Reinventing the Peabody Sisters

Declaration and Deference: Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Mary Peabody Mann, and the Complex Rhetoric of Mediation

Both Elizabeth Palmer Peabody and Mary Peabody Mann precariously balanced the needs and duties of the individual American woman against the cultural idea of community. Their self-positionings as intermediate authority figures—evident in Peabody’s various prefaces and Mann’s The Flower People and Christianity in the Kitchen—both worked within and resisted the framework of male-defined roles for these women, and read against the male voices in education and the sciences. Through controlled rhetorics of assertion and assimilation, these sisters argued that the power for reform of educational, literary, and domestic practices rested not in opposing camps but in the middle ground between conflicting, gendered philosophies and languages. At stake in such position-takings, however, was a loss of voice that would erode the success of their rhetorical and reformative efforts. Throughout her life, Elizabeth Peabody assumed her mediatory role as translator, historian, and especially as educator. While Bruce Ronda has asserted in his biography of Peabody that she was a “reformer on her own terms,” in fact Peabody remained continually mindful of everyone else’s terms. She seemed persistently concerned with creating opportunities for dialogue on a variety of social topics; as Ronda points out, Peabody acted similarly to “the printed page [that] mediates between author and audience ” and “served as a mediator between the radical and original thinkers of the New England Renaissance and a middle-class, educated public committed to certain reforms.”1 Yet mediation demands an awareness of, and perhaps a deference to, the views and goals of others. Thus, negotiation Declaration and Deference Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Mary Peabody Mann, and the Complex Rhetoric of Mediation mark vasquez • 45 • 46 • conversations, dialectic discourse, self-representations was for Peabody a multilayered,complicated concept.The prefaces to both the second edition of Record of a School (1835) and Conversations with Children on the Gospels (1836) illustrate the precarious nature of Peabody’s mediatory project: she asserts a rhetorical control over the work of Bronson Alcott while tempering such authority with a deference that allows Peabody to maintain her own voice yet guard against potential criticism. For instance, the “Explanatory Preface” to Record of a School negotiates between Alcott’s teaching philosophy and Peabody’s own and emerges as a dialogue of sorts between the two educators. As its title suggests, the “Explanatory Preface” presents Peabody as translator, a position of authority new in the reissue of Record, which was first published anonymously. Immediately in the preface, Peabody admits responsibility for the previous and current editions of Record, noting that the book “has, in several particulars, been misunderstood. And I am told that I must ascribe this to my own want of perspicacity,—especially in the last chapter ...that some persons say is unintelligible. On this account, I here attempt another explanation ” (iii). Yet Peabody does not completely relent to the authority of her anonymous critics. In a tone simultaneously declarative and defensive, she claims responsibility for her work while acknowledging that she might have misunderstood and misrepresented Alcott’s philosophy. This stance between assertion and self-defense marks most of the early passages in the preface. Peabody’s rhetoric mirrors this intermediate position, as she often seems to be relaying a conversation between Alcott and his imagined skeptics: But some say, that the philosophy of the Spirit is a disputed philosophy;—that the questions,—what are its earliest manifestations upon earth, and what are the means and laws of its growth?—are unsettled; and therefore it is not a subject for dogmatic teaching. Mr. Alcott replies to this objection, that his teaching is not dogmatic; that nothing more is assumed by him, than that Spirit exists, bearing a relation to the body in which it is manifested, analogous to the relation which God bears to the external creation. (v–vi). Peabody often anchors her conciliatory rhetoric (as above) on the conditional , opposing conjunction but, a word that implies a careful, measured forcefulness. For example, when Peabody questions the persistence of Al- mark vasquez • 47 cott’s Socratic method, she stops short of either chastising him fully or refraining from entering the interview in the record: And Mr. Alcott, I believe, agrees with me in this, notwithstanding that he practically goes sometimes upon the very verge of the rights of reserve, as in the instance referred to. He doubted, immediately, whether that first lesson was wise, and materially changed the character of...