Jennifer A. Desiderio
While Ben Franklin’s Autobiography and Hannah Heaton’s diary may follow one another on early American literature syllabi, the relationship between autobiography and diary, or more broadly, autobiography and literature, has not always been so comfortable. In the 1960s, theoretical discussions developed around the genre and its relationship to literature. Critics argued whether or not autobiography was imaginative or creative enough, or if it was too didactic and moralistic, to be considered literature. The genre’s mix of fact and fiction received considerable attention, with critics quibbling over the proper amount of fictional material that could be included in autobiography. Forms of autobiography also came under attack, and many scholars rejected diaries and journals as fragmented and overly concerned with domestic trivia. Much has shifted in the field since these early debates, and autobiography’s status as literature seems secure today with a welcome broadening of the canon and increased recovery of life writing during the periods predating 1820. If at the beginning of these debates Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and John Woolman were the primary autobiographers studied in early American literature and history, over 50 years later these autobiographers share attention with the Massachusetts sailor Ashley Bowen, the Mohegan minister Samson Occom, and the Quaker diarist Hannah Callender Sansom, among others, many of whom receive significant scholarly consideration and inclusion on American literature syllabi.
Throughout this essay I define autobiography as a first‐person recollection of one’s life composed at a single moment in time for a public audience. Early American autobiographies tend to be written by men since they had access to the time and machinery of print to write and publish. These autobiographies, by Ben Franklin, John Adams, and other eighteenth‐century figures, have an outward gaze, describing political and national occurrences. For example, Franklin’s autobiography, while it departs from many traditional autobiographies in that it is unfinished and was written over a period of three decades, chronicles the events of the colony and country and reflects the revolutionary spirit associated with the new republic. Popular accounts of American autobiography privilege Franklin as the originator of the form, alluding to Puritan figures like John Winthrop, Cotton Mather, and Samuel Sewall, who wrote autobiographies but whose radical religious zeal and piety are challenging for readers to fully understand and appreciate. In addition to Puritan autobiographies, many forms of life writing have been left out of the traditional narrative of autobiography. I use the term “life writing” to describe the many genres composed for particularized audiences and purposes and that are often written within the confines of domestic life; life writing includes letters, diaries, journals, almanacs, and other forms. It is within life writing that we sometimes find an inward gaze about the self and domestic life as well as a much more diverse representation of America than the Puritan and political fathers of the autobiography provide, since many common men and women had access to literacy due to the Protestant creed that believers read the Bible and examine their lives. Through life writing, readers encounter an eclectic array of life experiences, such as the journals of the black itinerant preacher John Marrant, the diary of the upper‐class Quaker woman Elizabeth Drinker, and the homoerotic letters between Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake.
This essay examines the scholarship on autobiography and, particularly, its relationship to women’s diaries and the slave narrative. By looking at the spiritual narrative of the Puritans and Quakers, we find the religious importance of writing about the self in regard to salvation and how the relationship between the public and private and the oral and textual shape autobiographical practice. These latter tensions characterize early American autobiographical writing and unite forms as disparate as women’s diaries and slave narratives. Late twentieth‐century scholarship on autobiography and life writing in early America opened up the canon to a wide selection of voices and has diversified it. Twenty‐first‐century scholars must continue this important recovery work by expanding the generic definitions of life writing and autobiography.
The autobiography’s popularity in America owes much to the Puritan and Quaker presence in colonial America. In Spiritual Autobiography in Early America (1968), Daniel B. Shea was one of the first to describe the relationship between the autobiography and the religious traditions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Puritans and Quakers assiduously recorded their interactions with the divine and depended upon these descriptions to access their favor with God. Within this spiritual and autobiographical, albeit conventional, genre, Shea locates individual arguments and distinct personalities. He explores the various types of spiritual narratives and distinguishes between autobiography and the diary by focusing on the moment of composition, labeling the diarist an unfortunate “prisoner of the present” unable to write a refined narrative of experience (x). Working upon the assumption that the passage of time grants the author invaluable insight and knowledge, Shea excludes diaries from his study and privileges autobiographies and memoirs of Quakers and Puritans, by such colonial giants as Woolman, Edward Taylor, and John Winthrop. Notably, Shea departs from many of his contemporary critics on autobiography and devotes large sections of his study to colonial women, such as Elizabeth Ashbridge, Anne Bradstreet, and Elizabeth White.
