The wonderful epigraph of the text gives voice to this issue:

Nil Sapientiae odiosius acumine nimio [nothing is more odious to wisdom than excessive cleverness]

Before we begin, we must note that the word “cleverness” here carries two very specific connotations. First, the word invokes a myopic perspective: a narrow attention to detail, and a lack of ability to connect small details to some sort of greater significance. This is, more or less, the sense of cleverness as we would use it in normal conversation. The second sense, draws attention to proficiency in a particular domain of knowledge, sometimes referred to as “acumen.” The subject is not so much general cleverness as it is a trained mastery of a specific field. If we shift our attention to the details of the story itself, they help to make the clear distinction between a shortsighted lack of insight and acumen.

In the story, Poe’s amateur detective Auguste Dupin, a precursor to Sherlock Holmes, takes on a case in which he must find an incriminating letter hidden somewhere in a hotel room. The text begins with the Prefect D of the Parisian Police soliciting Dupin’s help and describing his own failed attempt to locate the letter. The Prefect knows exactly what he is looking for, possessing a “minute account” of the letter’s physical appearance and its contents. He conducts a thoroughly “microscopic” search of the premises, drawing upon a battery of investigative techniques developed over his “long experience” with such matters. Much of this search involves focusing on minor details that he hopes will lead him to the letter. He probes furniture upholstery and book bindings with thin needles, dismantles furniture, and uses a microscope to look for displaced dust and wood-shavings. Unfortunately, this detailed search yields no results, and the Prefect turns to Dupin. After a brief survey, Dupin finds it exactly where nobody would expect to find it: in a card-rack full of letters, slightly torn and marked to change its external appearance.

This story is often used to emphasize a “too-close attention to detail” which illustrates a “hidden in plain sight” dynamic; sometimes the things that most deserve our attention “escape observation by dint of being excessively obvious.” In this first use, the story highlights the pitfalls of myopic perspectives. However, the story also comments on the second component of cleverness, “acumen,” or the specificity of a field of knowledge. The problem is not so much that the Prefect is incompetent or that his methods are poorly executed. On the contrary, Dupin calls the search techniques “highly ingenious.” Rather, the problem is the assumption that a particular framework can be universally applied to any situation, that the way the Prefect follows clues will always yield the thing for which he searches. The prefect “forcibly adapts his designs” to his skillset, and cannot imagine another way of looking for a hidden item. It is his training and experience that set limits on what he is looking for, how he can conduct the search, and ultimately what he is able to find.

In my first post in this series, I spoke about the work of mastery in precisely these terms. I described mastery as knowing what to look for, and noted that this knowledge is cultivated through consistent practice and training. I hope that the Prefect illustrates why I expressed reservations about mastery in that same post. In certain ways, mastery is little more than mere “cleverness.” On the one hand, these skills can make engagement with a text a gateway to entirely new perspectives, which last week’s reading of Hospital Sketches demonstrates. On the other hand, ill-applied mastery can easily become a limiting factor, narrowing the focus of what the reader is looking for in the text, and consequently what she finds in it.

Unlike the case of the purloined letter, such directed searches do not always result in complete failure. A reader could easily, having seen the importance of biographical information to Alcott’s text, turn to authorial biography as the key to unlocking meaning in any text. I’m sure that I could read Poe’s life into “The Purloined Letter” and develop a coherent reading. The question, however, is whether or not I should focus on that detail. Doing so certainly wouldn’t have developed the reading outlined above. And it’s this that causes me pause. If my students have learned to apply a framework of author biography, or symbolic objects, or metaphors to the works they read, I worry that this is the only way that they will approach texts once they leave my classroom. Mastery and cleverness, while valuable, may also result in uniform interpretations. It is possible to be clever and to decide what to look for in a text before even reading the first word. It takes an investment in the joy of studying literature, in the joy of discovery, to let the text offer up which details are important on its own terms.

Wil Marple is a PhD student in the English Department at Syracuse University. He studies American literature of the long nineteenth century with a particular interest in the Transcendentalists and other authors of the mid-century “American Renaissance.” He hopes that his current fascination with the notion that expectations shape perception will lead him to produce a project titled Great Expectations that has absolutely nothing to do with Charles Dickens.

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An article in the most recent issue of The Atlantic draws attention to the varied ways in which Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women is read. The main suggestion is that knowledge of Alcott’s biography can drastically change a reader’s interpretation of the text. This knowledge about the author’s biography, one of many types of topic mastery I discussed in my post last week, illuminates greater meaning for the novel. One can read it either as a reproduction of sentimental feminine domesticity or as a criticism of that mode of understanding the place of women in society.

In much the same way that the protagonist, Tribulation Periwinkle (a fictionalized version of Alcott herself), is forced to reckon with her understanding of wartime heroism and gender roles, the reader is forced to come to terms with the same notions.

This theme of simultaneous reproduction of and resistance to conventional frameworks of knowledge is prevalent in much of Alcott’s work. It is undoubtedly the subject of the lesser-known Hospital Sketches, a semi-autobiographical account of an experience in a Civil War hospital. It is possible to read this text in the same vein of most Civil War memoirs: as a sort of valorization of patriotism and male courage. However, attention to the formal details of the text, particularly the military language and metaphors that pervade it, reveals that it is better considered as a reflection on these commonsense values. The text is, at its core, about the disappointment of expectations. In much the same way that the protagonist, Tribulation Periwinkle (a fictionalized version of Alcott herself), is forced to reckon with her understanding of wartime heroism and gender roles, the reader is forced to come to terms with the same notions.

