Conclusions from Chapters Three and Four

As both a performer and a writer, Menken chose her symbols carefully; as histiographers we must perform our analyses just as carefully. For me, such concerns point to the importance that those of us who tell stories of histories must go back to the beginnings. We must heed the counsel of scholars like Nan Johnson and Jacqueline Jones Royster, who tell us to place ourselves in the worlds of our subjects. Hence, the consequence of mis-transcriptions and

omissions. Analyzing such mistakes and their relation to Menken’s personal and public rhetorics also helps to answer a WHY question. Other answers to this question come through my

transformative analyses in the previous chapter of Menken’s self-posed carte de visites, visual rhetorical performances that showed over time her use of the photography medium to subvert

and challenge Victorian social codes. Further answers to the overarching WHY come from close readings in this chapter of Adah Menken’s poetry, essays, and personal correspondence. Taken together, all of the artifacts support my claim that Adah Menken performed and wrote as a feminist pathfinder during a time when her invention was not understood or welcomed. Two years of archival research uncovered overt and underlying feminist themes that support my conclusion.

A study like mine is significant because it not only gives a voice to a forgotten rhetor, that was in her own time a worldwide sensation, but because my recovery also discovers surprises and ambiguities that reveal how such a rhetor situated herself both in her professional and personal life amongst contemporary others who are remembered as feminist rhetors when she is not. As a feminist researcher, I am especially concerned both in correcting this error to prove that Menken is indeed a feminist commentator and in demonstrating how Menken defined herself as a woman who operated within and without Victorian social codes governing

womanhood. I concern myself also with uncovering how she performed her own vision of what would be subversive womanhood and how her actions to those ends marginalized her to the point of rhetorical elision. Conceivably, Menken’s feminist ideology is lost because her chosen genre of invention, or maybe because of her personal life choices. Who knows? Again, I argue that the most interesting reason to recover Adah Menken’s visual and written rhetorics lies in the ambiguities that surround them and in the fact that Victorian publics both in America and in Europe were not ready to hear Menken’s rhetorical challenges to social codes governing

womanhood. For me, this is the big WHY. For others, more answers to WHY may be necessary. In the next chapter, I offer my rhetorical recovery of Adah Menken as a case study towards the possibility of using archival research exemplars as paradigms through which scholars can

describe theoretical frameworks both in our field and in cross-disciplinary applications. My particular application of the Adah Menken recovery project filters critical rhetorical recovery work through the philosophies of two major theorists in 20th-century cultural theory – Judith Butler and Michel Foucault.

5 FEMINIST RECOVERY AS CROSS-DISCIPLINARY CASE STUDY !

5.1 Narrative and Scope

One of the key questions asked by critics of archival research is “why is this research important?.” As I noted in Chapter 2, feminist historiographers have long struggled with such critiques of our work as we seek out marginalized, feminine voices that may or not have a space in the rhetorical canon. My Adah Menken recovery project is a feminist archival inquiry that embodies such critiques in how it provides one possible answer and in how it gives an

opportunity for the application of archival research. It provides an example of the means through which feminist researchers in historical rhetorics can defend against the “WHY,” through

imbuing our projects with a type of agency that gives archival projects efficacy in their applications outside of our field. For this chapter, I use my Adah Menken recovery as a case study for filtering archival findings through different scholarly frameworks outside of the field of rhetoric. I chose two theories in cultural theory to apply to the Project, using the project as a heuristic for synthesizing and evaluating Judith Butler’s idea of performativity and Foucault’s philosophy of resistance as they both relate to subversive rhetorics in public spaces and point back to my argument that Adah Menken is a feminist rhetor, whose invention is important for further analysis and study. Chapter Five speaks to previous chapters to alleviate repetition in terms of historical foundations for specific elements like photography. My goal for Chapter Five is to present the opportunity for readers to view my archival findings through cross-disciplinary feminist frameworks.

5.2 Photography’s Significance Towards a Critical Analysis

As I explained in Chapter Three, and continue to historicize as a theme throughout this chapter, photography underwent a transformation in the mid-19th _{century, one in which the}