Everything New is Old Again
I started some comments to put in this blog section of the post, then realized they fit better into the "Introduction" part of the publication record. So I'm left with nothing of substance to say here. Some day I should post a blog showing the underlying data structure of the Project so that this sort of thing makes sense to readers. (Assuming anyone cares.)
Major category: LHMPTags: LHMP LHMP #491c Cleves 2014 Charity & Sylvia Chapter 3 & 4 About LHMP Full citation:Cleves, Rachel Hope. 2014. Charity & Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America. Oxford University Press, Oxford. ISBN 978-0-19-933542-8
Chapter 3 & 4
I have become fascinated with the cyclicity of historical trends--not necessarily the "big stuff" like wars and forms of government, but the way certain concepts and reactions cycle over and over again, in different forms, but with similar shapes and consequence-chains. We see this in Valerie Traub's idea of "cycles of salience" where specific manifestations of female homoeroticism have dominated social awareness at different times. We see this in the "waves" of feminism, which began long before "first wave" feminism, where women agitate against the specific injustices of their time, make progress to address those injustices, then are hit by backlash that recurs in similar forms, time and time again.
Today's chapters from Charity and Sylvia touch on one of those cycles: the "generation gap" (my label, not the author's). Some sort of social or political disruption occurs that leads a younger generation to have sufficiently different understandings of society that disrupts the idea of learning from and following the lead of the older generation. I'm not talking about a constant background radiation of "kids these days!" but the points at which a generation has literally grown up in an entirely different world from their parents, affecting expectations and assumptions. For Charity and Sylvia, that disruption was the American Revolution, not only due to the physical and economic hardship, but because of embracing the principles that you didn't have to accept "the way things are." That you can make drastic changes in your relationship to authority structures. Authority structures like family hierarchies.
One of the pervasive threads in this book--and an aspect of history that can be hard for modern people to grasp entirely--was the essential interconnectedness of communities. For queer people, that interconnectedness has often been a threat: the need to hide or conform in order to not lose that essential economic stability the community and family provide. The quintessential American archetype of the independent loner who rejects society's demands has always been mostly an illusion. When Sylvia's brother struck out for the "wilds" of Vermont, his success was not that of an independent loner, but of someone who identified key social structures and wove himself into them. (Marrying the boss's daughter has always been a useful strategy.) and when he achieved that success, his first thought was to pull in the loosened strands of his family and weave them back into cloth again.
Charity's family was badly disrupted by autocratic and controling parents, with the result that their children took any opportunity to get out from under their thumb. (A "generation gap" that might have been harder to implement without the general atmosphere of liberatoin.) But those threads were still tangled. Charity's professional life was made possible by the anchors of various siblings who hosted her during her teaching years, allowing her to move between communities while still being tied to them. On the other side, for a single woman to be able to make a living as a teacher was made possible by significant attitude shifts regarding public education that emerged out of the Enlightenment and the disruption of Colonial era attitudes toward the relationship between government and the public good.
Did Charity and Sylvia come to the conclusion that their fantasy of a female "marriage" was possible because of those disruptions to social patterns? It's always hard to distinguish the larger patterns from the particular cases. In several places, Cleves draws parallels between Charity & Sylvia and the similar relationshps of Ponsonby & Butler and Lister & Walker. Yes, they lived in a similar era, but their socio-political contexts were quite different. To what extent is it reasonable to consider them part of a larger pattern of queer possibility and to what extent is the urge toward queer partnerships a constant with individual cases popping into visibility for random reasons and then given undue weight because of that visibility?
Ok, I'm starting to ramble now. But since one of the goals of the Project is to identify larger patterns in history that can help root characters and stories into the particularity of a time and place, these questions are always on my mind.
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Chapter 3: O the Example! 1787
The Revolution had inspired something of a “generation gap” as younger people took seriously the ideals of liberty and independence and were less inclined to reflexively bow to parental and employer authority. Another legacy of the Revolution was the valorization of intimate same-sex friendships among both men and women. These friendships had the potential to displace the familial bonds that had previously been the essential basis for economic success. Such friendships had the same potential as m/f relationships for both joy and tragic break-ups. One of Charity’s brothers suffered greatly from the destruction of one such friendship, which may have affected some of her ambivalence about intimate relationships.
Another of her brothers also had an intimate friendship with that same man, and there was conflict between the brothers over contrasting loyalties. [Note: Although the author doesn’t make the connection at this point, these close same-sex friendships may have been a model for Charity’s own socializing later. Also note: I’m using “intimate friendship” in the sense of a highly particular, intensely emotional bond, without necessarily implying an erotic component.]
Resistance to parental attempts to dictate their lives led to most of Charity’s siblings eventually distancing themselves from their father and step-mother. Her sisters struggled harder to find a path other than marriage. One had poetic aspirations, but chose marriage at 20. Another married even younger. Both moved away from the family neighborhood at marriage. That left Charity as the only child at home at age 15. Charity clashed regularly with her stepmother, perhaps over her distaste for the endless housework, preferring literary activities. These gave her a common focus for close friendships with other young women in the community.
At age 20, after a conflict with her father, he threw Charity out of the house and she went to live with one of her married sisters. In the next decade, Charity moved between several communities, living with relatives, and formed a number of close friendships with women who were drawn by her intellect and bold spirit. But the admiration she attracted also sparked gossip and tension within those communities.
Chapter 4: Mistress of a School 1797
Charity worked as a school teacher, which fit well with her skills and interests, though she had a low opinion of many of her students. Like several of her siblings, she was a poet. At first, she boarded with her sister Anna. After some problems with gossip (more on which later), and a minor medical crisis, she moved back in with her parents until that became untenable. Then she went to live with a brother in western Massachusetts, where she resumed teaching. Then back to join Anna in a different locations. Despite these various moves and occasional breaks from teaching, the profession gave her freedom and economic independence, if not a very substantial income.
Post-revolutionary America encouraged general education, creating new employment opportunities for educated women (as they could be paid less than male teachers). Young female teachers often wrote about their “liberty” from parental oversight and restrictions (and the expectation of domestic labor if they remained at home).
Charity became a prolific letter writer, as well as a poet, often describing her life in dramatic and sentimental terms, as if narrating a novel.
She often wrote poems as gifts to friends, and was considered talented. She and her correspondents sometimes had pet names for each other used in their letters.
In her writing, Charity praised the virtues of modesty and sincerity, though she didn’t always recognize her own failings in those areas. Others viewed her pride and self-confidence as deviating from feminine ideals.
Time period: 18th c19th cPlace: USAEvent / person: Charity Bryant & Sylvia Drake View comments (0)
