“Then Alone Could the Morning Stars Sing Together for Joy”: Engendering Rhetorical Alliance in the Stone-Blackwell Courtship Correspondence

Abstract

Historians of rhetoric have recently explored how nineteenth-century women’s personal and romantic letters have offered a venue for the rhetorical work of raising consciousness, building coalitions, and contesting gender norms. This essay examines the work undertaken by Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell in their courtship correspondence. Drawing on a body of manuscript letters exchanged between 1853 and 1855 and a selection of nineteenth-century letter-writing manuals, the essay argues that the couple uses their letters to: explore their views on rhetoric; contest the genre and gender conventions being taught by manuals; and engender the possibility of forming a rhetorical alliance.

Notes

1 I thank RR reviewers Pamela VanHaitsma and Lynee Gaillet for their very helpful suggestions for revisions to an earlier draft of this essay.

2 Stone and Blackwell’s June 1853-April 1855 correspondence is archived in Boxes 80-81 of the Lucy Stone Papers among the Blackwell Family Papers in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress. Microfilm scans are available on Reel 63. A careful examination reveals that a number of letters are misdated and misfiled and that some letters, mostly from Blackwell, are missing. Quotations are from my transcriptions. I use italics to indicate where words were underlined and have standardized punctuation, spelling, and capitalization. A cleanly-edited selection of the courtship letters is available in Wheeler’s Loving Warriors.My research on nineteenth-century letter writers was conducted at the New York Historical Society’s Patricia D. Klingenstein Library and in the New York Public Library’s Manuscripts and Archives Division and General Research Division. I supplemented this research by locating additional manuals via digital archives such as the Hathi Trust Digital Library and archive.org. Ultimately, I reviewed over thirty manuals that were published in the U.S. between 1800 and 1870 and that offered instruction on how to write romantic letters. I analyzed this sample by organizing the texts into three groups, manuals published prior to the 1850s, during the 1850s, and after the 1850s, looking for changes and trends that might indicate whether and how the conventions and norms of romantic correspondence were evolving during the period when Stone and Blackwell were writing.

3 This essay does not review disciplinary scholarship on Blackwell because there have been no publications focusing exclusively on his career. Blackwell is discussed briefly in Buchanan’s Regendering Delivery as a husband who struggled, at first, to provide “offstage,” “supportive collaboration” for Stone’s career but eventually became a “productive collaborator” (144-146, n181-182). For more on Blackwell’s subsequent endeavors as an activist, speaker, and writer, please see “‘Dear Mr. Blackwell, How He Has Helped’: Toward an Anatomy of Ally Rhetoric” (Hanly).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

J.P. Hanly

J.P. Hanly is an Assistant Professor of English and Director of First-Year Composition at Monmouth University in West Long Branch, New Jersey, where he teaches first-year composition and undergraduate and graduate-level courses in the history of rhetoric and composition pedagogy. He has published essays in Peitho: Journal of the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition and the Kentucky Philological Review; has delivered presentations at CCCC, RSA, NeMLA, PCA/ACA, and the Thomas R. Watson Conference; and is a 2011 graduate of the University of Louisville’s Ph.D program in Rhetoric and Composition.