RHETORICAL GESTURES IN BRITISH ELOCUTIONISM BY CORY S. HOLDING DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English with a concentration in Writing Studies in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2012 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Professor Debra Hawhee, Chair Professor Martin Camargo Professor Emeritus Gail Hawisher Professor Richard Powers Professor Paul Prior Associate Professor Ted Underwood ABSTRACT This project uncovers the rhetoric of gesture in British elocutionist handbooks on delivery (about 1650 to 1800). In the work of Bulwer, Sheridan, Walker, Priestley, Austin and others, the gesture exceeds its caricature in histories of rhetoric: an ancillary, if “detached” mechanism for the coercion of audience. Instead, the gesture produces meaning as it promotes appeal. It recommends presence as an inventional resource, and moving-with as a means to coming to terms, drawing toward what Crowley, writing in the context of contemporary political action, calls “civil discourse.” By tracking and analyzing the rhetorical gesture through interrelated thematic locations—medicine, theatre, pulpit, and philosophical chemistry—this project not only argues for re- embodying invention, but also (like the Elocutionists themselves did) suggests that theorists of material and body rhetoric would benefit by extending their cross-disciplinary reach. Rhetorical gesture points out an alternative to “invention” (as well as rhetoric) that is by nature personal, oral and alphabetic. I offer this study/ gesture in support of current efforts to theorize the body’s role in the production of argument (Hawhee, Davis), as well as feminst rhetorics that assert the importance of looking beyond the speaker (Glenn, Ratcliffe) and even text, for rhetorical subjects and “stance.” ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS For your iconic gestures;1 your deictic gestures that signaled a way and your dream gestures; your gestures of complement, admonishment, applause, adjuration, yielding, confessing, cherishing, demanding, blessing, proving, confirming, saluting, entertaining, giving thanks, giving welcome, bidding farewell, consenting, upbraiding, rewarding, force, pacification, invitation, justification, disdain, forgiveness, promise, performance, invocation, request, charge, praise, direction, adoption, faith, exchange, benevolence, mercy, grace, silence, comfort, relief, demonstration, remonstrance, mirth, and wonder;2 your patent emblems and patented touch-screen gestures; your gestures of interrogation, frankness, tenderness, dominance, rejection, consternation, triumph, irony, and confusion “(pêlemêle)”;3 your metaphoric gestures in all due forms—mixed, absolute, implied, dead, complex as the day is long; your beats, in time, as time, went by; gestures showing something as essential or fundamental, what is notable, narration;4 your affect displays, regulators (“acts which maintain and regulate the back-and-forth nature of speaking and listening”), and adaptors;5 your just plain “idiosyncratic spontaneous movements”;6 your 1 For they are nothing if not iconic! 2 John Bulwer, Chirologia, or, The naturall language of the hand composed of speaking motions, and discoursing gestures thereof: whereunto is added Chironomia, or, The art of manuall rhetoricke, consisting of the naturall expressions, digested by art in the hand, as the chiefest instrument of eloquence (London: Tho. Harper, 1644), 9-10. 3 Adam Kendon, Gesture: Visible Action as Utterance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 86, paraphrasing Bary from Méthode pour bien prononcer un discours et pour le bien animer (1679). 4 Ibid. 5 Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen, “The Repertoire of Nonverbal Behavior: Categories, origins, Usage, and Coding,” Semiotica 1, no. 1 (1969): 82, 84. 6 David McNeill, Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal About Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 37. iii Butterworths,7 your batons,8 and your cohesives;9 for all of your signs; your in-between gestures, and your hitherto not classified gestures which by and by cast mine: thank you, teachers. 7 Kendon, Gesture, 101. 8 Ekman and Friesen, “The Repertoire of Nonverbal Behavior,” 68. 9 McNeill, Hand and Mind, 16. