The Unvarnished Truth

The Unvarnished Truth: Personal Narratives in Nineteenth-Century America. By Ann Fabian. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Pp. xiii, 255. Illustrations. $39.95.) Culture of Eloquence: Oratory and Reform in Antebellum America. By James Perrin Warren. (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999. Pp. x, 202. $40.00.) Here are two books about words, about written and spoken eloquence, about writer's or speaker's attempts to reach, convince, and change an audience. Both books analyze groups of nineteenth-century American writers; both seek to understand how writer and reader, speaker and hearer communicated, striving to avoid mutual incomprehension or mistrust. In Culture of Eloquence, literary scholar climbs era's Olympian heights to consider how some of its best-known and most revered essayists and orators-among them Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Frederick Douglass-employed written and spoken word in cause of social and political reform. In The Unvarnished Truth, cultural historian descends into Stygian world of historical ephemera and returns with armloads of long-buried pamphlets, each of which once attempted to represent sad-but-true tale of its obscure author. Ann Fabian's subjects may be beggars and ex-convicts, James Perrin Warren's heavenly crew of orators, yet both groups allow their analysts to consider important questions about how speakers and writers sought to reach their audiences. The books diverge significantly in their approach to words-their meanings and their uses. Warren's is primarily work of exegesis, or internal analysis of ideas. In it, he carefully dissects his subjects' views on oratorical and role of culture of eloquence in promoting social reform. Taking as starting points ideal of reciprocity between word and deed, theory and reality, orator and auditors (47) and his belief in ability of eloquent speech to awaken and intoxicate audience (45), Warren explores how seven figures of eloquence (27)Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Peabody, Frederick Douglass, William Gilmore Simms, and Walt Whitman-- embodied, expanded, or altered Emerson's vision of reforming power of language (28). Fabian's book is much more a social history of cultural form (4), insistently personal (3) narrative of ordinary individual, narrative that might have originated as spoken story but ended up being printed (sometimes by subscription) and circulated in pamphlet form. As such, Fabian's book raises fascinating analytical questions about relationship between words and experiences they represent (or produce), cultural work performed by so-called true story narratives, role of literary marketplace in turning people's stories into commodities, and changing meaning of in American society. is social convention, she asserts arrestingly; it is the product of agreements among people (98). Fabian's book analyzes process by which some people's stories acquired truth and authority (7) while others, however similarly experienced, seemed inauthentic. From beginning to end, The Unvarnished Truth is triumph of wellchosen sources, sensitive reading, shrewd analysis, interesting insight, and engaging writing. In analyzing successive types of narratives-whether of beggars, convicts, fugitive slaves, or Civil War prisoners-Fabian shows both how individuals turned their misfortunes into assets (4) and how market for their stories made speaking and writing into commodities (52). Noting that socially marginal folk such as beggars employed culturally central (12) act of writing in their quest for an audience, Fabian asks whether reading and writing uniformly hastened spread of gentility (11)

Art · Literature · Narrative · Sociology · Gender Studies · History · Media, Communication, and Education