The opening chapters of the text describe Tribulation’s decision to travel from Concord to Washington, DC to serve as a Civil War nurse. From the very start we get a sense of her grossly romanticized notion of what the experience will entail. These chapters largely focus on the mundane processes of obtaining train tickets and traveling from one city to the next. Despite the mundanity, we see Tribulation with her head full of “heroic purposes ‘to do or die,’ — perhaps both,” speaking with “martial brevity,” and viewing her actions in decidedly militaristic terms.

While it is worth noting that much of her “heroic” outlook is structured with reference to her reading — newspaper articles about “our brave boys” and romantic poetry like Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade” — I will not linger on that point. What I wish to emphasize is that the text introduces militaristic language and metaphors to emphasize a stark contrast between the domestic (typically synonymous with femininity) and the heroic (associated with masculinity). Tribulation constantly tries to leave her domestic behaviors behind in order to inhabit an entirely different sphere: heroic nurses absolutely do not cry on the train after leaving their mothers. This dynamic being established, the text proceeds to emphasize the ways in which Tribulation’s perspective on these categories shifts throughout her service. The deployment of military language and metaphor soon ceases to signal the sharp distinction between what constitutes domesticity or heroism. Instead, it signals a reflection on what such rigid ways of understanding the world occludes.

The third chapter begins with a frantic exclamation that “they’ve come!”, causing Tribulation to spring to action. Convinced that the Confederate soldiers have arrived to take the hospital by storm, she prepares to do battle. In doing so, she evokes a romantic poetic reference describing her willingness “‘To gird my woman’s form, / And on the ramparts die,’ if necessary.” Her heroic expectations are immediately undercut by the reality of the situation: it is not the rebels, but a group of wounded soldiers coming from the Battle of Fredericksburg. Her task is not to stand and fight, but rather to wash their bodies. While Tribulation is “staggered” and bewildered by the seeming mundanity, and there is a humorous element to the scenario, the point here is not to laugh at her naivety. Rather, this scene raises a more pointed question that the reader is asked to consider: what are the aspects of warfare that typically aren’t considered? What is ignored when all of the discursive emphasis is placed upon heroic deeds of manly valor?

The sequence that follows, then, is an effort to acknowledge these crucial yet oft-neglected features of war. What results is a breakdown of conventional cultural frameworks, a space in which the heroic and the domestic, the masculine and the feminine, are able to blend together. This blending is emphasized through the continued usage of militaristic language: a bar of soap can be “manfully” taken up and the washing of soldiers is accomplished “vi et armis” (that is, “by force of arms”); rough soldiers can blush “like bashful girls” while being scrubbed; the serving of a meal can be described as a “skirmishing” of utensils and a “marching and counter-marching” of rushing plates back and forth. Whereas in the first section Tribulation attempts to abandon the domestic, we see here the domesticating of the heroic military world.

Her illness manifests itself as a more acute sense of what was always present to her, but what she did not always pay attention to.

The text ends with Tribulation’s removal from the hospital, brought on by a bout of typhoid fever. Significantly, her illness produces in her “a painful consciousness of my pleura, and a realizing sense of bones in the human frame.” In other words, her illness manifests itself as a more acute sense of what was always present to her, but what she did not always pay attention to. In this way, Tribulation’s bodily illness mirrors her mental processes. While she hasn’t “learned” anything in the strictest sense, she undergoes a re-orientation of consciousness.

A similar re-orientation is possible for attentive readers, but it is by no means guaranteed. A reader lacking mastery of literary conventions may miss the close reading outlined above with its attention to specific language usage. Even readers aware of the importance of such details are likely to miss out. I expect students to pick up on Alcott’s word choice, but I know that they will likely need guidance while considering the overall effect. Guiding students through this reading is, in a way, an exercise in mastery. It serves as a sort of model for moving from minor details to the overall meaning that I discussed last week. However, my hope is that it serves another purpose. Even if students don’t get to this reading on their own, very few feel like they don’t understand the text. With that in mind, in offering this explanation I am implicitly posing a question; one that hopefully leads to a moment of “recognition.” What is actually happening in this text that seems so straightforward?

Wil Marple is a PhD student in the English Department at Syracuse University. He studies American literature of the long nineteenth century with a particular interest in the Transcendentalists and other authors of the mid-century “American Renaissance.” He hopes that his current fascination with the notion that expectations shape perception will lead him to produce a project titled Great Expectations that has absolutely nothing to do with Charles Dickens.

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In simplest terms, the discussion might best be described as a lack of a unifying principle guiding scholarly work. To over-simplify the debate immensely, some scholars advocate for the freedom that this lack of a dominant framework allows in our work, while others are invested in the power of an interpretive paradigm, often nebulously referred to as “critique” or “symptomatic reading.” This second process involves the unveiling of meanings hidden in a text, and, in doing so, attacking the cultural forces that structure such hidden meanings.

