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Queering Romantic Engagement in the Postal Age: A Rhetorical Education: Notes

Queering Romantic Engagement in the Postal Age: A Rhetorical Education
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table of contents
  1. Cover Page
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright Page
  4. Dedication
  5. Contents
  6. Series Editor’s Preface
  7. Acknowledgments
  8. Prologue
  9. Introduction: Beyond Civic Engagement
    1. Genres for Romantic Epistolary Rhetoric
      1. Heteronormative Genre Instruction and Queer Practices
      2. Epistolary Address, Exchange, and Genre-Queer Practices
      3. Romantic Letters as Epistolary Rhetoric
    2. Education, Gender, and Sexuality in the Postal Age
      1. Letter-Writing Instruction during Rhetoric’s Period of Decline
      2. Gender, Letters, and Nineteenth-Century Women’s Rhetoric
      3. Same-Sex Romantic Friendships before Sexual Identity Categories
    3. Expanding Histories of Rhetorical Education for Civic and Romantic Engagement
  10. Chapter 1: “The language of the heart”: Genre Instruction in Heteronormative Relations
    1. Complete Letter Writers
    2. Genre Conventions in Heteronormative Models
      1. Romantic Letters and Writing from the Heart
      2. Epistolary Address and the Gendered Coupling of Romantic Relations
      3. Letter Pacing and the Exercise of Restraint
      4. Rhetorical Purpose and the Marriage Telos
    3. Invention Strategies with Queer Effects
      1. Copying from Others’ Hearts
      2. Category-Crossing Forms of Address
      3. Letter Writing with Urgency and Intensity
      4. Repurposing the Romantic Subgenre
    4. Imagining Letter-Writing Manuals as Pedagogical Failures
  11. Chapter 2: “To address you My Husband”: Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus’s Queer Epistolary Exchange
    1. Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus’s Correspondence
    2. Queering Genre Conventions within Same-Sex Epistolary Rhetoric
      1. Romantic Address across Categories of Gender and Relationship
      2. Epistolary Exchange with Urgency and Intensity
      3. Repurposing to Erotic and Political Ends
    3. Rhetorical Strategies of Invention for Adapting the Language of the Heart
      1. Composing with Language of the Heart from Poetry
      2. Composing about Language of the Heart from the Novel
    4. Reading Romantic Letters as Learned and Crafted Epistolary Rhetoric
  12. Chapter 3: “Somehow or other, queer in the extreme”: Albert Dodd’s Civic Training and Genre-Queer Practices
    1. Albert Dodd’s Multigenre Epistolary Rhetoric
    2. Classically Modeled Rhetorical Education for Civic Engagement
      1. Orientation to Civic Participation
      2. Broad Study of “Rhetorical” and “Literary” Genres
      3. Practice with Oratory and Writing
    3. Genre-Queer Practices for Romantic Engagement
      1. Composing Self-Rhetorics on Literary Representations of Same-Sex Erotic Relations
      2. Shifting Genres from Commonplace Book to Diary
      3. Inventing Romantic Epistolary Address and Exchange through Diary Writing
      4. Mixing Epistolary and Poetic Address and Exchange
    4. Rhetorically Situating Letters within Networks of Related Genres
  13. Conclusion: Toward Queer Failure
  14. Notes
  15. Works Cited
  16. Index

Page 109 →Notes

Prologue

  1. 1. The name for Godey’s “changed … numerous times during its tenure” (Mahoney 415 n. 12). The story “Eliza Farnham; or, The Love Letters” consists of two parts: “Part the First” (217–20) and “Part the Second” (245–50). Published under the name “Miss Leslie,” the story has been attributed to the conduct writer Eliza Leslie, whose manual Miss Leslie’s Behaviour Book (1839) includes a chapter on letter writing. Selections from Eliza Leslie reprints the story (81–114). For discussion of Leslie’s conduct writing as well as Godey’s, see Peary.

