JAC Volume 17 Issue 1

Despite the egregious subject-verb agreement error in a sentence cited from my own essay on Gertrude Buck, JoAnn Campbell has put together a wonderful book of just the sort our profession needs to encourage as we set about the task of excavating our disciplinary roots. Campbell has made the job of those who join us in puzzling our way to a better understanding of Buck a lot easier in two distinct ways: first, by demonstrating for beginning researchers in composition how to go about laying the groundwork for a larger study while modeling the care such research requires; and second, by putting into our hands a collection of Buck's published writing along with a good biographical introduction, the brevity of which may belie the amount of serious scholarly effort that has gone into it.

Too often, in this field that seems so rich with fertile, unplowed soil, the publish-or-perish mentality has made the temptation to make claims based on too little reading in original sources very nearly irresistible. Archival research can be slow going, and we don't always find what we anticipate or would prefer to be there when we find it. The process of selection in arranging the detail too easily becomes a matter of testing a small sample of the available data against our own preferences. After all, we prefer our stories to have heroes (those enlightened folk who agreed with us before our own time) and whipping-boys (those unenlightened folk who saddled us with this vile current-traditional rhetoric). It is far too easy to take one of a handful of glib, unexamined propositions to wrap one's own telling of an historical narrative around.

Campbell says, quite rightly I expect, that Gerald Mulderig and Virginia Allen reveal "a way of doing history that values most the unique, the first, or the anomalous." Mulderig can speak for himself, but I will plead guilty as charged. I offer as extenuating circumstances that I was young and it was the seventies when I first came across Buck, as most of us did, in Albert Kitzhaber's dissertation. Kitzhaber recognizes the originality of Buck's thinking, but finds the center of gravity of her ideas in evolutionary science and psychology finally unconvincing. James Berlin situates her in romanticism filtered through Emerson. Donald Stewart, whose professional life was dedicated to the study of Buck's teacher, Fred Newton Scott, opines that her theory of metaphor was more important than has been realized, but he stops short of defining the nature of her importance, except to say that she, no doubt, owed her independence of thought to Scott and John Dewey.

Mark Johnson claims that after Aristotle there is no new explanation of metaphor before the twentieth century. He's wrong. You may not care for Buck's theory of metaphor grounded in evolutionary theory: but it was definitely new, and she was not only dead serious about it, she demonstrated that the principal alternative explanations (in the nineteenth century, those of Max Muller, William Dwight Whitney, and Alexander Bain) could not explain the data, and to disprove her evolutionary hypothesis, one would have to resort to proving a negative.

Each of us selects a piece of the puzzle, makes reasonably accurate observations, but the very process of selection distorts the larger picture. The Gertrude Buck constructed by Campbell is, as she says, "based primarily on her published writings" (xi); for the rest we can only speculate around the edges of tidy lacunae of missing information. To my knowledge, Campbell has done the most thorough search so far trying to fill in the gaps. In her introduction and commentary to each of the excerpts from longer works (including Buck's published articles, essays, and fiction), she joins the increasing throng of scholars who are fascinated by this extraordinary turn-of-the-century woman but who, if they are smart, end up making very modest claims about her work.

That said, the only complaint I have to make about this wonderful collection of some of the writings of Gertrude Buck is the labeling of it as a move "toward a feminist rhetoric"; even the toward, I think, puts the emphasis in the wrong place. My guess is that the title would surprise Buck herself. In a selection Campbell includes from The Inlander (May 1893), written when she was twenty-two and an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, Buck articulated her own position: "Nothing is gained, but much is lost by any attempt, however well meaning, to make some accident of birth co-ordinate with proved capacity, as qualification for office, in any sphere of activity" (26-27). At issue was the election of women to the editorial board of The Inlander. She held to this principle, one typical of fin de siecle feminists, even when the reality of jockeying for power in the academic hierarchy began to get her down. (Campbell's selection of the correspondence with President McCracken of Vassar is an inspired choice here.) But given the title of the collection, I would wish that the Inlander essay had been given a little more prominence by attaching a title of its own instead of letting it end up as a trailer to "The Religious Experience of a Skeptic." But that is the most minor of quibbles in an extraordinary piece of editorial work.

There is, in truth, a problem with figuring Buck out, both in trying to find the right narrative structure to put her story inside of and in laying hand to the biographical material that would resolve some of the open questions. Campbell says: "What sets Buck apart from many composition teachers today is the explicitly spiritual orientation of her writing" (xvii). Some wag once quipped that Buck died of Christian Science, but to emphasize the spiritual concerns without putting them within the context of the authority of science, Lamarckian evolutionary science or vitalism—to be more precise—is again to be slightly off center. Buck's most unappealing rhetorical strategy is, time and again, to appeal to the certainty of science, "the flood of irresistible progress in education" (143), the inevitability of the biological-psychological view of everything from logic to syntax.

