Until I read chapter one of Rosemarie Bodenheimer’s The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans, I had no idea that reading published letters was so fraught with peril. A letter is a letter, right? I mean it is something personal you write to a friend or business relation. You can take it for what it says, right? And when you want to find out more about a well known person you read their published letters for biographical tidbits and insight into their character and work. You can do all that but you’ll also be doing a lot of misreading:
Letters cannot “explain” novels or give us access to the writer “behind” the fictional narrative, nor can excerpts from letters reliably provide “facts” about a situation or a sensibility on which to ground a literary argument. Letters and novels are both acts of self-representation in writing and, as such, may both be taken, to begin with, as fictions. They differ markedly in genre, purpose, formality, and above all, in their establishment of relations with their readers.
Likewise it is a mistake to read letters as though they were a conversation between two people. Writing is a wholly different beast than conversation and while we can say letters are conversational, they are not conversations. Nor can we read letters as if they are a complete narrative.
If you have guessed that there are two camps that argue about the genre of letters, you have guessed correctly. The majority of critics tend toward the letters as truth and revelation of character and personality approach. Heck most readers do too. But Bodenheimer has a point that must be considered. We must admit, she insists, that the best letters, the ones we claim as qualifying as literature, are “particularly artful, rhetorically inventive, or brilliantly calculated to imitate spontaneity.”
But to say that letters are literature is also a mistake. Letters need to be read as representations of a different sort. We need to respect the “writerly fictionality” of letters and take care that when we read them, we read them in their own context. Letters, after all, are written in a particular time and place to a very particular audience. They are often written with the expectation of a return and they can also be written as a response to a letter received. Meaning in letters is the product of collaboration between the correspondents.
Bodenheimer suggests approaching letters as a “phenomenological study of the narrative gestures that most deeply characterize the productions of a writer.” There is no direct correlation between letters and a writer’s fiction. Instead, letters and fiction should be kept as “two separate registers” that confront each other and form a dialectic between public and private. We cannot look for character and personality, but we can ask about how a writer transforms personal into fictional conflict. Or we can examine to what extent a writer’s fictional imagination is limited and determined by the social and moral codes that shape her letters. We can also look for recurring forms and styles and patterns.
I very much enjoyed the chapter. It has much food for thought in it and made me aware of my assumptions about reading published letters. I feel like I’ve merely blundered around and fallen into a trap since I am guilty of reading letters as though they were anything but constructed self-representations. People like to construct narratives to make sense of things and letters are just one more way we do that. Chapter two is also likely to be interesting. It is about constructing the reader.
Wow, that does sound like an excellent book. The author’s arguments make perfect sense when you think about it, and yet I’m sure hardly anybody reads letters the way she recommends. But when I think about letters I’ve written, it’s clear to me that I’m shaping my experience for a particular person, and would write in an entirely different way if my audience were different. Interestingly, I think we’d have no trouble reading epistolary novels in the way the author recommends — the letters there are clearly acts of self-creation, right? — and yet we don’t read letters from real people that way.
Yes, very intriguing. Makes me think of Andre Gide’s wife, Madeleine, who was so fed up with him when he finally admitted to being a homosexual that she burnt all his love letters to her. A wife knows how to hurt – Gide was beside himself. He was intending to publish them all in the not-too-distant future and had written them with a collected volume in mind.
I agree that letters are performances that an author puts forward to their private audience. But then I think that performance is very telling. Particularly if you have a little biographical information to bring to bear on the letters in question and you can check for spin.
Your letter writing project is proving most fruitful, Stefanie!
That’s really interesting! It’s actually something I was thinking of when writing my essay on Virginia Woolf. I think I might have to add this book to my wish list!
I never thought about how different letters are from other written formats- those that were intended for a public audience. I’ve often been disappointed at how uninteresting I found published letters- maybe I was looking at them in the wrong way.
Dorothy, her arguments do make sense and I am surprised that there is opposition to it since as you note from personal experience how we craft our letters according to the audience. I think reading epistolary novels would be easier but then we are also drawn into the trap of continuous narrative which we cannot expect from “real” letters.
Litlove, that’s some story about Gide! Madeleine really got him back good. Oh yes, I agree, the performance in letter writing is very telling. I think often though the performance is overlooked, downplayed or misread. And you are quite right, the letter writing project has turned out to be even better than I hoped.
Em, have you read Woolf’s letters? I’ve read the ones she and Vita wrote to each other. I’d like to read her collected sometime in light of the ideas in this book. The Woolf essay you wrote sounds like it is interesting!
Jeane, I have been disappointed in published letters too, but this puts a new spin on things doesn’t it? I don’t think I will be able to read letters in the same way again.
No, I didn’t read her letters, I had to rely on how critics interpreted them. This is the problem with essays, you get so little time to write them that you can’t really delve too much on the subject.
I wonder what Bodenheimer would have to say about diaries. Can they really be considered as truthful?
Em, you’re right about essays not giving you much time to delve. Bodenhemier mentions diaries but only in comparison to letters and why they should not be read the same way even though some of their conventions are the same (dated entries). I bet she would have a lot of interesting things to say about them. I’ll have to check and see if she’s written about diaries at all.
This made me think about my utter disappointment upon reading some of Thomas Jefferson’s correspondence about religion. He corresponded secretly with a select group about his ideas to strip Jesus of any supernatural characteristics; and, upon someone deciding they wanted out, he would demand all of his correspondence be returned.
Also, his letter from which the words “separation of church and state” were taken, left an impression on me. He was definitely a very politically adept man.
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