G. Thomas Couser (1979) continues Shea’s work on the spiritual autobiography. Like Shea, Couser differentiates between the spiritual autobiography and the diary, a “fundamental Puritan form.” Defining it as “a devotional or confessional form,” Couser claims that the diary differs from “other Puritan literary forms in its intense introspection, its concentration on self‐doubt, dullness, and depression, its presentation of the self in isolation from the community, and its meditational, or at least nonnarrative method” (11). Because of its isolated depiction of the self, Couser dismisses the diary from most of his study and instead concentrates on the autobiography, which he argues offers an interactive dynamic between self and community. Couser posits that autobiographies, like those of Increase Mather, Thomas Shepard, and Jonathan Edwards, portray the autobiographer as an integral and integrated part of the Puritan community, unlike the diary, which depicts the individual as isolated. This depiction of the self is accompanied by a hortatory and prophetic narrative voice; this prophetic mode originates, according to Couser, with the Puritan spiritual autobiography.
Within the scholarship of spiritual autobiography, the conversion narrative receives considerable interest. Patricia Caldwell, Elizabeth Bruss, and Rodger M. Payne differentiate the conversion narrative from spiritual autobiography and the diary. According to Caldwell (1985), the conversion narrative, unlike other autobiographical genres in early America, began as an oral form. Caldwell recognizes the origins of the narrative in a “collection of fifty‐one ‘Confessions’ given at the First Church of Cambridge, Massachusetts, between 1637 and 1645, and recorded in a small private notebook by the minister of the church, Thomas Shepard” (ix). Due to its public and oral dimension, authors of the conversion narrative had to negotiate the “personall” struggle of sin and the “publick” community of saints (46). Employing Caldwell’s helpful terminology, Payne in The Self and the Sacred: Conversion and Autobiography in Early American Protestantism (1998) scrutinizes the dynamic between the personal and public within the Puritan diary and the oral conversion tale. Payne looks to John Beadle’s 1656 publication on diary keeping as a source that instructed Puritans on how to use their diaries as a means of examining grace. Payne finds that it was when churches required their members to orally present their conversion that diaries played an important role in the construction of the conversion tale. In other words, the diary, for many Puritans, functioned as a sort of private first draft for the more public conversion narrative. Bruss (1976) succinctly ties together Puritanism, the technology of writing, and the genre of the autobiography, stating, “The religion of Calvin and Luther turned hagiography into autobiography, since it was no longer miraculous works which were the sign of the saint, but faith – private and personal experience” (34). Autobiographical forms of writing, whether the conversion narrative or the diary, became important textual pieces in colonial America as common men and women, and not bishops, cardinals, and saints, examined grace.
Early American feminist critics look to these early religious autobiographical forms as places to locate women’s voices. While some critics find that Protestant autobiographical forms helped create greater autonomy for women, others posit that the any type of independence was an unintended consequence of autobiographical writing. Ann Taves, in “Self and God in the Early Published Memoirs of New England Women” (1992), argues that readers cannot assume that the authorship of conversion tales and diaries creates a sense of autonomy and empowerment in women. According to Taves, the point of many Protestant autobiographical forms was for the writer – whether male or female – to exhibit complete dependence upon God. Kathleen Swain (1992) similarly insists that readers historically conceptualize the function of early American autobiographical forms. She writes, “When the autobiographical discourse is the outward and visible sign of the achieved annihilation of self, the genre necessarily differs radically from what we usually think of as autobiography” (42). Swain, like Taves, situates the female autobiographer within the context of Protestantism’s belief in an omnipotent God. In addition, she reveals that women’s conversion narratives tend to be shorter than men’s, use more personal pronouns, and cite female‐authored biblical books. When considering gender and the tradition of the conversion narrative in early America, nuanced definitions of independence and dependence and gendered differences emerge.
More broadly, feminist scholars outside of early American studies began to understand female autobiography as fundamentally different from male autobiography. Estelle Jelinek, in Women’s Autobiography: Essays in Criticism (1980), posits that many discussions on autobiography are not appropriate for women’s autobiography. For instance, most male autobiographers’ lives are public and worldly, and follow the history of the nation, resulting in theories of the exemplary life; women’s lives, on the other hand, tended to be more domestic and private and follow the history of the family. In addition, Jelinek recognizes that male autobiography contains a linear narrative, and that women’s lives, and hence their autobiographies, are much more irregular. Shari Benstock (1988) comes to define this irregularity in women’s autobiography as “female discontinuity” (20), a stark contrast to men’s autobiographies which “seal up and cover over gaps in memory, dislocations in time and space, insecurities, hesitations, and blind spots” (20). Susan Stanford Friedman, in “Women’s Autobiographical Selves: Theory and Practice” (1998), accounts for these differences in autobiography by suggesting that women have a different individuation process. Friedman suggests that a feminine collective identity emerges from women’s autobiography as opposed to the staunch individual in men’s autobiography.
