Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Once More With Feelings...

   While working in the archive in Boston I came face to face with one of my least favorite aspects of archival research...oh, the censoring.

   Because I deal in teenage-girl documents, I run into this a lot.  There's nothing that frustrates me more than being in the middle of what seems to be a fabulous story...and the black descends.  Because weakling 1790s ink doesn't stand a chance against the thick blacks of the 1860s just as the open emotions of a seventeen-year-old in love don't stand against the disapproving pen of a censor fifty years later.

  In some of the cases I've run across it's clear that the censorship comes from the hand of the author as an adult woman.  When her cousin and confidant married in 1825, Anna Cabot Lowell, then seventeen, fearfully pondered marriage in her "ninth private journal".

I may, (& probably shall) live single all my life & then what a comfort will it be to me, to have a never failing source of entertainment & occupation to while away the tediousness of many a solitary hour.  Or if my lot should be cast & I should be destined to become a wife...

I couldn't tell what Anna felt about the possibility of marriage because she thoroughly blotted out the next 5 lines of the diary.  The envelopes containing her diaries bear annotations  - noting the dates that she read or "went over" her old journals - and the matching ink suggests that she made these changes in her forties or fifties.  Sophie du Pont censored her teenage letters (as well as those of her sisters) and diaries around the same time, also noting the years in which she'd read over the documents in adulthood. As adult women, they chose to obscure the scandalous, silly or scurrilous things that they'd written in their youth.  And while that's frustrating to me as a historian, as a woman who wrote very many silly things in teenage diaries, I understand the impulse.  I wasn't prepared, however, for the frustrating censorship in my research so far came in the diary of Elizabeth Cranch.

   Elizabeth Cranch - daughter of Richard and Mary, niece to Abigail Adams, and friend to all -  was a fairly faithful, if not prolific, diarist in her late teens and early twenties.  She began a 1786 diary with the news of the death of her fiancĂ©.  On October 29 "Mama," she wrote, "informed me of the death of my dearest friend"

She goes on to mourn her lost love, in subtle and oblique ways, throughout the rest of the diary.  Yet on that day, in her grief, she wrote another line.  However, her descendant(s), while annotating and commenting on the historically significant people and events in the diary, violently struck out the entry.  While the news of Cranch's dearest friend's death is still legible, what she went on to write is not.

    These holes, in blacked out lines and excised paragraphs, leave me wondering about the stories that the gaps obscure - both the story on the page, indelibly covered, and the other of why those words needed to be hidden.  Betsey Cranch recovered from the death of her fiancĂ© and went on to marry and have a passel of children.  What about her grief over her first love, the man who did not become her husband, so upsetting to her annotating descendant that the evidence had to be so violently covered?  The emotion? The fact that Grandmama Norton had been so deeply in love?  What did Anna Cabot Lowell feel about the possibility of her future marriage and why was that feeling worth hiding as an adult woman?  Inquiring girl historians want to know.

***************

Intrepid readers~ Want to know more about Betsey Cranch and other nineteenth-century editors of eighteenth-century women?  Check out Kathleen McDonald's fabulous essay for the Women Writers Project Conference - here.

Monday, August 8, 2011

Two centuries on and that girl still rubs me the wrong way...

  There's a peril in the work of historians.  I play with incomplete pieces of other people's lives. I meddle and muddle about with their things, read their words, interpret their motives and intentions.  And then, occasionally, I find myself liking one of them.  Or feeling wretched that, though she didn't know it, she was only a few months away from her own death.  Or, as was the case all day today at the archive in Boston, wanting to strangle her.
 
   It's particularly perilous in my dissertation, though I didn't see it coming when I proposed the topic.  See, the thing is -- teenage angst is shockingly consistent.  Its expression, of course, varies.  But even before the term "teenagers" was coined they were still out there, slouching around, writing overwrought poetry, complaining about their cruel and heartless parents, and sniping at their siblings.  I really didn't think about having to spend my days elbow-deep in the diaries and letters and things of moody, emotionally-charged, angst-riddled teens.  Honestly, what was I thinking?

  Here's the thing, though.  Despite their whining, they're fabulously interesting.  I love that they bounce between self-absorption and startling depth in the course of one diary entry.  I love that, though some two centuries separate us, they make me laugh out loud (take that stodgy reading room!!)  I love that while they were being dismissed as insignificant because of their age and gender,  as a group they scared the pants off the founding fathers.  Worth the angst?  Probably.

  So, as a continue my life as big historical snoop - or rather, serious academic researcher - I'll keep reminding myself that, for every pretentious and overwound Hannah there's a wry and snarky Eleu.  For every angsty Amelia there's a sunny Mary, dying at 19 but still writing her heart out.  And however frustrated they all make me, and they all frustrate the hell out of me from time to time (because goodness knows it's best to never sign or date your letters, refer to everyone by a series of cryptic nicknames and black out all the good bits),  it means something. And I've got to hand it to 'em - they left something behind.  And, whether they imagined it or not, they've made it possible for me to read their lives between the lines.   Probably worth a few bad poems about the loneliness of the sea...

Intrepid girl historian seeks dissertation, revelation, and the possible meaning of life

      I always claim that I majored in history because I couldn't major in everything.  This is a lie.  Well, a little lie.  I appreciate that history has let me ramble through any number of academic curiosities from eighteenth-century cartoons to thirteenth-century Irish dress codes and modern Minnesota politics. Historians proved much friendlier to my "serendipity works" mindset than did Chemists.

    But in truth I became a historian the day I fell for stories.  I do history because, at the very heart of the matter, I love nothing in the world more than stories - reading them, hearing them, telling them - always have, always will.  And in the course of falling for stories as a little kid, I heard the stories of a great many intrepid girls.  But among the intrepid-est of intrepid young ladies was Nancy - with her blue roadster and cunning detection, Nancy Drew seemed, to eight-year-old me, the height of cool.  And while, in a more grown-up mindset, I recognize that I'd rather not be clubbed or chloroformed while in pursuit of my detecting, I still hope to channel the famed girl detective in my own work- being a girl (things) detective.

   Hence the blog

    I'll try to let it reconnect me to what I love - the stories of my dissertation.  I'll spin tales of what I read and see and uncover as I continue to dissertate furiously onward.

    So let's keep the blue roadster idling at the curb -- I could be off on the trail of a menacing black sedan (of the historical variety) at any moment.  That's just how we intrepid girl historians roll.