“Contempt for her Practice”: Elizabeth Ashbridge’s Quest for Religious Freedom through Pious Rhetoric and Rebellious Female Agency

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Notes

¹ Michael Zuckerman interprets Ashbridge’s departure from the gender expectations of the dominant culture (i.e., the patriarchy), as such, “Her very submission to God sustained her refusal to submit to her husband or to any other men. She knew very well the obedience she owed her spouse and the insubordination on which she had launched. … Ashbridge experienced all the men she met in America as superficially righteous representatives of an established order that did not bear scrutiny. … Her narrative was not just an account of her inward quest. It was also an interrogation of provincial patriarchy” (248, 250). Zuckerman emphasizes her status as a wife before her status as a woman, which is interesting, but more importantly he does not mention Ashbridge’s mother who becomes a foil to Ashbridge by never defying the patriarchy. The subtle difference in my argument and Zuckerman’s lies in that I believe she depicts herself as faithful and thus aligned to God long before she finds a channel for that faith in Quakerism. Her allegiance to God was the source of her power to disobey the patriarchy in the instances Zuckerman provides as examples of her disobedience.

² Myles writes, “Throughout the Antinomian crisis, men sought where possible to close ranks with men, and were willing to sacrifice a prophetic woman leader to do so. By contrast, the first generation of Friends gave women full standing in their community, valuing their witness and sufferings no less than men’s and seeing in their boldness the embodiment of divine authority rather than gender transgression” (14).

³ Zuckerman skims Ashbridge’s rejection of the patriarchy, and instead largely only reiterates the events of her narrative. My analysis departs from his because of my emphasis on the factor that Ashbridge’s faith plays into her narrative. Also, Ceppi points out that two main problems exist with the current scholarship on Ashbridge: (1) the extant copies were not transcribed by her, and (2) the details of her life post-narrative come from second and third hand accounts that are few and far between (141).

⁴ Her father works at sea for the main part of her upbringing, and because of this she relies solely on her mother’s education in her socialization as a young girl, “… she discharged her duty, in endeavoring to imbue my mind with the principles of virtue” (2). This parenthetical citation refers to the section of Ashbridge’s narrative this quote is taken from, as will be the format for subsequent Ashbridge citations. Mary Anne Schofield points out that this characterization fits one of the criteria of female Quaker narratives contemporary to Ashbridge’s, although many of Schofield’s other criteria do not apply to Ashbridge’s narrative: “Naturally enough, real mothers feature prominently in these eighteenth-century texts. They are strong, well educated, especially solicitous toward their daughters and their upbringing” (72–73).

⁵ Zuckerman asserts that for Ashbridge beginning with her unapproved marriage at 14 “her every essential decision was a rebellious one” (245). However, he goes on to distinguish that what began as “adolescent and impetuous” rebellion in the Old World developed into a more mature and informed rebellion in the New World (246–47).

⁶ This double manipulation, by both male and female authority figures, begins the theme of isolation in her narrative. After a week in New York as an indentured servant, her master puts “a difference” to her that she refuses to describe (probably sexual assault) and Ashbridge becomes depressed and suicidal. D. Britton Gildersleeve remarks that in this instance Ashbridge gives a surprising and seemingly illogical amount of agency to this woman, and argues that this is out of Ashbridge’s grief for not being able to bond with this woman due to the absence of her own mother (374). Schofield asserts that all female interactions in female Quaker conversion narratives are beneficial and supportive to the protagonist (73). This obviously does not apply to Ashbridge considering interactions with the Irish “gentlewoman” who indentures her, the gossiping woman who suffers her to be whipped via violating Ashbridge’s trust, and Ashbridge’s interaction with the woman who asserts Christ was not real shortly before Ashbridge becomes ordained as a minister.

⁷ Zuckerman notes that her rebellion as an adult is informed by her first unfortunate encounter with authority en route to America, the betrayal of the captain who she saves (246). While Zuckerman qualifies this instance as one in which the patriarchy devalues Ashbridge’s authority, I further his interpretation of this incident by distinguishing it as one in which both male and female authority, a symbol of the patriarchy alongside an adherent of it, have betrayed her, which further complicates analogizing these figures with Ashbridge’s own parents.

