Paper Bodies: Letters and Letter Writing in the Early American Novel

Tillman, Kacy

Paper Bodies: Letters and Letter Writing in the Early American Novel

Files

Paper Bodies for Tulsa.pdf (238.73 KB)

Date

2016

Authors

Tillman, Kacy

Publisher

The University of Tulsa

Abstract

This article suggests that in early American novels, the letter served as a kind of paper body, a contested space where women writers and their readers vied for control over the female form, symbolizing the broader cultural struggle in which women were enmeshed during and shortly after the American Revolution. Using Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple, Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette, William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy, Tabitha Gilman Tenney’s Female Quixotism, and the letter-writing manuals that informed these novels, this article argues that epistles in early American fiction function less like scenery and more like characters with rules of propriety governing their construction, delivery, reception, and response. While letters offered a certain amount of agency to women as paper bodies that could travel long distances unaccompanied into the private rooms of men, they could also pass out of their writers’ control. Men and women could intercept, change, misinterpret, redirect, and generally manipulate epistles as they saw fit. In these novels, no matter what choice a woman makes—write or avoid writing, read or avoid reading—her agency is as easily destroyed as the paper on which her words are written.

Description

This is a pre-copyedited version of an article accepted for publication in Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature. For citation purposes, please consult the definitive publisher-authenticated version, which can be accessed through Project MUSE, through JSTOR (five years after publication), or through the paper journal. If you do not have access to these resources, please contact tswl@utulsa.edu. All rights to reproduction are reserved.
Please click on the link above for the final full-text version of the article. If you are off-campus, please log into MyUTampa first.

Keywords

Women's studies, Early american novels, Letters, Paper body, Early America, Susanna Rowson, Charlotte Temple, Hannah Webster Foster’, The Coquette, William Hill Brown, The Power of Sympathy, Tabitha Gilman Tenney’, Female Quixotism