Angelina Grimke: Rhetoric, Identity, and the Radical Imagination. (Book Reviews).

Angelina Grimke: Rhetoric, Identity, and the Radical Imagination. By Stephen Howard Brown. Rhetoric and Public Affairs Series. (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, c. 1999. Pp. [x], 201. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 0-87013-542-2; cloth, $50.00, ISBN 0-87013-530-9.)

This book is primarily a contribution to the study of rhetoric, whose meaning and function it aims to illuminate. The author, Stephen Howard Browne, defines "rhetoric" as "the process through which individuals avail themselves of such symbolic resources as culture may be said to provide" (p. 6). Browne explores the rhetorical career of abolitionist activist and pioneer women's rights advocate Angelina Grimke by presenting detailed analyses of her writings and speeches, particularly those composed in the 1820s and 1830s. The result is an important demonstration of how Grimke used rhetoric (that is, the resources of her culture) to create her personal identity as a reformer and to construct a basis for collective moral action. Throughout the study Browne weaves the theme of the integral relationship of rhetoric to action.

Browne develops his argument through a series of essays that examine key points in the life and career of Angelina Grimke. These include discussions of the early journal Grimke kept, which reveals that her youth was marked by a growing consciousness of the inhumanity and immorality of slavery, prompting her to question and resist; her 1835 letter to William Lloyd Garrison that served as her entree into the public arena; her Appeal to the Christian Women of the South a year later, in which Grimke urged repudiation of the traditional sisterhood of silent complicity in the evil of slavery; her thirteen letters of reply to Catharine Beecher, in which Grimke argued that women should contribute to reform as free moral agents transcending the conventional female sphere; the correspondence with her future husband, Theodore Dwight Weld, in which Grimke insisted on the necessity of the liberation of women to fully engage in the struggle to free the slave; and Grimke's 1838 Pennsylvania Hall address on the evening before the burning of that building. In this, her final public appearance, she completed a process that began with her letter to Garrison in 1835--that is, the transformation of anti-abolitionist violence into a renewed commitment to the eradication of slavery.

Browne shows how, during each stage of Grimke's evolution as a public figure, her words--whether written or delivered from the podium--shaped her actions and constituted a basis for collective moral action. Sharing her painful past in a slaveholding society and subsequent experiences with the public, Grimke used her rhetoric to help break the bonds of community based on oppression and exclusion and also helped Americans to imagine a new way of uniting as free moral agents. By closely examining her words and their impact, Stephen Browne demonstrates precisely how Angelina Grimke did what she did.