My deepest frustration is that I am unable to convey what I consider the most interesting aspects about engaging a literary text, and am instead left with a duller, albeit crucial, task.

Allow me to explain.

Part of my pedagogical method is a modification of something that I’ve taken away from an experience with an AmeriCorps program wherein I was working at a Philadelphia middle school. The teaching style emphasized in this school, which I remember as the “I Do, We Do, You Do” model but which I believe is more accurately called the “Gradual Release of Responsibility” model, is one that, despite some of its flaws, has provided a loose foundation from which I have developed my own approach to teaching.

I think that modeling behaviors and practices can be of use to students; a major part of my role as an instructor consists of providing students with concrete ideas or interpretive frameworks, with an approach or a set of details to look out for as they encounter the wide range of texts that an undergraduate course (and especially a survey) throws at them. In short, I consider it important to bring students to a certain degree of mastery in the field of “English,” broadly stated. I’ve often heard this sort of process referred to in other terms as getting a classroom of students to all speak the same language or “sing the same song.”

I consider developing such mastery as an admirable outcome for a typical course. However, my own work is informed by an idea that there is a step beyond mastery, and it is this additional step that leads to the truly interesting moments of engaging with a text.

The work of mastering a practice, broadly stated, is one that cultivates expectations and primes one to notice (and to actively look for) particular aspects or features of an object or situation. In the field of literary studies, taking a text as our object of study, this often means understanding the uses of that text’s formal elements: word choice, sentence structure, tone, narrative arrangement, rhyme scheme and meter, symbols, etc. Consistently drawing attention to the same elements across multiple instances establishes a pattern of expectations and a valuable sense of direction when faced with the daunting task of interpreting a text.

However, there is the all-too-real possibility that as these concepts become internalized, they grow increasingly singular in application, leading a reader to think that there is only one way of understanding the usage of these features in a single text. In my mind, the true moments of discovery come when we are able to forget what we have learned and internalized. They occur when we are able to be surprised by different aspects of a text, when a pattern of expectations fails to account for the whole.

In all of my own scholarly work, I have a quote from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden ever in the back of my mind: “The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions” (97). While Thoreau resonates with me in a way that he may not for other readers (and especially other academics), I see this line as a beautiful articulation of the way in which our knowledge and expectations actively shape the experiences that we have )a subject that, I will briefly note, is the preoccupation of many recent studies in perception psychology).

Part of Thoreau’s larger project while living at Walden (which is not always entirely evident in the text of Walden) was a deliberate cultivation of expectations through observation of the natural world, and finding joy in the moments when such expectations are thwarted. Because, unlike Thoreau, I do not have the patience to stare at an apple for hours and notice the ways in which my perceptions of it change (note: Thoreau’s Journals written during his time at Walden are often interesting, though quite dry), I take literature as my way of enacting this process. I consider reading and interpreting a text to be in many ways an exercise of noticing things, and what a reader notices in a text is largely influenced by the expectation that she brings to it.

In this endeavor I am heavily guided by the thought of Hans-Georg Gadamer, a philosopher who wrote exclusively on hermeneutics, or interpretation. In his masterwork, Truth and Method, Gadamer speaks of the “joy of recognition” that we can derive from a text in terms similar to what I have attempted to outline above:

“what we experience in a work of art and what invites our attention is how true it is — i.e., to what extent one knows and recognizes something and oneself. But we do not understand what recognition is in its profoundest nature if we only regard it as knowing something again that we know already — i.e., what is familiar is recognized again. The joy of recognition is rather the joy of knowing more than is already familiar”

Hans-Georg Gadamer

If we think of mastery as a process of familiarization and internalization, then the moment of joy is one of noticing something new in what we thought we had mastered, in realizing the limits of our knowledge, in seeing something from a new perspective, in noticing new aspects.

The texts that are the most fun to read are only fun for experienced readers — those who have mastered the craft. I’m afraid that when I teach, I am often boring my students; mastery is often a dull experience. It is my hope that I have primed some of them to come to the joy of recognition on their own terms.

While I have attempted to sketch out in general terms this tension of mastery and recognition, such abstract reflections don’t have the same force as a concrete example. In order to provide a practical illustration, next week we will explore this tension in detail in a nineteenth-century text that takes it as its own subject matter.

Wil Marple is a PhD student in the English Department at Syracuse University. He studies American literature of the long nineteenth century with a particular interest in the Transcendentalists and other authors of the mid-century “American Renaissance.” He hopes that his current fascination with the notion that expectations shape perception will lead him to produce a project titled Great Expectations that has absolutely nothing to do with Charles Dickens.

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Mechanics of Victorian “Nervousness”

As a Victorianist, I spend a lot of time talking about nineteenth-century, and specifically Victorian, anxieties. So much of my time is devoted to this in fact that recently, when I was telling someone about research I’m currently doing for a seminar paper, they replied by saying, “So, is your research interest Victorian anxiety because you relate, or…?” As it turns out, my research interests do not center around Victorian anxiety disorders. However, I am very interested in the ways the phrase “nervous energy” is explicitly or implicitly invoked across discourses in the Victorian era.

