Antebellum American Women’s Poetry: A Rhetoric of Sentiment by Wendy Dasler Johnson
Abstract
Reviews Wendy Dasler Johnson, Antebellum American Women's Poetry: A Rhetoric of Sentiment, Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2016. 265 pp. ISBN: 9780809335008 Sentimental poetry is not a common subject of rhetorical analysis. Nor is it a highly regarded literary form. However, Wendy Dasler Johnson argues that for a large number of antebellum American women, sentimental poetry served as an important rhetorical space where they could voice their opinions on social and moral issues. Specifically, Johnson presents a deep and focused analysis of the sentimental verse of antebellum America's three most popular female poets: Lydia Huntley Sigourney, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Julia Ward Howe. Thanks to three decades of feminist recovery scholarship, Sigourney, Harper, and Howe are not entirely obscure figures in literary and rhetorical histories. Scholars of nineteenth-century American literature have recovered the writing of these three women, and feminist historians of rhetoric have recognized their rhetorical accomplishments as reformers in education, abo lition, temperance, and suffrage. However, their sentimental poetry remains a blind spot in both literary and rhetorical scholarship. While rhetorical scho lars do not usually consider poetry as part of these women's rhetorical oeuvre, literary scholars have struggled to analyze their verse. Johnson quotes (p. 1) the lament of literary scholar Cheryl Walker, who, upon the rediscovery of antebellum American women's sentimental poetry, said, "The problem is, we don't know how to read their poems." Johnson claims that a rhetorical framework is the solution to this problem. A literary/rhetorical divide has marginalized women's sentimental poetry in both literary and rhetorical his tory, and Johnson's study actively traverses this divide. To recover antebellum women's sentimental verse, Johnson argues that poetry, especially sentimental poetry, is a rhetorical genre. "[M]any hold to a modernist view," Johnson writes, "that literature by definition makes no arguments" (p. 4). However, nineteenth-century Americans, influenced by the belletrism and faculty psychology found in the rhetorical theory of George Campbell and Hugh Blair, understood poetry as a sub category of rhetoric, and they valued sentimentalism as part of the process of persuasion. Citing Campbell, Johnson demonstrates how eighteenthand nineteenth-century rhetorical theory linked "'sentiment to moral Rhetorica, Vol. XXXVII, Issue 2, pp. 207-212. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 15338541 . © 2019 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www. ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2019.37.2.207. 208 RHETORICA and 'sensible/ not to an excess of feeling" (p. 7). As Campbell explains, "what is addressed solely to the moral powers of the mind, is not so prop erly denominated the pathetic, as the sentimental."1 Thus, as Johnson concludes, poetry is a valid rhetorical genre, and sentimentalism is a rhetor ical appeal that "works alongside pathos or persuasion of public feeling" to "invok[e] arguments about ethics, rational values, and judgments" (p. 18). Eventually, sentimentalism "got linked to women pejoratively," alongside the rise of women's literacy and the establishment of elite, white, male English departments (pp. 7-8). This feminization of sentimental verse played no small part in the marginalization of the genre. However, as John son demonstrates, in early nineteenth-century America, poetry was a valid rhetorical genre, and sentimentalism was considered a masculine discourse, which women co-opted in order to write about public issues. True to the rhetorical nature of her project, Johnson divides her study into three main parts: "Logos" (or rhetorical aims), "Ethos" (writing perso nae), and "Pathos" (audience appeals). In each section, Johnson offers anal yses informed by literary research, eighteenth-century rhetorical theory, and postmodern theories of semiotics that work to foreground the rhetoric of sentimentalism in the verse of Sigourney, Harper, and Howe. In Part 1, which consists of one chapter, Johnson examines the "reasoning and theo ries of persuasion" that these three women use to justify their right and their duty to write (p. 12). According to Johnson, sentimental logos does not rely on syllogism but rather is found in sentimental poets' use...
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- Rhetorica
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- 2019-03-01
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- 10.1353/rht.2019.0023
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