notes of a neophyte

As my thesitation takes me onto wobbly territory in the realm of what is commonly called “women’s history,” this seems an apt time to start to work out some of my own investments in that realm. The recent kerfuffle about one “Mercurius Rusticus” and his misogynistic blurt lets me know that, whatever progress has been made, the field remains vexed, and that those of us who are engaged in it had better stay engaged — and pay close attention to how we formulate that engagement.

First, some slightly irritated ground-clearing in response to two stupid questions. Please note that I use “women’s history” here largely as a signpost for “histories of the subaltern”: because I do not wish to speak to that of which I know nearly nothing, I stick to “women” and “gender.” But I have a feeling what I will say here and in future posts may apply to other areas as well.

To the question, “Why does women’s history matter?” I respond easily that I have yet to hear a convincing argument for why it doesn’t matter, and that to challenge any category of historical analysis is to challenge the historical endeavor itself. Why does history matter? is an important question, but if “history matters” can be taken as a given, “women’s history matters,” “military history matters,” “culinary history matters,” “the history of imperialism matters,” and every other formulation, easily follow. The more interesting questions are, “how can we do women’s history?”, “where will women’s history take us, as historians, as literaturians, as educators?”, “how is women’s history different from any other history?”, and so on. Crucially: “What is the difference between ‘women’s history’ and ‘gender history’?” To this last I hope to return in a later post.

To the argument that those who are engaged in the history of women, of gender, and of the family are sapping energy from other areas, I respond easily, “What the hell are you smoking?” Every creative act committed means that a range of others were not committed in that moment, with that energy. The cynical way to see it is that arithmetic progress entails geometric loss. This is the fundamental principle behind the impossibility of a Key to All Mythologies: no one can do everything, and every mythos that gets recorded eats up some time that could have gone to the others. If you find a solution to this problem, please give Doctor Causaubon a call; I’m sure he’d love to hear from you.

There are overtilled fields — many areas of Shakespeare studies and the American Civil War provide prime examples. A great deal of ink gets spilled producing largely unoriginal accounts of this or that. Yet the accusation to be levelled in that case is, precisely, of unoriginality, not of inutility.

The vast lacunae in the histories of women and of gender indicate that they will not approach supersaturation any time soon - not within my lifetime, anyhow. Scholars of early modern western Europe, for example, have only just begun, in the past ten years or so, to look for means to discover significant literacy rates for women of all classes. How women read, what they read, which women read, under what circumstances, to what purpose, and why any of this was so, are all open questions in the field of early modern studies. This is only one example. Because much of women’s political and creative agency took its roots in private or domestic spaces, in the informal economy, in manuscript rather than in print, through influence and string-pulling rather than through public action, their lives and the significance of their lives must be sought by means to which traditional historiography was never suited. Those means are not always obvious, the archive is often obscure, the problems vexed and multifaceted and their solutions roundabout.

In some ways, the unobviousness of gender history, of gendered historiography, is what makes it thrilling for its practitioners. Unobviousness is one place to which women’s history can take us: it enables us to question our assumptions about the nature of a given historical problem and about the materials by which we wish to assess that problem. Simply put, doing women’s history keeps us on our toes — a position especially necessary for wee mouse here.

There will be more on this. I am, for reasons obvious to my longtime readers, especially interested in how the historical and literary disciplines intersect in the “women’s history” enterprise. To be investigated.

Readers, your thoughts?

Reader/writer/recusant-mama to the rescue. Bless her.

She solved a problem I didn’t know I had — the best kind of solution. Or rather, I knew there was a problem, but I thought it was me. Now I realize I was missing a link. She is my link.

She started as an idle curiosity. I ordered up every early edition of her work — well, all but the latest, which lives exclusively at the Folger. [Sidenote: this dissertation should be subtitled, "Or, Getting the Most Out of a Year at the British Library."] When I went in today to look at them, I expected to spend an hour or two, make a handful of notes, and get back to bibliographing the books that are more central to the project. Instead, I found myself literally bouncing in my chair. Biting my lip. Grinning.

“Thank you,” I kept whispering. I damn near squealed.

When I came home to Flavia’s post on leisurely archive-perusing, my heart ached with wanting. The wonderful thing about the kind of program that I’m doing is that it gives time and space for that sort of thing during the term. With only two courses, very loosely structured reading lists, and vast swathes of unstructured time, I’d been able to wallow about in this and that, reading more or less whatever I chose. I was able to tailor what I read to a loosely defined area of research, so that when it came time to write the papers (except in one disastrous case), I was prepared to go whole-hog, and write swiftly. This is also how my undergrad thesis came to make any form of sense — I had a whole summer of idle reading on a fellowship to familiarize me with the field, so that I came to the project’s start vastly more prepared than I otherwise could have been.

