(De)Constructing the Praxis of Memory-Keeping: Late Nineteenth-Century Autograph Albums as Sites of Rhetorical Invention

Abstract

Deconstructing the praxis involved in the collecting of discourse in late nineteenth-century American autograph albums, this essay links the socially based practices involved in middle-class young women's (re)inscription of messages of friendship within such spaces to Jacques Derrida's theory of différance. While the commonplace language contained within such objects often has a conservative orientation, its circulation within communities through customary practices of exchange opened up opportunities for rhetorical invention. The opportunity to write in these locations also represented access to new discursive arenas, participation which likely played a part in women's gradually increasing access to the public sphere.

Notes

¹I thank RR reviewers Maureen Daly Goggin and Brooke Rollins, whose comments on earlier drafts were both insightful and highly generative.

²In keeping with Paulo Freire's introduction of the terms of composition studies nearly three decades ago, Raymond Williams states that praxis erases the “polarity [between practice and theory] through the means of dialectics.” In doing so, it can be defined as “a whole mode of activity in which, by analysis but only by analysis, theoretical and practical elements can be distinguished, but which is always a whole activity, to be judged as such” (Williams qtd. in Fitts 188–89).

³Jennie Drew's autograph album is in the author's private collection.

4The Oxford English Dictionary defines a “moulder” employed in a foundry setting as “[a] person who makes moulds for casting” (“Oxford English Dictionary moulder/molder” 2.4).

⁵The one clearly original message recorded by Potter was written in 1883 by a Vermont foster mother and reads:

• Willie when a little boy

• Three years old to our house you came.

• I have always tried instruction to give.

• My best wishes to you as long as you live. (Potter, “Round” 7)

⁶In “Listen, My Children: Modes and Functions of Poetry Reading in American Schools, 1880–1950,” Joan Shelley Rubin discusses the popularity of “memory gems,” selections of poetry deemed appropriate for young minds, which schoolchildren were required to memorize as part of their inculcation in polite society (265).