Dr Lilith Acadia’s research project ‘A Northampton Marriage: Discursive Construction and Concealment of a Queer Relationship’ looks at the papers of prominent novelist Mary Ellen Chase and religion scholar Eleanor Shipley Duckett, who lived together from 1935-1973 and who used their academic careers, Christian faith, and female friendship as pretexts to hide their romantic relationship.
Having come to the Trinity Long Room Hub to focus on the deployment of pretext in forming and concealing identity, Dr Acadia found a more pressing application to contemporary scenarios, including the use of pretext to conceal motives in the fast-moving COVID world during the latter half of her fellowship.
At a time when truth has been pushed to its limits, health expertise is questioned and conspiracies are rife, Dr Acadia sees the concept of pretext as a way to navigate language use and get to the root of motive.
Pretext and Rhetoric
Pretext, she argues, is a category of discourse which “describes a justification for an action, stance, or identity that serves to veil the motivating reasons or manipulate the audience.”
It was during a women’s studies master’s at Oxford that Dr Acadia first began to think about this discursive device, while looking at how religion is used as a pretext for violence. She says that there are many examples of cultural violence or physical violence --of both historical and contemporary cases where “people use religion as a justification for their violence, in ways that didn’t express how it motivated the violence, but rather to appeal to religion as an incontrovertible source of justification.”
...a justification for an action, stance, or identity that serves to veil the motivating reasons or manipulate the audience.
She examined the conflicting discourse on veiling in Northern African and European communities about how each uses women’s bodies as vessels for culture, and she also looked at the ‘corrective rape’ epidemic in South Africa and femicide in India.
In her PhD at Berkeley, she began to consider “how important the discourse itself is” and how “literary as well as cultural texts can demonstrate the political weight of not questioning pretexts.” Here she started to focus more closely on literature; her project at the Hub combined the two.
A Northampton Marriage
Continuing to focus on religion, albeit not as a justification for violence, Dr Acadia’s project as part of her fellowship at the Trinity Long Room Hub looked at “how religion, along with [academic] career, female friendship and respectability became pretexts for concealing an identity.”
Novelist Mary Ellen Chase and religion scholar Eleanor Shipley Duckett are the protagonists of Dr Acadia’s project; a transnational couple living in Massachusetts in the middle of the 20th century, Mary Ellen Chase was originally from Maine in the US while Eleanor Shipley Duckett was British.
They “lived in one sense very ‘out’ —everyone in their circle, their editors, their colleagues, their families —knew that they were a couple, and yet they had this veil of pretext surrounding their identity”, Dr Acadia explains.
The pretext in their case included a justification for the reasons that they were not married to men; “we’re good Christian women”, “we are successful academics”, “we are expressing the depth of possibility of female friendship.”
These interesting uses of pretexts as a way of disguising identity are visible in their published writings about one another and in Mary Ellen Chase’s fiction, Dr Acadia notes.
Before coming to Trinity, Dr Acadia carried out archival research in the Smith College Collections and in the Maine Women Writers’ Collection, from whom she also received funding for her project. Although she felt that would be the bulk of her research, she then decided to look at the literature too. “This opened up a whole new framework of how I could be addressing the topic”, Dr Acadia says, highlighting the “rare and unique” archive of Mary Ellen Chase’s novels in Trinity Library’s special collections.
She describes a “moment of pure academic joy” when she was finally able to sit down with this special collection in Trinity Library’s Early Printed Books room, holding in her hands books she’d never before seen in print.
Research and the Pandemic
While Dr Acadia was completing her fellowship in 2020, countries around the world went into lockdown putting some of her research plans on hold – not least her ability to access the library.
However, there were also many surprises for Dr Acadia, who—while interacting with the Hub community, the research discussions and themes—began to realise how many different academic fields her research could relate to. “One of the benefits of being at the Hub is getting to know these scholars and fields I never would’ve encountered (including Neuroscience right before lockdown!) and seeing that there is relevance beyond what I conceived of as the scope of my research.” She says that this has been an exhilarating realisation because “I thought I had this niche rhetoric topic but it really is relevant in the public discourses I found during COVID and in many other academic fields.”