Dissertating, by contrast, has felt hideously rushed. I chose to write in an area entirely new to me, where I did not have my bearings and where, frankly, I do not have time to get my bearings fully enough to be comfortable writing. I crashed through a handful of Seminal Works of scholarship, ingested most of my primary material in a single gulp, and have been progressing by fits and starts (emphasis on the “fits”) ever since. It’s disorienting and frustrating and I’ve cried about it more than I’m willing to admit.

I crave time and space. Now, I know that to a certain degree, that desire carries an inherent fallacy - work expands to fill the time allotted to it, and if there’s anything a writer wants, it’s always more time, more time. But this is at least a five-month project, not a three-month one. I need to stretch out and read more, instead of narrowly, intently reading only bits and scraps that I am absolutely certain will be wholly relevant.

This project is in many ways a promiscuous one, especially disciplinarily. It spans a lot of more or less discrete areas of study, and hopes to synthesize them in order to make new sense of a single author’s printed output. I’m good at synthetic work, and in the case of this project, I think this kind of approach serves particularly well. But synthesis demands a broadly-cast net and a lot of patient waiting — and what I’ve got is a jury-rigged fishing pole and about five minutes.

So when my (slightly insane) recusantish lady came to rescue me today, I counted it as a big old heap of blessings. I had somehow managed to reap a sliver of the benefits of spending ages in an archive without actually spending those ages. And praise be for it.

Breakthrough. Direction. Scope. Your little mouse is back on her game.

[... For now.]

… Ah.

Servetus was right (telepathically?).

I don’t know how many times I’ve said over the past year that I am blessed in my mentors. I say it again: I am blessed in my mentors.

[There is more than one reason - each vaguely disturbing in its own way - for my continued tendency to talk about my academic work in religious terms. Fodder for a further post.]

This morning’s meeting reminded me to feel blessed, and to hold carefully in mind what that blessing is and how it works.

Thus: a good mentor does not only hold his student’s hand. He faces her bluntly and directly with her task, presents to her the scrambled machinery of her project and asks her, plainly, to make it go. Because she trusts him, because she knows that he is there to teach her and that she has no choice but to learn, she places her delicate (if clumsy), loving (if careless) fingers on the gears and the wires and the ticky thing she doesn’t quite know what to do with, and she fumbles (sometimes gracefully, more often not) until it starts to clack and whirr.

When smoke starts pouring out, her teacher is there with his swift sense to stop the sparks and isolate the problem. Sheepishly, she turns the ticky thing the other way and the whole mess stops clacking and settles into a gentle frrrruummm.

Grace is too much to ask.

Deft mechanics is a better start.

(The next step: Okay. It works. But what does it do?)

I am a complete fool for believing that crises of faith should be recompensed by moments of grace.

And yet… and yet… and yet…

In the words of my supervisor, the Heretic:

“You seem distressed, lately.”

[I know.]

“You’re still finding your way, aren’t you.”

But your proposal is “another smashing number [...] lovely stuff.”

You’ve done it before. “I’m proud of you.”

But then there’s the… thing you just handed me. “This isn’t your most… coherent piece of prose.”

[I know.]

“What’s troubling you about this?”

“Keep going. Try to find your intellectual centre.”

…I am trying. I find it, I think, now and then — here in a bit of a gospel, there in an invigorating line, then again over here in a particularly masterful stroke of scholarship. Then it slips away. I forget my purpose; I lose my centre.

I juggle my many elements with perfect precision, one moment. I see my task clear. The next moment… I don’t exactly drop an element, I don’t exactly fumble. I simply forget what I’m juggling, or that I’m juggling. I stand still. The elements juggle themselves, somewhere, above my head or next door, or beyond me in a dimension just slightly aslant of this one.

In still another dimension, Robert Southwell laughs gently to himself, his young poet’s hands moving swiftly, creating with my elements, the elements I see in him, hoops and swirls and arabesques excruciatingly exquisite. He laughs again. (Martyrs can, and do, laugh.) And then he winks at me, and I slide back from my inter-dimensional hallucination, and am again alone amid my books.

My books and my teacher’s voice: “Find your intellectual centre.”

