Paper Bodies: Data and Embodiment in the Sisterhood of Slade's Commonplace Books

  • “Power works as a mode of directionality, a way of orienting bodies in particular ways, so they are facing a certain way, heading toward a future that is given a face. As you become aware of how the social world is organized, norms appear as palpable things. (Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life)” ⤴️

  • “the data that we, as Romanticists, turn toward; second, the data that the Leigh sisters felt they were recording.” ⤴️

  • “hese commonplace books were useful for the Leigh sisters as mnemonic tokens of relationships and emotional bonds” ⤴️

  • ""archives become useful when they are being used” (Ahmed, What’s the Use 14).” ⤴️

  • “the kinds of data the sisters prioritized” ⤴️

  • “how the sisters used their commonplace books as archives of shared intimacy.” ⤴️

  • “he sisters transcribed verse written for the album tradition (by Thomas Moore and James Montgomery), which they then amplified and imitated.” ⤴️

  • “how bodies move through space, how they acquire meaning, and how they are directed toward particular futures. Husserl and Merleau-Ponty also appear in the following pages for their insights into embodied consciousness.” ⤴️

  • “how the sisters encode their embodiment with pen and ink.” ⤴️

  • realising ii care a lot about material legacy as evidence of my thought processes as they’re more important to me than the physical embodied acts often recorded about me or of me - i care to find multimodal, resilient ways to record the ‘otherness’ my own life represents and to bring room and direction for counter-publics of these kinds of ‘otherness’ - i must leave some kind of information legacy

  • “substantial paratext that thickens around the verse and teaches us what kinds of data the sisters thought themselves to be recording.” ⤴️

  • “the things themselves” ⤴️

  • “used material objects to ground lyrical abstraction.” ⤴️

  • “for a moment let us linger on the paper behind the words (on what McGann terms the “bibliographic code”)” ⤴️

  • “writing in an albumor common- place book is an act that reverberates outside of time.” ⤴️

  • “the sisters’ paratexts instruct our interpreta- tion ofthe verse as metaphorically linked to the living bodies that penned it.” ⤴️

  • “Charles Lamb describes the tradition as a tool for collecting people, with album verse as an alchemical practice that reanimates the dead—a kind of literary galvanism.” ⤴️

  • “John Hamilton Reynolds, describes opening his commonplace book and finding “living authors” moving therein. “Turn to one part ofthe book and see feasting, and splen- dour, and merriment; turn to another and hear intelligent conversation, and see the brightest persons in the world.”” ⤴️

  • “Reynolds explains, “if I but say to my book, ‘Call him, let me see him!’” ⤴️

  • “—Byronmight appear before him through the alchemy of his verse: “I turn to the page, and, lo! there he is!—‘In his habit as he lives!’” ⤴️

  • ”.In Rey- nold’s own words: “It is not, What is the Book? it is,Who is the author?” (135). Reynolds describes his commonplace book as a repository ofpeople, not just texts. More than that, these people are embodied” ⤴️

  • “But what kinds ofdata do such fleshly fragments contain? And howdid albumverse and the commonplace traditionmake this information legible?” ⤴️

  • “Merleau-Ponty’sand de Beauvoir’s embodied phenomenologies are in- structive here for the ways they orient us toward incarnate subjectivity.” ⤴️

  • “The body, as Merleau-Ponty explains, “is much more than an instrument or a means; it is our expression in the world, the visible form ofour inten- tions” (Basic Writings 36). In this respect, handwriting (on the pages of a commonplace book, for example) offers a visual representation ofembodi- ment, as the writer’s gestures and posturemanifest in the curve of her script.” ⤴️

  • ”: “i” ⤴️

  • “AsSimonedeBeauvoirwrites: “if the body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and the outline for our projects” (Second Sex 46).” ⤴️

  • screenshots are also descirbed as ‘situations’ in that other text - entire context as represented in one embodied thing, a capture of present and past and (as in that one with code in it) possibly premonitions of the future

  • “The sisters demonstrate their agency as they narrate their relationships and their intertwined lives.” ⤴️

  • “The inked bodies that appear on the page in the Leigh sisters’ common- place books are oriented toward a future separation, whether in the formof death ormarriage.” ⤴️

  • ”, their wedding marked an end to a certain kind of life for Thomazine, and a separation from her sisters.” ⤴️

  • this may be resonating to me in particular as formerly one of four sisters, how parts of the future becoming present meant leaving some of that sisterhood behind and forming new a new sibling assemblage

  • “man is a historical idea, rather than a fact, de Beauvoir explains that “Woman is not a fixed reality but a becoming” (Second Sex 45).” ⤴️

  • ”, “Marriage is the reference by which the single woman is defined” (Second Sex 439). Sarah felt Thomazine’s marriage to be a kind of loss.” ⤴️

  • this also reminds me of the ‘coming of age’ and perpetual youth themes in Encanto, which reminds me of the kind of degendering you get as a disabled person, as an autistic person, as a queer person, as a trans person, as a non-binary person, how stepping outside of a defined path puts you at a strange point of adult amongst children and elders rather than adult amongst adult. queer time.

