SOURCE: “Negotiating a Self: The Autobiography and Journals of Catharine Maria Sedgwick,” in New England Quarterly, Vol. 66, No. 3, September, 1993, pp. 366-98.

[In the following essay, Kelley appraises Sedgwick's autobiography and journals in the context of the larger contemporary political and ideological landscape in which they were written.]

In a letter written on 5 October 1851, Catharine Maria Sedgwick responded to a proposal made by William Minot, the husband of her beloved niece and namesake, Kate. William had suggested that Sedgwick, a nationally acclaimed author of novels, tales, and sketches, undertake her autobiography. Had William appealed to her on the basis of her literary achievements, this inveterately modest woman almost certainly would have declined. Not surprisingly, then, William asked that the autobiography be written for his and Kate's daughter Alice, a child to whom Sedgwick was devoted.

Nonetheless, the project seemed daunting. A woman who had remained unmarried despite the protestations of suitors, Sedgwick told William she had “‘boarded round’ so much, had my home in so many houses and so many hearts,” indeed had her life “so woven into the fabric of others that I seem to have had no separate individual existence.” Nowhere else in the entire body of Sedgwick's writings did she reveal more about the character of her richly textured relationships with her parents, her brothers and sisters, her nieces and nephews than in this letter to Minot. Nowhere else did she signal more strikingly the impact those relationships had upon her sense of self. Ironically, this conception of herself as intertwined with the lives of those whom she cherished also meant that she would not refuse William's request, that she would consider it her “filial duty.” Telling him that “perhaps I might tell a short and pleasant story to my darling Alice,” Sedgwick displayed her typical modesty. Just as typically, she achieved much more than she promised in her autobiography of a childhood and adolescence that had spanned the opening years of the early republic. Gathering together the threads of memory, Sedgwick wove together a deeply personal narrative and an illuminating portrayal of a newly independent America.¹

Sedgwick also kept a journal throughout much of her adult life. Beginning in the summer of 1821, when she was thirty-one, Sedgwick filled twelve volumes with meditations upon the author as an adult and the world she shared with other antebellum Americans. Taken together, the autobiography and the journals constitute Sedgwick's self-representation, child to adult. Moreover, they offer readers a dramatic representation of both the changes and the continuities characterizing relations of power in the decades between America's Revolution and its Civil War. More than a century before historians did so, Sedgwick situated power in its broadest context. Her autobiography and journals extended the meaning of power to include gender relations, and they addressed with equal insight social and political relations.

Ranked in the nineteenth century with Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and William Cullen Bryant as a founder of her nation's literature, Sedgwick published six novels and nearly one hundred tales and sketches in a career that spanned the four decades prior to the Civil War. Ranging from a revisionary portrayal of the conflict between Puritans and Indians to a dissection of a Jacksonian America dominated by commercialism, Sedgwick's fiction dealt with issues decidedly social and political in character. Portrayals of movements for reform, discourses on class relations, doctrinal debates between Congregationalists and Unitarians—all these issues and more were incorporated into a body of literature that spoke to the felt realities of early nineteenth-century Americans. Equally concerned with issues of gender, Sedgwick placed strong, independent, and articulate heroines at the center of her fiction. Sedgwick's model of gender relations presumed different roles for women and men. Nonetheless, she accorded women signal status as central social and cultural actors.

In the opening sentence of her autobiography, Sedgwick describes her project as a collection of “memories.”² Begun in the sixty-fourth year of her life, Sedgwick's autobiography in the narrowest sense is exactly that—a commemorative text designed to inscribe the past upon the present. However, the design, the effort “to brighten the links of the chain that binds us to those who have gone before, and to keep it fast and strong,” has significance beyond this objective. Perhaps most important, Sedgwick departs from an autobiographical tradition in which the self moves inexorably toward separation and individuation. In sanctioning connection, in stressing reciprocal commitment, Sedgwick stood in contrast to other notable American autobiographers such as Benjamin Franklin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry Adams, each of whom presents the self on a trajectory toward autonomy.³ Sedgwick's emphasis upon an identity constructed in relation to others locates her narrative in an alternative tradition initiated by the fourteenth-century Englishwoman Dame Julian of Norwich. Julian's Revelations, Margery Kempe's fifteenth-century Book of Margery Kempe, and Margaret Cavendish's True Relation two centuries later all define the self in relation to others. New Englander Anne Bradstreet inscribed the same relational self in her seventeenth-century “To My Dear Children.” So too did Sedgwick in the middle of the nineteenth century.⁴

Born in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, on 28 December 1789, Catharine Maria was the third daughter and sixth child of the Sedgwicks. Descended from one of the most distinguished families in the Connecticut River Valley, Pamela Dwight had married Theodore Sedgwick in 1774. She had chosen a husband who rapidly achieved the standing of her parents, the socially prominent Joseph and Abigail Dwight. Theodore's election to the Massachusetts legislature, first the house and then the senate, had elevated the Sedgwicks to one of the state's leading families prior to their daughter's birth. The next decade brought national distinction. Elected to the United States House of Representatives, in which he served as speaker, and the Senate, Theodore became one of the early republic's most influential Federalists. His proud daughter recalled that Theodore and his allies in the “Federal party loved their country and were devoted to it, as virtuous parents are to their children.”

However much these powerful Federalists may have been dedicated to their nation, they found their claims to leadership in a newly independent America challenged by those who sought a more egalitarian society. The hierarchy, the finely graded stratification, and the deference to a gentlemanly elite that had prevailed in colonial society no longer seemed secure.⁵ In the description of her mother's parents, Sedgwick illustrated the contrast between that earlier world and the one being born in the years following the American Revolution. A “gentleman par excellence of his time,” Joseph Dwight had been a highly successful lawyer and land speculator in the Connecticut River Valley. One of Stockbridge's prominent residents and trustee of its Indian school, Joseph's status had been conveyed to posterity in a painting that displayed his “most delicately beautiful hands.” Sedgwick presumed that her grandfather had simply wanted to show his descendants that he “had kept ‘clean hands,’ a commendable virtue, physically or morally speaking.” Perhaps he did, but those hands, free of the marks of hard labor, also served to distinguish Joseph as a member of the elite, a leader among his contemporaries. Virtually everything about Abigail Dwight had performed the same service. Described in terms of readily identifiable signifiers of status, the woman who shared in the management of the Indian school was “dignified,” “benevolent,” and “pleasing.” Like the hands that her husband displayed, the apparel that Abigail donned confirmed her social standing. The “dress, of rich silk, a high-crowned cap, with plaited border, and a watch, then so seldom worn as to be a distinction, all marked the gentlewoman, and inspired respect.”

In the midst of a transformation that was altering their nation's social and political premises, a post-revolutionary elite continued to defend the prerogatives that had set Joseph and Abigail apart even as challenges to their authority escalated. Infuriated that forms of deference signifying a hierarchical society were being cast aside, Theodore Sedgwick's brow had lowered when emboldened artisans presented themselves at the front door of his home. He did more than glower when a still more presumptuous representative of the coming order stood at the same door and refused to remove his hat. The lad had been forcibly removed by the elder Sedgwick, albeit with the hat still securely on his head. Clearly, as his daughter remarked wryly, Theodore had been “born too soon to relish the freedoms of democracy.” The same might be said for Pamela Sedgwick. She had insisted that the family and the servants be segregated—household help, Catharine recalled, had been “restricted to the kitchen table.” Sedgwick's recollections documented the increasing resistance to Pamela's practice. “Now Catharine,” said a local resident when the young Sedgwick had been sent to recruit the woman's daughter for a servant, “‘we are all made out of the same clay, we have got one Maker and one Judge, and we've got to lay down in the grave side by side. Why can't you sit down to the table together?”