Today, Barack Obama gave the keynote address at my little alma mater’s commencement ceremony. I, of course, on my peculiar piece of English earth, could not attend. So my Victorianist and I wired ourselves into the webcast and prepared ourselves for a healthy dose of Hope, Audacity, and other such forms of inspiration.

He was, of course, inspiring. Aside from a bit of vaguely offensive stumping, his speech on the value of investing in small changes in the interest of creating bigger ones, was, yes, inspiring, luminous, et caetera.

But you know what? Michael S. Roth, my little alma mater’s new president, was more inspiring, more luminous. Michael Roth was the one who made me cry. Michael Roth was the one who made me proud to be an alumna of this institution, who reminded me why I value as deeply as I do the lessons that I learned there, who reminded me of the urgent need for me to take those lessons with me into the world. 

His words, in part:

Being in the company of students as gifted and energetic as Wesleyan’s class of 2008, gives me faith that we may well be able to reject the status quo, to build a politics and a culture of hope and community rather than of fear and divisiveness. Your thoughtfulness and courage, your questioning and your exuberance keeps me from becoming cynical and pessimistic. If you engage in the serious politics of change, if you participate in the struggle for social justice and sustainable economic growth, I believe we can change course. Now, it would be easier for you to use your smarts, your sophisticated learning, to be funny and hip, to be smart and ironic. But you don’t have to take this path of least resistance. You have the moral and intellectual capacity to take the path of actually making real progressive change, of becoming productive idealists. 

For many generations of students, Wesleyan University has stood for the opportunity to connect serious intellectual and aesthetic work with making a difference in the world. Wesleyan students have the talent, the capacity and the drive to create something new. This year’s graduates, like Wesleyan alumni before you, will contribute to shaping our culture in the future, because otherwise it will be shaped by people for whom creativity and change, freedom and equality, diversity and tolerance, are much too threatening. We are counting on you to help shape our culture, so that it will not be shaped by forces of oppression and violence.

Violence remains one of the sad, disturbing parts of our lives. It is the loud noise that keeps us from hearing the music of the world. Violence not only destroys meaning, but it has the potential to disrupt our very capacity to make future meaning. Wesleyan University resists that violence [...] As scholars and artists, as scientists and as writers, you also set an example against the de-meaning that is violence.

You will hear people tell you that the greatest protection against violence is surveillance, that greater security is developed with higher fences to keep out the foreigners, or that we must project violence on distant shores to keep our homes safe. DO NOT BELIEVE THESE MESSAGES. Please remember that your education stands in opposition to non-sense and cruelty; please recall your capacity to create when others around you call for destruction.

This “education” is an investment in the fate of the universe. I wonder, sometimes, what my choice to pursue a career in what we quaintly call “higher education” actually means. Today, Michael Roth reminded me that to be an educator, and to do it well, is to insert one’s entire being into the fabric of the universe and shake it as hard as one can. 

That is what the best among faculty of my alma mater do every time they step into a classroom. That is what makes them shapers of the minds of a body of students known for their commitment to meaningful change. My fellow graduates are all, in one way or another, teachers. They teach every day of their lives. They are invested in transmitting their commitments and their passions. My alma mater is a community of committed teachers, and I am feeling very powerfully at this moment my connection to that community.

We don’t have to be rabble-rousers (though some of us are, and brilliantly). The material we teach doesn’t have to be “topical,” or whatever, for it to be useful. The men and women whose student I have been blessed to be have taught me many things in many ways, but all of them have taught me mindfulness. They have taught me to respect the complexity of the universe, and to engage it with all my intellectual might. They have taught me that this is what resistance means — that to engage, to refuse stasis, to create, is to shake the fabric of the universe.

That work will be mine to carry forward, one day — rather soon, really. I look forward to it more than I can possibly say. Today, a quirky young intellectual who by some miracle has got his hands on the presidency of my little alma mater reminded me that I owe it to myself to rise to the challenge of that work, and that I will be damned lucky if I can live up to the example my teachers have set me.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, because she understands about England.

