Anglia 2020; 138(3): 428–448
Katrin Horn* Of Gaps and Gossip: Intimacy in the Archive https://doi.org/10.1515/ang-2020-0037
Abstract: Arguing for gossip’s relevance in the archive, this article examines the surviving private material relating to Charlotte Cushman (1816–1876). Cushman was the most celebrated American actress of the nineteenth century yet spent most of her life in an expatriate community in Rome, where she shared her home with other female artists. Analysing letters, diaries, and related forms of life writ- ing by Cushman herself as well as by friends and family, this article pursues two goals: First, it accounts for how a fear of gossip (by Cushman and her family) might have shaped the gaps in the collection concerning Cushman’s sexual and romantic relationships. Second, it makes the case for the archival traces of gossip as evidence in writing the story of Cushman’s intimate life. The article thus re- flects on the role of gossip and privacy in “intimate archives” (Dever et al. 2010) and contemplates their relevance to Cushman as an insightful case study of LGBTQ history. Overall, this article advocates turning to the archive with a re- newed fervour for evidence of intimacy as well as for turning to intimacy for evi- dence.
Introduction
“Gossip thrives when the facts are uncertain, neither publicly known nor easily discovered” (Merry 1984: 275). As a source of knowledge, gossip thus runs counter to an “archival field [that] historically has had a central preoccupation with the actual and the tangible” (Cifor/Gilliland 2016: 2). What about situations, however, in which there is no actual and tangible archival evidence? Researchers regularly must contend with fragmentary records, whether the gaps are caused by a loss of
documents over time, are inherent in the material (e. g. letters), or result from self- censorship by the author. Such issues are often exacerbated when the research focuses on private matters due to “the invisibility that often surrounds intimate life”,as“sex and feelings are too personal or too ephemeral to leave records” (Cvetkovich 2002: 110, 112). Yet what they leave, are traces of gossip.
Corresponding author: Katrin Horn, Universität Bayreuth E-Mail: [email protected] Of Gaps and Gossip: Intimacy in the Archive 429
Gossip’s connection to intimate life goes beyond its often-private subject mat- ter. Intimate matters encompass not only “what is closely held and personal”, but also “what is deeply shared with others” (Yousef 2013: 1). Such wavering between secrecy and disclosure also marks gossip. Furthermore, its content, according to historian Louise White, is usually “secondary to the process of creating bonds and boundaries” (1994: 76). Such close bonds among people in turn create the “kind of code not easily penetrable or comprehensible to those outside its boundaries”, as Susan Wahl argues (1999: 1). Gossip, in that sense, emerges as a prime example of what Wahl calls a “language of intimacy” (1999: 1). While rumours can be dis- seminated anonymously, gossip is always personal: an “intimate, usually collec- tive narrative” (Adkins 2002: 216) that relies on close personal ties between all involved. It can become a useful “agent of preservation” (Spacks 1985: 77) for the intimate life of self and others, as its traces spread across multiple sites of preser- vation in diaries, letters, and other forms of life writing, where they invite less censure than confessional ego-documents. This article makes the case for gossip’s relevance in the archive, especially concerning the archive as a source for the history of intimate matters and for LGBTQ histories, and it will do so by examining Charlotte Cushman’s legacy of private materials. Cushman (1816–1876) was the most celebrated American ac- tress of the nineteenth century, yet she spent most of her life in an expatriate community in Rome, where she shared her home with other female artists. The Library of Congress holds the largest collection of Cushman’s private material, 23 containers (two of them oversize) in total, which include hundreds of letters to and from Cushman, complemented by a collection of newspaper clippings (pre- pared, at least partially, by Cushman herself) and other ephemera from friends, lovers, and family.1 By analysing what has been preserved at the Library of Con- gress and comparing it with records of friends and acquaintances held at other archives, I pursue two primary goals. I will first account for how a fear of gossip (by Cushman and her family) might have shaped the gaps in the collection con- cerning Cushman’s sexual and romantic relationships. This fear expresses itself not only in self-censorship in different forms of life writing, but it also influences when and how such private writing enters the public arena of biography and in- stitutionalised archives. Second, I consider the archival traces of gossip as evi- dence in writing the story of Cushman’s intimate life. To this end, I study the ways in which gossip and considerations of privacy influence “intimate archives” (Dever et al. 2010), contemplating in particular their relevance to Cushman as a
1 Charlotte Cushman Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, abbreviated as CCP for citations in this article. 430 Katrin Horn crucial case study for writing LGBTQ history. Specifically in this context – wrought as it is with silences, power imbalances, open secrets, and refusals of public recognition –, gossip attains its full potential as both a form of social control and as a discourse that escapes it.