A result of the attention to gender and genre in the last decades of the twentieth century was the recovery and publication of many diaries. Jelinek (1980), in her assessment of autobiographies from men and women, writes, “One is struck by the number of women writing diaries, journals, and notebooks, in contrast to the many more men writing autobiographies proper. From the earliest time, these discontinuous forms have been important to women because they are analogous to the fragment, interrupted, and formless nature of their lives” (19). The letters, journals, diaries, and letter‐books Jelinek discusses were often considered ephemeral compared to the autobiography, and with the attention to women’s lives spurred by feminism, scholars began taking these genres more seriously. This is an important moment in autobiographical studies because it birthed life‐writing studies, legitimizing what were once considered the stepchildren, or subgenres, of autobiographical studies.
After years of scholars delegitimizing the diary, even though it appeared next to spiritual autobiographies throughout the Puritan and colonial era, the diary earned significant critical attention by feminist literary critics in the 1980s. Joanne Cooper, in “Shaping Meaning: Women’s Diaries, Journals, and Letters – the Old and the New” (1987), and Cynthia Huff (1989) claim the diary as a female genre with particular feminine characteristics; for example, Huff writes, “Diaries are about community, not hierarchy, about communication, not authority. Hence, their inherent generic qualities are subversive to the literary establishment and to the patriarchal social order” (6). In “Expanding the Boundaries of Criticism: The Diary as Female Autobiography” (1987), Judy Nolte Lensink underscores the dailiness of the diary and its attention to domestic detail and relationships, and also labels it a female form. Gayle Davis, in “Women’s Frontier Diaries: Writing for Good Reason” (1987), uncovers diaries written by frontier women and concludes that it was a genre that allowed women to adjust to the challenges of their new lives. Feminism of the late twentieth century established the diary as an acceptable generic form for literary study, recovering it from critical neglect.
The attention on the diary culminated in the extraordinary publication success of A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812 (1990) by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. Ulrich devotes each chapter of her book to one year from Ballard’s diary and heavily contextualizes chapters with individual introductions and maps, medical records, and other illustrations. By studying what critics once dismissed as the trivia of domestic life, Ulrich discovers “a consistent, daily record of an operation of a female‐managed economy” (33). Indeed, it is “the very dailiness, the exhaustive, repetitious dailiness,” that Ulrich holds up as the means of understanding life in the new republic for a woman residing on the Maine frontier (9). Critics lauded Ulrich’s publication as paradigm shifting. Scholars followed Ulrich’s publication with articles on midwifery, medicine, family labor, servants, medicine, female domestic economy, and other topics pertinent to Ballard’s diary and the eighteenth century. Historians and literary scholars touted the diary as an aid to producing studies of communities, decentered from the dominant and familiar perspective of white men. Finally, women’s writing was used to write history and to understand the early Federal Period.
Ulrich’s study made it more difficult for publishers and scholars to dismiss diaries as mundane chronicles, and its unprecedented success ushered more diaries into print. For instance, John Woolman, a colonial Quaker, was often taught as the example of a Quaker diarist; however, eighteenth‐century Quaker women diarists are now well represented in print, thanks in part to Ulrich’s success. In addition to Elizabeth Ashbridge’s Some Account of the Fore Part of the Life of Elizabeth Ashbridge (1774), which has at least one book‐length study devoted to it (Levenduski 1996), Elizabeth Drinker (Crane 1991) and Hannah Callender Sansom (Klepp and Wulf 2010) are two other Quaker women whose diaries are currently in print. Drinker kept a multi‐volume diary in Philadelphia during the Revolution, chronicling the passage of her life from a single woman to a grandmother. The diary of her contemporary, Sansom, also chronicles her transitions between multiple domestic roles. Sansom and Drinker read each other’s diaries as young girls, highlighting the importance of diaries and their circulation in the lives of Quaker girls and women. Scholars have mined Drinker’s and Sansom’s diaries for information on childcare, health care, marriage, reading habits, yellow fever, and more.
Like George Whitefield, Edwards, and David Brainerd, white evangelical women kept careful diaries responding to the religious fervor of the Great Awakening. In fact, Edwards’s daughter, Esther Edwards Burr (Karlsen and Crumpacker 1984), wrote a diary from 1754 to 1757 that detailed her newly married life in Princeton, New Jersey. Similar to Drinker and Sansom, who read each other’s diaries, Burr and her friend Sarah Prince dedicated their diaries to one another and read each other’s. While Burr’s and Prince’s decision speaks to the Puritan tradition of the diary as a place to monitor one’s spiritual development, they move outside this tradition with their desire to exchange their diaries with each other. Diaries were not private texts, but were penned with a specific audience in mind, and thus, played an instrumental role not just in religious development but in female friendship too. In addition to Burr and Prince as female friends and diarists, Sarah Osborn and Susanna Anthony are another pair of women who kept diaries and wrote letters to each other during the Great Awakening in Newark, Rhode Island. Osborn was known not just for her preaching to African American men and women, but for her extensive writings too, including diaries, a memoir, religious tracts, and letters. Diaries, from Burr to Osborn, reveal life during the Great Awakening and the lives of individual women who were committed to not just to their religious communities and spiritual growth but also to their female friends and their writing.
