Cultural Rhetorics of Women's Corsets

Abstract

One thread in the American nineteenth-centuryi f discourse of sentiment wraps itself around women's bodies.1 This essay is about those bodies, women's writing, and sentimental rhetoric. The three intersect in corsets-and not just in those torso-squeezing contraptions that assured a woman's hourglass figure in Western bourgeois Figure I Coat advertisement, culture from at least the 1750s to the early twentiMcLure's Magazine (1896). eth century. In this article I address a number of cultural constructions, formal matters that perform a kind of poesis shaping a woman writer's heart, spirit, and body back in the nineteenth century, and now, too. The Canadian National Film Board ad quoted above views the corset and its culture only as "restraint." But sentimental rhetoric puts those corsets and cultural bodies in a different light. Rhetorical codes map a particular significance of