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The Other Enlightenment: Excess and the Epistolary Novel in
the Long Eighteenth Century

presented by

Huang-Hua Chen

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THE OTHER ENLIGHTENMENT: EXCESS AND THE EPISTOLARY NOVEL IN
THE LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

By

Huang-hua Chen

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
English

2009

ABSTRACT

THE OTHER ENLIGHTENMENT: EXCESS AND THE EPISTOLARY NOVEL IN
THE LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

By
Huang-hua Chen

This is a dissertation about eighteenth-century epistolary novels and their
somewhat “dangerous liaisons” with the Enlightenment. It seeks to explain why their
popularity is no mere accident and why letter-novels in many ways facilitate and
reinforce the Enlightenment ethos. My study of the relationship between the
Enlightenment and eighteenth-century epistolary novels, however, takes a slightly
different turn: while epistolary novels promote a sense of order and sequence, bounding
the writing self within the conﬁnes of epistolary verisimilitude, they often display signs
of excess that run counter to the premise of the Enlightenment and therefore produce in
readers a sense of disorientation or disproportion that refracts the illuminating effects of
the Enlightenment. I argue that the “peak of the epistolary novel” in the eighteenth-
century should not merely be seen as part of the rise of the novel; it in fact responds to a
larger cultural suspicion toward Enlightenment discourses, such as rational subjectivity
and empirical claims of authorship, authenticity, identity, and materiality. The eighteenth-
century epistolary novel thus calls our attention to a burgeoning awareness of excess as a

fundamental part of modernity.

Copyright by
Huang-hua Chen
2009

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION ................................................................................... l
The Enlightenment ................................................................................................. 6
Excess in the Eighteenth Century ....................................................... 18
Excess in the Eighteenth-Century Epistolary Novel ................................. 21

CHAPTER 1

EPISTOLARY INTERIOR AND FIGURES OF WASTE IN PAMELA .................. 34

CHAPTER 2

“ET CETERA”: INDETERMINACY AND PARODIC LETTERS IN SHAMELA 65

CHAPTER 3

“THESE LETTERS ARE NO LETTERS”: THE EXCESS OF ENLIGHTENMENT
DISCOURSE IN ROUSSEAU’S JULIE, OR THE NEW HELOISE ..................... 106

CHAPTER 4

“I HAVE DILIGENTLY COLLECTED EVERYTHING”: EDITORIAL ELLIPSES
AND INTERPOLATIONS IN GOETHE’S THE SORROWS OF YOUNG

WERTHER ........................................................................................ 162
CONCLUSION
FRANKENSTEIN’S MUTILATED TEXTS AND FATE OF THE LETTER ......... 200

iv

The Other Enlightenment: Excess and the Epistolary Novel in the Long Eighteenth

Century

Introduction:

This is a dissertation about eighteenth-century epistolary novels and their somewhat
“dangerous liaisons” with the Enlightenment. It seeks to explain why the popularity of
epistolary novels in the eighteenth century is no mere accident and why letter-novels in
many ways facilitate and reinforce the Enlightenment ethos.l That the eighteenth-century
epistolary novel is very much invested in recording authentic and private personal
experiences, both in terms of the content and the form, has a lot to do with the
Enlightenment demand for a rational subject.2 Indeed, the very fact of writing letters

constitutes a kind of personal enlightenment, as Richardson’s Pamela, for example,

 

l I privilege works by Immanuel Kant, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau when I refer to the
Enlightenment. Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?”, for example, emphasizes the importance of
self—dependence and the use of reason. Locke’s idea of human consciousness as a blank page that acquires
experiences over time shows the human capacity for growth and progress. Rousseau constantly raises
questions about truth and origin. As for the modern critiques of the Enlightenment, I consider Michel
Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jurgen Habennas. I especially rely on Foucault to talk about the experience
of modernity as a kind of “vertigo” in contrast to Kant’s experience of the Enlightenment as a “vocation”
and “calling.” I will go into details of the speciﬁc texts in the “Enlightenment” section. Immanuel Kant,
“What is Enlightenment?” What is Enlightenment?: Eighteenth-Century Answers and Wentieth-Centwy
estions, Ed. James Schmidt (Berkeley: University of California Press, I996), 59-60.

Ian Watt sees Pamela as the “ﬁrst true novel,” remarking that part of its success depends on Richardson’s
attention to formal realism—in other words, “the authenticity of its presentation.” Ian Watt, The Rise of the
Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Los Angeles: University of California Press), 175-177.
All other references in the text and the notes will be in parenthesis. J H] Campbell shares a similar opinion
and point out that Richardson’s close afﬁliation with the print industry helps him adopt the “language of
‘closed and detailed,’ particularized description that became the hallmark of his novelistic style,” as we see
in Pamela and Clarissa. Jill Campbell, “Domestic Intelligence: Newspaper Advertising and the
Eighteenth-Century Novel.” The Yale Journal of Criticism 15, 2 (Fall 2002): 252.

becomes more and more threatening to Mr. B as she ﬁnds her epistolary voice, defying
the existing patriarchal order he represents in the process. The epistolary theme of
spontaneous narration also helps “illuminate” the interiority of modern consciousness,
creating an illusion of unmediated self-narrative. Moreover, epistolary correspondence
within the novel, though tending to be private missives, anticipates and encourages
participation in public matters.3 St.Preux in Julie writes extensively about political
economy in his letters, and characters in Rousseau’s novel debate a range of cultural,
social, and aesthetic issues. Finally, letters in these novels often promote a sense of
propriety as advocated by letter manuals and the reigning culture of politeness, and

therefore further reﬂect the Enlightenment’s view of a well-ordered world.4

 

3 Jﬁrgen Habermas uses Addison and Steele’s Tatler to explore epistolary correspondence as a way of
“mutual enlightenment.” Habermas also suggests that the free exchange of opinion in the public sphere can
ﬁnd its root in the intimate space of the family, as private individuals view themselves “as persons capable
of entering into ‘purely human’ relations with one another.” The main medium, for Habermas, is the letter.
John Howland states that “the sending of a letter, like a statement made orally, invites a reaction, an answer,
on the part pf the addressee and thus suggests exchange, interaction and equality among correspondents.”

J [trgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Thomas Burger, Trans. (Cambridge:
The MIT Press, 1991 ), 42, 62. All other references in the text and notes will be in parenthesis. John
Howland suggests that letter accommodates the Enlightenment demand for truthfulness. What is even more
important, using letter to participate in public affairs and showing personal opinions creates an illusion of
civil society. This is in the balance between individual performance and public interest that he ﬁnds the
epistolary paradox. John Howland, Letter Form and the French Enlightenment: The Epistolary Paradox
(New York: Peter Lang, 199]). While John Howland studies how letter forms might or might not be
suitable for the Enlightenment, he still sees the Enlightenment as a project of progress and reason.

When discussing the epistolary correspondence in the Tatler, Habermas recognizes the edifying
possibility of the literature. Habermas, Structural Transformation, 43. The culture of politeness and
decorum and the number of epistolary manuals in the eighteenth century also show how letter writing
requires a certain formality. Eve Bannet, for example, suggests that Richard Steele promotes a sense of
propriety and functionality through his letter fragments in The Spectator. Eve Bannet, Empire of Letters:
Letter Manuals and Transatlantic Correspondence, 1688-1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2005), 288.

That the prevalence of letters and epistolary novels has contributed immensely to the
promotion and circulation of the Enlightenment has been well documented. My study of
the relationship between the Enlightenment and eighteenth-century epistolary novels,
however, takes a slightly different tum: while epistolary novels promote a sense of order
and sequence, bounding the writing self within the conﬁnes of epistolary verisimilitude,
they often display signs of excess that run counter to the premise of the Enlightenment as
outlined. By excess, I mean to suggest something out of the reach of reason, a sense of
disorientation or disproportion that refracts the illuminating effects of the Enlightenment.
I want to suggest that the epistolary novelist registers and explores epistemological shifts
of the period in the form of the letter itself, which is often viewed, uncritically, as a
metonym for the heart. Textually, these excesses might surface as an “acciden ” note
that is exposed to scrutiny in the course of the novel and which subsequently presents a
categorical difficulty, blurring the distinction between the letter proper and non-letter; or
perhaps we might encounter a copied letter that we have already read, but which makes
an uncanny return in a different temporality.5 Almost all the epistolary writers included

in this project problematize the notion of a mannered and conventional epistolarity and

 

5 By distinguishing the letter from the note, I hope to demonstrate the insistence on the formality and
candor is temporarily relieved in the note due to its urgency, informality, and fragmented nature. The note is
therefore a good place to explore the “excess” of the self, an “extra-epistolary” that might not be recognized
by the writing self.

each of them complicates the epistolary boundaries by providing new models. The
epistolary excess could also been seen in the role of the editor that so often, out of
necessity, appears within the form structure of these novels, as they not only collect and
interpolate the letters outside of the story’s diegesis, but also emend and censure
problematic passages. It might even be seen in the literary rendering of epistolary forms,
forms that continually exceed their own contours, bringing the physical and frequently
forgotten margins of the page into signifying relationship with the body of the text, as

I shall explain in the Pamela chapter.6 Finally, they also might be witnessed in those
self-reﬂexive moments when letter writers begin to question the capacity of the letter to
self-actualize, to deliver powerful feelings to its recipient. In this sense, the letter
“performs” one’s identity—as it constantly involves dialogue, exchange and
correspondence—rather than merely represents it, and thus makes it difficult to locate
one’s identity in ﬁxed terms.7 Purloined, transcribed, transformed, enclosed, fragmented,

summarized, forged—these letters of excess in epistolary novels often suffer an ill fate,

 

6 Ian Watt also emphasizes this aspect with regards to Richardson’s novelistic art in The Rise of the Novel.
He suggests that Richardson “exploited” this afﬁliation with printing business in two other ways, namely,
“the authority of print” and “the illusion of print” (I97-8). The former establishes him as the source of his
credibility as the editor. The latter then creates the reality of the enclosed world in Pamela’s letters.

I use the idea of “perform” similar to Janet Altman’s idea of “epistolarity” in which “the basic formal
and functional characteristics of the letter. ..signiﬁcantly inﬂuence the way meaning is consciously and
unconsciously constructed by writers and readers of epistolary works” (4). In this sense, to read a letter is to
carefully consider its dynamic interactions with what comes before and after it. Janet Altman, Epistolarity:
Approaches to a Form (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1982). All other references in the text and
notes will be in parenthesis.

often losing their origins and referential power. They raise crucial questions of authority
and origin, and explore the boundaries of self-identity. Viewed through this prism, the
Enlightenment is no longer just about the gloriﬁcation of reason; if anything, the
prevalence of excess in these works suggests another side to the Enlightenment. With
the overarching emphasis on the power of reason and demand for clarity and certainty,
there is also a sober realization of its own limit; something that is out of the reach of
reason needs to be reckoned with.8 Parodying Descartes’ famous dictum “I think,
therefore I am,” now eighteenth-century epistolary novelists seem to say, “I write letters
of excess, therefore I am.”

In the sections that follow I look at the entangled relationship between forms of
excess (material, epistemological, affective, etc.), the Enlightenment, and the rise and fall
of eighteenth-century epistolary novels. I will try to explain how the Enlightenment
fosters the idea of excess as one of its underlying themes and how epistolary novels in
many ways harbor and even promote the same concerns. Eventually, the dissertation
considers various ways in which eighteenth-century epistolary novels use principles of

the Enlightenment as a facade to create an epistolary world that goes against the

 

I am intentionally constructing a somewhat simpliﬁed version of “enlightenment” here that will be
complicated as the project unfolds. Needless to say, the enlightenment is more than just a “gloriﬁcation of

reason.”

empirical claims of identity, authorship, authenticity, and materiality.

The Enlightenment
“It is no accident that the eighteenth-century became the century of the letter:
through letter writing the individual unfolded himself in his subjectivity...From
the beginning, the psychological interest increased in the dual relation to both
one Is self and the other: self-observation entered a union partly curious, partly
sympathetic with emotional stirrings of the other I. The diary became a letter
addressed to the sender; and the ﬁrst person narrative became a conversation
with oneself addressed to another person. ” ~ The Structural Transform of the
Public Sphere9

When J iirgen Habermas makes this statement in The Structural Transformation of

the Public Sphere, he envisions a new subjectivity in the eighteenth century whose

validity is assured through unmediated self-narrative; that is, the subject is composing his

or her own life story and entering a conversation with themselves. Indeed, the eighteenth

century is “the century of the letter,” and “through letter writing the individual unfolded

 

Habermas, Structural Transformation, 48-9.

himself in his subjectivity.”l0

Therefore, Enlightenment subjectivity is possible only if
one can issue for oneself a voice, a presence such as the circulation of letters in the public
sphere. When Richardson’s Pamela writes her ﬁrst letter, for example, she “hides” it in
her “bosom,” a symbolic gesture for the truthfulness of the letter that is somewhat
identical to the self (1 I -2).ll At the same time, Habermas’s interesting choice of genres
also makes this new subjectivity one of excess: if this self-narrative (“diary”) has to be
sent to the self as a letter, it is also a “ﬁrst person narrative” that addresses another person,
and therefore this subjectivity is compromised, blurred, or at least self-divided. The letter,
in this sense, becomes a contested arena of subjectivities, and it is not surprising to
sometimes ﬁnd overlapping epistolary boundaries and futile correspondences in these

novels. Pamela proves this by writing her “ﬁrst” letter, which already contains with a

parasitical note, without which the letter is not complete.12 While Richardson describes

 

‘0 Habermas, Structural Transformation, 48.

H Samuel Richardson, Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded, eds. Thomas Keymer and Alice Wakely (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2001 ). All other reference to Pamela in the text and notes will be in parenthesis.
Habermas indicates that Pamela’s appearance on the literary scene has an indirect impact on the inception
of ﬁrst public library. In addition, the familiar letters, like those in Pamela, contribute to “the process of
enlightenment they together promoted.” Habermas, Structural Transformation, 49, 51.

The presence of Pamela’s ﬁrst letter is “revealed” in the note as Pamela’s note marks the difference of
temporality in it. Pamela says in the note that follows the ﬁrst letter, “for just now, I was folding this
letter...in comes my young Master!” (12). Yet Richardson treats it as if it is there is a continuation between
the letter and the note. The note also proves to be both functional in establishing the boundaries of the letter
proper; and at the same time comes to undermine its parasitical role. Note is transitional, abrupt, and of
little use “on paper” since everything that is of the heart is already written—why else is it a note if not
unimportant? But in the note, it is also the ﬁrst time that we glimpse of Pamela’s questionable moves, like
using her late Lady’s Dressing-room, and therefore the note is also assigned an ambivalent role in
understanding Pamela. In a sense, the note provides a categorical diﬂiculty, challenging the idea of letter
proper and its demand for personal and genuine feelings. One can also think of the note’s difficulty to

how Pamela deﬁes Mr. B and demonstrates her own innocence, the readers also see
another, different Pamela in Mr. B’s responses (and strangely in her own letters). Terry
Eagleton says it well that “the reader no sooner cynically suspect[s] that Pamela may be a

little schemer than Mr. B says it for us.”I3

While these preliminary examples only reveal
one aspect of excess in the eighteenth century that the present study aims to bring out,
one has to wonder why the Enlightenment—in the case of Habermas at least—is bound
up with letters and the “scenes of writing” which ﬁgure prominently therein.'4 In
addition, what is it that makes the letter so enticing and fascinating in the eighteenth
century and that justiﬁes Habermas’s claim that ever since the publication of Rousseau’s
New Heloise and Goethe’s Werther “the rest of the century reveled and felt at ease in a

terrain of subjectivity?"l5 If epistolary genres also contain in themselves the room for

excess, how do we assess their cultural importance in the eighteenth-century?

 

categorize in terms of Derrida’s idea of a post card: “neither legible or illegible, open and radically
unintelligible.” For Derrida, the post card reveals letter’s openness because it is always open to public and
it is less than letter for its lack of formality. Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and
Beyond. Alan Bass, Trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 79. All other references in the text
or notes will be in parenthesis.

'3 Terry Eagleton, The Rape of Clarissa: Writing, Sexuality and Class Struggle in Samuel Richardson
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1982), 31.

4 Peter Brooks sees the confessional writing constitutes the modern identity in his Troubling Confessions:
Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature. While the self-writing provides “truth,” it also calls into question the
“Enlightenment concept of ‘Man’” who produces “disturbing inﬁnity of confessions” and shows one’s
“inability to reach an endpoint.” Peter Brooks, Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and
Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 49. See his chapter four for more discussion of the
interrelationship between confession and the emergent self.

l5 .

Habermas, Structural Transformation, 50. Habermas means to suggest that these epistolary novels
provide an expression and a mirror for eighteenth-century readers to realize their emotional capacity to
know themselves.

To be more speciﬁc, I locate in eighteenth-century epistolary novels the place
through which the Enlightenment and excess can be negotiated. Intrigued by the “peak”
of epistolary novels in this period, I try to expose a double-sided tale of the
Enlightenment project. On the one hand, the age of reason might be productively
embodied in the ideal of unobstructed exchange of opinion provided by the letter’s
communicative capacity. One writes and reads letters, as Habermas hints above, for a
sense of community and to beneﬁt the self through social exchange, correspondence and
rational empathy. On the other hand, it is also a period trying to appropriate and manage
feeling, sentimentality, the sublime, the grotesque, and other philosophic and aesthetic
categories that often register something excessive and disorienting. '6 While letter writers
hope to contain the heart and attendant feelings in the interior of the letter’s formality,
they also make us aware of that same letter’s margins, absences, and gaps in
correspondence, spaces where meanings often reside. In this sense, the letter heightens
our awareness of the fragmented sense of the self. If the letter genre promotes two kinds

of Enlightenment image, one has to wonder why the other side of the story is constantly

 

'6 Adam Phillips suggests that “for Burke and Kant the Sublime was a way of thinking about excess as the
key to a new kind of subjectivity.” Adam Phillips, Ed. “Introduction.” A Philosophical Enquiry (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1990), ix. Also, although the epistolary novel is hardly a genre about the sublime,
it is nonetheless used to contain and expatiate feelings of horror and estrangement. Pamela and Clarissa,
for examples, are ﬁlled with instances of paranoia and hysteria. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Bram
Stoker’s Dracula, and recent New York Times best seller, The Historian, all use the epistolary genre as a
way of narrating stories of horror. Frankenstein, in particular, proposes a fragmented sense of human
identity.

.._._-..—--- I

kept in the dark. Indeed, it is the latter that serves as the starting point of the present study:
while the letter genre is often seen as the truthful medium of the enlightened self, such a
view fails to account for letter’s unreliability and susceptibility to failed performance. I 7
When it comes to transcription and transmission, the letter genre as it appears in novels
often creates interpretive havoc. Fielding, for example, undermines the transparency of
Shamela’s letters by enclosing them within Parson Oliver’s framed epistolary narrative.
The rhetorical and epistemological structure of the collection grows shakier still when we
learn later that Parson Oliver “transcribes” Shamela’s letters, and the originals are sent by
Shamela’s mother rather than by Shamela herself, such that the subjects of the exchange
are compromised at every turn. Similarly, in Goethe’s Werther the ﬁctional editor claims
to diligently collect “everything” that Werther sends to his addressees, but the failure to
account for the return side of the correspondence (with Wilhelm and Lotte, most
prominently) means that Werther’s voice seems stranded, desolate, and the function of the

letter is again compromised.

 

‘7 As above mentioned, Habermas sees the letter as a means through which the eighteenth-century subjects
see themselves as well as the public. For a more thorough discussion of how the eighteenth-century letter
helps facilitate the Enlightenment, please see the third chapter of John Howland’s The Letter Form and the
French Enlightenment: The Epistolary Paradox. Because the letter invites responses and communications,
it naturally becomes a vehicle for advocating the Enlightenment ideals (49). Ian Watt suggests that “the
letter form, then offered Richardson a short-cut, as it were, to the heart and encouraged him to express what
he found there with the greatest possible precision” (195). See also Tom Keymer’s ﬁrst chapter in
Richardson is Clarissa and the Eighteenth-Century Reader, which explains why traditionally the letter is
considered the language of the heart and therefore its truthful medium. Torn Keymer, Richardson Is Clarissa
and the Eighteenth-Century Reader, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 1-15.

10

It is therefore my contention that epistolary novels have often been the site of excess
not only because they produce multiple narrators with psychological complexity that
troubles, if not disables, the fantasy of a uniﬁed self, but because they eventually give the
lie to our faith in the straightforward passage of the letter to its destination. In his Post
Card, Jacques Derrida’s narrator questions the idea that the letter “would still have to be
returned to me somewhat, the letter would still have to come back to its destination” (5 7).
Derrida’s quotation indicates that one’s letter always implies response in exchange for a
sense of the uniﬁed self or “destination.” Yet, it is also here that uncertainty. arises, since
narrator recognizes that this is only wishful thinking. The epistolary genre, in this sense,
is always in danger of stepping over the boundary it set up and relies upon, always in
danger of being lost in its network of correspondence. If human consciousness depends
on the letter’s conspicuousness, it also runs the risk of exceeding its premises, its
parameters.

Yet, while the project charts the interrelationship between excess and the
Enlightenment through a study of eighteenth-century epistolary novels, it does not
presume to see the Enlightenment as a necessary and contested other. What I am
proposing is to recognize an underlying theme of excess in the Enlightenment and see it

as manifested in the practice of epistolary genres, especially eighteenth-century epistolary

ll

 

novels. It is my suggestion that we can see the Enlightenment not as a single project of
reason; rather a new kind of Enlightenment—acknowledging excess as a vital part of
human activity—has emerged as a fundamental part of modernity in recent critical
studies of the period.18 One can see, for example, a powerful undercmrent of feeling and
passion in Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?” despite his overarching defense of the use of
reason.’9 For Kant, it is not so much “the lack of understanding” that hinders one from
personal enlightenment; after all, human beings are imbued with reasonable faculties that
can eventually produce understanding. Rather it is the “lack of the resolution and the
courage to use it without the guidance of another” that makes one incur the state of

immaturity. To ensure that enlightenment occurs, “nothing more is required than

 

l .
8 I am building argument on an existing scholarship while trying to include and emphasrze the concept of

“excess” as an undercurrent of the Enlightenment. In the Epilogue of Torrid Zones, Felicity Nussbaum
urges for a non-essentialist’s view on the Enlightenment. She wants to “displace assumptions about an
easily codiﬁed Enlightenment and consider instead a richly historicized and contextualized Enlightenment
in the hope that it may release us, as Foucault urges from the ‘intellectual blackmail’ of being ‘for or
against the Enlightenment.”’ Felicity Nussbaum, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in
Eighteenth-Century English Narratives (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), I94. Others
like Mita Choudhury and Laura Rosenthal also suggest that the Enlightenment should be understood “as a
network of ideologies and problems” rather than “a set of axioms.” Mita Choudhury and Laura Rosenthal,
Monstrous Dreams of Reason: Body, Self and the Other in the Enlightenment (Lewisburg: Bucknell
University Press, 2002), I 1. Or in Paul Gilroy’s case, one can ﬁnd ways to deconstruct the “Enlightenment
project as the idea of universality, the ﬁxity of meaning, the coherence of the subject, and of course, the
foundational ethnocentrism in which these have all tended to be anchored.” Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic:
Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 55.

While I understand the Enlightenment to be loosely clustered around philosophers like Locke, Hume,
and Rousseau, Kant’s perspective here provides a touchstone for this study because it has also tried to
grapple with what it means to be enlightened in the eighteenth century. Indeed, Kant’s retrospective view in
“What is Enlightenment” has often been the starting point for contemporary scholars to talk about the
Enlightenment legacy.

12

 

freedom... namely the freedom to make a public use of one’s reason in all matters.”20

Indeed, it is this implicit link between the public use of reason and the ability to situate or
realize oneself in collective terms that prompts one to have the “resolution” to become
mature. In a sense, in pointing out the necessity of the “vocation of each man to think for
himself,” Kant also emphasizes the ethical exigency to recognize the active role that one
plays in the public sphere.2' In other words, a personal inability (e. g. the failure of
courage) to use reason triggers a snowballing effect on the road to true Enlightenment.
And conversely, only when one takes into consideration a collective inability to use
reason is one able to shake off the “yoke of immaturity” for oneself. And courage derives
inevitably from one’s emotional attachment with the community one is within. Here,
Kant’s enlightenment project not only presupposes a loss of the autonomous subject—no
longer the selﬁsh individual but a passive agent motivated by a collective will—but is
always a project of feeling and passion, one that borders on the limits of eighteenth
century rationalism. Kant seems to suggest that human enlightenment is not something
that you can reason; it is achieved in and through a moment of disorientation outside the
structuring consolation of reason. This sense of disorientation, a temporary abandonment

of reason, is the excess of the Enlightenment. It is here that I ﬁnd a convincing link

 

2° Kant, “What is Enlightenment?”, 59.

2] Kant, “What is Enlightenment?”, 59.

13

between epistolary practices and excess; in terms of epistolary novels, this sense of
disorientation usually occurs when the writing self ﬁnds its meaning not in
self-authorship but in reciprocity and exchange. In Julie, St. Preux and Julie’s unbounded
passion is mirrored in their epistolary practice; their letters begin to look more and more
like each other as they begin to mirror each other’s rhetorical strategies. In Werther, what
is marked as absent becomes more and more conspicuous and integral to understanding
the novel: letters that go missing begin to expose the editorial decisions that have made
“Werther”—both protagonist and narrative—cohere, and when we reach the tragic end of
Werther’s testimony, a sequence of informants must gather around the corpse to explain
how such destruction came to be.

While Kant sees the underlying value of feeling and passion in the project of the
Enlightenment, Foucault’s commentary on Kant’s essay takes it one step further as a
historical imperative of the self. In fact, Foucault’s view of Kant and the Enlightenment is
guided by the theme of excess throughout. For instance, commenting on Foucault’s view
on Kant’s enlightenment, Felicity Nussbaum suggests that Foucault sees the
Enlightenment as a “victim of its own excess” in terms of its rationalist agendas.22 In his

“What Is Enlightenment?” Foucault begins his response to Kant by highlighting Kant’s

 

22 Felicity, I95.

14

implicit negativity on the Enlightenment as an “exit,” something out of its own prescribed
space. It is in a space like a “revolving door,” the entering and exiting of a past, that
Foucault sees the process of the Enlightenment as “vertigo,” indeed, a moment of mental
lapse.” This is no longer the Enlightenment that houses conventional notions of will,
freedom, and independence. Entering the Enlightenment is like entering a vertiginous
zone, where one constantly experiences a state of uncertainty, where one is not sure of
one’s own existence. Similarly, in commenting on the relationship between
eighteenth-century consciousness and the Enlightenment, Terry Castle suggests that

the very psychic and cultural transformation that led to the subsequent

gloriﬁcation of the period as an age of reason or enlightenment. . .also produced,

like a kind of toxic side effect, a new human experience of strangeness, anxiety,
bafﬂement, and intellectual impasse.24
This dream-like state which Foucault imagines as the essence of modernity enables the
creation of modern selfhood, a self that is constantly on the brink of becoming, yet never

is. Indeed, if letter writing instrumentalizes the creation of self, the letter is, in a sense,

always on the brink of becoming. Foucault’s modernity, in this sense, depends on the

 

23 Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?” Catherine Porter, trans. The Foucault Reader. Paul
Rabinow, ed. (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 39. All other references in the text and notes will be in
parenthesis.

4 Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 8-9.

15

creation of an excess of the self, in Baudelaire’s words “more than natural” and “more

than beautiful” (qtd in Foucault 41). In a sense, the letters’ excessiveness—one creates a

sense of the self in the physicality of the letter while the letter depends on the

correspondence and the “extra-epistolary” for its completion—mirrors the elaboration of

self, “a desperate eagerness to imagine it, to imagine it otherwise than it is, and to

transform it not by destroying it but by grasping it in what it is” (41). Indeed, letter

readers often ﬁnd that the meaning of the letter resides not within the boundaries of the

epistle, but outside, often in the interstices of correspondence or in the margin between

the letter and the note. Foucault seems to say that it is only when we are not blinded by

the Enlightenment project’s superﬁcial criterion that we begin to see excess as a

sustaining force in the eighteenth century: “I have been seeking, on the one hand, to

emphasize the extent to which a type of philosophical interrogation—one that

simultaneously problematizes man’s relation to the present, man’s historical mode of

being, and the constitution of the self as an autonomous subject—is rooted in the

Enlightenment.” The fundamental attitude of modernity is exactly “the critique of what

we are,” i.e. “the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an

experiment with the possibility of going beyond them” (50). If for Kant, the

Enlightenment entails a teleological human progress, then Foucault, seeing excess as a

16

constant in the Enlightenment project, demystiﬁes that possibility of human maturity—“I
do not know whether we will ever reach mature adulthood” (49). If the Enlightenment
does not entail an end, the idea that somehow the letter represents the enlightened self is
also problematic.

That is also why Derrida’s study of the epistolary genre highlights the idea that “a
letter does not always arrive at its destination” (489). For Derrida, the letter as a physical
presence of the self can only be a metonym, always at the risk of extenuating itself too far.
And its ends, be they the addressees or the circulation of correspondence, are open-ended
at best. Derrida is forced to ask himself, “Who is writing? To whom? And to send, to
destine, to dispatch what? To what address?.... I don’t know” (5). The awareness of the
excess of letter becomes what haunts the epistolary writers of the eighteenth century.
Indeed, if the public sphere of the Enlightenment would suggest a free use of reason,
trafﬁcking within the unobstructed circulation of letters, then the ideal of
correspondence—the pure communicability between an addressee and

addresser—becomes a myth as well.25 This “Enlightenment” subject will always require

 

25 . . . . . . . .
For Habermas, the Enlightenment rs an unﬁnished pr0ject msofar as rational communication can be

achieved. In this sense, our experiences of the “lifeworld” are shared and there are no prioritized or
privileged positions. He states that “as speakers and hearers straightforwardly achieve a mutual
understanding about something in the world, they move within the horizon of their common lifeworld.” He
therefore sees Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adomo’s dire depiction of the Enlightenment as a reverted
myth (a new myth replacing the old myth) questionable. Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of
Modernity. Frederick Lawrence, Trans. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 298-9.

17

some “going beyond” (in Foucault’s words)—and, in the process, more and more
letters—to ensure its autonomy. It is in the idea of “going beyond” that the present project

links the Enlightenment ethos with the idea of excess in the eighteenth century.

Excess in the Eighteenth Century

So far, I have been trying to suggest that in the eighteenth century excess can be
seen as a kind of otherness to the Enlightenment; at the same time, excess also ﬁgures
prominently within epistolary practices, which comprise one of the central
communication networks of the period. But how then do we speak of excess in the

”726 How

eighteenth century? Is it simply the equivalent of Derrida’s “supplementarity
might it manifest itself in the registers of culture? It would seem reasonable to assume
that excess is everything contrary to norm, proportion and reason: Samuel Johnson’s

Dictionary, for example, lists ﬁve deﬁnitions, ranging ﬁ'om extravagance to passionate

acts.27 For Johnson, excess represents the opposite of reason because it is difﬁcult to

 

6 Excess is similar to Derrida’s idea of “supplementarity,” which compensates for the loss of presence yet
comes to be marginalized. As he analyzes Rousseau’s philosophy of language in OfGrammatology, Derrida
comments that supplements are that which “transgress[es] a prohibition and are experienced as culpability.
But, by the economy of difference, they conﬁrm the interdict they transgress, get around a danger, and
reserve an expenditure.” Indeed, the Enlightenment’s overemphasis on reason and self-presence would
suggest a tension with excess since excess represents that which is beyond reason, testing the realm of
danger. Jacques Derrida, OfGrammatoIogy. Gayatri Spivak, Trans. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1976), 165.

The deﬁnitions of “excess” are: I) superﬂuity 2) exuberance 3) unreasonable indulgence 4) violence of
passion 5) transgression of due limits. All of them carry within themselves a sense of uncontrollability.

18

assess its proper value.28 Excess proves to be a conceptual challenge, and is therefore
usually tagged with a negativity and suspicion. At the same time, “excess” also undergoes
literary-historical transformation, as we witness in the rise of Sentimentalism during the
course of the long eighteenth century, a shift that openly and dramatically valorizes
feeling over reason.29 Michael McKeon proposes that although literary critics tend to
treat Smollett’s Expedition of Humphry Clinker as a novel of “social and ethical
norm[s],” Matt Brarnble’s body politics nonetheless use “excess” as a cure against
ordered stability.30 Excess comes to denote a sober realization of reason’s own limit.
Luxurious excesses also undergo serious scrutiny: David Hume sees “excesses” as
vulgarities of various kinds that are antonymous to “luxury” in his “Of Reﬁnement in the
Arts.” At the same time, Hume wants to justify the value of “luxury” in an eighteenth
century that often sees it as “excess”—that of extravagance and disproportion—and
ﬁrrther suggests that luxury can be beneﬁcial to the Enlightenment and serve as a

indicator of the level of civilization.3 l In this sense, Hume seems to suggest the

 

8 . . . . . .
Similarly, II‘I Tatler No. 51, Richard Steele describes the unsettled Circumstances and extravagant
behavior of Orlando as “excesses,” where a sense of disorder and unreasonableness is implied.