From “Aurora Leigh”

Then, land!–then, England! oh, the frosty cliffs
Looked cold upon me. Could I find a home
Among those mean red houses through the fog?
And when I heard my father’s language first
From alien lips which had no kiss for mine,
I wept aloud, then laughed, then wept, then wept,–
And some one near me said the child was mad
Through much sea-sickness. The train swept us on.
Was this my father’s England? the great isle?
The ground seemed cut up from the fellowship
Or verdure, field from field, as man from man;
The skies themselves looked low and positive,
As almost you could touch them with a hand,
And dared to do it, they were so far off
From God’s celestial crystals; all things, blurred
And dull and vague. Did Shakspeare and his mates
Absorb the light here?–not a hill or stone
With heart to strike a radiant colour up
Or active outline on the indifferent air!

[...]

Not a grand nature. Not my chestnut-woods
Of Vallombrosa, cleaving by the spurs
To the precipices. Not my headlong leaps
Of waters, that cry out for joy or fear
In leaping through the palpitating pines,
Like a white soul tossed out to eternity
With thrills of time upon it. Not indeed
My multitudinous mountains, sitting in
The magic circle, with the mutual touch
Electric, panting from their full deep hearts
Beneath the influent heavens, and waiting for
Communion and commission. Italy
Is one thing, England one.
On English ground
You understand the letter . . ere the fall,
How Adam lived in a garden. All the fields
Are tied up fast with hedges, nosegay-like;
The hills are crumpled plains–the plains, parterres–
The trees, round, woolly, ready to be clipped;
And if you seek for any wilderness
You find, at best, a park. A nature tamed
And grown domestic like a barn-door fowl,
Which does not awe you with its claws and beak,
Nor tempt you to an eyrie too high up,
But which, in cackling, sets you thinking of
Your eggs to-morrow at breakfast, in the pause
Of finer meditation.
Rather say
A sweet familiar nature, stealing in
As a dog might, or child, to touch your hand
Or pluck your gown, and humbly mind you so
Of presence and affection, excellent
For inner uses, from the things without.

Adrienne Rich
“Through Corralitos Under Rolls of Cloud” iii

If you know who died in that bed, do you know
who has survived? If you say, she was weaker,
held life less dear, expected others
to fight for her if pride lets you name her
victim and the one who got up and threw
the windows open, stripped the bed, survivor
– what have you said, what do you know
of the survivor when you know her
only in opposition to the lost?
What does it mean to say I have survived
until you take the mirrors and turn them outward
and read your own face in their outraged light?

Grad students especially, but also everyone else: go now — now — to this new blog, The Economical Academic. Kermit’s post today about taxes made my heart sing — not because I’m afraid of taxes, but because it’s refreshing to see useful, clear information get disseminated with a view to actually helping people. Other posts on budgeting, debt, and so on promise that this blog will continue to be a productive, practical place. Huzzah.

Updating the blogroll to add:
Servetus, of (Almost) Without Footnotes. I have no idea what her deal is, really. And that’s what I like.

Margaret Soltan, of University Diaries. If deity were an elected office, I would quit my job to get her on the ballot.

Cardinal Wolsey, of Cardinal Wolsey’s Today in History. Tudory goodness.

Kathy G., of The G-Spot. Great new cultural-political blog by a poli sci Ph.D. student. No idea where she gets the time for all those posts.

And please also go check out Luz, a lovely little web comic about sustainable living in urban environments, narrated by the very charming Luz, who puts me completely to shame.

Poetry to follow.

[This blog has not lost its politics. They are simply in hiding. Someday when they're a little less shell-shocked they'll come out to play.]

From Cymbeline, more or less as printed in the 1623 folio:

Feare no more the heate o’th’Sun,
Nor the furious Winters rages,
Thou thy worldly task has don,
Home art gon, and tane thy wages.
Golden Lads, and Girles all must,
As chimney-Sweepers come to dust.

Feare no more the frowne o’th’Great,
Thou art past the Tirants streake,
Care no more to cloath and eate,
To thee the Reede is as the Oake:
The Scepter, Learning, Physicke must,
All follow this and come to dust.

Feare no more the Lightning flash,
Nor th’all-dreaded Thunderstone.
Feare not Slander, Censure rash,
Thou hast finish’d Joy and mone.
All Lovers young, all Lovers must,
Consigne to thee and come to dust.

No Exorciser harme thee,
Nor no witch-craft charme thee.
Ghost unlaid forbeare thee.
Nothing ill come neere thee.
Quiet consumation have,
And renowned be thy grave.

I have been especially attached to this song since I first encountered Woolf’s allusion to it in Mrs Dalloway. And Cymbeline is among my favorites of Shakespeare’s plays. My removal of speech-headings here should not be taken as lack of love for the sweet forest brothers who sing it. As for authorship controversies: I don’t much care.