Valerie Blair Assignment

Rhetorical Situation for the Critique Assignment:
The instructor of vocal culture for women at the Baptist Missionary Training School in Chicago (1892) wishes to teach her students about the importance and art of critique, as explained by Hugh Blair.

The young women are familiar with the speeches of many prominent abolitionists. Primary texts studied thus far include speeches and letters presented by the Grimke sisters (Epistle to the Clergy of the Southern States, Appeal to the Christian Women of the South), and the Correspondence Between Lydia Maria Child and Governor Wise and Mrs. Mason. Likewise, the women have read Catharine Beecher’s Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism, with Reference to the Duty of American Females (1837).

Because the young women are primarily from northern states, most implicitly sympathize with the abolitionist cause and believe the emancipation of African Americans to be the just cause of the Civil War. Few of the women, however, are familiar with the African American abolitionists’ rhetoric and contributions to the anti-slavery cause. Some have heard the name “Sojourner Truth,” but none have read any transcription of her speech: “Aren’t I A Woman?”

Critique Assignment - Reading/Writing/ Synthesis

I will ask my students to read the record of the Sojourner Truth speech delivered to the Woman’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio (1851) as remembered by Frances Gage, which appeared, according to Logan, in the 1870s. Then, I will ask my students to read Blair’s “Lecture XX: Critical Examination of the Style of Mr. Addison,” where after praising Addison’s manner as “natural and unaffected, easy and polite,” argues that his not without “defects” (256) -- defects which Blair exposes and rewrites.

My students will read Blair’s critique, first, as a model, and then embark on a rewriting of Truth’s speech with an eye toward certain stylistic “faults.” Since Truth’s speech is, even by Blair’s standard’s a success (“for the public is the supreme judge” (25)), he would likely argue that Truth - because she did not have access to the most approved models, could not study the best authors, lacked in taste. Her speech, therefore, could be refined.

(Interestingly, Blair, were he to have seen Truth’s speech or been familiar with a transcript of her speech, might have argued that she is a genius, and perhaps achieved some moments of sublimity; still, even geniuses are not experts in judging-- that is a job for the critics to perform after the execution.)

Before my students begin the line by line rewriting of Truth’s speech under Blair’s rubric, I will remind them of Blair’s thoughts about the status and purpose of critique:

• “True criticism is a liberal and humane art. It is the offspring of good sense and refined taste” (6).

• “True criticism is the application of taste and of good sense to the several fine arts. The object which it proposes is, to distinguish what is beautiful and what is faulty in every performance…” (23).

• “Precisely in the same manner, with respect to the beauty of composition and discourse, attention to the most approved models, study of the best authors, comparisons of lower and higher degrees of the same beauties, operate toward the refinement of taste” (13).


Finally, I will direct my students to Blair’s “Lecture X: Precision in Style” and ask them to critique Truth’s speech with an eye to purity and propriety of language, for Blair advises:

• “Purity is the use of such words, and such constructions, as belong to the idiom of the language which we speak; in opposition to words and phrases that are imported from other languages, or that are obsolete, or new-coined, or used without proper authority. Propriety, is the selection of such words in the language, as the best and most established usage has appropriated to those ideas which we intend to express by them. It implies the correct and happy application of them, according to that usage, in opposition to vulgarisms, or low expressions” (118).

• “Whereas, style cannot be proper without also being pure; and where both purity and propriety meet, besides making style perspicuous, they also render it graceful. There is no standard, either of purity or of propriety, but the practice of the best writers and speakers in the country” (118).

Pedagogy/ Thoughts
Undoubtedly, part of Blair’s project in going through a systematic critique of Addison’s work in Lecture XX is to express his admiration for Addison’s genius, and use the piece’s strengths as a model for his students. The line by line combing through of the text works to slow student readers so that Blair can draw their attention to the sentence-level details and show them, at least in his view, where Addison’s piece succeeds and where it fails.

Blair is unprepared to praise the work without reservation; he elevates the writer’s position (and genius) as superior to the critic’s position in general, but argues that the critique is the better judge of the two. While Addison may be the more gifted overall, Blair is the superior critic. This creates an interesting power dynamic between genius and critic.

Given the controversy surrounding Gage’s transcription and Campbell’s later revision (as well as other, competing versions) of the speech, I thought it would be interesting (and in that late 19c context acceptable) to have students “rewrite” Truth’s speech in a way that attempted to keep the moments of sublimity and beauty (“genius”) while correcting/improving upon the “impure, improper” stylistic features. And, I ask: is a version of this exercise akin to the project that Campbell herself inadvertently took on when she published a 20c version of the speech which “removes all dialectical indicators and ungrammatical constructions” (Logan 20)? It seems Campbell concedes this to be the case.

The students in this imaginary class have read several Anglo women abolitionists, as well as other examples of texts that reflect the taste of the day (taste as conceptualized as learned, Christian, northern, and Anglo). It is likely that the women would have internalized many of the stylistic conventions of their class, gender, social position such that they could “refine” the speech, rather wholly reimagine the speaker and speech, in Anglo, middle-class terms.

The power relationship Blair explains between the genius and the critic is activated in this context as well: the students are “below” the speaker Truth in their ability to compose and execute such a speech, but they are placed “above” the speaker Truth as judges and critics, likely reinforcing their already-held beliefs about the respective position of the races in society (after all, they get the proverbial “last word”).