| Provisional Notes |
birth date: 09-07-1811
death date: 10-10-1872
Elizabethada Wright
Siggin and Singing: The Case of a Nineteenth-Century American White Woman Signifyin(g)
Recently, Mikhail Bahktin's concept of "double-voiced discourse" has become increasingly important to scholars who use it to describe the ways that oppressed people deliver subversive messages. For example, Linda Hutcheon has observed ways women use irony, a kind of double-voiced discourse, to de stabilize their opposition, and Henry Louis Gates has studied the African-American strategy of Signification, which thrives on its powerful play with language.
While Signification has been studied as a rhetorical strategy of African Americans, some of the double-voiced discourse utilized by white American women, especially during the nineteenth century, has strong similarities to Signifyin(g). Seeing women's discourse as play that serves a purpose, that teaches but does not preach, and that thrives on the unexpected, we may better understand much of the dismissed humorous work of nineteenth-century women. Working toward this end, this paper analyzes the newspaper columns of the nineteenth-century writer Fanny Fern, a woman whose humor has been little studied, to draw connections between the rhetorical strategies in her work. Signification can better help us understand both the strategies of some nineteenth-century white women and the similarities between the situations of African Americans and women.
Contribution to The Second Biennial Feminism(s)
and Rhetoric(s) Conference "Challenging Rhetorics: Cross-Disciplinary Sites of Feminist Discourse" (1999)
(SvDijk sept. 2003)
KLK 1904 |