29 Janet Todd’s Sensibility points out that writers of Sentimentalism tend to offer textual excesses of all
sorts: lacunae, ﬁ'agments, unﬁnished works. This suggests that excess as a literary motif is quite prevalent
at the mid eighteenth century. Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (London: Methuen, 1986), 5-6.

0 Michael McKeon, “Aesthetrcrsrng the Critique of Luxury: Smollett’s Humphry Cltnker.” Luxury tn the
Eighteenth Century. Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger, eds. (New York: Palgrave, 2003), 57 and 60.

For Hume, “...industry, knowledge, and humanity, are not advantageous in private life alone: They
diffuse their beneﬁcial inﬂuence on the public, and render the government as great and ﬂourishing as they

19

prevalence and positive valence of excess in the eighteenth century England and that
there is a muddier mutual ground between what is deemed excessive and reasonable.
Indeed, Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger suggest that “the language of luxury evolved to

9”

redeﬁne ‘excess’ as ‘surplus’, ‘vanity’ as ‘reﬁnement in the period.32 Likewise, Roy
Porter seeks to explain why sensual pleasures, usually cast as a matter of moral policing,
end up becoming fundamental for Enlightenment thinkers trying to recognize the place of
feeling in the world: “The eighteenth century gave its blessing to the pursuit of pleasure,
but it was able to do this precisely because it redeﬁned the nature of the pleasure it was
desirable to pursue.”33 Despite excess’s encroachment on Enlightenment program, it is
often recognized in the eighteenth century through its antithetical, uncontrollable nature.
More importantly, excess reveals its ambivalent relationship with the Enlightenment, and

this blurring of distinction shows that excess can be applied in different ways as

Enlightenment thinkers see ﬁt.

 

make individuals happy and prosperous. The encrease and consumption of all the commodities, which
serve to the ornament and pleasure of life, are advantageous to society; because, at the same time that they
multiply those innocent gratiﬁcations to individuals, they are a kind of storehouse of labour, which, in the
exigencies of state, may be turned to the public service. In a nation, where there is no demand for such
superﬂuities, men sink into indolence, lose all enjoyment of life, and are useless to the public, which cannot
maintain or support its ﬂeets and armies, Item the industry of such slothful members.” See his “Of
Reﬁnement in the Arts” for more detailed discussions as to why he thinks that excess is has a reversal effect
on the achieving of human progress and liberty.

32 Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger, eds. Luxury in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Polgrave, 2003), 9.
3 Porter continues to suggest that “...the English Ideology, as articulated through Lockean psychology,
utilitarianism and political economy, promoted civilized hedonism within the values of rational self-interest

in a capitalist system.” Roy Porter, “Enlightenment and Pleasure.” Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century. Roy
Porter and Marie Roberts, eds. (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 18.

20

While excess as a concept might undergo some redeﬁnition in the eighteenth century,
it remains largely associated with that which is outside of reason. According to The
Oxford English Dictionary, before the eighteenth century the word tended to be
associated with extravagance, things or behaviors that are out of proportion and
exceeding moderation.34 In its later sense, excess implies the state of chaos, and thus an
association with violence and passion. What might be noted is the potential threat in
excess, as it readily contains not only elements of violence, but certain uncontrollability.
Interestingly, it is in this uncontrollability that we might ﬁnd a connection with its archaic
meaning. Excess connotes the idea of being suspended, “to go out or forth,” or
“adjournment.” To be excessive, in this sense, means to be held back with a lack of
destination and determination, just like the vertiginous feeling that the Foucauldean

modernity experiences.

Excess in the Eighteenth-Century Epistolary Novel
So far, our discussion of excess in the eighteenth century has produced several
threads, but overall, they all seem to guide us toward excess’s otherness, its disorientation,

and danger. At the same time, it facilitates, resurfaces, lingers within the rhetoric of the

 

34 . . . . . . . .
Among the various meanings chieﬂy listed rn OED are “Violence of passron,” “the overstepprng of the
limits of moderation,” and “extravagant violation of law, decency or morality.”

21

rationality. When Derrida muses on his own letters in Post Card, he shares this
disoriented feeling by making the analogy to Socrates’ letters: just like “Socrates reading
Socrates, if you will, and suddenly not understanding a thing, and just on the verge of
waking up” (180). For Derrida, to send letters is to send oneself to an unknown
destination in a dream-like state, much like the modern experience that both Kant and
Foucault describe. Derrida’s comment not only reminds us of the epistolary paradox that
Habermas faces; it also suggests that to write a letter is to enter a topsy-turvy world
where the supposedly transparent self faces surprising turns and outcomes.

While I acknowledge that there is already ample research on the epistolary arts,
my study takes a different and more philosophically-invested turn.35 My study is largely
inspired by Janet Altman’s forrnalistic research on epistolarity. In one of her footnotes she

offers what might be the starting point of my analysis, suggesting that Derrida’s notion of

 

After Janet Altman’s Epistolarity, one has seen a range of studies on epistolary novels and epistolary
discourses after the 19805. Linda Kauffrnan’s Discourses of Desire, for example, charts the way “ideology
enforces certain stereotypes” in the production of male and female desire in epistolary novels. Linda
Kauffman, Discourses of Desire: Gender; Genre, and Epistolary Fictions (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1986), 19. At the same time, “amorous epistolary discourse subverts so many conventional dichotomies and
explores so many transgressions and transformations” that they register doubleness in identity and question
their own ideology (26-7). The relationship between Enlightenment discourse and the letter, however, is not
the focus of the book because Kauffman treats a wide selection of epistolary novels, ranging from Ovid to
Austen. Nicola Watson focuses on the post-French Revolution era and posits that the epistolary novels’
erotic essence provides a contesting site for both anti-revolutionary and revolutionary discourses due to the
epistolary novel’s ambiguity. Nicola Watson, Revolution and the Form of the British Novel 1790-1825
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1994). Claimed to be a sequel to Watson’s Revolution and the Form of the British
Novel 1790-1825, Barbara Zaczek’s Censored Sentiments traces the eighteenth century epistolary history
and suggests that because of letter’s subversive quality, especially female letters, letter will be “watched,”
“intercepted,” “criticized,” “rewrote” so as to “achieve a perfect specimen of female epistolary writing”
(12). Barbara Zaczek, Censored Sentiments (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997), 12.

22

a letter rid of its destination “merits further exploration in careful historical terms” (215).

Altman, who coins the term “epistolarity” to describe how letter forms can be “used to

create meaning” (4), suggests that the eighteenth-century fascination with the epistolary

novel has something to do with the way this form “intensiﬁes awareness of the gap and

traps that are built into the narrative representation of intersubjective and temporal

experience” (212). Furthermore, I suggest that meaning lies not simply in the diegesis

itself—the content of the letter and its presumptive world—but in otherwise neglected

places within the letter’s communicative system: the periphery, the outside, the seam and

the excess. While eighteenth-century epistolary novels continue to effectively create the

illusion of reality, their own embedded structural qualities force readers to go back and

forth between the content of the letters and their unstable forms, between the addresser

and the addressees, and between the linear sequence of each individual letter and the plot

of correspondence, constantly producing a feeling of disorientation in both the temporal

and spatial sense.

It is in what I call the “margins” of letters—at once the non-functioning parts of the

letter; the spaces between exchange; and various failed or superﬂuous epistolary acts—

that one constantly sees the literary ﬁguring of excess. By this, I mean to suggest that

while epistolary novels operate according to the sequencing of correspondence, another

23

force is equally potent in creating a kind of useless consumption in the form of twice
copied letters, misdirected or misread letters, and the like.36 Pamela, for example, is
ﬁlled with letters that are formal and satisfactory at ﬁrst glance, yet reveal the fact that
they are ultimately misplaced, haunting the epistolary order that Richardson sets up.
More importantly, because epistolary novelists focus on the letter’s formal qualiﬁes of
excess, they also incorporate themes of excess into their texts. Throughout the
dissertation that follows I will attempt to productively weave together these generic and
thematic concerns, although my focus will largely remain on letter’s form and function,
and its failure to deliver the Enlightenment as we have come to know it. What follows
is a brief synopsis of the argumentative are I trace from the mid eighteenth century to the
ascendancy of European romanticism.

In this dissertation, I look at excess in ﬁve epistolary novels: Samuel Richardson’s
Pamela, Henry F ielding’s Shamela, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The New Heloise, Johann
Goethe’s The Sorrow of Young Werther, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. My reading of
Pamela deals with forms of material excess in the eighteenth century; the chapter on

Shamela seeks to explain why parody and burlesque, as forms of excess, become a

 

36 . . . . . .
Ann Bower sees these formal qualities as “literature encumbered.” At the same trme, rt rs “for those

encumbrances” that “modern authors come to the form.” Ann Bower, Epistolary Responses: The Letter in
Twentieth-Century American Fiction and Criticism (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997), 10.

24

double-edged sword that eventually conﬁrms excess’s desirability in the eighteenth
century; the Rousseau chapter proceeds from the limit of the Enlightenment encyclopedia
to the excess of epistolary knowledge in order to show that excess is very much at the
heart of Enlightenment thought; and my Werther chapter then acknowledges the
Enlightenment dream of transcendence and how the letter alternately helps and deﬁes that
governing wish. Finally, in a short coda on Frankenstein I point to the end of epistolary
novels in the long eighteenth century.37

My ﬁrst chapter, titled “The Epistolary Interior and Figures of Waste in Pamela,”
sets up the epistolary paradigm that the rest of the dissertation tries to expose as well as
problematize. The dissertation begins with Richardson’s Pamela not just because this
novel provides a prototype of the feminocentric epistolary novel in the eighteenth century,
but also because Pamela’s popularity tells us how the eighteenth-century came to accept
various kinds of excess in the novel, even with Richardson’s insistence that models of

authenticity and epistolary formality be privileged. While Richardson seems to focus on

 

37 I acknowledge the presence of other famous epistolary novels in the same period: Aphra Behn’s
experiments with epistolary techniques in Love-Letters between a Noble-Man and His Sister offer insights
into why epistolary novels might provide intrigues and “dangerous liaisons” before the full-blown maturity
in Richardson; Tobias Smollett’s Humphry Clinker deals with extravagance and morality; Frances Bumey’s
Evelina offers insight into both London’s modernity and the excesses of theatricality; John Cleland’s
Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure demonstrates yet another Enlightenment, a sort of mock version of the
female Bildungsroman. The present arrangement, however, allows a better linkage between the
Enlightenment ideal and the concept of excess. It begins with the moment when the epistolary novel
assumes its supremacy and ironically creates a century-long controversy. Rousseau and Goethe, both are
philosophers of the time, help us see the gap between Enlightenment discourse and its literary practice.
Frankenstein marks the end of epistolary dominance in the long eighteenth century.

25

how the immediacy of the letter reﬂects Pamela’s true feelings, Pamela’s letters
sometimes exceed this aim and direct our attention to the wasted spaces in the epistolary
novel. Indeed, as I will show, “waste” and “excess,” because they contain within
themselves both images of barrenness and lavish abundance, help us understand a letter’s
two-sidedness: that is, as I suggest throughout, letters help establish the image of the
rational self as the foundation of the Enlightenment, but also become a matter of
indeterminacy at times. Like “excess,” waste is also understood as matter “out of place”
or dangerous to the status quo.38 Pamela’s story proves again and again how
manipulating the sequential order of her letters, or utilizing the marginal spaces within
her letters, reveals a Pamela that is surprisingly subversive. Pamela’s meticulously
designed replies to Mr. B’s proposal, for example, reveal an acute awareness of the
potentiality of epistolary margins.

I am suggesting that charting the wasted spaces in Pamela provides us a chance to
study the complex relationship between material excess and how Enlightenment rhetoric
seems inadequate to cope with the culture of excess in the eighteenth century. How do

Pamela’s letters lay bare the latent desires, even as they work tirelessly to formalize and

 

38 The Introduction of William Cohen and Ryan Johnson’s Filth, for example, discusses several cultural
implications of waste matters. They are seen as contaminations that are not only dangerous but also
disruptive to the system. They also invoke the image of abject, blurring the line between subject and object.
William Cohen and Ryan Johnson, eds. Filth: Dirt, Disgust, and Modern Life (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2005), vii-xxxi.

26

 

constrain them? What does Pemala’s habit of revising, enclosing, fragmenting letters tell
us about the open-endedness of her feelings and identiﬁcations? What does it mean to
have materials within the letter that are meaningful and yet difficult to categorize at the
same time? These are questions that Pamela poses to a culture of decorum and formality
that sees less and less capacity over its reign.

“‘Et Cetera’: The Indeterrninacy of Parodic Letters in Shamela,” the second chapter,
charts the formal ramiﬁcations of Henry Fielding’s parody of Pamela. I would suggest
that once Fielding enters the epistolary scene, he, like Richardson, cannot help but see his
parodic work turn into an excessive project of its own. While traditionally Fielding and
Richardson are seen as distinctive branches in the making of the early novel, pairing
Fielding and Richardson through epistolary novels allows us to see how they both
respond to the concept of excess in the eighteenth century. Unlike readings that simply
read Shamela as a parasitical novel that rarely ﬁmctions beyond its “literal” meaning as
“the sham(e) of Pamela,” I would suggest a reading that sees Shamela as an
self-actualized work that has a surprisingly distinctive epistolary perspective of its own.
Fielding in this sense uses the epistolary genre not simply as a poor and corrupted
imitation of Richardson’s Pamela; rather, he tries to imagine the epistolary scene as a

way to comment on the epistolary practices of the day as a dangerous enterprise. Indeed,

27

Shamela, as I will try to show, displays a life of its own, just like the letter-copies whose
reproducibility frnally subverts the original letters in epistolary novels.

Implicit in this reading of Shamela is the connection between parody and excess.
Why is it that Augustan literature pride itself as the literature of decorum only to ﬁnd
itself indulging in satire and parody that often displays an excessive nature? In a weird
way, the eighteenth century fascination with satire and parody ﬁnds its uncanny reﬂection
in epistolary practices, since like Shamela’s letters parody is also itself a corrupted letter
to the original that could have been written—e. g. Pamela’s inherent Sharnela-like
qualities—but nonetheless repressed. In this sense, might we suggest that Fielding and
Richardson’s competition best exempliﬁes what it means to be in excess within the
mid-eighteenth-century literary scene? Aren’t they both creating for each other a double
that they cannot easily dispense with, an excess that is the same but not quite?39

The ﬁnal two chapters add a transatlantic ﬂavor to the study by considering
Rousseau’s Julie and Goethe’s Werther to show the epistolary genre’s prevalence in the
long eighteenth century and across national borders. My third chapter, “‘These Letters are

no Letters’: The Excess of Enlightenment Discourse in Rousseau’s Julie, or the New

Heloise,” links Rousseau’s epistolary passion with his rational discourses. What interests

 

3 . . . . .
9 For Watt, Richardson and Freldmg each represent a different strain of novel’s development.

28

me in Julie is how an epistolary novel about forbidden love resists or reconciles
Rousseau’s apparent affinity with philosophical discourse of reason in his Social Contract,
A Discourse on Inequality and “On the Origin of Language.” Similarly, Confessions and
Reveries of a Solitary Walker also concern themselves about the origin of the self.
Despite the fact that in these works Rousseau constantly poses as a rationalist, he actually
subscribes to a secret desire for excess. Indeed, almost all his critical works rely on a
myth of origin that cannot hold. At the same time, the re-occurrence of these original
scenes almost always comes with a slight change, and therefore concurs with an anxiety,
a repeated nightmare of false writing that he constantly brings up in his Confessions.
These excesses——i.e. the lies, the false writings, the false speech—therefore constitute
who he is, and indeed, his “uniqueness,” because for Rousseau the road to self-presence
already entails these excesses. Every representation of his self-identity already entails a
false identity, like a false writing —- “There is not one that I have not had to rewrite four or

”40 That is also the reason that he needs a

ﬁve times before sending it to the printer.
second “confessions,” The Reveries of the Solitary Walker, as he himself calls it a sequel.

In Julie, this theme of false writing is seen through Julie and Saint-Preux’s

correspondence, as they continue to misread each other’s letters, and thus cast doubts on

 

4O
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions (London: Penguin Group, 1953), 113.

29

how letter writing can be transparent. If writing always entails dangerous deviation for
Rousseau, then writing letters is doubly so, since now one’s letter is read through the eyes
of the letter writer and the addressee. We might suggest therefore that Rousseau’s
awareness of the inherent excess in letter writing anticipates the Enlightenment excess in
his philosophical discourse.

The fourth chapter on Goethe’s Werther studies how Werther’s letters try to
transform the problematic epistolary excesses that I have been trying to lay out so far.
Werther, being proto-romantic at times, envisions an all-encompassing subjectivity that is
unbounded by the physicality of the letter. For him, his heart is the source of his
imagination but his heart is also something indescribable, subject to continuous
extenuation and transformation. The success of Werther therefore relies on the editor’s
meticulous rearrangement of the Werther correspondence and his own interpolations. In
this sense, the editor foresees the effect of the new Werther in a single voice free of
contamination as Julie has so often displayed. The marginal role of the epistolary editor
has now becomes integral to the Werther project of romantic subjectivity. On the other
hand, the overt participation of the editor towards the end of Werther also proves to be
detrimental to this single voiced narrative. While at the outset, both romanticism and the

epistolary novel would prefer a language of excess as an underlying principle, they are

30

quite different in results. Werther’s romantic transcendence proves too much of a burden

for the epistolary novel: if excess is taken to mean that which cannot be assumed by

self-presence, then Werther’s ideal also needs to be undone. What is left in Werther, is a

failed attempt to valorize one excess over the other. And as we transit into the nineteenth

century, this demand for a single, more authoritarian voice becomes more prevalent

against the multiple, excessive voices in the eighteenth-century epistolary novel.

The study concludes with Shelley’s Frankenstein, a widely studied text, although its

epistolary frames are frequently neglected. Although literary critics regard the letters as

the beginning of the story, they tend to focus more on the nested Frankenstein narratives.

I would argue, however, that this oversight not only intimates our sense of the letter’s

somewhat paradoxical private and transparent quality, but also our desire for a uniﬁed

narrative structure. Chapter one of Shelley’s novel begins with Frankenstein’s narrative,

not Captain Walton’s epistles. Yet if we are to reverse the dynamic of the content and the

frame, we might ﬁnd out that the epistolary frames that Shelley carefully plants in

between Frankenstein’s story and the reader force us to recognize the letter genre’s

transgression through permeability. Echoing Derrida’s claim that “mixture is the letter,

the epistle, which is not a genre but all genres, literature itself” (48), I want to argue that

the supposed waning of the eighteenth-century epistolary novels ﬁnally is just another

31

facade, an ironic fate of the letter’s excessive nature.

Finally, the dissertation is comparativist in essence because it is inevitably linked to
the Enlightenment as a cultural movement in eighteenth-century Europe. In addition, the
rise of the epistolary novel is by no means an English phenomenon: although I start with
Richardson, there has been a richer French epistolary literature since the seventeenth
century. In turn, Richardson also inﬂuences Rousseau and Goethe. The project also offers
an alternative to several ﬁelds of study in the eighteenth century. It puts forth an
Enlightenment that is no longer merely a monolithic project of reason: it can be about an
unashamed, manifest affiliation with excess as well—Rousseau’s attempts to naturalize
excess in the love letters, Richardson’s attentions to epistolary margins, or Fielding’s
exuberant style of parodic letters. As for the rise of the novel, while existing scholarly
works on the rise of the novel often see it as motivated by a new consciousness of
individuality, the dissertation proposes to view this new consciousness as accompanied
with a sense of disorientation. Indeed, letters in these novels are concerned themselves to
temporarily creating a vertiginous feeling: Pamela’s repetitive uses of the same letter; the
extensive search for the origin of its true author in Shamela; the contagious feeling that
crosses over letter boundaries in Julie and its editor’s playfulness in the second preface.

All of them suggest that the epistolary novel presents a candid, genuine, and authentic

32

self when the novel is a convoluted whole. In the latter sense, we will be able to see a

better connection between the Enlightenment and the literature of sentimentality in the

second half of the eighteenth century because this movement also highlights the

psychological complexity and the loss of origin in human subjectivity.

33

Epistolary Interior and Figures of Waste in Pamela

Samuel Richardson’s Pamela has long been seen as an integral part of the rise of
the novel as well as the epitome of eighteenth-century epistolary novels. Ian Watt sees
Pamela as the “ﬁrst true novel,” remarking that part of its success depends on
Richardson’s attention to formal realism—in other words, “the authenticity of its
presentation.”1 Jill Campbell shares a similar opinion in pointing out that Richardson’s
close afﬁliation with the print industry helps him adopt the “language of ‘closed and
detailed,’ particularized description that became the hallmark of his novelistic style,” as
we see in Pamela and Clarissa.2 James Turner goes one step further to suggest that both
Pamela supporters and the anti-Parnelists share the premise that Richardson’s
representation of Pamela transcends the paper and produces an “autonomous embodied”

Pamela (77-8).3 That is why, for Denis Diderot, “whether we wish it or not, we play a part

 

I All other reference in the text and notes will be in parenthesis. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2001), 175-7.

Jill Campbell, “Domestic Intelligence,” The Yale Journal of Criticism 15.2 (2002), 252. Ian Watt also
emphasizes this aspect with regards to Richardson’s novelistic art in The Rise of the Novel. He suggests that
Richardson “exploited” this afﬁliation with printing business in two other ways, namely, “the authority of
print” and “the illusion of print” (197-8). The former establishes him as the source of his credibility as the
editor. The latter then creates the reality of the enclosed world in Pamela’s letters.

3 James Grantham Turner, “Novel Panic: Picture and Performance in the Reception of Richardson’s
Pamela,” Representations No. 48 (Autumn 1994), 77-8.

34

in your [Richardson’s] works,” and that during a few hours of reading, “I had heard the
genuine language of the passions” (82-3).4 Tickletext in Henry F ielding’s Shamela makes
a similar, though ironic claim toward Pamela: “I have done nothing but read it to others,
and hear others again read it to me, ever since it came into my Hand” and “if I lay the
Book down it came after me” (9).5

If Richardson’s print strategies and languages of formal realism do not sufﬁce to
manipulate readerly identiﬁcation with the novel, Richardson’s choice of genre, the
epistolary form, secures its access to the reader’s heart. In discussing Pamela, Christine
Roulston values the epistolary genre’s ability to “provide a formal narrative that could
represent the subject effectively in its most transparent and unmediated form” (1).6
Richardson himself states in his Preface to the Letters written to and for particular
friends, on the most important occasions that

Nature, Propriety of Character, Plain Sense, and General Use, have been the chief

Objects of the Author’s Attention in the penning of these Letters; and as he every-

 

4 Denis Diderot, Selected Writings on Art and Literature, trans. Geoffrey Bremner (London: Penguin Books,
1994), 82-3

5 Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews and Shamela, ed. Judith Hawley (London: Penguin Books, 1999), 9.

6 Christine Roulston, Virtue, Gender; and the Authentic Self in the Eighteenth-Century Fiction: Richardson,
Rousseau, and Laclos (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998), I. For Roulston, eighteenth-century
representation of authenticity often creates an ironic result. While writers of sentimentalism put emphasis
on feeling, and thus create a sense of authenticity, their excessive language often diverts them ﬁ'om
vicarious experiences. For more discussion on authenticity, see her Introduction. Watt also suggests that
“the letter form, then offered Richardson a short-cut, as it were, to the heart, and encouraged him to express
what he found there with the greatest possible precision” (I95).

35

where aimed to write to the Judgment, rather to the Imagination, he would chuse,

that they should generally be found more useful than diverting.7
Here Richardson not only stresses the importance of morality that his letters convey but
also points out the transparency and accessibility of these letters. After all, they are
written “to the judgment,” not “to the imagination.”

Thus Richardson consciously pursues an authentic Pamela that is shared by his
readers. Even he himself constantly revises his novels in response to the reader’s
comments and critiques. Yet despite these efforts to create an affectively credible Pamela
and to conﬁne Pamela within the letter proper so as to see her heart, one opposite result
ensues: Pamela’s heart, if ever one can access it, often lies not inside the letter but in the
excessive and wasted spaces that the epistolary novel creates. Epistolary interior, in this
sense, is the multitude of letters that serve as the transparent medium through which
Pamela can be authenticated as well as Richardson’s textual representation of the letter’s

formality.8 On the one hand, just as the “interior monologue” is often tied in with the

 

7 Samuel Richardson, Letters written to and for particular friends, on the most important occasions,
Eighteenth Century Collection Online (London, 1741), 1-2

Richardson’s emphasis on letter’s “Nature, Propriety of Character, Plain Sense, and General Use” is
crucial to the understanding of letter’s formality. In addition, the culture of politeness and decorum and the
amount of epistolary manuals in the eighteenth century also show how letter writing requires a certain
formality. Eve Bannet, for example, suggests that Richard Steele promotes a sense of propriety and
functionality through his letter fragments in The Spectator. Eve Bannet, Empire of Letters : Letter Manuals
and Transatlantic Correspondence, 1688-1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 288.
There are also several studies on the letter conceived in spatial or physical terms. James How use
“epistolary space” to indicate the “spaces of connection, providing permanent and seemingly unbreakable

36

authentic self, so the epistolary interior in Pamela is to be conceptualized as a space for
the Enlightenment individuality and self-presence.9 On the other hand, the “interior” is
also realized as lacuna and secrecy, something that eludes our eyes. The contrast between
transparency and secrecy in the epistolary interior therefore takes us to a moment when
Richardson’s epistolary representation is at the threshold: between printed pages and
manuscripts, between the private and public, between copies and the original, etc.
Hence this essay is interested in how the epistolary interior opens up to the
margins and periphery and how it constantly negotiates its boundary through ﬁgures of
waste.lo By excess and waste, 1 mean to suggest that while the epistolary novel focuses
on the mimesis of letter writing and epistolary verisimilitude, its literary representation
necessarily exceeds its own functions and produces a certain form of textual waste. In

Illuminating Letters, Paul Gutjahr and Megan Benton have demonstrated how often type

 

links between people and places.” James How, Epistolary spaces : English letter-writing from the
Foundation of the Post Office to Richardson 's Clarissa,(Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2003), 4.
Elizabeth Cook reminds us of the physical “body” of the letter, “the trace of a body that has not yet been
entirely typographically encoded” in the epistolary novel (3). Elizabeth Cook, Epistolary Bodies : Gender
and Genre in the Eighteenth-Century Republic of Letters (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). See
also Rebecca Earle, ed. Epistolary Selves: Letters and Letter- Writers, 1600-1945 (Aldershot: Ashgate
Publishing Company, 1999).

9 Because of the letter’s close afﬁnity to the heart, it readily fulﬁlls the promise of modem subjectivity.
Jacques Denida has shown to us how the Enlightenment’s priority of the oral over the written establishes

the self-presence, the “transparent proximity in the face-to-face countenances and the immediate range of
the voice.” Jacques Derrida, OfGrammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), I38.

'0 For further discussion on margins in book, see Evelyn Tribble’s Margins and Marginality: The Printed
Page in Early Modern England. She states that “precisely because the margin was in a ﬂuid relationship to
the text proper, margins allow us to see the competing claims of internal authority and plural, external
authorities in the margins of the text” (6).

37

fonts and book designs are not na’r’ve renditions of the manuscript and can be translated
into formal representations of reality.11 Therefore, according to Steven Price, one can ﬁnd
in the third edition Clarissa traces of Richardson’s typographical manipulation that
“produces typeset pages that visually suggest autograph, handwritten manuscripts of
familiar letters” and “builds credibility of his novel’s didactic message by raising the
possibility that the letters in Clarissa could be based on authentic documents.”'2 To
further their arguments, I would suggest that this is not simply a one-way traffic whereby
Richardson uses typography simply for perpetuating or imitating reality in the second
order; for Richardson, the epistolary form can be a kind of reality, revealing a kind of
awareness of the revelry, excess, and doubleness that are embedded in the margin of
letters and the ﬁgures of waste. As Clare Brant mentions, eighteenth-century letter writers
are constantly aware of letters in printed form and the possibility that their letters are to
be printed; in a sense, the double meanings of letters—that they are simply a metonymic

presence to the heart, to truth, and to authenticity—are often in the back of their mind.'3

 

11 Paul Gutjahr and Megan Benton, eds. Illuminating Letters (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press,
2001).

12 . . . . . . . .

Steven Pnce, “The Autograph Manuscript 1n Pnnt: Samuel Richardson’s Type Font Manipulation m
Clarissa.” Illuminating Letters, eds. Paul Gutjahr and Megan Benton (Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 2001), 119.

Brant’s research shows that there is a mutual inﬂuence between eighteenth-century epistolary
manuscripts and printed letters. For her, “the relationship between script and print is emphatically
simultaneous not sequential: that is, correspondence and printed letters co-existed in multiple and complex
ways.” Clare Brant, Eighteenth-Century Letters and British Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006),
9. Temma Berg presents another epistolary doubleness. For her, “letters conveyed news of public events,

38

In Pamela, this awareness is intensiﬁed through the use of ﬁgures of waste—seemingly
useless consumptions or unwanted matters—and for Richardson, they are to be seen or
staged as natural and authentic to the eyes so as to make them the source of signiﬁcation:
A letter that repeats a previous letter, a note that is accidental and spontaneous, an
enclosed letter that is supposed to expatiate a personal account, and a copied or even a
lost letter that we as readers have already read before.'4 Thus, the present study focuses
not just textual performances in the margin of letters; it also extends to letters that have
been “wasted” and become marginal. These “wasted” letters that traverse the epistolary
interior often occur in the interstices of epistolary writing, but their marginalities end up
contributing to reading Pamela.

Among the various responses that Pamela writes to Mr. B in the novel, one
particular letter stands out that best exempliﬁes epistolary waste—Pamela’s enclosure of
Mr. B’s marriage proposal. One thing that quickly catches our attention is the
arrangement of both Pamela’s and Mr. B’s letters. Both letters are put together on the

same page in two columns: on the left-hand side is the ultimatum that Mr. B issues

 

but, like novels, they were never uniformly real. Just as novels insisted on their verisimilitude even as they
tilted toward the fantastic and romantic, just so the letter, sent ﬁ'om one real person to another and
undeniably containing truth, yet employed rhetorical devices to relay reveries and supposition as well as
fact.” Temma Berg, The Lives and Letters of an Eighteenth-Century Circle of A cquaintance (Burlington:
Ashgate Publishing Company, 2006), 12.

Berg suggests that “by constructing novels out of private letters, writers could ensure that their
discourses remained both factual and ﬁctive.” Berg, 12.

39

regarding matters of their marriage, whereas Pamela’s response is on the right-hand side.
While this may seem like an oddity, it is based on the miniature of the overall epistolary
structure: you write, and then I respond. But at that moment we are no longer just reading
“true” letters from Pamela nor enclosed letters that Pamela so often claims to present with
her own letters: as if letters alone are not enough to convey to us Pamela’s true feeling;
we now have Richardson’s print arrangement of the particular set of letters. In a sense,
we are reading Richardson’s imagination of Pamela’s mental state; we are reading along
side her at that particular moment when she gives him her replies. By highlighting the
corresponsive nature of epistolary novels, Richardson tries to capture the reciprocal and
dialogical quality of her letter writing. Yet, the ambivalence of this particular scene—that
whether we are actually reading a genuine letter that is arranged by Pamela in such a way
or whether we are reading two enclosed letters arranged by Richardson or whether there
is such a letter—seems to question the effectiveness of Richardson’s epistolary ideal and
order. At the very least, Pamela’s interpolation of Mr. B’s letter (she earlier calls it his
“Articles”) can be seen as a symbolic shattering of the letter proper that epistolary
verisimilitude so often relies on. And at that moment, fragments and excesses, Shams and
wastes—things that temporarily abandon the letter proper—are allowed.

In a sense, this is a story of the “unpublished” Pamela Andrews, and indeed, the

40

eighteenth century is no fool in picking up this undertone within the novel in the anti-
Pamela controversy. To be more speciﬁc, I would argue that Richardson is not only
aware of the extent to which print manipulates readerly emotion and produces successful
identiﬁcation; in so doing, he also takes a rather unexpected “formal” turn that highlights
the margins and the peripheries. While margins and peripheries are often neglected in the
epistolary ebb and ﬂow, and objects and texts that exist in them are usually seen as
wasteful, sometimes only for decorative purposes, Richardson’s print strategies—ranging
from what functions it perform, what needs to be emphasized and what needs to be
excluded, and what can be seen and what is invisible—-may have appeared to attach more
meanings to the supposedly transparent heart.

Scholars have paid extra attention to the formal qualities of the letter in epistolary
novels since Janet Altman’s Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form, which focuses on how
letters in epistolary novels ﬁnally mean something not just because of the “histoire” but
because of the “discourse.”15 In other words, one is constantly mediated by the frame—
the letters—if not the narrators. One is therefore reading a story within a story, so to

speak, because one cannot get to the epistolary arch-story without ﬁrst reading other

 

'5 Janet Altman, Epistolarity: Approaches to a F orm (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1982), 207.
For a succinct deﬁnition of “story” and “discourse,” see Roland Barthes, “Introduction to the Structural
Analysis of Narrative.” Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1988).

