A Midwife's Tale is a beautiful story about a woman's agency in a society where women were assumed to have little or no agency. Moreover, it seems to have all the proper ingredients of what we've learned may be a classic microhistory: a social history that conveys personal experience as a lens for larger issues. One of the larger issues in this book involves the important role of women, and there was no more telling fact of that issue than the description of Dr. Daniel Cony's medical practice. Cony was a prominent doctor who is historically remembered for his paper on one delivery he made, whereas his fellow Hallowell resident Martha Ballard went unrecognized for almost 200 years after her many hundreds of deliveries. Additionally the story of Martha Ballard has been available at least since the beginning of the age of professional historians, but because it was about women's "trivia," no one discerned its importance until A Midwife's Tale was published in 1990.
It is interesting to contrast the way Laurel Thatcher Ulrich deals with unknown facts compared to Natalie Zemon Davis. Ulrich makes comments such as "one wonders if Cyrus was impaired in some way, though his mother never wrote of it in her diary" (he was unmarried and moved in and out of his parent's house, perhaps more of a twenty-first century trend). Or, in speaking of Joseph's North's acquittal of rape, Ulrich writes that Ballard's "reference to 'the great surprise' suggests that the evidence against North had been damning." While Ulrich uses words like "one wonders" and "suggests," Davis, as we have seen, writes her history of Martine Guerre with far more emphatic language. Davis wrote in her rebuttal to Robert Findley's criticism that she was seeking "possible truth" as opposed to Findley's demand for "absolute truth." However, it seems that Ulrich's gentler approach to seeking "possible truth" allows readers more latitude to assess the connections between facts and suppositions for themselves.
Speaking of Martin Guerre, on the front page of yesterday's Washington Post (Friday), there as a sad story of a woman who called the police about her ex-husband, who she saw in a Maryland Panera Bread restaurant. The encounter with the police ended in the deaths of two policemen. An interesting aside to the story was that the woman, who had not seen her ex-husband for 17 years, was not certain that it was him when she first saw him last December. She told the police later that he seemed too short. Even though he was wanted for shooting at her 17 years ago, and she had been married to him long enough to have had several children, she could not identify him the first time and did not call the police until she saw him again last Thursday.
John, I like your contrast of Ulrich's and Davis' methods of addressing uncertainty in their writing. I wonder if some of this stems from an expectation that more facts would be available for a story from the late 18th century than one could find for a case 200 years earlier. Regardless, it is clear that historical speculation is a part of historical writing, and each author has to decide how to incorporate it.
ReplyDeleteI appreciate your interesting corollary between Martin Guerre and current events. I had not noticed that connection.