Introduction

  1. 1. The emphasis is in the original here and throughout, except where otherwise noted.
  2. 2. Ronald has challenged this common representation of classical rhetoric.
  3. 3. Enoch made this point as well (6).
  4. 4. See also Bacon and McClish; Bordelon; Gold and Hobbs; McClish; Rothermel (“Sphere of Noble Action”); Royster; Stock; Stuckey; Wetzel. On the persistence of citizenship as a key concept within present-day pedagogy, see Wan.
  5. 5. While these lists are by no means exhaustive, other queer rhetorics scholarship that is historical or pedagogical in orientation includes Alexander and Gibson; Alexander and Rhodes; Alexander and Wallace; Branstetter; Brookey; Carstarphen; Cavallaro; Cloud; Cram; Gibson, Marinara, and Meem; Gross and Alexander; Lipari; Monson and Rhodes; Narayan; Sloop, “Lucy Lobdell’s Queer Circumstances”; VanHaitsma; Watts. Cox and Faris’s bibliography accounts further for a range of queer rhetorics scholarship across communication and composition.
  6. 6. Queer scholarship within rhetorical studies also explores the relationship between publicity and privacy (Chavéz, “Beyond Inclusion”; Cloud; Lipari; Morris, “Introduction”). In insisting on the public nature of privacy, queer theorists and rhetoricians continue a long tradition within feminist activism and interdisciplinary feminist scholarship of studying the ways notions of “private” and “public” restrict women’s power, sexuality, and movement (Elshtain; Fraser; C. Griffin; Johnson, Gender and Rhetorical Space). Page 110 →Simplistic divisions between “public” and “private” are challenged within literary, cultural, and social histories of the letter as well (Decker; Favret; Gilroy and Verhoeven; Hewitt).
  7. 7. The distribution of civil rights via marriage is a central issue in queer politics. Much queer scholarship is critical of liberal assimilationist political projects that attempt to secure rights largely on behalf of middle-class and white citizens of the United States in ways that, within late capitalism, recuperate liberal political theory and its emphasis on individualism, privacy, and choice. These political projects work at the expense of many people within and beyond the current borders of the United States. As Eng has stated, “queer liberalism’s claims to state-sanctioned rights, recognitions, and privileges implicitly reinforce a normative politics, not just of family and kinship, but of U.S. citizenship” (28). Yet it is often the case that, as Eng admitted, borrowing the language of Spivak, “we ‘cannot not want’” the rights and recognitions that these political projects promise (25).
  8. 8. In Berlant and Warner’s terms, the “official national culture” of the United States has been constructed as heterosexual on the basis of ideas about privacy that “cloak its sexualization of national membership” (547). They have called this construction “national heterosexuality,” explaining that it “is the mechanism by which a core national culture can be imagined as a sanitized … space of pure citizenship” (549). In contrast with how this national culture is imagined, “intimacy is itself publicly mediated” (553). On nationality and sexuality, also see Berlant, Queen of America; Cvetkovich; Parker, Russo, Sommer, and Yaeger; Radhakrishnan.
  9. 9. Other critical perspectives regarding concepts of citizenship within rhetorical studies include Rufo and Atchison; Wan.
  10. 10. Scholarship on constitutive rhetoric includes Anderson; Charland; Clark; Jasinski; C. Olson. Olson has outlined the “two overlapped but distinct traditions” of constitutive rhetoric, noting how they build on the work of Burke as well as Althusser (86–87).
  11. 11. It would be a mistake, in other words, to merely shift attention away from civic engagement, toward romantic engagement, as though the two were distinct. As Cloud has argued, it is problematic to “valorize” practices deemed “private” without simultaneously attending to their “relevance” for what gets defined as “public” and “political” (26).
  12. 12. For an overview of rhetorical genre theory, see Bawarshi and Reiff.
  13. 13. Here I paraphrase Berlant and Warner, who defined heteronormativity as “the institutions, structures of understanding, and practical orientations that make heterosexuality seem not only coherent—that is, organized as a sexuality—but also privileged” (548 n. 2; ctd. in Morris, “Introduction” 16 n. 17).
  14. 14. Moreover, contemporary practices associated with LGBTQ life within late capitalism may be “homonormative” (Conrad; Dinshaw et al.; Duggan; Eng; Muñoz; Stryker). As Hoang explained, in conversation with Halberstam, “There is also a homonormative time line. We pity those who come out late in life, do not find a long-term partner before they lose their looks, or continue to hit the bars when they are the bartender’s father’s age. We create our own temporal normativity outside the heteronormative family” (Dinshaw et al. 183–84).
  15. 15. Alexander and Rhodes have defined queer rhetoric as “self-conscious and critical engagement with normative discourses of sexuality in the public sphere that exposes their Page 111 →naturalization and torques them to create different or counter-discourses, giving voice and agency to multiple and complex sexual experiences” (“Queer Rhetoric” n. pag.; see also Sexual Rhetorics). On the distinction between queer practice and identity within queer theory and especially historiography, see Butler (“Critically Queer”; Gender Trouble); Chauncey; Foucault; Halperin (How to Do the History); Hansen (“‘No Kisses’”); Katz; Rotundo (“Romantic Friendship”).
  16. 16. On another related genre not considered here—the “crush note,” usually exchanged at women’s schools and colleges—see Horowitz; Inness.
  17. 17. For other formulations of genre in relation to queer lives and practices, see Gardiner; Karkulehto; Lazar. Of particular note in rhetoric and communication is Rand’s theorization of form and queerness in relation to agency.
  18. 18. When developing his concept of “genre-queer,” Ali cited Wilchins’s discussion of normative gender systems and binaries, which draws on Butler’s theory of gender performativity (Ali 29; Wilchins 27–28). See also Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination”; “Genrequeer”; Hawkins; Nestle, Wilchins, and Howell.
  19. 19. Nor do I mean to imply that writers engaged in queer rhetorical practices hold a monopoly on inventive challenges to generic categories. Indeed, as Singer and Walker have insisted, “We organize our textbooks and courses into tidy generic categories, but literary genres are notoriously difficult to theorize or define. We think of genres as fixed and clearly bounded when in fact transgression is the norm … we would argue that there is no such thing as non-hybrid genre” (3).
  20. 20. See Donawerth; Gage; Johnson; Mahoney; Poster and Mitchell; Schultz; Spring; Trasciatti.
  21. 21. Garlinger explained further that “the letter functions as an open closet—or, at least, a door to the closet—to recuperate, at moments ahistorically, queer subjectivities from the past” (189 n. 1). In other words, “The letter replicates the tropological dynamics of the closet as a space that contains intimate thoughts and secret desires, hidden behind the protective veil of an envelope” (x). However, “This is not to suggest that letters are more authentic or sincere [than autobiography], but rather that notions of authenticity and sincerity are fundamentally different for letter writing” (xvii). See also Faderman, To Believe in Women; Jones.
  22. 22. It is easy to call to mind the most flagrant instances: someone locates letters that “prove” a person was gay, or in a same-sex romantic friendship, or in a romantic friendship that was not sexual. For example, controversies over how Eleanor Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln are remembered turn in part on alterative interpretations of their letters (Cloud; Morris, “My Old Kentucky Homo”).
  23. 23. In the metaphoric sense, the rhetoric of courtship is for identification within communication that requires “transcending … social estrangement” between different social classes (Burke 208). In the literal sense, the rhetoric of courtship is for transcending estrangement within the process of romantic courting. This estrangement may include the “mystery” involved in any courtship, though Burke focused especially on the social mystery between “different kinds of beings,” including differently sexed or gendered beings, who court each other (208–09). For scholarship on Burke’s metaphoric rhetoric of Page 112 →courtship, see Clair and Anderson; Heath; Kraemer. On Burke’s literal rhetoric of courtship, see Derrin; Nelson; Scruggs; Sedinger; Thames; Zwagerman.
  24. 24. Here I have in mind Plato’s Phaedrus and Gorgias. Kelley focused on Phaedrus and Symposium, concluding that “The ratio developing out of both dialogues is this: Love is to seduction as Truth is to rhetoric. Rhetoric is the semblance of wisdom as seduction is the semblance of love” (79). In Ballif’s account of Western rhetoric’s dismissal of sophistry and women, she has offered a poststructuralist seduction away from distinctions between truth and deception. See also Blythin; Brockriede; Erickson and Thomson; Tiles; Weaver.
  25. 25. Bates’s literary history clarifies how the meaning of the verb “to court” is culturally and historically specific. Older meanings included the courtship of “being at court,” “being a courtier,” “suing for favor,” and “behaving as courtiers should behave.” The more “modern meaning of courtship—‘wooing someone’”—emerged in the sixteenth century and has come to include “the interactive behavior and ritual between two people who are emotionally and romantically engaged” (1, 6). For scholarship that engages with Bates’s conception of the rhetoric of courtship, see Lee; Runge; Sedinger.
  26. 26. As Zwagerman has explained, “courtship, in the rhetorical, Burkean sense, need not be manipulative” (147).
  27. 27. In this respect, my methodology is inspired by Buchanan’s study of delivery: she considered both how delivery was taught through the rhetorical education of elocutionary manuals and how delivery was enacted through the rhetorical practices of specific speakers.
  28. 28. In addition to the cultural historians and rhetorical theorists cited throughout, Barthes and Derrida have theorized epistolary writing, especially in terms of presence and absence as well as the instability of gender and sexuality. See Ballif (92); Davidson (9); Decker (14); Favret (13, 18, 20); Garlinger (xl); Gilroy and Verhoeven (7); Kauffman (xli, 317); Love (32).
  29. 29. Gaul and Harris and Schultz have also discussed postal reform. For additional information about the U.S. Post Office, see Decker; Fuller; Henkin; John.
  30. 30. See Halloran; Halloran and Clark. Other complicating accounts of these nineteenth-century shifts include Bordelon (“‘Resolved’”); Brereton; Connors (Composition-Rhetoric); Crowley; DePalma; Horner; Johnson (Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric); Kitzhaber; Legg; Mendenhall; Ricker (“‘Ars Stripped of Praxis’”); Whitburn.
  31. 31. For more on the place of letter writing within the history of Western rhetoric, see Bannet; S. Carr; Murphy; Poster; Poster and Mitchell; M. Richardson; Sullivan.
  32. 32. On increased access to higher education, see Brereton; Carr, Carr, and Schultz; Connors (Composition-Rhetoric); Gold; Kates; Kitzhaber.
  33. 33. See also Schultz (123).
  34. 34. On women’s theories of conversation as a rhetorical practice, see Donawerth (Conversational Rhetoric).
  35. 35. As Favret, along with Gilroy and Verhoeven, have shown, this fiction of the letter was instantiated by literary critics constructing a relatively limited archive that consisted mainly of eighteenth-century English and French epistolary novels—ones primarily written by men and about women heroines, such as in Clarissa, Pamela, Julie, and Evelina. More recent scholarship has constructed a broader archive inclusive of other kinds Page 113 →of epistolary novels, literature, and actual letters that represent both women and men composing epistolary rhetoric. Scholars thus have come to more complex conclusions, exploding the presumptive association between women and letters and revealing it to be a fiction. In the field of rhetoric and composition, S. Miller has also challenged the association between women and letters that saturates scholarship on the nineteenth century.
  36. 36. See also Chauncey; Halperin (How to Do the History); Katz; Rotundo (“Romantic Friendship”).
  37. 37. See Sedgwick; Somerville.
  38. 38. For continued citations of Faderman and Smith-Rosenberg’s early work, see Rotundo (“Romantic Friendship”); Seidman. The earlier accounts have been complicated by Smith-Rosenberg herself (“Discourses of Sexuality and Subjectivity”), as well as Comment (“‘When it ceases’”); Diggs; Sedgwick; Somerville; Vicinus (Intimate Friends; “‘They Wonder’”); Wood.
  39. 39. Halberstam also made this argument (“Perverse Presentism”).
  40. 40. See, for example, Cloud; Diggs; Faderman (Surpassing the Love of Men); Morris (“My Old Kentucky Homo”); Smith-Rosenberg (“Diaries and Letters”; “Female World”).
  41. 41. Examples of what Diggs pointed out can be found in Faderman (Surpassing the Love of Men 18–19, 250–51, 414).
  42. 42. See Lystra; Rothman.

