'Invisible to the Eye': Rhetorics of Ethical
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‘INVISIBLE TO THE EYE’: RHETORICS OF ETHICAL EMOTIONALITY IN MISTER ROGERS’ NEIGHBORHOOD by Alexandra Castro Klarén B.A. in History, Sarah Lawrence College, 2002 M.A. in Writing, Johns Hopkins University, 2004 M.A. in Religious Studies, University of Pittsburgh, 2009 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Kenneth P. Dietrich Arts & Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh 2016 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH KENNETH P. DIETRICH SCHOOL OF ARTS & SCIENCES This dissertation was presented by Alexandra Castro Klarén It was defended on April 13, 2016 and approved by Dr. Tyler Bickford, Assistant Professor, Department of English Dr. Jane Feuer, Professor, Department of English Dr. Brenton J. Malin, Associate Professor, Department of Communication Dissertation Advisor: Dr. Ronald J. Zboray, Professor, Department of Communication ii Copyright © by Alexandra Castro Klarén 2016 iii ‘INVISIBLE TO THE EYE’: RHETORICS OF ETHICAL EMOTIONALITY IN MISTER ROGERS’ NEIGHBORHOOD Alexandra Castro Klarén, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2016 This dissertation seeks to understand the success, significance, and impact of the children’s television program, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood (1968-2001). It explores the nuanced complexity of Rogers’ thought, the dialogical integration of his various influences, and the intentional ethic of care behind the creation of a program that spoke to the affective, cultural, and educational needs of children (and adults) during a period of cultural and political upheaval in the United States. Despite the program’s longevity and popularity, it has received only scant attention from humanities scholars. The sole monograph to date interprets the program from a pacifist perspective. My dissertation provides the first full-fledged contextualization of the program, its vision and its enactment, as an innovative intervention into the world of children’s television. Delving into the newly available primary documents at the Fred Rogers Archive, I examined and analyzed speeches, notes, scripts, and letters written by Rogers in order to discover and understand his vision for the Neighborhood and his conception of televisual communication. Viewer mail revealed the efficacy and specificity of his heightened parasocial communication techniques and pedagogical objectives. A rhetorical analysis of the program’s first year shows how Rogers interweaves a dialogical ethos with a meticulous study of objects and play to engage young viewers in social-material culture. iv Drawing on dialogic theory (M. Bakhtin, P. Friere, R. Arnett, M. Buber), Roger Burggraeve’s concept of “ethical emotionality,” and D.W. Winnicott’s theories of child development, this study shows how Rogers presciently recognized in television the parasocial possibilities for making the critical embodied social-emotional communication connections that humans need to develop and cope in the world. I argue that Rogers deployed the critical orientation of “ethical emotionality” necessary for a “holistic and moral education” (R. Burggraeve). I show how the success of the program revolves around Rogers’ establishment of a space of “emotional safety,” a pathos recognized by Saint-Exupéry as “invisible to the eye,” through rhetorics of care and connection in his televisual encounter. The dissertation’s major findings detail how the program’s success is largely owed to Rogers’ effective deployment of “ethical emotionality,” parasociality, and tele-dialogism to reach his viewers. v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This expansive dissertation project has taken the support of many people. I must first thank my advisor Dr. Ronald J. Zboray for all of his dedicated guidance, mentorship, and direction over the years of my graduate tenure at the University of Pittsburgh. I also want to thank Mary Saracino Zboray for her helpful feedback, comments, and dialoguing about media, culture, and religion. Dr. Brenton J. Malin, my second reader and mentor, deserves my sincere gratitude for his many years of seminar instruction, stimulating conversation, and dedicated support. I also want to thank the other members of my committee, Dr. Jane Feuer and Dr. Tyler Bickford, for their insightful contributions to my thinking and for their most helpful feedback on this piece of research. Second, I owe many thanks to the team at the Fred Rogers Center for welcoming me at the Archives during my visits and for providing a neighborly environment for me to study Rogers’ work. I want to especially thank Emily Uhrin, who went above and beyond her archival call of duty to provide me with assistance. Furthermore, she graciously transferred much of her vast knowledge of all things Mister Rogers to me in conversation, demonstrating