To make the statement that Victorians were anxious because they were forced to witness and experience THE transition into modernity seems like a fallacy because a “fear of modernity” is noticeable throughout history. There is always something new, changing, incomprehensible and, therefore, ominous on the horizon. So, a general fear of modernity itself may not be the best way to explain the “nervousness” of the Victorians.

Because most of my research up until this point has focused on nineteenth-century anxieties surrounding affectation and performance, much of my time has been spent trying to understand the apparently problematic nature of inauthenticity and fake or forced feeling. My “obsession” with Victorian anxieties began with an interest in Victorian sensation fiction. Specifically, how period critiques of the genre called the incitement of fake feeling—the genre’s need and ability to “make the public’s flesh creep”—one of sensation fiction’s worst offenses.

More recently, a conference paper I presented on performance in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park focused on the problem of theatricality and acting (i.e., faking feeling) and mediation—more specifically, the ways in which mediation affects the performance and interpretation of feeling. While this paper focused on how the body and printed text can be used to mediate and remediate affect, a recent line of inquiry (as stated in a previous post) has gotten me thinking about Victorian “new” media’s relationship to affect and feeling. Although I’ve encountered arguments describing the “nervousness” of the Victorian era when looking at various elements of Victorian popular culture (such as sensation fiction and theatre), I came across the phrase “nervous energy” multiple times while reading about Victorian new media. This phrase might help elucidate the Victorians’ relationship to and anxieties surrounding modernity.

Media theorist Marshall McLuhan has used the phrase “the affect of the electric age” to describe twentieth-century changes in aesthetic and social interaction. Though he is writing roughly a century later, this phrase can be used to reference the problem of energy (gas, steam, electricity) beginning to permeate Victorian life in much the same way fears of affectation appear to. If criticisms surrounding nineteenth-century sensation fiction and theatre often described feeling as a contagion that could infect bodies and attack nerves, electricity might necessarily be a hypermediated, physical manifestation of this anxiety.

This thought leaves me with many thoughts and questions, but I’ll wrap up this section with just a few: If nervous energy and feeling can infect bodies and attack nerves, is it possible to understand electricity functioning in a similar way if media are interpreted as mechanical bodies? How might the concept of affective economies be applied to media, if at all? What might a comparison of Victorian new media/technology, sensation fiction’s (female) readers, and the figure of the (female) occultist medium reveal if we think of energy as something that is able to possess and control fleshy or mechanical bodies?

In the next week, I’ll be attempting to tackle some of these questions in a seminar paper. I’m not quite sure how I feel, but I’m hoping it’s affective.

Objects and Bodies

I’m a person that spends most of their time thinking about objects, space, and bodies. Even though there are similarities between objects and bodies, I still choose to separate the two. For instance: both move through cultural spaces, both can seem ‘out of place’, and both are manipulated for labor. I admit that the separation itself at first feels as if I am privileging the human over the inhuman. Except separating the two also allows for us to partially divest that which has been considered human from the body; creating lacunas that must necessarily be filled by that which is nonhuman.

While writing this I am listening to Porter Robinson’s, “Worlds: The Movie” and am having a memory of their performance at Electric Forest. People often refer to the festival and its [s]p(l)ace as ‘Forest’. Of course it has a different meaning for everyone, but I’ve come to understand this experience as a celebration of the (in)organic. There you will find a horse made of CDs in a small clearing, and more towards the center you might find a technicolor cloud installation among the branches of trees.

As a scholar, I seek to understand the relations between humans, materials, and art. This has led me to consider questions of media, remediation, and affect. To be clearer, I am interested in which ways the individual, susceptible to its environment, is affected by objects. I’m now entangled not only in considering the techne of affectation, but also in questioning how affect circulates between materials and bodies. Readers can find similar concerns being worked through in the modernist novel, Nightwood.

My obsession with Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood during the first semester made my cohort convinced that my dossier was going to be on melancholy. The extent to which Nightwood had affected me also affected my cohort – to put it in another way, we sensed something. How might a text not only contain affect, but also infect readers with affect? Strange discusses the melancholic affect within Nightwood as it relates to the incapacity of figural language that over represents, and occludes, sensation to mediate the truth (134). Parsons suggests that it is not just the text, but the narrative form that’s also structured in such a way that melancholia permeates (169). I consider Nightwood an affective object. However, what makes Nightwood an object of fascination for me is that the objects within Nightwood are affective as well (as mentioned last week). But, as a return to how we sensed something while in the presence of Nightwood: should we not call this, as Noelle has suggested, resonance? Further, what does thinking about the mediation of affect as ‘resonance’ afford in contrast to thinking of affect as an epidemiological phenomenon of ‘infection’?

I took breaks while writing this to watch the video of Worlds on YouTube. I’ve been thinking about which ways I resonate with this particular virtual object. Porter has commented that he created this album as a way to channel his feelings of nostalgia. This is interesting when you consider the fact that the video is compiled of videos from various performances, uploaded by disparate users and edited into a narrative that is just over an hour long. We can draw connections between the reasons for why the video was created, to fix the memory of an enjoyed performance from the past, and the emotion of nostalgia itself. I question whether the nostalgia I’m feeling is in fact my own feeling, or if it’s a resonate affect of this virtual object.

Parsons, Deborah. “Djuna Barnes and Affective Modernism.” The Cambridge Companion to the Modernist Novel. Ed. Morag Schiach. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. 165-177.

