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112 3 Muscle Memory Building the Body Politic of Character in Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the National Police Gazette Nature has a record of all men’s deeds, keeping her accounts on fleshy tablets. The mind may forget, the body never. —Newell Hillis, A Man’s Value to Society Studies in Self-Culture and Character1 In 1851, Sojourner Truth gave a speech to the Akron Women’s Rights Convention that launched her public career and eventually came to define in many ways her legendary status as feminist icon, staunch abolitionist , and exemplary “self-made” character. The power of the speech, which has come to be known by the name of its repeated refrain, “Ar’n’t I a Woman?” has often been attributed not only to Truth’s unique and sophisticated rhetorical style but also to the equally spectacular presence of her powerfully formed and muscular body. In Frances Gage’s influential and controversial reconstruction of the 1851 speech, she attempts to re-create the full drama of Truth’s performance by reiterating her famous verbal refrain, “Ar’n’t I a woman?” while editorially underscoring the even more dramatic unveiling of her muscular arm: “Well, chillen, whar dar’s so much racket dar must be som’ting out o’ kilter . I tink dat, ’twixt de niggers of de South and de women at de Norf, all a-talking ’bout rights, de white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what’s all this here talking ’bout? Dat man ober dar say dat woman needs to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have de best place Muscle Memory 113 eberywhar. Nobody eber helps me into carriages, or ober mud-puddles, or gives me any best place;” and, raising herself to her full height, and her voice to a pitch like rolling thunder, she asked, “And ar’n’t I a woman? Look at me. Look at my arm,” and she bared her right arm to the shoulder, showing its tremendous muscular power. “I have plowed and planted and gathered into barns, and no man could head me—and ar’n’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man, (when I could get it,) and bear de lash as well—and ar’n’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen chillen, and seen ’em mos’ all sold off into slavery, and when I cried out with a mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard—and ar’n’t I a woman?”2 The iconic status of Sojourner Truth’s 1851 speech, and its role in establishing Truth, as one reviewer put it after her death in 1883, as “one of the most notable characters in history and one preeminently belonging to America,” stems from its evocation of the muscular body as political signifier and in particular from the ability of muscle to constitute Truth as an exemplary and self-made character.3 Truth’s “interesting and decidedly original character” was frequently cited as the source of her political and rhetorical power as commonly as was her powerful physical body, for it was only from a physical frame seemingly “carved out without hand or chisel from the solid mountain mass” that Truth’s character, according to Anna Julia Cooper, acquired its critical force.4 Truth’s speech thus marks an important yet vexed moment in the discourse of character when the muscular body emerged as a controversial site of political agency because of its ability to figure the inherent “equality ” of seemingly “different” physiological bodies. Citing examples of her exclusion from and invisibility to the many social rituals of femininity , Truth’s speech turns her exclusion into a sign of physical strength, a strength that she not only asserts through her question to be the strength of “a woman” that is equal to any man’s but that she also goes on to dramatize through the baring of her own arm, an arm, as Gage editorially underscores, that displays “tremendous muscular power.” In juxtaposing her semantically loaded question “Ar’n’t I a woman?” against the evocative visual testimony of her muscular arm, Truth thus asks her audience to rethink what femininity might mean such that it can encompass her own maternal body, which bears the history of its racial subjection as the strength of its physical form, a form that, as the speech goes on to assert, represents the new “strength” of the women’s movement...

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