“Public Opinion, That Omnipotent Engine Before Which We All Must Bow”
Charlotte Cushman’s career spanned several decades, with early success as an opera singer in the USA, her breakthrough as a Shakespearean actress in England in 1844, and continuous tours and reading engagements that lasted until her death in 1876. Contemporary accounts relied on superlatives to describe her as “the great tragedienne of the age” (“Charlotte Cushman As She Was” 1851: 38), “the grandest actress on [the English stage]” (Greenwood 1871: n. pag.), or “great- est American dramatic artist” (“Charlotte Cushman” 1874: 742). In his analysis of the replication of power imbalances in archival collections, Rodney Carter stresses that “marginal voices” often do not enter into collections of libraries, universities, and other institutions of knowledge preservation (2006: 219). Precisely for this reason, Cushman is such a highly insightful case study for the role of gossip in the archive. As an actress and as a woman with exclusively same-sex relationships, her reputation as a reputable woman and member of so- ciety was doubly at risk at a time when Americans became increasingly invested in respectability (Kasson 1990: 43). Actresses in general were emblematic of the perceived dangers of women’s participation in the public sphere and thus even more so than male actors associated with what was perceived as “the theatre’s allure and its weakness: its intimate but dependent relationship with its audi- ence” (Kobetts Miller 2019: 1). Cushman defied gendered expectations of hetero- sexual marriage, secluded domesticity, and biological motherhood – and yet, due to her status as a celebrity, her life was deemed worthy of attention and, later, archival preservation. As historian Victoria Harris reminds us, margins are not only “that space just on the ‘bad’ side of the divide between normality and de- viance”, but also “the space just on the ‘good’ side as well”. In Harris’s terms, Cushman could be categorised as “‘marginally’ normal” (2010: 1099). Her finan- cial advantages and social networks place her in close proximity to ‘the centre’, where the management of reputation becomes a crucial method in her efforts to straddle the line between deviance and conformity. Cushman was keen to share enough of her private life to keep the public engaged, but not so much as to threat- en her reputation as a respectable artist and model American. Defined as the Of Gaps and Gossip: Intimacy in the Archive 431
“social information about the value of people” (Origgi 2019: 68), reputation for Cushman was a deeply economic concern – a situation exacerbated by the growth in syndicated celebrity gossip and pieces of ‘foreign news’ that characterise the changing newspaper landscape in the second half of the nineteenth century, when Cushman was at the height of her international fame.2 On 12 September 1860, for example, Charlotte Cushman implores Emma Crow3 to inquire at the post office about a seemingly lost love letter and reminds the younger woman of the importance of its recovery: “I don’t like such dear let- ters addressed to me to be lost or be sent to the dead letter office. If any ‘unscru- pulous person or persons’ should find it my reputation might be lost forever – and only think how fearful that would be” (CCP 1: 186).4 This is only one of many instances illustrating that Cushman “kept scrupulous records of the letters she wrote and received” (Merrill 2000: 218) in order to stay in control of any and all information shared by and with her that might become fodder for gossip beyond her immediate circle of friends and family. As early as 1836, an acquaintance of Cushman’s who wrote theatre reviews for the New Yorker alerted her to the power of “public opinion, that omnipotent engine before which we all must bow” (CCP 11: 3310 verso). Cushman bowed not only herself, but made others bow, too: “Dar- ling mine, I wish you would burn my letters”, she implored Emma Crow on 20 June 1858 (qtd. in Merrill 2000: 212). Taking matters into her own hands, she explained the reticence of her letters, again to Emma Crow, a few years later: “I will avoid all love words or epithets save those which might meet any eye, only putting a blank_ there which she can fill up with anything in the world most sweet and dear, anything which she pleases” (CCP 1: 275 verso, 29 June 1861). These letters and their blanks and gaps are not only of interest to those study- ing the life of Charlotte Cushman. They also offer an important corrective to many earlier studies in LGBTQ history (Lilian Faderman’s most famous among them), which insisted on the widespread acceptance of all forms of ‘romantic friendship’ ’ “ in the U. S. during the nineteenth century. Cushman s letters, in contrast, sug-
2 Ponce de Leon, for example, considers Cushman central to the development of the star system in
U. S. American theatre promotion (2002: 207). 3 Emma Crow (1839–1920) had been in a romantic relationship with Cushman for almost twenty years. In early biographies, such as Joseph Leach’s (1970), she is, however, only mentioned as the wife of Edwin “Ned” Cushman (1838–1909), Cushman’s nephew and adopted son. They married on 3 April 1861, after Cushman had intervened on their behalf with Emma Crow’s father Wayman Crow. Lisa Merrill’s biography (2000) builds to a large degree on the correspondence between Emma Crow and Cushman, as does Martha Vicinus’s chapter on Cushman in Intimate Friends (2004). 4 Digitised versions of all letters cited in this article and their (partial) transcripts can be accessed at archivalgossip.com/collection. 432 Katrin Horn
” gest [ ] a degree of awareness that the nature of her passion was transgressive (Walen 1998: 56). It is thus clear from the surviving archival evidence that the silence surrounding Cushman’s intimate life is at last partially of her own choos- ing rather than the result of the “exclusion of certain dissenting voices and non- conforming records” (Carter 2006: 219). Despite claims in recent publications to the openness with which the star supposedly treated her relationships with wom- en – Robert Baker, for example, describes her as “famous for her performances in Shakespeare and notorious for her open lesbianism” when he refers to her medical history as a cancer patient (2013: 108) –, Cushman’s own words belie such modern ideas of “being out”. They instead frame her private life as intimate in the sense of both secret and “deeply shared” with only a select few – hence, the (literal) blank spaces whenever the risk of breach of confidence arose. Further reactions to the (perceived or expected) criticism of her private life and gender representation can be gauged from her scrapbook of clippings. These include numerous reviews that contain careful additions of date and title of pub- lication. Often, however, they also contain subtractions: Whenever a review in- cludes references to a lack of femininity, these lines are carefully crossed out. Whether Cushman did this in