The publication of female‐authored diaries expands our understanding of the diary’s role and function. Take, for instance, scholarship on the Quaker diary. Traditionally, scholars have understood the Quaker diary as concerned with spiritual matters and religious awakening. Quaker diarists from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries describe an antagonistic relationship with their surrounding communities. Through this relationship, Quakers portray their well‐known defiance of a community’s customs and display the ensuing suffering that often results from their beliefs. Drinker and Sansom challenge this tradition with their focus on the physical and the domestic dramas of motherhood. For example, after witnessing her daughter‐in‐law give birth, Drinker, on 13 August 1804, writes, “Hannah S. Drinker was deliver’d yesterday morning of 2 Children a Son and a Daughter – so that our Son Henry at present has 6 Children, and has buried two – they have been married 9 years and 8 months, nearly – O dear!” (Crane 1991: 266). While Shea deridingly characterized a diarist as a “prisoner of the present,” it is the present moment that makes Drinker’s comment so memorable, aptly portraying the perils of childbirth for the contemporary reader. The urgency is felt with her three dashes and pauses, conveying her genuine worry over her son and daughter‐in‐law. More importantly, her comment strikingly shows her at odds with the expectations of motherhood and childrearing. This is a different type of defiance from the traditional Quaker defiance. Drinker challenges cultural expectations, rather than religious dogma or doctrine, and thus, she expands scholarly understanding of gender and Quaker defiance in diaries.
Since the diary was not a private text and women shared their diaries, statements such as Drinker’s offer women comfort and the knowledge that they are not alone with their frustrations and burdens. In Sansom’s diary, she clearly recognizes her daughter as a potential reader, writing, “it has pleased god to bless me with three children William, Sarah, and Joseph, my daughter, if she lives, it may be will look in this with some pleasure” (Klepp and Wulf 2010: 215). Sansom’s comment delineates between her daughter and sons, and locates only her daughter as a future reader. While Sandra Stanley Holton (2007) recognizes letters, diaries, and memoirs as texts that function as “memorials for the dead,” life writing needs to be studied not only as testimonial but as text actively attempting to influence readers’ lives (2). After Sansom’s daughter marries a non‐Quaker, a marriage that Sansom encouraged, she writes in her diary, “thou hast most assuredly gained a heart. if thou guards it with female softness. it looks to me thou will keep it” (314). This quote is intended to be read by her daughter as Sansom directs it with her pronoun usage. Before she writes this particular passage, Sansom displays her defiance of Quaker doctrine and her husband as she records her clandestine negotiations between herself, her daughter, Sally, and Sally’s suitor. Similar to Drinker, Sansom challenges cultural marital norms, but she also seems intent in wanting her daughter to know how hard she worked for her marriage and that she gave her blessing. In other words, Sansom wanted to interact with her daughter after she was gone and to remind her of these particular actions. When readers recall that diaries circulated to daughters, friends, and others, scholars must recognize this new avenue of inquiry and consider how diarists attempt to influence their readers.
While Drinker and Sansom use their diaries to communicate, Drinker in particular finds solace and comfort in writing. On 13 March 1805, Drinker writes, “’Tis now between 12 and one o’clock, all asleep but myself, who am scribling, must go into the Childrens room to see little Mary, before I go to bed” (Crane 1991: 271). Again, Drinker bristles under the responsibilities of motherhood as she enjoys “scribling” by herself in the early hours of the night. Writing was clearly more than “scribling” or a way to pass the time for Drinker since she fills more than three volumes worth of diary entries during her lifetime. On 1 January 1799, she writes, “I have for years past keep’t a sort of diary, but intend to discontinue it and make this a memorandum book, but seeing a fine snow falling this morning and being used to make observations on the weather, began this first day in the accustomed manner” (206). Drinker’s self‐awareness of her text and authorship is striking as she attempts to alter the direction of her diary, yet fails. She cannot write short memorandums, but must write long prose‐like entries. Again, the scholarship on Quaker diaries does not help us to navigate these entries. The future of scholarship needs to address women’s writing habits and how their writing functioned in their lives and their readers’ lives.
