CRS 568

Jump to Comments

 Readings on the Rhetoric of Social Protest
“‘Like Gory Spectres’: Representing Evil in Theodore Weld’s American Slavery As It Is.”
Stephen Browne

“‘Our Capital Aversion’: Abigail Folsom, Madness, and Radical Antislavery Practice.”
Charles E. Morris III

Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader.
Chapter Four: “No Easy Walk (1961-1963)”
David J. Garrow.

Note: These notes were quickly written and posted without much (if any) editing.

“‘Like Gory Spectres’: Representing Evil in Theodore Weld’s American Slavery As It Is.”
Stephen Browne
Browne points out the power and pitfalls of using the sentimental style when trying to persuade people to identify with reform movements. Browne explains the downside of sentimentality by stating “Whatever the individual expression of sentiment understood in this way, there remains one constant: as a response, sentimentalism extends no further than its exhaustion. This exhaustion, indeed, defines precisely the sentimentalism’s dangerous pleasures: once consummated, it dies…therefore, [when] the sentimental style is deployed in the service of a reform movement, it effect is apt to be paradoxical: the greater the intensity of the response, the less likely is the respondent moved to action” (211).

To illustrate this he uses American Slavery As It Is, a book published in 1839. Browne intimates American Slavery…is the progenitor of this style in North America, and that this text, through its inability to move its readers to physical action, is deeply implicated in the continued issues of racism and racial violence that continues to be a fixture of the American landscape. The text, which used sentimental rhetoric, sold “22,000 copies…in four months” and hit the sales mark of 100,000 “within in one year” (210). The wide spread dissemination of American Slavery…,through its use of sentimental rhetoric in recounting the beating of slaves created a “generalized fixation with the body and its subjection” for its readers, which allowed “the slave’s body [to be] defined as a site onto which anxieties of self and culture could be projected. As if to atone for their complicity in the system of slavery, readers could literally punish themselves with its representations” (220, 221). According to Browne, the readers were persuaded to identify with the slaves through sentimentality, and this commitment through manipulated emotions led the reader to confuse a cathartic moment with the action of social reform. This idealized representation and simultaneous identification of the reader with the slave allowed for the creation of a imaginary reader-slave who became a temporary victim. This “idealized” form “took emotional intensity to be at once the means and end of moral commitment” (221).

For Browne this was a necessary move so abolitionist, like Theodore Weld (husband of Angelina Grimke), could combat the apathy and racism often found in the North when it came to slavery and African Americans. The “transformation of [the] language” used to talk about slavery in the North was “the transformation of culture” (222), but the idea that “it seems enough to be terrified” or “an act of perception ” being confused “for an act of moral judgment” derailed the material effectiveness pf the abolitionist movement by confusing personal change with social change, and negated the will of people to participate in activities to change experiential, non-fictional reality.  For Browne, this is the response of a people dependent on a system of capitalism built on slavery; it allowed for moral outrage but did nothing to affect the quality of life nor the cultural status quo.  Browne ties these practices to the more recent reform movements, and notes that “Ideology is style, and can be read only as it is textually inscribed” (222, emphasis original)–meaning any social movement looking to invoke change needs to be mindful of how it persuades people to its cause using texts.  

Within the context of the Civil Rights Movement, this could be construed to mean the drop off in the movement’s effectiveness between the 60s and the beginning of the 80s.  Once the marches, speeches, and books were consumed, wider, whiter America began the Regan era thinking it had solved the “race issue” and could now concentrate on attaining individual wealth.

