Names of the Flowers: Ruby Hemenway's Redemption of History, The

Frontiers, 2004 by Hoberman, Michael

While Hemenway's columns clearly resonate with the work of contemporary feminist historians and scholars of material culture, they suggest other parallels as well. New England, with its centuries-old, self-conscious sense of regional identity, has produced generations of amateur, local historians, among whom we might naturally number Hemenway. Her birth village of North Leverett lay less than fifty miles from Dublin, New Hampshire, home of Yankee Magazine, an effective popularizer of New England cultural identity. The reading audience for Hemenway's columns-which often extended far beyond the circulation area of The Recorder, owing to her readers' propensity to clip and mail the pieces to exiled rural New Englanders in other parts of the country-was similar to the audience of American Heritage, Smithsonian, and Old Farmers' Almanac; that is, they were elderly and connected to the past. In fact, when Hemenway was approaching her one-hundredth birthday, she enjoyed a brief moment in the national spotlight, a testament to her popular appeal. Don Pride, who was then editor of The Recorder, ticked off a list of publicity surrounding her as a writer. In addition to the feature article on her published in the January 1984 edition of Yankee Magazine, he wrote, "The Associated Press is preparing a piece. So is USA Today, which bills itself as the nation's newspaper. Readers Digest is also planning a story. . . . A crew from CBS News will be in Franklin County this weekend, filming a feature on Miss Hemenway for Charles Kuralt s 'American Parade' program. . . . Willard Scott . . . is also coming here to film a birthday greeting." Clearly, the novelty of a one-hundred-year-old news columnist, who began her writing career in her nineties, bore a popular "old time" appeal. Hemenway could be said to represent the "real thing" in the frenzied swirl of popular media. She still wrote in longhand and insisted on being called "Miss Hemenway" by all but her closest friends and relatives. But her popular appeal in Franklin County and among her devoted regular readers, did not derive from her novelty status but rather because her work represented a popular and innovative challenge to an increasingly out-of-touch, professionalized American history. By writing so consistently about the things of the past, Hemenway at once offered her readers an alternate form of "people's history" and, remarkably, a distinctly unselfconscious and innovative lens through which to view the past.9

Hemenway s consistent appreciation for the value of detail is the key to her vision of history. Her writing problematizes the received wisdom of a hierarchy of relations between details on the one hand and historical meaning on the other. Hemenway confronts readers with an inversion of values worthy of any critical theorist. The facts as encountered in Hemenway's "I Remember When ..." columns call to mind the work of critic Naomi Schor, who asks in her book, Reading in Detail, if audiences in pursuit not only of abstract or spiritual fulfillment should have to resist the pull of detail, the anchoring power it wields in a representing world of signs? Which element in Rubens painting is more important-the image of Christ and the Disciples, or that of the dog under the table, gnawing away at a bone?10