Chapter 1: “The language of the heart”

  1. 1. Letters were frequently published in periodicals, and, regardless of the intended purpose of such publication, it provided readers with sample letters from which to learn. In addition, my research has uncovered hundreds of nineteenth-century periodical articles about letter writing. For analysis of periodicals that taught letter writing, see Johnson (Gender and Rhetorical Space); Mahoney.
  2. 2. Mahoney has noted that women learned to write letters through “even the sensational literature of the period” (411). This relationship between letters, literature, epistolary fiction, and cultural pedagogy has been extensively analyzed by literary critics and historians (Altman; Bray; Cook; Favret; Gilroy and Verhoeven; Hewitt; Kauffman; Zaczek). Nineteenth-century letter-writing manuals also pointed to the learning of epistolary rhetoric from fiction (Chesterfield’s 55–56; Fashionable American Letter Writer 167).
  3. 3. One example is Montague’s letters and epistle verses, which were collected and reprinted in nineteenth-century New York and Philadelphia. Articles on letter writing that represented Montague as the genius of female letter writing in the English language—and thus a pedagogical model—were published by a range of periodicals (“Art. XXII”; “Letter Writing” (a); “Letter-Writing” (b); “Odds and Ends”; “On Letters and Letter-Writers”; “Reviews”; “Woman’s Genius”).
  4. 4. The treatise that most influenced letter-writing instruction as a feature of college-level rhetorical education is Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres. The popularity of Blair’s rhetoric played a role in the inclusion of letter writing within nineteenth-century textbooks designed for classroom use. Some composition textbooks focused entirely on letter writing, such as Loomis’s Practical Letter Writing (1897). More commonly, textbooks Page 114 →included sections on letter writing; an example is Newman’s A Practical System of Rhetoric (1836). This textbook was incredibly popular—by one account “first published in 1827 and in its twentieth printing by 1846” (Berlin 36), by another “the most widely used rhetoric written in America between 1820 and 1860, going through at least sixty ‘editions’ or printings” (Connors, Composition-Rhetoric 220). In Gage’s survey of almost two hundred composition textbooks, 52 percent included letter-writing instruction (201). Gage concluded that it was “a considerable and consistent feature of composition instruction throughout the period, though clearly a dispensable one” (201).
  5. 5. See also Cavallaro; Enoch; VanHaitsma (“Romantic Correspondence”).
  6. 6. Other histories of Western letter-writing instruction include Bruce; Chartier, Dauphin, and Boureau; Murphy.
  7. 7. These definitions can be found in Bannet (44, 277); Blair (346); Masten (378). Paraphrased versions of Blair’s definition also appear in manuals throughout the nineteenth century (Business and Social Correspondence 60; Hardie 1; Loomis 7). Manuals that copied other lines from Blair include How to Write Letters (Westlake 12–14) and The Useful Letter Writer (x–xi, xxi–xxii).
  8. 8. The manual contents I cite throughout my analysis are characteristic of the broader sample, except where otherwise indicated. Many model letters were compiled and reprinted across manuals, as was common within nineteenth-century textbook production (Bannet; S. Carr; Nietz). The Fashionable [American] Letter Writer was especially popular up to and at midcentury. According to Johnson, it was “first published in 1818” and “went through twenty-seven editions into 1860,” making it “The most successful American letter-writing manual for over half a century” (Gender and Rhetorical Space 189 n. 5). Another manual I cite frequently, Chesterfield’s, was “modestly successful … at midcentury” and “went through three editions between 1857 and 1860” (189 n. 5). J. Carr has cautioned, however, that it is difficult to pinpoint the popularity of nineteenth-century manuals and textbooks: “The numbers of textbook copies sold in the nineteenth century is always an elusive bit of ‘knowledge.’ Scholars propose a figure, based on extrapolations from known editions and school populations, publishers’ blurbs, or early bibliographic records” (228 n. 48). Yet, as Carr demonstrated through examples of specific books, the sales figures proposed on the basis of such extrapolation vary widely, as do claims about popularity.
  9. 9. It is problematic to use the term “American” in reference only to people living in (or citizens of) what is now the United States, because such usage ignores people throughout the Americas in ways complicit with colonialism. Where I use the term, I do so to underscore how letter-writing manuals from the nineteenth century presented their pedagogy as distinctively “American.”
  10. 10. The Useful Letter Writer distinguishes between letters “From a young Tradesman” and those “From a young Gentleman” (v). Similarly, The American Lady’s and Gentleman’s Modern Letter Writer [185] distinguishes between multiple romantic letters from “A Gentleman” and one letter from “A Man Servant to the Object of His Affections,” which clearly teaches class-specific ways of maintaining and cultivating same-class romantic relationships (43–44).
  11. Page 115 →11. Conquergood made a similar point in his work on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century elocutionary manuals, which he understands as teaching elocution “redefined as the performativity of whiteness naturalized” (325).
  12. 12. While Johnson realized “the crucial function of the courtship letter,” it was beyond the scope of her study to emphasize instruction in this subgenre and its gendering of romantic relations (Gender and Rhetorical Space 96). Thus her most extended attention to romantic epistolary rhetoric came in an endnote, where she acknowledged that manuals typically included instruction in appropriate ways for unmarried women and men to address each other (188). Similarly, Mahoney mentioned a manual focused on teaching “love-letters,” but only in passing (414). Bannet and Trasciatti did briefly consider nineteenth-century manual instruction in romantic letter writing (198+; 85–88), and S. Miller discussed learning through the practice of romantic letter writing (201–06).
  13. 13. Whereas my study focuses on historically specific genre instruction, Davidson has considered what she framed as timeless about the romantic letter. Explaining that it “is a genre with its own set of rules and conventions,” she asserted, “The variations in the formula that have taken place across centuries and continents and even, surprisingly, across the great divide of the sexes are relatively minor when compared to the features of the love letter that persist relatively unchanged” (8–9). For discussion of specifically nineteenth-century “heterosexual love letters,” see Albertine (141).
  14. 14. See Halttunen; Hewitt; Zaczek.
