Rhetoric Review Apr 2021

Haunting Women’s Public Memory: Ethos, Space, and Gender in the Winchester Mystery House

Amy J. Lueck Santa Clara University

Abstract

This article examines the rhetorical framing of San Jose’s “Winchester Mystery House” house tour to consider the role of spatiality in shaping the ethos and subsequent public remembrance of women. Built in the late nineteenth-century by the heiress to the Winchester Rifle Company fortune, the sprawling Victorian mansion is now a popular tourist attraction that has become a metonym for the architect herself, whose memory remains shrouded in stories of séances, seclusion, and mystery. The article traces the image of Winchester as a bizarre and spooky widow to the public tour and the spatial rhetorics of her house itself. The house challenges our limited notions of space—particularly domestic space—with implications for other sites of women’s public memory and the ethos of the woman rhetor.

Journal
Rhetoric Review
Published
2021-04-03
DOI
10.1080/07350198.2021.1883832
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Open Access
Closed
Topics
rhetorical criticism argument gender and writing place and space
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Citation Context

Cited by in this index (2)

  1. Rohan (2023)
    There Went the Neighborhood: Spatial Rhetoric, Spatial Occupation, Regendering …
    Rhetoric Review
  2. García et al. (2022)
    Deep Rhetoricity as Methodological Grounds for Unsettling the Settled
    College Composition and Communication

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  5. Dickinson Greg (2010)
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  1. ——— (2006)
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CrossRef global citation count: 2 View in citation network → Build reading path →

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