An uncanny architrope: impossible ghosts of empire at the Brontë Parsonage Museum

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article offers the “architrope” as a means for apprehending rhetorical figures on a symbolic landscape (or “tropography”). I argue that ethical critique of public memory places requires more than reading visual representations and envisioning resistive viewer agencies. Inspired by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s declaration that it should not be possible to remember Victorian England’s women writers without recalling the “worlding” functions of colonial literature in British imperialism, I examine how the Brontë Parsonage Museum should unworld and otherworld its memoryscape. Adding spatial dimension to visual rhetoric, I map tropographic turns where visitors should not only unsettle histories but also confront aporias of postcolonial, feminist, and queer memories. Although rhetorical scholars celebrate the radical potential of the uncanny and the subjunctive mood, my analysis shows that uncanniness can be commodified, and colonizing narratives necessitate overt negation. Remapping commonplaces of museums and memorials therefore requires replacing rhetorical theory’s acquiescence to possibility with emplaced attunement to impossible demands of the forgotten and unrepresentable dead.