What’s a 21st Century Feminist To Do?
By Emily Sullivan, English PhD student and DITI Assistant Director
Introduction
I began reading Hannah Webster Foster’s (1798) The Boarding School; Lessons of a Preceptress to Her Pupils with every intention of analytically chopping it for parts. During my first weekly encoding meeting with the Women Writers Project (WWP), newcomers were tasked with claiming an unencoded text, and Foster’s The Boarding School was perpetually pitched down the line, as the group shared a sentiment of distaste for the inevitable eye rolls and frustrated sighs that would ensue while close reading this 18th century hybrid conduct manual and epistolary novel (Piggush, 2019). With the potential for deformance, subversion, remixing and the like bubbling in my brain, I signed up for this 252-paged text, excited to wield its oppressive social attitudes about gender against its original purpose.
As its title suggests, the novel revolves around schooling. In the time that Foster was writing, debates were hotly waged regarding whether women can or should be educated—and if so, exactly how (Jarenski, 2004; Pettengill, 1992; Piggush, 2019). The Boarding School contributed to this discourse by presenting education dually as “a virtue and a vice,” where too much of the “wrong” kind of education can lead to promiscuity and ruin, a lesson that we learn repeatedly throughout the first part of the novel, when the readers are aligned with the schoolgoing girls, all of us beholden to Mrs. Williams’s lectures (Jarenski, 2004, p. 60; Piggush, 2019). Conversely, the “right” amount of the proper sort of education will lead to a network of lovely ladies, exemplified in the second part of the novel, which comprises letters exchanged by all of the women who graduated from Harmony-Grove (Jarenski, 2004, p. 65; Pettengill, 1992). Interestingly, there is very little scholarship on The Boarding School, especially contrasted to Foster’s much more popular 1797 work, The Coquette—an epistolary novel about a scandalous woman and her illegitimate child—which has sustained steady scholarly engagement.
So, what’s a 21st century feminist to do with a text like this? When I first started encoding the text, I had gloriously devious plans: I was going to extract all of the negative qualities attributed to femininity in the novel and display them in some subversive visual, planning to call upon theories of glitch feminism (Liao, 2024; Russell, 2020) and creative methods like collaging (Butler-Kisber & Poldma, 2010; de Rijke, 2024) to (re)present those that Foster (and the 18th century writ large) deemed as “bad” women. And in some ways, I got what I wanted: the entire first part of the novel is filled with contraire parables of girl-gone-wrong, a ripe textual ground for my methodical feminist plucking.
For example, take Juliana: “She had a brilliant fancy, and a fondneſs for books, which properly directed, might have proved of great uſe to her” (Foster, p. 19); and so, the only daughter of a wealthy merchant, “ſhe indulged herſelf in the unlimited reading of novels, and every light publication which a circulating library could furniſh. Hence her imagination took wing, and carried her far above the ſcenes of common life” (Foster, p. 19). Juliana’s obsession with books gave her such a sense of whimsy that ordinary life was no longer interesting to her, and indeed, neither were ordinary men: “The ſwain, who would not die for her, ſhe deemed unworthy of notice” (Foster, p. 19). Of course, though, against the good sense of her father, she fell into the arms of a “worthless man” who wasted away their fortune, her father died ashamed of his “undutiful and ruined daughter,” and Juliana’s story ends with her as the “the emblem of wretchedneſs and ſloth” (Foster, pp. 22-23). And what’s the lesson that we learn from Juliana? According to Mrs. Williams, “let your reading of every deſcription be regular and methodical. Never confuſe your minds by a variety of ſubjects at once,” and though you should “seldom” read for “mere amuſement,” if you do, “be careful not to corrupt and vitiate your taſte by frothy and illiberal performances, which will degrade the dignity and ſully the purity of your minds” (Foster, p. 26). Don’t read, girls!
