November 2, 2009

So far my main response to Mrs. Ann Carson has been something like, "Oh the rhetoric!" Maybe that's a tad dramatic, but so is Mrs. Carson. She writes about liberty more times than Henry Tufts changed wives. Her discussion of liberty is interesting especially in light of the other authors we have read so far. She is, obviously, the first woman, and liberty means something different to her than it does to the men. She talks about the relative liberty she enjoys when her husband leaves on voyages. Really, she did have a much greater degree of liberty within her marriage than most women of her time. But her liberty is quite different from the liberty of Tufts or Burroughs. Tufts and Burroughs enjoyed the liberty to go anywhere and do anything. Liberty to them meant not being in jail and having the ability to eat and be merry. They also enjoyed their sexual liberty. Carson must defend herself against charges of any exercise of sexual liberty. I could be wrong, but I don't recall her using liberty at all in terms of her sexuality. I think it will be interesting to continue to look at Carson's discussion of liberty and her sexuality, since we know that she will develop more fully into America's notorious "fallen woman."

I was also struck by Carson's use of language that referenced fate and/or luck. She says on more than one occasion that "the die was cast." She uses fate rhetoric to describe relationships, such as, "the die was cast; I had drawn a blank in the matrimonial lottery" (83). I think it would interesting to look at the difference between male and female rhetoric of fate. Tufts describes women as witches that have entranced him, making him a passive participant in the relationship, but I think Carson's rhetoric is different. It seems that her relationships are part of a larger scale of fate and destiny that spans across her entire life. She alludes to the future that she is already experiencing frequently at the beginning of the narrative. Her foreshadowing creates more reality in her belief in destiny than Burroughs does with his philosophy.

Carson mentions reading frequently in her narrative. This detail is also quite different from Burroughs and Tufts, who pretend to be uneducated despite nearly constant classical references. Carson is not just a contributer to print culture, she is also a consumer of it. How does this affect her understanding of and response to publication? She is also not the immediate deviant and counterfeiter that Tufts and Burroughs are. Tufts and Burroughs admit to very early inclinations towards deviance and stealing, but Carson paints herself as a normal girl and young woman. Carson roots herself into accepted society before she participates in illegal activity more thoroughly than the males we have examined. I wonder how much of that may be because she is a woman. Women were dependent on men and society for day-to-day necessities much more than men, and thus it seems natural that a woman would be more inclined to attempt to be accepted by society. In addition to looking at how Carson's gender affects her rhetoric, I think it will be interesting to look at how her gender affects her deviance versus her desire for acceptance and stability.