The Epistolary Novel

Representations of Consciousness

Joe Bray

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134402533
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The epistolary novel is a form which has been neglected in most accounts of the development of the novel. This book argues that the way that the eighteenth-century epistolary novel represented consciousness had a significant influence on the later novel.
Critics have drawn a distinction between the self at the time of writing and the self at the time at which events or emotions were experienced. This book demonstrates that the tensions within consciousness are the result of a continual interaction between the two selves of the letter-writer and charts the oscillation between these two selves in the epistolary novels of, amongst others, Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, Fanny Burney and Charlotte Smith.

1 Introduction

Consciousness, the novel and the letter

This book attends to a type of novel whose stylistic influence has been neglected. Though it is indisputable that many early novels were in letters,¹ the epistolary novel has too often been treated as an isolated, digressive episode in the history of the novel as a whole, limited to the 120 years from Roger L’Estrange’s first translation of Les Lettres portugaises² in 1678 to Jane Austen’s decision in late 1797 or early 1798 to transform the probably epistolary ‘Elinor and Marianne’ into the third-person narrative of Sense and Sensibility.³ It is often seen as an exclusively late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century phenomenon; an early, experimental form which faded away once the third-person novel began to realise its potential in the hands of novelists such as Austen and George Eliot. English Showalter’s view is typical: ‘the epistolary novel, despite the prestige of Richardson and Rousseau, was obviously a technical dead end’ (1972: 121).

One reason for this assessment may be the epistolary novel’s perceived inferiority in a key area of the novel’s responsibilities: the representation of consciousness. From its beginnings, the novel has been associated with some kind of an attempt to render individual psychology, to delve into the minds of its characters. The epistolary novel is often thought to present a relatively unsophisticated and transparent version of subjectivity, as its letter-writers apparently jot down whatever is passing through their heads at the moment of writing. ‘Certainly the reader was meant to believe’, Ruth Perry asserts, ‘that the characters in such epistolary fictions were transcribing uncensored streams of consciousness. Thoughts are seemingly written down as they come, without any effort to control their logic or structure. Characters talk to themselves, reflect, think out loud – on paper’ (1980: 128). Such uncensored transcribing would seem to preclude the subtle exploration of consciousness which is seen as the hallmark of the novel at its peak. The epistolary novel is rarely assigned a prominent role in the history of how the novel developed ways of representing consciousness. Though she admits that ‘the rise of the consciousness novel would be unthinkable without Clarissa’ (1996b: 171), Monika Fludernik allots the epistolary novel only a parenthetical place in her account of this rise:

there is an increased interest in consciousness, usually third-person consciousness, on the part of writers, resulting in an extended portrayal of the mind: early examples are Aphra Behn, Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, and Jane Austen, and – for the first person – Charles Brockden Brown and William Godwin. (Epistolary narrative participates in this emphasis on consciousness.)

(1996b: 48)

This study seeks to show that the epistolary novel is more than an incidental participant in this ‘increased interest in consciousness’. Instead it regards this type as fundamental to the novel’s development of increasingly sophisticated ways of representing individual psychology. Thoughts and feelings are not as unmediated and transparent in the fictional letter as has often been supposed. Rather, epistolary novelists such as Richardson explore with great subtlety complex tensions within the divided minds of their characters. As a result, the way the epistolary novel represents consciousness has significant consequences for the history of third-person narrative, beyond the date of its apparent demise. Linda S. Kauffman (1986, 1992) has shown that the ‘epistolary mode’ flourished in the nineteenth century and is also prevalent in recent fiction.⁴ This book takes her claims further by arguing that the style of the novel-in-letters had a penetrating influence on the way the nineteenth- and twentieth-century novel represents consciousness, thus establishing the epistolary novel as more than a digressive episode in English literary history. In Mikhail M. Bakhtin’s words, the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century epistolary novel ‘has great stylistic significance for the subsequent history of the novel’ (1981: 396).⁵