It is fitting that as more diaries come into print, the definition of the diary must change. For instance, Mehetabel Chandler Coit’s diary (Coughlin 2012), which begins in May 1688 and continues into the eighteenth century, is now considered to be the first female autobiographical text, replacing Madam Sarah Kemble Knight’s travel journal. Containing a rich array of poems, recipes, religious reflections, and more, the diary’s diverse contents depart from more traditional diaries from the period. With more diaries in print, critics are forced to reconsider assumptions about the formulaic structure of the diary. Elise Pinckney’s The Letterbook of Eliza Lucas Pinckney, 1739–1762 (1997) and Rachel Hope Cleves’s Charity and Sylvia: A Same‐Sex Marriage in Early America (2014) foreground issues of genre classification. Cleves uncovers and collects a range of different types of life writing, such as fragments from diaries, business papers, poems, correspondence, and scraps, to tell the story of two women who lived together in rural Vermont for years in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Similarly, Pinckney’s collection of Eliza Lucas Pinckney’s letters and memorandum resembles a type of diary with its daily construction but exceeds it with the variety of texts included. These women enter the narrative of early American life writing when genre definitions broaden and scholarly attention shifts from public and masculine constructions of the self to private and feminine creations. The future of life‐writing studies appears to consist of texts that are not as neatly arranged as the diary, but that give readers access to diverse voices in early America. The fluidity of the diary genre enables comparative analysis across time and space, from Pickney’s eighteenth‐century South Carolina to Drinker’s nineteenth‐century Philadelphia, and it appears that this type of categorically messy text might be the future of early American studies and life writing.
Since 1980, there have been significant developments in the study of early American black autobiography. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African‐American Literary Criticism (1988), and Houston A. Baker, Jr., in Blues, Ideology, and Afro‐American Literature (1987), brought attention to black autobiography. They offered highly theoretical readings of an expansive African American literary canon that spanned, at that time, three centuries. Gates and Baker not only suggested innovative ways to approach African American literature, but they created for it an origin story. They turned to the slave narrative of the eighteenth century, the earliest form of autobiography by black English‐speakers, to locate the beginnings of an African American literary tradition; more specifically, they looked to The Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself (1789) as an ur‐text that defines and influences black autobiographical writing, particularly the slave narratives of the eighteenth century. Gates and Baker contributed to the burgeoning field of African American literature in the 1980s and inaugurated scholarly interest in the autobiography and the slave narrative.
William L. Andrews (1986) offers the first comprehensive study on the slave narrative, introducing numerous authors and strategies to understand the roughly 100‐year period in which the slave narrative was written. He argues that the “writing of autobiography” for the black slave was “uniquely self‐liberating, the final, climatic act in the drama of the lifelong quests for freedom” which “became a very public way of declaring oneself free” (xi). At the same time, though, Andrews recognizes that freedom for the black writer was tempered by outside factors. The black autobiographer encountered multiple challenges with his white editor, white amanuensis, and/or white audience. These white amanuenses and editors of the slave narrative made certain to mimic “the organizing principles and cultural values of popular white autobiographical genres, in particular, the captivity narrative, the conversion account, the criminal confession, the spiritual autobiography, and the journal of ministerial labors” in order to present the narratives to a white audience (38). Here, an interesting conflation of autobiographical forms occurs as we see the spiritual autobiography of Protestant evangelicals influence the slave narrative and vice versa. For example, in James Gronniosaw’s (1772) narrative, he recounts the moment he saw the Dutch captain of a slave ship: “I ran to him and put my arms round him, and said, ‘father, save me.’ (for I knew that if he did not buy me, I should be treated very ill, or, possibly, murdered) And though he did not understand my language, yet it pleased the ALMIGHTY to influence him in my behalf, and he bought me” (1999: 12). The influence of the spiritual autobiography is apparent in Gronniosaw’s word choice and gratitude to the Almighty. His invocation of the father is troubling, though, as he possibly calls the white slaver “father.” Moments like this one became entry points for critics and readers to follow and to question race and the larger autobiographical tradition in early America. Andrews’s trailblazing work introduced eighteenth‐century black writers as firmly committed to the autobiographical act and highlighted the tensions between the black writer, white audience, white editor, and the tradition of spiritual autobiography.