  15. 15. This series was copied and adapted from Gregory’s A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters, which was published in London (1774) and reprinted in the United States (1834). The series also appeared in other complete letter writers, including The Complete Letter Writer (1811), The Pocket Letter Writer (1840), and The New Parlor Letter Writer [1853]. The New Parlor Letter Writer is named on its inside title page as such and is catalogued by the library as The New Parlor Letter Writing. But the manual is titled The Complete Letter Writer on its outside cover. While there are differences between The Complete Letter Writer and The New Parlor Letter Writer, there are also pages that are exactly alike (such as 68–77; 78–84). In these ways, the models in complete letter writers were not only subject to copying but copied themselves (S. Carr).
  16. 16. Some manuals were more explicit. Letter-Writing Simplified insists that “All letters should be dated” (12). Frost’s explains that “Every letter or note should be carefully dated…. The date of the letter comprises the city or town, state and country in some instances, day of the month, month and year” (Shields 29).
  17. 17. On this point from Halberstam, see also Dunn (“(Queer) Family Time” 137).
  18. 18. While offering a third alternative, Dunn has characterized two general ways that scholars approach queer temporality: as a negative, critical rejection of “reproductive futurism,” following the work of Edelman, or as an affirmation of productively queer alternatives to normative time, following Halberstam as well as Muñoz, Freeman, and Freccero (Dunn, “(Queer) Family” 137). Other queer scholarship important to theorizing queer temporality cited by Dunn includes Boellstorff; Castiglia and Reed; Düttmann; Goltz; Morris (“My Old Kentucky Homo”). Also see the special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies devoted to queer temporalities, especially the introduction by Page 116 →Freeman and roundtable discussion by Dinshaw, Edelman, Ferguson, Freccero, Freeman, Halberstam, Jagose, Nealon, and Nguyen.
  19. 19. This gendering of the models is in line with epistolary novels, which generally represent the gendered seduction of women by men who were “rakes” (Hewitt 44, 124–25; Illouz 46).
  20. 20. In the absence of copyright laws and given limited railroads, roads, and mail services, any printer could copy text from another printer’s book and sell that text locally; books often included material copied and compiled from other books (Nietz 7; see also Bannet; S. Carr).
  21. 21. For further discussion of nineteenth-century invention practices, see Crowley; Rothermel (“Prophets, Friends, Conversationalists”).
  22. 22. Farrar deemed the entire complete letter-writer genre “a serious evil, and one to be guarded against” (vi). Initiating her critique, Farrar remarked on “The numerous editions which the ‘Complete Letter-Writer’ has passed through, and the various forms in which it has, again and again, been presented to the public,” characterizing these editions as marked by “glaring absurdities and gross faults” (v–vi). She claimed that complete letter writers “are filled with absurdities, vulgarisms, and the flattest nonsense that was ever offered to the public, as a guide to letter-writing” (125). Vulgarity was also an accusation made by The Epistolary Guide (1817): “The various works, called Complete Letter Writers, are well known for the grossness of their matter, as well as the vulgarity of their manner. … Even a volume of essays would answer a better purpose; because it would not mislead, by pretending to exhibit models of genuine letters” (Hardie vii). The Complete American Letter-Writer simply refers to other complete letter writers as “ridiculous trash” and “ignorant productions” (iii).
  23. 23. The Art of Correspondence warns, “Those who attempt to copy wholly the letters of another will find themselves in the position of the rustic who copied a proposal of marriage from a published Letter-Writer and sent it to a young lady, who replied that the negative answer could be found in the same book from which he copied the proposal” (Locke 11–12). A similar story is told in How to Write Letters (Westlake 84–85) and Letter-Writing Simplified (2).
  24. 24. A twentieth-century manual, Putnam’s Phrase Book: An Aid to Social Letter Writing (1922), offers remarkably detailed instruction for invention through the copying and adapting of models (E. Carr iv, 63, 169).
  25. 25. The section on letter writing in Farrar’s conduct manual advises young women that “All kissing and caressing of your female friends should be kept for your hours of privacy, and never be indulged in before gentlemen” (The Young Lady’s Friend 241). For consideration of this line, see Comment (“‘When it ceases’”). On Farrar, see also Donawerth (“Poaching on Men’s Philosophies”); Huh; Schlesinger; Wood.
  26. 26. In rare cases, manuals even marked the gender of writers and readers with “queer effect.” Garlinger has identified an eighteenth-century manual that “by mistake” included romantic letters written by men to men. Garlinger explained, “The prescriptive function of the letter-writing manual revealed one of the elements that had been eliminated in the process of (mis)categorizing the model letters. The possibility that male letter writers Page 117 →might send missives to other men reveals the extent to which homoeroticism appears only by means of its absence” (xxi).
  27. 27. See also The Useful Letter Writer vii, 159; Turner xiv, 255; The Pocket Letter Writer xvii, 171. It is possible that some model romantic letters were placed within “Miscellaneous” sections due to nineteenth-century printing and textbook production practices. Adding new models to earlier editions could be accomplished more easily through appending them in a new section at the end of the book than by rearranging to categorize each new model within existing sections.
  28. 28. The same cryptogram was reprinted in Locke’s The Art of Correspondence (1884). Here the cryptogram was included in the chapter on romantic letters. Locke offered a longer explanatory title for the letter, though he too emphasized ingenuity: “A letter with a double meaning, showing how an ingenious wife deceived an arbitrary, overbearing husband, who compelled her to show him all her letters” (161, emphasis added).
  29. 29. To view this cryptogram letter, see VanHaitsma (“Queering ‘the language of the heart’”).
  30. 30. Carmichael mentioned “a truly remarkable collection of early-nineteenth-century cryptograms” found among the papers of a retired professor, whose estate also included “private correspondence to the professor from his best friend, interspersed with some titillating although not raunchy gay pictorial pornography” (89). Perhaps the best-known instance of writing in code about same-sex romantic relations is the English gentlewoman Anne Lister’s diary (Pritchard, Fashioning Lives; Vicinus, Intimate Friends; Whitbread, I Know My Own Heart; No Priest but Love). Lister also wrote coded letters to Mariana Belcombe after she married Charles Lawton and he began reviewing all of the women’s correspondence (Vicinus, Intimate Friends 20).
  31. 31. Elsewhere I discuss these feminist methodologies of critical imagination in terms of queer gossip (“Gossip as Rhetorical Methodology”).
  32. 32. Royster expands on this initial definition with Kirsch (71).

