An Address to One and Many: Epistolary Experiments with the Public Sphere in England and the United States - 1735, 1796, 1998

Abstract

This dissertation examines the genre of the author-published familiar letter to consider the ways in which people come to understand themselves as part of a public, and as actors who might affect the shape of that public. Chapter 1, on Alexander Pope’s Mr. Pope’s Literary Correspondence (1735-7), and Chapter 2, on Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796) look at eighteenth century British volumes—written and published in a culture of letter-writing when the standards of epistolary writing are strongly expressed and familiar to readers. Chapter 3, on Dodie Bellamy’s The Letters of Mina Harker (1998) examines the structural capacities of the letter form in the late 20th century. These capacities – including the form’s hyper-awareness of polite social norms, its necessary narrative polytemporality, and the effect of transmuting pronouns (the expectation that the “you” addressed will become the “I” responding) – are discursive tools these three authors use to outline a site of agency for themselves and their readers in political history. Pope’s provocative crudeness and didactic description of what constitutes a “pleasing” response to his lewd remarks proffers a model of authentic discourse free of the polite constraints dictated by letter manuals and the nascent bourgeois public sphere; Wollstonecraft’s hermeneutic revision of Gothic encounters, combined with the epistolary imperative to reply, summons readers to recuperate their own British identity as rooted in radical “grand causes” such as equality, contrary to Burke’s slow, accretive, progressivism; and Bellamy’s occult narrator—the spirit of Mina Harker possessing the character Dodie Bellamy—brings the dilemma of the transmuting subject (I/you) and the expressive possibilities of the epistolary into question, drawing attention to the necessity of locating an irrational subject against the hyper-rational neoliberal political economy through a logic of proliferation. These epistolary addresses are experiments, exemplary rhetorical responses to the dilemmas of entering through language into the public sphere.