The conflict between those defending the older order and their challengers took on a political cast in the competition between the nation's parties, the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans.⁶ The political philosophy of loyal Federalist Theodore bore all the marks of a party committed to the maintenance of a traditional hierarchy—a paternalistic approach to politics, a belief that only elite leadership could sustain the nation, and a haughty distrust of the lower orders. Theodore's commitment to the republican experiment was not the issue. Service as a legislator in the Massachusetts General Court, leadership in the nation's Congress, and tenure on the Massachusetts Supreme Court all testified to his dedication to republican government founded under the Constitution. Instead, it was the very meaning of republicanism that was being contested during the three decades of Theodore's career. Sedgwick recalled that her father and other prominent Federalists “hoped a republic might exist and prosper.” Indeed, they entertained the hope that it might “be the happiest government in the world, but not without a strong aristocratic element.” It was that last caveat, that insistence upon a “strong aristocratic element,” that separated leading Federalists from those dedicated to a republicanism in which all of the enfranchised played a role in the conduct of politics.

The Federalists' opposition to increased popular participation was informed by their allegiance to a traditional social structure that divided the world into gentlemen and lower orders. Men like Theodore who identified “all sound principles, truth, justice, and patriotism” with a gentlemanly elite had no truck with the lower orders, at least as political entities. They, as Sedgwick recalled, were dismissed by her father “as ‘Jacobins,’ ‘sans culottes,’ and ‘miscreants.’” Theodore's epithets notwithstanding, he surely recognized, as his daughter did, that the forces opposing him possessed an “intense desire to grasp the power and place that had been denied to them, and a determination to work out the theories of the government.” With the election of 1800, Theodore believed they had accomplished exactly that. The defeat of his party at the polls and the rejection of the republicanism with which he identified led Theodore to resign his Congressional seat. Still in control of Massachusetts, the Federalists appointed him to the state's highest court. Disillusioned but still eager to wield influence, he remained there until his death in 1813.

Despite the highly publicized hostility between the rival parties, politics in the early republic was not without a lighter side. And despite Theodore's sober sense of purpose, his daughter caught the pranks, the lampoons, and the unpretentious humor of the times. She recorded these memories in her autobiography. They also became the subject of “A Reminiscence of Federalism,” a story Sedgwick based upon a summer she spent in Bennington, Vermont, during the last decade of the eighteenth century. Bennington's main street, as she noted in the autobiography, “extended a long way, some mile and a half, from a hill at one end to a plain at the other,” a section of town where the old horse Clover was left to graze. Clover was no ordinary horse. His distinction was that his superannuated sides had been “pasted over with lampoons in which the rival factions vented their wit or their malignity safe from personal responsibility, for Clover could tell no tales.” Daily, indeed hourly, Clover “trudged from the hill, a walking gazette, his ragged and grizzled sides covered with the militant missives, and returned bearing the responses of the valley, as unconscious of his hostile burden, as the mail is of its portentous contents.” In her story, which she published in 1835, Sedgwick allows one Democratic-Republican to voice his opinion that “distrust of the people was the great error of the Federalists”; the narrator responds that that perspective “will now perhaps be admitted with truth.”⁷ Sedgwick had come to the same opinion only in adulthood. The younger Sedgwick, as she readily admitted in her autobiography, had aligned herself with her father, looking upon every member of the opposition as “grasping, dishonest, and vulgar.” Every member of the rival party had been cast as “an enemy to his country.”

The hierarchy and deference under assault in the social and political relations of the early republic had also characterized gender relations in colonial society. Whether gentlewoman or member of the lower orders, a woman had been considered a man's subordinate. In a hierarchy that divided the world into the feminine and the masculine, a woman had been expected to defer to male authority in the household and in the world beyond its doors. Many of the underpinnings of this system remained intact in the years after the Revolution. Women were still subject to coverture, a legal tradition that submerged a wife's property in her husband's. They were still denied participation in the nation's body politic either as voters or as jurors. Simultaneously, however, subtle but discernible changes were becoming evident.

Enhanced opportunities for female education began to erase the disparity in literacy between white women and white men. Building upon the basic literacy taught in public schools, an increasing number of private academies and seminaries provided women a more extended and diversified education. Republican motherhood, an ideology that ascribed political significance to domestic responsibilities, made women's education critical to the survival of the newly independent nation. Expected to foster the necessary elements of virtue in their sons and to encourage the same in their husbands, mothers and wives became the educators of their nation's citizens. In fulfilling this obligation, women participated, albeit indirectly, in civil and political life. Standing as an archetype of gender relations, the institution of marriage registered continuity and change in the early republic. Women did remain subject to the intersecting strands of subordination and authority that had marked colonial marriages. Nonetheless, the practice of more egalitarian relations in some households signaled modifications in this pattern. Not least, the idea that a woman might remain unmarried and still have a meaningful life was glimpsed as a possibility. Within a generation, Catharine Maria Sedgwick would count herself among the women who made that idea a reality.⁸

The marriages of Theodore Sedgwick illustrated the persistence of older patterns of gender relations. Before he had reached the age of twenty-eight, Theodore had married twice, enhancing his status both times. In 1768 he married Eliza Mason, a member of a prominent family in Franklin, Connecticut. When he contracted smallpox three years after their marriage, Theodore immediately removed himself from the household and returned only after he had been certified as recovered. These precautions notwithstanding, Eliza, whose pregnancy had made inoculation inadvisable, became infected. The smallpox that her husband had barely survived killed her. Although Catharine Sedgwick believed that only “the canonized ‘year and a day’” had elapsed before her parents' marriage, Theodore actually married Pamela Dwight in 1774, three years after Eliza's death. Whatever their individual differences, Eliza and Pamela both practiced the deference toward Theodore that traditional gender relations mandated. And, as if to signify the wifely role she and Eliza shared, Pamela enshrined the memory of her predecessor in the name of her eldest child, Eliza Mason.

In characterizing her mother as “modest,” “humble,” and “reserved,” Sedgwick described the posture that Pamela had adopted toward her husband. Their conversations when Theodore was deciding whether to continue his political career betray the same deference. In a letter Sedgwick included in her autobiography, Pamela suggested that her husband consider the toll exacted by his career. “‘A wish to serve the true interests of our country is certainly a laudable ambition,’” she recognized, but should not Theodore consider that “‘the intention brings many cares with it.’” With striking ease and confidence, Pamela commented on the political realities her husband faced in the waning years of the eighteenth century—the government was as yet untried, the citizenry as yet untested. Both ease and confidence disappeared, however, when she enumerated the costs that mattered most to her. She could say only hesitantly that “‘your family deserves some attention.’” She could not say at all that she merited consideration: “‘I have not a distant wish you should sacrifice your happiness to mine, or your inclination to my opinion.’” Instead, should Theodore decide to continue to pursue a career that took him away from his family at least half of each year, Pamela duly assured him that “‘submission is my duty, and, however hard, I will try to practice what reason teaches me I am under obligation to do.’” At the top of the letter, which was deposited with the family's correspondence at the Massachusetts Historical Society, Sedgwick wrote in her own hand: “a beautiful and characteristic letter from my beloved mother, wise and tender.”⁹

Her daughter's sentiments notwithstanding, Pamela found the separations from her husband very hard indeed. Sedgwick herself acknowledged that her mother had been “left for many months in this cold northern country, with young children, a large household, and complicated concerns, and the necessity of economy.” Pamela's letters to her husband focused upon the isolation, the longing for companionship; indeed, her letters were a litany of loneliness. Theodore's departure occasioned a “very sensible pain,” although she had tried to conceal it so as not to distress him. Disappointed that his return was delayed yet again, she told him in another letter: “I sicken at the thought of your being absent for so long a time.” She found almost intolerable “this vale of Widowhood.” Perhaps most tellingly, Pamela confided in still another letter, “we are all like a body without a soul.”¹⁰

The costs of separation increased as Pamela's fragile health grew more precarious and her struggle with depression more desperate. In December 1791, she pleaded with her husband to return home and the next moment ordered him to stay away. The letter was short. It told Theodore that she had sunk deeply into herself. Friends had tried to tell her that she was ill, “but this I have no reason to believe.” Yet as the words tumbled from her pen she made Theodore believe: “But shall I tell, can I tell you that I have lost my understanding.” What was she to think, what could she think, she wondered, “what is my shame, what is my pain, what is my confusion to think of this what evils [a]wait my poor family without a guide, without a head.” She wanted him to return for the children, “for their sakes,” but surely not for his or for hers, “for your sake I wish you not to come, you must not come. It would only make us both more wretched.”¹¹ Although Pamela rallied from that attack, others that followed were still more severe. In a letter that Sedgwick included in her autobiography, Theodore told his other daughters, Eliza and Frances, that as Pamela's condition deteriorated, he had struggled to decide whether to remain in Congress or resign his office: “‘I most sincerely endeavored to weigh all circumstances, and to discover what I ought to do.’” Theodore chose his career. Pamela's attacks of depression ended only with her death in 1807.

