Conversation and the boundaries of public discourse in rhetorical theory by renaissance women

Rhetorica - Journal of the History of Rhetoric

Volumn 16, Issue 2, 1998, Pages 181-199

  Donawerth, Jane ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 34547871867     PISSN: 07348584     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/rh.1998.16.2.181     Document Type: Article

References (46)

1. As Susan Sniader Lanser and Evelyn Torton Beck have pointed out in "[Why] Are There No Great Women Critics?", "patriarchal culture-continues to resist, denigrate, and mistrust woman as critic, theory-builder, or judge"; See The Prism of Sex: Essays in the Sociology of Knowledge, ed. Julie A. Sherman and Evelyn Torton Beck (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979), p. 79.
2. The standard histories of rhetorical theory include almost no women. Standard histories that do not mention female teachers of rhetoric or women rhetorical theorists include Warren Guthrie, "The Development of Rhetorical Theory in America, 1635-1850," Speech Monographs 15 (1948): 61-71,
3. Wilbur Samuel Howell, Eighteenth-Century British Logic and Rhetoric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971),
4. Nan Johnson, Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric in North America (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991),
5. George Kennedy, The Art of Rhetoric in the Roman World 300 B.C.-300 A.D. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972),
6. James J. Murphy, ed., A Synoptic History of Classical Rhetoric (New York: Random House, 1972),
7. Rhetoric in the Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974),
8. and Barbara Warnick, The Sixth Canon: Belletristic Rhetorical Theory and Its French Antecedents (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993).
9. Wilbur Samuel Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England 1500-1700 (1956; New York: Russell & Russell, 1961), pp. 166-67 on Mary Queen of Scots;
10. George Kennedy, The Art of Persuasion in Greece (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), pp. 158-64 on Aspasia,
11. and Albert Raymond Kitzhaber, "Rhetoric in American Colleges 1850-1900" (Diss. University of Washington, 1953), pp. 182-83, 212-14, 220, 238-40, 282-91, 306-09, 311 - all on Gertrude Buck.
12. In order to include women, we must redefine rhetorical theory to cover areas other than the speech that men historically made to each other in the public business of law, government, and preaching, where women were excluded; recent calls for a revision of the history of rhetorical theory include John Schilb, "The History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History," Pre/Text 7 (1986): 11-34,
13. Patricia Bizzell, "Opportunities for Feminist Research in the History of Rhetoric," Rhetoric Review 11.1 (Fall 1992): 50-58,
14. Carole Blair, "Contested Histories of Rhetoric: The Politics of Preservation, Progress, and Chance," Quarterly Journal of Speech 78 (1992): 403-428,
15. Jane Donawerth, "Transforming the History of Rhetorical Theory," Feminist Teacher 7 (1992): 35-39
16. and Cheryl Glenn, "Remapping Rhetorical Territory," Rhetoric Review 13.2 (Spring 1995): 287-303.
17. Cheryl Glenn, "sex, lies, and manuscript: Refiguring Aspasia in the History of Rhetoric," CCC 45.2 (May 1994): 180-99
18. and Madeleine Henry, Prisoner of History: Aspasia of Miletus and Her Biographical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
19. and Bathsua Makin, An Essay to Revive the Antient Education of Gentlewomen (1673; rpt. Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1980), p. 14.
20. On Ban Zhao, see Nancy Lee Swann, Pan Chao: Foremost Woman Scholar of China, First Century A.D. (1932; New York: Russell & Russell, 1968), esp. pp. 82-99.
21. On Sosipatra, see Eunapius, Lives of the Philosophers and Sophists, trans. Wilmer Cave Wright (1921; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), pp. 399-419.
22. On Beatrix Galindo, see Susan Bassnett, Elizabeth I: A Feminist Perspective (Oxford: Berg, 1989), p. 21. For help in finding these theorists and teachers of rhetoric, I wish to thank Richard Fravel, Ana Kothe, Shirley Logan, Marc Mirrell, and many other graduate students in my courses on the history of rhetorical theory at the University of Maryland at College Park.
23. See Joan Gibson, "Educating for Silence," Hypatia 4 (Spring 1989): 9-27, esp. pp. 10-12, 16, and 18-20.
24. See Carolyn Lougee, Le Paradis des Femmes: Women, Salons, and Social Stratification m Seventeenth-Century France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976);
25. see also Domna Stanton, The Aristocrat as Art: A Study of the Honnête Homme and the Dandy in Seventeenth- and Nineteenth-Century French Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980).
