Page 1 →Prologue

This book is a queer history of rhetorical education, taking as its touchstone the teaching and learning of romantic letter writing. The genre of the letter, or epistolary rhetoric, has long occupied a place in Western histories of rhetoric. And one subgenre of epistolary rhetoric, that of romantic letters, continues to serve a crucial role as primary evidence within histories of sexuality. My own history brings together these historiographic strands, moving them in directions that are simultaneously rhetorical and queer as well as pedagogical. Through archival research, I investigate nonnormative epistolary rhetoric, seeking out the stories of diverse learners who crafted letters that subverted heteronormative forms of genre instruction in the nineteenth-century United States. But first, I begin with another story, a more normative story, the sort of story that is most often associated with romantic letters—and that nonetheless points to rhetorical and pedagogical openings for this queer history.

In 1841 Godey’s Lady’s Book presented to readers a cautionary tale about learning to compose romantic epistolary rhetoric.¹ In “Eliza Farnham; or, the Love Letters,” the central conflict facing the main character is that her new fiancée, Horace, has written her a love letter and predictably expects one in return. This expectation is a problem, as she attempts to explain to the brother and grandmother entrusted with her care, for Eliza is “no great scratch at [her] pen” (Leslie, “Part the First” 218). The brother and grandmother are incredulous because Eliza was educated at a “fashionable” boarding school, and they had received many letters from her while she was away at school (217). But Eliza reveals that these letters were variously written by a friend, adapted from friends’ letters, or rewritten by teachers. Unequipped to compose her own romantic epistolary rhetoric, Eliza exclaims, “I wish with all my heart there were receipts for writing love-letters. … How such a book would sell!” (219). Not possessing such a book, Eliza asks others to provide a love letter she may copy. Her brother refuses, insisting that doing so would amount to “deception.” Her grandmother refuses initially, too, but then gives in and shares an “old” love letter. Eliza is later advised by “one of Page 2 →the servants, a black girl named Belinda,” to avoid using the grandmother’s letter (220). Belinda suggests it is “not at all fit to send … now-a-days,” offering one of her own letters instead (Leslie, “Part the Second” 245). Eliza also decides against using Belinda’s letter, calling it “nonsense” and “foolish,” though admitting it contains “more ideas” than the grandmother’s (246).

Setting out to write her own love letter, Eliza dates and addresses it “Dear Horace” but then labors over how to begin and end her sentences (246). Again wishing for a book to copy from, Eliza laments that because Horace is “a great reader,” he may easily detect her “deception.” She recalls the reading she has done, including Hugh Blair’s lecture on the rhetoric of epistolary writing, yet here laments that she studied so little. Once Eliza has managed to compose a letter, she requests feedback from Belinda, who warns the letter makes “no sense” (247). Although Eliza fails to heed this warning, Belinda promises never to tell anyone “what a dreadful nonplush you’ve been at because you did not know how to write a letter to your sweetheart, and had to borrow patterns of every body both white and coloured.” When Horace finally receives Eliza’s letter, he too laments. In keeping with cultural commonplaces about romantic letters, Horace reads Eliza’s letter as “a true picture” of her mind and heart (248). Of her mind, he concludes she is “shallow-headed,” of her heart, that she “does not love” him truly. Horace breaks off the engagement.

While this broken engagement serves as a warning about poorly written or copied epistolary rhetoric, Eliza’s story has a happy ending. She embarks on a course of study that involves daily reading as well as letter writing to her brother. Meanwhile, Horace moves abroad and, after a couple years in Europe, meets a friend of Eliza’s who stays in touch by letter. Horace reads one of Eliza’s letters to the friend, and he sees a new and changed “true picture” of her mind and heart. Horace is “charmed,” feeling “all his love for Eliza Farnham return with redoubled warmth” (250). Horace returns to the United States, and he and Eliza marry.

Of course, the story of Eliza’s love letters is a story of heteronormativity—a story in which the only happy ending imaginable is a marriage between a man and a woman. Yet the story also brings to life pedagogical and rhetorical openings that my queer history of rhetorical education mines.

First and most obvious is the question of how people like Eliza were taught rhetorical practices for crafting romantic letters. Rejecting the heteronormative presumption that Eliza’s happy ending is inevitable, I ask how people learned to accomplish the normative rhetorical purposes she did. As exemplified by Horace’s reading of Eliza’s initial attempt, romantic letters are often understood simply as expressions of feeling—of one’s “true” heart and mind. Even popular nineteenth-century letter-writing manuals, those very texts claiming to teach letter writing, asserted that composing a romantic letter is a matter of writing “from Page 3 →the heart,” of speaking on paper just as one would talk to the beloved (Shields 119). But as Eliza complains in the story, “It is in vain to tell me to try and write just the same as I talk. When it comes to the pinch I can do no such thing” (Leslie, “Part the First” 219). Nor was the fictional Eliza alone. The popularity of letter-writing manuals, with their extensive instruction in the romantic subgenre of epistolary rhetoric, makes clear that writing from the heart was not automatic or simple but a practice to be taught and learned.

