Anna Letitia Barbauld was a powerhouse.
I could write about her. She was an anti-war abolitionist, and an advocate for freedom
of religion during a time when the Church of England bullied for its monopolization.
She wrote a forceful essay in 1775[1]
supporting her dissenting opinion of the political institutionalization of
religion, while simultaneously, and elegantly, conceding the benefit of the
Church of England:
We may see such good in an
establishment, the doctrines of which we cannot give our assent to without
violating our integrity; we may respect the tendencies of a sect, the tenets of
which we utterly disapprove. We may think practices useful which we cannot
adopt without
hypocrisy. We may think all religious beneficial, and believe of
one alone that is true.
The essay is
nothing if not rational, lucid, and persuasive. She argues that mandated
association with the church would only weaken members’ devotion, and that the
Church would come out stronger when supported by a willing constituency. She
appeals regularly to reason and consequence, repeatedly pointing out the lack
of opinion or prejudice in her argument.
This,
along with her other broadly read essays of dissent and civic engagement,
contributed to the eventual repeal of Great Britain’s religiously restrictive acts.
If that doesn’t convince my readers she’s worth looking into, I should mention
how she published an open letter to one of the era’s most fervent abolitionists
in support of his cause, excoriating Parliament for refusing to pass a bill that
would end the slave trade.[2]
And she wrote it in verse, no less!
But
Barbauld’s religiosity is more intense than I’d prefer to spend much time with,
which would be necessary in order to properly explore her work…and then there’s
the story about her turning down a position to educate young women because she
didn’t think they were as capable of rigorous instruction as their male
counterparts.
Perhaps
I should write about someone like Margaret Fuller, a journalist and women’s
rights advocate. She was also the editor of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s journal The Dial, a position extended to her as
a friend of Emerson. Surely her transcendentalist work will attract those
readers whose interest might not otherwise be piqued by her feminist tone. I
can discuss the philosophical essay she published in 1843, which encompasses
both views. In it she suggests that the spectrum of masculinity and femininity
can be experienced within the individual, rather than within a male/female
dichotomy:
In
so far as soul is in [woman] completely developed, all soul is the same; but as
far as it is modified in her as woman, it flows, it breaths, it sings, rather
than deposits soil, or finishes work … But it is no more the order of nature
that it should be incarnated pure in any form, than that the masculine energy
should exist unmingled with it in any form.
Male and female represent the two sides
of the great radical dualism. But, in fact, they are perpetually passing into
one another. Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid. There is no wholly
masculine man, no purely feminine woman.
The essay demonstrates
her ability to blend personal perspective, metaphor, and literary and cultural references
into a legitimate critique of society.
But
if I’m to be honest with myself, and my readers, it’s most appealing to expose
an author who wasn’t borne of Western traditions. The contemporary essay can benefit
most from an exhibition of the successful perspectives, styles, and experiments
of writers couched in a heritage wholly different from those juggernauts
(Montaigne, for example) usually extolled and analyzed. Perhaps someone like
Jelena Dimitrijević, a native of the politically and culturally piebald Serbia.
From 1881 to 1898, shortly after the Ottoman Empire’s Islamic stronghold there
was dissolved, she lived in the southern city of Niš. During a time when most
of Serbia’s non-Muslim citizens felt little sympathy for their Muslim
neighbors, Dimitrijević befriended a Muslim family, including a harem of women,
and published a series of ethnographic letters addressed to a deceased friend
that enumerated her experiences.[3]
She wrote with respect and curiosity for their customs, out of a desire to
humanize the stranded denizens. By employing an epistolary form, she was free
from the restraints of stringent anthropology or sequential chronology, and had
formal permission to digress.
If
I ever heard someone say “Evil as a Turk”, I would smile and remember my
present neighbors. I went to see them the day before yesterday: the father was
shelling peas; his son hanging out nappies (who knows, he may even have washed
them, so that his wife should not tire herself).
Despite being identified by literary
scholars[4]
as one of the few Serbian women to have made an intellectual impression in
Serbia during the 19th century (some listing as few as three), I was unable to
find a translation of Dimitrijević’s epistles, resorting to my own translation.
Unfortunately, this in and of itself may not be as surprising as I would like
it to be.
Perhaps
then what I need to talk about is the fact that I keep bumping into the same
phenomenon with all three of these authors: their literary legacies have been
altered, ignored, and nearly forgotten. As much as I want to focus solely on
the literary accomplishments of these authors, I can’t in good faith leave out this
distressing observation.
History
contains an overwhelming wealth of authors and essays to be found, the nature
of which prevents many of us from even attempting. It’s easier to assume the
myriad scholars working before us have curated a well-rounded literary oeuvre
deserving of our time and attention. In my quest for a worthy subject, I
haven’t found this to be the case. Until the 1980s, Anna Letitia Barbauld was
remembered as a writer of didactic children’s textbooks and hymns, her place in
18th century England’s political battles erased from contemporary
consciousness. It wasn’t until feminists sniffed out some of the works of a lost
literary ancestry that her essays resurfaced. Shortly after Margaret Fuller’s
death in 1850, a memoir was published of her life and some of her work, though
details were omitted, and her essays reworded as to be less offensive.
According to scholars,[5]
she was remembered not on her own merit but for her proximity to others of
merit. This is despite the fact that many of her contemporaries held her in
high regard, including Walt Whitman, Susan B. Anthony, Henry David Thoreau, and
of course Ralph Waldo Emerson. Jelena Dimitrijević, too, was shortchanged.
Despite being well known while alive, even being awarded the Matica srpska prize
for literature, she was literally forgotten until literary scholars exhumed her
work in the 1980s.
This
is all to say that we as essayists can’t take the linguistic heritage handed to
us as comprehensive, or even representative. It’s our responsibility to seek
out the fruits of history that are just out of reach, to push aside branches we
have been told are sturdy and to climb onto the limbs of writers offering
something forbidden.
Molly Coon is an
MFA candidate in the University of Iowa nonfiction writing program.
[1] “Thoughts on the Devotional Taste on
Sects, and on Establishments”, 1775.
http://www.orgs.miamioh.edu/womenpoets/barbauld/sects.html
[2]
“Epistle to William Wilberforce, Esq. on the Rejection of the Bill for
Abolishing the Slave Trade”, 1791.
http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/barbauld/wilberforce/wilberforce.html
[3] Pisma
iz Niša o haremima, 1986, Belgrade. https://archive.org/details/pismaizniaohare00pekogoog
[4] See Celia Hawkesworth, “A Serbian Woman
in a Turkish Harem: The Work of Jelena Dimitrijević”, The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 77, No. 1 (1999),
56–73. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4212795
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