Chapter 2: “To address you My Husband”

  1. 1. See Comment (“Dickinson’s Bawdy”); Doyle; Faderman (Surpassing the Love of Men; To Believe in Women); Hart; Katz; Messmer; Morris (“My Old Kentucky Homo”); Norton; Rotundo, “Romantic Friendship”; Smith-Rosenberg; Vicinus.
  2. 2. Also see Newkirk, whose collection consists of romantic letters by African Americans.
  3. 3. My use of the term “everyday” follows Zboray and Zboray (Everyday Ideas xx). I also use the term in the tradition of de Certeau, in that I underscore the tactical creativity and ingenuity of people in queering cultural norms, genre conventions, and generic boundaries as they learned romantic epistolary rhetoric. For characterizations of Brown and Primus’s epistolary practices as “everyday” and “ordinary,” see F. Griffin (4); Hansen (“No Kisses” 179). Other sources on everyday rhetoric include Ackerman; Dickinson; Modesti; Nystrand and Duffy; Sinor; Sloop, “People Shopping.”
  4. 4. Prichard discusses this erasure further in Fashioning Lives: Black Queers and the Politics of Literacy (10, 53, 103–04). Exceptions cited by Pritchard include portions of Page 118 →studies by Malinowitz and by Pough (51). See also Campbell; Chávez (Queer Migration Politics); Morrissey; Nakayama; L. Olson; Patton; Ramirez; Squires and Brouwer; VanHaitsma (“Queering ‘the language of the heart’”; “Romantic Correspondence”); Watts.
  5. 5. Pritchard defined “racialized heteronormativity” as “the racialization of gender and sexual practices that position elite, White, cisgender, male, heterosexuality as the model of normativity and the qualifying standard for national identity within the Western state” (Fashioning Lives 26). In the face of racialized heteronormativity, “restorative literacies are a form of cultural labor through which individuals tactically counter acts of literacy normativity through the application of literacies for self- and communal love” (33).
  6. 6. This letter is from Box I of the Primus Family Papers, held at the Connecticut Historical Society. Box I includes Brown’s letters to Primus, and Box II includes Primus’s letters to family. Within each box, folders are organized by date. I cite letters according to their date.
  7. 7. For more on Primus’s involvement in self-education for racial uplift on behalf of formerly enslaved African Americans, see Beeching (Hopes); F. Griffin; VanHaitsma (“Romantic Correspondence”).
  8. 8. F. Griffin did mention the envelope on the back of which, “in Rebecca’s handwriting, is written: ‘Addie died at home, January 11, 1870’” (235).
  9. 9. The earliest scholarship on Brown and Primus’s letters focused on the history of African Americans in Hartford. White did not go much further than recognizing that the women’s relationship was “particularly close” (“Addie Brown’s Hartford” 57; see also “Rebecca Primus”). Beeching more fully acknowledged their relationship as a “sentimental and erotic connection” (Hopes 141), but maintained that “Whether there was homosexual content is not clear from Addie’s letters” (“Primus Papers” 55).
  10. 10. Hansen first discovered the letters when conducting research for her book, A Very Social Time. Unless otherwise noted, quotations of Hansen are from her essay, “‘No Kisses Is Like Youres.’” Hansen was responsible for having “introduced” F. Griffin to the letters (F. Griffin xiii). Faderman also cited Hansen (To Believe in Women 368).
  11. 11. F. Griffin collected, edited, and offered commentary on Brown and Primus’s correspondence. Griffin highlighted the importance of their letters for addressing silences within the historical record about the “personal and public” lives of “ordinary” black women not self-censoring in order to write for publication or a white audience (4). Griffin’s edited versions of the letters have been cited by R. Harrison and Peiss, and the collection itself has become a subject of analysis by Grasso, who considered how “the letters tell another story as the result of being organized, annotated, placed in the company of other sources, and published in book form” (250).
  12. 12. Hansen explained how the correspondence “fills a gap in the literature about African-American women in the nineteenth century,” because the letters are written by “ordinary women” about their “everyday” lives (178–79). Moreover, the correspondence “fills a gap in the literature” about nineteenth-century romantic friendship between women, which at that point focused almost entirely on white middle-class women (179, 202). Here Hansen cited research on middle-class white women by Cott, Faderman (Surpassing the Love of Men), and Smith-Rosenberg (“Female World”), as well as her own research on working-class white women (Very).
  13. Page 119 →13. For further discussion of the familial terms of address used within romantic letters between women, see Vicinus (Intimate Friends 43–45).
  14. 14. There were, however, same-sex couples in the nineteenth-century United States whose relationships were understood as “marriage” within their local contexts (Cleves).
  15. 15. Brown wrote, “We are to be married at 6 p.m. and leave at 7 whenever take place. Please dont mention to no one” (Oct. 15, 1867). In F. Griffin’s words, Brown “welcomes the opportunity to leave her job as a live-in servant and to begin a new life as the wife of her longtime suitor, Joseph Tines. Nonetheless, though she views marriage as an escape from life as a domestic servant, she continues to express some ambivalence and fear about the institution” (236).
  16. 16. It is possible that Primus also conceived of their relationship in terms more romantic than her marriage to Charles Thomas. In 1868, Brown married Joseph Tines, and extant correspondence with Primus ceased (F. Griffin 235). When Brown passed away shortly after, in 1870, Primus made note of her death on the outside of an envelope (235). By 1872 Primus had married Thomas (77). Although Primus stayed with Thomas and his wife when teaching in Royal Oak, neither her nor Brown’s mentions of him suggest a romantic relation or even flirtation. The Primus Family Papers include two postcards and five letters to Thomas from others; these letters are short, incredibly formal, and for clearly professional and political purposes. Primus saved the romantic letters from Brown—well over a hundred of them—until her own death more than sixty years later, in 1932 (White, “Rebecca Primus” 284). It may also be of note that there is some mystery surrounding the circumstances of Thomas’s parting with his first wife and his marriage to Primus (281).
  17. 17. As I discuss elsewhere, Brown’s repurposing of the romantic letter genre to erotic ends takes on further significance within the context of stereotypes about black women’s sexuality that were used to justify violence and often circumscribed black women’s expression (Abdur-Rahman; P. Collins; Hansen; Lorde; Pritchard, Fashioning Lives; E. Richardson; VanHaitsma, “Romantic Correspondence”). Subverting the “racialized heteronormativity” that “pathologizes Black sexuality,” Brown’s writing about erotic life amounted to what Pritchard has theorized as “restorative literacy” (65).
  18. 18. While I focus on “the language of the heart” in poetry and the novel, Brown and Primus’s letters reference texts ranging from novels to antislavery papers, from slave narratives to poetry, from speeches to books on religion, politics, and history.
  19. 19. Brown also redeployed phrasing from the Christian Bible in order to express desire and longing for Primus (Aug. 30, 1859; May 24, 1861).
  20. 20. F. Griffin similarly noted this shift in style as indicative of copying (64).
  21. 21. Nor was Brown’s relationship to other texts deferential on the whole. As F. Griffin pointed out, Brown “demonstrates her intellectual independence” when writing about a speech by Henry Ward Beecher (140). Calling Beecher “very plain,” Brown wrote, “he says the recent history of the nation may be divided into three periods…. I should think it was four” (Oct. 16, 1866).
  22. 22. As Beeching wrote, “Addie’s letters frequently started off as if she were following a formulae…. Once under way, however, Addie’s writing conveyed the impression of transcribed speech” (“Primus Papers” 70).
  23. Page 120 →23. With George Pope Morris and Nathaniel Parker Willis, Fay served as an editor of the New-York Mirror: Devoted to Literature and the Fine Arts, with which he corresponded while traveling abroad. “Reveries by Night” was published in the New-York Mirror under the heading “Original Communications” (1831).
  24. 24. Brown also used this invention strategy of interspersing seemingly copied language with epistolary address in more overtly romantic passages (Mar. 30, 1862; also ctd. in Faderman, To Believe in Women 104; Grasso 262; R. Harrison 224; Peiss 218).
  25. 25. Brown’s active process of selection and deletion is further evident in her use of the poem “Alone” (Dec. 8, 1861), another version of which was published in Peterson’s Magazine (1855) under the name Clarence May.
  26. 26. On nineteenth-century autograph albums and rhetorical invention, see Ricker (“(De)Constructing the Praxis”).
  27. 27. On the racial politics of imitation as practiced by African Americans in the nineteenth century, see Wilson.
  28. 28. For further discussion of romantic letters as evidence, as well as approaches to reading and interpreting such texts, see Cloud; Faderman, To Believe in Women; Jones; Lystra; Morris, “My Old Kentucky Homo”; Stanley.
  29. 29. Nor are such approaches to letters limited to histories of sexuality. As Henkin wrote in his history of the postal age, historians rely on letters as evidence, but “often with the underexamined assumption that letters provide unusually transparent windows into the sincere beliefs or private lives of their authors” (6). In contrast with the assumption described by Henkin, Ruberg has recognized that “it is often not possible for historians to reconstruct actually felt emotions. Since emotions are always represented through a medium (often a text), their discursive character should be taken into account…. Letters cannot be taken as straightforward sources unveiling historical reality, but have to be studied as multifaceted and complicated documents. Letters are often composed according to social and cultural rules and written with certain aims in mind. Relationships between sender and receiver are constructed in correspondence, not necessarily reflecting daily relationships outside the correspondence” (208–09).
  30. 30. Like letters, K. Harrison has explained, “Diaries … do not present pure, unfiltered rhetorical evidence. As readers, we can never know with certainty the slant by which an event was recounted or the details omitted to support a desired image for the writer’s own self-narrative or for the benefit of future readers, whether imagined or real. Yet, such uncertainties do not negate the value of evidence found in diaries, especially with a focus on patterns and the writer’s context” (Rhetoric of Rebel Women 20).
  31. 31. The series of letters includes those dated Oct. 20, 27; Nov. 17; Dec. 8, 1867.
  32. 32. Here the letter under consideration is from Jan. 21, 1866.
  33. 33. For further discussion of how writers used the letter to develop and advance cultural and political critiques, see Carlacio; Favret; Gaul and Harris; Henkin; Hewitt.

