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Amanda Frisken, J. Samaine Lockwood. Archives of Desire: The Queer Historical Work of New England Regionalism., The American Historical Review, Volume 122, Issue 5, December 2017, Pages 1620–1621, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/122.5.1620
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In this critical analysis of late-nineteenth century regionalism, J. Samaine Lockwood explores the figure of the “unmarried New England daughter” as both creator and radical resister of the region’s history (8). The book’s four chapters explore how women used not just fictional works, but also colonial revivalism, paintings, photography, tourism, and china collection, to develop a practice Lockwood calls “intimate historicism,” a concept that implies a deeply personal engagement with the past (10).
She begins, in chapter 1, “Renovating the House of History,” by sketching the intimate historicism of the “triadic, same-sex family” (25) of three early feminist intellectuals on the eve of the modern period. Their embrace of the colonial revival movement constituted, in Lockwood’s words, “embodied, pleasurable labor as well as a performance” (26), arising from a feeling of being haunted by past women’s lives. In her travels and research for her book True Stories of New England Captives Carried to Canada during the Old French and Indian Wars (1897), historian C. Alice Baker immersed herself in the histories of dozens of captives taken by the French and Indians in the early 1700s, some of whom subsequently resisted repatriation to New England. Lockwood shows that painter Susan Minot Lane’s haunting 1875 landscape of a famous colonial home connected to the French and Indian wars, The Junkins Garrison (in contrast to a more upbeat rendering of the same structure by Winslow Homer that year), did not romanticize the colonial past but rather evoked its “desolation and alienating aspect” (53). Photographer Emma Lewis Coleman fused Lane’s and Baker’s unconventional colonial visions in her New England Captives (1925), a more comprehensive and diverse compendium of the captives’ stories, and one that Lockwood calls “a modern work of feminist history driven by an ethic of recovery” (54). Each woman’s intimate historicism, Lockwood suggests, arose from her fascination with the “fragments” of history, “because the clamoring of the dead, both the unknown and the loved, resounds in the chambers of her very being” (56).
