I have been studying Mulock-Craik’s book, A Woman’s Thoughts about Women, and I am interested in how the book works within the model of “womanly” rhetoric as well as how Mulock-Craik invites audience participation.
When I looked at the preface through the lens of Campbell’s essay Man Cannot Speak For Her, I found examples of the balance that Mulock-Craik had to find between her rhetorical aims and her feminine positions. As an author in general, was Mulock-Craik successful in maintaining this balance? I would like to research some biographical information about her as well as some critiques or reviews of her work to help answer this question.
Another aspect of feminine rhetoric is inviting audience participation. How does Mulock-Craik invite readers to participate and interact with her ideas? Who is her intended audience? Much of her writing seems to be directed toward women, but she also appeals to men. She says that her thoughts are not original and that many women have had similar thoughts. How does she appeal to readers who already agree with her views and to readers who disagree with them? I will use Ong’s essay about audience construction to analyze how Mulock-Craik constructs her audience.
I looked at another work by Mulock-Craik to try to get another view of her writing. I looked at One Year: A Child’s Book, In Prose and Verse. The book is divided into twelve sections, one for each month, and there are illustrations. There are three stories in each section, and the third story in each is a description of the typical activities in the childhood of the author and two other children. Throughout the narration of these descriptions, Mulock-Craik uses first and second person in order to establish a dialogue with the reader. I was only able to skim through the descriptions of her year, but I saw some themes that relate to A Woman’s Thoughts about Women, such as the importance of being self-dependent and of being a good Christian.
At the end of her preface in A Woman’s Thoughts about Women, Mulock-Craik says that she is sure that her book will have a good effect. I wonder if there is some way for me to get an idea of what effect her book had at the time she wrote it. Through historical British newspapers and other online resources, I hope to find references to her book to help me better understand what effect her audience construction and feminine positioning may have had on society’s response to her writings.
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Nicole, doing a study of audience sounds exciting, especially if you can locate primary documents with actual responses to Mulock-Craik. What will you want to know or see from those audience responses to determine "effectiveness"? And what might be the kinds of responses you would look for (i.e., book reviews, editorials, letters, third-party references, images, newspaper cartoons, etc.)? I hadn't sat down to think about this before, but it seems like the possibilities will be vast!
ReplyDelete( I wonder if you see ways that Campbell's theorization of suffrage rhetoric does not fit Mulock-Craik? It could be interesting to explore that dissonance, as well, especially if you begin to see limits in applying Campbell to Mulock-Craik, i.e., if her text isn't written from the same exigency as other suffrage texts, or for some other reason)
-Dr. Graban
I think your critical questions on feminine style and audience construction will be very interesting to unpack! I had not even thought of how Mulock-Craik might appeal to men in her book, so I think that will be a great comparison to how she appeals to women. Mulock-Craik's second text also sounds like an excellent idea. Perhaps it will go along with your theme of audience construction, and you could compare how she appeals to different audiences (should you find that they are different).
ReplyDeleteThe question that I am exploring in my final paper is how Dinah Maria Mulock-Craik appeals to her audience in A Woman’s Thoughts about Women. As the title indicates, the book is mostly for women, but it also appeals to men, though in a different manner. While she speaks with women, she speaks to men. This dual male/female audience construction has been present in other works that we have studied, so I want to more fully explore how Mulock-Craik relates to women. Throughout the book, she addresses women both as individuals and as a collective, connected group; thus, she seeks to both empower women as individual people and to unite them as a group working for the same goal to improve the lives of women.
ReplyDeleteIn her preface, Mulock-Craik says that her book includes thoughts that many women have already thought (iv). From the very beginning, she positions herself and other women in a collective group with similar ideas and goals. Also in the preface, she says that "thinkers, talkers, and doers" must work together (iv). She acknowledges that not every woman can contribute to society in the same way, nor should she be asked to. Mulock-Craik reinforces this fact by the way the book is organized. The book includes twelve chapters that cover multiple aspects of women’s lives that relate to both married and unmarried women. She says that her book is mostly for “the ordinary middle ranks of unmarried women” (288); this is very fitting, considering that the 1851 census in England recorded that unmarried women over the age of twenty formed thirty percent of the population while an additional thirteen percent were widowed (Showalter 12). She does not allow the focus of her intended audience, however, to limit her from reaching out to all women because throughout her book, she emphasizes that there is “one meeting-point…far below, or above, all external barriers – the common womanhood in which all share” (Mulock-Craik 97).
Resources:
Mulock-Craik, Dinah Maria. A Woman’s Thoughts about Women. London: Hurst and Blackett,
1858.
Showalter, Elaine. “Dinah Mulock Craik and the Tactics of Sentiment: A Case Study in
Victorian Female Authorship.” Feminist Studies 1975, Vol. 2, No. 2/3: 5-23. JSTOR. Indiana University, Bloomington, IN. 2 Apr. 2009 www.jstor.org.
Nicole, I really admire how your question immediately causes us to rethink binaries and some of our standard taxonomical categories, i.e., individual vs. group. It struck me as slightly ironic that Mulock-Craik might propose a "common womanhood" when it seems like what you're finding in her text is evidence of all the kinds of collective identities that have to be brought together. In other words, how promoting the collective draws our attention to the individualistic. But then I realized she's probably earnest about it (and not ironic), and maybe that's what's so unique about your question--that Mulock-Craik recognizes the simultaneous individuality and collectivity of a woman in Victorian England and she's capitalizing on that.
ReplyDeleteHave fun finishing this up!
-Dr. Graban