Manuals taught romantic epistolary practices partly through a pedagogical reliance on model romantic letters to be copied and adapted. When Eliza wishes for a book of “receipts for writing love-letters” to copy from, the story implies that such a book is unavailable. But in letter-writing manuals, chapters on the romantic subgenre consisted almost entirely of model love letters, and, as Eliza predicts, these books did “sell” quite well. As in the story of Eliza, the manuals warned that an overreliance on copying, as opposed to writing from the heart, was “deceptive.” It could backfire if detected, even interfering with the learner’s chances of accomplishing the heteronormative rhetorical purpose of the genre: courtship leading to the marriage of a man and woman. My queer history of rhetorical education is interested in this potential for pedagogical backfires or failures, both by learners who consulted manual models and by those who, like Eliza, turned to other kinds of educational and cultural texts.

A second opening that plays out in the story of Eliza’s love letters concerns learners not like her. With Godey’s addressing a readership of primarily middle- and upper-class white women, it comes as no surprise that in these articles Eliza is featured as the main character in the story. Nor would readers, then or now, be surprised that Eliza addresses her love letters to a man. Even in feminist histories of rhetoric, nineteenth-century letters are most often associated with women like Eliza. But as the story acknowledges, however implicitly and problematically, people more like Horace and Belinda also learned to write romantic letters. Moreover, as histories of sexuality and nineteenth-century romantic life document, still other people composed romantic letters within the context of same-sex and other forms of queer, as in nonnormative, romantic relationships. So, whereas the character Eliza is faced with certain options, as Belinda remarks, “to borrow patterns of every body both white and coloured,” a wider range of learners diverse by gender, race, class, education, and sexuality were faced with different possibilities for borrowing and learning from the patterned models available to them. My queer history focuses on these people, considering how those least likely to find their romantic relationships represented in popular manuals learned to compose romantic epistolary rhetoric in pursuit of nonnormative relations.

Queering Romantic Engagement in the Postal Age: A Rhetorical Education seizes on both kinds of opening, even in a familiar story, even amid nineteenth-century letter-writing instruction that was predominantly heteronormative—and even Page 4 →though histories of rhetorical education usually treat queer romantic life as distinct from and subordinate to civic life. The book’s introduction queers those binary distinctions between public and private life that have relegated queer stories to the margins in histories of rhetorical education. I theorize a new concept of rhetorical education to enable queer histories of teaching and learning, while introducing the key terms and cultural contexts for my own history of romantic epistolary rhetoric in the nineteenth-century United States. This history engages the queer openings I have described through archival research on manuals that teach the romantic letter genre, romantic letters that were exchanged between two African American women, and a white man’s multigenre romantic epistolary rhetoric.

I begin with those books Eliza imagines, “receipts for writing love-letters.” Through archival research in the University of Pittsburgh’s Nietz Collection, I examined more than forty of these books, usually called “complete letter-writers” in nineteenth-century discourse. The complete coverage of complete letter-writer manuals included sections on the romantic letter genre. While these sections instruct that composing romantic letters is simply a matter of writing from the heart, the manuals paradoxically offer extensive modeling of the generic conventions constraining such composition. This instruction in genre conventions for romantic epistolary rhetoric embeds a heteronormatively gendered conception of romantic relations but, at the same time, teaches invention strategies for copying and adapting model romantic letters in ways that render the genre susceptible to queer rhetorical practices.

I then turn to the queer epistolary rhetoric of learners whose romantic relations were not in keeping with the genre conventions and cultural norms taught by letter-writing manuals. I consider the romantic correspondence of two freeborn African American women, Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus. I conducted primary research on Brown and Primus’s romantic epistolary exchange, spanning nearly a decade and consisting of more than one hundred extant letters, at the Connecticut Historical Society. These women defied the genre conventions widely taught by manuals in order to rhetorically craft their same-sex, cross-class romantic and erotic relations. While there is no indication they consulted letter-writing manuals, Brown, like Eliza, experimented with the invention strategies manuals taught for copying and adaptation. As Belinda would put it, Brown “borrow[ed] patterns.” Specifically, Brown crossed generic lines by copying romantic language from poetry and the novel and then queerly repurposing that language in order to address romantic letters to Primus. Brown and Primus’s epistolary exchange pursued nonnormative rhetorical purposes that were not only romantic but also explicitly erotic and political.

From there the book’s scope expands outward to explore further the overtly civic dimensions of romantic epistolary rhetoric, though by a learner culturally Page 5 →positioned, like Eliza’s fiancée, Horace, as an upper-class white man. In the third chapter I focus on the formal rhetorical education and romantic epistolary practices of Albert Dodd, who was a student at Washington College and then at Yale. Dodd’s multigenre epistolary practices included a commonplace book turned diary and a poetry album that I consulted in the Yale University Library’s Manuscripts and Archives. In the commonplace book turned diary, Dodd described his formal educational experiences and accounted for the romantic letters he addressed to and exchanged with both men and women. These accounts, along with an album of his poetry, suggest that Dodd transferred his college-level civic training in order to develop multigenre forms of epistolary address and exchange across a network of genres related to the letter. Dodd used these multigenre practices to queerly compose his nonnormative romantic relations with multiple men and women.

Across these archival studies, I argue that rhetorical education shaped learners as romantic subjects in predictably heteronormative ways and simultaneously opened up possibilities for queer rhetorical practices that transgressed cultural norms while subverting genre conventions and boundaries. In framing such teaching and learning as specifically rhetorical, I am conceiving of rhetorical education in atypical ways. Indeed, what makes this history of romantic epistolary instruction and practice queer has as much to do with its conception of rhetorical education as with its emphasis on the practices of learners in same-sex relationships. This project is not simply a recovery of queer rhetorical practices from the nineteenth-century United States, in other words, but a reconception of rhetorical education and the normative frames that continue to direct historiography to this day.