41

people’s mail which supposedly only tells a piece of the story. This insight into the
epistolary novel shifts our focus to the rim of the letter proper, as the story of the letter
readily produce other stories, contributing to the overall understanding of the epistolary
novel. In a sense, one is constantly aware of the out-of-the-scene actions and events
within the epistolary novel in order to continue and comprehend the seemingly proleptic
plotline.l6 Janine Barchas’s study on the graphic design and print culture in eighteenth
century England presents a different case. '7 She does not focus on eighteenth-century
epistolarity per se, but her chapters on Clarissa and Pamela force us to recognize the
materiality of both epistolary novels. For her, there is a deﬁnite link between the novel’s
materiality—the way it is printed, arranged, edited, etc—and its impact on readers
“irrespective of authorial control” (4).18 It begs further questions as to how such textual

excess becomes a trademark of epistolary novels.19

 

'6 Altman’s study shows how the letter’s functionality does not necessarily stretch to its own content.
Although it is mainly a structuralist’s approach to the classiﬁcation of epistolary novels, she does offer us a
new outlook to the relationship between letter’s form and its cultural implication in the eighteenth century:
“Epistolary ﬁctions tends to ﬂourish at those moments when novelists most openly reﬂect upon the relation
between story telling and intersubjective communication and begin to question the way in which writing
reﬂects, betrays, or constitutes the relations between self, other, and experience.” Indeed, if the sfructuralist
impulse dominates her study of the letter form, the ﬁnal comments seem to gesture toward its material
impact on eighteenth-century consciousness (most of her examples are ﬁom the eighteenth century).
Altman, 212.

'7 Janine Barchas, Graphic Design, Print Culture, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003).

Barchas, 4. Her opening remark on Swift’s poem, for example, takes us back to the “original” scene of
his published poem along side with the advertisement and the impact such juxtaposition create.

Barchas’s discussion of the way Richardson uses punctuations and graphic designs in Pamela, for
example, not only demonstrates how temporality is crucially disrupted through non-verbal events, but also

42

What may interest us is that both studies indirectly draw upon ﬁgures of waste as
their inspirations. Altman’s “epistolarity,” after all, is a term that is designed to show how
the meaning of the letter is not in the content but in the form. It then directs our attention
less to the plot and the epistolary ﬂow than to the peripheries, those otherwise ignored
places in the text, and indeed, the wasteland of the letter world. By the same token,
Barchas’s study on the disappearance of Clarissa’s music score and Pamela’s use of
ﬂeuron reminds us of the dispensable yet crucial status of waste in these letter novels. In
a sense, the letter as an embodiment of the Enlightenment ironically carries within itself
an image of waste.20

While letter-reading requires a bit of the logic of waste, the letter itself can be
seen as a kind of waste as well. After all, the books and prints that are piled along the
Grub Street—Clare Brant reminds us that one way that the eighteenth century enters print

culture is through writing and printing letters—are hardly valuable possessions to the

 

shows us that Richardson’s epistolary strategy extends to such ignored items as ﬂeuron and illustrations
that are deemed insigniﬁcant to the understanding of the novel and eventually left out in modern editions.
The missing music score originally included in Clarissa also “exerts” a “profound thematic sway” (117).
Such attentions to the details of print do not burden our interpretations; if anything, Richardson reveals,
consciously or unconsciously, a whole other dimension of epistolary correspondence that are usually
excessive to the modern eyes—usually in the margin of the text—and therefore needed to be left out even
in his own later editions.

20 In his Letter F arm and the French Enlightenment: The Epistolary Paradox, John Howland suggests that
letter accommodates the Enlightenment demand for truthfulness. What is even more important, using letters
to participate in public affairs and showing personal opinions creates an illusion of civil society. This is in
the balance between individual performance and public interest that he ﬁnds the epistolary paradox.

43

eyes of eighteenth-century commoners.” Moreover, the proliferation of letter manuals in
the eighteenth century suggests a sense of formality and prompts one to wonder about the
letter’s imitative quality that is hardly genuine. In addition, letters in Pamela constantly
suffer from ill fate, ranging from being hacked, stolen, copied, fragmented, to being
enclosed in other letters. If one looks at the history of waste, one starts to see how the
letter and waste uncannily reﬂect each other. Waste, according to Oxford English
Dictionary, originally comes to represent a vast land of nothingness, usually uninhabited.
This vastness is then used for the embodiment of two opposite meanings, that of
barrenness like the dessert and a lavish abundance. Like the letter’s two sidedness, one
that is readily informative and dispensable at the same time, waste is regarded as either
pleasurable for its sheer abundance of lavishness or detestable for its unproductiveness.
Waste is also associated with damage and ravage. The amount of critical work on the
cultural value of waste already suggests waste’s contaminating effect on the subject,
pointing to its danger to the public because of its permeability.22 The letter, if the analogy

holds, would always be out of bounds, so to speak, for its potential danger, as the rest of

 

21 . . . .

Brant, 6-9. For a discussron on eighteenth-century print culture and its excess, see James Raven,
Judging New Wealth: Popular Publishing and Responses to Commerce in England 1750-1800 (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1992), 61-3.

2 For further discussion of the various cultural meaning of waste, see the Introduction in Filth: Dirt,
Disgust, and Modern Life, edited by William Cohen and Ryan Johnson. (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2005).

44

the paper is trying to show. These comparisons between waste and letter all seem to beg
the same question: how do the seemingly unproductiveness and damage eventually
become the epistolary novel’s secret pleasure? How does the advertised Enlightenment
subjectivity become excessive? How does the waste reside in the epistolary genre
eventually become valuable?23 I would like to think of these various kinds of wasteful
ﬁguring in Pamela—possibly the founding text of the epistolary dominance in the
eighteenth century England—not as a coincidence that one can easily write off. Rather,
they bespeak a larger issue of the culture of excess, which often hides its extravagance in

the name of reason and progress that one so readily sees in the Enlightenment.

II
Even without further discussion of ﬁgures of waste, it would be difficult not to see
Samuel Richardson’s 1740 Pamela as an excessive novel, or as a novel about excess in
various different ways. In a sense, this is a novel constantly invested in opening up its
interior. The second part of the novel, for example, morphs into diary entries that

sometimes last for pages before Richardson reminds the reader that they are still letters

 

23 Roland Barthes’s narrative model on the cardinal and catalyst event might be of help here. If eventually
all segments within the narrative are built up toward the cardinal event as if there is a teleological force,
then catalyst events become the embodiment of the moments of delay and loitering, without which the
narrative would fail to produce its pleasure. See Roland Barthes’s “Introduction to the Structural Analysis
of Narrative” and Pleasure of the Text, trans, Richard Miller. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975).

45

intended for Pamela’s parents.24 Pamela’s later editions display an even more excessive
nature, for Richardson’s continuous revision of the novel becomes a complex
collaborative process in which the epistolary novel itself turns out to be in some sense an
epistolary correspondence as well, which of course leaves literary critics with some
interpretative difficulties.25 Indeed, while commenting on Richardson’s ideological
project, Terry Eagleton points out that perhaps one can see Richardson’s works not as “a
ﬁnished, seamless product” but as “kits, great unwieldly containers crammed with spare
parts and agreeable extras, for which the manufacturer never ceases to churn out new
streamlined improvements, ingenious additions and revised instruction sheets.”26 Clearly
for Eagleton, the whole Pamela business invites not only questions of the excessiveness
of authorship but also some readerly speculations as to how well this novel reﬂects
Richardson’s own personal views in its ever expanding enterprise. One has to wonder
why Richardson, whose novelistic art is often associated with maintaining and
“constructing” the ideology of the rising middle class, invests so much energy in the

notion of excess, that which constantly eludes forms and boundaries, be they novelistic

 

24 For Ian Watt, “the epistolary convention itself gradually broke down, the letters turned into ‘Pamela’s
Journal,’ and the later part of the novel therefore produced a kind of narrative effect “not unlike that of
autobiographical memoir in Defoe” (209).

25 For a brief description of Richardson’s collaborative process, see Terry Eagleton, The Rape of Clarissa:
Writing, Sexuality and Class Struggle in Samuel Richardson, 10-12.

Eagleton, 20. For him, the second edition of Pamela is a great example of Richardson’s continuous
involvement in the revision.

46

conﬁnes or the limits of individuality.”

Richardson sets up the tension between a virtuous and an excessive Pamela from
the beginning. Pamela writes, for example, that her phrasing and “blotted” papers are the
direct result of the sadness aroused by her lady’s death. Yet the ﬁrst thing that catches Mr.
B’s eyes in the same letter is her ability to “write a pretty hand” and “spell tolerably
too.”28 Pamela quickly establishes herself as a sentimental writer, which is hardly
associated with a servant maid. The ﬁrst letter then subsequently marks a series of
contrasts in which the logic of the epistolary waste eventually prevails in order to allow
Pamela to become un-Pamela-like for a while. Indeed, Terry Castle suggests in her
Female Thermometer that Richardson’s epistolary world is much like a dream scenario,
“a great dizzyingly recursive structure, where opposites mingle and the truth is always
double,” and she demonstrates to us the disoriented feeling that is to come once we

encounter the Pamela letters.29 To begin with, once we ﬁnish the ﬁrst letter, we realize

 

27
Eagleton, 7.

28 Samuel Richardson, Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, eds. Thomas Keymer and Alice Wakely (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2001), 11-2. All other reference to Pamela in the text and notes will be in
parenthesis.

9 Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 66. Also, in commenting on Part II of Pamela, Terry Castle points
out that Richardson creates a subplot of Pamela’s unconscious desire for freedom already seen in the ﬁrst
part. It can be seen as a subconscious manifestation of its ﬁrst part, i.e. a kind of denied fantasy and
shadowy double of the ﬁrst. Yet the catch is that this re-carnivalization of Pamela is only realized
temporarily and then soon repressed. Castle’s insight on Part II as a kind of repetition then calls our
attention to a Richardsonian tendency in highlighting the dynamic between the original and the copy. Terry
Castle, Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and
Fiction (London: Methuen, I986).

47

that there is an addendum, a parasitical note that borders between the letter and non-letter.
This note is structured as if it were written at the moment of surprise: it begins with “l
have been feared out of my senses; for just now, as I was folding this Letter, in my late
Lady’s Dressing-room, in comes my young Master” (12). This “Letter” of course refers to
the ﬁrst part of the letter where Pamela tells her parents about her sadness and innocent
behaviors, and therefore we know quite clearly that the second part is added only after the
ﬁrst letter is ﬁnished. Yet the note’s proximity to the ﬁrst letter, being enclosed with it,
gives us an illusion that the note is written with the ﬁrst. By doing so, Pamela also
transfers the kind of submissive tone of the ﬁrst letter into the note and hence reduces the
impact of transgression within it. The note, in this sense, becomes the center of the letter
since Pamela deliberately uses it to create a voice of her own while retaining the note’s
marginal status, something that can be dispensed with easily. The note literally becomes
an appendix, a useless organ of the body that captures waste. Mark for example that being
a good maid (as described in the ﬁrst letter), she presumptuously uses her “late Lady’s
Dressing-room” as her private writing space. Also in the note, she downplays the fact that
Mr. B might have done something inappropriate by snatching the letter out of “her bosom”
(12). This careful manipulation of her parents’ reaction points to not only the dynamic

between letter-writing and theatricality but also Pamela’s understanding of the limitation

48

of the epistolary interior as a ﬁxed space for one’s truthful self. Her dramatized voice
resides somewhere else, in the note that is very difﬁcult to characterize.

This reversal of letter/note dynamic comes with another twist in the following
letters and the vertiginous letter world continues its path. One might even say that certain
logic of illogicality keeps the narrative going. Letter XV, for example, actually mirrors
the structures of the note in the ﬁrst letter since it also begins with an’apologetic gesture:
“I broke off abruptly my last letter; for I fear’d he was coming; and so it happened” (29).
If in the ﬁrst letter, the note is the humble abode of Richardson’s textual excess, then
Letter XV becomes the manifestation of Richardson’s secret desire for epistolary excess.
Now the note, the addendum, becomes itself a letter. The letter no longer can be
distinguished from the note and the role of the letter as evidence of self-presence now
suffers a series of transformations as well. Here Pamela does not carry with her the victim
image that is traditionally associated with her. In fact, she answers Mr. B’s hysterical and
desperate moves of coercion with reason and deﬁance. Similar to her ways of responding
to Mr. B’s patriarchal interrogations, she now freely appropriates the letter form—as a
sign of the Enlightenment—in such a way as to accommodate the notes. Despite the fact
that Mr. B continues to accuse her as being a “Boldface” and “Equivocator,”suggesting

that Pamela’s epistolary transgressions will be her “own enemy” and that her “perverse

49

Folly” will be her own “Ruin” (30-1), Pamela’s parody of the letter form—the kind of
reversal of letter/note—mocks the notion of the letter as a transparent medium. Just as the
note’s wasteful status becomes the site of Pamela’s textual freedom, so the letter’s failure
as a transparent interior also allows her to double her unreadability.30

The interior of Pamela, in this sense, is ﬁlled with textual appendices where
letters fold unto themselves. Indeed, a certain Gothicization of the epistolary interior—
where the interior becomes haunted by its own elusive images——has manifested itself in
Pamela’s letters.3 ' In Letter X, for example, Pamela tells her mother that Mr. B “says to
Mrs. Jervis, This Girl is always scribbling; I think she may be better employ’d” (22). But
Letter XII—supposedly a letter substitute for a lost letter between Letter IX and X—turns
around and repeats what she has already stated in Letter X:

All the next day I was very sad, and began to write my long Letter. He saw me

writing, and said (as I mention’d) to Mrs. Jervis, That Girl is always scribbling;

 

30 In terms of Pamela’s unreadability, Mr. B’s two symbolic gestures of snatching the letter out of her
bosom suggest an implicit link not only between Pamela’s writing self and sexuality but also between
Pamela and her textuality. It can be also seen in this letter that Pamela’s self-reﬂexive comments on her
own textuality—she being Lucretia and him being the Ravisher—further reveals how she treats herself
eventually as something intending to be read, like the letter that leaves the conﬁne of the authorial intent
and loses its self-referential power. It might also be noted that despite the fact that we as readers are siding
with Pamela more or less, we also hear Mr. B’s side of the story—although still ﬁ'om Pamela’s point of
view (the oppositional viewpoints in epistolary novels will eventually be developed in Richardson’s
Clarissa where it becomes even more polyphonic). For Mr. B, he clearly understands that Pamela is
operating in a similar rhetoric like his, and his comments on Pamela’s artiﬁciality, for example, add to the
complexity of how we understand the letter.

If one recalls, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto is not without its secret passages and textual
lacunae.

50

me thinks she might ﬁnd something else to do, or to that purpose. (26)
At ﬁrst sight, this déja-vu passage sort of becomes a comic relief for its sheer repetition.
But this is also a self-reﬂexive moment when Pamela comments on her own writing in
hindsight. It not only adds something to Letter X—“all the next day I was very sa ”—but
also displays Pamela’s awareness of her writing as a kind of construction. In the very
least, Pamela becomes her own reader. Moreover, one must also experience a sense of
disorientation for if indeed Mr. B sees Pamela write the long letter and makes the above
comment to Mrs. Jervis, is one to suppose that Mr. B’s comments would have been
recorded in the long letter as a testament to “writing to the moment”? If this is the case,
this self-reﬂexive moment no longer just serves as a comic relief; it tickles but it also
makes the reader uncomfortable.

From this perspective, Pamela’s enclosure of Mr. B’s marriage proposal provides
a curious case as to how Richardson’s rearrangement of their letters manifests an impulse
to open up its epistolary interior and to destabilize its own presence. Instead of arranging
two letters in the usual format or enclosing Mr. B’s letter within Pamela’s response,
Richardson chooses to serialize the two letters and put them side by side as if Mr. B and
Pamela are having a conversation right now. Richardson’s treatment of epistolary

correspondence is hardly new, since eighteenth century tends to see letter correspondence

51

as conversation.32 Yet what exceeds Richardson’s interior arrangement is the blank spaces
now occupy Mr. B’s enclosed letter. What they represent is open to discussion, but what
may interest us is the idea that the waste matters reside in the letter not only grow and
expand but also carve out an interior space that is difﬁcult to characterize. It thus pushes
the epistolary interior into several different directions: sometimes it is Mr. B’s letter that
is burdened by the blank space and sometimes it is Pamela’s response spills over to Mr.
B’s ultimatum. It also opens up several ways of reading them. While we might follow the
sequence of their correspondence from left to right, we can also read it from top to
bottom in order to read the “real letter.” Not only that, these are letters that are self-
divisive and multiplied at the same time: both Mr. B’s and Pamela’s letters beget more
letters, as each section becomes a new correspondence. The spatial traversing makes us
constantly aware of the rim, as we can actually see the edge of these letters. Richardson
seems to suggest that the epistolary interior can easily become an excessive space where
Pamela can temporarily enjoy an equal status; after all, she just encloses and fragments
Mr. B’s letter in such a way that throws the epistolary verisimilitude into questions.

Indeed, the correspondence ends when Pamela’s letter completely surrounds Mr. B’s

 

2 . . . . . .
For a dlscuSSlon on elghteenth-century eplstolary manuals and conversation, see Brant, 21-4 and 34-5.

52

letter, a symbolic gesture of Pamela’s textual ﬁ'eedom.33 In addition, these epistolary
interiors readily expose themselves to the margin as they always fold and unfold as they
go, just as Mr. B’s and Pamela’s letters suggest.

A similar situation occurs in Richardson’s Clarissa. After Clarissa’s rape by
Lovelace, she produces a series of letters which prompts Lovelace to comment that “the
original is too much an original to let it go out of my hands.”34 These letters are not just
letters: like the letter-note that Pamela produces, these letters are fragments dressed up as
letters. One can undoubtedly neglect them, as the editor of Clarissa does, and treats them
as “papers” (890-1).3s However, these are also “too much an original,” a kind of excess
that in Lovelace’s word becomes “extravagant” (889). Indeed, Lovelace’s subsequent
reactions prove to be ironic. On the one hand, these papers are dismissed by Lovelace for
their inscrutability. After all, they are fragmented and therefore can only be regarded as a
manifestation of Clarissa’s madness. As a result, despite the fact that the copy of the
fragmented papers will furnish Belford, Lovelace’s conﬁdant and correspondent, “with a

new weapon” against Lovelace, he nonetheless urges Belford to “spare [his] comments”

 

33 In this particular ending, Richardson again shows us how difﬁcult it is to even begin to talk about the

“end” of the epistolary interior. At the end of Pamela’s one-on-one epistolary fragments, Pamela continues
for another two lines that are not in response to Mr. B before her letter ﬁnally moves on to the regular
format.

34 All reference to Clarissa will be in parenthesis. Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, or the History of a Young
Lady, ed. Angus Ross (London: Penguin, 1985), 889.

These fragments are numbered from I to V (890-891).

53

since his own reﬂection will render Belford’s criticism “needless” (889). The letter-paper,
like Clarissa’s violated body and Pamela’s imprisoned self, cannot be treated seriously.
On the other hand, Clarissa’s fragmented papers do have an impact on Lovelace.
Immediately after Lovelace “skim[s] over these transcriptions,” he tells Belford that “her
memory, which serves her so well for these poetical ﬂights, is far from being impaired”
(894). In this sense, Clarissa’s epistolary interiority is also ironically at its most manifest
condition, either when it is fragmented or when it temporarily becomes non-letter so as to

blur its own epistemological status.

111
The dynamic between self-presence and metonymic proximity, between

masculinity and femininity, and between the original and the copy reveal to us a different
scene of the epistolary interior. Richardson’s epistolary arrangement is no longer just
about various ways of “dressing up;” it is also about how the epistolary interior is always
realized and measured through waste matters that constantly lurk behind. In fact, the
letter as a kind of ghostly presence does haunt the epistolary conﬁnes, especially in the
use of doubles. The afore-mentioned Letter XV, for examples, is in some sense a ghostly

letter for its duplicity and uncertainty. But the letter is ghostly in another sense, that they

54

often create a sense of the Uncanny similar to Roland Barthes’s “pleasure of the text”
where it—the uncanny—is no longer just a somatic and bodily pleasure caused by the
textual bliss; it is now a revelation which lays bare of its own insigniﬁcance.36 In this
sense, the ghostly letters in Pamela work to undo the epistolary ﬂow and order; they are
the mirror image of the letter proper yet always remain wasteful for their silence in the
text.

Again, Pamela’s prison letters present a curious case. In a letter titled “Friday,
Saturday” (supposedly the ninth and tenth day of her imprisonment), Pamela produces a
lengthy diary entry recounting a series of correspondence with Mr. B and Mr. \Vllliams.
As these letters by Mr. B and Mr. Williams could very much become one of the letter
entries, they become “enclosed” letters, waiting to be sent out by Pamela. Their existence
in Pamela’s letters literally becomes a kind haunting, trapped within letters and kept
lingering in the epistolary world of Pamela due to the recycling of their “face values”—
they are often taken as face value, as a signiﬁer of a prior appointment or a prior diary
entry. Not only does this constant recycling of the enclosed letters in Pamela remind us of

their status as wastes but the loss of their contexts and functions—their waywardness and

 

36 In The Pleasure of the Text, Barthes suggests that the pleasure that the text provides yields the contrary
result; instead, it “suspends” its “signiﬁed value.” Indeed, since the signiﬁer is always “extravagance,” it
produces no value at all: “value shifted to the sumptuous rank of the signiﬁer” and therefore loses its
referential capacity. In the context of the ghostly letters, they resist any measurement for their sheer
excessiveness. Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, 65.

55

their mis-directions——mﬂects the epistolary condition of the novel, that the letters in
Pamela are too in search of a destination, be it the epistlers, Mr. B, or the readers. Ian
Watt’s curious comment that “in Pamela there was only one main correspondence—that
of the heroine and her parents” shows us how even the enclosed letters from Mr. B can be
misleading or faulty since we have no guarantee as to the authenticity of the letters (208).
For him, “there was no direct presentation of Mr. B’s point of view, and our picture of
Pamela was completely one-sided.” That Mr. B’s letters are constantly mediated and
taken out of context should not be regarded as a mere coincidence. These enclosed letters
reveal in them what should have been kept repressed, i.e. the letters that should never be
appearing in the epistolary novel.

That the uncanniness of the letter, i.e. the doubled letter that should have been
repressed yet is nonetheless revealed, becomes a ﬁgure of waste should not come as a
surprise. After all, we are never sure of the authenticity of the letter since it is Pamela
who collects and interpolates them into her own diary entries. Yet, these enclosed letters
are wasted in another sense, since their simultaneous attaching and detaching from the
epistolary order resemble that of Julia Kristeva’s process of abjection, where the

boundary between object and subject becomes blurred.37 Here, Pamela’s enclosure of

 

37 . . . .
Julla Knsteva, Powers of Horror: A n Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon Roudlez. (New York: Columbla

56

these letters problematizes their status as letter, and like abject, they represent the waste
that should be cut out yet intimately associated with the making of Pamela’s letters.
Indeed, the whole episode on the ninth and tenth day of Pamela’s imprisonment has
orchestrated this highly complex process of abjection, the simultaneous alienating from
and bonding with these enclosed letters. The ﬁrst enclosed letter, for example, is
originally an enclosed letter from Mr. B to Mrs. Jewkes. Although the double enclosure
of Mr. B’s letter indicates the difﬁculty of communication as well as the confusion about
the authenticity of the letters that is to come, we have no problem reading Mr. B’s letter
as it is. Pamela’s replying letter, however, presents a peculiar counterpart. For a moment,
we are told that she has sent this letter to Mr. B as if she is reading the letter along side
with the addressee, yet her reaction takes a different tum: she has “taken a Copy of this,”
then “folded it up,” and has Mrs. Jewkes “convey” it (139-40). Obviously, the one that
we are reading as a “real” letter is no more than a copy, since the “r ” one has already
been sent to Mr. B. To add to the complexity of the matter, the copy that we are reading at
the moment is only, as Pamela suggests, written “as follows” (138). The copy becomes a
sort of ghostly double and in a weird way, our participation in the reading of the letter

helps to bring out its presence. In a sense, we are involved in the meaning-making

 

University Press, 1982).

57

process of the novel through these ghostly presences.

We can see Pamela’s ﬁnther exploitation of the original/copy tension. Earlier in

the letter when Pamela recovers Mr. Williams’s letter, she has “intimated” to him Mr. B’s

letter and has sent out a secret letter. Yet, we have never seen this letter since Pamela has

“not time to take a Copy of this Letter” because she was “so watched” (136). A few pages

later, as one again reads through two enclosed letters from Mr. B, responding to Mr.

William and Mrs. Jewkes, Pamela states that

“I had hardly time to transcribe these Letters, tho’ writing so much, I write pretty

fast, before they both came up again in high Spirits” (147).

Pamela smoothly weaves the two enclosed letters into her narrative as if we are reading

along side Pamela. Yet, it is only afterwards that we ﬁnd out that these enclosed letters

are only partial letters “transcribed” by her. These can be seen as mockeries to the

authentic letters supposedly enclosed in Pamela’s, yet Richardson treats them as if they

are the originals. In a sense, they reﬂect Richardson’s ambivalence toward the epistolary

waste that keeps haunting the verisimilitude of his epistolary interior.

A week later, a similar line of events occurs when Mr. William sends a letter to

Mrs. Jewkes. Pamela treats the letter as if it is part of her enclosed letter, only to

contradict herself by claiming that Mrs. Jewkes reads the letter to her (150-1). These are

58

only summaries of the letters instead of the real ones, yet the letters’ material forms in
Pamela’s letter make them look as if they are the original ones. In other words, despite
Richardson’s effort to bring out the genuine quality of the letter, much like what he does
in the Preface, it continues to elude him, hiding behind the epistolary waste that he cannot
do without. In a weird way, these letters continue to show their physical existence yet
remain to be invisible. In a similar fashion, we are kept from realizing that the letters sent
by Mr. Williams are actually intercepted by Mr. B and we only know these secrecies after
Mr. B reveals his undertakings. The letters that we are reading at the moment are
artiﬁcially weaved into the narrative or again transcribed by Pamela as copies into her
letters. Despite the claim for truthfulness and authenticity in epistolary novels, what we
have instead are the copies or simulacra: they are the kind of Derridean Différance that
disguises as sameness.38 They are those that should be repressed—unproductive wastes—
yet are nonetheless revealed.

If Derrida’s Différance reveals to us our inability to tell the difference within
difference, then Richardson’s letters in Pamela give us a taste of how this excess can be
seen through the material wastes embedded within the textual mimesis of Pamela’s letters.

This seeing-as-not-seeing tells us the paradox of materiality in the eighteenth century: on

 

38 . . . . . . . ,, .
For Demda, “dlfferance IS recognized as the obliterated orlgln of absence and presence. Demda, 143.

59

the one hand, the Lockean empiricism and Burkean universalism maintain a
comprehensible body of knowledge through human senses; on the other hand, the letter
as a physical presence of the heart may never be ﬁxed and located. In fact, it has taken on
a life of its own, lurking behind epistolary scenes. Indeed, it may be observed that Mr. B’s
continuous demand to read Pamela’s letter right before or after the marriage, and his
continuous production of letters for Pamela ironically locate themselves in the letter and
thus put more weight on the epistolary practice than their actions. As Pamela puts it, “tho’
I don’t remember all I wrote, yet I know I wrote my heart” (230). Yet, even those letters
are fruitless in mapping out Pamela’s interior, because they are always mediated in some
ways, and twice removed from their origin and destination. Right before Pamela’s
reconciliation with Mr. B, she loses her second parcel to Mrs. Jewkes, and is forced to
recount to her parents in another letter “to the best of Remembrance, the Contents of the
Papers” (227). While we have read these letters already, Pamela forces us to re-read them
again. In a sense, those letters are cast upon a new light: miraculously recovered later but
used as the origin of Pamela’s heart, they are nonetheless mis-directed to Mr. Williams,
stolen by Mrs. J ewkes, and eventually rewritten by Pamela. Pamela’s recounting of these
letters, it seems to me, presents another version of Pamela’s heart, since now we are

reading along side with Mr. B, who comes in to read them after Pamela’s recounting

6O

passages. These letters no doubt have lost their power of reference—or simply become
too excessive—to the extent of being unproductive. But if anything, Richardson seems to
be content with just that since these wastes have become so prevalent in the novel that
one cannot help but to suspect that Richardson employ these ﬁgures of waste in letters
with a purpose of his own; there is a politics of excess that seems to emerge out of the
well-structured world of his epistolary interior that is so often regarded as the paradigm
of novels and letters alike. While we continue to enjoy the genuineness of Pamela’s
letters, it is the epistolary waste that provides the intriguing correspondence that perhaps

fuels the debates over Pamela’s supposed innocence over the years.

IV
There are other kinds of wastes in the novel: that the characters in Pamela are
interested more in being written and read about shows us how these “characters” are no
more than empty vehicles waiting to ﬁlled in with romances, fables, and letters. Lady
Davers, for example, wants to be read as texts. After their reconciliation, she demands
that Pamela continue to write and send to her, and that she would personally come visit
her to be her “guest,” indicating that she would prefer to be seen as a character as well

(498). The editor, another wasteful ﬁgure for his marginal presence, often exceeds his

61

own role and becomes the irnposer of meaning. That he can traverse in and out of the
epistolary interior makes him elusive, much like the ghostly letters that lay bare the
tension between self-presence and its excess.39 The interior of Pamela, in this sense,
literally becomes a wasteland, where letters offer safe passages as much as impasses.
What this eventually suggests is that despite the kind of formal qualities that are required
' of the epistolary novels, Richardson, it seems to me, replaces the formal letters with a
politics of wastes. Indeed, with the Enlightenment demand for order and progression, still,
there is another kind of Enlightenment going on, a darker one perhaps, that is constituted
of wasteful and excessive ﬁgures, as Pamela attests. This oxymoronic situation, that is,
upholding a narrative order while disrupting it, does not necessarily suggest that
Richardson heralds the kind of Shandean narrative or rejects the Augustan social value.
Yet, it does suggest there is a burgeoning awareness of the wasteful and excessive ﬁgures
whose ghostly presences might not be so detested, after all.

Richardson’s conscious manipulation of the print types that exceeds the formal

qualities of the letters, his fascination with the marginal spaces in his epistolary novel, his

 

39 . . . . . .
The two Instances where the edltor mtrudes the eplstolary ﬂow seem rather surpnsrng. The ﬁrst one

occurs when the editor comes in to explain the situation with Mr. B and the fact that Mr. B has already read
Pamela’s letters to her parents (92). The second one is even odder since to end the story, the editor uses a
lame excuse of the reunion between Pamela and her parents, where in fact we know for sure, as in the case
with Lady Davers and Mr. B, that Pamela will continue to write. Instead, the story goes on, and becomes
the editor’s reﬂection on Pamela story’s ramiﬁcation (498-503).

62

persistent pursuit of a dialectic of subject and object, letter proper and note, copy and
non-copy, original and sham, all indicate that Richardson’s participation in formal realism
might take him to a different turn. Indeed, his textual aposiopesis——lost letters,
transcription of letters, enclosed letters, notes, things that we regard as epistolary
wastes—often creates excessive spaces that impede our interpretation and thus requires
us to temporarily abandon our judgment. What is there? What is it that we are actually
reading? What is beyond the epistolary conﬁnes? All these throw us into an uncertain
state about materiality, forms, spaces, and eventually subjectivity in the eighteenth
century. Cynthia Wall’s recent comment on the Pamela’s fantastic descriptions of the
things around her points out new ways of describing, categorizing, inventing materiality
and spaces in the eighteenth century.40 For her, “all these things rise around Pamela and
become visible as she moves through them, vanishing again once she’s gone?“ Spaces
“tend to form around her” and the “implied spaces” are always present.42 Like the
epistolary interior that Richardson creates, here Wall indicates that fantastic tumarounds
in Pamela, be they objects or rooms, can be created uncannily at will. Similarly, Terry

Castle’s notion on the “spectralization of the Other” in the eighteenth century also

 

40 Cynthia Wall, The Prose of Things: Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2006).

4' Wall, 140.
42 Wall, 141-2.

63

suggests that with the prevalence of the Enlightenment, there is also a feeling of
uncertainty when it comes to empirical perceptions: “everything merges—inside and
outside, cause and effect, mind and the universe—in a vertiginous sense of ‘cosmic
fusion.”’43 Richardson’s epistolary wastes, in this sense, are no mere idiosyncratic
arrangement of letter’s formal qualities but are evidence of a larger cultural suspicion
toward material functionalities. Finally, by studying Pamela’s epistolary wastes, we will
be able to see a clearer picture of the literary trajectory toward Literature of
Sentimentalism and Gothic novels in the second half of the eighteenth century, which,
coincidentally, are also interested in the human psyche, the loss of origin, and the ghostly

presence.

