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Elizabeth Palmer Peabody and the “Art” of Conversation
- University of Iowa Press
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Early and late, readers have expected more of Elizabeth Peabody than they find in her texts, in part because her accomplishment as a talker led contemporaries to demand more of her writing. Testimony to her conversational talent abounds. Sallie Holley, Oberlin-trained educator and feministabolitionist , admired Peabody’s “rare and exquisite grace of expression” (Chadwick 148). Harvard-educated writer-lecturer Ralph Waldo Emerson enthused over “the ease & scope & authority of a learned professor or high literary celebrity in her talk” (Letters, 1: 449). African American writer and teacher Charlotte Forten Grimké remarked that Peabody “converses finely,” displaying “genius” (Stevenson 229). Professor of literary history Moses Coit Tyler singled out her conversation as “a rare treat” even in “a brilliant assemblage” (Baylor 72). Caroline Dall admired Peabody’s talk more than the celebrated conversations of Margaret Fuller (Deese 79), and associates in the New England Women’s Club held that Peabody “could have talked with Hypatia” (Porter 341). Well into Peabody’s eighties, interlocutors felt “‘enriched by [her] conversation’” (Baylor 166). Later accounts, however, discredit Peabody. Henry James’s fiction figured Peabody as a “discursive old woman,” talking “continually” (25, 345). Genealogies of Transcendentalists ’ conversation subsume her and other women to men’s traditions or the influence of individual men, while women’s talk is instanced as representing the “fatuity” of Transcendental conversation (Buell, Transcendentalism ,85; see Capper 296, Warren).Generally, accounts of Peabody’s conversational talent and acuity are subordinated to a litany of repeated charges of discoursive failures.1 Although Peabody was in many ways more representative than women novelists of their era’s “New England literary ethos,” Elizabeth Palmer Peabody and the “Art” of Conversation charlene avallone • 23 • 24 • conversations, dialectic discourse, self-representations as Lawrence Buell observes, her critical reputation does not reflect that fact (New England, 40). While both defamed and eulogized as a talker, Peabody has been little studied as such. To consider her as a converser can help renovate her reputation , while showing the crucial role that she played in her era’s culture of conversation. Peabody is a significant figure in the evolution of conversation in the United States from a domestic training in etiquette and social discourse for the pleasure and “improvement”of both sexes into a feminine “art” of conversing that extended into institutional pedagogy, professional writing, and an alternative public-sphere discourse associated with women and their influence (Farrar 40–41, 382; G. Emerson, Lecture, 13). Preceded by two generations of female belles lettres conversationalists in her family, Peabody participated in myriad associations for literary intercourse increasingly informed by what men held to be learning, as she also developed the conversational model of pedagogy begun by her mother-teacher into a form that shaped American education and, thereby, American culture . Her extensive conversational culture engaged her in both masculine scholarly traditions and feminine discoursive traditions and shaped her contributions in print as well as talk, making her a pivotal figure in the transition from an academic to a colloquial literary tradition in the United States. In Christine Battersby’s model of literary history, Peabody answers to the definition of “genius” presented as most useful to feminist criticism, not an “élite being, different from other (ordinary) women” but rather a figure whose contribution “occup[ies] a strategic position in the matrilineal and patrilineal patterns of tradition that make up a culture” (157). To claim a greater sense of Peabody’s achievements, my chapter maps the trajectory of this involvement and suggests that the alternative aesthetic grounded in a Greek tradition of harmonious social intercourse, which Peabody imagined in “The Dorian Measure,” might be employed to reassess her own contribution. Elizabeth Peabody, her mother, and her grandmother were educated on models of “literary” converse—that is, conversation “pertaining to letters ” or informed by learning (Webster’s Dictionary 1828)—models diffused through the Spectator and subsequent publications. These models of imbricated orality, literacy, and writing aimed to equip women for literary discourse with men or mixed companies in social settings to the end of mu- [18.216.186.164] Project MUSE (2024-04-19 13:16 GMT) charlene avallone • 25 tual pleasure and instruction; for genteel converse in companionate marriages ; for domestic pedagogy as pupils or teachers; and for conversation with other women over handiwork and reading. The Spectator, reacting against more expansive models of female rhetoric, aimed to bring learning “out of closets and libraries”into society,to make “deeper scholars....who talk much better” at ladies’ tea...