Anne Moody, Rhetoric, and Reader-Response Theory

Reader response theory is a type of literary criticism that considers the reader the most important part of a text. This is in stark contrast to other literary criticisms which view the text as solely important. Because the reader's response is the most valuable aspect of a text, certain devices must be employed by writers in order to ensure that their audience reaches the reactions they want them to. For this reason, rhetoric is an important part of reader response theory (Guerin 352-3).

In her autobiography Coming of Age in Mississippi, Anne Moody uses many rhetorical devices in order to encourage her audience to examine her viewpoints on the treatment of African Americans in the southern United States prior to the Civil Rights Movement. Most of Moody's use of rhetoric concerns pathos, or emotional response. In this paper, I plan to examine the rhetorical devices that Moody uses in her book in order to show how she constructs not only her reader but also her reader's reactions as a means of serving her political agenda.

Part one of Coming of Age in Mississippi, "Childhood," is a recollection of Moody's childhood from the ages of four to fourteen. This portion of the book is told by young Moody, and her questions and concerns are typical of a person of those ages. Beginning her story from the point of view of a child is the beginning of her use of pathos, as people generally have more sympathy for children than adults. As the story opens with Moody and her sister, Adline, being babysat by their seven-year-old cousin, George Lee, you see the beginnings of the extreme conditions that her race and poverty will cause her for the rest of her book.

Anne explains that George Lee doesn't like babysitting her and her sister, that he much rather be out playing in the woods. One day, George Lee comes over to watch them, and he's angry the minute he walks in the door: "I'm goin' to burn you two cryin' fools up. Then I won't have to come here and keep yo' asses every day" (Moody 7). He proceeds to set the house on fire then runs into the woods, leaving Anne and Adline alone in a burning house. When Anne's parents notice their house on fire from the field they worked in below their home, they come running. George Lee returns with a bucket of water from the woods, and, when Anne's dad asks him what happened, George Lee claimed that he'd been in the woods getting a bucket of water. As a result, Anne was blamed for the fire, and her father beat her (7-10).

This story leaves Anne's reader looking for someone to blame. Anne never places blame herself -- she leaves the placing of blame to her reader. This is a use of the logos technique known as syllogismus -- "the use of an image which calls upon the audience to draw an obvious conclusion" (Burton). Can we, as an audience, blame George Lee, a seven-year-old who was acting just as a seven-year-old should? Should we blame Anne's parents, a couple so poor that they had no other choice than to leave their children with their young cousin while they worked from dawn to dusk to feed their family beans and milk? Or, should we blame the unnamed culprit, the white man who employed Anne's parents to work in his field without paying them enough to feed their children, afford legitimate childcare, or rent a suitable home? The conclusion Anne wants her readers to come to is obvious.

Another use of logos rhetoric in the first part of her book is ratiocination, or "reasoning (typically with oneself) by asking questions" (Burton). This is especially effective in this part of the book because of the point of view that it's told from. For example, when Anne discovers that she has two cousins that she believes are white, she asks her mom why they aren't white. Her mom explains that they aren't white because their mother isn't white. Anne plays up her childhood ignorance in this part of the book in her questioning of what makes a person white, asking "If it wasn't the straight hair and white skin that made you white, then what was it?" (34-5).

Part two of Anne's book opens with the murder of Emmett Till. This is basically the setting for the feel of the rest of the book. Emmett Till was a 14-year-old African American boy who was murdered by whites because he whistled at a white woman. As Anne moves through high school in this part of the book, she witnesses many hate crimes played out on her neighbors, classmates, and friends. While many of these crimes are told in graphic detail, I would like to show only one as a means of explaining her use of the pathos technique of descriptio -- "vivid description that stirs up its hearers" (Burton). When rumors started traveling around town about a white man who was taking care of a black woman and her children in his basement, the local white people decided to take measures to stop the rumors and once again show who had the power in the town. Their method of doing so was to burn down the house that the white man, black woman, and children were rumored to live in (Moody 127-41).

Anne and her family hear the house burning, hear people screaming down the street. They wake up and drive down the street to find out what's going on. When they arrive, they can't get close enough to see what's happening. People that were passing by kept them updated. Eventually, they found out that someone had burned down the home of the Taplin family. Eight or nine people had burned to death, including children. According to Moody, "I almost vomited when I caught a whiff of the odor of burned bodies mixed with the gasoline" (143).

Part four of Moody's book is perhaps the most important as far as rhetoric is concerned -- it discusses the Civil Rights Movement and her part in it. This part opens with Moody engaging in several demonstrations, including the Woolworth's sit-in, and Moody was arrested more than once during these demonstrations. After Medgar Evers was killed, Moody decided that she wanted to go to jail: "Jail was the only place I could think in" (303). As a result, she decided to participate in a march protesting Evers' death.

During the march, Moody and her friends were arrested, thrown on top of each other in a paddy wagon and taken to the fairgrounds. At the fairgrounds, the protesters were kept behind wire in the same buildings that they kept the cattle in during the fair. "As I looked through the wire, I imagined myself in Nazi, Germany, the policemen Nazi soldiers... Yet this was America, 'the land of the free and the home of the brave'" (305). Moody's comparison of her situation to that of the Jews during the Holocaust is a use of the pathos technique of pathopoeia, "a speech of figure designed to arouse emotion" (Burton). First published in 1968, Moody's book was very close to the end of World War II. This means that the people who were reading her book were likely the same people who either lived through the war or had heard about it frequently from their parents. Emotions would have been high concerning the Nazi concentration camps, and Moody hoped that her image of the black Americans as no different than the Jews in Germany would arouse a strong emotional response in her readers.

Another pathos technique that Moody uses is in her appeals to God in the last part of the book. At one point, she becomes so emotionally and physically exhausted that she decides to take a day off from the Movement work and visit a friend's parents. While she's there, she walks through the woods thinking about all of the murders she'd seen in her life. "Since I had been a part of the Movement, I had witnessed killing, stealing, and adultery committed against Negroes by whites throughout the South... It seemed to me now that there must be two gods, many gods, or no god at all" (371).

This technique is known as deesis, or "the vehement expression of desire put in terms of 'for God's sake'" (Burton). By pleading to a God that everyone is supposed to be the god of everyone or by saying that this god can't exist because otherwise he'd be a hypocrite, Moody forces people to question their religion and beliefs.

The final use of rhetoric that I'm going to point out in this paper (though there are many more) is the one that was used in the last sentences of Moody's book. At the end, Moody repeats the phrase, "I wonder. I wonder. I wonder. I really wonder" (424). Here, she is wondering whether the African Americans will ever overcome the prejudice and hatred that surrounded them. This repetition is a technique known as epimone -- "persistent repetition of the same plea in much the same words, a direct method for underscoring the pathetic appeal" (Burton).

Throughout Moody's book, she uses rhetorical techniques in order to encourage her audience to examine her viewpoints on the treatment of African Americans in the southern United States prior to the Civil Rights Movement. In this way, I would argue that Moody's book was written solely for its political purpose. Furthermore, I would argue that Moody constructed her readers' responses through her uses of rhetoric and emotional appeal.

Works Cited

Burton, Gideon O. "Figures of Reasoning." 16 Jun. 2003. Brigham Young University. 7 Dec. 2006 < http://humanities.byu.edu/rhetoric/silva.htm>.

Guerin, Wilfred L., et al. "The Play of Meanings: Reader-Response Criticism, Dialogics, and Structuralism, and Poststructuralism, Including Deconstruction." A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature. 5^th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 350-61.

Moody, Anne. Coming of Age in Mississippi. New York: Bantam Dell, 1968.