Chapter 3: “Somehow or other, queer in the extreme”

  1. 1. The Albert Dodd Papers are held by the Yale University Library, Manuscripts and Archives. The Papers consist of three folders: the first is labeled Dodd’s “diary”; the second Page 121 →his “album of poetry”; and the third his “letters” and “obituary.” Entries, poems, and letters are generally dated, and I cite them according to their dates.
  2. 2. Although Dodd’s education was marked by consequential forms of race, class, and gender privilege, his epistolary rhetoric can also be understood as “everyday.” Just as the first historian to publish on Brown’s writing was dismissive, the first historian to publish on Dodd’s denigrated it as an “artless record” (Gay 207; see also White, “Addie Brown’s Hartford” 57–58). Along with Brown and Primus, Dodd was included in Zboray and Zboray’s large-scale study of everyday letters and diaries by “931 informants” (Everyday Ideas xxi, 54, 183, 316). In none of these references, though, are their same-sex romantic epistolary relations acknowledged.
  3. 3. For other discussions of queer boundary crossing, pedagogy, and student writing, see Alexander and Rhodes (“Queer: An Impossible Subject”); Waite (“Cultivating the Scavenger”).
  4. 4. In a dairy entry dated Apr. 27, 1838, Dodd wrote, “Yesterday was my birthday, 19 years old.” But other sources conflict regarding the year of his birth. His “Obituary” does not reference his date of birth. Biographical Record of the Class of 1838 in Yale College claims he was “Born about 1818” (53), but, as Katz indicated, Biographical Notes of Graduates of Yale College states that he “died at the age of 27, in 1844, which means that he was born in 1817” (Dexter 288 ctd. in Katz 354 n. 1).
  5. 5. According to the obituary, “a meeting of the citizens of Bloomington and vicinity” was held regarding his death “on Monday the 19th day of June, a.d., 1844.” See also Biographical Record 53; Dexter 288.
  6. 6. Jesse was “a tree and flower enthusiast, a temperance advocate, and a civic leader” (Katz 31). In 1834 he “had begun a friendship and long political association with Abraham Lincoln,” and later he “worked hard to win Lincoln the Republican nomination for president” (31). Related to the potential significance of this connection to Lincoln, see Morris (“My Old Kentucky Homo”).
  7. 7. I have modernized the long s, and I will do so throughout.
  8. 8. Soon after beginning his studies at Yale, Dodd joined the secret society Skull and Bones (July 5, 1837). Dodd’s other extracurricular involvements at Yale included a less-than positive experience getting published in the Yale Literary Magazine (diary July 17, 1837; “The Sea Nymph’s Song” 294; poetry album Aug. 1835).
  9. 9. Since I conducted my primary research in the brick-and-mortar archives at Yale, Dodd’s commonplace book turned diary has been digitized. Readers may find it here: http://digital.library.yale.edu/cdm/ref/collection/1004_8/id/1381.
  10. 10. In Katz’s view, Dodd here referred to “two sins unwritable among that day’s college students, most probably sexual sins, which Dodd represented by long dashes.” Katz also speculated about whether “M. O.” is “mutual onanism? masturbation? ononism?” (27).
  11. 11. The first of these historians to publish about Dodd, Gay briefly attended to Dodd’s writing within The Tender Passion (206–12). Rotundo considered Dodd’s writing alongside that of other young men when seeking to define the characteristics of nineteenth-century romantic friendship between men (“Romantic Friendship”). Rotundo cited Gay’s book, however, and did not mention conducting primary research (8; 23 n. 26). Katz offered Page 122 →the most in-depth discussion of Dodd and his romantic relations. Dodd’s diary is widely cited elsewhere as well (Bernard; Quinn; Robb; Robinson; Rotundo, American Manhood; Woolverton; Zboray and Zboray, Everyday Ideas).
  12. 12. Commenting on this entry, Gay continued, “It might in fact be manly and pure, but it was heavily invested with libido, a ‘flame,’ as Albert Dodd pictured it to himself, ‘that was burning’ in his heart” (208).
  13. 13. Unless otherwise noted, all subsequent citations of Rotundo refer to his article “Romantic Friendship”.
  14. 14. As Rotundo remarked, “Not only does Albert kiss Anthony Halsey as they embrace in bed … but there is an undertone of passion to Albert Dodd’s account of his mention of Anthony’s ‘beloved form’ and in his remembrance of the kisses—and the nights—as ‘sweet’ ones. All these subtle differences take additional erotic force from Albert’s confession that he found Anthony ‘so handsome’” (7).
  15. 15. Like Dodd, Elizabeth Morgan may have experienced “love” for both men and women. Dodd wrote in his diary, “Had some interesting conversation with her … among other things, she asked me if I had ever fallen in love at first sight … she said she had once so, not meaning love for one of another sex, but of her own” (Apr. 19, 1837).
  16. 16. Gay wrote that Dodd’s diary moves “without apparent strain from male to female loves,” often from one line to the very next, and his “sexual choices” repeatedly “vacillate between women and men” (207–08).
  17. 17. For further discussion of the classical orientation of rhetorical education at Yale, see Whitburn (“Rhetorical Theory”).
  18. 18. Yet, as Johnson has cautioned, scholars should avoid a “classicist stance,” which leads to pejorative assessments of nineteenth-century education as “unstable or inherently compromised” to the extent that it deviates from Ciceronian or Aristotelian rhetorical philosophy (Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric 12). While I emphasize how Dodd’s rhetorical training was classically oriented, it is important to remember that his education was “synthetic,” “a composite of classical assumptions and epistemological and belletristic premises initially popularized in the late eighteenth-century English tradition” (19).
  19. 19. The Stillman K. Wightman Papers are held by the Yale University Library, Manuscripts and Archives. Here I quote from Wightman’s notes, apparently taken during one of Goodrich’s lectures, which are in Box 1, Folder 19.
  20. 20. While Cicero advanced a Roman history and tradition of rhetoric, the Greek Demosthenes was one of the “prominent models” that Cicero referenced (Enos 108).
  21. 21. “Plato’s Gorgias” is listed for the third part of junior year, but only as one text among others, “At the option of the student” (Catalogue 27).
  22. 22. The Goodrich Family Papers are also held by the Yale University Library, Manuscripts and Archives. Here I reference Goodrich’s lecture notes in Box 7, Folders 61, 71, 73, 77, and 80. Although less frequently, the notes reference other classical rhetorical theorists as well. In “Lecture on Demosthenes,” they reference Plato (Folder 77); in “Lectures on Eloquence,” they reference Quintilian (Folder 86). For discussion of Goodrich in relation to the history of public address, see Medhurst (24).
  23. 23. Here I reference notes in Box I, Folder 18 of the Stillman K. Wightman Papers. These student notes also mention Isocrates.
  24. Page 123 →24. Dodd’s study of rhetorical treatises was not limited to classical ones, however. Instead, his early nineteenth-century rhetorical education combined the classical with eighteenth-century English and Scottish works—such as those of Blair and Kames—as was common (Johnson, Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric; Dodd, Apr. 12, 1842). See also Connors, “Day, Henry Noble” 162; Desmet 133; Goodrich, Folders 62, 70, 86; Goodrich, Select British Eloquence iii.