This book’s focus on narrative style sets it apart from most book-length treatments of the epistolary novel. The earliest of these survey the genre and give brief accounts of the key works. Godfrey Singer, for example, aims ‘to present as complete a survey as possible’ of ‘the novel cast in letter form’ (1963: vii), and proceeds to trace ‘a history of the epistolary impulse’ ‘in more or less chronological fashion’ (215). He begins with Cicero’s letters to Atticus and ends with A.P. Herbert’s Topsy (1931), ‘the rather diffuse trials and tribulations of a very modern girl’ (180). Robert Adams Day covers a much narrower period, from the Restoration to the publication of Pamela, yet again is concerned primarily with surveying the work of early epistolary novelists, or, in his words, ‘afford[ing] information on how much they had accomplished before Richardson’s time’ in order to ‘place him in proper historical perspective’ (1966: 9).

More recent studies of the epistolary novel have tended to divide into two camps. On the one hand are those primarily concerned with its formal properties. According to Janet Altman, ‘for the letter novelist the choice of epistle as narrative instrument can foster certain patterns of thematic emphasis, narrative action, character types, and narrative selfconsciousness’ (1982: 9).⁶ On the other hand are those who have sought to connect the novel-in-letters with theoretical or political debates. Thus epistolary fiction has been mined productively by gender theorists,⁷ and welcome attention has been given to the letter’s participation in the turbulent politics of Romanticism.⁸ Thomas O. Beebee has taken this approach further by investigating epistolary fiction through the Foucauldian concept of ‘genealogy’, according to which ‘the individual is only one level in a sequence of conflicts, appropriations, and resistances’ (1999: 10). Thus Beebee treats the letter as ‘a Protean form which crystallized social relationships in a variety of ways’ and delineates ‘various positions taken up by the letter within the network of European intellectual, discursive, and literary relations as generative mechanisms giving epistolary fiction its distinctive forms and social power’ (3). While this study shares Beebee’s interest in ‘the historical or socio-political aspects of epistolary fiction’ (5), this does not necessarily exclude analysis of its form. Though Beebee’s view that ‘the letter is not a particular form or object, but a set of functions and capabilities’ (202) is attractive, this lack of formal essence does not mean that the changing styles of epistolary fiction do not interact with changing social and cultural realities. By combining close stylistic analysis with an attention to wider intellectual movements and debates, this book demonstrates how various critical tensions which preoccupied the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries are represented within the consciousnesses of its epistolary heroes and heroines.

The novel’s concern with consciousness has been emphasised by most of its historians. In Michael Holquist’s words, ‘since at least the German Romantics, conflating the history of literature with the history of consciousness has been a move that characterizes most theories of the novel’ (1990: 73). One work in which this conflation is particularly evident is Georg Lukács’s The Theory of the Novel.⁹ First composed in 1914–15, long before the Marxist formulations of his later career (for example, in The Historical Novel¹⁰), The Theory of the Novel is a lament for the loss of epic certainty and an account of the novel’s role in the growth of selfconsciousness. ¹¹ Lukács famously states that ‘the novel is the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God’ (1978: 88). This new genre appears in ‘an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given, in which the immanence of meaning in life has become a problem, yet which still thinks in terms of totality’ (56). The ‘antagonistic duality of soul and world’ and ‘the agonising distance between psyche and soul’ in this new age results in what Lukács calls ‘the autonomous life of interiority’ (66). This ‘interiority’ is represented in ‘the inner form of the novel’ as ‘the process of the problematic individual’s journeying towards himself, the road from dull captivity within a merely present reality – a reality that is heterogenous in itself and meaningless to the individual – towards clear selfrecognition’ (80). The novel is thus associated for Lukács with a search for inner self in a world which no longer offers external totality. He claims that

the novel tells of the adventure of interiority; the content of the novel is the story of the soul that goes to find itself, that seeks adventures in order to be proved and tested by them, and, by proving itself, to find its own essence.

