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

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
Open Access: Closed
Topics: argument

Citation Context

Cited by in this index (2)

Rohan (2023)

There Went the Neighborhood: Spatial Rhetoric, Spatial Occupation, Regendering …

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García et al. (2022)

Deep Rhetoricity as Methodological Grounds for Unsettling the Settled

College Composition and Communication

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A Woman’s Place Is in the School: Rhetorics of Gendered Space in Nineteenth-Cen…

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Constructing essences: Ethos and the postmodern subject of feminism

Rhetoric Review
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<i>Ethos</i>as location: New sites for understanding discursive authority

Rhetoric Review

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