  25. 25. Dodd actually wrote the most about studying Greek and Latin language and literature during his period of suspension (Mar. 1, 2, 3, 10, 12, 13, 15, 17; Apr. 8, 30; May 7, 8, 17; June 18, 1837).
  26. 26. While I cite Brent’s survey and empirical research, the scholarship on transfer is expansive. For work especially relevant to questions of rhetorical education, student writing, and genre, see the following: Anson and Schwegler; Ball, Bowen, and Fenn; Beaufort; Clark and Hernandez; Cleary; Dirk; Downs and Wardle; Fraizer; Miles et al.; Moore; Nowacek; Reiff and Bawarshi; Rounsaville; Rounsaville, Goldberg, and Bawarshi; Wardle.
  27. 27. Of course, Dodd’s nineteenth-century transfer cannot be characterized with certitude. Even writing studies researchers with the opportunity to ask present-day students about transfer find it difficult to get clear answers. Brent has explained, “To determine whether students have been able to reuse higher level knowledge, we need to search for evidence of prior learning that has been transformed or used as a platform for further learning rather than merely transferred…. Of course, searching for transformed knowledge makes our research task more difficult because it is hard to know what such knowledge looks like when it is applied to a new rhetorical context” (“Transfer, Transformation, and Rhetorical Knowledge” 410).
  28. 28. See, for instance, Bizzell and Herzberg; Fone; Gunderson; Halperin (One Hundred Years of Homosexuality); Hawhee.
  29. 29. Book 12 of the Greek Anthology is “a collection of over 250 epigrams devoted to pederastic sentiment,” including “the earliest anthologies of homoerotic verse, the Garland of Meleager,” and “poetry by a wide selection of Greek writers celebrat[ing] love, desire, and sex between adult males and youths, often with great specificity” (Fone 40–44).
  30. 30. It is unclear whether Dodd wrote, compiled, or translated this verse.
  31. 31. The myth is associated with pederasty and even “abduction” (Fone 16; see also Boswell). But there is nothing in Dodd’s verse about the abduction of Ganymede by Zeus, and there are no direct references to pederasty or even Ganymede’s age. Nor is there any reason to presume that Dodd participated in pederastic relations. Where Dodd hinted at the age of his romantic interests, they were students within one to three years of his own age (Sept. 21; Oct. 5, 10, 1837).
  32. 32. On self-rhetorics, K. Harrison cited V. Collins and Nienkamp (Civil War Diaries 15).
  33. 33. Additional studies of the diary include Bunkers; Gannett; K. Harrison (“Rhetorical Rehearsals”); McCarthy; Sinor; Sjöblad. As Logan has reminded readers, this “literature on the history of diary-keeping centers on the habits of middle-class white women” (33).
  34. 34. Dodd did write about his attractions as similar in that he was attracted to the same (Western, white) physical form in both men and women. After commenting on Morgan’s Page 124 →personality and demeanor, he wrote, “In truth she is a beautiful girl, and I like my first acquaintance with her much. She is handsome, of the style of beauty which I admire, viz: light complexion and hair, and blue eyes;—just like Julia” (Feb. 26, 1837). Then, a few months later, Dodd wrote of Smith: “Went up in the City Hotel with Jabe and slept with him. He is a fine, handsome fellow, and he interests me much, light curly hair, light complexion, blue eyes, handsome [?] countenance, and a slight graceful form” (Apr. 24, 1837). What Dodd found attractive in all three romantic interests, whether female or male, included a “light complexion” and “blue eyes.” These similarities do not suggest, however, that his romantic relations were not carried out in gendered ways. Predictably, he described sharing beds and physically intimate space with men but characterized his interactions with women as limited largely to church and calling (Feb. 11, 26; Mar. 15, 27; Apr. 24; May 8, 17; Sept. 9, 21; Oct. 5, 1837; May 23, 1838). See also Gay (210); Katz (30); Morris, “My Old Kentucky Homo” (96–97); Rotundo (10, 13).
  35. 35. Gay claimed that “boys aroused” Dodd “even more” than girls did (208–09).
  36. 36. For further discussion of commonplace books, see Rothermel (“Prophets, Friends, Conversationalists”).
  37. 37. The first entry following the preface is an essay-like reflection on time, occasioned by Dodd’s anticipation of commencement and the completion of his second year of college (July 31, 1836). The second, “Miss Clifton, as Ernestine,” accounts for visiting “the new National Theatre” while vacationing in New York (Sept. 29, 1836). In the entry most like a school-based rhetorical exercise, he began with quotation of a question in Latin that he translated into English. After promising to first “take up the subject literally and analytically,” he quoted (again in Latin) a description from Homer, endeavoring to “examine the subject in a metaphorical aspect” and then to “build up an argument for the opposite side” (Oct. 30, 1836). The final commonplace book entry, “Sketches of Travel,” characterizes another trip to New York (Nov. 4, 1836).
  38. 38. In Logan’s study, writers also reported sharing diaries (29, 49).
  39. 39. Logan defined the diary as “a text written in the first person with dated, chronological passages in which the writing subject speaks of and comments on certain events” (32). K. Harrison discussed scholarly distinctions between the diary and the journal (Rhetoric of Rebel Women 180 n. 15).
  40. 40. As Gold explained in his review of Harrison’s study, “the rhetoricity of diaries” involves not only how they “illuminated the public rhetorical activities of their authors” but also how diaries functioned “as sites of rhetorical invention in themselves” (385).
  41. 41. On the relationship between nineteenth-century epistolary and poetic writing, particularly with respect to Dickinson, see Messmer.
  42. 42. For more on the epistolary genre in Latin literature and Horace especially, see de Pretis.
  43. 43. Examples include entries dated June 18; June 27; Sept. 3, 1837.
  44. 44. In this poem the speaker begins, “I think of thee, Elizabeth,” declaring that, “Whatever I do, wherever I roam,” the speaker’s thoughts turn to “thee at home” (June 1838). The poem returns throughout to versions of the opening refrain, with the final stanza concluding, “I think of thee, I dream of thee. / I sigh for thee, Elizabeth, / Be Page 125 →thou my friend, my guardian be, / And I will love thee while I’ve breath. / In good or evil destiny, / Elizabeth, I’ll think of thee.”
  45. 45. In his poem “Epistolary,” it is possible Dodd also imitated Byron’s epic poem “Don Juan.” Unlike Horace, Byron was not referenced directly in Dodd’s writing or in Yale’s Catalogue. Nor is “Don Juan” an epistle verse. Yet “Epistolary” resembles “Don Juan” in terms of Dodd’s playful use of parenthesis as well as his rhyme scheme (Barton 15).
  46. 46. See Gay (210, 212); Katz (27); Rotundo (8).
  47. 47. Dodd essentially instructed Edward to focus on the positive, rather than worrying about what one cannot control, as Dodd himself used to do (Mar. 13, 1844).
  48. 48. In response to my inquiries about the provenance of the Albert Dodd Papers, the Manuscripts and Archives staff at Yale University Library confirmed only that, as indicated in the Finding Aide, the papers were a gift of Marion Belden Cook in 1981. Prior to this gift, they were held in a private collection; no further information can be provided.