As critical attention to the slave narrative grew, a discussion resulted that questioned whether or not the slave narrative was an example of autobiography and whether or not it contained an “authentic” black voice. These debates resembled the arguments concerning autobiography’s relationship to literature occurring in the 1960s. James Olney, in “‘I Was Born’: Slave Narratives, Their Status as Autobiography and as Literature” (1984), insists that autobiography is a recollective act that creatively shapes memory into a written text. According to Olney, slave narratives are conventional and overdetermined and are neither literature nor autobiography. John Sekora (1987) questions the existence of a black “authentic” voice within slave narratives. Sekora memorably defines the relationship between white institutional power and the black narrative voice as a “black message […] sealed within a white envelope,” a phrase that becomes repeated in criticism concerning slave narratives (502). The scholarship of the 1980s was split between understanding the autobiographical act of black writers as either empowering and liberating, or as inauthentic, further debilitating and oppressing the black writer.
Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic (1993) shifted attention from voice to issues of identity. Gilroy’s scholarship offered readers a means to approach eighteenth‐century black autobiography that refused ethnic and racial absolutism. Challenging ideas of authenticity and nationhood, Gilroy introduced the phrase “the black Atlantic” as a way of thinking about the African diaspora and the languages, cultures, and practices that developed in response to slavery. In opposition to Manichean categories of identity, Gilroy presents such terms as “creole” and “hybrid” when discussing the communities of the black Atlantic. Identity, for Gilroy, is a process that is inseparable from movement, and thus, identity is always changing and never stable. Gilroy’s interest in the Atlantic littoral and black diaspora gave birth to new ways of looking at the first generation of black autobiography. By applying Gilroy’s ideas, scholars were no longer bogged down in a desire to define an “authentic” voice, since identity and voice were continually altering and adjusting. This was an important moment for black autobiography because it removed the burden of authenticity as readers began to understand black identity and voice as protean.
With such rich scholarship from the 1980s and 1990s, readers needed primary sources as a necessary complement especially since many narratives were not in print. Adam Potkay and Sandra Burr’s Black Atlantic Writers of the 18th Century: Living the New Exodus in England and the Americas (1995), Vincent Carretta’s Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the English‐Speaking World of the 18th Century (1996), and Joanna Brooks and John Saillant’s “Face Zion Forward”: First Writers of the Black Atlantic (2002) filled the void and placed eighteenth‐century black autobiographies in print for the first time since their initial publication. In these collections, many autobiographers are identified as contributing to the literature of the black Atlantic, reflecting the ideas of Gilroy, rather than contributing to a national literature. Potkay and Burr organize their anthology around Christianity and the autobiographical spiritual conversion tales. Publishing selections of Gronniosaw, Marrant, Cugoano, and Equiano, Potkay and Burr argue that these men connect the slave narrative to the spiritual conversion as a means to underscore physical and spiritual bondage. The spiritual conversion tale was a genre that allowed the slave to prove his equal humanity through the embrace of Christianity. Carretta’s anthology casts a much broader net, including the poetry of Phillis Wheatley, Francis Williams, and Jupiter Hammon alongside the autobiographical prose writings of Ignatius Sancho, Johnson Green, David George, Boston King, and Venture Smith. Here, we witness a liberal definition of autobiography with poetry placed next to the slave narrative. This approach to autobiography is necessary, though, in order to access black women’s voices from the eighteenth century, and it recalls similar conversations in feminist autobiography circles regarding the loosening of generic classifications. There must be a broadening of genre definitions if we are to read more diverse authors. Brooks and Saillant’s anthology draws attention to the collected works of John Marrant and his contemporaries, such as David George, Prince Hall, and Boston King, displaying the interconnectedness of black writers and their thoughts on Africa, America, and England. All three anthologies initiated the important work of placing autobiographies in print and contextualizing autobiographical genres, like the spiritual conversion narrative, captivity narrative, and slave narratives.
It is well worth noting that “Face Zion Forward” includes the entirety of John Marrant’s Journal, its first publication since the original in 1785. The Journal describes the resettlement of 3000 black Loyalists in Nova Scotia. The Journal is the “most extensive account of a black man preaching in black communities before the American Civil War” (Brooks and Saillant 2002: 21). According to Brooks and Saillant, Marrant positioned himself as a black prophet delivering a message to a black audience, and his Journal shows his awareness of this dangerous and provocative identity. They state:
Ultimately, the Journal is more than a missionary’s autobiography. Behind the traditional genre lurks a hidden transcript that shows that John Marrant went to Nova Scotia not only to further the work of the Huntingdon Connexion but to deliver a message of specific import to its black Loyalist communities. This message is encoded in the Journal’s numerous biblical citations, which refer the reader to the chapters and verses that formed the bases for Marrant’s sermons. […] It is important to notice that the Journal provides references but not texts, because this method of encoding disguised the specifically black content of his preaching from the Huntingdon Connexion and other potentially hostile or dangerous readers. (24)
Clearly, Marrant did not consider his Journal a private text. The Journal’s description as “encoded” with biblical passages makes scholars and readers, of the diary in particular, pause. Drinker’s and Sansom’s messages to their readers come to mind as they too used their diaries to connect to a wider, yet still quite intimate audience. Marrant knows that a varied audience will read his journal, and thus, he covertly delivers his message in his journal to his black readers, or to readers outside of the Connexion. Thus, Marrant, Drinker, and Sansom all attempt to communicate with a particular audience through their diaries at roughly the same point in history, yet race, gender, and societal position influence their means of doing so. It is these attempts to communicate with others through the eighteenth‐century diary that need to be uncovered and considered.
