Suturing a Wounded Body-Wounded Mind in Red Silk on White Linen: Embodied and Hand(Y) Knowledge of Trauma

• Authors: Maureen Daly Goggin
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

In 1830, Elizabeth Parker, daughter of a day laborer and of a teacher in Ashburnham, East Sussex, England, cross-stitched in red silk thread an extraordinarily complex text that participates in several genres, including a memoir of her then brief life of some seventeen years, a confession, a suicide note, and a prayer. These various genres cohere around one momentous event in Parker’s young life: the sexual violation and physical abuse at the hands of her employer, Lt. G. After suturing 46 lines, 1,722 words, and 6,699 characters, she stops mid-line and mid-way down her cloth with the powerful plea, “What will become of my soul[?]” This paper argues that Parker’s sampler was a robust site in which Parker was able to grapple with her wounded body and mind. To justify the claim that a woman’s stitching can be interpreted as an epistemic activity, the proposed paper turns to two key concepts “situated knowledges” and “embodied knowledge”- both of which have been posited by feminists as a way to destabilize the dominant validation of disembodied, abstract thinking where the eye serves as the mind’s tool of investigation. (Haraway; Knappett; Frank; Driver)

Keywords

EN

feminism; rhetoric; material culture

• Publisher: Sciendo
• Journal: Linguaculture
• Year: 2012
• Volume: 2012
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 27-46

Dates

published

2012-12-01

online

2013-02-12

Contributors

author

Maureen Daly Goggin

• Arizona State University, U.S.A.