(1978: 89)

Bakhtin’s essay ‘Epic and the Novel’ talks of a similar collapse of totality and ‘elevation of interiority’, also asserting that ‘the epic wholeness of an individual disintegrates in a novel’ (1981: 37). He argues that ‘a crucial tension develops between the external and the internal man’, and as a result ‘the subjectivity of the individual becomes an object of experimentation and representation’ (37). Yet while Lukács laments this rise of ‘subjectivity’, Bakhtin celebrates it, affirming the multiplicity of languages and meanings that arise from the disintegration of ‘wholeness’. For him the loss of epic authority produces, in the hands of the great novelists, a dazzlingly openended variety of languages and voices. This reaches its peak in the novels of Dostoevsky, who, as ‘creator of the polyphonic novel’, ‘created a fundamentally new novelistic genre’ (1984: 7). For Bakhtin, ‘the chief characteristic of Dostoevsky’s novels’ is ‘a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices’ (6).

Some examination is required at this point of what Bakhtin and others mean by ‘consciousness’. Much debate and contention has been provoked by attempts to define this term. As Christopher Fox observes: ‘How did Locke define “consciousness”? This has proven a hard question, in his age and our own’ (1988: 32). The most common modern sense of ‘consciousness’: ‘The totality of the impressions, thoughts, and feelings, which make up a person’s conscious being’ can, according to the OED, be traced to Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, the first edition of which was published in 1689 (OED, 5a).¹² Yet this is just one approach to the meaning of the word. For Bakhtin, consciousness is inseparable from language. The point is made explicitly in ‘From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse’: ‘To a greater or lesser extent, every novel is a dialogized system made up of the images of “languages,” styles and consciousnesses that are concrete and inseparable from language’ (1981: 49). In ‘Discourse and the Novel’ he notes that ‘consciousness finds itself inevitably facing the necessity of having to choose a language. With each literary-verbal performance, consciousness must actively orient itself amidst heteroglossia, it must move in and occupy a position for itself within it, it chooses, in other words, a “language”’ (295). Having done so, the ‘linguistic consciousness’ participates ‘in the social multi- and varilanguagedness of evolving languages’ (326).

For Bakhtin then, consciousness is not concerned with ‘impressions, thoughts, and feelings’. Instead he describes it ‘speaking’, negotiating its way among ‘a variety of alien voices’ (348) and becoming ‘an active participant in social dialogue’ (276). ‘The fundamental condition’ of novelistic discourse, ‘that which makes a novel a novel, that which is responsible for its stylistic uniqueness, is the speaking person and his discourse’ (332). Bakhtin’s ‘consciousness’ is thus inextricably bound up with social realities and the competing struggles of heteroglossia; it is, in his terms, ‘socio-ideological’ (276). In the ‘double-languaged novelistic hybrid’ there are ‘not only (and not even so much) two individual consciousnesses, two voices, two accents, as there are two socio-linguistic consciousnesses’ (360).

This ‘socio-ideological’ and ‘socio-linguistic’ view of consciousness has found other adherents in the twentieth century, especially among Marxist thinkers. Elizabeth Kraft quotes Raymond Williams’s view that all consciousness is ‘culturally produced’ (1977: 139), before setting out her own culturally-inflected definition:

With regard to fiction, consciousness then becomes the text itself, the reader’s response to the text, the characters’ response to events and other characters, the participation in the contemporary milieu to which topical references allude. In other words, consciousness is the reflection of a cultural process that includes the individual mind, but includes it as it regards the larger world, the community in opposition to which it emerges as individual.

(1992: xi)

Definitions of ‘consciousness’ can therefore be divided into two main strands. On the one side are those which emphasise, in Lukács’s terms, ‘the autonomous life of interiority’, or ‘the totality of the impressions, thoughts, and feelings, which make up a person’s conscious being’. On the other is the notion of ‘consciousness’ as ‘socio-ideological’ and ‘the reflection of a cultural process’ which sets ‘the individual mind’ against ‘the larger world’, or ‘community’. The conflict between these two approaches to ‘consciousness’ animates the tensions within the mind which will be the subject of subsequent chapters. It also bubbles beneath the surface of most accounts of the role of consciousness in the ‘rise’ of the novel.

