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Distance and the Rhetoric of Violence in American Women's Narratives of Abuse
Dr.
Etta Madden American women's narratives of abuse sometimes render heated discussions in the classroom. The stories of spousal abuse inscribed by eighteenth-century quaker elizabeth Ashbridge and devout New Englander Abigail Abbot Bailey, for example, often invoke comments of outrage against past traditions of Christianity, which have discouraged women from leaving such abusive situations. But when the stories are temporally and topically closer to home—such as in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Sula, Alice Walker's The Color Purple, and Sapphire's Push—the reactions become more mixed. That is, as the distance between student readers and the subjects of contemporary narratives of abuse is contracted, students often internalize their reactions, stifling a rhetoric that appears otherwise spontaneous, heart-felt and free-flowing. We might assume the opposite would occur—that as students read of contemporary situations of abuse, often physical abuse of children by parents or other adult family members, they would wax linguistic, if not rhetorically eloquent, and perhaps even become violent as they discussed the social injustices described in these narratives. Yet a guarded rhetoric often takes over, I will suggest through this exploratory essay, for two possible reasons: first, some students are uncertain how their violent emotional reactions to narratives of abuse will be received in the classroom environment. A second possible reason, however, is that students are uncertain as to what they think about such situations. Thus, rather than using rhetoric in the classroom as a form of inquiry and coming to knowledge in the pre-Platonic sense, these students become silent. The exceptions to this stifled and guarded rhetoric, I will also note, occur as students see the distance between themselves and the characters in the narratives as a safe one. the purpose of my essay is two-fold: to examine the rhetorical ethos of the classroom, as we select material which we know pushes the edges of the envelope many of our students know and understand from their own experiences. The questions of this aspect of the essay are of the violence we bring to students through the teaching situation—the place of violence in the classroom, if you will, albeit channeled through the rhetoric of texts we select. The second aspect of the essay goes beyond pedagogy to consider readers in general, and the distance created through the rhetoric of these narratives: first, the way in which writers attempt through language to bridge a gap between themselves and their readers that has been established through the isolating nature of abuse; second, to consider the isolating, because violent, nature of some contemporary narratives which wish to shock readers into social response. As a part of this discussion I will touch upon the theme of lying and truth in personal narratives, a topic which not only is of interest to scholars of contemporary women's writing but also has its roots in classical rhetorical, as C. Jan Swearingen discussed at the last meeting of the Centre.
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