In haunting ways, “this era’s contradictory ideologies of womanhood” and “the culture’s anxious concern with inscribing ‘woman’s place’ during a period of great uncertainty” strike me as urgent in our current sociopolitical landscape (Pettengill, 1992, p. 185). Yet, the more that I read (for I did not heed the warning of the wretched Juliana), the more I started to feel like my original vision for this project would be partial—incomplete. Yes, The Boarding School is guilty of all the things: patriarchal standards and logics, oppressive norms and gendered social structures, harmful depictions of villainizing autonomy in women, etc.; and at the same time, it passes the Bechdel Test with flying colors. The cast of characters is entirely female; men are rarely named, and when they are, it is in the context of women’s dialogue or quoting literary source material (sometimes praising, sometimes critiquing), the men rarely appearing as direct speakers. As one scholar put it, “in The Boarding School, the male world is shadowy and vague” (Pettengill, 1992, p. 188). Fierce friendship and sisterhood is arguably presented as the most prized of relationships. The structure of the story is intrinsically matriarchal, with Mrs. Williams operating in myriad ways as a Jesus-like figure to her pupils, preparing them to go out to the world and spread their good news (an analytic bunny trail I was very tempted to go down, but ultimately, deemed it out of scope for this project).
And so, I had approached the text with my own prescriptive attitude, preconceived notions teed for confirmation, entirely disregarding the novel’s potential for feminist scholarship apart from that which I planned to impose. Humbled by this reflection, I realized I needed to adjust my methodological and analytical approach, to embrace the opportunity for plurality in feminisms. I was operating on an “either/or” binary with a feminist-savior slant, my original research question being something like, how can I bring feminism into a text that doesn’t want it, that ideologically works against its goals? How can I repair the portrait of the women presented?
My revised research question is twofold: first, how are women being and doing in The Boarding School? Second, how does process influence method? In other words, how does the process, pace, and affect involved in encoding a text using TEI influence my analytic approach to text analysis?
Methods & Results: Text Analysis
The choice to encode the text using TEI (as opposed to a simpler method that would still produce a plain text file capable of text analysis) coincided with my own goals for learning the encoding language in the context of my graduate education. And, indeed, TEI felt like the perfect method for this project, as my learning blossomed within a network of supportive women: first, with a professor who donated her time to teach a few colleagues and I over multiple Zoom sessions; then, with those same colleagues and I continuing to meet together for encoding practice; and finally, with my joining the Women Writers Project, where TEI is used to bring attention to, make accessible, and elevate women’s literature.
The entire process of encoding The Boarding School took me almost an entire academic year, devoting around 5-10 hours per week to the project; for the first semester, all of this time was spent training and learning, both TEI as an encoding language and the specific WWP documentation and processes. The second semester comprised the actual encoding, working in longer and more efficient chunks as the encoding combinations became more internalized; for example, every page was always initiated by the idealized signature mark (<milestone unit="sig" n="K3v"/>), as well as the numerical page number (<mw type="pageNum" rend="align(right)">114</mw>). Like the characters in The Boarding School, the first task was to learn, and the second was to put that learning to practice. Encoding the text by hand also meant that I had to read it closely, so that by the end, I had grown deeply familiar with the text as a piece of literature, in addition to producing an XML file with all kinds of helpful tags, categorizing person from place names, renditionally distinct phrases, signature marks and page numbers, etc.
After my text was complete, I decided to use Voyant, a free web-based platform where you can upload one or more files to perform computational text analysis. In addition to leveraging the Digital Integration Teaching Initiative‘s teaching resources on the tool, Voyant is generally considered fairly user-friendly, offering a wide variety of textual, graphical, and visual analytic functions with no installation or log in required. This is now my second project to involve “distant reading,” or computational text analysis of either a single, long text or a thematically compiled corpus, and I have continued to find that the text analysis portion is so much richer when you also have that intimate familiarity with the text itself.
I uploaded three files to Voyant to analyze separately, since I had distinct goals for each: first, an XML file containing only the first part of the novel (the chapters); second, an XML file containing only the second part of the novel (the letters); and finally, the XML file containing the entire text. Accordingly, I had to create a custom list of stop words, some of which targeted the TEI-specific language that I wanted to filter out (like <persName>, <milestone> and <div>), and some to address words used commonly in the text that don’t convey as much meaning for distant reading (like “miſs” or “dear,” “ſome” and “ſuch”). After this, all that was left was to upload my files and experiment with Voyant’s varied features.
Part I: Chapters
I wanted to begin by analyzing the chapters and the letters separately, since they mark such thematically distinctive sections, with the hope that my final analysis of the entire text would be more contextualized after better understanding the particular nuances of the two parts. To get a sense for the section holistically, I engaged Voyant’s “Bubbles” visualization, which displays the relative frequency of terms across the document (Figure 1).