preparation for a memoir or simply for her own memories is now, of course, impossible to tell. In any case, these pencil strokes are further evidence of her chosen ‘blanks’. From an article in the Sunday Times from 16 February 1845, for example, she keeps the following comment: “It is therefore in scenes that require almost masculine energy, or that fierce intensity to which the female passions may be excited under extraordinary circumstances, that Miss Cushman unequalled”. The crossed-out line reads: “But this must be the extent of our praise; she cannot portray woman in her tender and dovelike nature; she paints her not in her moments of gentleness and love, but in the wild storm of destroying passions”. A very different indicator for Cushman’s strategic invest- ment in the potential of public writing to damage her reputation can be found in the same clippings collection. Among the very few clippings collected there, which are not related to her own theatrical career, are articles pertaining to the – Tilton-Beecher trial the most notorious sex scandal in the U. S. in the nineteenth century. The Tilton-Beecher trial filled papers nationwide for several months and had been – as the reports did not tire of stressing – the result of gossip among friends, which had then been relayed to the press.5
5 See Fox (1999) for a highly detailed account of this trial and the alleged affair at its centre. Fox’s use of sources, ranging from letters to court transcripts, also supports my claims about gossip’s perseverance and relevance in written documents. Of Gaps and Gossip: Intimacy in the Archive 433
Seldom found in her own collection, but omnipresent in the newspapers at the time, are articles with little or no reference to her performances yet plenty of public reporting (and speculation) about Cushman’s private life. As a woman who had challenged the separation of realms by stepping onto the stage, Cushman also invited the blurring of boundaries “between the personal and the widely known” (Spacks 1985: 262) inherent to (celebrity) gossip. As gossip “generally contains some element of evaluation or interpretation of the event or person”, however “implicit or unstated” (Merry 1984: 275), the ‘facts’ of Cushman’s life were interpreted in such articles in various ways, many of them troubling for someone dependent on the social value attributed by the public. In 1853, Cushman had temporarily retired from the stage and moved to Rome,
which seemingly only intensified the interest in her in the U. S., where reports about her activities were mixed with reporting about Italy as an exotic place of leisure and artistic achievement.6 A short report in the Daily Evening Star (25 February 1853: 1), supposedly drawing on a “letter from Rome”, for example, “ informs its U. S. American readers that Miss Cushman and five other ladies, in- cluding Grace Greenwood, Miss Hosmer, the young sculptress [...] Miss Vaughn, Miss Hays, &c., are living together like the ‘Happy Family,’ in the Corso”.7 The newspaper gives this article the title “A Nice Party”. An exact reprint three weeks later in the Portsmouth Inquirer (11 March 1853: 1) is titled “A Dangerous Party”, thus re-interpreting the description of this formerly innocuous living arrangement as sinister. Such apprehension about Cushman’s divergence from gendered norms sometimes found its expression even on the very same pages that also raved about her artistic achievements. One article in The Illustrated American News wonders: “How is it that America has no great actor or actress, save and except Charlotte Cushman, and she is among the greatest any where?” (9 August 1851: 78). The next column, however, cites an article from The Cleveland Plain- dealer under the headline “MISS CUSHMAN IN MALE ATTIRE” that describes Cushman’s holiday in Saut in sensational terms, as she “astonished the guests [...] by appearing equipped cap-a-pie, in masculine attire hat coat unmention-
6 Sofer, for example, recounts a letter by writer Augusta Jane Evans that envisions her own trip to Italy during which she would be “chaperoned” by Charlotte Cushman and Harriet Hosmer. Sofer reads this as a reflection of Evans’s “reading of the ‘quality’ periodicals”, through which she – and – “ other young U. S. American women like her gained familiarity with the social customs of the community of expatriate women artists” (2005: 197).
7 Greenwood reported regularly about Cushman during the 1850 s, and the two often feature to- gether in such celebrity gossip. In 1874, however, Cushman calls Greenwood “too rotten to wash” in a letter to Helen Hunt Jackson that leaves open the reason behind her disapproval (Cushman 1874: n. pag.). 434 Katrin Horn ables, and all”. Lest readers think of this merely as a publicity stunt for her breeches roles, the newspaper clarifies: “No, she rode in it, fished, walked, ran and romped in it; and, for aught we can learn, says the Plaindealer, has deter- mined to wear it for the remainder of her days at least of maidenhood”.As“the days of her maidenhood” grew longer, criticism of her appearance grew louder. In 1861, The Hartford Daily Times (7 March: n. pag.) attacks Cushman’s appearance in no uncertain terms in its column “Letter from New York”: “Miss Cushman has succeeded in making herself a celebrated woman, but Nature had a very narrow miss of it in not making her a very ordinary man. She is intensely masculine”. To fill the blanks of her life and to evaluate seemingly incomprehensibly de- cisions (like her continued maidenhood), newspapers employed the rhetoric of intimate access to Cushman. In “The Story of Her Love as Told by Celia Logan”, the Lowell Daily Citizen (14 August 1877: n. pag.) contends, “twice in her life she was ready to sacrifice everything for the man of her heart”. As sources, the paper first cites “a friend, who was cognizant of the circumstances”, and for the second story of unrequited love, it claims direct access to Cushman. She is described as having confided in the reporter that she “would rather be a pretty woman than anything else in this wide, wide world”. The story of Cushman’s broken heart had been a constant in reporting about her ever since Mary Howitt had first relied on it as a justification for Cushman’s dedication to her art rather than to a conventional family in an exhaustive biographical sketch in 1846.8 Biography, especially in the “ U. S. during the nineteenth century, provided models of conduct, depictions of embodied excellence” (Spacks 1984: 48), and thus lent itself particularly well to the efforts to build Cushman’s reputation as a dedicated artist and woman of high moral integrity. Howitt therefore follows the stages of Cushman’s early success, all the while emphasising that Cushman’s eagerness to be successful was largely the result of her devotion to her family, which was increasingly financially depen- dent on her. Hence, she goes to great lengths to provide a plausible narrative to account for the one aspect of Cushman’s public persona most likely to be detri- mental to her reputation, “the subject which has excited some remarks, and as we think needlessly, to Miss Cushman’s disadvantage, – we mean on her taking male parts” (1846: 48). As Howitt explains,
