Conversational Rhetoric: The Rise and Fall of a Women's Tradition, 1600-1900

Elocution: Sentimental Culture and Performing Femininity

105 G 4 Elocution: Sentimental Culture and Performing Femininity By the mid-nineteenth century, conversation as a model of discourse, the gendered nature of communication, and women’s rights to public speaking were intertwined in a transatlantic women’s tradition of rhetoric in women’s rhetorical theory. However, besides conduct rhetoric and defenses of women’s preaching, nineteenth-century women also wrote elocution handbooks that added to this tradition a theoretical consideration of women’s bodies as means of persuasion. These handbooks provided vocal exercises and calisthenics to guide the performance of emotions in public displays such as oral reading and pantomime. As taught to girls and women in the nineteenth century, elocution was preparation for a young lady’s role in conversation, as well, and so conversation was also a model for women’s public elocutionary performance. In the second half of the century, sentimental culture, emphasizing the public display of emotion, was already associated with women. In elocution, the performance of emotion through voice and body, sentimental culture found ideal expression, and the women who took over the teaching of elocution found a new freedom and control over themselves. As Carol Mattingly has observed, the body, because of gendered restrictions on women, was “the greatest barrier women speakers faced” (Appropriate[ing]Dress 135). Despite the association of sentiment and sympathy with gendered constraints on women’s roles in the nineteenth century, elocution offered women an avenue into public speaking and a means of powerful physical training that countered the passivity of the nineteenth-century ideal of delicate femininity. In elocution handbooks, women reimagined women’s bodies not as weak and soft, but as strong and powerful. After an opening section defining elocution and linking it to sentimental culture, in this chapter I analyze elocution texts by four women (with briefer 106 Elocution references to other texts by women), explicating their theories of sentimental performance art and practice: two by Anna Morgan, actress and director, whose treatises discussed elocution as a foundation for dramatics; two by Genevieve Stebbins, forerunner of modern dance, whose many handbooks represented elocution as creative movement; one by Emily Bishop, developer of modern physical education and physical therapy; and two by Hallie Quinn Brown, African American elocutionist and professor at Wilberforce College, whose early handbook offered elocution for parlor and stage performance, and whose later textbook treated elocution as preparation for public speaking.1 These texts were chosen because they represent the major directions that this art of bodily performance and public reading took in the nineteenth century. Elocution and Sentimental Culture Elocution was the most popular form of Anglo-American rhetoric for over a century. In the eighteenth century, as the focus of rhetoric changed from emphasis on the training of public orators to emphasis on the development of taste in the audience, delivery was separated off from rhetoric as a specialized art of oral reading or recitation.2 In this art of elocution, middle-class AngloAmerican vernacular readers were taught correct pronunciation, vocal control , bodily grace, dramatic gesture, and expressive reading. In the eighteenth century, in texts like Thomas Sheridan’s Lectures on Elocution (1762) and John Walker’s Elements of Elocution (1781), the art of reading aloud was developed into a set of rules and exercises as a means of training for public speaking and public entertainment.3 In the nineteenth century, besides Sheridan and Walker, American elocution was influenced primarily by the theories of the French teacher of acting François Delsarte (1811–71), published after his death by his students. Delsarte retained the rules and exercises of traditional elocution, but rationalized them by an epistemology based on Emanuel Swedenborg’s mysticism , applying Swedenborg’s principle of the trinity as basis of all life to the physical, mental, and spiritual effects of elocution.4 By the mid-nineteenth century, elocution permeated middle-class United States culture. Children in public schools studied techniques for reading aloud and presented programs to parents that included recitation and physical movement drills. Printers published collections of poems and excerpts for reading aloud at school or home or on civic occasions. Adults registered for classes and went to lyceums, chautauquas, and public lecture halls to hear famous elocutionists . Middle-class families read to each other for evening entertainment and pronounced “pieces” for family or church gatherings, and women put on public performances, reciting literary passages and performing pantomimes or synchronized physical movement pageants.5 Elocution...