Strange, Martina. “’Melancholia, melancholia’; Changing Black Bile into Black Ink in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood.” in Hayford Hall: Hangovers, Erotics, and Modernist Aesthetics. Edited by Podnieks and Chait. Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, 133-49, 2005.

Noelle Hedgcock is an MA student in English at Syracuse University. Her research and teaching interests focus on nineteenth-century British literature and culture.

Tyler Smart, an MA student in English at Syracuse University,  is primarily interested how space produces certain subjectivities, locally and transculturally, in literary and cultural imagination. Other research interests include cross-cultural influences, queer theory and the history of sexuality, subjectivity, phenomenology, eco-criticism, and post-humanism.

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Oral history of Buckland tells the tale of Josiah’s early escape attempt: he rubbed his chains against the wooden floor in his bedroom for about a year, finally breaking them. This story is recorded in Neil Perry’s 1966 article for the Springfield Morning Union. While there is much sensationalism in any newspaper article written about Josiah, my trip to the Spaulding house in Buckland in 2012 led me to believe this had actually happened.

After some research, I managed to locate the owner of the former parsonage, built in the late 1700s, the home of Reverend Spaulding, Mary Williams and their children. There has been very little restoration or modernization done to the former Spaulding home. I was invited there by its owner at the time, Edward Purinton, whose family goes back two hundred years in the Buckland area. Ed grew up in Josiah’s room and his mother had been a local Spaulding researcher. She collected funds from the community to install a gravestone for Josiah in the churchyard cemetery alongside his family, for Josiah, who died at the Deerfield Poor Farm, was buried in an unmarked grave.

Ed told me that the room was very cold in the winter, and in the letters, Josiah’s sisters often expressed concern that he stayed warm enough. Josiah’s bedroom still had the original wide-plank floors, the type of which is no longer seen in the United States. Ed moved the bed out of the way, and there underneath were the chain grooves made by young Josiah, who had been chained in front of the fireplace.

The grooves in the floor where Josiah scraped his chains.

According to legend, Josiah managed to break his chains after he rubbed them into the wooden floor. He escaped from his bedroom out the back staircase, which was situated very close to his bedroom and would have been easily reached. The original hardware was still on the doors of the house, and Josiah’s bedroom only had a latch—typical hardware of the late 1700s in this region. The back staircase did indeed open to the kitchen, where the back door was about a foot away. The barn was also very close to the house; here, Josiah attempted to take the family horse and ride to freedom. According to oral history, a neighbor commandeered Josiah and brought him back to the Reverend. Next door to the Spaulding house is an early nineteenth century house that would have been there in 1812. Josiah’s sister Lydia is said to have alerted her father of his escape, and in the commotion, the neighbor came out to tackle Josiah.

The villagers of Buckland were all aware of what had happened to Josiah; they knew that he was “insane,” and that the Reverend was keeping him chained up. It may be hard to believe that the villagers did not think of it as abusive, but at this time, they did not view it that way. Instead, church records and biographies of Reverend Spaulding refer to his “affliction,” his punishment from God: his son, Josiah Jr. Just like epidemic disease in this era was not understood to be biological in nature, mental illness was believed also to be something that God put upon a family. These afflictions were not anyone’s business to interfere with, especially not if it was the family of the highly revered local minister. Reverend Spaulding spoke from the pulpit about what had happened with his son and his version of events is what everyone believed, although it is unclear exactly what he may have said. Whatever he said, it did not elicit sympathy for Josiah. The sympathy was for the Reverend.

After Josiah’s foiled escape-attempt, Reverend Spaulding knew he had to contain him in something much stronger and harder to escape, so he had an iron cage built by the local blacksmith. In this very small, rural village, the blacksmith and the villagers all would have known exactly for whom they built the cage. It was delivered to the Spaulding home, probably carried there, and strong men assisted the Reverend as they forced his son into it. Once Josiah was put into the cage, his relationship with his sisters and his friends effectively either ended completely or was greatly changed. Letters from Josiah’s friend Ezra Fisk were no longer sent to the Spaulding house and Josiah’s correspondence with his favorite sister, Mary, also ended. The horror and desperation Mary must have felt upon learning that her brother had been put into an iron cage one can only imagine. It most likely only compounded her own feelings of being trapped, isolated, incarcerated in the patriarchal world of the early 1800s in which she could not attend college, work, or be independent of men. There was absolutely nothing Mary could have done about her brother’s situation—and she knew it.

Shortly after Josiah was caged, Mary’s husband Isaac died at age thirty-three from what I suspect may have been cholera or dysentery, when Mary was pregnant with her second child. Their three-year-old daughter also died of disease around the same time. At this time, Mary wrote one of the most heartbreaking letters of the collection to her parents, in which she implored them to help. Mary was entirely alone in Southampton with her second child. Her handwriting was wild, and her tone was of arrant, devastated and hopeless emotion, the kind that occurs only after a remarkable tragedy like what she had experienced: she lost almost everyone important to her in a matter of a few years. Mary had little choice but to return home to Buckland to stay with her parents. Upon her return the family home, she was met with the reality that her brother was now in an iron cage, and that was where he was going to stay for the rest of his life. I do not think that Mary ever recovered from any of these events, and she died at age thirty-nine. None of the Spaulding women survived past the age of fifty.

