800 Years of Women's Letters (3 page)

The telephone is often blamed for what some consider a dearth of good letter-writing today. For this reason I include letters written to me, by friends, on topics such as living alone, travelling in India, coping with a small boy while studying, and on how to live a full life on a tiny income. They testify to the continuing qualities of women's letters.

Although these letters, written over eight centuries, display a variety of concerns, they also reveal similarities which can now be seen as forming a tradition of women's writing. Certain aspects stand out. First, the need to use writing to communicate with a wider circle than the family, or small community, in which the women lived. Writing was obviously of tremendous importance in replacing lack of freedom to move physically with this freedom to correspond with the outside world.

The women letter-writers' ability to use many types of discourse is evident. They include the conversational, the descriptive, the dramatic, the caring, the spiritual – some of which may be termed ‘feminine' – and rational, philosophical discourse, sometimes termed ‘patriarchal', since it was too frequently the preserve of males in power, in law and in the Church. With many women, skill in using the pen to persuade was highly developed. This can be seen, for instance, in the missives of Hildegard of Bingen to Popes, Elizabeth I's letters to her father, and in recent epistolary novels.

The warmth of female relationships, which male society scarcely recognized until recently, can also be seen significantly in sisters, such as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Fanny Burney, and Jane Austen, who developed close lasting relationships with their sisters. Their letters, despite radical differences, reveal honesty, love, compassion, truthful analysis and humility – values extolled by ethical and religious codes but seldom seen in the more public world of men. Furthermore these letters form a precious new primary source for study of the past. Women's letters give us a new type of history. The lost voices of the past are restored to the reader of this book.

1.
Women, Letters and the Novel
, Ruth Perry, A.M.S. Press, N.Y., 1980.

2. Ibid.

3. Preface to
Sociable Letters
, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, 1664.

4. To Elizabeth Carter, 1782.
Mrs Montagu ‘Queen of the Blues': Her Letters and Friendships from 1762 to 1800
, ed. R. Blunt (Constable n.d.) pp. 11, 119.

5. ‘A Series of Letters between Mrs Elizabeth Carter and Miss Catherine Talbot from 1741 to 1770', London 1809 (pub. n.k.)

Writing the Female Voice: Essays on Epistolary Literature
, Elizabeth C. Goldsmith, Northeastern University Press, Boston, 1989.

Recent criticism offers varied and skilful ways to analyse these letters: post-modernism, post-colonialism, deconstruction, Black feminist criticism, French literary criticism and New Historicism.

Post-modernism uncovers the non-masterful voice of much recent writing – and of many of these letters. Since the Middle Ages women have disclaimed the master narrative of history, the imposition of over-arching theory to explain multifarious ‘reality'. Women generally refuse to be an ‘authority' on topics such as moral wisdom, unlike Lord Chesterfield in his letters to his son. They show there is another cognitive space, a less arrogant, less definitive way of inscribing the ‘I' of the defining self.

Women who enjoyed power, such as Saint Teresa of Avila, Catherine the Great and La Pasionaria, demonstrate the ability to deploy many discourses. These can be read as constant difference and plurality, because they considered themselves the equals of male leaders when angered, but knew when to exploit female wiles to persuade. When discussing topics they had considered in depth, such as politics or religion, they wrote with clarity of argument and moral perspective. Many less powerful women also possess rich diversity of register, including Mrs Gaskell, Madame de Staël and Rosalía de Castro (in nineteenth-century Spain). This diversity undermines the concept of the unified self. It supports the deconstructive view of identity as a cultural construct, never finalized, constantly shifting.

