in the same register. Mimicry is a kind of performance that exposes (often unintentionally) the artificiality of symbolic expressions of power. Imitating the sentimentalized codes of refinement characterizing the cult of true (white) womanhood, free blacks employed what Michel de Certeau calls a “tactic” in The Practice of Everyday Life (1984): a deliberate action by the disenfranchised to attain a privileged place of power. White fear of black touch – through material objects – underscores the dystoposthesia (or in this case, strategic incongruity) of black bodies in an upper‐class salon.
A social corrective to parlor parodies, the manuscript tradition of African American friendship albums might be read in response to these racially charged, sentimental performances of race (Cobb 2015a). The books were an iterative event adapting literary and sentimentalism’s readable codes that forged intimate publics to promote empathy and social uplift among African American women. Given as gifts and placed beside the Bible, hymnal, and other parlor ornaments on the center table, friendship albums represented a black woman’s gentility. As manufactured objects by 1825, album books were blank volumes produced to mimic handicraft with decorative covers for inscription and display. Friendship albums are a bricolage of tactile arts: handwritten poetry, flower illustrations and watercolors, pen‐and‐ink sketches, personal letters, and print anecdotes. Scholars disagree about these albums’ generic categorization as a print or scrapbook artifact, as a political strategy or sentimental object, but their original and transcribed work and visual art clearly parallels the manuscript commonplace book’s collaborative practices tailored to free African American women’s cultural and emotional needs for connection. Thus the friendship album is both a literary event and a handicraft. Following the albums’ movements, as Bellion and Torres (2011) and Jennifer Roberts (2014) suggest, unlocks a previously fenced landscape around social authorship.
Philadelphia abolitionist Amy Matilda Cassey illustrates her 1833 album book’s shared construction:
Now reader as you find delight,
In scanning o’er what others write,
’Tis hoped in gratitude alone,
You’ll add a tribute of your own.
And thus with one choice piece at least
enrich this mental pic‐nic feast.
(Dunbar 2008: 126)
Passed between friends along the east coast, who read and added handwritten contributions, the albums were a community‐building practice among privileged blacks in the early nineteenth century, a collaborative and textual variant of their semi‐public literary societies (Dunbar 2008: 123). The albums were never sent through the mail, but carried, inscribed, and returned in person. An embodied aesthetic of inscription, the books brought African Americans face to face. Cassey thus curates a literary object and readable performance of African American respectability and taste – a moveable feast. Her heterosocial (though primarily female) compilation of signatures, messages, and poems (sometimes impromptu, other times transcriptions) praised the author, displayed polite learning, and organized a participatory reading audience through tactile artifacts.
The Thing‐Poem as Manufact
Though material culture scholars have long debated the distinction between word and thing (i.e. privileging texts over objects as historical evidence and reading objects as texts), I would like to revive the dated term manufact – something handmade – to underscore the rich intersensorial entanglements of manuscript and artifact over the long eighteenth century. As a poem inscribed on an object or an object inscribed in a poem, the thing‐poem is a manufact: a poetic treatment of “things‐in‐time,” but also “in‐place.” They are poesies (portable inscriptions written for intimates at a distance), on the one hand, and occasional verse (marking a birthday, anniversary, or public event through epideictic rhetoric to cement communality), on the other. As such, thing‐poems have both social agency and affective power over “immediate, sensual and secular, human relationships” (Benedict 2007: 201). As object and surface, poem and inscription, these manufacts constitute a publication event or “moment of encounter with the thing[,] the poetic occasion” that is made “to be carried away” to a new context, taking “in its fully material, visual mode, as it exists in its moment, a particular site” (Benedict 2007: 205; Fleming 2001: 20). As physical object and tactile metonym for its maker, the thing‐poem raises questions about the embodiment and transmission of meaning in the early American sensescape. The following thing‐poems are telling manufacts that embody each object’s biography of human exchange, revealing the particularly haptic nature of social authorship.