 

43 Castle, The Female Thermometer, 127.

“Et Cetera”: Indeterminacy of Parodic Letters in Shamela

In order for me to talk about Henry Fielding’s particular treatment of his parodic
work, Shamela, I begin with a detour to an appendix entry concerning “personal identity”
in David Hume’s 1739 A Treatise of Human Nature.1 In a series of inquiries about what
forms the self and its material relationship to substance, Hume stumbles into a “labyrinth”
that he confesses he does not know “how to render [it] consistent” (633). He ﬁnds ﬁrst
that when reﬂecting upon himself, he can “never perceive this self without some one or
more perceptions” nor can he “ever perceive anything but the perceptions” (634). The
thinking self depends on its perceptions to see itself; yet it is also the perceptions that
constitute the self. This self-reﬂexive moment, one that ﬁnds itself as it defaces it,
establishes the recursive structure which breaks away from the Cartesian “I think
therefore I am.”2 For Hume, while one relies on human perceptions to shape the material

reality, human perceptions alone render oneself both the thinking subject and the

 

' All reference to A Treatise of Human Nature will be in parenthesis. David Hume, A Treatise of Human
Nature, edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978).

Hume acknowledges the contingency of Descartes’ position by claiming “many philosophers seem
inclin’d to think, that personal identity arises from consciousness; and consciousness is nothing but a
reﬂected thought or perception” (635). Yet he constantly admits his lack of answer to the question of self
and substance.

65

empirical object. The thinking subject no longer guarantees the connection between what
one perceives and what is out there. In other words, if the subject’s perceptions have no
empirical basis (“consciousness” is perception, as Hume claims), how can one be sure of
the material distinctions of the world? Conversely, if the self is only equivalent to an
empirical object, how is it different from its own extensions?
Hume, of course, ends up acknowledging his own limit:
In short, there are two principles, which I cannot render consistent; nor is it in
my power to renounce either of them, viz. that all our distinct perceptions are
distinct existences, and that the mind never perceives any real connexion
among distinct existences. . .. For my part, I must plead the privilege of a sceptic,
and confess, that this difficulty is too hard for my understanding (636).
Hume’s departure from empirical science may be temporary and contingent, as he admits
that there are always two “doctrines,” one of the “philosophers” and one of the “vulgar”
(634).3 Yet, his anxiety about the extent of human perceptions and the distinct properties
of existence seems rather alarming in the context of eighteenth-century empiricism: if

one’s perceptions of the physical world dictate the existence of self-identity, Hume then

 

3 Although of a slightly different theme, Hume suggests that the doctrine of the philosophers sees
perceptions as universal, whereas the doctrine of the vulgar sees each perception as distinct and unique. For
him, “there is no contradiction, therefore, in extending the same doctrine to all the perceptions” (634).

66

involuntarily comes to the conclusion that such conﬁdence might be crippled by the
indeterminacy of the empirical world. Human perceptions might not be able to ﬁnd their
counterparts in reality, and subsequently the self in the physicality of the body.4 If this is
the case, the empirical sense of the world will, it seems to me, always ﬂuctuate between
the self and its perceptions of the world and what may seem ostensible may very well be
muddy and layered.

My own interest in the dynamic between Shamela and Pamela derives from this
eighteenth-century cultural concem—this ontological crisis of the “self and
substance”——that becomes part of the foundation for Hume’s skepticism. Shamela
certainly is not the physical counterpart of Pamela, nor is Shamela by any means
mistaken for Pamela. For the most part, Shamela is merely the parody of Pamela. But
what is worth exploring here is the fact that both Richardson and Fielding worry about
the question of the author and thus the blurred distinction the book and the author.

This ﬂuctuation from subject to object, from fraud to original, or from book to

author, et cetera, is the backbone of the current chapter on F ielding’s parodic Shamela

 

4 Please see the 2007 fall special issue of The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation for a
thorough discussion of the ways empiricism shapes and is shaped by eighteenth-century narratives:
“eighteenth-century narrative and ﬁgural modes are equally invested in activating and resolving the crises
of perception precipitated by the period's empiricist turn. At the same time that empiricism inaugurates such
crises of perception, it insistently pursues new modalities of substance.” Helen Thompson and Natania
Meeker, “Empiricism, Substance, Narrative: An Introduction - The Eighteenth Century 48:3” The
Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 48.3 (2007), I86.

67

following the publication of Richardson’s Pamela. While Fielding is busy poking flm at
Richardson’s seriousness and naiveté in Pamela, he is also aware of the obvious status of
his Shamela as a fraud, as a copy, and as a parody, which at the same time aims to be a
“true writing”. After all, Shamela exposes the weakness of Pamela for who Pamela is
from F ielding’s perspective, despite the fact that Shamela does so in her own expense. In
other words, Shamela’s usurpation of Pamela also depends on her ability to cover up her
own identity, and as a result, turning herself into a ﬂuctuating signiﬁer.

More importantly, Fielding’s choice of epistolary genre complicates his satiric
purpose since to write in letters in some sense already implies looking at oneself (the
letter) from the outside. Such a position naturally puts one in a self-conscious or even
ironic position.5 In a weird way, the combination of a parody and an epistolary
novella—both imitate and the alienate at the same time——no longer serves as F ielding’s
frivolous literary creation; its indeterminacy, both in the sense of the content and the form,
best exempliﬁes F ielding’s effort to improve the epistolary genre in Shamela based on

Richardson’s project of excess as shown in the previous chapter.

 

5 In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, J tirgen Habermas suggests that writing letters not
only provide self-observation but also an interaction with the “other I.” For him, “the diary became a letter
addressed to the sender, and the ﬁrst-person narrative became a conversation with one’s self addressed to
another person.” J Ilrgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Thomas Burger,
Trans. (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1991), 49.

68

In the following sections, I try to suggest that while Fielding uses Shamela to show
his understanding of the limits of Richardson’s epistolary paradigm, he unwittingly
stumbles into the “labyrinth” set up by the mixtures of genres and the indeterminacy of
self and substance. Indeed, if as I try to suggest in the ﬁrst chapter, epistolary novels
utilize ﬁgures of waste and tend to present an ironic version of the heart, then Fielding’s
epistolary parody is doubly excessive. This can be further seen in one of the central
cruxes in Shamela—Shamela and Mr. Booby’s marriage banquet—in which Shamela
uses “et cetera” to refer to a certain tabooed knowledge for and about women. Indeed, as
Judith Hawley and Thomas Keymer both suggest, “Etc.” has “the same slang
meaning—‘vagina’—as fanny” at the time.6 This certainly reminds us of Derrida’s
notion of “invagination” which indicates textual folds that traverse textual boundaries.7
What is it about “et cetera” that makes it dangerous and transgressive? And why is
Shamela unable to name it? If we tentatively see “et cetera” as a textual aposiopesis
(from OED), we realize that Shamela’s inability points to her own limitation as a pure

replica of or as a totally different Pamela. She becomes the “et cetera” itself, a vacillating

 

6 Judith Hawley, Ed. Joseph Andrews and Shamela, (London: Penguin, 1999), 336, 339. Thomas Keymer
and Peter Sabor, Eds. The Pamela Controversy: Criticisms and Adaptations of Samuel Richardson Is Pamela,
Volume 1, (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2001), Iii.

Jacques Derrida’s “The Law of Genre,” edited by Martin McQuillan. The Narrative Reader, (New York:
Routledge, 2000), 222-5.

69

signiﬁer that is waiting to be named. After all, “etc” is a ﬁgure of enumeration, of a list
that is open-ended and thus excessive. At the same time, she is also an excess—“the
rest”——that needs to be contained and to be re-categorized. Through highlighting “et
cetera,” Shamela expatiates a larger story of excess’s outlandish styles in the parodic
form, its subversion and unsettling effects that blur the boundaries of empirical categories,

such as that of the author and book.

11

How does one read Shamela against Pamela? Is Henry Fielding’s 1741 novel simply
a parody of the latter? What and how does Shamela, in excess of Pamela, tell us
something about the epistolary excess in Pamela? In this chapter, I want to read Shamela
not simply as a parody of Pamela, but as a text that participates in sorting out questions
of epistolary excess in the eighteenth century.

Literary critics have long ﬁxated on their intertwined history, and it is difﬁcult not to
treat them as a pair. Eric Rothstein’s pioneering study of Shamela’s framework in 1968,
for example, sees Shamela as both “realistic and preposterous, the one as a corrective to

Pamela and the other as an exaggeration of Pamela.”8 Fielding’s deliberate use of the

 

8 Eric Rothstein, “The Framework of Shamela.” ELH, Vol. 35, No. 3 (Sep., 1968), 401.

70

framework then directs one’s attention to Fielding’s mastery of the burlesque as well as
his contention of the letterforrn. Similarly, Hugh Amory suggests that one can read
Shamela as an Aesopic satire against Pamela; indeed, the somewhat inaccurate picture of
the characters in Pamela serves only to intensify its satiric effect.9 More recently,
Richard Gooding charts out the history of the two camps after the inception of Pamela,
Shamela being on the anti-Pamela side. 10 More importantly, he suggests that Fielding’s
treatment of Pamela is turique not just because of the parody of the letters, but also
because of “he exploits Pamela’s psychological complexity instead simply suppressing it;”
hence a surprisingly more motivated and multidimensional Shamela.ll Yet, despite their
striking differences, Pamela and Shamela reveal an uncanny similarity in terms of their
involvement in the larger issue of epistolary polernics in the eighteenth century. By
treating them as equal instead of hierarchical, one may then suggest that the reversal of
the role—the host and the parasite—reveals not only the theme of excess in which the
boundary of the text can be easily crossed and traversed but also the epistemological

inability to sustain the valid presence of the original.12 Each becomes the letters that

 

9 Hugh Amory, “Shamela as Aesopic Satire.” ELH, Vol. 38, No. 2 (Jun., 1971), 252-3.

0 Richard Gooding, “Pamela, Shamela, and the Politics of the Pamela Vogue.” Eighteenth-Century
Fiction 7, no. 2 (January 1995), 126.

” Gooding, 126.
The editor obviously treats Shamela as his own “book.” The same thing goes with Parson Oliver, who
claims that he has also written this book. Pamela, although is not a ﬁctional fabrication as the editor

71

should and could have been written but are nevertheless left out of the epistolary traffic.
Such is the condition of letters, since letters always await their supplements or
counterparts, i.e. their correspondence, in order to complete themselves and eventually
“know” themselves. If Shamela somehow reveals Pamela’s “true” self, it is because
Pamela already leaves some room for a sinister reading and interpretation. After all, with
all the intentions of exposing the higher-class world of Mr. B, Richardson also does so
through an out-of-her-place Pamela, who is just a servant girl. And while Pamela’s letters
“seem” to give us “intimate access to the ebb and ﬂow of consciousness”, they also
present some dubious moments: Pamela, for example, constantly shows her forced
kissing scenes in her letters, though such actions tend to be toned down in the novel. '3 In
the ﬁrst letter, she mentions that when Mr. B catches her using her late lady’s drossing
room, she has to hide her letter in her bosom. When he snatches the letter out of her
bosom, Pamela simply uses the verb “take,” which of course leaves one to wonder why
Pamela does not feel indignant, even violated by this affront to her virtue. Her comment

at the end of the letter seems even more suspicious: “to be sure I did nothing but curchee

 

suggests, constantly endures the editorial intrusion and interpolation. Indeed, the title page of Shamela
suggests that Pamela is a “Book.”

I Keymer, xiv. Thomas Keymer suggests that Richardson’s “writing to the moment” has two associated
qualities: “not just its capacity to register the ﬂux of consciousness over time, but more particularly its
dramatic synchronizations of narration and crisis, which focus above all on the immediate psychological
impact of ‘moments’ in the sense of tuming-points or critical junctures” (xiv).

72

and cry, and was all in Confusion, at his Goodness. Indeed, he is the best of Gentlemen, I
think!” (13).'4 Pamela makes it seem as if she wants to cover something up. Yet, even
her parents know exactly what is missing in the following letter: “But what avails all this,
if you are to be ruin’d and undone!” Her father continues to show his worry over Pamela
by wishing “the good ’Squire has no Design” (I 3).

In another incident during her Lincolnshire imprisonment, Pamela clearly
understands the limits of her epistolary transparency. After she rejects Mr. B’s proposal
for marriage, she recounts having a long walk with him:

My Master just now sent for me down to take a Walk with him in the garden.
But I like him not at all, nor his Ways. For he would have all the way his Arm
about my Waist. . .. After walking about, he led me into a little Alcove. . .and
really made me afraid of myself. For he began to be very teasing, and made me
‘ sit on his knee, and was so often kissing me, that I said, Sir, I don’t like to be
here at all, I assure you. (208)
The episode also features her own reasoning as to why Mr. B always “professed Honor at
all the Time with his Mouth, while hislActions did not correspond” (209). While the tone

sounds calm enough, she is at the same time describing Mr. B’s notorious behaviors as if

 

'4 All reference to Pamela will be in parenthesis. Samuel Richardson, Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded.
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

73

she is just watching the whole episode from the outside—“I know not how far he would
have proceeded: For I was forc’d to fall down upon my Knees” (209). Yet, as one may
remember, this letter comes after the Mr. B’s ultimatum to make her his mistress: Why
does not she take a ﬁrmer stand against Mr. B? At least, she always has her pens, her inks,
and her letters as a measure against Mr. B’s brutality. She has, after all, just assaulted Mr.
B in her response letter with reason, virtue, and forcefulness, and even as a symbolic
gesture, has fragmented his proposal letter (please see Figure l in Chapter 1). In a similar
situation, she describes Mr. B’s kiss nonchalantly as if this is just another passing
conversation (233). The readers keep wondering why she is not furious at Mr. B’s
obvious encroachment at all. The more Pamela alienates or distances herself from the
sexual undertone of her plight in order to keep her virtue, the more she invites scandalous
innuendo.

Fielding is quick to pick up the implication and emphasizes Pamela’s artfulness
through Shamela.15 Such imitation of Pamela, both as a book and the eponymous
heroine, can be seen everywhere in his Shamela. Fielding starts out in the title page of
Shamela emphasizing the fact that Pamela is a “Book” that has “many notorious

FALSEHOODS and MISREPRESENTATIONS, whereas Shamela is “the exact Copies

 

‘5 In The Pamela Controversy, Volume 1, Thomas Keymer lists several reasons why Pamela becomes so
easily the target of its parodies.

74

of authentic Papers delivered to the Editor.”16 The need to establish Shamela as the
authentic yet totally different other is imperative right from the beginning, but at the same
time, the difference has to be “true” enough in order to evoke the memory of Pamela. In
other words, Shamela has to be false and misrepresented; it has to reveal Pamela’s secret
as a book; and it has to reveal Shamela as a “sham” of Pamela. Yet, if Shamela somehow
reveals theme of the unreliability of copies, how does Fielding acknowledge its own
unreliability? If Shamela is false, how can one be sure Shamela is not also cunning about
her “falsehoods,” just as Fielding claims? The ambivalence of this economy of the
imitator and the imitated does not seem to bother Fielding. In fact, Fielding continues to
operate on both, exactly the kind of attitude that Hume adopts when it comes to the
lingering uncertainty of the ideal and the empirical.

It would be easy to ﬁnd evidence in Shamela that later fuels the controversy over
Pamela Shamela, to begin with, always speaks of “vartue” when she intends to refer to
“virtue”. When she ﬁnally makes sure that Mr. Booby would fall for her, she pretends
that she values her “vartue” in front of Mrs. J ewkes. Then they continue to discuss her
“vartue” which precedes her secret meeting with Parson Williams later. Vartue here

constitutes the ironic version of virtue, a “var”cical version of virtue if you will.

 

16 All reference to Shamela will be in parenthesis. Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrew s and Shamela,
(London: Penguin, 1999), 23.

75

Characters in Shamela also turn topsy-turvy. Mrs. Jervis, who is supposed to be the
benevolent character in Pamela, turns out to be playing a part in ensnaring Squire Booby.
Mrs. Jervis’s Letter VII tells the reader ﬁrsthand how she helps Shamela pretend to be
“Miss Sham” (19). The same thing can be said of Parson William, who is revealed very
early on to have been a hypocrite and already had an affair with Shamela. Mrs. Jewkes,
the one who serves as the pawn of Mr. B in Pamela, has a totally different demeanor in
Shamela: while she tortures and keeps Pamela always in check, she becomes a comical
ﬁgure in F ielding’s novel. Mark for example the reversal of role in Letter IX when Mrs.
J ewkes calls her a “mynx”:

Mynx! No more Mynx than yourself, says I; with that she hit me a Slap on the

Shoulder; and I ﬂew at her and scratched her Face, i’cod, ‘till she went crying

out of the Room. (24)
A similar change of fate can be seen in Squire Booby. Even the loyal Jervis is given a
ﬁrst name “Lucretia” that reminds us of the virtuous Lucretia in Pamela while all along

Shamela conﬁdes in Jervis every schemes she has to ensnare Squire Booby.

III

Fielding’s parody of Pamela is shown on another level. If the characters in Shamela

76

 

are to be discredited in order for the parody to work, then the two parsons in the frame
letters are to be seen as the anchors of the parody. In other words, they are to be taken
seriously in order for the parody to be effective. After all, they have to give us the inside
information as to how the book is gathered and how the Shamela letters are to be read. As
one of the two outside narrators, Parson Tickletext tells Parson Oliver that Pamela is a
“book” that inﬂames the ranks of the clergy (9). Already there is an indication that he
sees Pamela for its public didactic ﬁmction as a book, not as a servant maid’s collection
of private letters. This is no longer the ordinary collection of letters that are edited only
by chance in Richardson’s case. In Tickletext’s view, this is clearly written for a purpose.
Half parodying Pamela, he asks himself,
But, now I think of it, who is the Author, where is be, what is he, that hath
hitherto been able to hide such an encircling, all-mastering Spirit, “he possesses
every Quality that Art could have charm’d by: yet hath lent it to and concealed
it in Nature. The Comprehensiveness of his Imagination must be truly
prodigious! It has stretched out this diminutive mere Grain of Mustard seed (a
poor Girl’s little, etc.) into a Resemblance of that Heaven, which the best of
good Books has compared it to (10).

Tickletext is not sure of the author, nor is he treating the text as private letters to be

77

 

collected and published. Yet, he does suggest that the book has a root in Nature, that the

book somehow captures the essence of Pamela. Tickletext seems to suggest that the book

can always ﬁnd its counterpart in Nature. That there is a distinct connection between

Pamela the real person and Pamela is furthered when Tickletext marvels at the effect of

Pamela: “I ﬁnd I am like to do nothing else, for I know not how long yet to come:

because if I lay the Book down it comes aﬁer me” (9). And not just the physical presence

 

of a moving object, as Tickletext confesses to Oliver, “methinks I see Pamela at this ll
Instant” (10). Similarly, Tickletext suggests that “happy would it be for Mankind, if all
other Books were burnt, that we might do nothing but read thee all Day, and dream of
thee all Night” (Emphasis mine; 10). It is no longer the book that some author writes into
being;'it is now Pamela herself. Both quotations indicate that the author somehow
presents a true Pamela, who is able to transcend the material book. The Parson’s assertion
that the book has a life of its own becomes an ironic version of Hume’s skepticism, that
there is, after all, a counter part in the reality.

One can start to sense that even with Tickletext’s strong convictions, multiple
Pamela begin to proliferate, since Pamela is at once the author, the book, and the physical
presence that somehow attaches to the name “Pamela”. Pamela becomes the ﬂuctuating

signiﬁer that is discussed earlier. Yet, Tickletext’s conﬁdence is soon to be shattered by

78

Parson Oliver’s ensuing letter. Upon receiving Tickletext’s letter of admiration, Oliver

claims to have the original letters and thus the knowledge of a fraud. He suggests to

Tickletext that Pamela, and therefore, the letters of Pamela, are not written by Pamela

herself: “for though we do not imagine her the Author of the Narrative itself, yet we must

suppose the Instructions were given by her, as well as the Reward, to the Composer” (12).

At the same time, we are reading Oliver’s version of the story—later he claims to have

possession of the Shamela letters—since the Shamela narratives could very well be made

up by Oliver: he, like the editor, has a say over what will be exhibited and what will be

left out. He is therefore comparable to the author of Pamela. Tickletext’s comic response

to Pamela’s effect and Oliver’s stern rejection of Pamela’s virtue therefore provide the

necessary fuels for the parody of Pamela.

The frame narratives come with a twist. While we are to read Parson Oliver’s letter

literally, it is not without its own irony and ambivalence. Already Oliver informs us that

he will send Tickletext “some Papers relating to this Matter, which will set Pamela and

some others in a very different Light, than that in which they appear in the printed book”

to solidify his claim (12). In fact, the rest of the letter seems persuasive enough as

evidence of Pamela’s transgression and cunning tricks. But Oliver seems to be caught up

in his own confusion about the author and the book as well. At the end of Oliver’s letter,

79

 

 

we realize that these are enclosed letters—the Shamela narratives—in his letter to Parson

Tickletext. The framed letters are created to make us believe the Tickletext and Oliver are

on the outside looking in, but in the actual textual arrangement, there is no clear-cut

division between Oliver’s letter and the beginning and end of the Shamela narratives. We

are, in fact, reading the whole Shamela story as letters within a letter. However, as I

suggested in the ﬁrst chapter, enclosed letters create temporal and spatial illusion as if

these letters are somehow miraculously recovered only to be read as part of the present

letters. They lose their referencing power since now they are out of their functions and

contexts, exactly the kind of unsettling effect that undoes the essence of things. While

Oliver assures us that these letters are “authentick,” he tells Tickletext earlier that he will

only send the real letters till later (1 3). Already there is ambivalence about the

authenticity of the enclosed letters: If the real letters are only on the way, what are the

letters we are reading at the moment? If we are to take Oliver’s words seriously, can we

be sure that the Shamela narrative and correspondence are written by Shamela and the

company? Both Oliver and Tickletext’s inability to discern and create boundaries of

things—between letters, between books and authors, between originals and copies—are

indicatives of their acceptance to the idea of excess—things in excess of themselves or

voided of their self-referential power—that we have been discussing so far.

80

Oliver continues to be present us with problematic, if not contradictory, accounts
about the author of the Shamela letters. He, for example, tells Tickletext that “the true
name of this Wench was SHAMELA, and not Pamela, as she stiles herself” (I 3). Indeed,
Shamela’s last letter conﬁrms that for the purpose of publishing the now-circulating
Pamela, Shamela’s “ﬁrst syllab[le] hath too comical a Sound, so it is to be changed into
Pamela” (40). Yet, in the second letters among the enclosed letters, Shamela also admits
that she was called “Pamela”-—“for so I am called here” (14). Here, Oliver’s ambiguous
statements are too many to be taken lightly. Eventually, we realize in the concluding
frame letter that he casually acknowledges that the whole Shamela narrative are
“transcribed” by himself “from the Originals, send down by her mother” (41). Even he
cannot be sure whether the book (or the heroine) he transcribed is called “Mrs. Shamela
or Pamela” (41). Oliver’s letter too like Shamela start to lose its credibility and readers
gradually come to realize that the Shamela narrative might not be the true account that
both Parson Oliver and Tickletext spend time debating in the beginning of
correspondence. While the reader might never engage in the kind of serious reading in
Shamela as in say Pamela, but these plays and explorations on what it means to write are
too many too ignore.

Oliver’s irony can also be seen from his conﬁdence in “handwriting.” Earlier on, we

81

 

learn from Oliver that upon receiving Tlckletext’s letter, he suspects its authenticity: “if I
had not known your Hand, 1 should from the sentiments and the stile of the Letter, have
imagined it to have come from the Author of the famous Apology” (l 1). In a sense, the
letter is believable not only because it is a letter by its own right but also because it bears
the handwriting of the addresser. For the same reason, the book of Pamela is not to be
trusted because it is not written and published by Pamela herself.17 Yet, the mistrust of
the printed book is to be seen in the Shamela story as well. Shamela herself admits that to
be painted by the author in a book is to “make black white” (40) so Shamela’s ﬂaws
would naturally be altered on purpose. Even at this moment, more ambivalence arises, for
as Shamela expatiates,
for to be sure I shan’t confess any of my secrets to them, and so I whispered
Parson Williams about that, who answered me, I need not give my self any
Trouble; for the Gentleman who writes Lives, never asked more than a few
Names of his Customers, and that he made all the rest out of his Head; you

mistake, Child, said he, if you apprehend any Truths are to be delivered (40-1).

 

'7 Fielding seems to show us there is a mistrust of print in the eighteenth century? Oliver claims that his
Shamela story will “set Pamela and some others in a very different Light, than that in which they appear in
the printed Book” (12). Coupled with the overall tone in the story, there seems to be a genuine mistrust in
print. Obviously, one of the reasons that Pamela enjoys such a tremendous success is due to Richardson
being a printer of his own works.

82

As it turns out, Shamela never reveals herself to the unknown author, so both Tickletext

and Oliver’s attacks on Shamela (or Pamela in that matter) seems unfounded. More

importantly, Shamela’s unwitting revelation, if we can take the face value of her words,

points out the obvious gap between the originals and the printed work as copies, for the

Shamela story is a copy written by someone else. Even Parson Tickletext becomes a

converted anti-Pamelist at the end of the story. In his postscript, he also claims, “since I

writ, I have a certain Account that Mr. Booby hath caught his Wife in bed with Williams;

hath turned her off, and is prosecuting him in the spiritual Court” (43). Which is of course

doubtful to the eyes of the readers, since if we are to believe both Parson Oliver and

Tickletext’s words, then we also face a paradoxical situation where we also have to

discredit their words in terms of the logic of the narrative: if Shamela is a true story, then

we know that Mr. Booby is not capable of catching his wife in bed with “Williams and

turning Shamela oﬂ' (it might be more believable that he should mistake Williams for his

wife).

Such a paradox also occurs when Parson Oliver reveals early on in his letter that the

Shamela story is “the History of Pamela I was acquainted with long before I received it

from you, from my Neighborhood to the Scene of Action” (11). Now we realize Oliver

not only has access to the letters but to the actual “scene of action” as well. Why then he

83

 

chooses to adhere to her mother’s letters remains to be further explored. But one thing is
for sure, that the Pamela story has many competing versions, be it Richardson’s
continuous revision of his Pamela, F ielding’s Shamela, the unknown author’s Pamela as
the frame letters seem to point out, Mrs. Henrietta Maria Honora Andrews’s collection of
letters, or Parson Oliver’s ﬁnal transcription of Shamela’s letters.l8 Here Parson Oliver
reveals his ﬁnal irony. If handwriting is the deciding factor of a work’s authenticity, then
his transcription of the Shamela narratives put him in an awkward position: bearing his
handwriting, are the Shamela narratives therefore worthy of one ’s attention? Is he, by
re-producing the Shamela narratives, then the author of the Shamela narratives? If so,
how is it different from Richardson’s editorial treatments of Pamela? Where are we to
ﬁnd Shamela’s own handwritings and her own stories?

All these questions, it seems to me, recount the eighteenth century concerns
surrounding the blurred relationship between the author and the book, authenticity and
the representation. That there is an attempt to replace the original text or an understanding
of the irnprobability of attaining something original—in the Shamela story and its frame
letters—together seek to tell the eighteenth-century story of excess of printed texts—both

as a metaphor of excessive number or as a metaphor of its affective potentials. They each

 

I8 . . .
One mlght even look lnto the questlons of how Shamela’s mother has access to those letters that are not

addressing her.

84

strive to claim the legitimacy of the original; yet none seems to have the ﬁnal say of the
matter. Even Richardson’s “original” Pamela is belittled to the extent of gradually losing
its credibility, not just because of F ielding’s parodic attack, but because of Pamela’s
edited nature—just as Shamela’s letters are produced by the unknown parson. If such is
the condition of the author and book, then in a sense, Pamela already is Shamela, since
both undergo a series of transformation and artiﬁcial transcription as well.'9 If Pamela
already is an instructed work, then readers do not need Shamela to uncover the secrets,
that is, Shamela already is a shadowy/shadowed Pamela. The framed letters in Shamela
seem to suggest that the original already contains in itself its own copy (in other words,
already things have no ﬁxed identity), and vice versa, as the Pamela and Shamela
controversy attest to. For Fielding, to enter the world of parody is to enter a vertiginous
zone, where the copy is to become the original, the book to have a life of its own, and the
authors to be too many to be named. In a sense, there is no longer the need for Shamela to
be in order for us to read Pamela as a fake. Furthermore, we might observe one constant
in the Shamela ﬁasco: that there is never just one single text when we read, as the original
tends to beget more texts, letters beget more letters, and ﬁnally the content begets frame

apologies. The text is always in a constant state of excess.

 

19 Enclosure of letters and the ﬁgures of waste in Pamela can be seen as a kind of transformation of the
self and artiﬁcial transcription.

85

 

IV
If we put F ielding’s parody in a larger historical context in the eighteenth century,
we realize that it is no accident that Fielding deliberately uses the parody form as a way
of divulging his idea of the indeterminacy of Shamela and Pamela, both as a book and an

author, copy and original. Roger Lund has suggested that Fielding’s use of burlesque and

 

parody has an experimental dimension that aims to take over the original. In other words,

 

however lowly or laughable Fielding’s parody may seem, it tries to cement its own status
as something new.20 But this awareness of what counts as original and fraud—if the aim
of parody is to replace the original and thus prioritize itself—also questions their
limitations. In reading Robert Phidden’s deconstructive approach to parody, Simon
Dentith suggests that “parody emerges as a formal practice in which the densely allusive
intertextual nature of all writing is made especially transparent, so that its ‘authorship’
becomes problematic?” Parody therefore possesses a “rare and disarming honesty in its

gestures towards multiplicity and plurality — a ‘celebration’ . . .of all that resist[s]

 

20 Roger Lund, “Augustan Burlesque and the Genesis of Joseph Andrews.” Studies in Philology, Volume
103, Number 1, Winter 2006, 88-119.

Simon Dentith, Paroay, (New York: Routledge, 2000), 15. Robert Phidden, Swift is Parody, (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995), 13-4, 203.

86

stabilization or conﬁnement.”22 As I have been trying to show, parody as a project of
excess in the eighteenth century tends to orient toward an open approach when it comes
to the question of author and authenticity. But before we go on to the content of Shamela,
we can linger on another text for a while, and trace this literary disposition in Jonathan
Swift’s extensive use of parody to see that to parody is not only to ridicule the intended
original; its another function lies in the laughter of oneself as an imposter, since such
laughter is an indicator of one’s awareness of the limitation as an author.23 For Mack,
Parodies, after all, are the textual products of a myriad of sophisticated literary
processes that seek not to obscure but rather to highlight—and, not infrequently,
ostentatiously to ﬂaunt—their status as in some way marked or derivative. The
originality of any given parody. . .would appear paradoxically to lie precisely in the
simple fact of its unoriginality.24
F urtherrnore, the “preliminaries” that parodied the content continues to tell the same story
of excess: if the text is void of an author, then it is also self-multiplied in the form of its

growing ﬁ'ames.

 

2
2 Robert Mack, The Genius of Parody: Imitation and Originality in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century
English Literature, (New Work: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), 3.

I am certainly aware of the various kinds of parody produced in the long eighteenth century. To say the
least, Pamela itself creates a media phenomenon that breeds a lot of parodies in its ﬁrst year of publication.
The choice of A Tale of a Tub and its frame is merely a choice based on similar use of its own ﬂame.

24 Mack, 3.

87

 

Similar to Tickletext and Oliver, the outside narrator in Swift’s A Tale of a Tub
writes the “Apology” for the content to remind the readers of the parodic purposes that
are involved in the making of the tale. The narrator, supposedly Swift himself, does
everything he can in his frame narrative to assure us that the tale in the middle is by no
means an unwitting parody that aims to mock the author himself (despite the fact that the
apology becomes a parody of the content).25 In fact, the narrator even helps us see the
inside narrator’s authorial intention as honorable and well-intentioned. As the narrator
suggests, the author of A Tale of a Tub “had endeavour’d to strip himself of as many real

prejudices as he could.”26

The outside narrator also helps explain the situation. For us,
the inside narrative might be a tale of a “tub”—a story of fragments, digressions, and
ﬁgrnents, and therefore is subject to ridicule—but for the outside narrator, the story
should be read as otherwise, as the author “thought the numerous and gross corruptions in
Religion and Learning might matter for a satire that would be useful and diverting” (2).
To further support the idea of a non-prejudiced author, the outside narrator weighs in on

the correct ways of reading A Tale of a Tub. For example, the narrator points out that

“some of the passages in this discourse which appear most liable to objection, are what

 

25 The narrator is quite aware of the new literary adaptation to parody. He points out that John Dryden ’s

L’Estrange is such new renovation in his own time.

26 All other reference in the text and notes will be in parenthesis. Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub and

Other Works, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 2.