her deep expertise on the program’s creator and history. I also thank Rick Fernandes, Executive Director at the Fred Rogers Center for his emphatic support and belief in my work. I am very grateful to Rita Catalano, former Executive Director at the Center, to the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, and to the Grable Foundation for the Fred Rogers Memorial Scholarship I was awarded in 2012. This scholarship provided me with the necessary support to carry out this project in the kind of thorough and in-depth fashion it called for. Last, but certainly not least amongst this vi special group, I wish to thank Hedda Sharapan and Joanne Rogers for sharing with me their wealth of memories, insights, and knowledge about Fred and MRN. Finally, I thank most profusely, my parents, Peter Klarén and Sara Castro-Klarén for inspiring me throughout my life to think critically about the world, to believe in myself, and to call upon my grandfather, José A. Castro’s sense of mote when life’s challenges present themselves. Thank you for to your unceasing love, strength, care, and support. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction…………………………………………………………….…………………1 Chapter 1: Situating Rogers’ Vision: A Socio-Cultural Framing……………………………………20 Television, Influence, and Interpersonal Connection……………………………….25 Television—Friend or Foe: Entering the Debates on the New Domestic Machine...39 Redeploying the Pastoral Ideal………………...……..……………….…………….47 Responding to Exigencies in Postwar America…………………………………….63 Christianity and Mass Entertainment: Tensions and Solutions……………………..76 Blurring Boundaries: TV, Pedagogy, Child Development, and the Family...............91 Conclusion…….……………………………………………...………....................116 Chapter 2: Creating the Dialogic: Christianity, Child Development and the Parasocial…………...118 Dialogic Beginnings: Divinity School and the Arsenal Family & Children’s Center…………………………………………………………………...123 The Wounded Healer and the Mutuality of Holy Ground…………………….…...135 Staging Development: Erik Erikson and Fred Rogers…………………………….148 Creativity and Agape: The Palimpsest of Feeling and Thinking…………….…....154 Parasocial Interactivity and the Birth of “Mister Rogers”………………………...168 Public Pedagogy and the MRN Intervention………………………………..……..172 Rogers’ “Philosophy”…………………..……………………………………….....177 viii An Anthropocentric Christian-Based Intervention….……………………………..187 Conclusion: A Third Way…………………....……………………………………198 Chapter 3: Inside MRN: Objects, Play, and the Cultural Dialectic ……….…………......................206 Architecture of the Program……………………………..………………………...214 MRN, Object Usage, and the Work of Reality-Making……..…………………….235 Winnicott, Objects, and the Location of Culture…………………………………..244 Origins, History, and Pleasure: MRN’s System of Objects……...………………...260 Conclusion………………..……………………………………………………......294 Chapter 4: “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?”: Intergenerational Dialogics in Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood Viewer Mail………………………………………….............................298 Recognizing, Reuniting, and Reconciling—Dialoging with Young Men…………309 On Becoming More Human – Dialoguing With a Young Woman………………..325 Sharing Existence – Dialoging with a Grieving Mother…………………………..337 Critiquing Parents………………………………………………………………….343 Letters from Professionals…………………………………………………………356 Conclusion: Dialogic Communication Ethics and the Good…….………………...366 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………...373 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………380 ix LIST OF FIGURES Figures 1-3. Lance Cardinal’s “Mister Rogers’ Television House Miniature”……239-240 Figure 4. Venn Diagram…………………………………………………………..........246 x INTRODUCTION In his 1997 commencement speech to the Memphis Theological Seminary entitled “Invisible Essentials,” Fred Rogers, writing at the age of 69, reflects back on defining moments in his life. He recounts his experience of being bullied when he was an overweight and timid young boy. Afraid to go to school each day, he was, in his own words “a perfect target for ridicule.” One day, after being released from school early, he decided to walk home. Soon after leaving the school grounds, he noticed that he was being followed by a group of boys who quickly gained on him while taunting him verbally. “Freddy, hey fat Freddy,” they shouted, “we’re going to get you, Freddy.” Rogers recalls breaking into a sprint, hoping that he would run fast enough to make it to the house of a widowed neighbor. He remembers praying that she would be home so that he would be taken in and sheltered from the ensuing threat. She was indeed home, and Rogers found “refuge.”1 As one might imagine, the painful feelings of shame that resulted from the social abuse and ostracism of bullying affected Rogers’ deeply. He recounted how, when he told the adult caretakers in his life about the