Ian Watt’s thesis that ‘the formal realism of the novel […] allows a more immediate imitation of individual experience set in its temporal and spatial environment than do other literary forms’ (1957: 32) has dominated subsequent accounts of ‘the rise of the novel’. For Watt, Defoe and Richardson give a particularly strong ‘imitation of individual experience’; he praises their ‘psychological closeness to the subjective world of their characters’ (297). ‘The direction’ of Richardson’s narrative, he asserts, is ‘towards the delineation of the domestic life and the private experience of the characters who belong to it: the two go together – we get inside their minds as well as inside their houses’ (175). Maximillian E. Novak makes a similar claim for Defoe, arguing that although he was undeniably interested in ‘the social and political milieu in which his characters moved’, ‘he was always more interested in what went on in his characters’ minds’ (2000: 248).

Yet others who have followed recently in Watt’s footsteps have tended to emphasise other factors behind the novel’s development, such as its connection with journalism and history,¹³ or else taken issue with the whole notion of its ‘rise’ and located its ‘institution’ at the beginning of the nineteenth century.¹⁴ Some recent accounts of the early novel have even questioned its connection with Lukács’s ‘interiority’. Deidre Lynch’s 1998 study sets out, in her own words, ‘to challenge the idea that the British novel from the start represented individual interiority’ (2000: 347). Her alternative ‘pragmatics of character’ investigates ‘the material culture of sentimentalism’ (348), in the belief that ‘rather than looking for improvements in the mimetic powers of novels, we might instead contemplate how a new way of using characters might have been endangered by an era of consumer revolution’ (364). Similarly, in his discussion of the novel’s relation to a rapidly developing ‘print culture’ between 1684 and 1750, William B. Warner claims that Watt added ‘an important new dimension to the story of the novel’s rise’:

By aligning Richardson’s ‘writing to the moment’ with the distinctly modern turn toward a rendering of private experience and subjectivity intensities, Watt redefines the object of novelistic mimesis from the social surface to the psychological interior.

(1998: 39)

Warner notes that ‘now the most advanced novels – those, for example, of Joyce, Proust, Woolf, and Faulkner – are claimed by critics to effect a mimesis of the inner consciousness’ (39). For him this is a result of the early twentieth century’s ‘turning inward’, which led to ‘the novel [being] reinterpreted as the medium uniquely suited to representing the inner life’ (39). Emphasis on the ‘psychological interior’ of eighteenth-century novels is thus, for Warner, an indication of the twentieth century’s preoccupation with ‘subjectivity’ and the ‘inner life’.

Yet this perspective will be challenged by the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century epistolary novels studied here, which develop sophisticated ways of exploring ‘subjectivity’ long before Warner’s ‘distinctly modern turn’. The evidence supports Kraft’s opposing view that novels of the period ‘reveal a preoccupation with the workings of the individual mind, a preoccupation that is characteristic of the age as a whole’ (1992: 17). Noting that in his ‘epistolary dialogue’ Richardson ‘distanced himself from the epistemological premises of documentary historicity’ (1987: 414), Michael McKeon quotes his response in Clarissa’s Preface to Fielding’s criticism of ‘the epistolary Style’¹⁵:

A series of letters, Richardson says, offers ‘the only natural Opportunity [...] of representing with any Grace those lively and delicate Impressions, which Things present are known to make upon the Minds of those affected by them,’ and which lead ‘us farther into the Recesses of the human Mind, than the colder and more general Reflections suited to a continued and more contracted Narrative.’ Thus the letter becomes a passport not to the objectivity of sense impressions but to the subjectivity of mind.

(1987: 414)

This book will demonstrate that Richardson was not alone among eighteenth-century novelists in wishing to explore ‘the Recesses of the human Mind’ through the epistolary form. Indeed it will confirm his view that a novel in ‘a series of letters’ is especially well-suited to the exploration of ‘the subjectivity of mind’, a project which many critics, following Watt, have taken to be central to the novel. For example, in answer to his own question, ‘What was new about the novel?’, J. Paul Hunter lists ten features that ‘characterize the species’. The sixth of these is ‘Individualism...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Sex and Politics
• 3 Reserve and Memory
• 4 Sentiment and sensibility
• 5 From first to third
• 6 Postscript
• Notes
• Bibliography