‘Private Letters’ for Public Audiences: The Complexities of Ethos in Louise Clappe’s The Shirley Letters from the California Mines, 1851–1852

Abstract

This essay examines the work of Louise Clappe (1819–1906), specifically The Shirley Letters from the California Mines, 1851–1852. Clappe’s Shirley Letters are significant because she uses the epistolary genre in the form of private letters to her sister to reach public audiences, a strategy practiced by few other American pioneer women who have been studied. Furthermore, although her location in the mining camps is extremely limiting in a material and social sense, Clappe creatively details her deprivations to highlight her distinctiveness and ingenuity in adapting to California’s challenging frontier.

Notes

¹ I would like to thank RR reviewers Nan Johnson and Keith Miller for their perceptive and helpful feedback. I also would like to thank Glen McClish, Ellen Quandahl, Julie Nelson Christoph, Elizabethada Wright, and Martha Cheng for their generous responses to earlier versions of this article.

² Although I’m sure there are others, one American female pioneer who used the epistolary genre in writing for publication in a periodical was Annie Pike Greenwood. She published “The Sage-Brush Farmer’s Wife” series of letters in The Atlantic Monthly in 1919.

³ In significant ways, this study parallels the work of Jordynn Jack in supporting more integrated feminist rhetorical methodologies for analyzing gender.

⁴ For instance, although extremely helpful in reconceiving ethos theoretically, the recent collection by Ryan, Myers, and Jones does not present a specific approach for reading ethos more systematically. Likewise, the collections by Hyde and by Baumlin and Baumlin also do not discuss specific strategies for a more material and relational readings of ethos.

⁵ I would like to thank Julie Nelson Christoph for bringing this point to my attention.

⁶ In his introduction to his 1922 edition of The Shirley Letters, Thomas C. Russell, for instance, asserts, “Shirley was not writing for publication” (xix).

⁷ My argument extends Halverson’s by analyzing rhetorically how Clappe constructs her “specialness.”

⁸ Borosity does not appear in the online Oxford English Dictionary.

⁹ See note three of Smith-Baranzini’s edited version of The Shirley Letters.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Suzanne Bordelon

Suzanne Bordelon is a professor and chair of the Department of Rhetoric and Writing Studies at San Diego State University. Her research interests focus on women’s rhetorical practices and pedagogies of the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. She is the author of A Feminist Legacy: The Rhetoric and Pedagogy of Gertrude Buck. In addition, her writing has appeared in Advances in the History of Rhetoric, College Composition and Communication, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Rhetoric Review, Journal of Teaching Writing, JAC: A Quarterly Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Rhetoric, Culture, and Politics, and other journals.