88

 

they call parodies, where the author personates the style and manner of other writers
whom he has a mind to expose (3).” Thus contrary to our reading that sees the inside
narrator as a laughing stock, the frame narrator anchors the reading. The idea that the
outside narrator helps clarify our understanding of the inside narrator is clearly present in
the “Apology” frame.
As it follows, be “resolved to proceed in a manner that should be altogether new, the
world having been already too long nauseated with endless repetitions upon every subject”
(2). The writer of the apology urges the reader not to easily deal out judgments about the
author’s intention:
There are three or four other passages which prejudiced or ignorant readers
have drawn by great force to hint at ill meanings, as if they glanced at some
tenets in religion. In answer to all which, the author solemnly protests he is
entirely innocent; and never had it once in his thoughts that anything he said
would in the least be capable of such interpretations, which he will engage to
deduce full as fairly from the most innocent book in the world (4).

At the same time, the frame narrator does not forget to belittle himself and thus

diminishes the credibility of his “apology.” In other words, the apology becomes just like

a tale of a tub, another parody that grows out of the content. Swift’s purpose lies not in an

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apologetic gesture toward the Tale of a Tub; if anything, he aims at ridiculing himself as
the author as well, with the apology itself serving as something that can be easily
dispensed with—like the notes in Pamela that are both central and excessive at the same
time. The frame narrator says it best that
this apology being chieﬂy intended for the satisfaction of future readers, it may
be thought unnecessary to take any notice of such treatises as have been written
against this ensuing discourse, which are already sunk into waste paper and
oblivion after the usual fate of common answerers to books which are allowed
to have any merit. They are indeed like annuals, that grow about a young tree
and seem to vie with it for a summer, but fall and die with the leaves in autumn
and are never heard of any more (4).
Swift understands the limit of textual inﬂuence of a frame. More importantly, he seems to
suggest an acute awareness of textual death in that their circulations are only short-lived,
if not neglected. If indeed, the frame narratives are integral to the anchoring of the parody,
they, being parodies themselves, are wastes at best. Nothing, in this sense, is a reference
to anything else, not even to itself. The anchoring frame now becomes a highly
self-conscious piece that questions its own designation as a parodied work. In this sense,

the ﬂame narrator is in no better position than the “answerers” of the Tale of the Tub that

90

 

he so vehemently dismisses. After all, he is an answerer too, “when he would have it
observed that the author’s wit is not his own” (7). Thus, the ultimate irony lies in that
even if the apology writer is the writer of the Tale of a Tub, by adding this apology, he
indirectly conﬁrms one of the answerer’s “mistaken” “conjectures” that “the author is
dead” (8).

For Swift, this convoluted mess of the frame and content, parody and original, is
shown at another level. At the beginning of the Apology, the narrator suggests that “the
greatest part of that book was ﬁnished above thirteen years since, 1696, which is eight
years before it was published” (2). Like the lengthy discussions as to how the Shamela
letters come to being in the frame letters, here the frame narrator also mentions how the
book is published. But where is the limit of book as a physical object? Is it 1696 when the
greatest part of that book was ﬁnished? Or is it 1704 that sees the actual publication of
the book? How do we account for the missing eight-year interval? Even the apology
writer is not sure about this. He tells us that “how the author came to be without his
papers is a story not proper to be told and of very little use, being a private fact of which
the reader would believe as little or as much as he thought good” (8). He eschews the
question of the original text and he fails to “apologize” for the author’s absence.

Moreover, he now contradicts himself by continuing to defarniliarize the reader with

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numerous accounts of how the book comes about. The book now is based on “a blotted
copy” that the inside narrator possesses which “he intended to have writ over with many
alterations” (8). While “a blotted copy” might assure the readers of its authentic nature
(much like Pamela’s letters in Chapter one), it was not the ﬁnal product because these
blotted passages are never shown to the readers. What alterations? What has been blotted?
The apology writer tells us that
in the author’s original copy there were not so many chasms as appear in the
book, and why some of them were left, he knows not; had the publication been
trusted to him, he would have made several corrections of passages against
which nothing hath been ever objected.
One has to wonder, if the author cannot have control over his own written work, what is
the extent of the excess of authorship and book? Again, the apology writer makes it
difficult for the readers to pin down the origin of the Tale of a Tub by adding that the
section “A Fragment” is something that the author “once lent a gentleman who had
designed a discourse of a somewhat the same subject” and “he never thought of it
afterwards” (8-9). Even the author admits that “it was a sufficient surprise to see it pieced
up together” with the Tale of a Tub. Even the explanatory notes are not intended by the

author in the ﬁrst place (I 0).

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By now, we realize that the frame is just another parody of the Tale of a Tub,
because the frame is full of vain talk, ellipses, and digressions. We cannot use the
apology to anchor the inside tale nor can we locate the real author in both of them. Swift

seems to destabilize his own position as a parodist by subverting whatever messages that

 

H
both the inside and outside narrator try to convey. If there is one set of logic that we can ‘
get out of Swift’s sometimes elusive approaches to his text, it seems to me that for Swift
any “thing” is readily a sort of parody of itself, like the frame narrative that grows out of “l

the original text or like the original text that expands and decreases as it wishes. Every
“thing” is more or less “like” itself. This indeterminacy as I have been suggested so far
becomes the backbone of a large cultural fascination with what counts as original and
copy, author and book, and eventually perception and materiality. Phidden tells us that
“parodic erasure disﬁgures its pretexts in various ways that seek to guide our
re-evaluation of reﬁguration of them. It is dialogical and suggestive as well as negatively
deconstructive, for it (at least potentially) can achieve controlled and meta-ﬁctional
commentary as well as purely arbitrary problematisation.”27 While parody assaults its
pretext, it also prompts us not only to question the necessary hierarchy between the

original and its fraud, but also reconsider the originality of the original. The parody, in

 

27 Phiddian, 13.

93

this sense, is no longer just to make fun of the intended target or the satirist himself; it in

fact participates in a philosophical inquiry of the empirical world.

V

There is therefore an explicit link between the use of parody and epistolarity in
F ielding’s Shamela. Shamela, in this view, is neither a mere addendum to Richardson’s
Pamela nor a creative attempt to replace it. Shamela itself poses questions about its own
origin, its own ontological status and therefore becomes an indeterminate object.
Shamela’s frame letters provide ample examples about how parody works to undermine
itself; similarly, Shamela’s content letters extend the concern about the excess of
authorship and empirical claims. But more importantly, for Fielding to successfully
facilitate his view on parody and excess in Shamela there must be moments in the novel
where all Fielding’s endeavors fail. These moments, perhaps, are conﬁrmations to the
apology writer’s inadvertent assertion that “the author is dead.” In other words, how does
Fielding reveal his letters as “Shams” but still is able to make them serious? How does he
talk about excess by using excessive genres like parody and letters without jeopardizing
his own epistolary project? As I approach the end of this chapter, I will try to show

Fielding’s particular treatment of the letter genre rarely mentioned in earlier criticism and

94

try to show that by engaging in the parody of Pamela, Fielding enters a loop where the
more he makes fun of Richardson’s artiﬁciality, the more he perpetuates Richardson’s
unﬁnished project of epistolary excess.

The reversing effect of Fielding’s mockery can be clearly felt throughout the
Shamela letters. From the beginning, we see the ﬁrst two Shamela letters model upon the
structure of Pamela’s ﬁrst letter. While Richardson relegates Pamela’s subversive
message to the note in the ﬁrst letter (and therefore reduced the effect of Pamela’s
transgression), Fielding has no problem rendering the note its proper status as a letter.
After all, he is mocking Richardson’s seriousness regarding the letter’s transparency and
Pamela’s virtues. Here the mourning for the old mistress is non-existent, and the subtle
transgression in Pamela’s note becomes too obvious. Shamela tells us that she “pretend[s]
to be shy” while Mr. Booby is making a move on her (14). Similarly, Pamela’s latent
desire emerges in Shamela’s overt claim of her sexuality. In the second letter, for example,
Shamela is upset by Mrs. J ervis’s interruption during her sexual encounter with Mr.
Booby. Indeed, she describes extensively how she entices Mr. Vlfllliams and Booby in her
letters. Later when she tricks Mr. Booby to her bed—a parodied scene from Pamela—she
makes it no secret to the reader that she is “only pretending” to be innocent. She

continues to pretend even to the schemer Mrs. Jervis.

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If Richardson’s letter veil hides Pamela’s darker side, Fielding throws it to the

reader’s face. At the same time, as I have been trying to suggest so far, Fielding’s parody

can only be an excess, something that is almost the original but not quite. For Richardson,

letter is “supposed” to be transparent (despite what the ironies of his print rendition);

Fielding’s letter mockery makes it explicit and therefore unwittingly conﬁrms that letter

is transparent, because we need to take the face value of what Shamela says in order for

the parody to work. In this sense, whatever Fielding tries to achieve in his writings will

always be put in this double-bind: how do you mock the original without becoming the

mocked as well? How do you write a letter novel without a suspected agenda? How can

the letter novel not simultaneously call attention to the excess of authorship inherent in

letters?

F ielding’s problematic double-bind is reﬂected in his epistolary “innovation” in

Shamela’s letters. If we go back to the ﬁrst letter in Shamela, we sees that it is not just a

parodied letter that shows how Pamela should be a sham; in parodying the ﬁrst letter,

Fielding actually creates a totally different dimension than what Pamela and “the Sham

of Pamela” can offer. By this, I mean the use of italicization in her letters, and

speciﬁcally those italicized sentences that serve as her inner thoughts. At the ﬁrst sight,

one might assume that the italicization functions as an en dash to indicate her sudden

96

 

epiphany or a breaking away from her current train of thought. When she mentions in the
ﬁrst letter, “0! How I long to be in the Balcony at the Old House,” she is expressing her
longing to go back home (14). But at the same time the en dashes surround the sentence
makes the italicization redundant. It is in the second time (in the second letter) that the
italicization appears that one starts to wonder at the full effect. In the second
letter—supposedly the note in Pamela’s letter—as I mentioned before, we observe an
unashamed Pamela/Shamela addressing us her pretensions. Why would Shamela need an
italicization to show us who she really is? The letter is supposed to present the truth of
Shamela’s heart, and she never fails to show that, even her pretensions—her pretending
to be ignorant—are carefully chronicled in her letter. The only explanation, it seems to
me, is that while Fielding demystiﬁes the notion of the letter’s transparency by inventing
an italicized voice inside the letter and Shamela’s heart, he in fact sets up a new
dimension for Shamela and the epistolary genre. Fielding now creates for Shamela a
monologue within a monologue as well as a parody of a parody (Shamela being a parody
already), exactly like the kind of recursive structure and economy in Hume. In a sense, if
Fielding tries to present an excessive Shamela in order to mock Richardson’s idealization
of the epistolary transparency, his own version of the epistolary transparency is not only

redundant but also exceeds the dimension of a coquettish Shamela: this is no longer just a

97

 

Shamela that is lustful; now you have a calculating, multidimensional one. Shamela
becomes the excessive signiﬁer whose meaning ﬂuctuates between the letter and her
inner voice.

The instances of Shamela’s use of monologue inside her letters are numerous, and I
will come back to this point later. For now, we realize that Fielding’s parody achieves its
effect by attacking and revealing Richardson’s weakness in Pamela. This is especially
true in his use of “writing to the moment” in his parodied version. In mocking one of the
sexual scenes in Pamela, Fielding deliberately has the whole episode written in the mode
so as to denigrate Richardson’s idealization of letter’s potential for unrestricted feelings.
In letter VI, Shamela describes to us one of her seduction scene, where she suggests that
she writes “in the present Tense” (18). The whole scene is hilarious exactly because
Shamela is reporting everything that happens in bed with Mr. Booby in real time. For
example, she would “shout out” to her reader that she is surprised by Mr. Booby’s
entrance—“Odsbobs! I hear him just coming in at the Door” (18). Of course we know
Fielding is not serious at all because mid-way through the letter, Shamela changes the
letter back to the past tense. But right before that, she again uses her inner voice in
italicization—“O what a diﬂiculty it is to keep one is countenance, when a violent Laugh

desires a burst forth” (18). Shamela’s inner voice suggests that she is laughing at how

98

gullible Mr. Booby is and at the comic scenes that ensues. One might even say that
Shamela is poking fun at the effect of this “writing to the moment.” At the same time, this
italicization also puts the reader in a difﬁcult position: which voice (her letter or her voice)
is closer to her “self”? Isn’t this inner voice also a sort of writing to the moment?
Moreover, this one speaks to the reader in a direct way as if one has an access to her heart.
The reader is forced to recognize the illusion of writing to the moment while accepting it
as the prerequisite of F ielding’s sarcastic attacks. In a weird way, the more Fielding
makes fun of Richardson’s seemingly seamless narrative ﬂow or his “writing to the
moment,” the more he conﬁrms Richardson’s own epistolary agenda. Like Tickletext and
Oliver, Fielding puts himself in an ironic position and therefore casts doubt on his own
position as someone who tries to amend Richardson’s “faults” through satirical attacks. In
a sense, Fielding is admitting that even these improvements are futile: one can never
access Shamela’s heart through the letter or through her inner voice. She is always at
large.

I will now turn to a central passage in Shamela that best exempliﬁes Fielding’s
awareness of the futility of his own epistolary project. What we have is a moment in the
text where Shamela is literally suspended—in a state of undecided chaos. Caught

between her letters—the editor suggests that “the following Letter seems to have been

99

 

written before Shamela received the last from her Mother” (29)—and her two homes
(Lincolnshire and Drury-Lane), she now receives a letter tossed into her chariot by a man
on horseback. The tossed letter that Parson Williams sends Shamela soon multiplies and

one reads a second enclosed letter from Parson Williams to Mr. Booby within Shamela’s

 

jr-l
letter to her mother. While Fielding’s satirical tone and haphazard rendition of the ‘
characters from Pamela seem natural enough for one to assume that Fielding inserts

Parson \Vllliam’s second letter into Shamela’s letter without much deliberation, one soon b

realizes that the enclosure of the “second” letter is by no means inadvertent. By
relegating the enclosed letter’s authenticity and authority to an “exact Copy” transcribed
by Shamela and disrupting the succession of the epistolary undertakings among Shamela,
her mother, Parson Williams and Mr. Booby, a certain “un”-willing suspense of disbelief
on the reader’s part can emerge. Earlier on, we know this letter is supposed to be written
after she receives her mother’s letter, yet the editor’s inserted comment on the letter’s
belatedness—a mocking gesture of the Richardsonian epistolary order—reveals a series
of confusion about the epistolary communication. Indeed, at the end of Shamela’s letter,
one knows that Shamela also receives an incoming letter from Mr. Booby desiring her
return to Lincolnshire; however, this letter is “unhappily lost,” as the editor claims, “as

well as the next which Shamela [writes], and which contain[s] an Account of all the

100

Proceedings previous to her Marriage” (33). He then goes on to tell the reader that

The only remaining one which I could preserve, seems to have been written about

a Week after the Ceremony was perform’d, and is as follows (emphasis mine; 33).
One has to wonder, if the editor, being part of the epistolary enterprise, can only offer an
assurance of a seeming truth, how is be able to proclaim the ownership of the collection
of letters, such as the Editor in Goethe’s Werther? If he has access to the letters, why does
he choose not to show the crucial letter linking Mr. B’s proposal and the wedding night?
Moreover, if the letters are collected from the mother as he later claims, how can he get
hold of other letters with different addressees?

This central lacuna embodies one of the recurrent images of the kind of epistolary
excess that this dissertation tries to elaborate. What attaches to this image is literally an
abandonment of the project itself, just like the letter’s sudden failed assurance. There
goes the self-referential power of the letter itself; what replaces it is an excess, something
that is quaintly bundled up with the letter itself yet never fully appreciated. Indeed, while
the epistolary novel itself tries to imitate the reality of the epistolary decorum—the
mimesis of the epistolary traffic of the eighteenth century, at the same time it creates—or
even to some extent intends—a world of topsy-turvy, sometimes burlesque or

carnivalesque, sometimes serious and formal, that to preside over the world of letters

101

 

means to relinquish some rights of being the rational subject of the eighteenth-century, of
the reality that one is used to in order to make a certain adjustment, in order to safely
return to the homeland of the canny. Fielding, in this sense, forces the reader to enter a
zone of phantasm while abandoning all the knowledge that one accumulates so far in the
reading of Shamela.
Reading Shamela in light of this means that Shamela is no mere copy of Pamela,
just like the copy of the letters are not just referential points of departure for the process
of mimesis. In a sense, Shamela becomes more than Shamela itself; it now can be read as
an epistolary novel, no longer subservient to the “vartue” of Shamela (as well as Pamela).
One cannot fail to detect a change in Sharnela’s attitude once entering this vertiginous
zone. In the ﬁnal letter, Shamela recounts the story of a dinner feast:
After dinner Mr. Williams drank the Church et cetera; and smiled on me; when
my Husband’s Tum came, he drank et cetera and the Church; for which he was
very severely rebuked by Mr. Williams; it being a high Crime, it seems, to name
any thing before the Church. I do not know what Et cetera is, but I believe it is
something concerning chusing Pallament Men. . .. (38)

In contrast to Shamela’s display of cunning and cleverness earlier on, now there is a

Shamela that is rather innocent and even dull to some extent. Why is it now, after 30

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pages of parodic work of Pamela, that Fielding intends a different Shamela? As if

controlled by ventriloquism, she is now the domesticated Pamela that the anti-Pamela

camp ﬁghts against. Indeed, one page earlier one sees a sexualized Pamela who is

obviously well-versed in the art of seduction, who doesn’t even require the mother’s

instruction. Shamela even reverses the gender power relationship inherent in traditional

marriage contract:

Truly, says 1, Sir, I shall live like other Ladies of my Fashion; and if you think,

because I was a Servant, that I shall be contented to be governed as you please, I

will shew you, you are mistaken (35).

But here at this real long letter, she suddenly realizes her own position as a servant girl of

the eighteenth century. No longer the manipulative “saucybox” for Mr. Booby and Mr.

Williams, She now knows nothing of politics and can only refer to it as “et cetera.” Yet, if

one sees these “et ceteras” as part of Fielding’s textual scheme of aposiopesis—Shamela

refuses to name them and replace the contents by using “et cetera”——one sees the matter

in a different light: now that Shamela is out in the open, she does not have to be Pamela’s

otherness; she in fact enjoys a temporary space of her own, a space of double-entendre,

where she can be read differently, much like what Fielding does to Pamela by creating

Shamela. Much to the reader’s dismay, now Shamela becomes an excessive signiﬁer, one

103

that may or may not subscribe to the idea of a Shamela as a corrupted copy of Pamela.
Similarly, the letter cannot be the window to the soul; it becomes a facade that hides, et

cetera.

VI

It is clear by now that Shamela as an undecided signiﬁer is quite dangerous. She can

 

be the book that instigates unguarded fervor as in Tickletext’s case; she can be the copy
that pretends to be the original and eventually subverts it; she can also be the author that
is not named (Pamela or Shamela), et cetera. But more importantly, she is the “et cetera”
itself, an excess or an addendum that at the same time needs to be repressed (it shall not
be named). Shamela’s lack of critical attention attests to the fate of such a project of
self-denigration. As we transit into another eighteenth-century epistolary, Julie, which
according to Habermas, provides a “terrain of subjectivity” within which the
eighteenth-century “reveled and felt at ease”, Shamela provides an interesting case of the
kind of epistolary endeavor to ﬁgure out how its own ontological status, both as a way of
self-representation as well as self-understanding.28 This understanding of the self as an

imposter is felt not only in Hume or other eighteenth-century philosophers when they

 

28 Habermas, 50.

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struggle to sustain the link between self and the substance, but also in Swift whose

parodic efforts shatter every claim of origin. Shamela therefore severs its own ties with

Pamela and cancel off its own parasitical status. In this view, F ielding’s observation of

implicit connection between parody and the excessive nature of the epistolary genre

therefore instructs us to read Shamela as a way of masquerading the seriousness for

lowness, the philosophical for vulgarity, in order to convey the ﬁnal signiﬁcance of

Shamela: only when Shamela ceases to mean anything, only when Shamela loses its

referential powers, then perhaps it can start to reveal an anti-empirical message, however

difficult it may be.

105

“These Letters are no Letters”: The Excess of Enlightenment Discourse in Rousseau’s

Julie, or the New Heloise

I end the second chapter by suggesting that Shamela can be read notjust as a
parodied work intended for fun; rather it in fact points toward a greater cultural
obsession about the ontology of things themselves. In Shamela, portraits that are
painted are not necessarily of good likeness; authors that present themselves as
authentic are ﬁauds; and books that claim to be the real thing never cease to deface
and expose themselves. In Julie, questions of authenticity and the status of things also
have a similar valence in Rousseau’s conceptualization of excess and epistolary
novels. As I divulge below, the oxymoronic claim “these letters are no letters”
becomes a recurrent theme in Julie that speaks to Rousseau’s idea that excess is just a
natural part of reason, and that what seems ostensible often has a surprising
underlying message.l Unlike Richardson or Fielding who are mostly concerned with
the formality of the letter and its implication for the heart, Rousseau uses the letter
genre to take on the problematic of the Enlightenment head on, and particularly one of

his lifelong obsessions: what is the limit of reason? what is the porous nature of letter

 

I Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie, or the New Heloise: Letters of Two Lovers Who Live in a Small Town

at the Foot of the Alps, Philip Stewart and Jean Vache, Trans. (London: University Press of New
England, 1997), 7. All other references to Julie will be shown in parenthesis.

106

and its consequences for understanding the boundaries of the subject in writing? And
unlike Goethe’s romantic hero Werther, who seeks to transform the contaminating
effects of epistolary writing by purifying it down to a single voice, Rousseau’s
characters are aware of the implications of correspondence and in many ways
continue the “shameful trafﬁc” that eighteenth-century morality struggles to curtail.

Because Rousseau straddles the historical movements commonly designated
Enlightenment and Romanticism, this is in many ways the central chapter in the
dissertation dealing with the Enlightenment rhetoric of reason and its constant
foreclosure of excess. But before I go into the analysis of how Rousseau’s Julie
presents a secret desire to naturalize excess, I want to begin with the Prefaces to the
novel, which serve to introduce Rousseau’s ﬁxation with excess and its discontents.
Not surprisingly, one preface would not suffice, and the author’s sense that a second
preface was necessary already begins to suggest how Rousseau never feels he can
achieve a deﬁnitive writing.2

The second preface consists of a conversation between Rousseau the editor (R)
and an unknown reader of Julie (N). The whole conversation centers around whether

Julie is a ﬁctional creation or a real collection of letters. To N’s dismay, R never really

 

Rousseau’s mistrust in writing is well-documented. One may begin with Jacques Derrida’s critiques
of Rousseau’s idea of writing as a “dangerous supplement.” Rousseau therefore “valorizes and
disqualiﬁes writing at the same time.” Please see Derrida’s “...That Dangerous Supplement...” in Of
Grammatology for more details on the Rousseauist prioritization of the speech over the writing.
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, ed. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press: 1976), 141-2.

107

conﬁrms N’s suspicion that this is all a ﬁction. At the same time, N never clearly
explains why one feels the need to get determine such things, which R continually
questions: “I don’t see that it matters. To say whether a Book is good or bad, how
does it matter how it came to be written?” (7). At an impasse, N answers his own
governing question, concluding that in Julie: “these Letters are no Letters; this Novel
is no Novel; the characters are people from the other world” (7). N wishes to
denounce Julie on the ground of its unlikely correspondence to human experiences,
such as Julie’s nearly impossible moral resolve, or the array of unusual or uncommon
characters within the novel. But N’s statement is also curious, paradoxical: Julie
cannot easily be categorized, and if it does attempt to reﬂect or copy Nature, it does so
in a corrupted, nearly impossible fashion. Indeed, when N tells R that “these Letters
are no Letters,” N is implying that he does not know how to properly assess Julie,
formally, critically, aesthetically, even perhaps ontologically. It is in N’s continuous
inquiry about Julie’s status that Rousseau casts a shadow over his novel that is not a
novel, what I am calling the other of eighteenth-century epistolarity: Rousseau sees a
kind of uncategorizable excess as a fundamental part of the Enlightenment, cautioning
at the same time about its bewildering effects on its readers.

Even the ﬁrst preface has already underscored Julie’s ambiguous origin: “Have I

done the whole thing, and is the entire correspondence a ﬁction? Worldly people,

108

what matters it to you? It is surely a ﬁction for you” (3). In the second preface, R
repeats the same gesture and reiterates the insigniﬁcance of knowing “how it came to
be written” (7). For N, the lack of a conspicuous origin means that Julie is an
unnatural product, an excess that cannot be properly measured by common sense.
Signiﬁcantly, N uses the analogy between a “portrait” and a “tableau” to argue that
Julie is a poor imitation of an “original,” whether it is an attempt to capture the
essence of a real thing, or to capture the commonality of human experience.3 N’s
contention is not groundless, for some readers have found something utopian in its
vision, and alienating in its plotting.4 N sums it up best when he suggests that in Julie
there is “not a single evil deed; not a single wicked man to make us fear for the good
ones” (8). Furthermore, the characterization in Julie depicts “neither features nor
shape” with a “veil for raiment” (8). In other words, the characters are vague,
sometimes unnatural in making the choices and decisions that they have to make and
thus ﬁltther the impression that these characters are “from the other world.” Finally,

the letters are too “stilted,” pompous and passionate, according to N (9). To be sure,

 

For N, “a Portralt always has some value prov1ded lt IS a good llkeness, however strange the Orlglnal.

But in a Tableau based on imagination, each human ﬁgure must possess features common to
mankind. . ..” (7).

James Jones Jr. suggests, Julie reveals “one of the most important and original variations of the
eighteenth-century topos of utopia” and the “utopian undercurrents” culminate in the ﬁnal setting of
Clarens. James Jones Jr., La Nouvelle Heloise: Rousseau and Utopia (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1977),
28 and 30. As for the worry about alienating the readers, the Editor does tell us in the First Preface that
“should an austere man leaﬁng through this collection be put off by the early parts, throw the book
down in anger, and rail at the Editor, I will not complain of his injustice; in his place, I might have done
the same” (4).

109

Julie offers no immediate satisfactions to those who anticipate simple, mannered
epistolary satisfactions and leaves readers like N—a surrogate for Rousseau’s general
reader perhaps—with questions about its posturing, characterizations, and plot
development.

N bases his dislike on the ground of the novel’s unnaturalness: “If your
characters are in nature, admit that their style is not very natural” (9). But N is also
very ambiguous about what it is that makes Julie unnatural. On the one hand, if Julie
is a ﬁction, then it is “so natural” that it is “too much so” (8). On the other hand, if it
is a real collection of letters, it is too excessive, too unnatural for contemporary taste
and morality. For N, “unnatural” is never a ﬁxed idea, and thus even the most natural
quality can uncannily cross over into the “unnatural” if such categorical judgments are
never given deﬁnition. Julie is difficult to assess not because it is indeed unnatural,
but because Julie is never just a novel or a collection of letters. It is always more or
other than what it is.

If this is the case, then N unwittingly reveals a problem about what it means to
be natural in the Enlightenment. After all even N, who uses it to protest against
Rousseau’s novel, cannot properly deﬁne it. But even without tlying to ﬁgure out
what is natural or reasonable for N, we can recognize that all of this is a pretense

concocted by Rousseau, staging an indeterminacy that will haunt the reception of the

110

 

novel, in part by pointing out this “ambiguity” in nature itself. If for N, there is always

a chance that something can be “too natural,” then for R, it is only natural to

acknowledge N’s position and claim that “excess” is the fundamental condition of

nature: “Who is daring enough to assign exact limits to Nature, and assert: Here is as

far as Man can go, and no further.” (7). Such a question is then traceable in the

characterizations within the novel, such that Claire is characterized by her “excessive

indulgence”; St. Preux is “full of weakness and ﬁne words”; Monsieur Wolmar

“sacriﬁce[es] everything to opinion”; and ﬁnally, Milord Edward is “forever driven by

wisdom, forever reasoning without reason” (8). R is clearly utilizing a language of

extremity to portray these characters and in turn add to the excessive quality of Julie.

Furthermore, in terms of the rhetorical devices of Julie, R also tries to suggest it

is Julie’s lack of proper form, or propriety, that makes it moving:

Read a love letter written by an Author in his study, by a wit trying to shine.

If he has at least a little ﬁre in his brain, his letter will, as we say, scorch the

paper; the heat will go no farther. You will be charmed, even stirred perhaps;

but with a stirring that is ﬂeeting and arid, that will leave you nothing to

remember but words. In contrast, a letter really dictated by love; a letter

from a truly passionate Lover, will be desultory, diffuse, full of verbose,

disconnected, repetitious passages. His heart, ﬁlled with an overﬂowing

lll

 

sentiment, ever repeats the same thing, and is never done, like a running
spring that ﬂows endlessly and never runs dry. Nothing salient, nothing
remarkable; neither the words, nor the turns, nor the sentences are
memorable; there is nothing in it to admire or to be struck by. And yet one
feels the soul melt; one feels moved without knowing why. The strength of
the sentiment may not strike us, but its truth affects us, and that is how one
heart can speak to another (10).
R’s statement reminds us of Richardson’s mimetic process in Clarissa’s letters of
madness. In a sense, the epistolary genre reaches its full sentimental capacity when it
becomes most volatile. Thus, the letters in Julie are supposed to be excessive because
this is a novel about the inscrutability of love and passion, and the impossibility that
reason will subsume them; conversely, because the letter genre provides a greater
freedom with its excessive qualities, Julie can never be ﬁnished, “like a running
spring that ﬂows endlessly and never runs dry.” Only when the letter becomes
“disconnected” and “repetitious” can one feel the genuine quality of the letters in
Julie. The ability of the Julie letters to move people relies on the reasonableness of
unreasonableness and the commonness of its uncommonness. In a sense, R
deliberately makes a case for writing an epistolary novel about love because of the

implicitly parallel structure between the heart and the letter. Indeed, as R continues,

112

 

loveis
but illusion; it fashions for itself, so to speak, another Universe; it surrounds
itself with objects that do not exist, or to which it alone has given being; and
as it renders all its sentiments by images, its language is always ﬁgurative.
But such ﬁgures lack precision and sequence; its eloquence is in its disorder; In
it convinces more when it reasons less (10).

By yoking love and letter together, R indirectly suggests that the letters of the novel 1

 

will often fail in their function to convey propriety and proper feeling, making them
somewhat akin to the wasteful ﬁgures we saw in chapter one (ﬁgures that ﬁequently
serve no ostensible function or meaning). They often exceed epistolary norms as they
struggle to present something as elusive as love, which partakes of eloquent disorder.
According to R, letters can no longer afford the luxury of their own style: “How can
you speak of Letters, of epistolary style? When writing to one’s beloved, who cares
about that! It is no longer Letters one writes, but Hymns” (11). Now, in order to write
love, the letter has to be other than itself. It is at once a letter, and some other genre,
for as we’ve learned the letter always has room to be more than it is. Thus it can be a
hymn, but more generally, it can defy its own style or its own existing rules in order to '
be even more “letter-like,” ﬁnally settling only when it is groundless.

A series of questions persist: if N indeed is this reader that Rousseau openly

113

deﬁes in the ﬁrst preface, why then are there so many parallels between R and N in
the second?5 Why are they both interested in and perhaps feigning anxiety about the
idea of excess, even to the extent of secretly admiring it? Why does N, being the
novel’s interlocutor, develop such a contentious, if ambiguous, attitude toward R’s
Julie? After all, he is one of the few people that actually ﬁnish reading Julie:

N: Here’s your manuscript. I have read it all the way through.

R: All the way through? I see: you expect few will do the same?

N: Vel duo, vel nemo. (7)
It seems to me that the uncanny resemblance between N and R and the questions
resulting from their conversation not only serve to reveal Rousseau’s anticipation of
readerly critiques, but also achieve another hidden agenda, showcasing the author’s
dissatisfaction with Enlightenment reason. Indeed, when R tells N that all that exists
in love is “ﬁgurative,” he is making a case against empirical certainty and universality.
To be ﬁgurative is exactly to be elusive. To take it one step further, if everything is
ﬁgurative in love, then might we not say that Julie’s textual existence in her love
letters is ﬁgurative too? It is therefore not too difficult to see why N and R are so
much alike. If they are the product of a ﬁgurative language in the second preface, then

they are also similarly elusive. When N says that only a few will ﬁnish reading Julie,

 

5 The Editor tells us in the First Preface that “should anyone, after reading it all the way through, dare
censure me for publishing it; let them proclaim it to the world if he pleases, but let him not come tell
me: I feel that I could never in my life have any regard for such a man” (4).

114

 

N sounds very much like Rousseau as he would later show up in the opening of his
Confessions: “I am made unlike any one I have ever met; I will even venture to say
that I am like no one in the whole world. I may be no better, but at least I am
different.”6

Both N and R identify themselves as unique, having read through the whole Julie.
To take this one step further, their similarity reﬂects the ambiguity of the origin of the

author as well as the ambiguity of the existence of the characters within the letters that

 

follow. For instance, toward the end of the second preface, when pressed upon the

question of the reality of the characters, R has the following conversation with N:
R: What does it matter whether they ever existed? In vain would you seek
them on the earth. They are no more.

