Stowe, Dickinson, and the Rhetoric of Modernism

TLDR: Rhetoric analysis, properly construed, can mediate these theoretical differences and draw a sharper picture of the nineteenth-century female literary voice than one stressing the thematic or formal categories on which literary history, even revisionist literary history has often depended as mentioned in this paper.

Abstract: The work of nineteenth-century American women writers influenced the development and shape of literary modernism to an extraordinary extent. Yet that influence is hatd to describe in a manner which does justice to the disparate perspectives proposed by feminist scholars: on the one hand the muting of Victorian women asserted by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in The Madwoman in the Attic, and on the other Nina Baym's argument that women \"dominated\" the \"literary marketplace\" from mid-nineteenth century on (50); on the one hand Elaine Showalter's identification of female expressivity with a \"wild zone\" of discourse outside cultural sanctions, and on the other the dissatisfaction of feminist critics like Elisabeth Meese with essentialist theories of linguistic sexual difference; on the one hand the call for canon reformation (Lillian Robinson, Jane Tompkins), and on the other condescension toward the popular, sentimental, or domestic nature of much nineteenth-century literature by women (Ann Douglas). I believe that rhetorical analysis, properly construed, can mediate these theoretical differences and draw a sharper picture of the nineteenth-century female literary voice than one stressing the thematic or formal categories on which literary history, even revisionist literary history, has often depended. In so doing, it reveals lines of filiation among women writers as different as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Emily Dickinson. Rhetoric addresses a concern raised by Baym in explaining why she doesn't \"do feminist literary theory\": \"it becomes clear that the theory of women's language is closely tied to a theory of the feminine person-