Ostensibly, Sedgwick defended her father's decision, declaring in the autobiography that Theodore's letters had been filled with the “most thoughtful love for my mother, the highest appreciation of her character.” Only devotion to his country had persuaded him to persist in his career; he had “felt it to be his duty to remain in public life at every private sacrifice.” Perhaps most important, Pamela's suffering had ended with her death. And his daughter insisted, Theodore's contribution “to establish the government, and to swell the amount of that political virtue which makes the history of the Federal party the record of the purest patriotism the world has known—that remains.”

Simultaneously, however, Sedgwick subverted this defense of her father. In some of the most moving passages in the autobiography, she tallies the costs of Theodore's choice. Surely the largest toll had been exacted from Pamela. Acknowledging the pain her mother had suffered, Sedgwick notes that the separations seemed “to have been almost cruel to her.” She had been “oppressed with cares and responsibilities.” She had borne the “terrible weight of domestic cares.” But Sedgwick did not stop there. The daughter also exposed her own deeply ambivalent response. She also had her litany. She recalls her first words, “Theodore” and “Philadelphia,” words signifying her father's absence. She recalls childhood's sorrows and joys, matched to “Papa's going away” and “Papa's coming home.” She recalls the suffering she endured at the time of Pamela's death. “Beloved mother,” she exclaims, “even at this distance of time, the thought of what I suffered when you died thrills my soul!” And there is the decision to include the wrenchingly powerful eulogy. Penned by her brother Harry shortly after Pamela's death, it testified to their mother's endurance. Declaring that “her sufferings, in degree and duration, have been perhaps without a parallel,” Harry emphasized that she had nonetheless displayed “the invincible meekness and the gentleness of her heavenly temper.” Meekness, gentleness, in a word, subordination, highlighted the gender relations that Pamela practiced. It was the costs inherent in those relations that led Sedgwick to undermine the defense of her father. Unable to elide the evidence of her ambivalence, Theodore and Pamela's daughter scattered its traces through the text of her autobiography.

Theodore's absence and Pamela's illness obliged Catharine to look elsewhere for daily care, support, and guidance. She found all that and more in Elizabeth Freeman, an African-American who was the family's servant for twenty-six years. In the passage in the autobiography that describes “Mah Bet,” or Mumbet, Sedgwick remarks to Alice that those “who surround us in our childhood, whose atmosphere infolds us, as it were, have more to do with the formation of our characters than all our didactic and preceptive education.” It was Mumbet's “perception of justice,” her “uncompromising honesty,” her “conduct of high intelligence” that had left an indelible impression on Theodore and Pamela's daughter. When she described my “Mother—my nurse—my faithful friend” in a journal entry made only a month before Mumbet's death on 28 December 1829, Sedgwick had listed the qualities that would emerge later in the autobiography: a “strong love of justice,” “incorruptible integrity,” and “intelligent industry.” Mumbet also exhibited “strong judgment,” had an “iron resolution,” and demonstrated “quick and firm decision.” Embodying a power that sets her apart from other individuals in the autobiography and the journals, Mumbet emerges as the most exceptional individual encountered there, regardless of sex. Still more tellingly, she emerges as the woman with whom Sedgwick most deeply identifies, and, in turn, Sedgwick declares that Mumbet had “clung to us with a devotion and tenacity of love seldom equalled.”¹²

In the autobiography, however, Sedgwick is oblivious to the structural limitations of her relationship with the beloved Mumbet. Presented as if untouched by the disabilities of the racially based institution of slavery dominating late eighteenth-century America, the loyal servant is constructed exclusively in relation to Catharine and her family. It is almost as if the racial difference between Mumbet and Catharine, between black and white, were erased. Notwithstanding Sedgwick's devotion, racial difference did privilege Catharine and render Mumbet her subordinate.¹³

But Mumbet was also Elizabeth Freeman, the African-American who had challenged slavery's legality in the newly independent state of Massachusetts. It is Freeman whom Sedgwick celebrates in “Slavery in New England,” a chronicle published in Bentley's Miscellany in 1853. Here Sedgwick acknowledges the difference between herself and Mumbet; here too she acknowledges Mumbet's agency. Having decided that the Declaration of Independence applied to all Americans, the slave Freeman had approached Theodore Sedgwick early in 1781. “Won't the law give me my freedom?” she had asked Berkshire County's most prominent lawyer. After Freeman enlisted Theodore as her counsel and challenged the constitutionality of slavery in the county's court, the law did exactly that. Freeman's achievement established the precedent for slavery's abolition throughout Massachusetts. Immediately after the court's decision, Freeman joined the Sedgwicks as the family's servant. It was Mumbet's personal strength, her determination, her force, all of which had been highlighted in the autobiography and journals, that made possible Freeman's public pursuit of liberation, an act that Sedgwick applauded in “Slavery in New England.”¹⁴

Sedgwick's older siblings also played an influential role in her childhood. Deeply attached to all of her brothers and sisters, Sedgwick developed the strongest ties with her four brothers, Theodore, Harry, Robert, and Charles. Sharing with them “an intimate companionship and I think as true and loving a friendship as ever existed between brothers and sister,” she considered them her “chiefest blessing in life.” Long after her childhood had ended, Sedgwick told a friend that she had “no recollection beyond the time when they made my happiness.”¹⁵ Nearly a decade older and already away at school, the younger Theodore had little impact on his sister's early years. Of the others, Harry's “loving, generous disposition,” his “domestic affections,” strongly impressed his sister. Robert, designated as her “favorite,” served as “protector and companion.” And Charles, born two years after Sedgwick, “was the youngest of the family, and so held that peculiar relation to us all as junior.” That status made him no less beloved. Charles, as Sedgwick made clear in her autobiography and journals, was “a joy and thanksgiving to me.”

Born fourteen and eleven years before their younger sister, Eliza and Frances had a less decisive influence upon Catharine's childhood. Both, as Sedgwick reflected, “were just at that period when girls' eyes are dazzled with their own glowing future.” That future was marriage, of course. And it was the relationship between marital union and sibling separation that Sedgwick remembered about her sisters. In recalling her oldest sister, who had played a maternal role in her early childhood, Sedgwick focused upon the separation occasioned by Eliza's marriage. The ceremony that might have been regarded as a celebration of a newly formed union left the seven-year-old Catharine with “the impression that a wedding was rather a sundering than a forming of ties.” Deeply upset, she had cried at the wedding and had been taken away. Mumbet had tried to calm her, whispering “her ‘hush’ but for the first time it was impotent.” Later the bridegroom, Thaddeus Pomeroy, had come to her and, trying to soothe her, had said, “‘Your sister may stay with you this summer!’” Five decades later, Sedgwick had not forgotten her reaction: “May! How my whole being revolted at the word. He had the power to bind or loose my sister!” The significance of this incident cannot be lost on readers of the autobiography, for Sedgwick repeats it almost verbatim and in equally impassioned tones just two pages later.