The bigger and darker-rimmed bubbles signify the most used words, and the bubbles decrease in size and hue in relation to their frequency (an order mirrored by the list on the right hand side of the visualization, where the most frequently used words are the biggest on the top of the list, and the words decrease in size as the list goes on).
Unsurprisingly, some of the most used terms in the Harmony-Grove portion of the novel are “mind,” “life,” “ſhould,” “muſt,” “love,” and “good,” signalling the ethos of the book: teaching young ladies how they should conduct themselves, what they must do to hone their minds and to have a good life. The next frequency level of terms adds some contextual granularity to this exhortative language, with “parents,” “pleaſure,” “virtue,” “time,” “friends,” “conduct,” “man,” “heart,” and “happineſs.”
As I mentioned, though, the Harmony-Grove portion of the novel is just as concerned with how women should not behave as it is with the positive ideals exemplified by the above word frequency visualization. As I encoded, I kept track of the names of women invoked by the preceptress, Mrs. Williams, in each of her parables of lady-hood—most of which taught by negative example, or don’t-be-like-her pedagogy. Each time I came across one of these names, I added it to a log, so that when it came time to do the text analysis, I could input each using the “Links” visualization feature to determine which words were most frequently linked with those names.
By inputting each of their names as keywords, I used the “Links” feature to create a network graph that displays the relationships between keywords (in blue) and their collocates (in orange), or the words that appear in close proximity to those keywords. I did two visualizations, one including the names of the girls/women who were invoked as positive examples (Figure 2), and one for the names of the girls/women who were cautioned against as negative examples (Figure 3).
Interestingly, by comparing these visuals, I discovered that there were two words that both the exemplar women and the contraire women had in common: “educated” and “ruin”/”ruined.” This commonality gestures to the tensions of the time, where education could be wielded as either a weapon in/by women or as their saving grace. I have thematically categorized the collocate terms that stood out as meaningfully connected to the women’s names across three domains, displayed in the table below: states of being, actions, and roles.
There are evident value differences across all three domains when comparing the exemplar to the contraire, reinforcing the novel’s “fastidious separation of virtuous characters from fallen ones” (Pettengill, 1992, p.192). The contraire have more negatively associated states of being (compare “miserable” and “wretched” to the exemplar’s “generous” and “striking”), but they are also afforded more variety and complexity. Where the exemplar women are beautiful but “pained,” the contraire women are endowed, ambitious, terrified, confident, and prideful. Similarly, the actions associated with the exemplar women are expectantly tame, honoring the virtues of a proper lady: “invitation,” “reason,” “thanked,” “elegantly,” “unverisally” (often used in combination with positive adjectives, such as “regarded,” “respected,” etc.) and “tarried.” In contrast, the contraire women’s actions are dynamic, each one in tension with its predecessor: “taught,” “hastily,” “attacked,” “soothed,” “wishing,” “smile,” “resented,” “thought,” “sacrificed.” Similarly, the exemplar women are associated with more community engaged roles that would be expected of them culturally, including “household” and “schools” and “pupils,” whereas the contraire women are associated with “friend” (which, from my reading, usually involved the loss of friendship) and “connexion” (similarly, a potential suitor, who is always lost by the end of the story). And yet, both the exemplar and the contraire have “mother” in common.
Part II: Letters
I then performed another “Bubbles” analysis on the XML file containing only the second portion of the novel, or the sequence of letters exchanged between the girls who graduated from Harmony-Grove and, occasionally, their preceptress, Mrs. Williams (Figure 4). The term frequencies of the letters mirror those of chapters (Figure 1), with “must,” “should,” “mind,” “life” “time” and “good” as the most frequently appearing words, and “she” as the highest occurring word, denoting that in many of the letters, the women are talking about each other. The second tier of word frequency gestures to the women’s application of their education to the reflection on their daily living and their role in society, shown by: “taste,” “should,” “sex,” “shall,” “friend,” “Williams,” “think,” “pleasure,” “love,” and “myself.” In contrast to the contraire girls of Mrs. Williams’s parables (Figure 3), the ladies of Harmony-Grove have evidently experienced education as a virtue and not a vice.
