Martha Ballard's Republic and Our Haunted Histories

Abstract

Martha Ballard’s Republic and Our Haunted Histories Tamara Harvey What do we now know about Martha Ballard that we did not before? Marion Rust’s symptomatic reading of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s work in “Personal History: Martha Ballard, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, and the Scholarly Guise in Early American Women’s Studies” may shed light on Ulrich and on the conditions under which women academics labored in the late-twentieth-century United States, but does it shed light on Ballard beyond asking us to reflect on how “the study of early American women’s writing both betrays and benefits from attachments it often expressly eschews” (148)? Rust focuses on how Ulrich’s reading of Ballard arises from the need to establish a “scholarly guise” that operates in tension with daily endeavors and passions while both using and denying similar tensions in the past. But like Althusser reading Marx, Rust ultimately finds that Ulrich does more than she knows or can fully articulate. As Rust observes, Ulrich’s “oscillation between what she terms ‘imagination’ and ‘rigor’ allows the book to exemplify a more inclusive historiography than the one it argues for” (155–56). For Althusser, symptomatic reading attends to the necessary exclusions of a text, what it must not see but nonetheless enacts in order do its work. This is “a guilty reading, but not one that absolves its crime on confessing it. On the contrary, it takes the responsibility for its crime as a ‘justified crime’ and defends it by proving its necessity” (Althusser 15). Rust finds a symptomatic oscillation between imagination and rigor in, for instance, Ulrich’s observation that a diary entry in which Ballard refers to God’s grace and mercy “reveals a storyteller, if not a writer, at work” (Ulrich 8). To the degree that the distinction between storytelling and writing is hierarchical, with Ballard the storyteller providing the raw material that Ulrich the writer then interprets, Rust finds Ulrich guilty of establishing her own authority in ways that could be heard and appreciated by the historians surrounding and evaluating her. In doing so Ulrich betrays her own method, logic, and conclusions insofar as they are grounded in her productive identification with Ballard. Like Ballard, Ulrich practices repetitive, skilled, often taxing labor as a historian. Also like Ballard, she is a storyteller; Rust stresses storytelling in Ulrich’s writing as a Mormon feminist, but A Midwife’s [End Page 185] Tale is also clearly an act of storytelling, although the storytelling of a professional historian. Storytelling and writing, imagination and rigor are not really separable despite those moments when Ulrich seems to claim analytical distance. Rust acknowledges Ulrich’s productive although restrained navigation of these two poles while suggesting that we need to attend to something more in this relationship. Both Ulrich’s and Rust’s works are about how we read history and seek to shed light on occluded counter-histories, histories that our assumptions about evidence and the purpose of historical writing may lead us to ignore. Ulrich asks us to look closely at an archive that has seemed irrelevant and apolitical, telling Ballard’s story in ways that foreground what historians have missed. Her association of storytelling with Ballard is not solely or primarily a matter of establishing generic hierarchies. In calling Ballard a storyteller, Ulrich is insisting on the larger significance of this diary. As she explains, “The problem is not that the diary is trivial but that it introduces more stories than can easily be recovered and absorbed” (25). When Ulrich applies the analytical skills of the historian, she is doing what an ethical researcher must: endeavoring to avoid assumptions and stereotypes in the service of a better, fuller truth. The Do History website that serves as a companion to Ulrich’s book treats this as exemplary practice when it stresses the use of many different archival sources in order to tease out competing interpretations and narratives in ways that are responsible and nuanced.1 It is also important to note that neither Ulrich nor Do History eschews activist narratives, although they do not foreground them. Drawing on two of Ulrich’s chapters, Do History offers students in-depth treatments of...