Eloquence Is Power: Oratory and Performance in Early America

Abstract

Eloquence Is Power: Oratory and Performance in Early America. By Sandra M. Gustafson. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Pp. xxvi, 287. Illustrations. Cloth, $39.95; paper, $17.95.) Sandra M. Gustafson traces symbolic use of oratory in conflicts over culture, religion, empire, and nation in America from early seventeenth to late eighteenth century. The key turning point was middle of eighteenth century, a time when conservative elements sought to revive classical oratory in order to counteract a democratization of print culture. Yet it was also a time when first Great Awakening and then American Revolution had effect of democratizing oratory itself. Gustafson's first conceptual move is to correct teleological histories that construe print culture as supplanting oral culture. Duly granting ascendancy of print culture, Gustafson concentrates on persistence of oral genres within this shifting context. Essentially subaltern history of an oral genre, Eloquence Is Power chronicles not sweeping triumph, but embattled resilience. Yet Eloquence Is Power is concerned neither strictly nor merely with oratory. Gustafson's second conceptual move is a deft one, because central framework guiding analysis is a dialectic between orality and textuality-what Gustafson calls the performance semiotic of and (xvi). Focal are oratorical claims to power and authenticity made either through reliance upon or repudiation of textual authority. Proponents of speech generally favored living voice over dead text as their way of challenging social hierarchies that were to their disadvantage. Proponents of text, on other hand, typically favored stable text over chaotic as their way of preserving hierarchies that were to their advantage. The history of oratory was consequently full of contestation among European-American, Native-American, and African-American standpoints, as well as those of male and female. The prologue introduces this heterogeneity of conflict in form of seventeenth-century Puritan patriarchs who invoked textual authority to squelch verbal opposition from two different sources-women and Native Americans. Chapter one swiftly propels narrative into eighteenth century. The 1692 Salem witchcraft crisis helped initiate a subtle change in which linguistic hierarchies were no longer seen as absolute (apparently from perspective of Puritan patriarchs, although Gustafson strays toward passive voice in attributing this shift in perception). Instead, a rising tide of cultural relativism accelerated in age of Great Awakening, an era that set textual authority of learned ministers against extemporaneous preaching of evangelicals. Gustafson's primary case study is Jonathan Edwards, Northampton, Massachusetts, minister who inspired a religious revival, and who, at same time, sought to steer pious women away from ecstatic expressions and toward public displays of self-- silencing. Edwards sought to preserve male authority traditionally associated with textuality, even as many other evangelicals were instead assigning religious authenticity to orality as an alternative claiming of social authority. Chapters two and three feature Native Americans. Inspired by Great Awakening, Samsum Occum (along with John Marrant, a black preacher) sought to turn oratorical directness into preaching of inclusionary universalism, but this strategy met with only limited resonance among European Americans. The same must be said of EuropeanAmerican fascination with Native-American diplomatic oratory, a fascination that did not translate into full cultural respect from European Americans, nor into decisive cultural leverage for Native Americans. …

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