it as a fact, and it is a fact full of generosity and beautiful affection, that it is solely on her sister’s account that she has done so. By taking herself the male character, for which she was
8 Cushman herself had tapped into the public’s interest in supposedly private details of her life, publishing under the guise of private life writing, most importantly with the headline “Extracts
from my Journal”,inGodey’s Lady’s Magazine in 1837. During the 1830 s and 1840 s, Cushman also published songs with highly emotional, pseudo-autobiographical lyrics in various magazines. Of Gaps and Gossip: Intimacy in the Archive 435
in many cases admirably suited, she was enabled to obtain the first female character for her sister; there being, as is well known, no plays written in which two prominent female char- acters, are found. Affection for [her sister] made her willing to give her every support and advantage she could, even where she herself had, as it seemed, to step out of a woman’s province. (1846: 48)
Cushman’s “stepping out of a woman’s province” is framed as the ultimate femi- nine act: female sacrifice for the good of her family. To support this version of Cushman’s life, Howitt makes similar claims as the Lowell Daily Citizen when she states that “The Miss Cushmans” had been “obtained from authentic sources” (1871: 30) – implying her sources (or she herself) were familiar with Cushman. While a fear of gossip guided Cushman’s actions, illusion of gossip-like intimacy guided much of the public writing about her. Lisa Merrill’s extensive research for When Romeo Was a Woman: Charlotte Cushman and Her Circle of Female Spectators, relies on Cushman’s only surviving diary to show that Cushman’s first relationship was most likely not with a man, but with painter Rosalie Sully, to whom she considered herself married (2000: 9). Merrill also illustrates the pleasure both Cushman and her female fans derived from her performances of masculinity on the stage. Howitt’s version of events, however, was as convenient to the public as it was to Cushman herself. Supported with vague references to reporters’ sources among Cushman’s close friends, sto- ries like these were never contested during the actress’s lifetime. Contemporary reviewers continued to comment regularly in less than flattering terms on Cush- man’s masculine appearance. Almost all accounts of her travels and theatrical engagements furthermore mention the women with whom she was sharing her life, such as Matilda Hays, Harriet Hosmer, and Emma Stebbins. By all accounts, Cushman’s private life was thus not a secret per se. Instead, it took the form of that unstable version of known unknown, the open secret, which Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick defines as the fundamental condition of queer existence (1990/2005: 67). When Cushman died on 18 February 1876, newspapers nationwide reported about the funeral arrangements and published emotional obituaries. So success- ful was Cushman in managing her reputation, in leaving blanks, and in curating silences to avoid conflict with “the public, that omnipotent engine”, that – while they varied in detail and focus – most reports agreed that among the most pre- cious things left behind by Cushman was her “splendid name” (“The Drama” 19 February 1876: 2). Seemingly untarnished by gossip either private or printed, the public record at the time of her death left enough unspoken to remember Cushman on ‘the good side’ of the margin between normality and deviance (Har- ris 2010: 1099). 436 Katrin Horn
“Letters and Memories”
Besides the both sympathetic and aggressive ‘unknowing’ of the press and Cush- man’s own strategic silences in the face of gossip, there are myriad other reasons for gaps in the archive of her life. All of her biographers – whether they finished their work, like Emma Stebbins, or abandoned it, like Lyman Beecher Stowe – had to contest with missing or vanishing sources. Lisa Merrill makes this a central point of discussion in the introduction to her Cushman biography:
As I struggle to provide coherence, to understand Charlotte Cushman, I am painfully con- scious of all the artifacts that are missing. [...] For every letter saved, how many others have been destroyed? What is left is fragmentary, partially the result of what lovers and family members who outlived her wanted to preserve, partially the results of her own intentional editing. Both the saving and the discarding were influenced, no doubt, by what Charlotte and her nineteenth-century contemporaries deemed important, significant, remarkable – or embarrassing, painful, or merely unnecessary. (2000: 12)
Maryanne Dever refers to this aggregated loss of material as “the fissured archive” (1996: 119). The problem here is not, as in some of Cushman’s letters, the metaphor- ical gaps in a correspondence edited for safe consumption even by “any eye”, but the physical absence of once-existing evidence. The archive of personal life all too often, as Dever describes it, “resembles a fishing net: the few threads [...] held taut over pockets of nothingness” (1996: 120). No historical research can escape the loss or destruction of records completely, yet for LGBTQ histories, the issue is particu- larly prevalent. Same-sex relationships have left (until very recently) no traces in state records, such as marriage certificates or the birth certificates of children. The writers, whose diaries, letters, and the like would reveal their same-sex desires, often felt it safer to destroy such incriminating records. If material was left to sur- viving family members and other ‘gatekeepers’ bestowed with the task of man- aging the written remnants of the lives and loves of LGBTQ people, they, too, would be much more likely to consider such evidence “embarrassing, painful, or merely unnecessary” (Merrill 2000: 12), and hence would often “honour [...] suppression over candour, and decency over drama” (Dever 1996: 119). Emma Stebbins (1815–1882), sculptor and Cushman’s partner for the last 20 years of her life, was the first to lament the “fissured archive”, when she be- gan working on Cushman’s biography shortly after the actress’s death. Charlotte Cushman: Her Letters and Memories of Her Life (1879) was a labour of love as well as an investment in the posthumous value of Cushman’s “splendid name”.9
9 A former acquaintance of Cushman’s in Rome, William J. Stillman (1901: 359–365) is among the first to be explicitly critical of both Cushman’s character and lifestyle in his autobiography. See also Of Gaps and Gossip: Intimacy in the Archive 437