Stitching Hands
In “Lines on Seeing a Map of New England werk’d very Acuratly; by a young Lady at a Boarding School” (inscribed under the commonplace book heading, “Needlework”), Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson (1798) applies the common trope of the pen and needle to printed embroidery designs: “Each nice drawn Stroke with Copper Plates disclose / Clear and distinct each bounded Spot is found; / Correct distinguished from its neighboring ground.” The needle’s stroke (a handwriting term) maps the landscape transformed by the embroiderer’s “touch.” Showcased in Martin Brückner’s curated exhibit, Common Destinations: Maps and the American Experience, at the Winterthur Museum (20 April 2013 to 5 January 2014), maps are social forms of written transmission, mimicking a manuscript’s intimacy with cursive fonts and various sized typography. Schoolgirls copied and sketched maps in their notebooks, stitching together a composite world.
Graeme Fergusson’s map poem also recalls the emergence of needlework pattern books during the eighteenth century. She had a copper‐plate engraving of her Scottish family coat of arms made during her London travels and printed it as book plates affixed to her commonplace books’ inside covers. Later transferring the engraving onto fabric, she stitched the heraldic emblem onto a decorative map for her parlor wall. The map poem thus inscribes the everyday practices of building civic cultures of refinement through hand‐made maps, global topoi hung on tavern and coffee shop walls and displayed through decorative parlor objects, including fire screens, window shades, and furniture upholstery. Such hand‐stitched maps, or cartifacts, were fashionable objects without apparent cartographic purpose. As Jennifer C. Van Horn (2005) illustrates in her discussion of samplers and gentility, these cartifacts were curiously haptic, adorning cosmopolitan bodies as handkerchiefs, neckties, gloves, and fans. Portable maps on mobile bodies.
While the map poem suggests a portable world in miniature, needlework samplers illustrate the mobility of ideas. Much like the handwritten verse, painted flower patterns, and print extracts inscribed in commonplace books and friendship albums, schoolgirls and women stitched and painted samplers that adapted neoclassical motifs (flora, fauna, foliage, and shells) from continental sources (such as painter Angelica Kauffman and poet James Thomson’s The Seasons) into regional vernaculars (Boston, Salem, Deerfield, Providence, Baltimore, Philadelphia, etc.). The compartmented verse and flower samplers introduced in 1750 are specifically arranged like a manuscript book, as Betty Ring illustrates in Girlhood Embroidery (1993). An arcaded floral border typically frames the interior ground, which is divided into nine or twelve equal boxes, alternately filled with colorful flower bouquets and tightly worked verse inscriptions. By the 1780s, women could purchase printed designs from portrait miniaturists (such as Thomas Johnston of Boston and John Bell in Baltimore) but primarily traced or hand‐copied patterns from engravings. Some sketched original patterns into notebooks or paper scraps, reusing the designs. Others pin‐pricked a pattern’s lines by placing it over the fabric and sifting powdered charcoal through the holes to leave the impression. A performance of gentility, needlework manufacts therefore combined exchangeable topoi in new contexts, each physical emplacement a publication event.
Kneeling Slaves
When African American portraitist Robert Douglass, Jr. inscribed a stanza from British poet William Shenstone’s 1744 “Elegy XX” in Mary Ann Dickerson’s friendship album book in 1834, he left a doubled signature: “Shenstone” and “RD,” followed by “(copied poem)” (Dickerson 1834: 3). His parenthetical attribution of a century‐old topos of slavery’s incongruity with Christianity serves as an epigram beneath his pen‐and‐ink sketch of a kneeling female slave, clasping her hands in supplication, eyes looking heavenward:
When the grim lion urged his cruel chase
When the stern panther sought his midnight prey
What fate reserved me for this Christian race?
A race more polished, more severe than they?
The sketch, too, is a copy, either of Henry Thomson’s 1827 oil painting The Booroom Slave or its 1833 lithograph frontispiece to Lydia Maria Child’s An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (Gonzalez 2014: 16–18). The Booroom Slave was a portable image among transatlantic antislavery propaganda begun with Josiah Wedgwood’s 1787 yellow‐on‐black jasperware cameo. Designed for the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, the medallion displays a kneeling slave, the arched inscription above his chained body a prayer: “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” After Wedgwood sent the cameos as gifts to Benjamin Franklin in 1788, the image – and countless variations – circulated in the United States in printed texts and on decorative objects. By 1833, the topos was feminized, the enslaved supplicant pleading, “Am I Not a Woman and a Sister?”