⁸ Here again the relationship with her father and her relationship with God seems to be conflated, especially since she invokes God directly before challenging her indentured master. Her master sends the whipper away and does not punish her, so in effect, Ashbridge has successfully risen to the oppression of the patriarchy and escaped persecution. The link between her newfound courage and her appeal to God seems confirmed by the dream she has soon after this ordeal, in which a woman holding a lamp knocks on her door in the night. When Ashbridge opens the door, the woman tells her to return to God so that “thy lamp shall not be put out in obscurity” (from Ashbridge, section 13). In light of Ashbridge’s recent ordeal in which she pleaded to God, the woman may be seen as a projection of her own desires to return to religion in order to face the horrors of her waking life. However, Scheick says the woman is an inversion of a specific portrayal of Christ (103–04).

⁹ Zuckerman argues that her plea to her master for him to whip her himself is actually a challenge for him to display his manhood, preventing him from pawning the job off on the whipper: “She might have to bow before her master’s power, but she was utterly unwilling to bow before his moral authority or his superior social standing. She ‘fixed her eyes on the barbarous man’ and ‘demanded’ that, if he thought she ‘deserve[d] such punishment,’ he ‘do it [him]self.’ Rather than being awed or abashed by him, she challenged him to display a modicum of manhood by assuming responsibility for her humiliation rather than fobbing it off on another. Her master dismissed the whipper, and she ‘came off without a blow’” (247). This assertion disregards the source of Ashbridge’s courage, her prayer immediately beforehand. Thus Zuckerman does not acknowledge the source of Ashbridge’s agency to reject these patriarchal forces, even before her conversion to Quakerism.

¹⁰ Michael G. Ditmore interprets Ashbridge’s revelation before she attempts suicide shortly after the whipping incident in terms of her future identity as a Quaker: “Although she kept it to herself, this revelatory experience was the first of several she was to experience before her final entrance to the Quaker movement” (25).

¹¹ As a part of her desire to return to God, she decides she must also find a way to love Sullivan, so she consults the Bible for advice on how to do so. Although she finds that this helps, it marks the start of the trend of her obedience to God in place of obedience to Sullivan. Although at this stage this simply means keeping harmony with her husband, it establishes a pattern of action that she sustains for the rest of their marriage.

¹² The vision serves as a similar function to a dream she has soon after challenging her indentured master to whip her. Both serve as manifestations of her unconscious dissatisfaction with her current state of religious affiliation, creating a dramatic irony for the reader who already knows she will become a Quaker minister. In the vision and the dream, her underlying desire to return to religion is challenged by self-doubt that affects her to depression soon afterward.

¹³ Roxanne Harde notes that Samuel Crisp was the author of these letters; although Ashbridge does not name the author of the letters, the authority of Harde is confirmed by the content of Crisp’s letters (160).

¹⁴ However, before Ashbridge tells anyone about her change of heart, she begins to experience external pressures when the neighbors notice her going to meetings. To deter their reproach she buys expensive clothes, which jeopardizes her acceptance into the Quaker community. However, only once Sullivan comes to visit her does she attest that her faith is on trial. At the surface, Ashbridge would not have announced her newfound faith as a Quaker until she was in the safety of the community due to the fact that Quakers were often persecuted by other communities, and Quaker women were often persecuted as witches (Levenduski, Peculiar Power 32).

¹⁵ In line with this, Crisp also describes how free he feels from the “bondage” of his past occupation as a chaplain (22).

¹⁶ Levenduski argues that this was in fact a paternalistic effort to humiliate her into recanting her Quaker faith, in order to prevent her from worse fates (Peculiar Power 38). Interestingly, while Myles asserts that Dyer’s husband pleaded for her release from prison (9), I note that Sullivan on the other hand persecutes Ashbridge to prevent her from becoming Quaker: an abusive logic in which he attempts to save her from worse persecution at the hands of others.