Two current collections on the black Atlantic autobiography that highlight the creativity and energy of the field are Genius in Bondage: Literature of the Early Black Atlantic (2001), co‐edited by Carretta and Philip Gould, and Venture Smith and the Business of Slavery and Freedom (2010), edited by James Brewer Stewart. Genius in Bondage’s introduction comments on how far the study of black autobiography has come. Carretta and Gould announce that eighteenth‐century black writing is its own field; it is no longer thought of as only the precursor to the more established black writers of antebellum America, as described in earlier scholarship. Revising themes from previous scholars, Carretta and Gould argue that the black writer actively shapes his narrative: “by the very act of authoring their texts,” black writers “achieved identities they had played some significant role in fashioning” (2). Agency is given to the black autobiographer as he is not seen mimicking other forms and authors, but actively shapes and designs his narrative. Gilroy’s influence is seen with Carretta and Gould’s description of a “diasporic model of racial identity” (3). This model of identity challenges previous scholarship regarding “authentic” black autobiographical voices and white hegemony. Carretta and Gould state, “Such critical declarations of the fluidity of identity suggest rhetorical possibilities for the creative engagement between black and white languages in the eighteenth century. They enable us, in other words, to reconsider the trope of the black message imprisoned in a white envelope” (4). Revising the work of Sekora, Carretta and Gould refuse to align the black voice and white voice as antagonistic; rather, they recognize various dynamics and voices and how these voices create power and possibility.
In Genuis and Bondage we witness a revision of the previous generation’s scholarship and debates. In his essay contribution, “Remarkable Liberty” (2001), Gould returns to issues of authenticity and convincingly argues that black autobiography is a collaborative act between black narrators and white editors. Referencing Sekora’s analogy of the white envelope, Gould suggests:
Rather than see these speaking autobiographers as victims to their white editors, we might see them truly as collaborators. […] If, then, as John Sekora has suggested, reading black literature entails sifting through the “white envelope” for the “black message,” reading the lives of these eighteenth‐century autobiographers entails recognizing the fragile seams and fraying edges of the white envelope itself. (128–129)
Gould’s model of collaboration challenges old models of reading based on racial absolutes and replaces it with a more dynamic and nuanced model. Similar to Gould, Karen W. Weyler (2001) glances back at previous debates surrounding the strained relationship between black narrators and white editors. She moves forward from this debate, writing, “Regardless of who actually wrote the narratives that appeared under the names of Hammon and Marrant, they were presented and received as narratives of black men, with probably little regard paid by readers to the exact mode of transmission” (42). Dismissing the discussion concerning authenticity and the relationship between the black writer and the white editor/amanuensis, Weyler points to how audiences understood the authorship of the texts. She explores how black autobiographers assume the identities of pious Christians within their autobiographies, which she reads as examples of “eighteenth‐century Anglophone captivity literature” (42). Genius in Bondage revises old theories and combines new theoretical trends, such as history of the book and diasporic racial identities, showcasing the new avenues of this field.
Venture Smith and the Business of Slavery and Freedom reflects a new approach to black autobiography studies with the publication of A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, A Native of Africa (1798) and essays on the narrative from a range of different scholars, a combination that works extraordinarily well in order to canonize and teach recovered authors. Smith’s name has been mentioned in lists of eighteenth‐century black autobiographers, but it is only in recent years that his narrative has drawn critical attention. Smith is known for his zeal for and obsession with economics; however, Stewart (2010) argues that “an enormous amount” is missed if readers see Smith as solely a “variant of Benjamin Franklin, wholly devoted to the hard‐fisted values of possessive individualism and capitalist accumulation” (xiv). Historians, literary scholars, poets, economists, philosophers, and geneticists combine in this collection to create interdisciplinary collaboration that not only introduces readers to Smith’s autobiography but delivers essays on a range of topics from gravesite excavation to the political economies in West Africa. Stewart insists that “interdisciplinary scholarship can provide substantial answers to a challenging range of questions surrounding the life of Venture Smith, and surrounding the nature of Atlantic‐world slavery and the struggle of freedom” (xiv).