The Spaulding Family graves

I often wonder if Mary talked to her brother after he was caged, or if he implored her to let him out. The Spaulding daughters and their mother, Mary Williams, were in charge of keeping Josiah clothed, fed and warm. They did his laundry, stoked the fireplace, and cared for him. Josiah was not at all a “raving maniac”; he was not a “lunatic”; and there is no evidence that he was ever “deranged”—whatever those words mean. He was guilty, as his father would have said, of great sin: for being different. He was guilty of running off to Southampton to have fun, of not sharing his father’s Calvinist beliefs, of what may have been possible homosexuality based on the letters that were sent to him by a seemingly infatuated Ezra Fisk. The possible outcome of all of this, as Reverend Spaulding knew, was a challenge to the indomitable religious, patriarchal hold the Reverend maintained over his family and the village. It was such an incredible hold, made stronger by its ultimate physical manifestation in the form of Josiah’s cage, that it continued to socially incarcerate the Spaulding family for decades after the Reverend died. Reverend Spaulding’s death in 1823 around the same time as his wife’s death, did not mean a release or reprieve for Josiah, who by then was in his forties. The next generation cared for him, in his cage, as Josiah was transported up the hill to his sister Lydia’s house after the death of his parents. He was taken from the cage, his limbs long atrophied, carried up the hill by villagers, some of whom also carried his cage, in a grim procession to his destination at the home of Lydia. They lived right across the street from the First Congregational Church of Buckland, where the Reverend had preached for twenty-eight years. In its shadow, Josiah would live out the second half of his adult life.

Disability history is imperative to the field of Disability Studies, especially when there is primary source material like Josiah’s letters. In this case, a researcher can analyze his life in a more direct fashion, and also can learn from the letters of his family. If we were to read only newspaper articles and biographies of Reverend Spaulding and Josiah, we might come to the conclusion that Josiah really was violent and deranged, and that his poor father had no other choice but to cage him. Understanding that people with psychiatric and other disabilities are often very intelligent, observant, caring and nonviolent people is imperative to creating and fostering a world where disabled people like Josiah are given the resources they need to achieve contribute to what Disability Studies scholar Rosemarie Garland Thomson would call a biodiverse world. Diversity amongst humans and perspectives of those who think differently or experience the world differently are an important part of fostering intellectual development for all humans. Presuming the competence of those with disabilities, as former Syracuse University Dean of the School of Education, Douglas Bicklen, would say, is a great way to start the process of biodiverse societal inclusion. Josiah’s letters clearly disprove presumptions of derangement, being “lower than a brute” and “insensate.” However, portrayals of psychiatric disability from the nineteenth century and before have continued to create stigma and bias today. Understanding the history of these perceptions and biases and where they began is necessary to unravel them, and see—really see, without presumption —the lives and experiences of disabled people now and in the past.

The cover photo is the room where Josiah was kept.

Kate Corbett Pollack is a graduate student in Cultural Foundations of Education and Disability Studies at Syracuse University.  Her scholarship has grown from Josiah’s story, and has led to an interest in prisons, mental illness, social reform, education and disability. She wrote a monthly blog for almost three years, which can be viewed at americanpomeroys.blogspot.com, the blog for the American Pomeroy Historic Genealogical Association. She has also written for and done work with the Landmarks Society of Greater Utica on the history and families who lived in a few of the beautiful old mansions in that area. Prior to coming to the university, she lived in Brooklyn, and before that Eugene, Oregon where she was born, and Utica, New York. Her family in Syracuse goes back one hundred years, and she has lived here over the years on occasion.

The post “While the dearest of friends lays in the cold ground”: Epidemic Disease, Incarceration and Patriarchal Control; The Continuing Story of Josiah Spaulding appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

By 1808, Josiah Spaulding Jr. had gained a position as a teacher in nearby Plainfield. Newspaper articles written in 1866 state that Josiah was not accepted to college because he was a raving maniac. I am unsure if Josiah attended college, but my estimation due to research is that he may not have. By the time Josiah had reached young adulthood, Reverend Spaulding had found a place among the New England Divines, and had gained respect and influence in Western Massachusetts. A teaching job in Plainfield could have easily been procured for him through his father’s connections whether he had gone to college or not. Josiah’s education in Buckland also would have been enough to curate his intelligence, which, based on his letters, was ample, and could facilitate a teaching job.

Reverend Spaulding, in an 1808 letter to written to Josiah while he was away at his teaching job, addressed the epidemic disease so prevalent in Buckland during these years. The Reverened believed that the disease was God directly killing people:

 My dear Son,

            The Lord keeps us alive, We are all of us still alive and in a measure of good health, which is thro’ the tender mercies of our God. There appear to be a calamity upon us, and the hand of God out against us; which ought to be for our humiliation, and prayerful consideration. I think that you, nor any of us, ought to despair, or to doubt the mercy of God, we may be guilty of great sin in this way.[1]

During these years, the epidemic disease that absolutely ravaged Buckland, written about in the Reverend’s above letter, could not be explained by science, as the tools did not exist. Reverend Spaulding, and by extension, the villagers of Buckland, believed that God was angry and killing people. In the Reverend’s 1808 letter to his son, he implores Josiah to not anger God any further, and to “prayerfully consider” the reason that God was striking people down. Josiah’s belief that God was loving would not have functioned to explain the constant disease and death in the village in the eyes of his father. For Reverend Spaulding, his son’s doctrinal rebellion was not only disobedient to him, it was disobedient to God, and disobedience to God during this time would result in direct, fatal consequences.