N: They are no more? Then they once were?

N: In faith, it won’t do you any good, you will be ﬁgured out in spite of
yourself. Don’t you see that your epigraph alone says it all?
R: I see that it says nothing about the point in question: for who can know

whether I found this epigraph in the manuscript, or whether it is I who put it

 

6 .
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions, J. M. Cohen, trans. (London: Pengum, 1953) 17. All other
references will be in parenthesis.

115

there? Who can say that I am not in the same doubt as you? (21)7
R even goes on to suggest that even when he tries to visit the actual locations detailed
in the novel, “nothing” is “similar to the house described in these Letters” (22). Plus,
as R’s research shows, no local residents claim to know about the name of Monsieur
de Wolmar and the Baron d’Etange. Like N, R cannot even be sure of the authenticity
of the Julie letters. When discussing the “transpositions of place and errors of
Topography” in the letters, R suggests that such mystiﬁcation exists “either because
the Author indeed knew it no better than that, or because his design was to confuse his
Readers” (22). While it might be true to suggest that the lack of a clear origin—R
claims to be the editor—might help establish a certain emotional distance and prove
the letters’ authenticity like those in Richardson’s epistolary novels, I think more
importantly R’s refusal to reveal the origin show us Rousseau’s playful attitude
toward what is considered excessive or outlandish. Unlike the “Rousseau” who is
usually associated with the Enlightenment, here we have a Rousseau that tries to think
about the playﬁllness of writing, not just the “dangerous supplements” that writing
comes to represent. In a ﬁnal sleight of hand, Rousseau creates an even more
confusing show, as N tells R: “One thing, though, I advise you to transpose our roles.

Pretend it is 1 who am urging you to publish this Collection, and that you are reluctant.

 

7 Rousseau translated two lines from Petrarch’s sonnet on the title page: “The World did not know her
while she was here:/ I knew her, I who remain alone here to weep.” N uses this as evidence of Julie’s
root in real life.

116

 

 

Give yourself the objections, and me the replies” (22). And just when R seems to be
on board, N makes a curious ﬁnal admission: “No, I was setting a trap for you. Leave
things as they are” (22). Now, after coming a full circle, N ﬁnally becomes R in a
sense, since N can be R at any point, their roles can be “transposed.” N can as easily
be the one who publishes this collection, as the one who writes it, as the one who
reads it.

I am tempted to read this as Rousseau’s sense of self-effacement within his own
writing, something that is commonly staged across his wide array of literary and
philosophical texts. While Derrida discusses at length Rousseau’s general mistrust of
writing and views him as a defender of the idea of “self-presence” in the eighteenth
century, the Rousseau of Julie reveals a more ambivalent attitude towards writing.8
By adding the second—seemingly superﬂuous but ﬁnally quite signiﬁcant—preface,
Rousseau anticipates the confusions that will follow in the letter collection proper, but
also shows us how excess can be textually pleasurable rather than morally
reprehensible. Witness the playful attitude that both N and R adopt toward the end
of the preface to demonstrate how both performance and self-effacement are very

much at the heart of the Julie letters. Even N urges R to “do more, write down this

 

Derrida regards Rousseau as an important ﬁgure in the Western logocentrism because Rousseau sees
writing as a danger that “threatens” the concept of self-presence. Self-presence as understood by
Derrida means an “objectivity takes the form of representation, of the idea as the modiﬁcation of a
self-present substance, conscious and certain of itself at the moment of its relation to itself.” Derrida,
Of Grammatology, 97.

117

conversation as the sole Preface,” recognizing that they are becoming part of the
strategies that follow (22). As a result, the second preface also contains for R the
desire to replace the ﬁrst preface and signiﬁes to us the possibility for an endless
sequence of addendums that would subvert the order of things.

Rousseau is attempting to rethink the relationship between the letter and the heart:
how, if the letter and the heart are inexplicably linked together, can we imagine an
epistolary language that can accommodate excess without jeopardizing its genuine
quality? What does it mean when the heart is indeed without boundary? How do we
think about excessive subjectivity in Julie against an Enlightenment framework?
What are the differences between Rousseau in Julie and Rousseau in his philosophical
mode? If excess is indeed undesirable, why does Julie become one of the most
popular novels in the eighteenth-century? These lingering questions can only be
glimpsed in the preface, and I will try to use the Julie letters to suggest that for
Rousseau the ﬁxation on excess will be a constant in his writing in dealing with the

rhetoric of the Enlightenment.

II
The prefaces to Julie suggest that the Julie letters will be read with difficulty due

to their excessive nature. They present the reader with certain categorical and

118

affective difﬁculties: “This book is not meant to circulate in society, and is suitable for

every few readers. . .. Whom then will it please? Perhaps no one but me: but very

certainly it will please no one moderately” (3). R suggests that he would “throw them

into the ﬁre” if he “lived in another age” (2). And he openly calls for readers’

tolerance of the novel: “he must tell himself in advance that their writers are not

French, wits, academicians, philosophers; but provincials, foreigners, solitary youths,

almost children, who in their romantic imaginations mistake the honest ravings of

their brains for philosophies” (2). For Rousseau, these letters defy expectations,

scandalize the propriety of fashionable epistles, and most important of all, are not

intended for everyone. In chapter one I noted that when people write letters in the

eighteenth century, there was an understanding that their correspondence may be

preserved, even printed. When N urges R to admit the possibility of these letters

“written to be printed,” R refuses to concede this, posing the idea that the Julie letters

are of a particular kind, excessively private and notably “genuine” (9). The prefaces

continually raise questions about the genuineness of the letter form and the decorum

surrounding the processes of correspondence. It is exactly because of such difﬁculties

that N says that “these letters are no letters.” Even Rousseau himself “prided himself

on having succeeded in sustaining a long narrative ‘sans episodes, sans aventure

Romanesque, sans mechancete d ’aucune espece ni dans les personages, ni dans [es

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actions” (qtd. in Fuchs 5). For Rousseau, the value of the Julie letters lies exactly in
the idea of being “without,” constantly exceeding the expectation of common sense.9
Much like N, critics have long been interested in the various interpretive
challenges posed by Julie. For M. B. Ellis, Rousseau’s use of key terms (terms such as
“nature” or “reason”) in his works is “ambiguous and arbitrary in the extreme,” which
can result in a dangerously “schizoid character” to the ideas in the author’s Julie.IO In
another instance, Christie Vance claims that Julie is “a work in which one ﬁnds
interaction between virtually all of Rousseau’s major preoccupations,” making it
therefore hard to unify opposite views existing in Rousseau.ll She also raises
affective issues regarding the apparent conﬂicts within Julie, such as how passionate
love can be compatible with the social demands. Regarding the characters in the novel,
Maurice Funke has suggested that “Rousseau was well aware of his inability to
resolve the conﬂict. . .between the desires and frustrations of the hidden personality

9912

and the virtuous performance of the public ﬁgure. Therefore, “Julie’s life ends in

both triumph and defeat.”13 Examples of Rousseau’s polarized and conﬂicted stances

 

9 Philip Stewart claims that “Julie sets out from the start to shock expectations.” Philip Stewart,
Half- Told Tales: Dilemmas of Meaning in Three French Novels (Chapel Hill: University of North
Caronlina Press, 1987), 123.

M. B. Ellis, Julie or La Nouvelle Heloise: A Synthesis of Rousseau Is Thought (1749-1959) (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1949), viii.

l I Christie McDonald Vance, The Extravagant Shepherd: a Study of the Pastoral Vision in Rousseau is
Nouvelle Heloise (England: Cheney & Sons LTD, 1973), 9.

2 Maurice R. F unke, From Saint to Psychotic: The Crisis of Human Identity in the Late 18'” Century
(New York: Peter Lang, 1983), 204.

'3 Funke, 205.

120

 

seem too many to name. Julie’s ﬁnal revelation that she is still in love with St. Preux,
for example, contradicts the reformed Julie that emerges in the latter half of the novel.
The Julie-St. Preux correspondence, which Julie calls the “shameful trafﬁc,” spins out
of control and becomes the necessary condition upon which the whole narrative
hinges. Perhaps the most inﬂuential analysis appears in Paul De Man’s Allegories of
Reading where he notices that “serious attempts to come to terms with the structure
and diction of Julie have always tended towards a bi-polar, pseudo-dialectical reading,
the main issue being the deﬁnition of the poles that set up the tension of the textual
ﬁeld.”'4 All these polarities themselves stem from a certain “referential
indeterminacy” and therefore result in ambiguous, even confounding readings.

“That Julie is ultimately ambiguous is not a new idea,” writes Philip Stewart in
Half-Told Tales, and this has a lot to do with “the persistent contradictions of its
author.”l 5 Stewart therefore focuses on how the Julie letters create their own
ambiguities by assigning different valences to different textual emphases, such as
“chastity”, “love” or “duty.” But perhaps a middle ground can be reached, that is,
Rousseau’s ambiguous treatment of Julie can be seen in his ambivalent attitude
toward excess, a life-long obsession that is so often reﬂected in his works, be they

political, biographical, or literary. Because excess represents something unstable,

 

14
Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), I90.

15 Stewart, 116.

121

Rousseau has to constantly get around it in order to consolidate his philosophical
system. But especially in Julie, such avoidance tends to be futile, creating the
wavering attitude between the two extremes. Indeed, as de Man suggests, for
Rousseau “suspended meaning is not for him, disinterested play, but always a threat

or a challenge.”16

The ambiguity and indeterminacy offered by Rousseau in the
Second Preface can therefore be seen as symptomatic of what is to come in terms of
excess in Julie. In fact, in Julie, the reader constantly experiences questions regarding
authenticity and veracity: is the letter that I am reading here different from any other
letters? Is this a true letter in the sense that it is written from the heart? Even if this is
a genuine letter, why is it that I still have a feeling that there is something suspicious
about the letter itself? Even the letter writers in Julie are aware of these problems,
often stopping to comment on them. For example, in the second half the novel when
Julie suggests to Monsieur de Wolmar that she would include him as her conﬁdant
when St. Preux comes to visit them, she says she would “hold no private interview
that would not be reported to him, and to write no letter he would not be shown” (3 54).
More importantly, she would even “oblige” herself “to write each Letter as if he were

not to see it, and then to show it to him” (354). That Julie would “oblige” herself to

write a faithful letter to St. Preux tells us the inherent difﬁculty in producing a letter

 

'6 De Man, 208.

122

that is not artﬁil. Indeed, as Monsieur de Wolmar explains why he refuses to read such
letters from Julie, he asserts that
although you never say anything between you that you would not like to inform
me of, take care not to make a rule of it, lest such duty becomes a constraint, and
expressing your intimate thoughts be less easy as the audience for them is
extended (354).
To write epistolary novels is to “extend” the “audience” and each writer’s letter is
never innocently motivated. After all, as Wolmar tells Julie, “the presence of any
witness at all holds back the out-pouring of ﬁ'iendship” (3 54). Moreover, to write a
genuine letter is to reveal its own secrecy thoroughly, a kind of self-reﬂexive moment
where its self-presence is established. Wolmar indicates to us that such a moment is
only possible when two people are close to each other and in this case, writing letters
to each other without the interruptions of others: “there are a thousand secrets that
three friends need to know and can only tell each other by twos” (354). Wolmar is
lamenting that the possibility of a genuine feeling—{he “out-pouring” of ﬁ'iendship or
the exhausting of secrets—can only occur when two friends are at their closest. At the
same time, the audience is always extended and one’s secrets are “a thousand,” not
“by twos.” In other words, the letter is excessive even if it is written out of a genuine

intent.

123

Through the ambiguity of the Julie letters, we can start to see how the epistolary
genre not only provides a greater freedom for the letter writer to touch upon issues of
self-identity but also tests the limit of the Enlightenment rhetoric of reason. While the
Julie letters are not a direct revelation of Rousseau’s thoughts on excess—unlike his
philosophical works or autobiographical writings, he rarely says anything about
“excess” speciﬁcally—they serve an even better purpose for Rousseau, as everything
is scattered among the different narrators in the epistolary novel. The prefaces have
taught us that excess may only be something to be hinted at, and Rousseau’s ﬁxation
with excess is something that needs to be recognized but cannot fully be named: this
is the condition of production in Julie. The rest of this chapter will be devoted to
explaining how for Rousseau the idea of excess is not just a simple matter of othering
the Enlightenment, but is a latent desire in the novel itself.

111

But how does Rousseau dwell on excess without making it explicit? How can he
be promoting Enlightenment ideals while secretly admiring the idea of excess? So far'
we have seen that Rousseau deliberately obscures any attempts to deﬁne what is
excess or letter’s excess. In the following sections, I propose looking at excess
through the lens of its relationship with Enlightenment discourses of reason,

universality, and subjectivity. Eventually I would like to offer an explanation as to

124

why excess becomes an underlying theme in Rousseau’s work, even if it proves to be
contradictory and even destabilizing to his thought system.

Perhaps we can start with how the Enlightenment is never just a project of
reason but a project that hinges on testing its own limits. Indeed, if Foucault’s
formulation of the Enlightenment subject holds true, then one would always feel
uncertain about being’s ontological status. Commenting on Kant’s “What is
Enlightenment?”, Foucault makes the case that

it seems to me that Kant’s reﬂection [on the Enlightenment] is even a way of
philosophizing that has not been without its importance or effectiveness during
the last two centuries. The critical ontology of ourselves has to be conceived
as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are
is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed
on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them (49-50).
For Foucault, the ultimate lesson of the Enlightenment is perhaps a sober realization
that one’s identity is based on its own demise and that eventually the “imposed” limits
only presuppose the “possibility of going beyond them.” J ﬁrgen Habermas shares the
same concern. Although Habermas constantly defends the Enlightenment by
critiquing Foucault’s idea of a hegemonic Enlightenment, a process “understood as an

unmasking reversal of the self-idolizing that subjectivity carries on and at the same

125

time conceals from itself,” he nonetheless agrees on this point with Foucault (308). In
his Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Habermas proposes to view the
Enlightenment spirit in light of its advocacy of a community based on communicative
subjects.l7 Indeed, that is not too far away from Kant’s idea that “the public use of
reason must at all times be free, and it alone can bring about enlightenment among
men” (59). For Habermas, the Enlightenment is always about communication and the
free exchange of opinions, and therefore entails what he calls a “non-subject-centered
reason.”I 8 In other words, the subject utilizes reason while at the same time admits
that one’s opinion hinges upon other’s as well, a condition similar to the postmodern
de.centercd subject yet with possibility of agency. For him, a non-subject-centered
reason relies on one’s ability to
realize that their discourse is never deﬁnitively “puriﬁed” of the motives and
compulsions that have been ﬁltered out. As little as [one] can do without the
supposition of a puriﬁed discourse, [one has] equally to make do with
“unpuriﬂed” discourse.l9
Like Foucault’s enlightened subject that constantly needs to go beyond the limits of

reason, now Habermas’s subject has to presuppose the possibility of an unpuriﬁed

 

'7 Jilrgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Frederick Lawrence, Trans.
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990).

8 Habermas, 294.
'9 Habermas, 323.

126

discourse embedded in one’s pursuit of puriﬁed discourse, very much like Wolmar’s
proposition that every letter contains within itself secrets that are not revealed. The
result is a not only a communicative subject but also an excessive one, constantly
bordering on the limit of truth and reason.
If excess is such a destabilizing force, it naturally incurs the attacks of reason.

In this sense, excess is similar to Den'ida’s idea of supplementarity, which
compensates the loss of presence yet comes to be marginalized. As he analyzes
Rousseau’s philosophy of language in his OfGrammatology, he comments that
supplements are that which

transgress a prohibition and are experience as culpability. But, by economy of

diﬂ‘erence, they conﬁrm the interdict they transgress, get around a danger, and

reserve an expenditure. In spite of them but also thanks to them, we are

authorized to see the sun, to deserve the light that keeps us on the surface of the
mine.20
Indeed, the Enlightenment’s overemphasis on reason and self-presence would suggest
a tension with excess since excess represents that which is beyond reason, testing the

realm of the unknown and danger. Derrida’s idea of différance also tells a similar tale.

In analyzing the problem of western logocentrism, he proposes to use the word

 

0 Derrida, 165.

127

différance as a way of critiquing reason’s transcendental status, which ironically puts
reason at once at the center of meaning and its guiding principle (therefore
transcending the meaning). As an invented word, “différance” shares the same
pronunciation with “difference” in French. It recalls a time when the word
“difference” ﬁnally came to mean two things at the same time, i.e. to differ and to
defer, whose otherwise different histories can only be yoked together because of a
certain metonymic process. Yet, diﬂ'érance’s ambivalence and potential transgression
(aﬂer all they share the same pronunciation) also becomes that which needs to be
contained or obliterated. Indeed, it becomes a non word, a kind of gerund, always in
the process of becoming only to ﬁnd itself fall short again. Excess, in this sense,
comes to ﬁgure that which undermines reason and also becomes marginalized in the
process.

I would propose, however, a third model to examine excess, that excess’s
predominant presence in eighteenth-century literature suggests a more vital sign of
ambivalence. Using Freud’s psychoanalytic notion of the uncanny, one can start to see
why excess becomes the site of considerable ﬁxation in the Enlightenment cultural
logic.2| For Freud, the word canny (in German, heimlich) comes to mean its opposite

uncanny (unheimlich) through a metonymic process. Looking into German

 

2| Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” The Uncanny, translated by David McLintock (London: Penguin,
2003)

128

dictionaries, he found that canny (homely) comes to mean that which belongs to the
home and something familiar, and then came to mean a private space, and eventually
secrets only known to the family. It eventually drifts away to mean something
unknown, and therefore unfamiliar and unhomely. Freud suggests therefore that the
idea of the uncanny not only is associated with an aesthetic experience of horror, but r

also describes the condition in which what is supposed to be repressed or covered up

 

nonetheless comes to be revealed. l
What Freud hints at is that the uncanny becomes the site of ﬁxation exactly
because of its familiarity and its homeliness. In that sense, excess is already
something that can be found in the rational discourse of the Enlightenment. If one
believes in the power of science and the capacity of the human being as a knowing
subject, then every process of producing knowledge is already a kind of mental
creation. After all, as Freud suggests, one is never too far away from the childhood
one once experienced, a period in which everything is one’s own desire or serves as
an extension of one’s desire. Yet to know is also to set up a boundary and to be able to
deﬁne a space, and therefore one ends up repeating the uncanny processes, in which
one ﬁnds oneself in a vertiginous zone of bewilderment. What Freud seems to suggest
then is that in submitting to the power of reason, one also in turn idolizes excess, its

double that one was once familiar with.

129

IV

Perhaps one can begin with Rousseau’s belief in reason (and therefore
self-presence) and the human capacity to produce self-knowledge.22 For Rousseau,
the possibility to use reason as the guiding principle relies exactly on its affinity with
the self. As Derrida points out in OfGrammatology, following the traditional western
logocentrism, Rousseau prefers speech over writing in that writing is less immediate
than speech, and therefore belongs to the realm of exteriority. Writing, by
supplementing speech, becomes an excess, potentially causing conﬁlsion and
therefore needing to be perfected. Indeed, in several junctures of his Confessions, he
stresses the fact that he cannot write or he needs more time to perfect his writing.
Having confessed that he cannot write immediately because of his “passionate
temperament” (113), he has to offer his “blotted, scratched, confused, illegible
manuscripts” as evidence for his inability to write (113). Writing thus presents a
challenge to him, and indeed becomes something he needs to conquer in order to be
an author. Similarly, he attributes his inability to talk in public to his passion, as he
states, “in my anxiety to fulﬁll my obligations as quickly as possible I hastily gabble a

few ill-considered words, and am only too glad if they mean nothing at all” (115).

 

2 .
If one treats reason as the guiding principle of self-knowledge, then reason IS the result of the state
of self-presence. For further analysis, see Derrida’s OfGrammatology, 97 - 100.

130

Being in a conversational setting, Rousseau has to make immediate responses, and
therefore his speech becomes fragmentary, much like his fragmented writing. Plagued
by broken down language, Rousseau ﬁnds obstacles to his self-presence, the
possibility of self-identity. One can see clearly in these two examples that whenever
Rousseau pairs two things together, he always prioritizes self-presence, that which
comes closer to the logos, to the self. In other words, he believes in the power of
subject’s ability to create a clear identity as long as he is able to control excess.23
Rousseau’s prioritizing of the logos has its own problems as well. Already
Rousseau’s self-presence depends on the excess it marginalizes. Using the
intermission of the Italian opera as a metaphor for writing, he suggests that in order to
get to true writing, one has to endure “all the long tumult” in between acts, and then
“little by little everything falls into place,” “nothing is missing,” and there appears “a
delightful spectacle” (113). He concludes that, “this is almost exactly the process that
takes place in my brain when I want to write” (113). For Rousseau, writing becomes
excessive because it is powered by passion; whereas true writing is a kind of mental
writing, being closer to one’s true self and therefore with the chance of reﬂection

(another sign of self-presence). At the end, “nothing is missing” because of his belief

 

Jeanne Fuchs also suggests that the desire for Rousseau to “go back to something simple or natural,
can be interpreted as a manifestation of his deeper urge to go into himself and to strip away the
denatured, corrupt veneer which has hidden his true self.” Jeanne Thomas Fuchs, The Pursuit of Virtue:
A Study of Order in La Nouvelle Heloise (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), 11

131

 

in the ability of reﬂection. Reason, in this case, already is self-divisive, given the fact
that true writing has to be distinguished from all other writing, the kinds of writing
fragment because of the lack of reﬂection. Furthermore, Rousseau’s image of the
opera hinges on the image of the intermission. It is exactly because of these
“dangerous supplements,” as Den'ida calls them, that Rousseau is able to form his true
writing (141). Realizing potential contradictions, he continues to state that
it is only on my walks, among the rocks and trees, it is at night in my bed when I
lie awake, that l compose in my head; you can imagine how slowly, for I am
completely without verbal memory and have never been able to memorize half a
dozen verses in my life. Some of my paragraphs 1 have shaped and reshaped
mentally for ﬁve or six nights before they were ﬁt to be put down on paper (1 14).
His intermission now no longer consists of “blotted and scratched” writings as he
called them earlier, since he is not relying on “verbal memory”; instead, it would be a
kind of graphic writing. Rousseau sidesteps the question of verbal memory—another
kind of false writing—in order to conﬁrm his self-presence, e.g. the ability to use
“imagination” to authorize the self. Imagination therefore supplies the memory. Yet,
for Rousseau, imagination and feeling are interchangeable, as he suggests that he “has
only one faithful guide on which 1 can count; the succession of feelings which have

marked the development of my being, and thereby recall the events that have acted

132

upon it as cause or effect” (262). Now Rousseau’s memory depends on his ability to
feel. If one recalls earlier when Rousseau discussed his inability to write, it is exactly
because feelings “bring no illumination” (113). He continues, “I feel everything but I
see nothing” (113). Feeling is not true seeing, therefore it cannot provide him with a
good graphic memory so as to ﬁnally make up true writing. Rousseau’s true writing,
or in this case, any writing, can be possible only if he is able to renounce it as writing
at the same time, forming a self—divisive excess.

This tension between the heart and the letter, between the interiority and the
exteriority, is played out in Julie fairly early on. In the second Preface, N has already
shown his mistrust of these letters. They are not only self-involved and self-interested
but often display a skewed sense of reality. The letters in this sense become the “false
writings” that Rousseau so frequently tries to avoid. For Rousseau, Julie becomes a
contested arena where different claims about the validity of letter writing clash.24
Sometimes letters are stolen, enclosed, and fragmented so that they are no longer the

window to one’s soul but a sort of deviation ﬁ'om self-presence.25 Some letters are

 

24 . . .
De Man, for example, suggests that even “Julie IS unable to read her own texts” in the sense that

Julie can be seen as an “allegory of unreadability.” De Man, 217.

The editor of the Julie letters has indicated on several footnotes that these letters are always in
danger of or subject to change and interpolation. Regarding St. Preux’s letters that describe the Parisian
social scenes, the Editor makes it clear that “without anticipating the Reader’s Judgement and Julie’s
about these narrations, I think I can say that if 1 had to make them and did not make them different. On
several occasions I have been on the verge of removing them and substituting some of my own;
ultimately I am leaving them in, and pride myself on my courage” (190).

133

repeated or complemented so that the same event can be recounted several times.26
Other letters will be reread and re-commented, and readers will derive from them
different readings and opinions. Finally, letter-writers in Julie constantly instruct their
readers (who are frequently letter-writers themselves) how to “properly” read their
particular letters, as well as letters in general. When St. Preux is forced to leave for
Paris, he produces a letter that is very much like Clarissa’s mad letter. Julie picks up
the dramatic parallel quickly and criticizes St. Preux for staging his own madness:
“No, my respectable friend, it is not you I recognize in this eﬁeminate letter which I
want to forget forever and already consider you to have disavowed” (emphasis mine;
174).27 Julie understands what it means to produce a fragmented letter, which clearly
violates the propriety of the letter (as l have discussed in Chapter 1). More
importantly, Julie is able to see through the epistolary facade to know how
letter-writing can be manipulated to create a certain expected readerly response. She
herself knows only too well that letter-writing is never just the writing of the heart

according to the dictates of propriety. Julie sees the letter as the site of

 

26 The end of Part One and the beginning of Part Two recount how St. Preux and Edward leave Julie.
Claire, Edward, and St. Preux all write long letters regarding similar events.

Katherine Ann Jensen suggests that there is a social ideal of “epistolary woman” created in the late
seventeenth—century France. It seeks to “moderate women’s discursive power by deﬁning women as
natural writers of letters.” “Her allegedly natural affinity for writing love bound women who emulated
her to a single and ‘nonliterary’ genre—the love letter—which further limited them to a self-defeating
heterosexual plot of seduction and betrayal.” In this sense, for St. Preux to occupy the position of the
epistolary woman when he is forced to leave Julie means that he is meticulously exploiting the existing
epistolary role so as to plead his case. Julie understands these implications as seen in Clarissa as well
as in Lettres portugaises, and therefore points out St. Preux’s effeminacy. For more details, please see
the Preface of Jensen’s Writing Love. Katherine Ann Jensen, Writing Love: Letters, Women, and the
Novel in France, I 605-] 7 76 (Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1995), Sand 3.

134

self-empowerment, viewing herself the equal of her correspondents. Letter-writing in
this sense is personal and self-motivated, and anyone else who enters this private
space would be considered an outsider. Julie discourages St. Preux from using letters
to ﬂatter her: “Take it from me, do not take it upon yourself to tell me the truth about
myself, you would do too poor ajob” (105).

From a structural level, one can clearly see that writing is as much a source of
self-knowledge as it is the communication between different parties: after all, there
are no letters written between St. Preux’s maritime departure and his eventual return
to see Julie, whereas only when St. Preux and Julie are closest to each other do they
write most of their letters to each other. So on the one hand, Julie, Claire, and St.
Preux subvert the epistolary purposes of communication by writing extensively about
themselves repeatedly, letter after letter.28 The act of letter-writing becomes the
cornerstone of Julie, and Julie. On the other hand, letter-writing becomes the source
of deviation (Wolmar’s idea of letter’s secrecy) and temptation, as the love story does
begin with St. Preux’s initial attempt to seduce his young student.29 In this case, every

letter could potentially possess the corrupting power to alienate the narrators from

 

28 De Man, 212 and 213.

29 Janet Altman suggests that this continuation of epistolary linkage is essential to epistolary novels,
especially the section ones. These letters are “instrument of destiny,” and the “very continuation of
their correspondence reﬂects the fatality of their passion.” On seduction plots in letter novels such as
Les Liaisons Dangereuses, she notices an “apparent determinism operating.” For her, “the more
conﬁdential and secret the relationship between the writers, the more dangerous and necessary the
maintenance of their tie becomes” and even result in a “fatal” ending. She also mentions that “secrets,
particularly in La Nouvelle Heloise, are often fatal.” Janet Altman, Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form
(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1982), 61-2.

135

themselves.
In Part III, Julie recounts the initial correspondence with St. Preux, and comes to
the conclusion,
instead of throwing your ﬁrst letter into the ﬁre, or taking it to my mother, I
made so bold as to open it. I meant to refrain from answering these fatal
letters which I could not reﬁ'ain ﬁ'om reading. That frightful struggle
impaired my health. I saw the chasm into which I was about to plunge
(281).
The love letters are fatal not just because they are passionate and therefore potentially
dangerous to one’s reason, but because once letter writing begins, it only begets more
letters. Early on, Julie confesses to St. Preux that
Had you in your lessons bent philosophy to your aims, had you tried to
establish maxims favorable to your interests, then in attempting to deceive
me you would soon have undeceived me; but the most dangerous of your
seduction is to use none (50).
From the outset, Julie tells St. Preux that it is his innocence and the purity of his love
that makes her drop her guard. As the reader knows from St. Preux’s love letters, he
never just “use[s] none” and in fact meticulously calculates the effect of his love

letters. That Julie unconsciously overlooks St. Preux’s letters suggests that in

136

 

eighteenth-century sentimental registers, people often regard the letter as an
equivalent of the heart. But more importantly, St. Preux’s letters seduce when they are
most lacking in rhetorical embellishment and sometimes literally without a physical
presence—“use none.” Like Edger Allen Poe’s purloined letter, under their innocent
facade letters continue to be a destabilizing force, confounding the eye and heart. This
corruptible and destabilizing force of the letter is even more obvious in the central
episode in Part III (the “Inoculation of Love” scene as the Fifth engraving suggests)
where St. Preux deliberately contracts smallpox from Julie despite knowing the
danger. Claire recounts the episode to Julie later on in another letter:

Unable to heal your disease, he meant to share it. Remembering the way he

kissed your hand, I cannot doubt that he inoculated himself deliberately

(274).
Love is seen as an act of contamination and contagion, just like their correspondence
is a “shameful traffic” that both Julie and St. Preux blame themselves for (299). Once
it starts, it cannot be stopped, even if their correspondence/love is seen as dangerous.
Julie says it best when she suggests that if St. Preux is “less dear” to her, she would
make the letter “shorter” (300). Julie implicitly points out the letter as a substitute of

love or passion would share the same kind of seductive power.30

 

30 De Man talks extensively about how Julie can be seen as a novel where referential power of passion

and love becomes so excessive that it also resists a proper reading. See page 198 for more details.

137

 

The whole episode ends with Julie’s rejection of St. Preux. The idea that the
letter is somehow seen as corrupted excess is further employed by Julie when she
writes a letter demanding St. Preux to stop his letters. She writes,

despite the security of my heart, I no longer wish to be judge of my own
cause, nor as wife succumb to the same overconﬁdence that was my
undoing as maiden. This is the letter you shall receive from me. I beg you
also to write me no more. Yet as I shall never cease to take the tenderest
interest in you and since this sentiment is as pure as the light of day, I will
be most pleased to have news of you betimes (309).
For Julie, the heart can be secure and contains the purest sentiment, yet the letter as
the heart’s content is always dangerous and corruptible. Only when the letter ceases to
be the heart’s content—“l will be most pleased to have news of you betimes”—is St.
Preux allowed to write. The letter is therefore seen as the extension of the self, always
risking deviation from self-presence. Yet despite all this discussion of the letter as a
dangerous sign, Rousseau’s letter-writers continue to revel in the letters they write and
the secrets they possess and exchange, as if epistolarity can take on life of its own.3 '
Even when Monsieur Wolmar and Julie are married after Part IV, Julie still insists on

writing to him.

 

3' Indeed, the plots of both halves of Julie depend on two secrets: Julie and St. Preux have to leave
each other because of their correspondence is recovered, and the second half begins with Julie laments
about the guilt she feels regarding St. Preux.