The kneeling slave became a visual rhetoric – a material commonplace – to stir compassion for trafficked Africans, but was quickly commodified as fashionable objects for white abolitionists. As Lynne Festa argues in Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth‐Century Britain and France (2006), the slave body became an emblem of white women’s sympathy, decorating their bodies and houses (i.e. brooches, hairclips, cufflinks, tea ware, cushion covers, fire screens, needlework pictures, and door pulls). Male or female, the kneeling slave thus consolidated metropolitan identities of pity and compassion between white consumers rather than with suffering slaves, racializing emotionally charged stereotypes.
Douglass’s sketch of the kneeling female slave in Dickerson’s album book thus recuperates and reframes the slave’s decorative body as a sentimental emblem for African American solidarity perpetuated by other black artists. Engraver and lithographer Patrick Reason, for example, stippled a variation of the female supplicant for the American Antislavery Society’s letterhead, signed: “Engraved by P. Reason, A Colored Young Man of the City of New York, 1835.” Reproductions of this engraving circulated in countless abolitionist publications. Like Mary Ann Dickerson, who shared her friendship album’s etched slave portrait within her circle, African American women inscribed the kneeling slave in their textile work. Sarah Sedgwick embroidered a commemorative sampler of her manumission with a kneeling female slave, stitching title and date, “Emancipation” “1832.” And Deborah Coates of Philadelphia pieced a multicolor quilt of geometric silk scraps with a stamped image of kneeling slave and inscription, “Deliver from the oppression of man” (c. 1840–1850). The pieced quilt, as repurposed fabric and moveable topos, roots communal memory in the female slave’s body, wrapped around the quilters like a second skin. Each an adaptation of the kneeling slave, the objects exemplify the social authorship of blackness, where script, as Robin Bernstein (2009) argues in “Dances with Things: Material Culture and the Performance of Race,” is more than handwriting or prescribed actions; it is the improvisation of and resistance to received narratives.
Painted Baskets
Categorizing a handwoven and painted Mohegan wood‐splint basket as a thing‐poem would incorrectly impose Western aesthetics on an Indigenous manufact, but I place it here as a contemporaneous and culturally emplaced example of Native American social authorship. “How do we begin to read the basket’s narrative?” asks literary historian Stephanie Fitzgerald (2008: 52). Crafted sometime around 1817 in Connecticut, the rectangular and lidded basket is decorated on three sides with pink and green Mohegan motifs (such as a four‐domed medallion, strawberries, leaves, and trellis). It resembles the decorative box (with “Trail of Life” and “Path of the Sun” designs) sent by Samson Occom to his sister Lucy in Connecticut after relocating a group of Mohegan Indians to Brothertown, NY in 1775. Contextualizing the basket in Mohegan cultural history, Fitzgerald reads it as a manufact of their original migration. Made and exchanged by Mohegan women since the pre‐contact period, utilitarian, ceremonial, decorative – and portable – baskets carry a cultural biography of Native American migration, forced relocation, lost artifacts, and repatriated corpses.
The manu‐da, or basket, then, is another form of social authorship: “communal rather than individual, and the resulting narrative belongs to the community as a whole” (Fitzgerald 2008: 54). It constitutes an iterative autobiographical object situated by scholars alongside Native American birch bark etchings, beadwork, wampum belts, pictograph signatures, painted plain tipis, and winter counts. The baskets’ complex, tactile constructions inscribe the women makers’ hands and pass on their cultural knowledge. Collecting materials from their local landscape, the Mohegan women select and soak the log, separate its wood rings, and prepare the splints before weaving, later hand painting the tribe’s traditional symbols with a handmade twig brush. This particular basket preserves a user’s hand, too, which added an 1817 Hartford, CT newspaper as a protective lining. Another set of hands, a printed text linguistically emptied and repurposed, signify each handmade basket’s haptic narrative. Accompanied by story and song, the women thus painted traditional symbols on woven baskets in an ekphrastic arrangement as the Mohegan word wuskuswang means both “painting” and “writing.”
If I hadn’t framed the topic of social authorship through manufacts (which trouble fixed notions of literacy and textuality), or hadn’t interpreted these objects through material culture methodologies, then the representative thing‐poems and their makers would be missing from this volume on American literary history. If I hadn’t considered an interdisciplinary archaeology of the senses, which understands the reciprocal agency of humans and artifacts, or I hadn’t considered how historical sensecapes construct social identities, then this essay would reiterate an outdated, exclusionary, and ideologically problematic canon. And if I hadn’t emphasized the animate residue of manufacts – as object biography, and haptic authorship, and contextual reception – then this essay would have forgotten that archives are a responsive bricolage.