The Spaulding Family’s Graves

Josiah’s response, dated June 15th, 1808:

 You think that I, or no one, ought to despair in the mercy of God, nor doubt his goodness…I think this is true, but all the impenitent ought to doubt, while they remain in sin, that they shall not be saved unless they repent…

According to Professor Philip Grevin of Rutgers University, who has written extensively on Puritan childrearing tradition, questioning the patriarch at all was gravely sinful and disobedient. Reverend Spaulding never relented even a little in his hardline Calvinist beliefs. Josiah and his friends, like the minister Ezra Fisk, wrote more about the loving nature of Christ and forgiveness. This was a doctrine different from Reverend Spaulding’s–and to differ even a little from Reverend Spaulding’s doctrine would be considered very rebellious in this era, especially by the Reverend himself.

More evidence of Josiah’s intelligent, caring nature appears in his 1806 letter to his sister Mary, written in gorgeous, flourishing, and artful script:

 Dear Sister. Whilst the morn arises and the sparkling sun shines around my habitation I converse a moment with a dear Absent sister, your letter I received with pleasure and happy would my state be if I truly considered those things which you wrote to me about…may Christ grant me and you a blessing that we may truly love him for he is worthy of all our love…I rejoice to hear of your health and all the rest of the family and that I in measure enjoy mine.[2]

Based on Josiah’s words to Mary in his above response to her, it seems as if she may have been gently giving him some kind of advice, which would be consistent with his un-Puritan behavior or his identity in the family as the different one. When he responded that he would be happier if he followed her advice, perhaps he meant that yes, he would be less stressed if he conformed to expectations.  Mary was very aware of the Reverend’s personality and role as patriarch, and what that meant–and therefore, she was likely worried about Josiah.

In 1810, Mary Spaulding married Isaac Pomeroy of Southampton, Massachusetts, and moved to that village, which was 30 miles south of Buckland. Josiah followed her move, and often joined Mary in Southampton–so much so that he kept clothing at Mary and Isaac’s house and possibly had his own room there. It does seem as if Josiah was struggling with mental illness of some kind, as his sisters wrote to each other out of concern for Josiah’s “lost reason,” and the “pills and drops” he was taking for it. Josiah was about 23 when these letters were written, the age that psychiatric disabilities like bipolar or schizophrenia often manifest.

Reverend Spaulding meanwhile, was busy crafting his three hundred-page book on the nature of hell and suffering, and seething over Josiah’s choices. In 1812, he would put a permanent stop to Josiah’s visits to Mary, sending youngest daughter Lydia there to collect him. When he returned home to Buckland, his father would forcibly chain Josiah to the floor of his bedroom in the beginning of his attempt to exert total control over his son.

[I will conclude my exploration of Josiah and his family in next week’s post.]   

The cover photo is Mary Lyon Church in Buckland, Massachusetts, originally called the First Congregational Church of Buckland. Reverend Spaulding was the minister therefor 28 years.

[1] Reverend Josiah Spaulding, letter to Josiah Spaulding, Jr., 21 May 1808, American Pomeroy Historic Genealogical Association Collection (copy), Sussana Cole Letters, 18080521 Rev Josiah Spaulding to Josiah Jr.(North Syracuse, New York).

[2] Josiah Spaulding Jr., letter to Mary Spaulding, 24 December 1806, American Pomeroy Historic Genealogical Association Collection (copy), Sussana Cole Letters, 18061224 Josiah Spaulding to Miss Mary Spaulding (North Syracuse, New York).

Kate Corbett Pollack is a graduate student in Cultural Foundations of Education and Disability Studies at Syracuse University.  Her scholarship has grown from Josiah’s story, and has led to an interest in prisons, mental illness, social reform, education and disability. She wrote a monthly blog for almost three years, which can be viewed at americanpomeroys.blogspot.com, the blog for the American Pomeroy Historic Genealogical Association. She has also written for and done work with the Landmarks Society of Greater Utica on the history and families who lived in a few of the beautiful old mansions in that area. Prior to coming to the university, she lived in Brooklyn, and before that Eugene, Oregon where she was born, and Utica, New York. Her family in Syracuse goes back one hundred years, and she has lived here over the years on occasion.

The post Only a Being of Senseless Existence: The Continuing Story of Josiah Spaulding, Jr. appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

What are the circumstances that would compel a family to imprison one of its members in an iron cage for the rest of his life? In the case of Josiah Spaulding Junior, born 1787, the answer given by his preacher father, Reverend Josiah Spaulding of Buckland, Massachusetts, was that his son had “lost his reason” and was a danger to the family. Later census records on the Spaulding family state that Josiah was insane. Perhaps he was, perhaps he wasn’t. I uncovered this story during my time as an archival researcher for a private archive in North Syracuse, where we received one hundred and forty-four letters written by four generations of Spaulding family members. In researching this story, I have been unable to find evidence for violent mental illness, but I have found evidence of many other things. Josiah was kept in a cage by various family members in their homes for fifty-seven years. He was put into it when he was about 23 years old, and it is there that he died.