I38

While letters in Julie do secure a sense of the self, their seductive quality always
threatens to jeopardize its boundaries. Just by looking at the correspondence between
Julie and St. Preux one cannot help but wonder how their letters come to resemble
each other, even to the extent of being indistinguishable from one another. When
learning about the fate of their love, both utilize the same dramatic effect of the
ﬁ-agmented letter: Part Two begins with a ﬁagmented letter from St. Preux when he is
forced to leave and ends with Julie’s nervous scribbles about the loss of St. Preux’s
correspondence (160, 251). Both St. Preux and Julie assume the double role of the
mentor and the mentee, and they instruct each other as well as being instructed on
how to read their correspondence. It is quite notable in Julie that letter-writers often
utilize and share the same sentiments and the same rhetoric devices over and over
again. Julie, for example, accuses St. Preux’s Paris letters for being too embellished:

Pray tell me, my ﬁ'iend, in what language or rather in what jargon in the
narration in your latest Letter? Might it not by chance be an instance of wit?
If your design is to use it with me often, you really should sendnme the
dictionary. What, pray, is the sentiment of a man’s attire? A soul dons like a
livery? Maxims measured by the fathom? What do you expect a poor Swiss
woman to understand by these sublime ﬁgures? (195)

St. Preux’s epistolary descriptions of Parisian scenes demonstrate his cultural

139

knowledge but not his pure sentiments—they are not out of his heart. Therefore Julie
is mocking him for making pompous claims that an innocent girl in the countryside
like her cannot comprehend. More importantly, this recalls the earlier letter where she
instructs St. Preux on the seductive power of his plainer letters (50). St. Preux then
reveals his understanding of Julie’s epistolary instruction, and in turn teaches her how
to read his letter:
All right, my Julie, scold me, quarrel with me, beat me; I will bear it all, but
I shall continue to tell you what I think. Who shall be the custodian of my
sentiments, if it is not you who enlightens them, and with whom would my
heart consent to speak, if you refused to hear it? When I give you an
account of my observations and judgments, that is you will correct them,
not so you will approve them, and the more errors I may commit, the more 1
must hasten to tell you about them. If I ﬁnd fault with the disorders that
strike me in this great city, I shall not apologize on the pretext I am speaking
to you in conﬁdence; for I never say anything about a third party that I am
not prepared to say to his face, and in everything I write you about the
Parisians, I am merely repeating what I say to their faces everyday (215).
St. Preux enjoys the reversal of the mentor and mentee dynamic as he repeats the

same rhetoric over and over again (see also 105). At the same time, he reverses

I40

Julie’s comment on his pompous style and suggests that there is not much difference
between Julie’s and his own letters: both can be read as having double meanings and
what is deemed innocence can be considered pompous to a trained eye. That is why
later on Claire (Now Madame d’Orbe) can scold Julie for being “pompous” too
(332).” Imitating St. Preux and Julie’s earlier fragmented epistolary style, now Claire
attempts to teach Julie how to read her own letter:
My goodness, Cousin, what pleasure your letter gave me! The charming
preacher! .. .. charming in truth. But preacher all the same. Splendid
orations: almost nothing about works. The Athenian architect!.... that fancy
talker!.... you know... in your old Plutarch. Pompous descriptions, a
superb temple!.... after he has ﬁnished talking, the other one comes forth; a
plain man; of simple appearance, grave and poised... like your Cousin
Claire, for instance. . .. In a feeble, slow, and even slightly nasal voice. . ..
What he has said, I will do. He stops, and all applaud! Exit the
phrase-monger. My child, we are these two Architects; the temple in
question is that of friendship (emphasis mine; 332-3).
While Claire uses this to talk about their friendship, she is also commenting on their

writing styles, one pompous and the other plain. But she also cautions Julie that her

 

32 It can also be noted that Claire acts neutrally during most of the ﬁrst half of the love story but
suddenly changes her attitude toward Julie. She now takes on an assertive role and even at times
reminds Julie of her hypocrisy when they are younger.

14]

sincerity can very well be artiﬁcial. Claire’s is a self-reﬂexive moment, for she is

thinking not just about their contrasting epistolary styles but also deliberating on the

“production” of letters in general, the architecture of that epistolary world. In some

sense Claire’s letter complements Julie’s because Claire’s letters serve to tease out the

“hidden” meanings in Julie’s letter (just as we need Julie’s letters to read St. Preux’s).

Moreover, Claire’s mocking letter calls attention to how epistolary boundaries—and

the selves that are constructed therein—are gradually eroding. The textured world of

Julie requires readerly vigilance when it comes to who is writing whom, and who is

reading what. A lot of letters in Julie are simply titled as “Reply” or “To [whom]” or

“From [whom]” as a deliberate play on the uncertain state of the addressers and

addressees. In other words, not only might letter-writing lead to the possibility of

losing oneself, but if you cannot tell the addresser from the addressee, and the imitator

from the imitated, how can you recognize the imposter? While for Rousseau the

ability to tell the pure from the corrupted is critical in the love affair between Julie and

St. Preux, there is also this other side of Rousseau that secretly enjoys this ambivalent

picture of epistolary excess.

V

The blurred distinction between the original and imposter, between author and

l 42

reader, and eventually between all the characters in his novel, is made increasingly
conspicuous. If reason is the overarching emphasis of the Enlightenment, then it is
also reason that needs to constantly incorporate the Other.33 In other words, it is not
enough to be within reason’s conﬁnes; in fact, despite all the talks of reason’s
reasonableness, the Enlightenment often goes beyond itself and attempts to include
“everything”.34 Indeed, one of the objectives of Rousseau’s confessional project is
to include everything so as to be able to reach the limit of himself, or as he puts it:
Since I have undertaken to reveal myself absolutely to the public, nothing about
me must remain hidden or obscure. I must remain incessantly beneath his gaze,
so that he may follow me in all the extravagances of my heart and into every
least comer of my life (65; emphasis mine)“5

Already readers of his Confessions feel the same kind of the tension between excess

and reason as is prevalent in his Julie. Indeed, if Julie provides a rational account of

 

3 One of Habermas’s contentions against postmodern critiques is their unfair assessment of the
subject’s ability to rationally critique oneself. If the postmodern critique of the Enlightenment always
points out reason’s inability to facilitate its other, then through using non-subject-centered reason, one
is able to ensure a possible civil community. Ironically, if the Enlightenment project relies on its ability
to assume otherness, it in turn suggests another kind of excess, a kind of paranoid economy in which
one is at once oneself and its other. As one can see, Foucault’s enlightened subject always tests reason’s
limit and therefore risks going beyond.

4 .
It is no surprise that the eighteenth century sees the ﬂourish of encyclopedias. Elizabeth J.

MacArthur, Extravagant Narratives: Closure and Dynamics in the Epistolary F orrn (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 19960), 20-22.

35 This “investigative spirit” in the Enlightenment, particularly in the forms of eighteenth-century
encyclopedias, dictionaries, and letters, “presents multiple perspectives and internal commentary,
putting into question the possibility of objective truth or stable authority.” See Elizabeth MacArthur’s
Extravagant Narratives, 19-22, for more details.

143

the heart, it is also most reasonable when the heart is at its utmost extravagant state.36
In the Confessions, excess becomes that which propels him to continue to write: after
all, without “all the extravagances” of his heart, he would have nothing that “remain[s]
hidden or obscure.” In this sense, the Confessions as an encyclopedic project of self
paradoxically relies both on his heart (“every least comer of his life”) and on its
“extravagances,” something that constantly eludes every comer, or something that
ﬁgures itself as a kind of bad writing in excess of himself. Rousseau’s Confessions
thus demands the public’s (or his readers’) incessant “gaze,” which he turns inwardly
onto himself; or better yet, he projects himself into the mind of the others as a way of
completing his encyclopedia project. Rousseau has to go beyond the limit, repeatedly
begging the reader to “suspend” one’s “judgment” till the reader has “read” him “to
the end” (261), suggesting that he will continue to write only to guarantee his
authorial grip and fulﬁll his project. In a sense, Rousseau’s encyclopedic project of
himself is also a project of his excessive identity because he has to continue to write
to prove to readers that he has told them everything; or, as he later states, “I am

repeating myself, and 1 know it; but it is necessary” (386). He is, as we can see, at

 

We may recall that in the second preface, R suggests that a love letter is most “reasonable” when it
is at its most excessive situations: “In contrast, a letter really dictated by love; a letter from a truly
passionate Lover, will be desultory, diffuse, full of verbose, disconnected, repetitious passages. His
heart, ﬁlled with an overﬂowing sentiment, ever repeats the same thing, and is never done, like a
running spring that ﬂows endlessly and never runs dry. Nothing salient, nothing remarkable; neither the
words, nor the turns, nor the sentences are memorable; there is nothing in it to admire or to be struck by.
And yet one feels the soul melt; one feels moved without knowing why. The strength of the sentiment
may not strike us, but its truth affects us, and that is how one heart can speak to another” (10).

I44

once inside within the recesses of his mind, and outside among the public.

If we were to borrow Freud’s idea of paranoia, we might suggest that while
Rousseau’s Confessions wishes to explore himself to inﬁnity, he also ﬁnds himself
inextricably bound up with others, be they the public or his readers. For Freud,
paranoia often reveals itself in the form of “projection into another one”: “I do not
love him” will be turned into “I hate him” and by projection turned into “He hates

(persecutes) me.”37

What is worth exploring further is that for Freud subjects can
ﬁeely replace each other in the case of paranoia. Therefore it is not just a simple
matter of internalizing others (the author of course is always worried about what
others see in him and his work), but a matter of the breakdown of subjectivity
(everyone is in me and, vice versa, 1 am in everyone). Rousseau, in this case, not only
shows his anxiety over his authorial intention, but also reveals the fact that there is
always a strange feeling that somehow he might not be himself, and that what he says
or writes may not always provide an authentic account of himself. If Freud’s paranoia

produces symptoms of feeling disoriented and uncertain, then Rousseau constantly

reminds us of his uneasy relationship with himself: on the one hand, there might

 

37 Sigmund Freud, Three Case Histories, Philip Rietf, ed, (New York: Touchstone, 1996), 139.
Accompany this is Rousseau’s constant self-defeating apology: in order to ensure his authority, he has
to repeatedly plead his innocence in representing himself despite his own suffering: “I am laying
myself sufficiently open to human malice by telling my story, without rendering myself more
vulnerable by any silence” (65). Breaking away from the traditional confessional genre in which one’s
life story serves didactic purposes, Rousseau seems to partially understand that to write is also to lose
one’s identity in the reader/author relationship — the Foucauldian lesson that the Enlightenment is
entails a sober realization that one’s identity is based on its own demise.

I45

always be a part of him, the “extravagances of his heart,” that elude him, and it
becomes the source of anxiety as exempliﬁed in the paranoia economy of his
Confessions. Conversely, if he is deﬁned by the “extravagances of his heart” then his
identity is also excessive, always encompassing everything, like his encyclopedia
project attempts to achieve.

A more full-blown parallel can be seen in his Julie since it involves not only the
letter, but also more diverse narrative voices. In fact, it is hot uncommon for
epistolary narrators to feel paranoid or to be involved in some sort of paranoiac
dynamic with his or her correspondents. For example, Pamela constantly worries
about her letters’ status; and she has every right to do so since her letters are actually
stolen and read without her awareness.38 Despite her realization of her letters’ ill-fate,
she continues to write in various forms, suggesting that paranoia in letters need not be
seen as crippling the pm.” As I have tried to show in Chapter 1, while Richardson
tries to render the truth of the heart through manipulation of epistolary print, he
ironically creates 3 Pamela whose heart lies not inside the interior of the letter but
often outside in its margins. Rousseau’s encyclopedic project of himself also

ironically relies on the outside. In Julie, while Rousseau’s letters lack the kind of

 

38 . . . .
“Plot” in Pamela. Even after she realizes her letters are stolen, she continues to write her letters for

writing’s sake. That characters in Pamela like to be “read” should be read as a symptom of this
aranoia.

9 It is no wonder that Thomas Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49, a modern classic on paranoia, centers
itself around the secret sign of Thurn and Taxis, a German princely house that was in charge of the
postal service in Europe during the sixteenth century.

I46

editorial manipulation—cg. Richardson himself is a printer of his own novels—they
do concern themselves very much with the authenticity of subjectivity and often cast
doubt on the validity of such an over-conﬁdent position that the Enlightenment so
often endorses.

In Julie, such suspicion of one’s control over one’s own words and selves is
shown throughout. Letter writers take turns revealing how their letters are never just a
product of themselves and how often their feelings are often created from without.
After all, as I have shown earlier, for R, love is ﬁgurative, and ﬁgures and characters
in love letters are doubly so. Letter writers extend, retract, and traverse the conﬁnes of
their epistolary selves. In the earlier quote that I use when St. Preux pleads Julie to be
his “custodian of his sentiments,” St. Preux does not just talk about how Julie should
“enlighten” him and his sentiments; in fact, he is using this occasion to demonstrate
how he and Julie are always bound up together once they are entwined in their letter
correspondence.40 If Julie safeguards and monitors St. Preux’s feeling, she does so by
becoming one with St. Preux: “I am, I confess, no longer my own, my alienated soul

is entirely in you. . .. O Julie, conceal nothing from your own self” (83). While St.

 

4 .
0 “All right, my Julie, scold me, quarrel with me, beat me; I will bear it all, but I shall continue to tell

you what I think. Who shall be the custodian of my sentiments, if it is not you who enlightens them,
and with whom would my heart consent to speak, if you refused to hear it? When 1 give you an account
of my observations andjudgments, that is you will correct them, not so you will approve them, and the
more errors I may commit, the more I must hasten to tell you about them. If I ﬁnd fault with the
disorders that strike me in this great city, 1 shall not apologize on the pretext I am speaking to you in
confidence; for 1 never say anything about a third party that I am not prepared to say to his face, and in
everything I write you about the Parisians, I am merely repeating what 1 say to their faces everyday”
(215).

I47

Preux’s plea may seem wishful and rhetorical, he is unwittingly pointing to an
epistolary moment where a shared identity is possible, exactly because letters provide
the occasion for such a connection: Just as St. Preux speculates that Julie would “see”
him “like a madman” in the same letter, so Julie refers to him as “madman” in her
letter to Claire a few pages earlier (83, 77). Epistolary communication encourages or
even facilitates a kind of paranoiac relationship where everyone becomes more and
more like each other because no one singular epistolary identity can exist without the
others, even invisible or implied others. After all, the question of author—Who is the
author of this letter? Who is the author of these letters? Who is reading or writing this
letter?——-is at the very heart of any epistolary correspondence.

In this light, St. Preux’s curious plea that Julie should “conceal nothing from
your own self” is not curious at all but is actually quite sincere since to engage in any
epistolary communication is in some sense to share an identity. Julie shares the same
sentiments when she says in her last sent letter before her death that

the whole charm of the [epistolary] relationship prevailed among us lies in that
openness of the heart that places all sentiments, all thoughts in common, and
makes it so that each one, feeling he is what he ought to be, reveals himself to all
such as he is (566).

In a sense, to write letters is to “conceal nothing from your own self’; after all,

148

epistolary writers pride themselves in concealing nothing from themselves. At the
same time, this “revelation” is also predicated upon the idea of writing to the others,
and thus the sharing: my self-realization is on the premise that I am writing to
someone. Therefore, for Julie to “conceal nothing” from her own self is also to
conceal nothing from St. Preux’s self (punning of “your own self” since St. Preux
regards himself as Julie’s own self), which St. Preux ironically seeks after. In Julie,
therefore, Rousseau seems to suggest that to write letters implicates the letter writers
in a web of identities; letter writers would always be paranoiac because they are
constantly worried about whether they have included everything (“conceal nothing”),
therein creating an illusion that they are not losing control of their words.“ We can
then more properly assess what St. Preux has been hinting at in terms of the question
of a genuine self: “for I never say anything about a third party that I am not prepared
to say to his face, and in everything I write you about the Parisians, I am merely
repeating what I say to their faces everyday” (215). St. Preux is saying that he
includes everything about everyone so that he can ensure his integrity and his genuine
self.42

This question of who is writing and what has been written therefore becomes the

 

4' In discussing epistolary fragments in French novels, Janet Altman discovers that these fragments
often alternate between different pronounces to indicate “the writer’s inner confusion” (58). And
certainly for her, Julie is no different. She points out that in Part 11, St. Preux addresses Julie from
“ ou” to “her”, indicating his unstable mental state.

This statement is also an example of Rousseau’s idea of self-presence where what writes is no
difference to what one says then to what one thinks or knows.

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question of excessive identity.43 One might even suggest that if indeed nothing is to
be concealed from one’s own self, then why is it that in the letter genre the conﬁdant
is constantly invoked?44 In other words, if there is nothing to conceal, why do you
write to someone who can share your secrets (if secrets can be shared, are they secret
still)? The letter conﬁdant is not just a mere other (like any other addressee or
addressers); the letter conﬁdant is the necessary other because a letter writer can
never ﬁnish an encyclopedic project of himself, such as Rousseau has been attempting
to achieve, without the letter conﬁdant sharing in the excess. For example, in Part
Four Julie writes to Claire that she needs to add Monsieur Wolmar as her letter
conﬁdant in order to gain his trust when St. Preux visits them. This act prompts both
Julie and Claire to think about the impact of the letter conﬁdant on the epistolary self.
Julie tells Claire,

it was to elect my husband himself as conﬁdant, to hold no private interview that

would not be reported to him, and to write no letter that he would not be shown. 1

even oblige to write each Letters as if he would not to see it, and then to show it

 

43 In fact, right before St. Preux’s plea, he repeats R’s idea of excess in that reason has no boundary:
“How do you expect a sensible soul to taste inﬁnite joys in moderation? How do you expect it to bear
so many kinds of transport at one time without losing control? Do you not know that there is a limit
where no reason can hold out, that there is no man in the world whose common sense can stand up to
every test?” (83).

Janet Altman’s Epistolarity devotes a whole chapter on “conﬁdence and conﬁdants”. Although

Altman mainly discusses the function of conﬁdants as a narrative device that reﬂect the changes in the
epistolary heroes or heroines, she does point out one paranoiac aspect of them: “the sudden
disappearance of a real conﬁdant emphasizes the mental isolation of a traumatized epistolary hero who
continues, even in his imagination, to address an unseizable and unreachable addressee.” Altman, 58.

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to him. . .. although 1 could not prevent myself, when writing it, from being aware

that he would see it, I bear myself witness that this did not lead to change a word

for it (354).
The watchful eyes of the conﬁdant are ever-present. Even Julie, who earlier believes
that “there was a time” when their letters “were easy and charming; the sentiment that
dictated them ﬂowed with an elegant simplicity; it required neither art nor coloration,
and its purity was its only ornament,” has to admit that she cannot prevent herself
from “being aware” that Wolmar would see it (83). In a sense, Julie’s letter is not just
exposed to St. Preux; it is also extended to her conﬁdants, whose otherwise secret
presences nonetheless compliment Julie’s letter and ensure the letter’s authenticity.
Claire admits that if she knows that a third party has

pried about in my letters, I would take no further pleasure in writing to you; little

by little coolness would insert itself between us together with reserve, and we no

longer love each other except as any other two women (356).
At the same time, what makes this a two-way relationship is that Julie’s conﬁdants are
never just mere correspondents; they reply in ways that not only reveal the letter’s
weaknesses and incapacities, but also expose its genuine quality in unexpected ways.
After realizing his role as a conﬁdant to Julie, Wolmar, for example, tells Julie that

You indeed convey the same things to your friend [Claire] and to your husband,

15]

but not in the same manner; and if you insist on lumping everything together, it
will come to pass that your Letters will be written more for me than for her, and
you will feel comfortable with neither the one nor the other (354; emphasis
mine).
Wolmar suggests that the epistolary desire to include “everything” is inextricably
bound up with the desire of being recognized by others (here in the form of one’s
conﬁdants). 1 am ﬁnally myself only when I write to my conﬁdant. But at the same
time, by a sheer change of audience, the letter’s content changes, e.g. “not in the same
manner”. I am both myself and everyone else. While Claire suggests that letting other
men read their letters is revolting, she and Julie constantly share their letters with
others, enclose others’ letters, and become themselves letter voyeurs. "Therefore,
Rousseau’s sensitivity to the role of conﬁdant and the kind of paranoiac relationship
intrinsic to letter correspondence suggests that he too realizes how paranoia is very
much at the heart of any project of encyclopedia, and how the epistolary selves he
envisions in Julie will always be exposed to one another, ironically making them

complete and fragmented at the same time.

VI

If for Rousseau, there is always the possibility of not accounting for oneself in

152

terms of identity or memory, he turns it into a recurrent theme of his in order to make
sense of it, to the extent of enjoying it. We have already seen how N and R teasingly
treat their own textual existences in the Second Preface, despite showing a serious
interest in the authenticity of these letters and the author. We may turn to another of
Freud’s essays, “The Uncanny,” to think about these contradictory attitudes toward
what is the truth behind everything and subsequently the loss of origin. If the uncanny
contains a moral about the Enlightenment, then it tells the story of how one’s past
desire (the uncanny) comes to be “surmounted,” if only to be later revealed.45 Indeed,
one of the stories that the Enlightenment constantly retells is the story of excess, or
the story of its ﬁxation on excess. In this respect, despite Rousseau’s attempt to
contain excess, the whole of Confessions is about excess. One of the things that
repeatedly come into place is that Rousseau’s Confessions has a secret confession,
namely, a confession of his desire to confess. Indeed, over and over again, Rousseau
repeats the same story: “I have only one thing to fear in this enterprise; not that I may
say too much to tell untruth, but that I may not tell everything and may conceal the
truth” (170). Rousseau seems to over and over again reassure the reader that he will
never consciously tell any lie, although he has to admit that he may unconsciously

leave out some details. Even the ending of the Confessions ends with this confession.

 

45 See Terry Castle’s Introduction to The Female Thermometer for more details. Terry Castle, The
Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1995), 155.

153

In a self-reﬂexive moment, Rousseau ends the text by reading to his ﬁ'iends the
ending of the Confessions:
I have told the truth. If anyone knows anything contrary to what I have
here recorded, though he prove it a thousand times, his knowledge a lie
and an irnposture; and if he refuses to investigate and inquire into it
during my lifetime he is no lover of j ustice or of truth (606).
The reason why he feels the need to reassure his reader is exactly because there is
something that he has to confess, a secret guilt, that he does enjoy all the excesses that
he nonetheless openly regards as a deviation. In other words, these are the things that
are repressed but nonetheless resurface in his Confessions.

Indeed, one of the lessons of Freud’s “Uncanny” is exactly the blurring of the
division between reason and excess. If excess and reason eventually share a certain
afﬁnity, it also helps to explain why he constantly confesses that he cannot be sure of
truth, because self-presence (the ability to set up boundary and therefore deﬁne the
self) is already excessive. That is why he will admit that he repeats things in his
Confessions, because until he can be sure that he has reached the moment of truth, he
has to stage the repetition again. He has to confess several times in the
autobiography that he is unique and natural at the same time. He has to fret over the

same points exactly because they represent something of an anxiety, a threat to his

154

self-identity. Similarly, he continues to set up the same promise of self-presence only
to ﬁnd himself extemalized: he can’t write, but he writes the Confessions any way.
This point also bears further theoretical inquiry outside the Confessions. For example,
in his Social Contract, A Discourse on Inequality, and “On the Origin of Language,”
the theoretical framework always hinges upon an original scene, namely, the scene of
the ﬁrst man, the ﬁrst human society, or the ﬁrst utterance. Yet at the same time, these
points of origin also bear in themselves differences. We can see this in the famous
episode in Book II of the Confessions when young Rousseau confesses that he lied
about his stealing of a pink ribbon accusing Marion instead. He repeats the episode
again in the fourth walk of his Reveries of the Solitary Walk only to deny his former
lie about his lying on the ground of “irresistible impulse of temperament” (52). The
constant reassurance of his inability to lie in his writings is not only excessive, but
also becomes a secret desire. The excesses, i.e. the lies, the false writings, the false
speech therefore constitute who he is, and indeed, his “uniqueness,” because for
Rousseau the road to self-presence already entails these excesses. Every
representation of his self-identity already entails a false identity, like a false writing:
“There is not one that I have not had to rewrite four or ﬁve times before sending it to
the printer” (113). That is also the reason that he needs a second “confessions,” The

Reveries of the Solitary Walker, as he himself calls it a sequel. His encyclopedic

155

project will never end. At the same time, he is not particularly worried: he actually
enjoys the repetitions, “the compulsion to write” (263), because if every form of
self-presence has already voided its origin, then every attempt and every repetition is
also in the process of becoming.

As we have seen, one of the traits that is central to an epistolary narrative is
exactly the concern over how events are narrated and repeated: often letters authors
take tums writing or commenting about the same event, while at other times they
might even relay, appropriate, or interpolate each other’s sentiments or opinions to the
extent of losing track of the idea’s origin. While Rousseau is concerned about what
we might call epistolary technology—i.e. how letters are transmitted, delivered,
etc.—his Julie provides other points of interest, namely, an extensive exploration of
the letter’s origin. It is in this light that we can perhaps revisit N’s idea that “these
letters are no letters.” While he tries to defy the legitimacy of the Julie letters, his
reading ironically points out Rousseau’s politics of excess: something ﬁnally has its
grounding when it is at its most excessive state.

I would like to offer a point of interest within Julie to highlight this simultaneous
built-up and erasure that has eventually become too prominent to ignore. In many
cases, the Julie letters culminate in Clarens, a place that not only houses the Wolmars

but also serves as the space of moral idealism of the novel. After all, this is where

156

Julie ﬁnds her inner peace and avoids St. Preux’s contacts.46 At the same time, the
seeming utopia is also ﬁlled with its own inner conﬂicts. In Clarens, we not only
witness the ﬁnal death of Julie, who confesses the irreconcilability between duty and
passion; by doing so, Julie reveals that her love for St. Preux never ends and “the
virtue that separates [them] on earth shall unite [them] in the eternal abode” (610).
That Clarens can only be a substitute for a higher ideal is no surprise. We do have the
head of Clarens, Wolmar, as a self-proclaimed atheist and despite Julie’s devotedness,
there always seems to be aloofrress between them. But Rousseau also spends the latter
half of the letter detailing this idealized location and thus calling our attentions to
some of the recurrent themes in Clarens, especially the discussion of excess disguised
as order and reason and that of another “original scene”.

St. Preux recounts his experience in Clarens in separate letters to Edward. In Part
Four, Letter X1, he starts to depict Julie’s secret orchard “Elysium” in Clarens in great
detail. This garden is maze-like, creating a disoriented feeling for St. Preux. He can no
longer see where he “had entered” and “found [himself] there as if [he] had dropped
from the sky” (387). St. Preux is baffled by the sight and thinks that “I was looking at

the wildest, most solitary place in nature, and it seemed to me I was the ﬁrst mortal

 

46 Michael Metteer suggests that Clarens is, supposedly, “meant to be the community of reconciliation,
of moral transparence and of a harmonious order that is progressively social, individual, aesthetic,
moral and religious.” Michael Metteer, Desire in Fictional Communities (New York: Garland
Publishing, 1988), 100.

157

who ever had set foot in this wilderness” (3 87). Again, Rousseau’s preoccupation with
the origin is again shown here, and Clarens and Elysium prove to be highly relevant
too. After all, St. Preux’s previous letter to Edward recounts his “principal
observations on the part of this house’s economy that concerns domestics and paid
labors” (386) and thus links Clarens’ ideal setting to Rousseau’s thoughts on political
economy.47 Indeed, what makes Elysium a stunning and “enchanting” place is its
artless artfulness. Julie tells St. Preux that “nature did it all” and at the same time, it is
under Julie’s direction, and “there is nothing here” that she has not “designed” (388).
Rousseau’s original myth thus bespeaks a human effort to establish civility ﬁ'om
scratch. Diﬂerent from the ones that go astray, Julie’s Elysium has to be excessive in
order for it to be reasonable and ideal. St. Preux continues to marvel at “everything,”
“everywhere” and “on every side” in this letter. What St. Preux has painted is a
harmonious relationship between human labors and nature. His description thus
reminds us of R’s words earlier, that no one can “assign exact limits to Nature” and
“assert” that “here is as far as Man can go” (7).

The idea that something excessive can be tamed therefore becomes the rationale

behind the establishment of Elysium, and eventually Clarens. While Rousseau admits

 

There are many examples in this letter to promote an allegorical reading in terms of Rousseau’s
political ideals. To name a few, Julie uses the animals in Elysium to explain how master and slave
relationship should be reversed, and Wolmar attacks the wealthy for not having “patience and time” to
nurture civil relationships (391).

158

that this place may be too ideal to obtain—Julie tells St. Preux that “in a moment you
will have returned from the ends of the earth” (3 88)——nonetheless he continues to
feature the excessive parts of Elysium as a way of returning to his idea of excess. As
soon as they emerge ﬁ'om Elysium, St. Preux asks Wolmar how Elysium can be
cultivated without the “slightest trace of cultivation” (393). For St. Preux,

Everything is verdant, fresh, vigorous, and the gardener’s hand is not to be seen:

nothing belies the idea of a desert Island which came to my mind as I entered,

and I see no footprint. (393)
Wolmar’s answer anticipates Rousseau’s true writing in his Confessions: the only true
cultivation is the one that looks least cultivated (or so excessively cultivated that one
cannot recognize it as cultivated). Wolmar reminds us again and again that an
idealized place is ideal exactly because of its lack of human contact. At the same time,
he has to take great care to “erase” these contacts in order to establish the Elysium. In
the same line of thinking, Wolmar assures St. Preux that “You see nothing here that is
aligned, nothing levelled; never did the line enter this place; nature never uses a line
in its plantings” (393). It is a line without a line, and every structure in Elysium,
once upheld, will immediately be “deconstructed,” no pun intended. Indeed, even the
“windings in their feigned irregularity” are manmade to erase its artiﬁcial edges.

Indeed, Wolmar’s dilemma is also Rousseau’s dilemma: how do you capture nature,

159

without being excessive? On the one hand, if nature can be described, can it still be
nature? True nature is unnatural, in the sense that it cannot be perceived by ﬁnite
being such as human beings. Thus only in the most excessive state can we perceive
nature; after all, Wolmar asks, “does nature constantly employ the square and ruler?”
(396). Similarly, St. Preux tells Edward about gardens in China in which “nature there
appeared in a thousand different guises, and the whole taken together was not natural”
(397). On the other hand, such nature also contains “art,” something that Julie calls “a
modicum ofillusion” (393, 394).48

It is in these repetitive writings about the original scene—nature without being
natural, line without a line, true taste that hides art—that we ﬁnally realize that the
origin is indeed without an origin. What this tells us, in light of N’s comment that
“these letters are no letters,” is that perhaps for Rousseau the letter is most letter-like
when its essence as a letter is exhausted. In this sense, Rousseau deliberately chooses
a literary medium that is formless and without an origin to uphold a rhetoric of reason
that is excessive at best. The irony of this, of course, is even in the end, we are not
sure the Rousseau that we know of in his later philosophical works has ever stepped
foot into the conﬁnes of these letters. As we move on to the next chapter on Johann

Wolfgang von Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther, we will start to see the impact of

 

48 . . . .

This rs also reﬂected in the letter form. True letter should be excessrve and formless exactly because
only in that condition that letter can continue to be a letter. This can be seen in the earlier discussion on
St. Preux’s fragmented letter.

I60

such excessive claims of the Enlightenment will have on Werther, speciﬁcally a

conscious effort to purge these excesses out of his epistolary narrative.

l6l

“I have Diligently Collected Everything”: Editorial Ellipses and Interpolations in

Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther

As we move into the last chapter on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of
Young Werther, we begin to see fewer and fewer concerns with the epistolary formality so
emphasized in the earlier epistolary models. Already we ﬁnd in Julie the lack of the
formal concerns, not just in Rousseau’s casual dismissal of addresser and addressee in the
letter title, but also in the diminished use of the material letters—the way letters are
arranged, transmitted, or enclosed so as to convey layered meanings. Although Julie is an
epistolary novel mainly about two lovers, it still heavily relies on a network of addressers
and addressees: Claire, Edward, and Wolmar all play their parts in creating an
Enlightenment model of “tmobstructed use of reason” and cater to a sense of familiarity
and sociality that Jﬁrgen Habermas observes in the rise of the eighteenth-century familial

letter.I There is still a communal sense in the function of the letter in Julie. Werther,

 

l Kant emphasizes the freedom of “public” and “private” uses of reason as indicators of enlightenment
My emphasis here is merely to point out the unrestricted circulation of opinions in the Enlightenment, at
least as an ideal. For more details, please see Immanuel Kant, “What is Enlightenment?” What is
Enlightenment?: Eighteenth-Century Answers and Tiventieth-Century Questions, Ed. James Schmidt
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 58-64. Jtlrgen Habermas, The Structural Damfomation
of the Public Sphere. Thomas Burger, Trans. (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1991), 48-56.

162

however, as one of the representative texts of the movement of “Sturm and Drang,” no
longer affords this kind of textual luxury: Werther as a proto-Romantic hero possesses an
highly subjectivized vision, and the novel signals the ﬁnal turn away from an
enlightenment model of epistolarity into a ﬁrlly operative—almost
paradigrnatic—romanticism.2 Goethe wants to create a narrative that seems almost
solipsistic, with the romantic subject always in view. Where early epistolary novels insist
on sociality, on exchange and correspondence, and the broader formal pressures that
shape the “genre” of letters (and that privilege materiality and audience), Werther is, until
the death of the subject, almost hermetic, with the protagonist’s exaggerated feels
suffusing the entirety of the world and its representation. Textual ly and narratively, no
one writes back to Werther, and the line between “letter” and “journal entry” is
continually blurred: save for the dates, and an occasional apostrophe to his friend, there
are few signs that these are even letters, and thus Goethe seems interested in testing the
contours of the letter as a sufﬁcient vehicle for romantic pathos.

But it is also here that I see in Werther a speciﬁc link to the formal excess of past

epistolarity. While Goethe tries to pursue a romantic aesthetic in Werther’s single voice,

 

2 Frederick Garber reminds us that “Werther evinces throughout much of the novel a radiant urge toward
happiness that depends in part (and dangerously) upon a compulsive insistence on personal freedom, an
expansiveness of self so total as to be almost with-out bounds.” Indeed, Werther is “quite sociable” at ﬁrst.
Frederick Garber, “Self, Society, Value, and the Romantic Hero.” Comparative Literature Vol. 19, No.4
(Autumn, 1967), 331.