As Sedgwick and her siblings prepared for their lives as adults, both their family status and their gender shaped the education their parents provided for them. Theodore, Harry, Robert, and Charles were all sent to preparatory schools that trained them in the classical languages, then the basic requirement for higher education. With the exception of Charles, the brothers all attended college before they began their apprenticeships as lawyers. These opportunities marked them as sons of an elite family. Less than one percent of the male population attended institutions of higher learning as late as 1840. None of the female population did so, at least in the eighteenth century. Oberlin, which did welcome women, did not open its doors until 1832.¹⁶ The family's standing also shaped the education offered Eliza, Frances, and Catharine, each of whom was provided the most advanced instruction then available to women: they attended a series of private schools in New York City, Albany, and Boston, where their programs combined a smattering of academics with preparation in social accomplishments.¹⁷

Sedgwick herself sharply distinguished between her formal and informal education. Her “school life,” she stated bluntly in her autobiography, “was a waste, my home life my only education.” This disclaimer notwithstanding, she did receive the formal schooling considered appropriate for the daughter of an elite family. Catharine first attended the local school in rural Stockbridge. When Catharine was eight, Pamela wrote to Theodore that she had sent their daughter to Bennington, Vermont, “as our school here is worse than none.”¹⁸ Catharine's letters to Theodore suggest that Pamela's opinion was at least slightly exaggerated. But in the autobiography Sedgwick did say that if there was “any other school a little more select or better chanced, I went to that.” Whatever the particular school, however, she noted wryly, “our minds were not weakened by too much study.” The demands were relatively insignificant and the curricula restricted to reading, spelling, geography, and arithmetic.

The family then enrolled their daughter in a series of schools in three different cities. Here, too, Catharine found the challenges slight. Recalling her experience in New York City with a mixture of levity and regret, she noted that as early as the age of eleven she had been sent there and “had the very best teaching of an eminent Professor of Dancing!” Her schooling at Mrs. Bell's in Albany continued in like fashion. Sedgwick commented that Mrs. Bell herself “rose late, was half the time out of her school, and did very little when in it.” Considering the instruction she offered when there, that may not have been a serious loss. In a letter written to her mother on 6 October 1803, the thirteen-year-old Catharine noted that she had “begun another piece of embroidery, a landscape. It has a very cultivated and rather a romantic appearance.” But the daughter had begun to take a stand regarding the relative merits of her education. Little time would be devoted to embroidery in the future, she told her mother. The study of geography and the practice of writing were much more important.¹⁹ So too was the mastery of a foreign language. In 1804, four years after she had begun French while in New York City, Catharine wrote to each parent describing her progress at Mrs. Payne's in Boston. In November she told Pamela that she was “very well contented and pleased with my new situation” and that she was pleased as well with her French instructor, “a very excellent one, I assure you.”²⁰ Nearly two months later, on the day after her fifteenth birthday, she answered Theodore's inquiry about her progress in French: “I hardly find time to attend to anything else; I am very fond of it and it is my opinion that I come on very well.”²¹ Nonetheless, the cumulative experience was judged inadequate, and years later Sedgwick registered her intense and lasting disappointment in the autobiography: “I have all my life felt the want of more systematic training.”

Although it was equally unsystematic, Sedgwick regarded her informal education far more positively. Noting that her father and her brothers had “uncommon mental vigor,” she emphasizes that “their daily habits, and pursuits, and pleasures were intellectual, and I naturally imbided from them a kindred taste.” She pays particular tribute to her father, who read aloud to the family. She remembers listening at the age of eight to passages from Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Hume. The father who read aloud also pressed the daughter to read to herself. Telling her that he hoped she would “find it in your power to devote your mornings to reading,” he reminded Catharine that hers was a privileged position—“there are few who can make such improvements by it and it would to be lamented if this precious time should be lost.”²² The girl heeded her father's counsel. Indeed, the “love of reading” he had instilled in her became to her “‘education.’” By the age of eleven, she was reading constantly, “chiefly novels.” When she was twelve, Catharine added Rollin's multi-volume Ancient History, which introduced her to “Cyrus's greatness.” Lighter fare included the increasingly popular children's miscellanies collected by Anna Barbauld and Arnaud Berquin.

Sedgwick, then, had little education in the “common sense,” but there were “peculiar circumstances in [her] condition that in some degree supplied these great deficiencies.” They were peculiar circumstances. Sedgwick was basically untutored and undirected, but as the result of living in a cultured household, “there was much chance seed dropped in the fresh furrow, and some of it was good seed.” She also boldly adds, “some of it, I may say, fell on good ground.” Sedgwick's metaphor highlights the paradoxical character of her education. Arbitrary, unstructured, and unpredictable as that education was, it had been obtained from a family that valued learning and considered the transmission of culture a responsibility, its possession a birthright.

Whether formal or informal, however, Sedgwick's education had not been designed to prepare her for a public career. Presuming that a woman's existence would be centered in the home, elite families focused on preparing their daughters for the roles of wife and mother. Companion to husband and instructor to children, the educated woman was expected to dedicate herself to her family. This ideal of the wife and mother aside, the physical and emotional demands of domesticity made it difficult to engage in other pursuits. Ideology and circumstance, then, located a woman within the household and made the role she played there central to her identity. Any career beyond the home was decidedly unlikely. In contrast to nine out of ten women in the nineteenth century, Sedgwick remained unmarried. However, that unusual status did not make her eligible for a career. Instead, it was assumed that an unmarried woman would either remain with her parental family or attach herself to her siblings' families. Whatever the familial locus, the single woman's life was still defined in the context of domesticity.

Nonetheless, Sedgwick challenged prevailing experience and expectation. Her siblings, female and male, played significant, albeit starkly different, roles in their sister's decision to remain single. The experiences of Eliza and Frances were cautionary tales. Each of their marriages made tangible a gender hierarchy in which women were relatively powerless. The consequences for Frances were disastrous. Although Sedgwick describes the marriage only sparingly in her autobiography, she captures its tone and temper in a single phrase—Frances “endured much heroically.” In letters written to her other siblings, Sedgwick elaborated upon her sister's desperately unhappy union with Ebenezer Watson. The reason for Frances's distress was simple. As Sedgwick wrote to Eliza about Frances's husband, “Mr. Watson is brutal in his conduct to her and does and has for a long time rendered her miserable.” With a demeanor that Sedgwick described as “oppressive,” as “essentially diabolical,” Ebenezer tyrannized over Frances. Why, then, did Frances remain with her husband? Again the answer was simple. Frances, as Sedgwick told Eliza in the same letter, “would leave him—but she cannot bear a separation from the children.” This was no idle concern. Nineteenth-century legislation governing custody of children in the event of separation or divorce accorded the husband almost exclusive rights. Frances's situation was, then, “one of those hopeless miseries over which we must mourn without being able to remove it.”²³ Throughout the crises that beset the marriage, Frances's brothers and sisters continued to provide sympathy and support. A resigned Frances remained in the marriage. Shortly before her elder sister's death in June 1842, Sedgwick wrote to a friend that Frances had been “through a life of vexing trials that would have cooled any love, exhausted any enthusiasm but hers.”²⁴ The evidence suggests that was only a slight exaggeration.

In contrast to her sister Frances's experience, Eliza sustained a deeply caring marriage with Thaddeus Pomeroy. Nonetheless, this union as well entailed hardship. Eliza, Sedgwick recalls in the autobiography, had a “hard life of it—indifferent health and the painful drudgery of bearing and nurturing twelve children.” Just as important, nineteenth-century gender relations dictated that the resolution of marital incompatibilities was Eliza's responsibility. Thaddeus, as Sedgwick described him, “was a man after the old pattern—resolute, fearless, enduring, generous, with alterations of tenderness and austerity, of impulsiveness and rigidity.” Unfortunately, some of these characteristics “were trying to [Eliza's] gentle disposition and unvarying and quiet devotion to duty.” Four months before her sister's death in 1827, Sedgwick testified to Eliza's success in adapting to a marriage that resembled her parents'. Eliza, she declared in her journals, “can look back upon a life in which her duties have been well sustained.” Her sister had been “an example of a Christian daughter and sister—wife and mother—friend and benefactor.”²⁵ Sedgwick praised the obvious constancy. She commended the effort well performed. Only later, in the autobiography, did she remark upon the costs. Only then did she attribute those costs to patriarchal gender relations.

