Audience Construction for Barton and Heilbrun

I have read my fair share of Walter Ong’s rhetorical theories (that seems like a given as an Editing, Writing, and Media major), and while I have understood what I’ve read on the theoretical level, I have never had such a complete grasp on the ideas in his writings as I have after reading Ellen Barton’s “Textual Practices of Erasure.” The idea of fictionalizing an audience seemed, to me, to be something a writer had to do in order to write his or her actual text. It never crossed my mind that it might be something a writer does to push an agenda or to identify normalcy and difference in a community. Barton made an extremely compelling argument for how United Way used different strategies to construct an audience that would react to their campaigns exactly how they wanted it to. At the same time, however, Heilbrun seemed to have trouble with this idea. If a writer could simply invent their own audience—and audience who would react in precisely the way the writer wanted them to—then why would it be so difficult for a woman to write about herself or other women? What if the audience has already constructed itself?

In “The Writer’s Audience is Always a Ficiton,” one of Ong’s main points is that an author must construct an audience which he or she then casts in some sort of role. The audience must then fictionalize itself and play the role that the author has cast for them, even if it is not the role they would usually play in their everyday life. Both the author (United Way) and the audience that Barton discussed did these things. The marketing materials from United Way constructed their audience as generous and savvy community members who were, once their donations were made, directly responsible for any success their fellow community members with disabilities may have (Barton 180). Their audience, likewise, played their part perfectly by donating their dollars and wearing their good deed proudly.

What concerns me, though, is how Heilbrun argues for an audience that does just the opposite. According to her, a woman writer’s power comes from her ability to act in the public domain and take an important place in a discourse (Heilbrun 17). She also argues that once women writers gain that power, they are criticized for it much more than men who have always had it (Heilbrun 16). Doesn’t an author’s ability to fictionalize or construct his or her own audience come, at least in some part, from their power as an author? It seems to me that if women writers, and most especially women biographers and autobiographers, could construct an audience that would be receptive to their writing (that is, to play the role assigned to them—the role of an individual who is not hasty to stigmatize women), then they would not have such difficulty writing their lives truthfully, or to lay claim to their accomplishments in writing without fear of being criticized for them.

Another aspect of this idea, which United Way excelled at but Heilbrun seemed so have trouble with, is the notion that there are many different strategies for constructing one’s own audience. One of United Way’s strategies was to invoke both pity and fear in their readers. They invoked pity by using children to convey the sense of helplessness and dependence, and they invoked fear by forcing their readers to think about themselves in the place of an individual with a disability (Barton 172). United Way was also able to use examples of extraordinary people’s achievement and success as a way to construct the audience’s perception of disabilities as adversity to be overcome (Barton 185).

If this were a problem with fewer dimensions, then these strategies could very well be a solution to the problems that female authors have when writing their lives. If they could use examples of extraordinary women and their success to construct their audience’s views of women, then their writings might be more widely accepted and criticized less simply for being by females. Women have plenty of extraordinary examples to invoke in their writings: Rosa Parks, Joan of Arc, Harriet Tubman, Amelia Earhart, Helen Keller, Mother Teresa, and Eleanor Roosevelt come immediately to mind. Why aren’t women like that enough to convince any audience that women—their lives, their achievements—are worth as much as men? Clearly, this is an issue that requires more than one easy fix, but it seems to me that audience construction is maybe not as simple as Ong would have us think.

-Jessica Gonzalez