Nellie Bly, “The Best Reporter in America” : One Woman's
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NELLIE BLY, “THE BEST REPORTER IN AMERICA” : ONE WOMAN’S RHETORICAL LEGACY by STACEY GAINES PARHAM A DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of The University of Alabama TUSCALOOSA, ALABAMA 2010 Copyright Stacey Gaines Parham 2010 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ABSTRACT My project shares the story of Nellie Bly, a true writer who applied her energies to accomplish more in her writing than most women of her time ever dreamed possible. During the Progressive Era (1890-1920), Bly fervently sought to define herself as a writer as she simultaneously negated the socially-constructed parameters that often sought to shield her from certain topics, those issues which were not considered appropriate for a woman’s pen to negotiate. What sets Nellie Bly apart from the largely silenced crowd of women attempting to write in her era is that she knew how to present stories as well as, if not better than, any man. Bly should be recognized as a writer in the annals of history and within the rhetorical canon. Little scholarly work exists on Nellie Bly’s contribution to women’s writing, or the ways in which women were allowed to express their views during the Progressive Era. Therefore, my dissertation specifically addresses the following aims: 1. To show the need for historical work on texts written by females in the Progressive Era. 2. To propose the texts of Nellie Bly as one locus of this historical work. 3. To provide a theoretical framework and research methodology to investigate feminist contributions to enlarge and enhance the rhetorical tradition of women and their writing. ii Building on the methodology of rhetorical sequencing devised by Richard Enos, my dissertation contributes to a greater understanding of the rhetorical canon by arguing to include another contributor. My study describes how Bly voiced her concerns in rhetorical spaces where women were theretofore mostly absent, and thus she disrupted rhetorical modes by which women were largely silenced. My major objective is to add to the history of women’s contributions to rhetoric by placing Nellie Bly and her work in that history. By restoring voice to Bly, who wrote when women were largely silenced, I add to discussions surrounding the need to further recognize feminist rhetorical contributions within the field of rhetoric and composition. iii DEDICATION To my loving husband. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I have always marveled at the number of persons whom writers tend to acknowledge on pages such as this one. However, having written a substantial document myself, I now realize that with such an accomplishment comes the desire to thank those that have made the process more enjoyable, more productive, and even more doable. Whether providing a word of encouragement, a recommendation for revision, or an idea for exploration, several people have made this undertaking possible and even pleasurable. To my director, Dr. Ralph Voss, I thank you heartily for your advice, your encouragement, and your leadership through this process. I am grateful to you for giving up a portion of your retirement in reading my drafts and commenting with ideas for revision. I truly appreciate how you have challenged and encouraged me as a student and a writer. Your direction has been invaluable, and I am sincerely appreciative for all your assistance. To the other members of my committee, Drs. Handa, Davies, Campbell, and Dayton- Wood, I thank you for your devotion to my studies and your support during this project. The four of you are among my most inspiring of academic role models. You have played an integral part in encouraging me to complete my doctoral degree and in providing me with four examples of women who have achieved great accomplishments and will continue to gain accolades as scholars, researchers, teachers, mentors, and rhetoricians. v To my husband, my parents, my in-laws, my grandparents, my Aunt Sarah, and my brother Russell, I thank you for unending encouragement, prayers, and love. When I think of those whom I most cherish, you are the ones that I picture, smiling before me. Without you, I do not know if my dream of becoming a doctor would have become a reality, and I thank you for being so instrumental in helping me to realize this dream. To my Savior Jesus Christ, I thank you for giving me life and the love of words and writing. Without you, I could do nothing. vi CONTENTS ABSTRACT ................................................................................................ ii DEDICATION ........................................................................................... iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...........................................................................v CHAPTER ONE / INTRODUCTION: MAPPING HER STORY..............1 CHAPTER TWO: DISCOVERING HER STORY ...................................23 CHAPTER THREE: RECONSTRUCTING HER STORY ......................48 CHAPTER FOUR: ANALYZING HER STORY .....................................78 CHAPTER FIVE / CONCLUSION: DISPLAYING HER STORY .......145 REFERENCES ........................................................................................154 vii CHAPTER 1 / INTRODUCTION: MAPPING HER STORY I will begin with a humble confession: Although I have intently studied English as a discipline for the past eight years and have written innumerable essays, I have always avoided defining myself as a writer. The avoidance of this descriptor has been whole-hearted. I thought of writers with great reverence, as those capable of easily producing their own texts, for their own purposes. Placing writers on this illusionary pedestal, I considered myself as not fitting into this idealized notion because I differed from what I thought a real writer should be. My initial avoidance of being a writer occurred during the first three years of my undergraduate career, as I sought the path of the M.D. instead of the Ph.D., studying calculus, physics, chemistry, and biology as a belligerent pre-med major. I use the term belligerent in describing myself because I find it most applicable to the war-like student I was, waging battle against her writing self , which I then associated more with the periodic table and graphing calculators than with journals and pens. My freshman composition teacher, who later also became my British literature survey professor, publicly denounced my intent of pursuing a biology degree when I introduced myself as a “biology major” on the first day of that survey course. She rather decisively asserted to a class of sophomores, “Her major should be English.” (Earlier, my high school English teacher 1 had told me as much, but what high schooler actually listens to anyone?) In wearing that suit of a pre-med student’s armor, I ignored these teachers spurring me in the direction of the career path that would eventually bring me the most joy and liberation, that of writing and research. Their assertions went unheeded as I continued to balance equations and set reagents on fire in chemistry labs. In my third year of undergraduate science study, I became increasingly uninterested in learning the amino acids in an advanced biology course, while I grew all the more envious of those English majors who were reading Dickinson and the Brontes instead of science textbooks. My career aspiration as a pre-med student was to enter medical school with the hopes of becoming a dermatologist, but the thoughts of preparing for the MCAT and beginning medical school became unappealing to me. Thus, I changed my major to English during my junior year. By turning from the sciences to the humanities, I stripped myself of the armament of the science/math student and donned the mask of the English/literature scholar, a disguise more comfortable to me but still the visage of an imposter. At that point in my academic career, perhaps because of my idealistic view of real writers, I still failed to embrace the term writer in defining myself . In my English undergraduate classes, I primarily wrote about topics that I thought might please my teachers, those ideas that would earn me a top grade, or those theses that mirrored the ever-present politics of those classes. My writing in some sense was not my own, but a reflection of that which I thought the professors desired in their students, in budding scholars, in aspiring but not “true” writers. As I formulated theses, drafted papers, and completed assignments, I thought the essays wrote themselves as I sought to shield my self-deception with that mask of confidence. I became just the bearer of the message, the transcriber of the data, or the mediator between proof and claim. And although every paper was returned to me bearing the 2 letter A, the often scarlet letter symbolizing the adultery of my own voice, I reasoned that I could share relevant information to persuade my professor to give me the desired grade, but I still did not believe that I was a writer . During my master’s degree program, I was confronted with what I perceived to be the truth of my situation: I indeed could not write; I had been found out. I was enrolled in the “boot camp” of the M. A. curriculum, the bibliography and research class. After I had written my thirty-page draft of the required paper, I swapped it with a classmate to engage in my first peer editing session as a graduate student. I proffered the longest essay of my short career in academia to my peer as the primary example of my proficiency as a master’s degree student. As a result of my peer editing session, those suspicions of my inability to write were confirmed when my peer editor returned my essay and noted that the paper lacked a thesis, communicated no relevant or convincing points to defend said unknown thesis, and ultimately left him completely befuddled as a reader. Finally, a peer had uncovered my guise; he had taken off the mask I had worn since I changed my major in my junior year.