While the experiences of Frances and Eliza contributed to Sedgwick's decision not to marry, her brothers, all of whom welcomed her into their households, played the crucial role. Offering care, affection, and companionship, Theodore, Harry, Robert, and Charles provided their sister with a familial base and made it possible for Sedgwick to create a marriage of circumstance. In a letter that she wrote when she was fifty-one, Sedgwick told her close friend Louisa Minot (mother of William; mother-in-law of Kate) that “the affection that others give to husbands and children I have given to my brothers.” She recognized that hers was an unusual situation. “Few,” she noted, “can understand the dependence and intensity of my love for them.”²⁶ Developed in childhood, that dependence and intensity increased in the wake of Theodore Sedgwick's death, which occurred shortly after his youngest daughter's twenty-third birthday. Writing to her eldest brother ten days after their father had died on 24 January 1813, Sedgwick told Theodore II that she longed to see him, longed to tell him that she felt “for all my brothers new sensations of love and dependence.”²⁷

In the decade following her father's death, Sedgwick's bond with two of her brothers increased in depth and strength. Each of these relationships had its particular character, each its particular expression of affection. Playfulness, remarkable wit, and shared sensibilities marked the intimacy Catharine shared with Harry. The attachment with Robert was charged with passion. Writing to him six months after their father's death, Sedgwick proclaimed, “I do love you, with a love surpassing at least the ordinary love of woman.” Six years later, she described him as “as much a part of me as the lifeblood that flows through my heart.” Robert's declarations of affection were equally intense, his need for her equally strong. “My dear Kate,” he told her on more than one occasion, “I know not how I could live without you.”²⁸

The trajectory of these relationships changed sharply in the 1820s, however. The years of mental illness that eventually cost Harry his life transformed all his relationships, not least the one that he had established with his sister Catharine. From 1827 until Harry's death late in 1831, Sedgwick's journals are filled with expressions of overwhelming loss. In one of the many entries commenting on Harry's deteriorating condition, she lamented his “darkened mind,” his “troubled spirit.” Still another entry described that once powerful mind as “a broken instrument.” The spontaneity, the clarity, the discernment were gone forever. “Oh, it is too much,” his sister cried out.²⁹

Sedgwick's desolation was sharpened by another loss she had experienced earlier in the decade. The situation was very different, although the impact seemed only slightly less. In December 1821, Robert had told his sister that he had decided to marry Elizabeth Ellery. “We cannot walk so close together as we have done,” Sedgwick responded. That recognition devastated her: “No one can ever know all that I have, and must feel, because no one has ever felt the sheltering love, the tenderness, the friendship that left me nothing to desire.” Despite Robert's efforts to dissuade his sister, Sedgwick tried to lessen her dependence upon him. At the time of his marriage, Robert complained that she no longer spoke in “that language of the heart, by which you are accustomed so faithfully to interpret its emotions.” Nearly a year passed before Sedgwick felt sufficiently detached to acknowledge that her reticence had been motivated by the need to have his presence and professions of affection become “less necessary.”³⁰ The connection, the sense of reciprocal commitment, established between sister and brother had become essential to Sedgwick; the process of disengagement had been extremely painful.

Ultimately, Sedgwick achieved her objective of lessened dependence, although a deep attachment clearly persisted. After Harry's declining health required him and his wife Jane to leave New York City, Sedgwick spent her winters there with Robert and his family. She also traveled with them in Europe for fifteen months. But the intimacy, the mutual reliance Catharine and Robert expressed in their letters prior to Robert's marriage, disappeared from their correspondence. Sedgwick herself alluded to the difference in a journal entry dated 2 December 1837. The passage describes her relationships with members of her family, including Robert. But the sentences about him have been carefully inked out. In the margin alongside the passage, Sedgwick added the following on 24 July 1846, nearly five years after her brother's death: “Here I had written a lamentation over the transference of the first place in my dear brother Robert's heart. He had been father, lover as well as brother to me, and when in the inevitable concentration of a closer tie I felt an aching void, I expressed it as I should not.”³¹ Sedgwick immediately added, “years passed on and I had proof that the love of our early years for a time without its usual demonstrations was there in that tenderest of hearts.” That restored intimacy was Robert's gift to his sister in the final months before his death in September 1841.

The vacuum left by Harry and Robert was increasingly filled by Charles. The bond Sedgwick developed with the only brother younger than herself is documented in a correspondence that spans nearly half a century. Theirs became a relationship in which reciprocity was perhaps the strongest hallmark. It seems appropriate that Sedgwick, an individual who had constituted herself in relation to others, should have experienced an exceptional mutuality in the sibling relationship that lasted the longest. Charles would express to his sister his desire to “make my house, myself, my all as conducive to your happiness as it is possible it should be.” Catharine prefigured the success of his endeavor in her earlier comment that she had known “nothing of love—of memory—of hope—of which you are not an essential part.”³²

The losses and shifting intensities notwithstanding, Sedgwick established deeply meaningful relationships with her brothers that sustained her until Charles's death in 1856. Still, in entry upon entry in her journal, Sedgwick considered the consequences of her decision to remain single. As each of her brothers married, she became “first to none,” as she phrased it in one of the early volumes. Being “second best” was inevitably difficult. It caused her the “keenest suffering.” It surely constituted the “chief misery of single life.” And, as she recorded in the journal's last entry on 28 December 1854, she still felt “so acutely—so unworthily the inevitable change from the time when I was first in many hearts to being first in none.”³³

But if Sedgwick chose to highlight the costs of her decision in most of her journal entries, she also left meditations there that located that decision in a larger and more balanced context. Yes, she had “suffered,” she noted on 29 December 1834, the day after her forty-fifth birthday. But her life's more positive dimension was openly acknowledged—“for the most part I can look back upon a very happy life.” Her literary career had brought her “far more of the world's respect than I ever expected.” Her cherished friendships had extended, undiminished, through the years. The most important ties, the connections upon which she had constructed her core identity, had been more complicated. The marriages of her brothers had meant that “a portion of what was mine has been diverted into other channels.” Resignedly she commented, “my heart has ached and does ache.” Resignation was balanced by resolution, however. She would not “repine,” she would not be “exacting.”³⁴ In another entry recorded two years later, Sedgwick mediated upon the alternative. The death of William Jarvis, one of her former suitors, provided the occasion. Whatever loneliness she had suffered, whatever pain her secondary status had entailed, Jarvis's death reminded Sedgwick of her conviction that a successful marriage required much more than the “liking” she had felt for the then “young man of five and twenty.”³⁵

It was not so much that Sedgwick regretted her decision to remain single; indeed, evidence indicates that she did not. And yet a relentlessly honest Sedgwick meditated upon the consequences of her choice throughout her life. That she vacillated, this time calmly accepting those consequences, that time lamenting them, suggests ambivalence. But Sedgwick was no simple woman, and neither was her ambivalence simple. Its complicated character she herself expressed concisely, profoundly, and perhaps unconsciously. “From my own experience,” she said, “I would not advise any one to remain unmarried.” For, she immediately added, “my experience has been a singularly happy one.”³⁶

Sedgwick's brothers were central to the choice she made about marriage. They were no less important in their sister's literary career. Strongly and consistently supportive, Theodore, Harry, Robert, and Charles encouraged the initially reluctant author, applauded the novels and stories, and negotiated with the publishers. In a letter written a decade before Sedgwick's appearance as a novelist, Harry displayed the enthusiasm with which he and his brothers fostered her career. Telling Catharine that he had agreed to edit Boston's Weekly Messenger every third week, he declared that he intended to print a portion of her recent letter—“a delightful scrap of yours on the sacred character of a pastor.” In his effort to bolster the confidence of female authors, he needed the “ammunition of a petticoated youth of high and early promise.” None other than his sister would provide the necessary armament: “How confidently shall I claim for ‘my fair countrywomen’ the need of their genius; how triumphantly shall I prove their precocity of intellect.”³⁷ Harry's confidence in his sister was manifest. So too was his determination that she cultivate her talent. In asserting that the country must no longer neglect the genius of its women, he laid claim upon Sedgwick to display her own. Harry was also the first brother to persuade her to enlarge the form and scope of a religious tract she had begun shortly after she left orthodox Congregationalism for Unitarianism.

