Queer Correspondence: Form and Femininity in the Long Eighteenth Century

Chaskin, Hannah Molly

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-xvz0-y908

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Queer Correspondence: Form and Femininity in the Long Eighteenth Century

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“Queer Correspondence: Form and Femininity in the Long Eighteenth Century” interrogates the role that the epistolary form played in the construction, representation, and discipline of female gender expressions and sexualities across the eighteenth century. Working from the perspectives of queer theory, formal analysis, and literary history, this dissertation argues that epistolary form can disrupt otherwise heterosexual narratives. The epistolary novel, a form comprising a sequence of first-person letters penned by characters within the text, took a didactic turn in the mid-eighteenth century. Authors took up the form to explore female sexuality and virtue through the subjective experience of female narrators, hoping to show women not only how to act, but how to be. “Queer Correspondence,” however, shows that epistolary form cannot sustain the didactic aims of such authors. Complex desires, incommensurate with virtue, appear unchallenged in epistolary narration, where female characters speak authoritatively in their “private” correspondence. “Queer Correspondence” argues that the very novels that appear most invested in producing hegemonic ideals of feminine, heterosexual virtue—novels still perceived today as tools for disciplining “proper” subjects—were undermined by their own form. Put most bluntly, I argue that the epistolary novel is, itself, queer. From the Restoration to the Romantic Era, “Queer Correspondence” explores the relationship between formal and sexual norms in Aphra Behn’s Love-Letters between a Nobleman and his Sister (1684-87), Samuel Richardson’s Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded (1740) and Clarissa; or, the History of a Young Lady (1747-48), Charlotte Lennox’s Euphemia (1790), and the anonymous The Woman of Colour, a Tale (1808).

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