Fanny Fern, writer and rhetorician: The influences of George Campbell and Hugh Blair on her discourse

Few readers today have enjoyed the wit of Sarah Willis Parton, better known as Fanny Fern, a popular nineteenth-century satirist and anomaly among early American women. Fern began publishing during the 1850s, a decade that offered unprecedented opportunities for women writers. This dissertation examines the sources of Fern's sense of humor, pragmatics, and nonconformity, and the rhetorical training that inspired and informed her writing from the beginning. The best source of such knowledge is Fern as she candidly reveals herself and, perhaps, recreates herself through the performative acts of autobiographical fiction and journalism. Chapter One provides the general biographical details---childhood, education, marriages, and poverty---that culminated in Fern's emergence as America's first and highest paid female newspaper columnist and as a best-selling novelist, phenomenal accomplishments for a woman of the nineteenth century. Chapter Two examines more closely American cultural influences---the Willis family legacy, the Republican Motherhood ideology, the Beecher connection, rhetorical training in nineteenth-century American schools, and the "feminine fifties" phenomenon---all of which coalesced to groom Fern for her role as an independent and prolific "bluestocking" and a respected social critic. The next two chapters explore the pervasive influence of the eighteenth-century Scottish school of rhetoric on Fern's own rhetorical theory and in her writing. An analysis of her social satire in terms of George Campbell's ends of discourse (Chapter Three) and Hugh Blair's focus on style and belletrism (Chapter Four) enlarges Fern scholarship and provides twenty-first-century readers a more accurate way of reading not only Fern but also other women writers from the same social and cultural milieu. The last chapter investigates Fern's popular and critical appeal and her response to criticism during her lifetime.