Conclusion

  1. 1. Additional scholarship on Halberstam’s queer failure and present-day rhetoric and writing pedagogy includes A. Carr; Gross and Alexander; Rhodes; Waite (“Andy Teaches Me”).
  2. 2. For another engagement with Halberstam’s queer failure with respect to historiography in rhetoric, see Dolmage.
  3. 3. See “How to Write”; R. Miller; Biguenet; Chace. The quoted passage is from Miller.
  4. 4. See “How to Succeed”; Khazan; Flexman; Hayes.
  5. 5. Other popular manuals are less closely tied to the history of rhetoric but nonetheless teach language practices for rhetorically participating in romantic relations (for example, Chapman; Gray).
  6. 6. For scholarship on the rhetoric of seduction, see Ballif; Blythin; Brockriede; Erickson and Thomson; Kelley; Tiles; Weaver.
  7. 7. For these titles see Davies; Fein and Schneider; Koppel; Silverstein and Lasky.
  8. 8. See Berzon; Kaminsky.
  9. 9. Homonormativity is theorized across queer studies, including within the work of Conrad; Dinshaw et al.; Duggan; Eng; Muñoz; Stryker.
  10. 10. These books are by Easton and Liszt; Matik. See also Taormino; West.
  11. 11. Elsewhere I consider classroom opportunities like those Alexander and Wallace call for (“New Archival Engagements”). Page 126 →

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