Abstract:
For centuries, stained-glass windows have figured prominently in the public sphere as a powerful means of visual persuasion. Even with the growing interest in visual rhetoric, no researcher has examined thoroughly the use of stained-glass windows to change beliefs, attitudes, opinions, and behavior in postbellum America, despite their use in almost every significant ecclesiastical building in our nation, as well as in many esteemed public and academic institutions. Recognizing the sway of non-discursive meaning and visual culture and using all of the available means of persuasion at their disposal, ecclesiastics and lay members created interior spaces that would perform cultural work beyond their lifetimes. The purpose of this study, therefore, is to demonstrate the rhetorical situation of Gothic and postbellum stained-glass windows applying the model theorized by rhetorical scholar, Lloyd Bitzer. I provide photographic evidence of these great works of art which “batter against the boundaries of their own culture” and serve to reinforce cultural stereotypes in their figural representations (Greenblatt 440). In examining the windows of two Gothic churches, at St.-Denis and Chartres, France, as well as those of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Richmond, Virginia, I consider the constituents of Bitzer’s model - exigence, audience, and constraints - to explore the rhetorical situation of postbellum stained-glass windows. For the church of late nineteenth-century America, stained-glass windows are a site of contestation, visual reminders of the troubled relationship between races, gender, and post-Reconstruction North and South.