Along with Stewart’s collection, Eileen Razzari Elrod’s Piety and Dissent: Race, Gender, and Biblical Rhetoric in Early American Autobiography (2008) forecasts the future for black autobiography and autobiographical studies. Unlike many other recent book‐length studies, Elrod places black autobiographers next to their non‐black contemporaries. Most of the scholarship on black autobiography compares the autobiographers to each other, whether it is analyzing eighteenth‐century writers together or comparing eighteenth‐century to nineteenth‐century writers. Elrod moves in a different direction and constructs an understanding between races and genders. Focusing upon Occom, Wheatley, William Apess, and Abigail Abbot Bailey, she recognizes their shared Protestantism and portrays how they engage with their religious beliefs and autobiography in order to oppose injustice and oppression. Elrod demonstrates a new way to understand autobiography by studying these writers together and answers questions surrounding voice, identity, marginality, and racial and gendered identities. This type of study paints a nuanced picture of the multicultural eighteenth century and how these diverse authors approached different topics through a similar means.
While Elrod’s study broadens the discussion on black autobiography and women’s writing, an obvious absence in early American black autobiography studies is women authors. While countless studies exist on black women’s autobiography, most of them begin with the nineteenth century. For example, Joanne M. Braxton’s groundbreaking Black Women Writing Autobiography: A Tradition within a Tradition (1989) starts with Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Unlike others, Braxton does recognize an eighteenth‐century text, “Belinda, or the Cruelty of Men Whose Faces Where Like the Moon” (1787), a court document that narrates the story of Belinda’s captivity from Africa and her cruel separation from her parents. Braxton marks “Belinda” as the beginning of the black woman’s autobiography tradition. However, she does not offer a lengthy analysis of this narrative, and very little scholarship outside of Braxton exists on it. As this example suggests, scholars must widen their gaze and search through court petitions, letters, and other historical documents to locate female‐authored or female‐narrated autobiographical texts by black women in order to generate a fuller picture of the black Atlantic and black autobiography.
Another glaring absence in autobiographical studies is texts authored by Native Americans. Autobiography undergoes close scrutiny in Native American studies. Arnold Krupat, in For Those Who Come After: A Study of Native American Autobiography (1985), argues that there is not an equivalent to the autobiographical tradition in Native American literature, positing that the celebration of the independent self does not occur in Indigenous cultures and certainly does not happen in written form. Even with these cultural differences, he locates Occom as the first Native American autobiographer, who has in recent years become a canonical early American voice. He is best known for his short autobiography that chronicles his hardships as a Mohegan minister. In Sending My Heart Back Across the Years: Tradition and Innovation in Native American Autobiography (1992), Hertha Dawn Wong counters Krupat and insists that there is an autobiographical tradition in Native American literature. She points to oral self‐narration tales in pre‐contact America and studies these stories along with pictographic personal narratives as evidence of autobiography.
In order to address texts which may convey Native American autobiographical acts, autobiography studies must find ways to accommodate cultural difference. For instance, Dawn G. Marsh, in A Lenape Among the Quakers: The Life of Hannah Freeman (2014), uses a court record given by Hannah Freeman in Chester County, Pennsylvania, in 1797, as an autobiographical text. She then uses it to construct Freeman’s life among the Quakers and the Lenapes. Laura Arnold Leibman’s Experience Mayhew’s Indian Converts (2008) is another creative example in Native American studies that locates autobiographical stories among the Wampanoag. Mayhew’s text includes four generations of biographies of Indian men, women, and children. While Indian Converts is technically considered a collection of biographies told to Mayhew by the Wampanoags, the text invokes questions regarding the genres of biography and autobiography in light of oral traditions. Once autobiography scholars expanded their scope and looked to other autobiographical genres, such as the diary, readers gained access to woman’s experience. Similarly, readers and scholars today must adjust their definitions of autobiography and alter approaches to textual studies in order to learn about Native Americans and black women in early America.
Perhaps more than any other genre in early America, autobiography represents a diverse cast of writers. These writers produced varying types of autobiographical forms, from the diary to the slave narrative to the conversion tale. Americans were drawn to the first person as a means to record everything from God’s judgment of them to their frustrations with familial norms. The ever‐expanding canon of autobiography and life writing broadens our knowledge of individual lives and the way these lives responded to the challenges of life in early America. Current readers and scholars must broaden the scope of autobiography by changing our current definitions and classifications of the genres of autobiography and life writing and continue to diversify American literature.
See also: chapter 7 (africans in early america); chapter 11 (travel writings in early america, 1680–1820); chapter 18 (letters in early american manuscript and print cultures); chapter 20 (the first black atlantic).