“‘Our Capital Aversion’: Abigail Folsom, Madness, and Radical Antislavery Practice.”
Charles E. Morris III

In this essay Morris examines Abigail Folsom and makes the case her “insanity” was nothing more than radical abolitionist performance deemed “mad” by other abolitionist who a) felt Folsom was a detriment to their cause or b) felt Folsom had transgressed the boundaries of appropriate behavior for a woman. In giving historical context, Morris traces out how women speaking in public was a very rule heavy genre and how Folsom’s performances broke those boundaries by using practices often used by men who were considered, by their peers within the movement at least, as merely “deeply committed” to their cause and moved–on a religious level–to speak out in ways that broke with oratorical conventions of the time. Madness, Morris demonstrates, was the only charge the abolitionist could use to discipline one of their own; it was the only rhetoric which could be used to discount a person’s right to speak in a movement that promoted itself as built on the concepts of emancipation and free speech.

Morris’ use of Folsom as the symbol of radical performances (meaning she was not insane) reaches it evolutionary end when he explains Folsom was the physical embodiment of “radicalized femininity” colliding with the “conventional ideological structures of reform culture” (451) (notice here this is reform culture). Morris posits Folsom acted in strategic ways to garner attention and call into trouble the notions of Garrisonian feminism and the commitment of the abolitionist movement to universalemancipation. In this way, Morris seems to be cautiously claiming (and I say cautious since Morris admits only secondary accounts of Folsom’s speeches survive) Folsom was consciously agonistic–not that she was playing mad but that she was using her body (via dress appearance, spatial/temporal presentation) as a cite of rhetoric to challenge concepts of gender, common social practice, oratorical conventions, and the ideological warrants of the abolitionist movement.

Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader.
Chapter Four: “No Easy Walk (1961-1963)”
David J. Garrow.

This introduction by Garrow points out the challenges faced by the Civil Rights Movement in Albany, Georgia when the white, segregationist movement did notuse violence to counter sit-ins and marches. As Garrow points out:

Laurie Pritchett’s peaceful defense of segregation led not to national criticism but to widespread news media praise of his professionalism and strategic sagacity. Without any incidents of mass violence akin to the attacks on the Freedom Riders, neither the American Public nor the Kennedy Administration paid much heed to Albany’s successful repression of the black demonstrations. (135)

The lack of attention from the Albany demonstrations, coupled with the behind the scenes recounting of the famous March on Washington (the march which culminated with King’s “I Have a Dream” speech) and put into context with Browne’s views on sentimentalism complicates and troubles the view of the Civil Rights Movement as successful. Viewed through this lens, the events seem like cathartic stage productions where obtuse moral support is granted the Movement, but then–as King explains after the March on Washington–it is “time once again for the movement to ‘return to the valley’”, meaning “the harshly segregated valley of the American South…and the deadly obstacles the movement workers continued to encounter in the most southern of southern states” (138). There is no change in experiential reality, merely a shift in public opinion.

The remaining selections for this week all seem to echo this complaint of moral, but not real, support (and if not articulated by the writer/speaker than seemingly through their placement and juxtaposition to other texts). Even in King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” there is criticism levied at the “white moderate” who seems to harbor no ill will towards African Americans nor the movement, and yet at the same time does nothing to actually help the movement. King complains the white moderate is a person “who is more devoted to ‘order’ than justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action’” (157). The best example comes from “The Original Text of Speech to Be Delivered at the Lincoln Memorial” from John Lewis. In this text Lewis points out:

In good conscience, we can not support the administration’s civil rights bill for it’s too little, too late. There’s not one thing in the bill that will protect our people from police brutality.
The bill will not protect young children and old women from police dogs and fire hoses [for] engaging in peaceful demonstrations…” (163, edits original).

Again, to echo the ideas after the Browne section of this post, it seems this would be the why America is constantly returning to issues of race and equality. The methods of persuasion are limited, and those available, those that fit within the strict confines of what will move moderates and place a movement of social reform in a positive light, do nothing more but make the reform movement a type of harlequin novel victim; a victim who, once the observer has consumed information about the victim, is tossed aside like a fictional character.

1 Comment

Filed under CRS 568

Tags: Charles E. Morris III, David J. Garrow., Sentimentalism, Stephen Browne