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| | | | | The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Third Edition
Paul Lauter, General Editor
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| | Hypertext Instructor's Guide
Volume 1
Elizabeth Ashbridge (1713-1755)
Contributing Editor: Liahna Babener
Classroom Issues and Strategies
Most students are unfamiliar with the doctrinal differences between
the Anglican and Quaker faiths, upon which Ashbridge's Account hinges.
They tend to be uncomfortable with early Quaker preaching practices, doctrinal
assumptions, and social customs. This discomfort sometimes alienates students
or prevents them from empathizing with Ashbridge's dilemma. Such anxieties,
however, are almost always overcome by the power and poignancy of the text
itself.
Providing background about religious and doctrinal tensions in the Great
Awakening and gender patterns in colonial America is crucial, and the adoption
of a feminist strategy of reading is particularly important. Comparing
other accounts of those who have been impelled by spiritual conviction
to act against convention and law is illuminating, as is reading personal
narratives of women of the period who use the autobiographical text as
a private means of self-vindication in a patriarchal culture.
Students enjoy discussing whether Ashbridge is heroic or perverse. They
often identify with her independent spirit and even her proto-feminist
rebellion, but lament her increasingly dour tone and her failed marriage.
Some wonder whether she gave up too much for conscience's sake. Some students
see the husband as abusive or imperious but cannot help sympathizing with
his distress over losing a mirthful wife. Students also wonder if Quakers
courted their social estrangement, contributing to their own victimization,
and ask whether Quakers should be blamed or censured for their martyrdom.
Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, and Personal Issues
1. The expressly female dilemma of having to choose between conscience
and husband, as well as the social stresses upon a woman who defies traditional
and prescribed sex roles, threatening the stability of the patriarchal
order.
2. The doctrinal and social conflicts between Anglicans and Quakers
in early America; more broadly, the pressures from a predominantly Anglican,
increasingly secularized culture to tame or compartmentalize religious
fervor.
3. Ways in which women autobiographers use personal narrative for self-vindicating
purposes, or for private rebellion against patriarchal norms.
4. The degree to which autobiography may be read as factual truth as
opposed to an invention or reconstruction of reality; the reliability of
the personal narrator as witness to and interpreter of events; the fictional
elements of the genre.
5. Making a living (as a woman) in colonial America.
6. Marriage, husbands' prerogatives, men's and women's ways of coping
with marital estrangement.
7. The nature of religious conviction; Quaker doctrine, patterns of
worship, and social customs.
Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions
Study the document as an example of the genre of spiritual autobiography,
of personal narrative, of female and feminist assertion, of social history,
of eighteenth-century rationalism, and at the same time of revivalist ardor.
Explore to what degree the document is confessional and to what degree
it may be understood as contrivance or fiction. How is the author "inventing"
herself as she writes? How does she turn her experience into a didactic
instrument for the edification of her readers?
Original Audience
Social, historical, religious, and political contexts are primary issues.
The composition and publication history of the text--penned just before
Ashbridge's death-- are also illuminating, especially considering that
no version of the document in Ashbridge's own hand survives, and scholars
are not in consensus about which extant version of the autobiography may
be considered authoritative or closest to the original. Consider the Great
Awakening audience who may have read this account of religious conversion.
Does the document create a sense of feminine solidarity? Can one theorize
about the kind of audience to whom Ashbridge directed the Account?
Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections
Compare other Great Awakening spiritual autobiographies, such as Edwards's
"Personal Narrative." Puritan introspective literature and conversion
stories, particularly by women, are instructive (such as those by Elizabeth
Mixer and Elizabeth White); chronicles of Quaker experience or persecution
in colonial America (such as Jane Hoskin's Quaker autobiography or Hawthorne's
tale, "The Gentle Boy") are revealing. Diaries, journals, and
letters of early American women documenting romantic, religious, and social
experiences (compare Sarah
Kemble Knight, Jarena Lee, Sarah Osborne, Abigail
Adams, and so forth) are useful. Benjamin
Franklin's more cunning and more secular Autobiography makes
an apt parallel.
Questions for Reading and Discussion/ Approaches to Writing
1. (a) Characterize Ashbridge's spiritual struggle(s) and marital dilemma(s).
Does she resolve the former at the expense of the latter?
(b) In what ways do you empathize with Ashbridge in her conflict with
her husband? Why or why not? How might you act differently from either
or both of them in this situation?
(c) Does the community treat Ashbridge fairly following her conversion?
(d) What implicit moral and spiritual advice does the piece contain?
2. How does Ashbridge structure the narrative and construct herself
as a character in her own story to win sympathy and intellectual support
from readers? Is she successful?
3. (a) Write a counterpart narrative (or defense) from the husband's
point of view.
(b) Write an Anglican's critique of or comment upon Ashbridge's behavior.
(c) Invent an imaginative dialogue between Ashbridge and Edwards
(or any of the following) concerning religious or gender issues: Anne Hutchinson,
Mary Rowlandson, Anne
Bradstreet, Samuel Sewall,
Knight, Benjamin
Franklin, Abigail Adams,
and so forth.
Bibliography
Two recent studies have provided important new information on Elizabeth
Ashbridge. The most significant published source is Daniel Shea's new edition
of Ashbridge's Some Account of the Fore Part of the Life of Elizabeth
Ashbridge, available with his detailed introduction and textual notes,
in Journeys in New Worlds: Early American Narratives, edited by
William L. Andrews et. al. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990),
from which this excerpt is drawn. Christine Levenduski's dissertation,
"Elizabeth Ashbridge's `Remarkable Experiences': Creating the Self
in a Quaker Personal Narrative" (University of Minnesota, 1989), is
an invaluable book-length discussion of the text and its author. Carol
Edkins's "Quest for Community: Spiritual Autobiographies of Eighteenth-Century
Quaker and Puritan Women in America" in Women's Autobiography:
Essays in Criticism, edited by Estelle C. Jelinek (Blooming-ton: Indiana
University Press, 1980), pp. 39-52, also discusses Ashbridge substantively.
Shea and Levenduski contain useful bibliographies of further materials
providing background to Ashbridge's life and narrative.
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