Finally, I uploaded the XML file containing the entire text to Voyant and completed a “Constellations” visualization, which combines word frequency with term collocates in a web-like graph (Figure 5).
Upper left: “Think,” “wit,” “Matilda,” “shall,” “letters,” “conversation,” “good”
Upper center: “Harmony,” “charms,” “beauty,” “far,” “society,” “little,” “just,” “company,” “superior,” “opinion,” “world,” “sex,” “ideas,” “taste”
Right side: “Love,” “ought,” “themselves,” “whose,” “heart,” “happiness,” “thought,” “best,” “man,” “youth,” “still,” “wish,” “life,” “sense,” “friends,” “merit,” “pleasure,” “mind,” “same,” “friendship,” “power,” “parents,” “affection,” “first,” “family,” “conduct,” “herself,” “friend”
Center group: “Appearance,” “female,” “should,” “education,” “great,” “happy,” “eye,” “important,” “minds,” “vanity,” “disposition,” “told”
Center line: “Render,” “honor,” “peace,” “person,” “character,” “virtue,” “reason,” “against”
Left side: “Want,” “hand,” “return,” “knowledge,” “kind,” “received,” “must,” “necessary,” “nature,” “Williams,” “myself,” “useful,” “day,” “reading,” “read,” “time,” “ladies,” “young,” “attention,” “father,” “lady,” “subject,” “less”
The thematic groups gleaned by this constellations visualization are unsurprisingly focused on what it is to be a proper lady based on a set of prescribed ideals, and in that regard, evoke the oppressive and gendered limitations on ways of being for women in the eighteenth century. And, at the same time, it is the women themselves that set, negotiate, and account for these ideals—together—in The Boarding School.
Discussion: The Both/And
In The Boarding School, women are obedient and disobedient. They speak, they think, they write, both to each other and their own creative works. Some of the women overcome pain through purity, and others succumb to “wretchedness.” The women form a close-knit network of friendship and support; and they wield those connections against those that do not assimilate to similar notions of propriety. And so, my first research question does not have a neat answer: the women of The Boarding School are being and doing variably. In addition to the structure of community afforded by the school setting, the epistolary portion of the novel reveals a network of connection, where the letters “do more than express private affection. They connect a series of American households in a female institution, a reading circle, the function of which is to maintain the highly integrated thoughts, conversations, poems, letters, novels and other books, reading not only written works but incidents and people in their lives” (Pettengill, 1992, pp. 191).
And, as the letters form these connections, they also constitute a kind of performance, where the writer must always imagine themselves at the “censure of the critic” (Foster, p. 151) and “observe the rules of decorum” (Piggush, 2019, p. 58). In one of Mrs. Williams’s parables, for example, Celia and Cecilia exchange letters in which they are entirely unfiltered, and “write with unlimited confidence without the least reserve” (Foster, p. 151); their “thoughtless folly” is punished when one of their suitors finds the letters and publicly shames the pair, and the Harmony-Grove girls learn that even in “their imaginary, private world[s],” they must maintain strict self-governance that “enables them to participate in the forms of polite, rational discourse that constitute society” (Piggush, 2019, p. 58). And to be sure, in the second part of the novel, the “schoolgirls demonstrate their capacity for self-government when they leave Mrs. Williams’s supervision and continue to practice polite wit in their homes and among their friends” (Piggush, 2019, p. 60).
But does operating within the confines of oppressive social customs negate the potential for autonomy and/or subversion? According to at least one scholar, as the girls of The Boarding School fall in line, they also leverage the tools they are afforded—namely, “polite wit”—for social gain, “civic engagement,” and to “shape public opinion” (Piggush, 2019, pp. 48-49). Wit could be used as a shield to ward off unwanted suitors without causing offense, and it could also be the ironic vehicle through which the schoolgirls “make fun of men,” even as they are “conforming to the social norms of enlightening conversation that enable republican self-government” (Piggush, 2019, p. 71). The looming preceptress, in all her moral high ground and authoritative glory, is also multifaceted. Instead of leading by fear, intimidation, and shaming, Mrs. Williams would “enter into her pupil’s emotions to understand them,” having a period each day where her authority is suspended so that she can just be with them: “By participating in the pleasures of young women (and by refraining from public correction, saving her criticisms for later, private dialogue), Mrs. Williams demonstrates the terms of her authority in a world of separate spheres. She is a ‘sister’ as well as a mother, a friend as well as a teacher” (Pettengill, 1992, p. 190).