Conclusion: Sensing Digital Things
As this essay has illustrated, authorship is always a situated practice, an engagement with the spaces, objects, and products of writing. Haptic, visual, and often auditory, handwriting generates different forms of social knowledge, as Arthur Marotti and Michael Bristol argue in Print, Manuscript, Performance (2000), and different forms of consciousness through sensory–neural pathways. How, then, do we understand the handwritten manuscript and its corresponding manufacts in the twenty‐first‐century digital age? How does resituating eighteenth‐ or nineteenth‐century script on the electronic page affect the object’s biography, its haptic nature, the knowledge it embodies? What meanings do its new context and media generate? Digital humanities has made manufacts readily accessible to modern scholars and students, broadening our opportunities for studying the past, but at what aesthetic cost? Script (or the “joining hand”) was considered an embodied, even synesthetic, art during the long eighteenth century: “painted voices, listening eyes, speaking hands, and colored sound” shaped the memorized and combined letter forms (Stabile 2004: 86). I suggest, then, that the future of studying early American social authorship lies not only in the paradoxical “digital manuscript,” but also in computer technologies informed by haptic materialities.
Since art historian and curator Alois Riegl developed the notion of “haptic looking” (a visceral plane of feeling and potential experience distinct from actual contact) in Late Roman Art Industry (1893), scholars have described touch as seeing with the hands. A century later, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (1988) extended Riegl’s definition of the haptic (preferring it to “tactile”) by putting the faculty of touch in space. The New Media studies, too, has amplified discussions of haptic technologies (touch screen, gestural interfaces, and virtual reality platforms) that should be considered in digital manuscript adaptations and communication. Such proximities are a peculiar prosthetic, however, extending the human sensorium where we “feel” without touching. Finally, scholars of sensory museology (including H. Chatterjee’s Touch in the Museum [2008] and C. Jones’s Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art [2006]) have much to teach us about haptics when approximating manuscript materialities at a distance. Their use of “assisted sensing” (i.e. sound or scent) to accentuate an object’s sensory dimensions, for example, manufacture a visitor’s three‐dimensional, haptic experience. But it’s not quite touch.
We find ourselves, then, at a technological moment replicating the aesthetic choices of eighteenth‐century authors and readers, considering how digital publication produces our social networks and identity. How does it engender authentic and manufactured experience and emotions? We fear the disappearance of the physical book, the independent bookstore, and the historical archive. Recently I read an online dissertation on early American manuscript culture in which the author admits never having stepped into an archive. Never fumbled through a haphazard card catalog. Never argued with a proprietary docent. Never smelled or sneezed dust into her sleeve after touching a manuscript. Never transcribed it by hand with a pencil. In other words, never experienced the sensory pleasures of the archive. I was not only disheartened, but judgmental: she cheated. Despite the wonderful convenience of digital archives (democratizing access and reducing our carbon footprint), the physical archive at historical societies and research libraries holds material objects precisely so we can touch them – feel the yellowing paper’s deckled edge, trace inkblots the pounce couldn’t absorb, follow the quill’s indented strokes, discover the fabric swatch or dried petals between a leather commonplace book’s leaves.
We should pair Matt Cohen’s (2009) theory of publication event with Dan Hicks and Mary Beaudry’s (2010) parallel method of treating material objects as “events” and “effects” (or perhaps “affects”?). Knowledge emerges from situated and iterative practices in moments of permeability between fieldworker, place, things, and people (87). A kind of fieldwork, archival study requires digging, too, our hands touching the material effects of early American literary production. Imagine walking into an archive in Philadelphia and encountering Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson’s original fan poem (Iteration 1), or its commonplace book inscription (Iteration 2), or as a memento (Iteration 3). It’s right there in front of you. Please touch. (Iteration 4).
References
Further Reading
See also: chapter 10 (acknowledging early american poetry); chapter 12 (early native american literacies to 1820); chapter 15 (writing lives); chapter 20 (the first black atlantic); chapter 25 (from the wharf to the woods); chapter 29 (remapping the canonical interregnum).