If rhetoric had been subsumed under psychology through the agency of ethics in the tradition of Herbert Spencer—a viable alternative between 1903 and, roughly, the 1930s (a period known as the eclipse of Darwinism)—Buck would have been a mainstream thinker. I once came across a reference to the psychological impact of evolutionary theory by a nineteenth-century (male) educator: he said something like "male students take evolution harder than females do." No one took evolution harder than Gertrude Buck, and the first selection Campbell presents is as near to an intellectual center of gravity for Buck as we are likely to find. Written in collaboration with Fred Newton Scott's sister Harriet, Organic Education takes as its basic premise that the ontogeny of the individual maturation process recapitulates the philogeny of the development of race. The burden of proof had shifted during the Edwardian period, and in "The Present Status of Rhetorical Theory," Buck rejected the "sophistic" approach to rhetoric as "a primitive aggression of the strong upon the weak" in favor of the "social conception" or the Platonic view(49). Although (in the single greatest sentence Gertrude Buck ever wrote) she says, "we are not now-a-days on such joyfully intimate terms with the absolute truth as was Plato," she thought the subject matter of rhetoric must be the individual's own "vision of the absolute truth," however "relative" or "temporary" that vision may be, and the goal of rhetoric to impress the speaker's perceptions and experiences upon the mind of the hearer (49). Buck's insight—and it was an early expression, not generally acknowledged when put forward—was to view the social group as "the organism" in the struggle for survival. The problem of altruism is solved, then, by the drive to maximize the survival advantage not just of the individual, but of the group. It is understandable that, as Campbell intimates and Robert Connors proclaims, we might see the agonistic impulse in rhetoric as masculine and the alternative of a cooperative, collaborative process grounded in love as a move toward a feminist rhetoric, but personally I wish we wouldn't.

A book review is not the place to develop an alternative thesis to the subject in front of us; my purpose here is only to urge that we go slowly as we reconstruct our disciplinary history. To answer the perennial question of what happened to rhetoric at the end of the nineteenth century and how teaching composition at the university level turned into woman's work, we need to understand what happened to Gertrude Buck, but we need to be careful that the narrative we construct is, as nearly as possible, hers and not our own. Even some of the most basic facts about Buck's life, few though they be, are open to interpretation. Campbell describes her as the daughter of one "George M. Buck, an attorney and judge in Kalamazoo, Michigan, who presumably encouraged her education," and yet when we read closely into her rhetorical theorizing, we see little hint of the testing of claims or warrants or burdens of proof that a sympathetic relationship with a father trained in the law might lead one to expect (xi). The point may seem trivial until we ponder the English/speech schism that separated rhetoric into the study of argumentation, found after World War I almost completely in departments of speech, and the teaching of composition, almost exclusively the purview of departments of English.

Campbell says that Buck's Course in Argumentative Writing (1899) competed with George Baker's and G.R. Carpenter's for the college market, and in it she sees more references to women as undergraduate writers. True enough, but also in it we see a principled rejection of the sort of deductive rhetoric that is said to have so dominated the rhetoric of the nineteenth century and to have revitalized the study of formal logic, a rhetoric associated with Archbishop Whately and his Elements of Rhetoric and Elements of Logic. One could wish that someone of Buck's or Scott's intellectual stature had taken on the real Whately (as opposed to his ubiquitous caricature) at this juncture. Buck, however, grounds her inductive approach to logic in three "beliefs." The first is a straightforward rejection of all that the master logician Whately taught: namely, that the principles of argument ought not to be taught directly but "derived by the student" in the practice of arguing. Where Whately had proclaimed that only those who didn't know the principles of any profession would think of working without them—as though sailors would navigate or doctors practice medicine without the benefit of their respective sciences--only those innocent of logic would attempt to argue without a knowledge of the art. Buck's second "article of faith"— that the subjects students work with should be a natural extension of and interwoven with their own experiences if they are to "gain" their principles from their "unconscious practice" —seems innocent enough on the surface (114). Scott notes in his memorial to her, contra Stewart, that she was saying this sort of thing before John Dewey and his followers had begun to put forth the ideas that we now call Progressivism. It is in her "third canon" that Buck brings the force of her view of Platonism and evolutionary science up against its severest test: "This is the conviction that the logical basis of argumentation should be ultimately referred to psychology. . . . The logical substructure of arguments is universally recognized, but seldom is the psychological substratum beneath that pointed out, and thus, cut off from its deepest roots, logic has come to seem rather like a dead tool than a living expression of thought" (114-15).

If the rise of romanticism at the beginning of the nineteenth century replaced invention in rhetoric with inspiration, progressivism may be credited with the demise of rhetoric itself within, at least, English studies. However admirable the notion that a teacher well trained in logic or grammar could nurture the growth of those concepts from the germ plasm of a single student (as Socrates elicited the solution to the double squares problem from a boy ignorant of geometry), the reality of twentieth-century college composition has been quite something else. Buck protested "the evils of phalanx teaching" to Dr. McCracken, who raised enrollments for financial reasons, to little effect. If the "organic approach" to instruction still appeals to our profession on epistemological grounds, to cite the most obvious examples, the conscious knowledge of "laws" of logic and grammar as requirements of the teacher was soon enough replaced with the same "unconscious knowledge" innate within the students.

And that is how college composition became the domain of teachers with no particular training in rhetoric, no subject matter, and no hope of advancement or respect within the academy. Whether you read Buck as a feminist, a romantic, or a progressivist, read her you must. This collection is worth its price for the fact alone that it makes Buck's little text The Social Criticism of Literature generally available again. She is a fascinating character, both anomalous and still very much a product of her intellectual times, and Campbell has done a service to the profession.