26. For an elaboration of my analysis of de Scudéry, see Jane Donawerth, "'As Becomes a Rational Woman to Speak': Madeleine de Scudéry's Rhetoric of Conversation," Essays on the Rhetorical Activities of Historical Women, ed. Molly Wertheimer (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997), pp. 305-19. When I say women take intellectual control of conversation in de Scudéry, I do not mean that they use conversation as an occasion for individual performance as do the men in earlier renaissance treatises on conversation, such as Baldassare Castiglione's The Courtier; there is much more give and take and collaborative exploration in de Scudéry's dialogues than in Castiglione's, where the women serve as audience to the long speeches of debate by the men.
27. For a history of conversation as an art in Europe, see Peter Burke, The Art of Conversation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 89-122;
28. for an extremely useful survey of men's writings on conversation in the Renaissance and eighteenth century, see Ann Cline Kelly, "Swift's Polite Conversation: An Eschatological Vision," Studies in Philology 73 (April 1976): 204-24;
29. for background on conversation as an art in France and context for de Scudéry's work, see Elizabeth C. Goldsmith, Exclusive Conversation: The Art of Interaction in Seventeenth-Century France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988).
30. On competition and warfare as metaphors for rhetoric in men's rhetorical theory for classical and renaissance eras, see Wayne Rebhorn, The Emperor of Men's Minds: Literature and the Renaissance Discourse of Rhetoric (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), pp. 23-79.
31. Nicole Aronson, Mademoiselle de Scudéry, trans. Stuart R. Aronson (Boston, MA: G. K. Hall & Co., 1978), p. 13.
32. On compliments, graciousness, and elegant self-presentation as the art of the courtier, see Frank Whigham, Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
33. Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, The Worlds Olio (London, 1655).
34. On women's writing as "natural," as opposed to men's writing as artful, see Katherine A. Jensen, "Male Models of Feminine Epistolarity; or How to Write Like a Woman in Seventeenth-Century France," in Writing the Female Voice: Essays on Epistolary Literature, ed. Elizabeth C. Goldsmith (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1989), pp. 25-45.
35. On manuals of cookery addressed to women as an audience in the Renaissance, see Elizabeth Tebeaux, "Technical Writing for Women in the English Renaissance: Technology, Literacy, and the Emergence of a Genre," in Written Communication 10.2 (April 1993): 164-99, esp. p. 168.
36. See Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy (London: Methuen, 1985), especially Chapter 6, "Silence and Speech," pp. 149-91.
37. On Fell's career as a preacher and Quaker organizer, see Isabel Ross, Margaret Fell, Mother of Quakerism (London: Longman, Green and Co., 1949).
38. See, for example, Belsey, Subject, p. 178;
39. Elaine Hobby, Virtue of Necessity: English Women's Writing 1649-1688 (London: Virago Press, 1988), p. 6;
40. Constance Jordan, Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), pp. 25, 63, 129;
41. and Susanne Woods ed., The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), Introduction, pp. xxxvi-xxxvii.
42. Astell's hope for a women's college was not realized immediately because she underestimated anti-Catholic sentiment in England: it was rumored that an anonymous lady was about to donate the funds to establish Astell's college when she was dissuaded by an Anglican bishop. But Astell's ideas were strongly influential on the pamphlet and fiction writing in favor of women's education throughout the eighteenth century (in works by writers like Judith Drake, Mary Lady Chudleigh, and Sarah Scott). On the influences of Astell's Serious Proposal, see Ruth Perry, The Celebrated Mary Astell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), esp. pp. 103-05, and ch. 8.
43. but she overemphasizes Arnauld's influence. Although Astell borrows Arnauld's definition of ideas as linked to thought not to real things, she does not borrow the Aristotelian apparatus of propositions and syllogism that Arnauld develops; and while Astell offers a method, it is neither Amauld's "Method of Geometry," nor his "Method of Sciences" (see Antoine Arnauld, Logic; or The Art of Thinking [London,1693], pp. 410, 450-451).
44. For further analysis of the influence of Augustine on Astell and her connections to Port Royal philosophy, see Christine Mason Sutherland, "Outside the Rhetorical Tradition: Mary Astell's Advice to Women in Seventeenth-Century England," Rhetorica 9 (1991): 147-63.
45. On George Campbell's The Philosophy of Rhetoric and other empiricist rhetorics as manipulative, see David Sebberson, "Practical Reasoning, and Wordsworth's 'Preface'" Spirits of Fire: English Romantic Writers and Contemporary Historical Methods, ed. G. A. Rosso and Daniel P. Watkins (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1990), pp. 95-111
46. and Margaret Ferguson, "A Room Not Their Own: Renaissance Women as Readers and Writers," in The Comparative Perspective on Literature, ed. Clayton Koelb and Susan Noakes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 13-116.