Exposing Mary Lincoln: Elizabeth Keckley and the rhetoric of intimate disclosure

• Hogan, Lisa Shawn ^[1]
  1. [1] Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center

     Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center

     Township of Derry, Estados Unidos

     
• Localización: Southern communication journal, ISSN 1041-794X, Vol. 78, nº 5, 2013, págs. 405-426
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • This essay analyzes Elizabeth Keckley's controversial exposé of Mary Lincoln,Behind the Scenes, as a rhetoric of intimate disclosure that disrupted nineteenth-century standards of decorum and propriety. Published as a tell-all book of her years as Lincoln's White House dressmaker, Keckley's memoir was greeted with skepticism and hostility by the mainstream press of the day, yet it remains the definitive account of Mary's time as first lady. This essay argues thatBehind the Scenesfunctioned not only as a postbellum slave narrative and as an autobiographical success story—as most contemporary critics have maintained—but also as a rhetoric of intimate disclosure that violated Victorian-era conceptions gender, class, and race.