Theodore and Robert then joined forces with Harry, and they convinced their sister that the novel that emerged from the tract should be published. Having read 130 pages of A New England Tale shortly after its publication in 1822, Theodore told Sedgwick that the novel “exceeds all my expectations, fond and flattering as they were.” He had never doubted her abilities, but having seen them confirmed, his heart was filled with “pride and pleasure.” With the publication of Sedgwick's second novel two years later, Robert delighted in recounting to his sister that “wherever I go I receive compliments, felicitations, and even homage for the honor I have come to, by my relation to the author of Redwood.” Charles “rejoiced beyond all expression at the progress of the book” he was reading in manuscript. The volume this time was Hope Leslie, Sedgwick's third novel, which appeared shortly after his heartening letter in the spring of 1827. Three years later, he told Sedgwick in mock horror that she must end her literary career or his “family will be ruined.” Adults and children alike were locked away in their rooms absorbed with Clarence, Sedgwick's fourth novel.³⁸ So long as each was able, all of Sedgwick's brothers stayed the course, prompting, bolstering, and persuading their sister that her talent demanded literary expression. Dedicating Clarence “To my Brothers—my best friends,” Sedgwick acknowledged their signal importance to her career.

The elite standing of her family and the gender conventions of her century intersected in Sedgwick's career. The daughter of an influential Federalist, she nonetheless discarded the political convictions of her father and came to support the more egalitarian democracy he had found so threatening. However, two letters, both expressing Sedgwick's pleasure at favorable reactions to her fiction, highlight a lingering elitism that qualified her support for egalitarian democracy. “In this country,” she succinctly informed her friend Louisa Minot, “we must do everything for the majority.”³⁹ Later elaborating upon her responsibilities to those who were numerically dominant, Sedgwick expressed her opinion to clergyman William Ellery Channing that “there is an immense moral field opening demanding laborers.” She, of course, defined herself as one of those laborers; “neither pride nor humility should withold [sic] us from the work to which we are clearly ‘sent.’”⁴⁰

In suggesting that elite status entailed particular responsibilities to the larger society, Sedgwick had to address a basic question: Was there any role for individuals of privilege in an increasingly democratic antebellum America? Despite the claims that resonated through these decades, America's democracy remained decidedly limited—barriers to participation either as voters or as jurors remained in place for African-American men and for women of all races. Universal suffrage for white men had made them equal at the polls. In defining the elite's obligations as cultural rather than political, then, Sedgwick envisioned a privileged class that might yet be critical to the success of a society that defined itself as democratic. Those who could no longer expect to dominate at the polls could retain power and authority in the domain of culture. And there they could continue to “do everything for the majority.” But was it possible for a woman to invest herself with the obligations she had accorded an elite? Entitled by her family's status to enrich herself intellectually and culturally, Sedgwick took a further step and defined herself as a participant in the construction of culture. Had she clung to the political model of elite dominance, she, like all women regardless of status, would have been excluded from participation in the national project. In combining the increasingly popular idea that women should be moral guardians with the long-standing conviction that culture should be informed by moral as well as aesthetic purpose, Sedgwick was able to circumvent barriers based on gender and to transform the legacy that Theodore Sedgwick had intended only for his sons. She could, therefore, see herself as Channing's equal and insist that they both dedicate themselves to the “work to which we are clearly ‘sent.’”⁴¹

The consequences of the obligations Sedgwick so willingly embraced were not always welcomed, however. Ranked with the early nineteenth century's most prominent writers, Sedgwick acknowledged the pleasure of distinction. Yes, she conceded in a journal entry recorded shortly after the publication of Hope Leslie, she delighted in being one of antebellum America's most notable literary figures, in “being able to command a high station wherever I go.” But that distinction also entailed what her brother Charles aptly termed “Lafayettism,” a condition in which the subject became the possession of her public. Having been “introduced to multitudes at [Saratoga] Springs who paid this compliment to what they deemed my literary success,” Sedgwick found the experience distasteful. She had “to fritter away in general courtesies time and thought and feeling.” It was a “disadvantage” that she felt deeply. That Sedgwick sought the betterment of those same multitudes was obvious. That she sought influence as a cultural arbiter was equally so. Nonetheless, she still longed for the deference that would have insulated her from the claims an increasingly aggressive public made upon its famous. She still longed to be aloof.⁴²

The moral nature of the cultural obligations Sedgwick assigned elite women is evident in the reflections on literary women that are scattered throughout her autobiography and journals. Sometimes the subject she chooses is herself. Shortly after the publication of Hope Leslie, Sedgwick recorded a meditation on the meaning of fame. Noting in her journal that “my fond friends expect a great accession of fame to me,” she asked herself that spring of 1827, “fame—what is it?” The praise that had marked the publication of her novel was dismissed as nothing more than the transient “breath of man.” Fame was welcomed only if it was endowed with purpose, only if her achievements “produced some good feeling.”⁴³ Almost as frequently, the subject is other women who have broken ground as participants in the construction of culture. Sedgwick's meditations in this regard appear almost as reflections in a mirror. In contemplating other literary women, this participant in her nation's intellectual and cultural enterprise contemplated herself. Nonetheless, Sedgwick had to look abroad for counterparts during the formative decades of her career. In contrast to the Englishwomen with whom she compared herself, she stood nearly alone as a prominent American writer who happened to be a woman.

The English writer Harriet Martineau, who visited the United States in the early 1830s, is the subject of one of the journals' longer entries. Considering Sedgwick's earlier reservations about the political economist, the impression Martineau made upon her when they met is all the more telling. At first Sedgwick had thought that the pursuit of such a masculine enterprise “was not the loveliest manifestation of woman.” But Martineau, whom Sedgwick calls “extraordinary,” had allayed this concern almost immediately. She had been “so modest, gentle, and kind.” She had exhibited such a venerable combination of “genius and virtue.” That Sedgwick considered virtue more important becomes obvious in a second entry comparing Martineau to Anna Barbauld, Maria Edgeworth, Anna Jameson, and Felicia Hemans, all of whom had been successful in their literary careers. None, however, had achieved Martineau's prominence. Sedgwick asks herself why. Certainly, the others had “shown as powerful a genius as hers”; indeed, Sedgwick considers some of them superior in this regard. Martineau had distinguished herself, rather, by her singular commitment of “God's good gifts to the use of his creatures.” She had made the common good the sine qua non of her career. Martineau had also been decidedly inclusive in her definition of those creatures. Leaving to others “the intellectual amusement or advancement of the gifted and educated,” Martineau had focused upon the multitudes. That egalitarianism had made “us all cry Hail thou favored among women!”⁴⁴

The two entries reveal at least as much about Sedgwick as about Martineau, their putative subject. Perhaps most notably, they demonstrate the remarkable agility with which Sedgwick was able to negotiate antebellum America's gender conventions. Erasing her initial suspicion that political economy is most properly a masculine undertaking, Sedgwick makes its practitioner the embodiment of femininity. Still more tellingly, she complicates the common premise that men alone are lords of creation, a popular phrase that signals the gender conventions limiting participation in the construction of culture. In ascribing creativity, or “genius,” to Martineau, Barbauld, Edgeworth, Jameson, and Hemans, Sedgwick openly contradicts those who locate generative power exclusively in the masculine. Yet for all the boldness of her challenge, the burden of Sedgwick's commentary is more in keeping with than set against prevailing gender conventions. Most strikingly, Sedgwick makes “virtue,” a concept increasingly associated with women, an equally important qualification for participation in the construction of culture. Although the precise meaning of virtue was contested among antebellum Americans, all generally agreed that dedication to the common good was central to its definition and that women's potential for such dedication exceeded men's. Negotiating the highly charged gender conventions and designing a readily identifiable persona from those conventions, Sedgwick had made culture Martineau's domain. Simultaneously, she had done the same for herself.