Stebbins’s intent to preserve Cushman’s respectability for posterity is evident from the first epigraph above her first chapter, where she quotes Shakespeare’s Othello on the importance of a good reputation: “Good name in man or woman / Is the immediate jewel of their souls”. Stebbins then follows the biographical formula established by Mary Howitt, tracing Cushman’s family back to the Puri- tans and her personal decisions to tragic setbacks and familial devotion. The biography is far more detailed but otherwise not significantly different in its con- tent from shorter (laudatory) pieces about the late star. “Emma Stebbins wrote a biography of her former spouse”, Sharon Marcus summarises the book’s conven- tionality, “with the reticence and impersonality typical of the lifewriting” of the time (2007: 197).10 The book’s genesis and structure are hence far more interest- ing than its content for studying the interplay among archives, intimacy, and gossip. Stebbins was hesitant about writing the biography and therefore initially re- lied on the help of author Sidney Lanier (1842–1881), of whom Cushman had grown fond shortly before her death. Stebbins’s letters to Lanier offer a detailed and frank account of the planning stages of the book.11 Among other things, the letters reveal that Stebbins was adamant that “that memoir [...] must be written by those who loved her, lest unworthy and careless hands undertake it” (JLP 2: “Stebbins to Lanier” 1 March 1876). Her intimacy with Cushman thus became the justification of her authorship, if not the book’s content. The central topic of this exchange – besides Stebbins’s worries about her health and the demands by the publisher – is Stebbins’s struggle to find sources on which to build her story,
“The Backlash and Beyond” in Merrill (2000), in which she links the posthumous demise of Cush- man’s fame to the rise of the sexual inversion trope at the end of the nineteenth century. 10 For Marcus, who investigates Cushman and Stebbins in her chapter on “The Genealogy of Mar- riage”, Stebbins establishes her privileged position as Cushman’s spouse by other means: writing the biography in the first place, excluding other lovers from the narrative, and detailing the inven- tory of their shared home(s) (2007: 197). Reading further between the lines, Stebbins’s explanation for whom the biography might be of interest – besides her adoring public – offers similar claims of affection: “those who loved her as few have ever been loved” (1879: 2). 11 These letters are preserved as part of the “Sidney Lanier Papers” at Johns Hopkins University. There is no comparable collection of Emma Stebbins’s correspondence or notes. Stebbins’s letters to fellow sculptor Anne Whitney have been digitised as part of Wellesley College Digital Scholar- ship and Archive’s “Papers of Anne Whitney (MSS. 4): Correspondence”. The letters to Lanier cited here were transcribed by theatre historian Jennie Lorenz from the original letters. Lorenz had pre-
pared to write a biography of Cushman in the 1950 s but died without completing it. In 1963, she bequeathed her detailed notes and numerous transcripts to the Library of Congress, where the “Jennie Lorenz collection relating to Charlotte Cushman” is now available to researchers in the Manuscript Division. Citations from this collection are abbreviated with JLP. 438 Katrin Horn lamenting that “we have nothing but letters and our memories” (JLP 2: “Stebbins to Lanier”,27 March 1876). Stebbins was confronted with two equally subjective and incomplete sources. To counter the ephemerality of memories, Stebbins asked friends of Cushman’s to send their written recollections. She also asked to be forwarded correspondence addressed to and written by the late star. Letters, however, are perhaps uniquely resistant to coherent narratives (Spacks 1985: 69). They are plagued not only by gaps left by missing responses, but also by “fleet- ing – or flirting – masks adopted according to the demands of recipient and cir- cumstance” (Dever 1996: 120). In the nineteenth century, letters had furthermore lost their “public nature” (Dever 1996: 117). They were – as Cushman’s letters to Emma Crow show – full of intensely private, often intimate information. Espe- cially those close to Cushman were therefore reluctant to follow Stebbins’s plea for access. English writer Geraldine Jewsbury (1812–1880), for example, worries in her response to Stebbins about the gossip that might be found in the thirty-year old letters: “[T]hings and people might be carelessly mentioned in a way that one [would] not now speak of them” (CCP 11: 3462–3462 verso, “Jewsbury to Stebbins, February 6, 1877”). Jewsbury repeatedly insists that she would produce these let- ters only on the condition that she should be given copies of all passages used in the memoir and that “no names or references of a personal nature shall be intro- duced”,as“one writes carelessly & on the impulse of the moment” (CCP 11: 3471, “Jewsbury to Stebbins, February 6, 1877”). Her letters, however, make clear that she is not only anxious about her perception as one who gossips. In her postscript to her letter, Jewsbury, who was passionately attached to Cushman among other women (Merrill 2000: 150–152; Vicinus 2004: 115–121), addresses the rationale behind so many empty archives, the fear of becoming the subject of gossip her- self: “I have no letters of Miss Cushman – many years ago I destroyed nearly all the letters I possessed by any one. I had no room to keep them & I prefer destroy- ing them to leaving them to any accidents” (CCP 11: 3471–3471 verso, “Jewsbury to Stebbins, February 6, 1877”; my emphasis). Stebbins admits to Lanier that she
had done the same, when she and Cushman left Rome to move back to the U. S. (JLP 2: “Stebbins to Lanier”,27 July 1876), thereby destroying all direct evidence of their courtship and marriage. Stebbins then turned to Emma Crow and her “voluminous correspondence with her Aunt” (JLP 2: “Stebbins to Lanier”,27 July 1876) as a key source. Yet Crow did “not feel inclined [...] – naturally” to grant access to her letters and Cushman’s without reviewing them first (JLP 2: “Stebbins to Lanier”,6 July 1876). Crow seemed to have been in the possession, too, of Cushman’s letters to her mother and Cushman’s diary of 1844, which she did hand over to Stebbins. The latter, however, notes that “much of it written in pencil – so fine and pale that I can scarcely decipher it even with a magnifying class” (JLP 2: “Stebbins to Lanier”, Of Gaps and Gossip: Intimacy in the Archive 439
12 6 July 1876). Three months later, Stebbins learns that Crow had reviewed the letters but found them “so purely personal & private – that she cannot find any- thing suitable for the public” (JLP 2: “Stebbins to Lanier”,27 July 1876). In the end, Stebbins cites three letters from Jewsbury to Cushman that praise the ac- tress’s genius, work ethic, and reputation (1879: 77–82). Despite the apparently rather generic content, the mere form of the letter instilled in Stebbins’s readers the impression of intimate insights. Stebbins was, after all, writing for a public “between whom and [Cushman] existed the never-failing attraction of a powerful ” and magnetic sympathy (1879: 2). Jewsbury and other famous friends (e. g. Fanny Seward, 1879: 189; Jane Carlyle, 1879: 84) are represented in the biography’s pages via excerpts from private letters, recollections of conversations, descrip- tions of domestic spaces in homes and on holiday. Charlotte Cushman: Letters and Memories of Her Life thus offers a careful curation of the supposedly intimate while withholding anything of a truly private nature. To this end, Stebbins cites
