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41 G 2 Conduct Book Rhetoric: Constructing a Theory of Feminine Discourse In Jane Austen’s Lady Susan (1793–94?), the wicked Lady Susan declares to her friend, “If I am vain of anything, it is of my eloquence. Consideration and esteem as surely follow command of language, as admiration waits on beauty. And here I have opportunity enough for the exercise of my talent, as the chief of my time is spent in conversation” (64). While Lady Susan would have been viewed in her time as inappropriately masculine in her claim to excellence, she nevertheless is in keeping with her society’s understanding of women’s roles when she cites conversation as the arena in which a woman exercises her eloquence . This chapter examines the ways that women constructed a transatlantic women’s tradition of conversational rhetoric, a theory of feminine discourse, in the works of Hannah More, Lydia Sigourney, Eliza Farrar, Florence Hartley, and Jennie Willing. The history of the teaching of rhetoric and development of theory to serve new cultural contexts in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has emphasized men’s education and men’s theory. The trends and categories advanced by the canonical histories of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and American rhetoric do not adequately account for the genres and strategies emphasized in women’s rhetorical theory. Conduct book rhetoric grew out of and contributed to this culture of continuing education and women’s clubs. Since the mid-1990s, feminists have recovered some of the history of the practice of women’s speech making and composition.1 But there has been relatively little consideration of conduct book rhetoric. This chapter remedies that lack, surveying the Anglo-American women’s tradition of conduct rhetoric that was established in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. I have chosen to treat conduct books by Hannah 42 Conduct Book Rhetoric More and Lydia Sigourney because they were the most popular British and American conduct book writers and because they demonstrate the origins of a women’s transatlantic network and tradition. I have chosen the conduct books by Eliza Farrar, Florence Hartley, and Jennie Willing because they demonstrate the development of a self-consciously feminine rhetoric and because these texts mark the limits of the range of politics for the genre. Beginning with More in Britain, and Sigourney in the United States (who was strongly influenced by More), conduct books by women theorized women’s cultural roles in writing and speaking and taught women conversation skills and letter writing. Women’s conduct book rhetoric developed a gendered theory of feminine rhetoric, constructed a women’s tradition by citing other women’s handbooks, offered advice on domestic uses of rhetoric and composition, elaborated a theory of conversation as a foundation of all discourse, and imagined discourses as collaborative and consensual even if deferring to masculine superiority. These women writers of conduct books promoted women’s education and theorized the gender constraints of speech and writing as means to persuasion, while not challenging these constraints outright until after 1850. Although women’s rhetorical role in this literature is, as Nan Johnson has pointed out, narrowly defined by their household roles as domestic or parlor rhetoric (Gender 15), conduct book rhetoric is nevertheless important for its development of detailed theories of letter writing and conversation (especially the art of listening and the sophistics of conversation). Moreover, the conservative role allotted to women in conduct rhetoric is not uncontested, as we shall see in analyses of the moderating influence of Lydia Sigourney and the radicalizing theory of Jennie Willing. Conduct Literature and Its Relationship to Rhetoric Late medieval and early modern courtesy literature, advice to princes and aristocrats on how to behave at court (such as Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the Body Politic or Baldassare Castiglione’s The Courtier) eventually migrated down the social ladder because of increasing social mobility during the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries in Europe and America, and from mainly male to also female readership. Madeleine de Scudéry’s Conversations, for example, is courtesy literature on its way to conduct book. From the late sixteenth century to the present, conduct books have advised the middle classes on how to behave: how to be good wives or husbands, how to educate oneself, how to converse and compose convincing letters, how to impress people with one’s knowledge, how to behave socially, how to succeed and appear to be a member of a superior class. In the seventeenth...

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