The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School Department of English AT THE INTERSECTION OF UTOPIA AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE: THE SPATIAL-RHETORICAL NEGOTIATIONS OF 19TH-CENTURY WOMEN A Dissertation in English by Michelle C. Smith ! 2010 Michelle C. Smith Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy August 2010 The dissertation of Michelle C. Smith was reviewed and approved* by the following: Cheryl Glenn Liberal Arts Research Professor of English Dissertation Advisor Chair of Committee John L. Selzer Professor of English Hester Blum Associate Professor of English Melissa Wright Associate Professor of Geography Robert E. Burkholder Associate Professor of English Associate Head of the Department of English *Signatures are on file in the Graduate School iii ABSTRACT The primary goal of this dissertation is to understand the role of space in women’s participation in 19th-century intentional communities and publics. Through their participation in 19th-century utopian experiments, my subjects were exposed to unconventional ideas about space, gender, labor, and community. Like many other participants in such communities, my subjects also formed rhetorical alliances with larger American communities concerned with business, politics, and social norms. The project follows these rhetorical trajectories from utopian space to the public sphere, guided by my overarching question: how does space affect the rhetorical alliances of 19th-century women? Following the theoretical and methodological orientation in Chapter Two, I go on to examine three female rhetors, drawing from their published writings and speeches and archival sources within their communities or pertaining to the women themselves. Chapter Three explores the infamous Frances Wright. Wright’s initial utopian reading of America prompted an aggressive campaign for abolition via an interracial communal experiment in Tennessee. After the community’s failure, Wright went on to become a leader in the freethought movement, employing spatial strategies such as relocating to New York and repurposing a church into a “Hall of Science” to promote the movement. Chapter Four, in contrast, examines my most obscure subject: Gertrude Rapp. Rapp lived her entire life within the German pietist Harmony Society. Rapp’s letters, circulated among a network of silk-growers, facilitated her participation in the burgeoning silk industry of mid 19th-century America. By situating the Harmony Society at the forefront iv of the “silk cause,” Rapp positioned her non-normative community as an integral part of America. Chapter Five explores the rhetoric of Abby Morton Diaz, who spent several years in the Transcendental Brook Farm. The community’s theories of space and labor were applied unevenly to the men and women of Brook Farm, belying gender hypocrisies that Diaz would expose in her writings about domestic space. Later in life, Diaz worked within a Boston women’s club to create urban space for cross-class relationships among women. In my final chapter, I consider some “Lessons from Intentional Communities,” lessons central to the study of rhetoric as a spatial practice. v TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES .....................................................................................................vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.........................................................................................viii Chapter 1 Gender, Rhetoric, and Space in 19th-Century America..............................1 Public Women ......................................................................................................10 The Placeless Public .............................................................................................16 Women Rhetors and Utopian Space.....................................................................19 Overview of Chapters...........................................................................................22 Conclusion ............................................................................................................25 Chapter 2 Theory and Method: Approaching Space, Publics, Utopia, and History ...28 Joining the Conversation: An Overview of Material Rhetoric.............................28 What’s the Matter with Material Rhetoric?...................................................29 Positioning Rhetoric and Reality...................................................................32 Learning from the Literature: Rhetorical Studies of Space and Publics ..............35 Space as Rhetorical, Rhetoric as Spatial .......................................................35 Women’s Place and Public Space .................................................................39 Reviving the Rhetorical Public......................................................................42 Anonymous Identities, Material Publics .......................................................44 Suveying Feminist Geography and Spatial Theory: A Spatial Model .................47 Approaches to Space .....................................................................................47 A Taxonomy of Space...................................................................................50 Considering Utopia: Histories of Utopian Thought and Action...........................52 Historicizing Rhetoric: Methods in Feminist Rhetorical Historiography.............56 Telling it Crooked, Getting it Straight...........................................................57 Canonical Versus Communal Rhetorics........................................................59 Chapter 3 Fanny Wright, Idealist and Outcast: Experimenting with Space from the Interracial Nashoba to Freethought in New York...........................................64 The Rhetorical Space of Nashoba: Space as Argument .......................................68 An Essentialist View of America ..................................................................68 Nashoba’s Compromises...............................................................................75 High Hopes Disappointed..............................................................................81 Conflicting Views of Nashoba ......................................................................86 The Spatial Rhetoric of Freethought: New York and the Hall of Science ...........93 Freethought in New York..............................................................................93 Public Discourse in the Hall of Science ........................................................99 Conclusion ............................................................................................................109 vi Chapter 4 Gertrude Rapp, Unlikely Entrepreneur: Repositioning the Harmony Society through the Cultivation of Silk ................................................................112 The Rhetorical Space of Harmony: Conflicted and Contested.............................114 Inside Harmony .............................................................................................115 Projections of Harmony.................................................................................122 Gertrude Rapp’s Silk Industry.......................................................................128 Harmony and the Silk Cause .........................................................................134 The Spatial Rhetoric of the Silk Public: Negotiating Spatial Isolation ................139 Making Letters Public ...................................................................................139 The Limits of Long-Distance Participation...................................................144 Bracketing, Gender, and Celibacy.................................................................152 Conclusion ............................................................................................................165 Chapter 5 Abby Morton Diaz, Renaissance Woman: Reconfiguing Labor and Gender in Brook Farm, Fiction, and the Urban Women’s Club...........................168 The Rhetorical Space of Brook Farm: Theory and Practice.................................172 Brook Farm’s Abstract Space........................................................................172 Women’s Work at the Farm ..........................................................................179 Domestic Matter over Female Mind..............................................................189 The Spatial Rhetoric of the WEIU: The Street and the Sisterhood ......................196 Women in Urban Space.................................................................................197 Spatial Practices and Cross-Class Alliances..................................................202 Conclusion ............................................................................................................210 Chapter 6 Lessons from Intentional Communities .....................................................214 Drawing Conclusions............................................................................................216 Spaces are Rhetorical ....................................................................................217 Publics Need Spaces......................................................................................219 Making Inferences ................................................................................................220 Spatial Resistance..........................................................................................220 Reconceptualizing Spatial