several letters to Emma Crow (e. g. 1879: 84), but only one of them gives her as the addressee (1879: 192). This anonymisation minimises Crow’s role in Cushman’s life and offers Cushman’s thoughts about her encounters with celebrated women like Carlyle without revealing to whom she entrusted those thoughts. From Jews- bury’s letters, such as the one cited on page 74 of the biography, Stebbins excises the overtly familiar salutation “my dear love” (CCP 11: 3435, “Jewsbury to Cush- man, Thursday”) with similar effects. Stebbins’s book is thus plagued by the “fis- sured archive” and itself an exercise in active silence, written, as it was, at a time when Cushman’s masculine appearance became increasingly suspicious. Stebbins’s letters provide the earliest overview of what kind of private materi- al existed – whether or not Stebbins gained access to it. They offer a starting point to think more broadly about the “fissured archive” and about the process of ar- chiving private material. Today, Cushman’s 1844 diary as well as letters from this early period in her life are held at Columbia University Libraries as part of the “Brander Matthews Dramatic Museum Theatre and Costume Print Collection, 1787–1966”. The vast majority of her letters, especially those to Emma Crow, are housed at the Library of Congress, where the “Charlotte Cushman Papers” origi- nated in 1925 as a gift by Emma Crow’s son (Charlotte Cushman’s grandson) and his wife, Victor N. and Louise Cushman. Seemingly lost, however, is a third com- ponent of the material, which Stebbins in 1876 assumes to be in Emma Crow’s possession: the younger woman’s own letters to Charlotte Cushman. Crow’s son
12 We can only speculate whether Stebbins inability to decipher the diary was connected to its content, namely the details about what Cushman had perceived as her first marriage to Rosalie Sully. 440 Katrin Horn and daughter-in-law donated their collection to the Library of Congress only 50 years after the actress’s and five years after his mother’s death. It is therefore likely that some letters were simply lost. The correspondence by another biogra- pher, Lyman Beecher Stowe, however, suggests that Crow’s letters to Cushman were still available long after 1925. During his research for the later abandoned biography of Charlotte Cushman, Beecher Stowe is contacted by Victor Cush- man’s nephew, Charles Cushman. On 13 March 1941, Charles Cushman explicitly excludes the letters by Emma Crow from the arranged transfer of his material to the Library of Congress: “You may tell [the head of the Manuscript Division] that he may have any of the Charlotte Cushman letters in which he is interested. The Emma Crow Cushman letters can be returned to me at his leisure” (Cushman 1941: n. pag.). There seems to be no further mention of these letters. Unlike other wom- en with whom Cushman had relationships (such as sculptor Emma Stebbins and author Matilda Hays) or who were infatuated with her (such as writer Geraldine Jewsbury), Crow had no independent artistic achievements that would merit her remembrance. Cushman’s own letters further suggest that Crow was far more explicit in expressing her emotions and desires than herself, as Cushman regu- larly reminds Crow to be more cautious (Merrill 2000: 216). Crow’s letters might therefore have seemed to her and Cushman’s descendants both historically in- significant and personally embarrassing. They thus encapsulate the dilemma of so many documents of LGBTQ histories – most of which do not even register as lost –, whose absence ultimately enforces the “epistemological privilege of unknowing” (Sedgwick 1990/2005: 5).
“She Had with Her Always a Female Companion”
This “privilege of unknowing” can be exercised in other ways, as well. The ques- tion is not only what is and is not there, but also what is and is not seen. The historiography of writing about Charlotte Cushman illustrates the importance not only of sources, but of scholarship in “reconstituting” past (queer) lives:
While archives are stages for the appearance of life, this life is always reconstituted, and the efforts of reconstitution that give the archive distinguishable form are always dramatized by the fragility not only of the documented life but of both the materials themselves and the investigative desire giving rise to their discovery. (Marshall, Murphy and Tortorici 2015: 1)
As investigative desires shift, so does the perception of what counts as evidence – and for what. Among Beecher Stowe’s research notes is a transcript of a letter by Cushman that offers a case in point. The transcript reads, “you are held among the dearest things in my heart [...]. I long for you exactly like a young lover ... I do love Of Gaps and Gossip: Intimacy in the Archive 441 you” (1841: 305) – to which Beecher Stowe, reflecting both a post-Freudian aware- ness of same-sex desire and a pre-Stonewall rejection of its public recognition, adds, “I suppose the prurient modern mind would give a sinister interpretation to this relationship” (1841: 308). Joseph Leach seemingly operated under similar as- sumptions when he wrote his biography of Cushman in 1970. Lisa Merrill notes that she and Leach had worked for the most part from the same material. Yet in his “attempt to revitalize Cushman’s name” (Leach 1970: xv), Leach had read yet not acknowledged either the 1844 diary entries about Rosalie Sully or the erotic components of the correspondence between Cushman and the various women in her life. For him, the details of her theatrical success overshadowed any regard for this tacit acknowledgement of the “female ménage” with Harriet Hosmer and Ma- tilda Hays or the “Emma[s] of her heart” (1970: 258, 281). With the “investigative ” ’ desire shifting in the 1990 s, a growing number of scholars turned to Leach s sources and found evidence of an intimate life that was far from vague. To counter Cushman’s own silences, widening gaps in the archive, and wilful ignorance of prior biographers, and thus to reconstitute Cushman’s life, these scholars not only re-read the same sources. They also looked for new sources that offered glimpses behind the public façade built by Cushman and those invested in her reputation. To bridge the divide between public and private, between open secrets and com- mon knowledge, these scholars turned to gossip. In June 1876, Anne Brewster (1818–1892) and the sculptor Harriet Hosmer (1830–1908) met in Italy, decades after their shared acquaintance with Cushman had originally brought them together. Shortly afterwards, Brewster would start preparing an account for Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (1878) of the time she
