Doctoral Dissertations
Date of Award
8-1994
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
Major
English
Major Professor
Michael A. Lofaro
Committee Members
Linda Bensel-Meyers, Chuck Maland, Milton Klein
Abstract
Benjamin Franklin's practice of creating various selves for literary and other rhetorical purposes and his fascination with characteristics of water or watercraft developed together, and they inform each other through Franklin's sometimes unique adaptations of cultural metaphors concerning water. Though a native New Englander partial to grids as systems of organizing towns, buildings, and thoughts, a lifetime of writing immersed Franklin in a world of continuous scientific and geopolitical change that required him to seek a more elastic conception by which to organize his world and his writing. Because of Franklin's lifelong affinity with and proximity to water, it became the central source of metaphors for his life and in his writing his "Journal of a Voyage" (1726), The Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency (1729), Plain Truth (1747), and The Causes of American Discontents before 1768
, for example--and inspired the prophetic nickname given the sober young printer by his co-workers at Watts' London printing house: Water-American." "the
This study focuses on the development of these tendencies throughout his life, culminating in a detailed analysis of Franklin's Autobiography, actually four separate texts composed over the final nineteen years of his life. In Part One, written in 1771, Franklin creates a symbolic system in which the sea is associated with lot, chance, uncontrolled forces, financial ruin, the "excommunication" of social isolation, and poetry. The land, conversely, is associated with "grounded" things--financial success, industry, and prose. Mediating these two extremes in Part One of the Autobiography are rivers, the navigation of which Franklin associates with mastery, control, and community.
When a new American ship of state was launched by the American Revolution and the ratification of the United States Constitution, Franklin used the figure of various ships under sail in Part Three of the Autobiography, written and revised between 1788 and 1790, to explain to an even broader populace the conditions for successful cooperation in a republic. Thus the movement from Part One to Part Three of the Autobiography involves the substitution of individual values for communal ones, thus promoting public cooperation over individual acquisitiveness.
Recommended Citation
Curtis, David Earl, "The "Water American" : rhetorical and symbolic currents in Benjamin Franklin's life and art. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 1994.
https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/10325