References

• Anderson, Olive. Suicide in Victorian and Edwardian England. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987.
• Aristotle. Poetics. In Aristotle in Twenty-Three Volumes: The Poetics, Longinus on the Sublime, Demetrius on Style. Translated by W. H. Fyfe, 3-118. 1932. Reprint. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982.
• Bailey, Victor. This Rash Act: Suicide across the Life Cycle in the Victorian City. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.
• Batchelor, Jennie, and Cora Kaplan. Women and Material Culture, 1660-1830. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007.
• Battersby, Christine. Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics. London: Women’s Press, 1989.
• Bergland, Betty. “Postmodernism and the Autobiographical Subject: Reconstructing the ‘Other’”. In Autobiography and Postmodernism. Eds. Kathleen M. Ashley, Leigh Gilmore and Gerald Peters, Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1994. 130-66.
• Bizzell, Patricia. “Feminist Methods of Research in the History of Rhetoric: What Difference Do They make?” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 30 (2000): 5-17.
• Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs. Man Cannot Speak for Her: A Critical Study of Early Feminist Rhetoric. 2 vols. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1989.
• Clifford, Geraldine. “‘Marry, Stitch, Die or Do Worse’: Educating Women for Work.” In Work, Youth, and Schooling: Historical Perspectives on Vocationalism in American Education. Eds. Harvey Kantor & David B. Tyack. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982. 223-68.
• Coffin, Judith G. “Consumption, Production, and Gender: The Sewing Machine in Nineteenth-Century France.” In Gender and Class in Modern Europe. Eds. Laura L. Frader, and Sonya O. Rose. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996. 111-41.
• Cotter, Holland. “New Samplers that Give Old Pieties the Needle.” New York Times. 5 March 1999, Art Review, 646.
• Driver, Felix. “Bodies in Space: Foucault’s Account of Disciplinary Power.” In Reassessing Foucault: Power, Medicine, and the Body. Eds. Colin Jones and Roy Porter. London: Routledge, 1994. 113-131.
• Enos, Richard Leo. “The Archaeology of Women in Rhetoric: Rhetorical Sequencing as a Research Method for Historical Scholarship.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 32 (2002): 65-80.
• Frank, Arthur. “Bringing Bodies Back In: A Decade Review.” Theory, Culture and Society 7 (1990): 131-62.
• Gilmore, Leigh. “The Mark of Autobiography: Postmodernism, Autobiography, and Genre.” In Autobiography and Postmodernism. Eds. Kathleen M. Ashley, Leigh Gilmore and Gerald Peters. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1994. 3-18.
• -----------“Policing Truth: Confession, Gender, and Autobiographical Authority.” In Autobiography and Postmodernism. Eds. Kathleen M. Ashley, Leigh Gilmore and Gerald Peters. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1994. 54-78.
• Glenn, Cheryl. Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity through theRenaissance. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997.
• Goggin, Maureen Daly. “One Nineteenth-Century English Woman’s Story in Silken Ink: Filling in the Missing Strands in Elizabeth Parker’s circa 1830 Sampler.” Samplers and Antique Needlework Quarterly 29 (Winter 2002): 38-49.
• Goggin, Peter N. and Maureen Daly Goggin. “Presence in Absence: Discourses and Teaching (In, On and about) Trauma.” In National Trauma and the Teaching ofWriting. Ed. Shane Borrowman. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. 29-51.
• Hall, Eliza Calvert. Aunt Jane of Kentucky. Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1910.
• Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14 (1988): 575-99.
• Hobbs, June Hadden. “I Sing for I Cannot be Silent”: The Feminization of AmericanHymnody, 1870-1920. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997.
• Jarratt, Susan C. Rereading the Sophists: Classical Rhetoric Refigured. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991.
• Knappett, Carl. Thinking through Material Culture: An Interdisciplinary Perspective. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005.
• LaCapra, Dominick. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.
• Laub, Dori. “An Event without a Witness: Truth, Testimony and Survival.” In Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. Eds. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub. New York: Routledge, 1992. 75-92.
• Lionnet, Françoise. Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989.
• Logan, Shirley W. We Are Coming: The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-CenturyBlack Women. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999.
• Lunsford, Andrea A., ed. Reclaiming Rhetorica Women in the Rhetorical Tradition. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995.
• MacDonald, Michael, and Terence R. Murphy. Sleepless Souls: Suicide in Early ModernEngland. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990.
• Mattingly, Carol. Appropriate[ing] Dress: Women’s Rhetorical Style in Nineteenth-Century America. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002a.
• ---. “Telling Evidence: Rethinking What Counts in Rhetoric.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 32 (2002b): 99-108.
• ---. Well-Tempered Women: Nineteenth-Century Temperance Rhetoric. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998.
• McClish, Glen, and Bacon, Jacqueline. “‘Telling the Story Her Own Way’: The Role of Feminist Standpoint Theory in Rhetorical Studies.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 32 (2002): 27-55.
• Miller, Marla R. The Needle’s Eye: Women and Work in the Age of Revolution. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006.
• Miller, Susan. Assuming the Positions: Cultural Pedagogy and the Politics ofCommonplace Writing. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. 1998.
• Moss, Ann. Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring Of Renaissance Thought. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.
• Ovid. Metamorphosis. Translated by R. Humphries. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955.
• Parker, Rozsika. The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine. 1984. Reprint. New York: Routledge, 1989.
• Peterson, Carla L. Doers of the Word: African-American Women Speakers and Writersin the North (1830-1880). New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
• Ratcliffe, Krista. Anglo-American Feminist Challenges to the Rhetorical Traditions:Virginia Woolf, Mary Daly, Adrienne Rich. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996.
• Rief, L., Host. “The Fabric of Our Lives: Quilt Making.” In Tales Out of School:Reading and Writing Beyond the Classroom. Produced by S. N. Scully and Directed by T. Van Horn. Star Schools. US Department of Education. Boston: Massachusetts Corporation of Educational Telecommunications, 1999.
• Ring, Betty. Let Virtue be a Guide to Thee: Needlework in the Education of RhodeIsland Women, 1730-1830. Providence: The Rhode Island Historical Society, 1983.
• Roche, Daniel. The Culture of Clothing: Dress and Fashion in the ‘Ancien Regime.’ Translated by Jean Birrell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
• Royster, Jacqueline Jones. Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change amongAfrican-American Women. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000.
• Ryan, Kathleen J., and Elizabeth Natalle J. “Fusing Horizons: Hermeneutics and Invitational Rhetoric.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 31 (2001): 69-90.
• Sappho. Sappho: Poems & Fragments. Translated by Josephine Balmer. Secaucus, NJ: Meadowland, 1984.
• Shakespeare, William. Titus Andronicus. In The Complete Works of WilliamShakespeare. New York: Avenel Books, 1975. 919-46.
• Spyer, Patricia. “The Body, Materiality and the Senses.” In Handbook of MaterialCulture. Eds. Christopher Tilley, Webb Keane, Susanne Küchler, Michael Rowlands and Patricia Spyerm. London: Sage, 2006. 125-29.
• Stallybrass, Peter. “Worn Worlds: Clothes and Mourning.” In Cultural Memory and theConstruction of Identity. Eds. Dan Ben-Amos and Liliane Weissberg. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999. 27-44.
• Sutherland, Christine Mason. “Feminist Historiography: Research Methods in Rhetoric.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 32 (2002): 109-22.
• Sutherland, Christine Mason, and Rebecca Sutcliffe, eds. The Changing Tradition:Women in the History of Rhetoric. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1999.
• Swaim, Kathleen M. “‘Come and Hear’ Women’s Puritan Evidences.” In AmericanWomen’s Autobiographies: Fea(s)ts of Memory. Ed. Margo Culley. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1993. 32-56.
• Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation ofan American Myth. New York: Alfred A. Knof, 2001.
• Wakoski, Diane. “Medieval Tapestry and Question.” In In Her Own Image: WomenWorking in the Arts. Eds. Elaine Hedges and Ingrid Wendt. Old Westbury, NY: Feminist Press, 1980. 38.
• Wertheimer, Molly Meijer, ed. Listening to their Voices: Essays on the RhetoricalActivities of Historical Women. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997.
• Wiesner, Merry E. “Spinsters and Seamstresses: Women in Cloth and Clothing Production.” In Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of SexualDifference in Early Modern Europe. Eds. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan and Nancy J. Vickers. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. 191-205.

Identifiers

DOI

10.2478/v10318-012-0016-4