The House of My Sojourn: Rhetoric, Women, and the Question of Authority (review)

Architects have much in common with rhetoricians. Both concern themselves with structure, aesthetics, and design. Both shape the ways in which people experience their material surroundings. Some reverentially plumb the past for insight and inspiration, while others envision the future. When done shoddily, the work of either has the potential to adversely affect people’s everyday lives. In The House of My Sojourn: Rhetoric, Women, and the Question of Authority, Jane S. Sutton regards the history of rhetoric with the eye of an architect—assessing its foundation, testing its structure, and determining whether its contours can be reshaped—or, more precisely, reimagined. This leveling of the “house of rhetoric” is necessary because, Sutton contends, “all attempts to include women in rhetoric exclude them in due course and this exclusion is built into the foundation of the house of rhetoric” (7). To support this contention, Sutton employs an extended analogy, envisioning “the relationship between women and rhetoric as a house, a structure erected upon principles and design concepts employed in ancient Greece,” and noting that “historically, that structure has allowed women to enter but has, at the same time, denied them the authority to speak from inside” (2). Sutton promises to interrogate the house metaphor (which has been applied to rhetoric since antiquity) in more than a superficial manner, “develop[ing] the house metaphor interiorly from its blueprints” (2).

Sutton’s examination of rhetoric’s blueprint is both “archaeological and tropological” (15). In chapter 1, she excavates the house of rhetoric, revealing the elements and principles that form its floor plan. Specifically, Sutton argues that the house of rhetoric is arranged into four planes that emerge vertically from each other—as if connected by a staircase. As one rises to each new level, so does one’s authority in the house of rhetoric. Sutton also employs a metaphor of the body to describe rhetoric’s structure, describing the stairs as a “spine” and rhetoric’s elements as the “bones of the proverbial ‘body of a speech’” (15). The body of rhetoric that Sutton uncovers is decidedly gendered. She contends that the “conceptual body refers to the vestigial gestures of a man—the skeletal remains of a warrior-citizen—who embodies more than himself and through his intercommunication among the planes of the house includes the demos or people” (15–16). In chapter 2, Sutton introduces the tropological dimension of her investigation, emphasizing especially the tropes of antonomasia, hypallage, and paronomasia and arguing that these tropes work in concert with the design of the house of rhetoric, overturning women’s rhetorical authority even as women slowly make their way up the stairs. Sutton supports this contention in the remaining three chapters of the book, presenting what she describes as “case studies of women’s exclusion by inclusion” (17).

Sutton’s seemingly eclectic choice of case examples includes examination of Frances Wright, Lucy Stone, and other key suffragists, assessment of the inclusion and exclusion of women in the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and critical interrogation of “working-class women employed as telephone operators in New York in 1919” (18). Sutton orients these diverse case studies around her discussion of the statue that graces the cover of her book: the “Portrait Monument to Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony.” A gift from the National Woman’s Party bestowed to the American public in 1921, the statue was consigned to the basement of the U.S. Capitol—the “Capitol’s crypt”—by congressional decree in 1963 after the basement was remodeled and opened for public display (5–6). Sutton describes her own journey down into the crypt as one dig site in her archeology of rhetoric. In later chapters she proceeds up through the rotunda, into the material and historical spaces that comprise the rest of her project.

If Sutton’s project were an uncomplicated recovery of women’s contributions to...