I thought I had this niche rhetoric topic but it really is relevant in the public discourses I found during COVID and in many other academic fields.
Another welcome realisation during her time at the Hub was the level of public engagement that was possible through her research topic. During her fellowship, Dr Acadia made unique contributions to public discourse around the pandemic by explaining the use of pretext and how that could help discern the information we were hearing around public health advice from governments. Dr Acadia was encouraged by Professor Jane Ohlmeyer, then Director of the Trinity Long Room Hub, to write an op-ed for the Irish Times, where she explored four key tests to judge whether coronavirus measures are justified. Published in April 2020, Dr Acadia writes “while a degree of trust in authority is necessary for society to function and allow public-health officials to combat the spread of infectious disease, a healthy scepticism is also necessary for maintaining free and fair societies.” This published article also led to a further interview on Newstalk radio with host Pat Kenny asking ‘are governments using the crisis to implement laws and measures to limit citizen’s rights?’
Dr Acadia also spoke as part of the Trinity Long Room Hub’s Rethinking Democracy in an Age of Pandemic Series which was held in collaboration with the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University.
“I didn’t realise until I got to the Hub, that I could also develop this new skill set in engaging with public humanities.”
Speaking of how these experiences helped to develop new skills and engage with new audiences, Dr Acadia was also inspired to work with other scholars in the Hub to start a new academic podcast called ‘The Hublic Sphere’, which launched with the support of the Trinity Long Room Hub in October 2020.
Fellowship
Since completing her fellowship, Dr Acadia has taken up a tenure-track assistant professorship in literary studies at National Taiwan University. Praising her fellowship mentors Jacob Erickson (Loyola Institute), Clare Tebbutt (Centre for Gender and Women’s Studies), and Philip Coleman (School of English), whom she credits for helping prepare her career move, Dr Acadia is teaching an introduction to 20th century US literature and a literary theory seminar this year.
“It is a huge department that is inter-disciplinary in different ways than the Hub is. We have languages and literature from a range of European languages, and linguistics, which is really interesting for me in thinking through different ways of presenting pretext—and there’s this history of being a critical theory department at the nation’s top university. The students I met in the interview and also last summer when I was in Taipei just blew me away with how motivated and knowledgable they are.”
This inter-disciplinary environment is something that Dr Acadia treasured while she was a fellow in the Hub; describing the institute as “vibrant, collegial and inspiring,” she says that “the Hub on a daily basis is so alive that you can walk into that middle floor common room and join in a jovial conversation about ancient government or a passionate discussion on religious minorities.” While being warm and familial, evident in the many connections Dr Acadia has built throughout her fellowship, she also describes it as “rigorous and mind-opening” as a result of that deep interaction across disciplines.
During her fellowship she also engaged actively with the Identities in Transformation Research Theme; the experience of participating in their steering committee and attending many associated research talks showed her a broader relevance for her research. “It showed me how other people are thinking about identity, in a much less historical way than I was doing.”
The Marie Curie COFUND has been a vital experience for me, fulfilling the best of what a post-doctoral fellowship could promise.
Although the pandemic put a stop to her library access, she says the “Hub did an excellent job of maintaining the academic programme even after lockdown” with the weekly coffee morning, Fellow in Focus discussions and the popular Behind the Headlines series. “I didn’t feel that my academic experience lulled at all.”
“The Marie Curie COFUND has been a vital experience for me, fulfilling the best of what a post-doctoral fellowship could promise: it transitioned me out of the doctoral stage and prepared me for my next stage as an assistant professor of literary theory—I presented and completed several projects, submitting them for publication, a process that led me to meet a number of relevant scholars, and which showed me where I want to focus next.”
On the 7th December 2020, Dr Acadia discussed her career and her latest research, as well as her time with the Trinity Long Room Hub as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie COFUND Fellow for 2019–20 with Professor Eve Patten, Director of the Trinity Long Room Hub.
Images:
- Mary Ellen Chase (L) and Eleanor Shipley Duckett (R) returning from England aboard the Queen Mary, November 1960. Held in the Smith College Archives.
- Dr Lilith Acadia (R) with former Trinity Long Room Hub IRC fellow Dr. Martin Sticker (L) at Howth Head, taken by Boots Wang.