Haunting Women’s Public Memory: Ethos, Space, and Gender in the Winchester Mystery House

ABSTRACT

This article examines the rhetorical framing of San Jose’s “Winchester Mystery House” house tour to consider the role of spatiality in shaping the ethos and subsequent public remembrance of women. Built in the late nineteenth-century by the heiress to the Winchester Rifle Company fortune, the sprawling Victorian mansion is now a popular tourist attraction that has become a metonym for the architect herself, whose memory remains shrouded in stories of séances, seclusion, and mystery. The article traces the image of Winchester as a bizarre and spooky widow to the public tour and the spatial rhetorics of her house itself. The house challenges our limited notions of space—particularly domestic space—with implications for other sites of women’s public memory and the ethos of the woman rhetor.

Notes

1. My most sincere thanks to the two RR reviewers of this manuscript, Jessica Enoch and Jane Greer, whose thoughtful and generous comments greatly improved this article and forwarded my thinking about this project more broadly.

2. Take, for example, the representation of Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House museum (West), or the demolition of the Women’s Temple discussed by Carol Mattingly.

3. Many thanks to Shenir Dennis who very intrepidly visited the house during COVID-19 to secure photographs for this publication. Thanks also to Nathan Lamoreau for the use of his photographs.

4. The remembering and gendering of the Winchester house are also tied particularly to the house’s Victorian architecture and the fate of that architectural style in history. As Carol Mattingly argues, such intricately designed spaces that combine the private and the public, function and aesthetics—popular in the nineteenth century—came to be scripted as feminine, and ultimately dismissed as such, by the twentieth century.

5. Following a series of seemingly endless renovations and redesigns of their own, the current owners have now populated the house with many more period items than when the author originally visited, including more furniture as well as tools such as a typewriter accompanied by typing sound effects. Still, the narrative of scarcity that undergirds the sense of “mystery” is centrally featured.

6. It should be noted that the visitor is necessarily able-bodied, as the tour experience is highly inaccessible to individuals with mobility issues. Thus, the able-bodied tour group is consuming the space of disability as spectacle.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Santa Clara University [Provost Research Grant].

Notes on contributors

Amy J. Lueck

Amy J. Lueck is Assistant Professor of English at Santa Clara University, where her research and teaching focus on histories of rhetorical instruction and practice, women’s rhetorics, feminist historiography, and public memory. Her book, A Shared History: Writing in the High School, College, and University, 1856-1886 (SIU Press 2020), brings together several of these research threads, interrogating the ostensible high school-college divide and the role it has played in shaping writing instruction in the U.S. Her work has previously appeared in journals such as College English, Rhetoric Review, Composition Studies, and Kairos.