¹⁷ Myles explains, “Agency is a complex issue in women’s religious radicalism, since Dyer, like other female prophets, would have seen herself as acting in God’s will and power. … Yet we still cannot erase the note of vigorous intentionality in Dyer’s engagement with Puritan authorities, both in recorded speech such as that [which appears in the final letter Dyer wrote while imprisoned before her execution] and in the unrelenting behavior that confounded her friends and judges alike. Even as she (or her chroniclers) frames her behavior in terms of submission to God’s will, her active verbs emphasize that she is voluntarily, joyfully walking into her fate, not being ‘done to’ in any passive sense…” (8–9). Myles’s note on the complexity of feminine agency byway of subversion to God is crucial to the concept of female martyrdom.

¹⁸ Myles notes the link between Hutchinson and Dyer in terms of their own persecutions by the public, heightened within the frame of Quaker rhetoric: “Like Hutchinson, whose parrying exchanges with magistrates and ministers are echoed here, Dyer refuses to allow her interrogators to rest secure in their construction of her meaning. Paradoxically, her death does not imply a loss of discursive control in which her meanings can be taken over by others; rather, in the Quaker context within which her responses are intended to signify, death seals with martyrdom the spiritual authority of her words” (10).

¹⁹ Here I paraphrase Madden’s description of this display of public nudity, which she terms as “an individual’s spiritual nakedness before God” (175). Madden asserts that Ashbridge’s “flamboyance” with her own body is an attempt to draw attention to herself, whereas I would like to distinguish “flamboyance” from resistance—although both are metaphorical, Madden’s implies more artifice on Ashbridge’s part than I feel is necessary, authorized, or pertinent to my argument. The subsequent metaphor derived from Ashbridge’s performance/display is completely my own.

²⁰ Whereas I categorize this scene as a display of martyrdom, Zuckerman portrays it as a victory for Ashbridge: “By ‘refusing to dance,’ she had won. By offering obedience to God and God alone, she had prevailed over the demands of matrimony and the prejudices of the public” (249). I point out that this is another instance in which Zuckerman hyperbolizes Ashbridge’s success, as he does in his interpretation of Ashbridge’s interaction with her master when he orders her to be whipped. I disagree with Zuckerman here because after the tavern scene Ashbridge still hides her faith from neighbors while living in Freehold, meaning she does not triumph over “public prejudices.” Also she does not feel she has “won” until Sullivan dies, nor does she ever term it as a winning or losing situation; instead she feels constantly persecuted for her “duty” to God, being Quaker, by the outside world, including Sullivan, until she enters into the Quaker community because at that point she has a kind of solidarity in that others subscribe to the force that Sullivan opposes.

²¹ While asserting that Ashbridge’s disobedience to Sullivan is inspired by the lessons her mother taught her as a child, Schofield conveniently overlooks that Ashbridge’s mother serves as a model of passivity, and that the lessons she conferred onto young Ashbridge did emphasize piety, but by way of feminine virtue that Ashbridge violates, as I point out (73).

²² Eventually, Sullivan consents that she is right to be a minister and that the Quaker faith seems to be the correct one for both of them, but admits that he could never bear the reproach she has and thus cannot convert himself: “I cannot bear the reproach thou dost, to be called turn-coat, and become a laughing-stock to the world; but I’ll no longer hinder thee” (from section 42). Applying the same logic from Ashbridge’s initial use of the “thee” form, Sullivan’s use of it here evidences a speech act that he too identifies himself privately as a Quaker. From that point forward, his struggle parallels Ashbridge’s earlier strife in seeking out her true religion, only his is marked by drinking and gambling instead of the depression into which she lapses.

²³ Schofield asserts that Ashbridge’s narrative itself may count as evidence of Ashbridge rising to the position of public speaker: “When these homey whispers, the murmurs of the private self, are placed beside the more vocal, public utterings, religious in tone, the Quaker feminine voice is born” (67).