spent with Cushman when they both lived in Philadelphia in the early 1840 s. While she refers to their shared time as one of “intimacy” repeatedly (1878: 170, 173, 175), her account focusses on how Cushman prepared for her roles. With Hosmer, Brewster (1876) shared a very different side of the late star, one inacces- sible to public reporting but preserved in Brewster’s diary (“Diary Entry of June 5, 1876”). Her recollection of their conversation offers a crucial case study on the relevance of gossip to historical research. It serves as evidence of an event not otherwise recorded, namely Cushman’s break-up with Matilda Hays. Beyond this factual recounting, however, the conversation between Brewster and Hosmer also highlights gossip’s epistemological qualities as an “intimate knowledge” beyond its focus on a private event among romantic partners. Rather, the knowledge it- self – regardless of subject matter – is intimate in terms of how it is generated and shared in the form of gossip. Gossip can operate as a form of social control (Gluck- man 1963: 308; Merry 1984: 272), and it was often perceived as such by Cushman herself. Yet it can also function as “a discourse of the margins and of the margin- alized” (Bastin 2011: 25), offering an “an alternative discourse to that of public 442 Katrin Horn life” and “a crucial means of self-expression, a crucial form of solidarity” (Spacks 1985: 46, 5). Contrary to its common association with uncertainty and unreliabil- ity, then, gossip can serve as a “wonderful historical source” as it is bound to “context and convention” (White 1994: 78, 76). Gossip furthermore relies on shared social knowledge to be communicable (Gluckman 1963: 309), and it cre- ates and fosters affective ties between those engaging in it (White 1994: 76). Inti- macy thus characterises not only the (open) secrets broached by gossip but also the relationship between the gossipers. For this reason, information spread in gossip is revelatory about more than “the conduct of absent persons” (Merry 1984: 275). It reflects the speaker’s values as well as their assumptions about their peer’s values. Rumours can be disseminated anonymously; gossip, on the other hand, is always personal. It expresses an “intimate” but “usually collective narra- tive” (Adkins 2002: 216). The collective narrative provided in the diary entry of 5 June 1876 starts with Brewster’s own account of Cushman, which introduces Harriet (“Hattie”) Hos- mer’s retelling of the central events:
She had with her always a female companion with which she quarrelled when she did not reign as tyrant. There was a certain Matilda Hayes [sic] who held this difficult position with her for a few years and C.C. & her fought like cat and dog. [...] At last one of their tussles took place before witnesses and they had to separate – Hattie said she was present. (1876: n. pag.)
Right away, Brewster shifts attention away from the details of the “tussles” to emphasise what she and Hosmer consider to be the much more egregious mis- step: the “public nature” of the incident. Whether true in its details or not, the scene and its retelling illustrate the line between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour that Cushman and her circle of friends drew. There was an implied causal link between each clause about the fighting: “[T]heir tussles took place before witnesses and [so] they had to separate” (1876: n. pag.). In this way, Brew- ster’s account not only reveals additional biographical details about a celebrity. It also deepens our knowledge of the discursive fault lines of gender and sexuality in her milieu. We glean this knowledge from the tacit agreement between Brew- ster and Hosmer about the definite nature of the outcome –“they had to separate” (1876: n. pag.; my emphasis) –, and thus the subsequent events need no further explanation. This is not a silence of oppression or exclusion, but one of comfort. It “carries hints, allusions, references, and opinions” (White 1994: 86). The knowl- edge itself could not exist without intimacy between the gossipers, which in turn engenders “the possibility of genuine dialogue, of meaning emerging gradually and cooperatively, or of meaning not articulated yet mutually understood” (Spacks 1985: 14). Without explicating all details, Brewster and Hosmer can ex- press what might be, “if not unknown, at least unspeakable” to outsiders (Weiss Of Gaps and Gossip: Intimacy in the Archive 443
2003: 288)13 yet was common knowledge among this set of women connected by their same-sex desires.14 Brewster herself stresses the importance of gossip as tied to context and com- munities. Her diary entry reflects Brewster’s eagerness to cite her sources and trace knowledge to its precise origin, and to clearly distinguish her own account from the “whispers” disregarded decades earlier by Hosmer. “Hattie was very in- timate with Miss C. & Miss H. She had heard whispers of private fisticuffs between the two women but she hardly credited the stories & counted them as gossip. She had a great respect for Miss C. & also a great admiration for Miss Hayes” (1876: n. pag.; my emphasis). Brewster stresses that her own knowledge of these events is not unreliable, anonymous, or obscure but rather defined and validated by the close association among all those involved. She insists that she relies not on hear- say but on intimacy.15 With the same authority, she introduces Emma Stebbins as the shaping presence in Cushman’s life from 1857 onwards: “After [the break-up,]
Miss Stebbins came to live with C. C. Miss S. is a soft gentle quite ladylike woman, a good woman too [...] a benefit to C.C. most certainly I think for she grew to be more of a lady” (1876: n. pag.). Stebbins’s acceptance as Cushman’s wife is not unique to Brewster and Hosmer. The correspondence between Cushman and Stebbins on the one hand and James T. and Annie Fields on the other is marked by a parallelism in which