In a letter that is emblematic of the devotion Sedgwick inspired in virtually everyone with whom she shared herself, the youngest of her siblings told her that she had been the recipient of many gifts. By far the one for which she should be most grateful was the most obvious—“the power of your sympathy,” as Charles described his sister's deep and sustaining identification with others.⁴⁵ The designation was appropriate for Sedgwick the individual as well as for the gender conventions of her century. In her autobiography, in her journals, in her fiction, in short, in all of her writings, she had insisted upon the signal importance of connectedness. Indeed, she had presented her life as entirely interwoven with the lives of others dear to her. Nineteenth-century gender conventions, which located in women a special capacity for selflessness, also privileged such connection as feminine.

Yet Charles neglected to mention the equal significance Sedgwick attached to the freedom to choose. Based on the premise that women had a claim on individual fulfillment, choice had enormous implications for women in a century in which they were expected to subordinate themselves to the needs and desires of men. In her writings and in the most important decisions taken in her life, Sedgwick made those implications tangible. The issues she selected covered a broad spectrum—decisions regarding religious affiliation, vocational commitment, and marital identity were included in her domain. The gender conventions of her century constructed connection and choice almost as a binary opposition. Inflected as feminine and masculine, choice appeared possible only for men. But Sedgwick deconstructed this opposition and made connection and choice complementary imperatives for both sexes. Insisting that women should freely and fully choose a life for themselves, she suggested that only then could they just as freely and fully practice connection. No longer marked as exclusively feminine, connection could be a mutual practice for women and men. In this as in so much else, she displayed the insight, or as Charles phrased it, the power of her sympathy, which made her autobiography and her journals compelling.

Notes

1. Catharine Maria Sedgwick to William Minot, 5 October 1851, Catharine Maria Sedgwick Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Mass. All quotations from MHS collections are by permission.

2. Autobiography of Catharine Maria Sedgwick, C. M. Sedgwick Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society. Unless otherwise noted, all subsequent references derive from this source.

3. This point was made by Georges Gusdorf, in “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography,” an influential essay published in 1956 (trans. James Olney, in his edition Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980], pp. 28-48). Autobiography, as Gusdorf has defined it, entails a “conscious awareness of the singularity of each individual life” (p. 30). Whatever its merits for analysis of the male autobiographical self, Gusdorf's theory is based solely upon an analysis of men's experiences. Susan Stanford Friedman has highlighted the gendered character of this individualistic theory in “Women's Autobiographical Selves: Theory and Practice” (in The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women's Autobiographical Writings, ed. Shari Benstock [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988], pp. 34-62). Until recently, scholarship on autobiography has focused almost exclusively on male texts. As her title suggests, Sidonie Smith's A Poetics of Women's Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions of Self-Representation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987) shifts the angle of vision. I have found Smith's commentary on current theories of women's autobiography very useful. She has explored the complicated relationship between experience and representation in women's autobiography in the highly suggestive “Construing Truths in Lying Mouths: Truthtelling in Women's Autobiography,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 23 (1990): 145-63. See also Estelle Jelinek, The Tradition of Women's Autobiography: From Antiquity to the Present (Boston: Twayne, 1986); Carolyn Heilbrun, Writing a Woman's Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988); Personal Narratives Group, ed., Interpreting Women's Lives: Feminist Theory and Personal Narratives (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989); Margo Cully, ed., American Women's Autobiography: Fea(s)ts of Memory (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992). For commentary on the varied forms of life writing, including letters, journals, and autobiographies analyzed in this article, see Susan Groag Bell and Marilyn Yalom, eds., Revealing Lives: Autobiography, Biography, and Gender (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), pp. 1-11.

4. In her analysis of the autobiographies of Dame Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Margaret Cavendish, and Anne Bradstreet, Mary Mason highlights characteristics that distinguish women's from men's construction of the self (“The Other Voice: Autobiographies of Women Writers,” in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, pp. 207-35). Carol Holly has employed a similar strategy in analyzing the autobiographies of Sedgwick and Lucy Larcom (“Nineteenth-Century Autobiographies of Affiliation: The Case of Catharine Sedgwick and Lucy Larcom,” in American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect, ed. Paul John Eakin [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991], pp. 216-34). See also Rose Norman, “New England Girlhoods in Nineteenth-Century Autobiography,” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 8 (1991): 104-17.

5. The unparalleled social and political changes that occurred in the decades following the Revolution are insightfully explored in Gordon S. Wood's “The Democratization of Mind in the American Revolution,” in Leadership in the American Revolution: Papers Presented at the Third Symposium, May 9 and 10, 1974 (Washington: Library of Congress, 1974), pp. 63-89. These changes have received extended treatment in Wood's recently published The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992). Robert E. Shalhope has analyzed the same phenomenon in his incisive “Republicanism, Liberalism, and Democracy: Political Culture in the Early Republic,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 102 (1992): 99-152.

6. The conduct and character of Massachusetts politics are described by Ronald P. Formisano, in The Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts Parties, 1790s-1840s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983). The Federalists are analyzed in James M. Banner Jr.'s To the Hartford Convention: The Federalists and the Origins of Party Politics in Massachusetts, 1789-1815 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970). Paul Goodman does the same for the opposition in The Democratic-Republicans of Massachusetts: Politics in a Young Republic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964). See also Linda K. Kerber's analysis of the Federalist ideology in Federalists in Dissent: Imagery and Ideology in Jeffersonian America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970).

7. Catharine Maria Sedgwick, “A Reminiscence of Federalism,” in Tales and Sketches (Philadelphia, 1835), pp. 24, 30.

8. There is now a considerable body of scholarship that examines the Revolution in relation to women. Linda Kerber has written extensively on the Revolution's legal and political implications. She also identified Republican Motherhood in her pathbreaking article “The Republican Mother: Women and the Enlightenment—An American Perspective,” American Quarterly 28 (1976): 187-205. See also Rosemarie Zagarri, “Morals, Manners, and the Republican Mother,” American Quarterly 44 (1992): 192-215. Jan Lewis commented upon a republican wife's responsibility to her husband in “The Republican Wife: Virtue and Seduction in the Early Republic,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser. 44 (1987): 696-721. Both Kerber and Mary Beth Norton have addressed the significance of women's increased educational opportunities. More recently, I have done the same in “‘Vindicating the Equality of Female Intellect’: Women and Authority in the Early Republic,” Prospects: An Annual Journal of American Cultural Studies 17 (1992): 1-27. Norton suggested that the choice to remain unmarried became viable in the years after the Revolution. See Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980); “The Paradox of Women's Citizenship in the Early Republic: The Case of Martin vs. Massachusetts, 1805,” American Historical Review 97 (1992): 349-78; Norton, Liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980).

9. Pamela Dwight Sedgwick to Theodore Sedgwick, 18 November [179?], Sedgwick IV, Massachusetts Historical Society.

10. Pamela Dwight Sedgwick to Theodore Sedgwick, 31 January 1789, 26 June 1790, 14 February 1791, Sedgwick III.

11. Pamela Dwight Sedgwick to Theodore Sedgwick, 4 December 1791, Sedgwick III.

12. Journals of Catharine Maria Sedgwick, 29 November 1829, C. M. Sedgwick Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.