Jacques Derrida has pointed out the inadequacy of Western construction of the ‘Other'. How far has the hegemonic conceptual framework prevented culture from discovering the genuine ‘otherness' of women's letters? Derrida claims the other cannot be invented; it must ‘come upon us' (
in-venire
) after we have deconstructed our habitual categories for apprehending the world (
Psyche, ‘Inventions de l'autre
,' Galilée, Paris, 1987, pp. 11–16). Even when patriarchal artists consider they ‘invent', they are merely re-inscribing their own concepts. These letter-writers display the diversity of possible definitions of the other. Hildegard of Bingen, Elizabeth I, George Sand, Fanny Burney, George Eliot, offer a wide range of discourses in their letters, from dominating to passionate, from meditative to reasoning on public issues. They can be read as disruptive texts, blurring binary definitions of gender attributes, between ‘high' and ‘low' registers, between culture and subcultures.

Another way of approaching these letters is to analyse them according to Julia Kristéva's three categories in her 1969 study of the ‘subject-in-process' in
Women's Time
. She outlined three generations of women: the first she defined as those who work
within
the symbolic, male order; the second counter-identify, while the third undo fixed notions of gender identity. This third category is seen by some critics, even Terry Eagleton, as disturbing. I would argue, like Kristéva, that it allows us to envisage a new space for women.

Women's letters show evidence of all three categories since the twelfth century. And close reading of
some
of these letters reveals Kristéva's third category of the undoing of fixed notions of gender. That is implicit in some of the wording of women in power, such as Queens and Abbesses.

Study of letters is in the forefront of comparative literature studies, which have developed beyond the comparing of literature in two distinct languages. Now differing cultural conceptions, approaches and impositions are analysed. The novelist Angela Carter and Professor Susan Basnett look at ways in which hegemonic languages have ‘colonized' minds. They are de-colonizing in showing up male attempts to ‘feminize' the unknown. In an era of post-colonialism, it is not farfetched to see parallels between the physical liberating of countries and the metaphorical freeing of women's minds from at least some areas of patriarchal power, when they take up their pens to inscribe their ideas.

Letters are written in the first person, which can resemble the first person of narrative fiction, and also include ‘realistic' and idealizing modes. As in autobiography, the ‘I' ranges from the singular to the third person plural. We all possess multiplicity, frequently stifled by patriarchy. Many unknown young letter-writers, such as Stéphanie Jullien, resemble novelists like Marguerite Duras, who, in semi-autobiographical novellas, cannot fix ‘self', finds no centre. This ‘deconstruction' of her situation is addressed to a male reader, like many female narratives. Duras often apostrophizes a ‘you' who is implicitly male. Jullien's male is explicit, the bourgeois patriarch who has obviously criticized her dilemma as ‘indecision', the social refusal of meaningful work as ‘leisure'. She demonstrates that it is in and by language that we define identity. This young female's identity is fractured, exceedingly fragile, imposed by males; her use of different discourses strives to free her ‘I' from the ‘I' of classifying patriarchy.

Jullien's questioning, and some of her vocabulary, may be called ‘feminine'. This word is problematic, though frequently used in the sense of ‘different from the masculine' and/or ‘culturally constructed'. In literary criticism it often incorporates Cixous' definition of ‘
écriture féminine
' as being less fixed than male, with more fluid sentences, linked with bodily rhythms, our sexuality. Thus the long parentheses of a Dorothy Richardson are ‘feminine' but so are many sentences of avant-garde male writers such as James Joyce and Proust. We still need a satisfactory definition of ‘feminine' writing which struggles to enunciate identity while UNdoing categories. I tentatively propose ‘uncovering new levels of meaning' and/or ‘linking conscious and unconscious elements'.

Letters such as George Eliot's, can be analysed as ‘
écriture féminine
', as they are an outpouring on many levels. Cixous maintains that women include the semiotic and the symbolic, the freedom of early childhood expression and the greater rigidity of the ‘law of the father', of culturally determined norms. ‘Semiotic' can be defined as the pre-oedipal, pre-imaginary rupturing of meaning, while the ‘symbolic' represents the order of patriarchal language and culture.

