In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

4 The Building—of the Future The end is not yet in sight, but it cannot be far away. —Lucy Stone . . . you pass under a bridge . . . and all of a sudden . . . you are in the Woman ’s Building . . . and you know that in what seemed like one step you’ve passed out o’ darkness and into the light. —Clara Burnham The road before us is shorter than the road behind. —Lucy Stone In the last chapter I discovered Frances Wright in the house of rhetoric. I began moving down the halls and eventually came to Lucy Stone. Meeting up with Lucy Stone meant another trip to Washington, D.C. At the Library of Congress, I read some of the speeches and private letters she had written and that were written to her. Using Lucy Stone as a placeholder of women’s rise in the house of rhetoric, I left the library around noon for a walk. As luck would have it, the Capitol is close by just as it starts to rain. As I enter the Capitol, I am in another time and place. It is 1893. I am standing in the “White City,” a nickname for a group of five white buildings that comprise the main area—the Court of Honor— of the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. What propels me from the Capitol to the “White City” is the imagination of the “Traveler” (William Dean Howells’s disguise) who visited the fair and wrote about it. Upon his arrival, the Traveler said, it is as if the Capitol in Washington, D.C., “had set sail” and “landed” on the shore of Lake Michigan.1 I am not all that surprised, therefore, when the Capitol turns into a sailboat that washes me ashore at the fair’s main gate. For the character called the Traveler, the connection between the two places is architectural. The Traveler made the metaphoric leap from the Capitol to the “White City” based on architectural appearances. The Capitol is white and the buildings of the “White City” are white. Thus they connect in time and space through color. But there is a deeper underlying architec- 90 / Chapter 4 tural connection between them. This is the architects’ conception of civic space based on a model of civic exchange. Therein is the house of rhetoric. Everything— and I do mean everything—is meant to promote a people’s experience of the civic realm.2 As I set up my stay (actually a stay in two spaces), the fair and the house of rhetoric—I continue to use two kinds of movements—that of going up and down signified by the staircase—to trace the path of women from within. Unlike the Capitol that gave me access to the house of rhetoric before, there is no staircase in the space of the fair proper; rather there is the projection of a hierarchy in the conceived space of the fairgrounds. Arranged by those in power, the buildings create an order as well as order the fairgoers’ experience that is akin to walking up and down stairs. As I make the hierarchical projection visible, I stage the two kinds of movements. Here is how the movement generating women’s access in the house of rhetoric looks in the fair proper. Women have for the very first time their own building —the Woman’s Building3 —for the official display of their accomplishments. In fact, it is billed as a major “discovery of women.” As one woman put it at the building’s dedication ceremony: “Even more important than the discovery of Columbus , which we are gathered together to celebrate, is the fact that the General Government has just discovered women.”4 This new mode of inclusion within the fair represents upward movement—like going up the stairs in the house. As I turn to the Woman’s Building and follow a particular tropical movement associated with metonymical addition, I feature a productive change of relation between women and rhetoric. The indecent epithets used to speak of women’s presence as leaders are rotated far out of range to warrant any impact. So how are women turned down the stairs? Using the classification system as key indicators of the development of the denial of women’s authority, the next stage features the tropical action called hypallage. To banner it as the changeling is useful because it exposes both sides of the action of exchange and its effects. One side of the...

Share