13 Elizabeth Barret Browning offers a noteworthy example of someone who occupies a middle ground between in- and outsider. In a letter to her sister, she distinguishes herself as someone close enough to be exposed to private information, yet not close enough to fully understand their impli- cations: “I understand that she & Miss Hayes [sic] have made vows of celibacy & of eternal attach- ment to each other – they live together, dress alike; it is a female marriage. I happened to say, ‘Well, I have never heard of such a thing before.’‘Haven’t you,’ said Mrs Corkrane, ‘oh, it is by no means uncommon’” (Berg Collection: n. pag. “Letter from Elizabeth Barrett Browning to her sister Arabel, Oct 22, 1852”). Unlike Brewster and Hosmer, Browning cannot leave silence mutually understood. She requires explanation and assumes that others do, too. 14 Brewster’s account has become central to scholarship on Cushman, initiating a clear distinc- tion between those who take this intimate knowledge into consideration and those who do not. The latter group insists on the respectability and general acceptance of romantic friendships (Lilian Faderman, most prominently, who relies only on Cushman’s diary in addition to Leach). For Lisa Merrill, however, Hays’s actions that day “shattered for all of them any lingering illusion of a ‘pas- sionless’ romantic friendship by the vehemence of her anger and grief. [...] And the spectacle ob- served by Hosmer and Gill so compromised Matilda Hays that there was no going back” (2000: 184). As noted about Cushman’s own letters above, Brewster’s shared, intimate knowledge enables a deeper understanding of the limits of the seemingly widespread acceptance of romantic friend- ships among affluent white women in the nineteenth century. 15 The contrast also makes obvious that there were, in fact, whispers about Cushman, Hays, and their “fisticuffs”–and that such public gossip was perceived as perilous and controlling. 444 Katrin Horn each couple recognises the other as such: Letters are often addressed to both, and where that is not the case, greetings are extended. Similarly, the exchange be- tween Stebbins and the younger sculptor Anne Whitney is replete with mentions of their respective partners (Cushman and Abby Manning). Upon learning of Cushman’s death, Abby Manning writes to Anne Whitney about the posthumous praise the actress receives, and she ends simply yet effectively: “Oh Miß Stebbins!” (Manning 1876: n. pag.). Stebbins rather than Cushman’s biological family is thereby singled out as the one most worthy of sympathy. Once again, the intimate exchange allows (or rather invites) ellipses that make room for expres- sive silences. Not all of those close to Stebbins and Cushman were supportive of their rela- tionship, and their disapproval sometimes lead to excessive speech rather than expressive silence. While their family’s criticism stayed within the appropriate confines of their domestic encounters (public rejection would have equalled pub- lic acknowledgment), its traces are nonetheless found in written records, such as the tacit condemnation of Cushman’s life in her mother’s letters or her sister’s hesitancy to stay close with her famous sibling. Their families’ rejection is itself if not evidence then at least a hint toward the deep bond shared between the two women. Furthermore, gossip among their families and a mutual friend in the spring of 1865 gave occasion to one of the most explicit confessions of intimacy between Cushman and Stebbins – somewhat ironically in a letter to Emma Crow. Cushman first complains that “her whole family utterly disapproved of her life with me [... and] they felt she was morally, socially, spiritually, physically injured by it” (CCP 1: “Cushman to Emma Crow Cushman” 11 May 1865). Upon being re- minded of this during her family’s stay in Rome, Stebbins’s health is deteriorat- ing, which spurs Cushman to declare: “I have loved & do love her too dearly & our lives have been far too intimately & sacredly associated not to make all her trou- bles reflect upon me & I suffer, in her sorrows or sufferings” (CCP 1: “Cushman to Emma Crow Cushman” 11 May 1865). No letters between Cushman and Stebbins are known to have survived. Given their decades of living together, they might have been scarce to begin with – proximity here amplifying “the invisibility that often surrounds intimate life” (Cvetkovich 2002: 110). Evidence of intimacy is thus found again on the periphery: in other people’s reactions and in Cushman’s own talk about “absent people”. Of Gaps and Gossip: Intimacy in the Archive 445
Turning to the Archive after the Archival Turn
At least since the archival turn in cultural studies, the archive as become a prime site to discuss the relationship between power and memory, but also to think about notions of evidence and truth – those supposedly material and reliable components of knowledge that a frivolous and ephemeral mode of communica- tion like gossip cannot offer.16 Nonetheless, Martha Vicinus mentions gossip 25 times in her book about intimate relationships between women, Cushman’s among them, in the long nineteenth century. Vicinus first references gossip in her acknowledgements: “Sharing gossip about ‘our women’ over the years has been a great pleasure” (2004: xiii) Indeed, she bases her extensive and detailed scholarly research on intimate knowledge (or curiosity) about gossip. Similarly, Lisa Merrill ends her biography of Cushman with the prognosis that her subject “will continue to change, as more letters, hints, gossip, and diaries surface” (2000: 266; my em- phasis). Gossip is thus both a cautious reminder of what we are not supposed to know and a unique source for what we nonetheless might know about the past: “a species of truth, deliverable in no other way than word of mouth, personal letters, diaries and journals published posthumously, and not obtainable otherwise” (Ep- stein 2012: xiii). The recording of this specific truth hinges to a large extent on the public importance of those involved. Anyone interested in Cushman is exceptionally lucky in that regard, as not only she herself was famous, but so were most of the people to whom she was close. Otherwise, the evidence of Cushman’s sexuality, her marginality, would certainly have been lost – partially, as we have seen, by her own design, partially by the influence of those who felt beholden to her “splendid name”. As it is, however, the intimacy both betrayed and documented in gossip has become a focal point of departure for research about her life and others like hers. Tracing such intimacy across emotional networks brings to light a different form of intimacy, too, namely that between researcher and object of study. Peter Burke describes archival research as generally “somewhat different from other kinds of research [... and as] allow[ing] a closer relationship with the past” (qtd. in Pallares-Burke 2002: 140). Putting a finer point on this, Ann Cvetkovich speaks of the “convergence of the archival turn with the affective turn”, particularly in the research marked by “deep attachments to the objects”
16 Friedrich laments that cultural studies has only thought about the metaphorical, and not the actual, archive (2013/2018: 12). I would hope that these considerations of how the ephemeral and the unsaid have been preserved in written records in different archival institutions would escape such criticism. 446 Katrin Horn
(2015: xvii).17 As gossip depends on the affective ties between those engaging in it to shed light on each “small, shared truth” (Spacks 1982: 24) it uncovers, so, too, the unearthing of its traces requires intimate knowledge and fosters the intimate ties with those who enter the archive. An embrace of gossip is then also an incentive to turn to the archive with renewed fervour for evidence of intimacy as well as for turning to intimacy for evidence.
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