We read
past
texts from the perspective of present-day knowledge and concerns, yet there is a significant difference between those who attempt to read them in their historical difference from the present, and those who merely seek to convert them into current categories. Both attitudes are valid, ever since Barthes pronounced that ‘the author is dead'. However, contemporary re-readings may lead us to judge limitations of past women, rather than place them in the context of their restricting cultures. Where possible, it is more productive to read for historical meanings rather than relevance to our expectations. Studying these past letters for their difference from the present, both historical and sexual, underlines both historical relativity and cultural construction. Such a process should help toward our understanding of the past
and
of gender formation.

A further fruitful way to analyse women's letters is the New Historicist approach. New Historicism, inspired by Professor Greenblatt in America, stresses that the artist functions within
many
processes, representing society to itself. The literary and the non-literary cannot be divided – as we notice in these letters. This new school of criticism asks us to grasp the social presence of the text in the world more sensitively, as Black feminist literary critics do also. They both point out that history is not purely descriptive, nor static; historical documents can be considered for their discourses, symbolism, etc., like literature. New Historicists maintain that ‘Literature is a primary document' and I maintain that these letters form a vital primary source, certainly for historical and women's studies. The relationship between literature and history is notoriously problematic, so a study of the synchronic text, as part of a whole culture, is to be welcomed. I have tried to show, as Professor Greenblatt proposed, that there are no hierarchies, and ‘to make the past live'.

Too little is still known about how women in the past differed from women today. The letters that follow give insights into explicit and implicit attitudes and how far gender division was accepted by most women. Did four walls and long skirts restrict the mind more than the body? When ideas of the inferiority of women were enshrined in religion and legislation, how many felt able to express their discontent?

There appear times when women have unselfconsciously used the language of patriarchy, even adopted the approach of males. Patriarchal discourse and assumptions are present in the letters of twelfth-century Hildegard of Bingen, Elizabeth I, and Anaïs Nin in the twentieth century. This could be partially explained by their upbringing, or by a temporary increase in equality. Feminists such as Dale Spender argue that history is cyclical, that women's movements have recurred, been suppressed, only to resurface in another period. These letters provide primary source material on this contentious issue of possible progress.

Also highlighted are the many different ways in which women reacted to cultural constructing of ‘femininity'. The very fact of being literate, being able to pick up a pen to manipulate words may have given them a sense of self-worth. Nevertheless, throughout the centuries dependent girls, from medieval Dorothy Plumpton to nineteenth-century Stéphanie Jullien, reveal themselves in more anxious and pleading registers than the few who exercised power.

In each century writing ranges from the forceful deployment of reason and argument to a variety of affectionate, emotional, dramatic and descriptive registers or styles, from Héloïse in the twelfth century to the present.

More is now available from the Middle Ages, thanks to feminist historians. The letters of Hildegard of Bingen, recently translated from the Latin, show she could be bold when writing to Popes; yet when asking for support, from Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, she used strategies suggesting the weakness of her sex, in order to beg for his much-needed male ecclesiastical support for her bold visionary preaching.

Héloïse, at roughly the same time, wrote in the scholastic language she had learnt in her uncle's house, while pleading for a letter from her adored Abelard, fusing ‘feminine' attributes in religious registers. Paris proved less chauvinist than most capitals and in the late fourteenth century, the first professional woman writer emerged: Christine de Pisan. Though born in Italy, as her name suggests, her father went to work in Paris when she was young. That is where she married and wrote her seminal works, even disputing the sexism of
Le Roman de la Rose
publicly. Like many women, she published first out of economic necessity, as she was widowed at twenty-five, and had three young children to support. She explicitly offered role models in
The City of Ladies
(1405), written in praise of women.

In seventeenth-century France, under Louis XIV, aristocrats had enforced leisure, in which they could analyse their feelings, as shown in the burgeoning novels about love, and the letters of Madame de Sévigné. The short extract here stresses the unpretentiousness which is a trait noticeable in many female letters from the time of Hildegard, a humility often used as a strategy. Women were particularly praised for the ‘sensibility' of their letters in seventeenth-century France, which saw the publication of anthologies of their work.