At the start of this project, I was much too hasty to throw the ladies out with the 18th-century bathwater. And so, to address my second research question, process, methodology, and scholarly product should be recursive—the slow pace of encoding, the affect involved in close reading, and the dialogic nature of scholarly research continuously folded in on each other, altering my goals and refining my methods as I proceeded. By The Boarding School, I am reminded that to deal only in absolutes is a patriarchal paradigm; instead, I shall continue to wade in the grey, the mushy, and the both/and of plural feminisms, 18th-century and otherwise.
And the most important lesson we can learn from The Boarding School? We should bring back the long-s.
Limitations.
There are many limitations to this project. Beginning with the technical component, my choice to encode the text using TEI was more relevant to my own scholarly goals and my affective experience with the text—and contributing another novel to the WWP’s stores—rather than serving the computational text analysis process in substantive ways. There are many ways that text analysis can be enhanced by leveraging the specificity of an XML file, whereas the type of text analysis I did could have been accomplished with a simple plain text/“txt” file; and indeed, I ended up adding all of the TEI-specific terms to my stop words list. Similarly, my engagement with Voyant was not particularly robust; the visualization features I engaged complemented my close reading and gleaned useful insights from a distanced viewpoint but, were I to extend this project, could be much richer by comparing and contrasting more of the analytic tools available in Voyant, for example, by diving deeper into the links between the women’s names and their term collocates.
There are also several limitations to my analytic focus in this project. While I touched on some of the broadly scoped gendered and social issues of the age, I merely scratched the surface; and I did not engage topics of race or class at all, which are unequivocally entangled and urgently linked to nearly every aspect of the novel, its impact, its context, and its arguments. Similarly, I did not address the interrelatedness between Foster’s contemporaries and their respective works, or the wider context of the feminist movement(s), its contributors, and/or its development, etc. There are also many themes in the novel relevant to feminist scholarship that merit closer rhetorical attention, like topics of appearance and embodiment and their connections to power and relationships.
Sources
Butler-Kisber, L., & Poldma, T. (2010). The power of visual approaches in qualitative inquiry: The use of collage making and concept mapping in experiential research. Journal of Research Practice, 6(2), 1–16.
de Rijke, Victoria. “The and article: Collage as research method.” Qualitative Inquiry 30.3-4 (2024): 301-310.
Foster, Hannah Webster. The boarding school; or, Lessons of a preceptress to her pupils: consisting of information, instruction, and advice, calculated to improve the manners, and form the character of young ladies. To which is added, a collection of letters, written by the pupils, to their instructor, their friends, and each other. By a lady of Massachusetts; author of The coquette.; Published according to act of Congress. By I. Thomas and E.T. Andrews. Sold by them, by C. Bingham, and the other booksellers in Boston; By I. Thomas, Worcester; by Thomas, Andrews & Penniman, Albany; and by Thomas, Andrews & Butler, Baltimore, 1798. Eighteenth Century Collections Online, link.gale.com/apps/doc/CB0129365471/ECCO?u=mlin_b_northest&sid=bookmark-ECCO&xid=ca27e2ab&pg=1.
Jarenski, Shelly. “The voice of the preceptress: Female education in and as the seduction novel.” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 37.1 (2004): 59-68.
Liao, Christine. “My avatar’s avatars: A visual exploration and response to AI-generated avatars.” Visual Culture & Gender 19 (2024): 11-23.
Pettengill, Claire C. “Sisterhood in a Separate Sphere: Female Friendship in Hannah Webster Foster’s ‘The Coquette and the Boarding School.’” Early American Literature [Amherst, Mass], vol. 27, no. 3, January 1992, pp. 185–203.
Piggush, Yvette R. ““A Very Dangerous Talent”: Wit for Women in Hannah Webster Foster’s The Boarding School.” The New England Quarterly 92.1 (2019): 46-74.
Russell, Legacy. Glitch feminism: A manifesto. Verso Books, 2020.