  • “the occasion and the “painful pleasure” of seeing her sister married” ⤴️

  • “y drawing atten- tion to the very paper she writes upon (“this little leaf”), a diminutive de- scription that clashes with the severity ofthe following line, “Keep it till we die” (fig. 3)” ⤴️

  • “Think ofwhen we gave it each We gave it with a sigh” ⤴️

  • “e inscribed initials that seem to read “JTC” (or is it TJC?)” ⤴️

  • when I want to remember the origins of my own poetry without making it too blatant or painful i also initial the people it was written about or for

  • ”. Marriage offers context for this poem” ⤴️

  • ”. (Often, the sisters neglect to attri- bute published verse even as they sign their initials as the personwho tran- scribed it.” ⤴️

  • “Written” ⤴️

  • “P that when the hand that wrote this is far away or perhaps mould- ering into dust she may retain some memorial ofher sincere friendship.” ⤴️

  • “Her bifurcated body is present in the act of transcription, but it is potentially absent in the act ofreading. In this way her hand alternates between subject and object.” ⤴️

  • “As Merleau-Ponty describes in The Visible and In- visible, flesh can feel and be felt, but never simultaneously. He writes ofthe “reversibility ofthe seeing and the visible, ofthe touching and the touched. It is time to emphasize that it is a reversibility that is always imminent and” ⤴️

  • “never realized in fact” (BasicWritings 259). Once the hand writes on the page, it has written. The hand then, becomes object, rather than subject—the touched rather than the touching.” ⤴️

  • “But howdo bodies touch across time? For Jean-LucNancy, reading and writing are always forms of touching: “the page itself is a touching (ofmy hand while it writes, and your hands while they hold the book) .” ⤴️

  • ”? Carolyn Korsmeyer warns us against the temptation to invest in the kind of thinking that views touch as transitive: “the sense that in touching something old, one makes contact with others who have touched it before”” ⤴️

  • this is how puritanical scary shit happens - (awful) belief that a virgin and non-virgin are abjectly different bodily states, stained and ruined and permanently changed - and also is the origin of the (awful) ‘gold star lesbian’ division amongst cis-terf-lesbians that having even touched a penis is to be tainted by it. i’m sure there are other big examples of this i’m not thinking of. leprosy?

  • ”. With their writing, the sisters cultivate an unruly sense oftime” ⤴️

  • ”. Russell describes ephemera as essentially queer because it “encodes … the politics of‘fugitive’—of be- ing outside or escaping the regime oflawand also, in so far as fugitive is not defined by temporality or the limits of time and space” (180)” ⤴️

  • “r an archive of“wayward, queerer modalities ofhistorical experience and historical representation” i” ⤴️

  • “The sisters frame the transitive quality of writing in their paratext as bothmaterial and immaterial because they linkwritingwithmemory” ⤴️

  • ”, there is no memo- rial required to fix stamp him indelibly on our memory and hearts” ⤴️

  • “h pleads for remem- brance: “think on thy friend who is far from thy sight.” O” ⤴️

  • ”” The content ofher note negates the need for a note. But it also seems to speak to later readerswho donot have themen stamped on their memory. For these readers, Thomazine offers an image ofcompo- sition” ⤴️

  • “e also recalls us to the incar- nate consciousness of the group: they might write transcendent verse, but they also sit down to eat dinner.” ⤴️

  • “pens feature in the sisters’ imagination as an extension ofeach writer’s body—a tool that renders the writer’s bod- ily movements visible on the page” ⤴️

  • ”) The pen takes on an associative quality that allows her to think through marks that transcend materiality.” ⤴️

  • “The sea performs a different kind ofwriting than we have seen in the sisters’ manuscripts, as it splattered inkon the sand.” ⤴️

  • “anchor their otherwise abstract and highly ritualized expres- sions of intimacy.” ⤴️

  • “n the period’s struggles to describe friendship.” ⤴️

  • ”. As Laura Zebuhr has shown in her discussion ofAmerican friendship albums: “the struggle to write, to articulate, and to communicate feeling constitutes the feeling”” ⤴️

  • ”. The sisters, then, find themselves circulating platitudes that fall short of the affection they hope to inscribe” ⤴️

  • “the sisters’ commonplace books were cer- tainly not private manuscripts because they functioned as tools ofsociality. As Samantha Matthews explains, “Album poems may have one implied reader, while imagining and speaking to other readers and wider audi- ences” (15). No doubt, the sisters’ affection for one another is sincere; how- ever, wemight question ifthe commonplace book was the right vehicle for expressing such intimacy.” ⤴️

  • commonplace books not inherently just for self, a mixed personal/private/social/public to its form

  • ”. Their verse and paratext are strategies ofencod- ing information for ease of transmission within the technology ofthe Ro- mantic manuscript book” ⤴️

  • “strategies t” ⤴️

  • “e linking immaterial ideas with the materiality of the notebook and paratext that teaches us how to read the verse in the context of the sisters’ lived experience” ⤴️

  • “physical objects that captured traces of their lived lives” ⤴️

  • “a range ofdata, including evidence of everyday reading and writing practices, album verse, and Romantic-era friendship” ⤴️

  • “phan- tasmal objects. They offer fleeting glimpses of an irrecoverable past” ⤴️

  • “the Leigh sisters were concerned with the manuscripts’ futures.” ⤴️

  • ”, the sisters also knew that their futures would in- variably separate them throughmarriage. But as Simone de Beauvoir power- fully asserts, “The fact is that noman is a datum which is passively suffered” (The Ethics ofAmbiguity 46–47). Indeed, based on the evidence oftheir com- monplace books, the Leigh sisters did not see themselves as passive data.” ⤴️