Weekly Post: 11/23/09

Because I am doing my final project on Tufts, I decided to find a bigamous man for this posting. One of the articles I found was published in 1867 and titled “A Husband of Varied Tastes. A Lover False and Truant. A Railroad Engineer with Three Wives.” Right away, I was struck by the comparison between this bigamist and Tufts. Both, because of their supposed “professions,” are able to traverse the country freely, thus enabling them to visit many cities and have many wives. Tufts was able to travel all throughout the country, and though he mainly stayed in a little area, he nevertheless was able to be unknown in other parts of the country, even if it was only a few miles away from his home and first wife. These two characters, Tufts and the engineer, also possess the necessary charm for becoming a bigamist: “He possessed that free and open manner which, united with youth, good looks and a surplus of spending money, never fails to win the hearts of a certain class of young ladies.” Note how the author of this article claims that “a certain class” of young women are susceptible to the amiable young engineer. This makes me wonder what types of judgments were passed on Tufts’ wives. Did they belong to any “class” that made them vulnerable to deception? Or, rather, were all women who were duped by these con-men instantly become part of this sisterhood of swindled gals? I thinking the latter is the case. The article also describes one of the young ladies as becoming stricken with admiration to her “god of her idolatry.” References to gods resonate throughout Tufts’ work as well, and though he falls short of describing himself as a god, he uses rhetoric that suggests he received heretical admiration from his various women. The engineer, after marrying his first wife in Kirkwood, marries a second one who lives within one mile of Kirkwood soon after. The proximity of the two women does not surprise me—it seems that for the men, mobility was easy, but for the women, moving around the country, or even a mile away to hear of a wedding, was not as accessible (though, of course, Ann Carson moves around quite a bit).
Above all, this article reiterates what we have discovered so far this semester—that identity for the early American republics was not a fixed concept, but rather a costume to be donned whenever needed. The bigamist in the article participates in this creation of identity, and for him laws and rules do not apply. Instead, he makes his own standards. The engineer, Tufts, Burroughs, Carson, or any of the other counterfeiters we have read thus far all take their identities into their own hands and mold them accordingly.
Along with this concept of identity (which for some reason I come back to in almost every blog posting I make!), is the idea of humor present in all of the accounts we have read. The story of the engineer is described in highly farcical language—as is the other counterfeit narratives. The humor is sometimes difficult to detect, but underlying all of these accounts is the sense that these tricksters and their adventures are amusing for the American public. They are enjoyable to read about because they use wit and funny situations to get the better of people. In this sense, perhaps more so than we realize, humor adds to these narratives and enhances the concept of identity because it challenges our own assumptions about these characters’ personalities and actions.
The bigamist gets away. His mobility, his talent for creating a new, personable identity, and his charming wit and humor allow him to flee the city.

Weekly Journal: 11/16/09

Though I expected the narrative to feature an anticlimactic summary of Ann Carson’s later years, I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of adventure and excitement present in the last third of the story. However, the shift in narrators made it a little more difficult to get through—Mary Clarke’s portion of the text is much less interesting to read. It also reads slower, for me at least, because Clarke seems to rush through a multitude of events and characters, whereas Ann spends time in describing each event carefully. For example, while the entire first volume centers around the momentous death of Captain Carson and the failed kidnapping of the Governor of Pennsylvania, this second volume, and particularly Clarke’s portion, presents a type of “catalogue of ships,” wherein most characters lose singularity because Clarke has so much to fit into this last section of the narrative. Nevertheless, there are certain things I love about Clarke’s own narration, particularly the insight she gives us on early American printing processes. I found it fascinating that we learn what business deals and negotiations occurred when attempting to create a printed text. For example, the publisher, Mr. D., reads little or nothing of the narrative before he agrees to print it. Yet, he somehow knows that the tale will be highly successful. I was most surprised at how many people were involved in the printing process—moneymen, lawyers, printers, etc. As Dr. Williams noted last week, the fact that this narrative discusses at length its own publication process makes this tale unusual and yet informative. This last section of the text is also highly interesting in terms of interpreting authorial voice in the first two sections. For example, though Mrs. Clarke freely admits that she wrote the entire “autobiography” of Ann, the tone is nevertheless different. It seems that Ann’s direction highly influenced the text. My guess: the element of revenge alters the tone of Ann’s first-person narration and Mrs. Clarke’s third-person relation of the same character. Yet, I suspect that Clarke might also be out for some sort of vengeance, perhaps against Ann herself. Though Mrs. Clarke avers that she continued to care for Ann, I can’t help detecting a trace of bitterness when she recounts how Ann abused her trust and a sense of self-satisfied “I-told-you-so” once Ann gets caught passing counterfeit bills. (By the way, did anyone else notice the term cogniac, which apparently means counterfeiter? I thought that was an interesting word).