Josiah Spaulding, Jr., the son of a prominent reverend, was expected to follow a certain life path. He was the only surviving infant of a triplet birth, born to Mary Williams of Taunton, Massachusetts and Reverend Spaulding, originally of Plainfield, Connecticut. Josiah’s sister Mary, the firstborn child, had been born the year before. The two maintained a close friendship for many years. Both of Josiah’s parents were from respected lines of New England families who were among the first white settlers of the region, and their genealogies span to the early seventeenth century in America.

Reverend Spaulding was a staunch Calvinist, and obtained his Doctor of Divinity from Yale in 1778. He was ordained as a minister in 1782 and had gone to Uxbridge, Massachusetts to begin his career as the local minister. He was married there, as well. However, as would occur repeatedly until his arrival in Buckland, the reverend was dismissed from his position in part because of “unpopularity due to his Calvinist theology”, according to the Biographical Sketches of the Graduates of Yale College, and the fact that he was thought to be eccentric. Hardline Calvinism, which had long been the established religion in New England, was slowly starting to fall out of vogue during this period. According to records, parishioners had a hard time believing that God “foreordained every thought, word and action” of human beings, as Calvinism and the Reverend taught. However, Reverend Spaulding deeply believed in the doctrine and would not renege even a little. As a result, he had to move around a few times until the family settled in Buckland, where he remained minister for twenty-eight years and was widely loved by the townspeople. Josiah was eight years old when the Spauldings arrived in Buckland. Daughters Nancy, Deborah, and Lydia had been added to the family, with Lydia being the youngest, born in 1799.

Letters between Josiah and his older sister, Mary, demonstrate a close relationship between the two. Mary’s 1801 letter to Josiah, written when she was sixteen and he around fourteen and away at a conference in Goshen, spoke heavily of religion and repentance but also of local gossip:

PS I will inform you of the death of Betsy Stinn, she died not long before thanksgiving  & it is expected that Lydia her sister is or will soon be married to the gentleman that courted Betsy. & What do you think of that, it has occasioned considerable talk here…

As a young woman of this era, Mary would not have been groomed for a career in the way that Reverend Spaulding was doing by bringing his son to a religious conference. Unlike her mother and namesake Mary Williams, Mary Spaulding was taught how to write and had beautiful penmanship. She and her sisters attended the local one-room schoolhouse in Buckland where a peer of theirs was Daniel Forbes, famous for his penmanship and friends with the Spaulding family. There is little doubt that the Spaulding children learned penmanship in some measure from Daniel, and in the Spaulding collection there are letters written by him to Mary. However, the Spaulding daughters’ education did not go much beyond their years at the local schoolhouse, as they were expected to excel instead in the domestic arts and get married.

Josiah, also expected to marry and raise a family and continue the Spaulding lineage, could attend college. Neil Perry’s 1966 article on Josiah for the Springfield Morning Union, based on Victorian era articles from one hundred years prior, states that Josiah was violent and rebellious in his youth, and was not accepted to college. These descriptions are from 1866, just before Josiah’s death. However, the language of articles like these is typical to language of the Victorian era when describing or reporting on mental illness, and Josiah is referred to as “deranged.”

The family letters indicate otherwise. Josiah was an articulate and intelligent young man who worked as a teacher, and had the most beautiful penmanship in the family. The story of Josiah will continue in a three part series on this blog. Perhaps he did have some mental illness, and he did seem to be rebellious for the era. It is my estimation that his aversion to Puritan based norms and expectations and his conflicting ideology from his father’s was the real reason that he was caged, along with what does seem to be some kind of possible psychiatric issue. However the description of him as violent and deranged was sensationalized, and is not an accurate description of those with psychiatric disabilities on the whole. There has long been, and continues to be a disparity in power between those who are considered to be able bodied and minded, and those who aren’t. The Spaulding family was absolutely dominated, as most Puritan lines were, by the patriarch. It is not Josiah that should necessarily be looked to as defining derangement, but his Calvinist father, who not only was the patriarch of the family, but of the entire village of Buckland and much of western Massachusetts.

[I will continue my exploration of Josiah and his family in next week’s post.]   

Kate Corbett Pollack is a graduate student in Cultural Foundations of Education and Disability Studies at Syracuse University.  Her scholarship has grown from Josiah’s story, and has led to an interest in prisons, mental illness, social reform, education and disability. She wrote a monthly blog for almost three years, which can be viewed at americanpomeroys.blogspot.com, the blog for the American Pomeroy Historic Genealogical Association. She has also written for and done work with the Landmarks Society of Greater Utica on the history and families who lived in a few of the beautiful old mansions in that area. Prior to coming to the university, she lived in Brooklyn, and before that Eugene, Oregon where she was born, and Utica, New York. Her family in Syracuse goes back one hundred years, and she has lived here over the years on occasion.

The post Fifty Seven Years in a Cage: A Story of Psychiatric Disability from the late Puritan Era appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.