Grimké and the Vocabulary Turned Against Its Own Household

The Argument

Scripture Addressed to the Household That Owned It

Grimké's Appeal to the Christian Women of the South takes the exact scriptural vocabulary her own slaveholding church used to justify its position and applies that same vocabulary against the position itself. Where Goldman's autobiography borrows moral language from a tradition it explicitly rejects, Grimké makes no such rejection. She argues from inside the professed faith of her audience, holding them to a standard they claimed rather than one she imposed from outside.

This distinguishes Grimké from the secular figures examined elsewhere in this batch. Gilman's narrator has no vocabulary of her own left to use against her confinement; the vocabulary belongs entirely to the husband who confines her. Grimké retains full possession of the shared vocabulary and turns it back on the institution that taught it to her, a maneuver only available to a writer who has not abandoned the source of the terms being used.

Read against the Genesis argument, Grimké's pamphlet demonstrates a fifth position beyond the four movements traced from Genesis 3: not covering accepted, refused, replaced, or imposed, but the inherited vocabulary of covering turned as an instrument of accusation against those who taught it while failing to live by it.

Supporting Text

The Appeal's Own Terms