Ann’s fall from grace occurs because she turns good money into counterfeit bills. Her subsequent arrest and trial does seem very carnivalesque, just like her entire “biography.” As Isabelle Lehuu notes in her book Carnival of Print: Popular Print Media in Antebellum America, antebellum America experienced an onslaught of new printed materials in the marketplace, and these printed works threatened the “orthodox uses of print culture.” These new forms of literature invaded the market and “[t]he festive carnival that burst onto the printed page during the antebellum period was not opposed to but rather belonged to the marketplace.” Indeed, Ann and Mrs. Clarke know quite well what to expect from the marketplace. I find their knowledge of financial and legal matters fascinating. Two independent women, in the early American republic, knew tons about business, real estate, how to sell a book, and law. While I do not trust Ann or Mrs. Clarke, I cannot help admire the amount of historical information the narrator provides. Further, Ann’s story is certainly carnivalesque, especially this final crime and trial scene. It seems that for Ann, the carnival occurs whenever she has liberty. Only in prison is she truly able to reign in her impulses for adventure, misrule, and the complete flouting of masculine and governmental authority.

I’ll briefly mention something I found quite confusing; perhaps someone can explain this to me. Why in the world does the narrator go through this long passage filled with quotes (from pages 126-128 in my copy)? The narrator uses Shakespearean characters and play titles, verses from poems, and other quotes rapidly, sometimes the quotes do not even make sense in the passage. Is this just a moment of the narrator proving that they are well-read? I can’t seem to find any explanation for this massive amount of distracting quotes.

Weekly Journal Entry: 11/9/09

“Let not the lords of the creation accuse our sex of tattling, when they are so deficient in discretion” (Vol. II pg. 21). This sermon-like indictment against men for being so free of speech and gossip comes in the midst of Ann’s tale when she is staying at some sort of criminal headquarters under an assumed name. Of course she is going to complain that men are hypocrites when it comes to restraining their aptitude to talk and accuse others! Yet, Ann is certainly guilty of the crime of being “deficient in discretion.” Her narrative, more so than any other counterfeiter we have read this semester, is vindictive towards the supposed villains of the story. Her language frequently lacks this discretion and she gives full reign to her rhetorical ability to defame her enemies. Thus, she describes a landlady as “fat, vulgar, wapping” (Vol. I pg. 312) and Simon Snyder as “of a middle stature, hard features, thickly pox-marked, with a dark, austere, unbending brow, and a countenance that seemed as if it had never relaxed into a smile” (Vol. I pg. 361). Rather than claim that she offers forgiveness to her persecutors, like Burroughs and Tufts occasionally do, Ann paints the villains of her story with vivid colors of physical and moral baseness—she does not flower her tale with protestations that she acts out of any Christian desire to forgive those who have harmed her and secure her spiritual wholeness for the future. Instead, Ann is disparaging to most sects of Christianity as well. She insults Roman Catholics, and many of the Irish (though her husband is Irish) in one blow: “I should have fancied her conscience was like the greater part of the ignorant Irish of that persuasion, priest-ridden […]” (Vol. I pg. 327). When a woman visits her in prison, with the intention of converting Ann, Ann boldly proclaims that she will never forgive Snyder and that “‘I shall never be a Christian’ […] (In fact, I was too well acquainted with the hypocrisy of many professed Christians not to question their sincerity)” (Vol. I pg. 367). However, Ann does not entirely refuse to acknowledge a Christian God, rather she shies away from any form of religion. She even recruits God to her side when she asserts “it is only the forms of society I have by that act offended, and not the laws of God” (Vol. I pg. 284). For Ann, religion as a form of societal regulation and indication of open hypocrisy is always suspect (though she does accede that the Methodists are okay). However, though she retains some sense of reverence for God, her narrative seems to avoid trying to spiritually atone for her past actions. Unlike Burroughs or Tufts, Ann is not as concerned with justifying her decisions to a religious community (at least compared to the other counterfeiters we have read, I do believe that Ann at least participates in using religious rhetoric for her own purposes, typically dishonest ones at that). Nonetheless, at this point in our reading of Ann, she seems wary of associating with any form of established religion and instead stands out as independent of that form of community. Her preferred community, instead, is a household of thieves.

Dr. Williams’ handout, containing quotes from Cathy Davidson’s Revolution and the Word, seems particularly helpful in understanding why Ann includes so many proposals and romantic adventures—her narrative is an emulation of early American sentimental novels. As Davidson points out, these novels depicted female independence outside of matrimony and perhaps this is why Ann’s narrative features so many rejections of the marital fetters, which she associates with a loss of liberty and pain: “True, matrimonial fetters are said to be of roses, but if so, the flowers have long since fallen off, and only the thorns remain for me and mine” (Vol. II pg. 13). Sentimental fiction, Davidson notes, intimated ideas of freedom for women and the right of these women to reject or accept men: “The unstated premise of sentimental fiction is that women must take greater control of their lives and must make shrewd decisions of the men who come into their lives” (Handout pg. 3). Of course, Ann does not always make what we would term “shrewd” decisions, but the fact that she does exercise some control over which men she receives indicates that her position, even though obtained through falsehoods and daring criminal activities, is one in which she can utilize her liberty and gain some control over her own life. Her narrative, then, participates in this line of sentimental novels in that she also advocates a freedom for women to choose which men have influence in their lives.