13. In her illuminating essay on the neglected dimensions of difference, Elsa Barkley Brown has analyzed the relational character of difference. See “‘What Has Happened Here’: The Politics of Difference in Women's History and Feminist Politics,” Feminist Studies 18 (1992): 295-312. See also Nell Irvin Painter's introduction to The Secret Eye: The Journal of Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas, 1848-1889 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), pp. 1-67.

14. Catharine Maria Sedgwick, “Slavery in New England,” Bentley's Miscellany 34 (1853): 417-24. Freeman's challenge to the constitutionality of slavery is the subject of Arthur Zilversmit's “Quok Walker, Mumbet, and the Abolition of Slavery in Massachusetts,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser. 25 (1968): 614-24. See also William O'Brien, “Did the Jennison Case Outlaw Slavery in Massachusetts,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser. 17 (1960): 219-41; John D. Cushing, “The Cushing Court and the Abolition of Slavery in Massachusetts: More Notes on the Quok Walker Case,” American Journal of Legal History 5 (1961): 118-44; and Elaine MacEacheren, “Emancipation of Slavery in Massachusetts: A Reexamination, 1770-1790,” Journal of Negro History 55 (1970): 289-306.

15. Catharine Maria Sedgwick to Orville Dewey, 7 September 1841, in Life and Letters of Catharine M. Sedgwick, ed. Mary E. Dewey (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1872), p. 278.

16. Maris Vinovskis and Richard Bernard have demonstrated that only a tiny percentage of the population attended college before the Civil War. Basing their findings on federal censuses, they show that 0.8٪ were enrolled in 1840, 0.8٪ in 1850, and 1.0٪ in 1860. See Vinovskis and Bernard, “Beyond Catharine Beecher: Female Education in the Antebellum Period,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 3 (1978): 859. Lawrence Cremin addresses education more generally in American Education: The Colonial Experience, 1607-1783 (New York: Harper & Row, 1970). Imaginative in approach and convincing in argument, Cremin's volume nonetheless suffers from a failure to distinguish between education offered females and males; only men receive extensive consideration.

17. Women's education is the subject of Thomas Woody, A History of Women's Education in the United States (New York: Science Press, 1929). Published more than fifty years ago, Woody's two volumes remain the basic source, although they are more descriptive than analytic. Barbara Miller Solomon's insightful study In The Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985) focuses on higher education.

18. Pamela Dwight Sedgwick to Theodore Sedgwick, 9 July 1798, Sedgwick III.

19. Catharine Maria Sedgwick to Pamela Dwight Sedgwick, 6 October 1803, Sedgwick IV.

20. Catharine Maria Sedgwick to Pamela Dwight Sedgwick, 11 November 1803, Sedgwick IV.

21. Catharine Maria Sedgwick to Theodore Sedgwick, 29 December 1804, Sedgwick IV.

22. Theodore Sedgwick to Catharine Maria Sedgwick, 23 April 1806, Sedgwick III.

23. Catharine Maria Sedgwick to Eliza Pomeroy, 1 December 1822, Sedgwick IV.

24. Catharine Maria Sedgwick to Orville Dewey, 12 June 1842, in Life and Letters, pp. 281-82.

25. Sedgwick, Journals, 9 July [1827].

26. Catharine Maria Sedgwick to Louisa Minot, 5 September 1841, Sedgwick IV.

27. Catharine Maria Sedgwick to Theodore Sedgwick II, 3 February 1813, Sedgwick III.

28. Catharine Maria Sedgwick to Robert Sedgwick, 2 July 1813, C. M. Sedgwick Papers; Catharine to Robert, 21 November 1819, C. M. Sedgwick Papers; Robert to Catharine, 20 November 1813, Sedgwick IV.

29. Sedgwick, Journals, 10 June [1827] and 31 December 1828.

30. Catharine Maria Sedgwick to Robert Sedgwick, December 1821, C. M. Sedgwick Papers; Robert to Catharine, 9 August 1822, Sedgwick IV; Catharine to Robert, 11 June 1823, C. M. Sedgwick Papers.

31. Sedgwick, Journals, 2 December 1837.

32. Charles Sedgwick to Catharine Maria Sedgwick, 2 April 1848, Sedgwick IV; Catharine to Charles, 2 February 1829, C. M. Sedgwick Papers.

33. Sedgwick, Journals, 18 May [1828], 5 August [1830], 2 December 1837, and 28 December 1854.

34. Sedgwick, Journals, 29 December 1834. She made another notable entry in this regard on 2 December 1837.

35. Sedgwick, Journals, 12 October 1836.

36. Sedgwick, Journals, 18 May [1828].

37. Harry Sedgwick to Catharine Maria Sedgwick, 22 June 1812, Sedgwick IV.

38. Theodore Sedgwick to Catharine Maria Sedgwick, 6 May 1822, Life and Letters, p. 152; Robert Sedgwick to Catharine, 17 July 1824, Sedgwick IV; Charles Sedgwick to Catharine, 28 March 1827, Sedgwick IV; Charles to Catharine, 21 May 1830, Sedgwick IV.

39. Catharine Maria Sedgwick to Louisa Minot, 26 November 1836, Sedgwick IV.

40. Catharine Maria Sedgwick to William Ellery Channing, 24 August 1837, C. M. Sedgwick Papers. The perspective of post-Revolutionary writers is the subject of Emory Elliott's Revolutionary Writers: Literature and Authority in the New Republic, 1725-1810 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982). Positing a crisis of authority as the signal experience of these writers, Elliott suggests that they forged an identity more in keeping with the democratizing tendencies of the early republic. The historical context for this development is provided in Joseph J. Ellis's After the Revolution: Profiles of Early American Culture (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979). Elliott and Ellis, each of whom considers only men, do not include gender as an analytical category. Gender is central to Cathy Davidson's highly suggestive study of these decades. See Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), esp. pp. 3-79. I have discussed gender and its relationship to literary authority in antebellum America in Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), esp. pp. 111-214. Michael Warner analyzes the implications of transformations in print discourse and reading that took place in eighteenth-century America in The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990). Richard Brown's study of the same phenomenon extends the analysis into the nineteenth century; see his Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700-1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

41. In a study published nearly sixty years ago, William Charvat identified how antebellum Americans linked the aesthetic and the moral when defining the purpose of culture. The importance that Unitarian leaders such as William Ellery Channing attached to this linkage has been explored by Daniel Walker Howe; Lawrence Buell has done the same for New England's writers more generally. The related tie between the moral and the feminine has received consideration from scholars studying women and antebellum reform. Lori Ginzberg's recent study of elite women's participation in organized benevolence is particularly insightful in this regard. Perhaps most notably, she has highlighted a strategy justifying female participation that is remarkably similar to Sedgwick's. See Charvat, The Origins of American Critical Thought, 1810-1835 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1936); Howe, The Unitarian Conscience: Harvard Moral Philosophy, 1805-1861 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970); Buell, New England Literary Culture: From Revolution through Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics and Class in the 19th-Century United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).

42. Michael T. Gilmore's analysis of Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Melville identifies a similar ambivalence in their reaction to popularity; they simultaneously sought to cultivate a larger and less elite public and to resist its claims. Donald M. Scott has examined the changing relationship between knowledge and the marketplace. No longer the possession of an elite, knowledge itself had become a commodity available for purchase by any literate American. Stow Persons's insightful study explores the implications of all these changes. See Gilmore, American Romanticism and the Marketplace (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), esp. pp. 1-17; Scott, “Knowledge and the Marketplace,” in The Mythmaking Frame of Mind: Social Imagination and American Culture, ed. James Gilbert et al. (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1992), pp. 99-112; Persons, The Decline of American Gentility (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973).

43. Sedgwick, Journals, 10 June 1827.

44. Sedgwick, Journals, 8 October [1834] and 9 August 1835.

45. Charles Sedgwick to Catharine Maria Sedgwick, [June 1837], Sedgwick IV.