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION: GESTURE LURE................................................................................1 CHAPTER ONE: PUTTING RHETORIC BACK IN THE FIST: JOHN BULWER’S CHIRONOMIA, CHIROLOGIA.........................................................................................19 CHAPTER TWO: INFECTIOUS GESTURES, OR THOMAS SHERIDAN’S SENSIBLE MARK.................................................................................................................................53 CHAPTER THREE: COMMUNICATION BY ELECTRIFICATION (JOSEPH PRIESTLEY’S RHETORICAL AFFINITY)..................................................................115 CHAPTER FOUR: THE RHETOR IN THE SPHERE: GESTURE AND CLIMATE IN GILBERT AUSTIN’S CHIRONOMIA............................................................................160 EPILOGUE: SOLICITATIONS......................................................................................191 BIBLIOGRAPHY............................................................................................................201 FIGURES.........................................................................................................................219 INTRODUCTION: GESTURE LURE 1 THE BEST LAID CAST In Book 6 of Institutio Oratoria, by way of touting the influence of appeals to emotion upon judges, Quintilian cautions that even the best-laid appeal can fall flat owing to body language. To illustrate, he describes courtroom scenes featuring the consequences of advocates’ lack of attunement with (or disregard of) other bodies. For example, he explains, an advocate who defends a woman thought it strategic for his peroration to produce an image of her husband in order to elicit sympathy from the court. However, the room only laughs: “the persons whose business it was to produce it,” unfamiliar with the genre, “displayed it to view whenever the advocate looked towards them and, when it was brought still more into sight at the conclusion,” when it was meant to be shown, “it destroyed the effect of all his previous eloquence by its ugliness, being a mere cast from an old man’s dead body.”1 Having emphasized that the best way to rouse feeling in judges is by rousing feeling in oneself—and that the surest way to “generate these emotions in ourselves, since emotion is not in our own power”2 is through deeply cast impression, and thus feeling—Quintilian emphasizes that this orator had the right idea. The flaw was with his execution. For meeting the laughter, he forgets the living element of his delivery, and carries on as planned. The death cast is what becomes of his speech, and its reception. 1 Quintilian, Institutes of Oratory, ed. Lee Honeycutt, tr. John Selby Watson (Ames: Iowa State, 2006), VI.i.40. 2 Quintilian, Institutes of Oratory, tr. H. E. Butler (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), VI.i.29. 1 2 RHETORICAL GESTURE I begin with the cast to introduce rhetorical gesture: motions of the body that are more than ornament, more than rational, and more than one’s own. Rhetorical gesture, I argue, is means not only to what Adam Kendon terms “manifest, deliberate expressiveness,” but it is also means to thinking through and reclaiming movement, formation and deformation, excess, occurrence—the event—as rhetorical opportunity.3 Although this gesture is not containable to the hand—indeed, it will course a foot, a shoulder, a torso, a posture, or even a handful of postures, side by side by side—the hand is a fitting place to begin a historiographic narrative about the relationship between gesture and rhetoric. In “The Rhetoric of the Open Hand and the Rhetoric of the Closed Fist,” Edward P.J. Corbett describes the rhetoric of the open hand as characteristic of “the kind of persuasive discourse that seeks to carry its point by reasoned, sustained, conciliatory discussion of the issues.”4 The closed fist “seeks to carry its point by non- rational, non-sequential, often non-verbal, frequently provocative means.”5 The open hand depends on the “seat of the intellect,” while the closed fist depends on the “seat of the pants.”6 My project takes a part in contemporary efforts to restore the rhetoric of the closed fist—not by way of abandoning the open hand, but by arguing that reasoned engagement is also wholly bodily. Thinking through bodily gesture offers a model of invention that acknowledges both what Sharon Crowley describes as appeal to the gut 3 Adam Kendon, Gesture: Visible Action as Utterance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 15. 4 Edward P. J. Corbett, “The Rhetoric of the Open Hand and the Rhetoric of the Closed Fist,” College Composition and Communication 20 (1969): 288. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., 293. Paraphrasing Leland M. Griffin in “The Rhetorical Structure of the ‘New Left’ Movement.” 2 and what Edwin Hutchins calls “cognitive systems that transcend the boundaries of individual bodies.”7 As Crowley says, “Beliefs can be learned by means of discourse, but they can also be learned through adopting bodily positions, making gestures, and performing movements.”8 Scholars of rhetoric should not merely treat bodies as receptacles for rhetorical effect. We should instead consider our own bodies, proximities, and gut sense as ways of thinking, and of coming to terms. Although this