I63

such an ideal also depends on the editor of the letter collection. After all, who else would
be able to collect Werther’s letters that have already been sent and dispersed among his
addressees? Why is it that Werther’s letters survive but not Wilhelm’s and Lotte’s letters
that address him? Indeed, that the editor transforms himself from almost non-existent
throughout most of the Werther collection, to omnipresent after Werther’s death forces us
to recognize the speciﬁc connection between Werther and the editor, as well as the
conspicuous correspondence between writing and life. Werther’s singular voice
represents a romantic urge to transcend the epistolary excesses that endanger the hero’s
wish to “withdraw into” himself,

and discover a world, albeit a notional world of dark desire rather than one of

actuality and vital strength. And everything swims before my sense, and I go my
way in the world wearing the smile of the dreamer.3
And the editor certainly tries not to intervene signiﬁcantly until after Werther’s death. At
the same time, Werther’s demand for purity proves to be futile as the editorial function is
also a form of epistolary excess, highlighting how the romantic letter makes a spectacle

of its ﬁnitude. This chapter will try to demonstrate Goethe’s formal struggle in Werther

and what it means for the eighteenth-century epistolary novel to adapt to a romantic

 

3 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther, translated by Michael Hulse (London:
Penguin, 1989), 31 . All references to Werther will follow parenthetically.

164

 

subject. The full thrust of the critical possibilities will be discussed in the dissertation’s
Conclusion (on Frankenstein), but for now, we will consider the ways in which the
editorial interpolations and ellipses in Werther help highlight Werther’s romantic outlook
and the conundrums that the editor faces in bring out Werther’s heightened sensitivity and

unbounded subjectivity.

II

I begin with a seemingly simple question: Can an epistolary novel end itself? To
answer this question, there has to be, it seems to me, some more sub-questions: What do
we mean by ending itself? What epistolary novel? Of course every epistolary novel ends
somewhere in some way, at least in the physical sense of the book. At the same time,
some epistolary novels, especially those ending in the death of the eponymous hero, often
have trouble ending themselves. The death of the protagonist signiﬁes the termination of
the self-narrative and immediately shifts the focus to the editor: what once seemed like an
unmediated and singular account of the protagonist’s deepest feelings and desires
suddenly is revealed to rely heavily on the intervention of an editor, who collects,
organizes, and often supplements the self-narrative that had once felt so intimate. The

role of the editor becomes not only important but also integral: beforehand, we read often

I65

uninterrupted correspondence between the hero and related parties, creating an illusion of
the gradual unfolding of the life-events of the eponymous hero; now we have to rely on
the editor to conﬁrm that which signals the ending, namely the death of the hero and what
comes afterwards. The editor prolongs what should have ended when the hero writes the
last letter and turns it into what is ﬁttingly the life story of the eponymous hero.4 In this
sense, the editor helps create an epistolary subjectivity that is in excess of itself but never
loses sights of what is important. Consider the real-life counterpart, Samuel Richardson,
who served as the editor and the author at the same time, and who frequently made
conspicuous what was added and subtracted from his novels: “Constantly in motion ‘in
itself’, Richardson’s text is rocked into ﬁrrther instability by the ‘supplementary’ material
added to ballast it,” Terry Eagleton observes in Rape of Clarissa.5 Richardson also
undertakes to revise and self-police his own works, and as Eagleton suggests, “the more

Richardson plugs and patches to disambiguate his writing and aver incorrect readings, the

 

4 l broadly deﬁne the role of the editor in the hope of pointing out the necessity of editorial function in
epistolary novel. Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa has a Conclusion (with an indication that it is “supposed to
be written by Mr. Belford”) and a Postscript. Julie “needs” the editor to include Wolmar’s and Claire’s
letters to end the Julie story, and until the very end, the editor is still very much active in shaping the way
we read the novel’s ending. Werther takes on the same feature as the editor not only edits and collects the
letters but also “assembles” all sorts of information from various related parties. In this regard, the editor
has a “split” personality as it were: he can be the author, one or many of the letter-addressees, or simply the
editor within the diegesis of the letter story.

5 Terry Eagleton, The Rape of Clarissa (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982), 21. For more details on
Richardson’s editorial practice, please see the Introduction to Rape of Clarissa.

166

more he piles on matter for yet further misconstruction.”6 The editor, in this sense, tries
to help the reader construe the story of the eponymous hero at the risk of further
deviation.

The editor is deﬁnitely an important plot device in the making of the novel, but more
so in the making of an epistolary one. In Julie, Rousseau claims to be the editor in the
preface, and thus equates the editor with the author. Without the editor, Julie could not be
assembled; otherwise, the Julie letters will only be a bunch of letters circulating among a
certain strata of society. In Julie, the editor is like an epistolary conﬁdant, one who has
access to everyone’s secret; he makes comments and interprets the meaning of particular
letters, often ironically. The editor, for example, makes fun of St. Preux’s serious tone and
philosophizing, as well as Julie’s excessive sentimentality.7 The editor makes constant
trips in and out of the diegetic world, as it were, and interacts with these letter-writers in
the collection as well as the readers of the letter collection.

Despite the deep involvement at the diegetic level, the editor also tries to maintain
the image of an outsider and the faithful keeper of the records. The editor, for example,

reassures the readers that he will not meddle in the narrative produced through the letters.

 

6 Eagleton, 23.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie, or the New Heloise: Letters of Two Lovers Who Live in a Small Town at
the Foot of the Alps, translated and annotated by Philip Stewart and Jean Vache (New England: University
Press of New England, 1997), 190, 218, 244, and 580. All references to Julie will be in parenthesis.

167

In one footnote regarding a letter of St. Preux’s, the editor assures us:
On several occasions, I have been on the verge of removing them [St. Preux’s love
letters] and substituting some of my own; ultimately I am leaving them in, and pride
myself on my courage. . . .. Let us then leave these Letters as they are (190).
Meanwhile, he also informs the readers that Edward’s adventure letters (addressed to St.
Preux) are not to be included here because he “could not bring [himself] to spoil the
simplicity of the two lovers’ story with the romantic side of his” (512). Yet, at least in two
places, the background of Edward’s adventure does resurface and is eventually appended
(ironically reduced to a third-person narrative form).8 If comprehensiveness is his main
concern, he also conﬁrms that these letters are no longer in their complete form:
One can tell there is a lacuna here, and there will be others in the course of the
correspondence. Several letters have been lost; others have been suppressed; others
have suffered curtailment: but nothing essential is missing that cannot easily be
supplied with the help of what remains (38).
He also tells us, in another instance, that St. Preux’s name is a substitute for his real name
(272), and will only be revealed in Part IV. However, every letter writer and addressee

has a name in the letter title, as designated by the editor, and one has to wonder why St.

 

8 . 0 9‘) 9
In another mstance, he tells the readers that he “cares not a Whlt whether these Letters please the novel 5
critics (518).

168

Preux should be treated otherwise. Despite the editor’s claim for being non-meddling, he
is everywhere, shaping how the epistolary novel expands and affecting how we read it
(however effective it may be).9

While Rousseau or Julie’s editor occasionally puts himself in the spotlight—after all,
he does appear in the two prefaces, and on numerous occasions throughout the
collection—the editor in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Werther does not have the same
kind of recurrent role to play. The opening page of Werther reads, “1 have diligently
collected everything I have been able to discover concerning the poor Werther,” but then
the editor fades into the collection, appearing only within an occasional footnote. Even
though the editor in Werther does not reveal his involvement in the letter collection, he
marks his appearance through disappearance, that is, his choice of letters will help us read
the Werther story in a certain way: while the earlier letters stress their materiality and
literariness, Werther’s editor seals over the breaks or protuberances that might distract
from the urgency of Werther’s romantic vision. In this chapter, I am trying to suggest that
the editorial arrangement central to, if mystiﬁed within Werther presents a consistent

effort to rectify the kind of excess that the epistolary genre so often offers, even

 

One can see another parallel between the later epistolary novels and the Richardsonian model: the editor
is a form of epistolary conceit, a fabricated complexity that tries to capture and ensure the realism behind
the letter collection.

169

accommodates. By limiting his appearance in the Werther collection, the editor
successfully creates an illusion of a one-man narrative without any interruptions, and thus
without the kind of epistolary excesses that I have been trying to show so far in the
dissertation. But to what effect does the editor achieve this goal? How does Werther’s
letter content and his aesthetic concerns correspond to the editor’s formal representations?
1 will ﬁrst turn to the end of the Werther to show that while Goethe intends to manage,

and even transcend the multiplicity inherent in epistolary excess through Werther’s
singular voice, the editor’s involvement actually reveals the formal problem of such

unbounded passion.

111
That Werther’s editor tries to keep a distance from the actual Werther story should
not come as a surprise. After all, he only shows up in three places in the collection proper
with more or less insigniﬁcant consequences. Even with his more prominent appearance
toward the end of the Werther letters, he still insists that he has “diligently” collected
everything regarding Werther as a way of excusing for his reluctant intrusion into
Werther:

I wish very much that we had enough of our ﬁiend’s own testimony, concerning the

170

last remarkable days of his life, to render it unnecessary for me to interrupt this

series of preserved letters with narration (106; emphasis mine).
The editor continues to suggest that it is his “duty to gather precise information from the
mouths of those likely to be best acquainted with his history” (106). In a sense, he tries to
assure the reader that even with his forced involvement, Werther’s account remains
uncorrupted “except on a few insigniﬁcant details” (106). Indeed, the editor does have
everything under control, even down to the last few details of Werther’s ﬁnal excruciating
minutes. He has “seen” the last letter sent out to Wilhelm—though we never know about
the content (131). He will be the one who witnesses the suicide scene for the reader and
gives the reader the horriﬁc speciﬁcities of Werther’s dying body, almost in a forensic
manner:

When the surgeon reached the unfortunate man, he found him on the ﬂoor, beyond

hope; his pulse was still beating but his limbs were powerless. He had shot himself

above the right eye, blowing out his brains. To crown it all, a vein was opened in his

arm; the blood ﬂowed; he still continued to breathe (133-4).
While the gory details might disturb some of readers, they read like a calm journalistic
report by modern standards. Obviously, the editor’s prosaic style can be construed as just

another way to keep himself out of the emotional vortex within Werther in order to

171

establish, or at least masquerade, as the objective editor who is worthy of the ofﬁce. In
the Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau suggests that the ﬁnal scene tends to be

99. u

“ob-scene” and therefore constitutes what we consider as “unnamable . censured,

”10 That the editor would

deprived of language, wrapped up in a shroud of silence.
promote the scene’s visibility suggests a certain marginal utility: instead of
over-sentimentalizing his dying body, the editor chooses to provide a steady hand to
shore up the emotional overﬂow.ll Indeed, De Certeau postulates that death is
“immediately transformed into a scientiﬁc and linguistic object foreign to everyday life
and language?”2 In this sense, the editor adapts to a different writing strategy. Whereas
Werther’s passion spills over his own letters, the editor provides every detail of Werther’s
last moment in the hope of anchoring himself as the moral authority and providing the
faithful source of that which we know as Werther. Everything is accounted for, even the

meticulous breakdown of Werther’s whereabouts before his suicide. The editor reports

the event in real time, suggesting that Werther’s end “was expected soon” (134).

 

'0 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1984), I91.

I In parallel, Cynthia Richards provides another famous eighteenth-century death scene, albeit a real one.
She suggests that Godwin’s horriﬁc description of Mary Wollstonecraft’s death-bed scene reveal a scientiﬁc
desire to assign the dying body at least some values. Cynthia Richards, “The Body of Her Work, the Work
of Her Body: Accounting for the Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction Vol.
21, No. 4, (Summer 2009), 565-592.

2 De Certeau, I91.

172

This idea of a reporter or an investigator with a composed demeanor is reinforced

when the editor refuses to describe Albert’s and Lotte’s reactions before Werther’s death

in fear of the emotional involvement (134). Throughout the last section of Werther, the

editor actively takes on the role of the objective outsider who interprets and interpolates

the letters of the ﬁnal moments only out of necessity. While Werther’s one-man narration

has brought us thus far without any difﬁculty in “understanding” what is going on, the

sudden need to insert the editor is necessary for bringing closure to Werther. In order to

present a seemingly credible account, the editor has to consider several other narrative

options. He, for example, claims to have listened to “what Albert’s ﬁ'iends say” regarding

the mental status of Werther (106). If the Werther letters start to lose their capacity to

show Werther’s immediate thoughts—now that we need the editorial interpolation—the

editor makes sure that we also read Werther’s “papers” and notes to add to the Werther

collection’s completeness. There are various attempts to render the Werther collection

true to its transparent epistolary quality before its ending, while at the same time

supplementing the epistolary narratives with non-epistolary texts.

The immediate consequence of the editor’s intrusion would be the presence of

different “genres” and narrative voices. The novel can no longer unfold in its epistolary

mode. One of the unambiguous signs of his editorial intrusion appears when Werther’s

173

epistolary narrative is replaced by the editor’s narration. Even if some occasional Werther
letters are provided for the purpose of guaranteeing the reliability of the story, these
letters fail to become the vehicles of unmediated feelings.l3 Letters become fragmented,
necessitating the editor’s encroachment into the narrative and the inside of the letter. '4
The letter of 14 December, for instance, marks the ﬁrst instance of the editor breaking in
to explain in detail the hero’s mental state. The gradual dissolution of the line between the
letter and non-letter can also be seen here, for the editor claims that the second part of the
letter belongs to “an undated note that was found among his papers and which was
probably the beginning of a letter to Wilhelm” (113).15 Still, he arranges the undated note
as if it is taken out of the second half the 14 December letter. In a sense, the note is added
as a supplement to the letter, all the while containing in itself the form of a letter. The
following letter on 20 December again has no clear separation with the ﬁnal letter
Werther sends to Lotte. This last letter contains several things—a note, a series of

Werther’s own translation of the songs of Ossian, and the fragments of Werther’s ﬁnal

 

'3 Regarding his inﬂuence ﬁ'om Richardson, Goethe believes that “the letter-form was thoroughly
dramatic, the reader really lives with the characters and experiences with them their emotions, and it has the
additional virtue of giving greater scope for detail than any other form.” James Boyd, Goethe’s Knowledge
of English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1932), 120-1 . Martin Swales and Erika Swales
suggest that Werther’s success was because the novel was “utterly attuned to the contemporary discourse of
Empﬁndsamkeit, with its stress on the supreme truthfulness of the heart.” Martin Swales and Erika Swales,
Reading Goethe: A Critical Introduction to the Literary Work (Rochester: Camden House, 2002), 64.

| 4 o c c
We may have recalled the letter fragments have several different meanings in Pamela, Shamela, and in
Julie.

15 . . .
It rs still very ambiguous as to how we should treat the I4-December Letter.

174

account, all intertwined with the editor’s commentary—and is difﬁcult to characterize. At
times the editor in this last part of Werther even sounds like an omnipresent third-person
narrator. We can perhaps consider the following passage about Lotte’s preparation of her
pistol for Werther to better judge the editor’s deep involvement in the Werther collection:

She handed the fateful implements to the servant, unable to utter a word, and once

he had left the house she packed up her work and retired to her room in an

inexpressible quandary. Her heart was ﬁlled with terrible foreboding (130).

It seems that the editor knows exactly where to break the chronology of the letter so as to
orchestrate the succession of events to add to the verisimilitude. But more importantly,
the editor sees what Lotte thinks, presenting a sense of Lotte’s interiority.

This resort to a third-person narrator in an epistolary novel is certainly not Goethe’s
invention. In fact, recognized by some critics as the “ﬁrst English (epistolary) novel,”
Aphra Behn’s Love Letters Between a Nobleman And His Sister (1684-7) shares the same
epistolary trait in which the dominant epistolary voices regress to a third-person one as
the story unfolds.’6 As a pioneering epistolary novel in the late seventeenth century

England, Behn’s Lover-Letters certainly contains an experimental dimension and to this

 

l . . . .
6 Judith Kegan Gardmer, “The First English Novel: Aphra Behn's Love Letters, The Canon, and Women's
Tastes”, Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Vol. 8, No. 2 (Autumn, 1989), 201-222.

175

end, the mixture of genres and voices should not come as a surprise to the readers. '7 It is
a “composite” text, as Janet Todd points out, as the result of the “negation of ﬁction and

history.” I 8

This suggests that as the novel genre assumes its gradual literary dominance
in the eighteenth century, its author also has to experiment with different forms and
voices in order to ﬁnd the appropriate medium. Goethe’s editor, however, fulﬁlls more
than an experimental function. His role largely involves choosing and weeding out letters
in the Werther collection so as to “complete” the Werther narrative. We will discuss in
detail the kind of implication of a composite work in Werther when we turn to Werther’s
aesthetic ideology below, but for now, the idea that the editor can somehow supply the
reader with a genuine wholeness in the Werther collection is problematic. Commenting
on the mixture of genre in Behn’s Love-Letters, Todd shows us that

the change in literary genre from a ﬁrst-person epistolary ﬁction to a third-person

narrative meant a change in vision, and inevitably a reinterpretation of what had

gone before. The assumed sincerity of Part I of Love-Letters does not merely

contrast with the insincerity and artiﬁce of Parts 11 and III. . .but is retrospectively

 

'7 Janet Todd, introduction to Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister, by Aphra Behn (London:
Penguin, 1996), xvi.

8 Todd, xvi

176

undermined by them. '9
While it might be worth exploring why the letter necessarily possesses an “assumed
sincerity,” Todd does expose the epistolary problem of an intruding voice uncontrolled by
the existing addressers. In the Werther narrative, the editor gives an unmediated narrative
of Werther, as it were, but then again, his existence also raises questions as to why
Werther even needs to present his letters in an uninterrupted manner if the editor
supposedly can weave his own composite narrative. We can see further editorial
involvement when quite a few people collaborate with the editor to complete the Werther
story. We are not just talking about established characters like Albert or Lotte; characters
like the servant are integral to realizing the plot: the details of Werther’s whereabouts at
the last minutes must come to the editor second-hand (128). It seems the more the editor
meddles with Werther’s narrative, the more Werther strays away from its supposed
singular vision.20 Ellis Dye has pointed out Goethe’s extensive use of “romantic irony,”
which

exposes the perverseness of language and of generic and conceptual systems of all

 

'9 Todd, xvi.

20 One can spot the German literary tradition of what Martin Swales and Erika Swales call the “narrative
of reﬂectivity.” They suggest that Goethe’s exploration of “various narrative modes” derives from this
reﬂectivity: “many of his works operate with processes of embedding and re-contextualizing narrative
statements, so that the text as a whole becomes a self-thematizing and self-commenting universe of
discourse.” Martin Swales and Erika Swales, 58.

177

sorts. It thus reveals, and enjoys revealing, the inherent ﬁctionality and ambiguity of
anal

For Dye, “Goethe’s irony shows the futility of transparent representation, the necessity of
mediation” and his “narrators are critiques as interlocutors.”22 In this sense, the editor’s
irony lies in his unawareness of his own limitation as mere mediation. By appropriating
and continuing Werther’s aesthetic outlook, his narrative becomes a second order to the
supposed purity of Werther’s letters, and therefore necessarily produces an outcome
different from what Werther would have envisioned.

This exploration of different narrative modes challenges our existing notion of the
letter and its formal qualities: if the letter is the dominant vehicle of the novel, Werther’s
notes, part of which is later destroyed, suddenly become the spotlight.23 As the last part
of the Werther narrative unfolds, the note is no longer subservient to the letter collection:
before we have the editorial intrusion, Werther’s narrative always appears in the letter
form, even though some of the letters are short and fragmented, like notes, since Werther

the romantic hero is less concerned with formalities and more committed to expressivity.

More importantly, notes grant immediacy to Werther’s vision as his romantic imagination

 

2] Ellis Dye, Love and Death in Goethe: “One and Double ” (Rochester: Camden House, 2004), 264.
22 Dye, 264.

23 . . . . -
Richardson’s Pamela has given the note a srmrlar role. Please see chapter one for more details.

178

is changing all time: Werther writes to Wilhelm that “I am often ﬁlled with longing, and

think: ah, if only you could express this, if only you could breathe onto the paper in all its

fullness and warmth what is so alive in you” (27). Thus, the editor tells us that he would

“attend to even the slightest scrap of paper” to add to the collection of letters; so naturally

the note, fragmented or not, will accrue more textual valences when the editor attempts to

piece them together into a unity (106). Indeed, it is the note’s immediacy that provides

the editor with more insight into Werther’s soul. Upon hearing the prisoner’s fate,

Werther tells us in a note that, “You cannot be saved, unfortunate man! I well see that we

cannot be saved” (110). The editor supposes that Werther’s note registers the impact of

the prisoner’s similar fate. A paragraph later, the editor tells us that Werther’s aversion to

Albert’s reaction to the prisoner can be found in a note “among his papers” (110).

While the note might serve a speciﬁc function, it also has other qualities that might

contradict the editor’s wish to present a truthful account of Werther towards the end. The

letter dated 14 December letter is followed by an undated note which the editor regards as

“the beginning of a letter to Wilhelm” (113). The note therefore can be the letter that has

never been ﬁnished, or it can be part of a letter, seeing that there is no clear distinction

between the letter proper and the note as arranged in the 14 December Letter.

Interestingly enough, it is exactly the note’s resistance to easy categorizations that is used

179

to the editor’s advantage. Mark for example that the whole 20 December letter has been
serialized and broken into fragments so that the editor can better explain the situation in
detail and further create a sense of real actions: “His confusion, his passion, his restless
energies and endeavours, and his weariness of life, are most powerfully attested in a few
surviving letters which we interpolate at this point” ( l l I). In a sense, the note or the
fragment is preferred for their ability to provide more immediate access to Werther’s
mind. Similarly, letters in the ﬁnal moments are to be sometimes mistreated as “papers”
(113). Right before Werther kills himself, the editor mentions to us the existence of these
unarranged papers that are torn up and thrown into the stove (131). These papers are his
“short essays and stray reﬂections” which eventually become the bulk of the unseen letter
he addresses to Wilhelm that we as readers have never gotten the chance to read. If such
interchangeable use of papers, notes and letters are present in the ﬁnal editorial
arrangement of Werther, then it also depicts a messier picture of how letters, notes, or
papers each ﬁrlﬁll their functions. There is no longer a clear-cut boundary as maintained
in the earlier Werther narrative pr0per.

The biggest contradiction might be the problem of the third-person voice that the
editor adopts. Initially, the editor lets us know that it is a collective “we” who are

witnessing, reporting, and eventually commenting on Werther’s last moments (106).

180

When commenting on Werther’s “anxiety in his heart” that has “sapped his remaining
mental vigor, his vitality, and his insight,” the editor assures us it is based on “what
Albert’s friends say” (106). Occasionally, the editor would also use “I,” but the
third-person narrative gradually takes over. Here the editor is presented with the same
conundrum as in the treatment of the note: how does he interpolate Werther’s letters
without contravening their integrity, which is at the heart of Werther’s letters? He does
present us with some disclaimers: that despite being an editor who has been diligently
collecting everything regarding Werther’s life-story, there is always a limit that he cannot
cross, remaining always an objective outsider to the story itself. Regarding the letter of 20
December, the collective “we” report that
We scarcely feel able to express in words what was happening in Lotte’s soul at this
time, or to describe her feelings towards her husband and her unfortunate friend;
although our knowledge of her character makes it possible to conceive of them, and
any sensitive female soul will be in a position to enter into Lotte’s frame of mind
and share her emotions (114).
Already here we start to see the slippery ground that the editor travels: although the editor

might not be able to describe Lotte’s feelings in words, he certainly possesses the

181

knowledge (just like what Werther mentions before).24 He, in a sense, becomes the
third-person narrator who, omniscient or not, fulﬁlls the objectivity that he wishes to
adopt.

This third-person narrative offers some advantages, as the editor can present a
totalizing view instead of relying on guesswork and rumor. The reader would be able to
see what a normal epistolary narrative cannot offer. While the epistolary novel tends to
present various viewpoints from different epistolary writers, they always are, in a sense,
limited within and by their own epistolary conﬁnes. These letter writers are also limited
in that they cannot respond properly to the situation until another letter comes along.25
They cannot project themselves into the future either, in terms of the narrative structure,
bound as they are the present of the writing moment. But the editor in Werther has no
such problem. He has assruned the authoritative position as soon as he makes the
disclaimer about his effort to collect everything there is to know about Werther’s last
moments. He immediately documents in detail what is going on in Werther’s mind as if

he was there to witness everything (107). However, if Werther’s self-questioning can be

 

24 Joyce Walker observes that in Werther that “Lotte never speaks for herself; rather, she is always
mediated by Werther or der Herausgeber [the editor]. Lotte is always a beautiful object, never a subject in
the narrative.” Joyce S. Walker, “Sex, Suicide, and the Sublime: A Reading of Goethe's ‘Werther,”’
Monatsheﬂe, 91, No. 2 (Summer, 1999), 210.

We still note the presence of Werther’s correspondents despite his one-way “correspondence.”

182

faithfully represented, why not present them in epistolary form?26 After all, these
questions are Werther’s, and what else would be more intimately revealing than those
written in the epistolary form? If Werther has not produced the papers that contain these
words, who else could have access to them? The only explanation, it seems to me, is that
the editor is determined to produce an authentic narrative that can be said to best ﬁt both
Werther and Werther the character, even if it means he has to sometimes overzealously
involved.

The treatment of Lotte is no different. On the one hand, the editor admits his
limitations when it comes to describing Lotte’s feelings. On the other hand, the editor
also gives us an unobstructed view into Lotte’s heart:

Her pure and untroubled blood was feverishly agitated, and a thousand different

feelings rent her virtuous heart. Was it the ﬁre of Werther’s embraces that she felt in

her bosom? Was it resentment of her outrageous behavior? Was it the sad
comparison of her present state with earlier times of ease, ﬁ'eedom, innocence and
unruffled conﬁdence in herself? How was she to approach her husband and confess

a scene which she had no reason to conceal and which she was nevertheless loath to

 

26 . . . . .

The editor notes that as Werther becomes entangled in hrs passron for Lotte, he starts self-doubtmg and
at the same time “harbom'ing a secret resentment” of Albert. In the editor’s third-person narrative, these
emotions are manifested in the form of Werther’s self-addressed questions (107-8).

183

tell him of? (128).
By using the free indirect style, the editor adopts a voice that mimics Lotte’s inner
thoughts. It also gives the reader a chance to approach Lotte without any restriction. After
all, it is Lotte who is telling us what she thinks in the form of a series of rhetorical
questions. Yet as Porter Abbott points out, one of the features of free indirect style is to
allow “a character’s voice momentarily to take over the narrative voice.” As a result, it
makes us “wonder about the status of the narrator” and presents “a challenge for
interpreters who are trying hard to locate a uniﬁed sensibility on which to base their
interpretation?” In another instance, the editor describes in detail how Lotte and
Werther feel when they cross the line and attest to their long latent desires:

They could sense their own wretchedness in the fates of the noble heroes; they

sensed it together, and shed tears in harmony. Werther rested his feverish lips and

eyes on Lotte’s arm; she trembled; she wanted to go, yet pain and sympathy lay

numbingly upon her like lead (125).
Certainly Werther is not going to write about this right before his suicide and Lotte is not
going to “report” this to the editor. The omnipresent narrator therefore presents the truth

about Werther, yet it also violates to some extent the reader-editor contract he articulates

 

27 H. Porter Abbott, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, (London: Cambridge University Press,
2002), 70-1. '

184

earlier. He is no longer the objective third party but an active agent in making Werther

possible.

This ability to access a character’s mind becomes ironically the way that the editor

loses control of his narrative composure toward the end. In adopting the omnipresent

narrator, the editor forces us to recognize his narrative desire to add to the collection

more than what is needed—more than what should be there. “Lotte was meanwhile in a

singular frame of mind,” suggests the editor, at which point “Werther wrote the following

paragraph of his ﬁnal letter to Lotte” (117-8). We are not only witnessing the interiority

of Lotte; we are also given the temporality of the two simultaneous events. Moreover, we

can now access Lotte’s mind in such a way that it is no longer limited to her “singular

frame of mind.” A few paragraphs later (in which we learn about Lotte’s struggle to come

to term with Werther’s passion), the editor reveals to us “all of these reﬂections prompted

a profound realization, albeit one which she was not consciously aware of, that her secret

heart’s desire was to keep him for herself” (118). In a weird way, the editor’s third-person

narrative serves the function of missing correspondence wherein one’s unconscious is

often uncannily revealed in another’s letter (as I have shown in previous chapters). It

performs the job of a responsive addressee, which has been altogether missing in the

Werther narrative. But more importantly, now we can see what the characters cannot see

185

from their limited capacity. We can access Lotte’s unconscious and her secret desires.
All of this prompts us to ask the following questions: if indeed, the third-person
narrative is much better for detailing the events and the interiority of the characters, why
do we need Werther’s letters in the ﬁrst place? Conversely, if Werther’s one-way letter
correspondence give us unobstructed view to his sentiments, why does not the editor
simply include his ﬁnal letters and end the story there without the third-person
interpolations and the gory details of the ﬁnal moment? I will now turn to the Werther
collection to show the kind of philosophical/aesthetical outlook that eventually promotes

the editorial decisions as effected in Werther.

IV
That Werther is explicitly about a newly modern aesthetic experience is by now a
familiar scholarly claim.28 After all, Goethe himself is one of the instigators of the Sturm
und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) movement in late eighteenth-century Germany.29 Elliot

Schreiber suggests that Werther gives “precise expression to the modern sense of

 

28 Elliot Schreiber discusses Werther’s “aesthetic of the instant” through Karl Philipp Moritz. For him,
modernity promotes “an awareness of time as always radically new” (193). Elliot Schreiber, “Towards an
Aesthetics of the Sublime Augenblick: Reading Karl Philipp Moritz Reading Goethe’s Die Leiden des
jungen Werthers.” The Enlightened Eye: Goethe and Visual Culture, edited by Evelyn K. Moore and
Patricia Anne Simpson, (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 193-217.

29 Angus Nicholls suggests that “in Werther Goethe can be seen to offer an early diagnosis of the aesthetic

preoccupations of the Sturm and Drang movement” (153). Angus Nicholls, Goethe Is Concept of the
Daemonic: After the Ancients (New York: Camden House, 2006), 142-66.

186

 

accelerating change,” citing Werther’s “powerful vision” in the letter from 18 August:
“There is no moment that does not consume you and yours, no moment in which you are

not, must be, a destroyer.”30

Werther gives voice to the idea of the new; at the same time,
he also worries about this unsettling effect produced by modernity, and therefore sees an
antagonistic relationship between the subject and modernity. In a sense, there seems to be
a need for Werther to transcend the inevitable change by becoming ironically a destroyer
(whose acts of destruction incite changes) as well. Whether or not Werther succeeds in
doing so is another matter, but it seems to me that a close reading of Werther’s aesthetic
experiences could give us clues as to how the rest of the Werther collection plays out and
how the editorial decisions are reached despite the obvious contradictions as discussed
above.

What does seem recurrent in the Werther collection, though, is the continuing effort
to keep Werther and Werther’s text intact within an aesthetically motivated idealism, so
that what we might call a certain textual purity can be maintained. Even his love Lotte is

preserved in such a way:

How her whole heart and soul are in it, you see, and her body is all harmony, so

 

30 Schreiber, 195. He also offers a brilliant analysis of the linguistic structure surrounding the
above-mentioned quote. At the end, “the language of Werther’s letter thereby enacts the very process of
transformation which it depicts” (201).

187

 

carefree and relaxed, as if there were nothing else, as if she had not a single other

thought or sensation; and, in that moment, undoubtedly everything else ceases to

exist for her (40).

Lotte becomes the symbol of purity in the novel—“she is perfection itself,” Werther tells
Wilhelm (36)——and Werther continues to draw from this idea of a singular, harmonious
moment. There is a tendency in Werther’s letters to emphasize not only his uniqueness
but also his uncontaminated feeling. Indeed, Werther tells Wilhelm, “my heart is mine
and mine alone” in response to the Prince’s appreciation of his ability (86). Werther
insists that the letters themselves alone provides the only way to know his heart.
Following this cue, the editor provides the readers a uniﬁed version of Werther.

Werther does give readers the impression throughout that he desires a moment of
purity. For example, he describes several sublime moments he has in Wahlheim and
repeatedly comments on the circumstances:

Before our souls lies an entire and dusky vastness which overwhelms our feelings as

it overwhelms our eyes, and ah! We long to surrender the whole of our being, and be

ﬁlled with all the joy of one single, immense, magniﬁcent emotion (44).

In a similar way, Werther’s heart contains “immense and ardent feeling for living Nature”

and it is “overwhelmed with so great a joy” (65). Just as his passion for Lotte indicates

188

unequivocal desire, so Werther’s unadulterated vision seems equally potent. There always
seems to be a moment like this that dictates Werther’s way of life, attempting to transcend
the corruptions of the material world. In another letter, he tells Wilhelm that “the heart
alone is the source of our happiness” (59). The heart may be corrupted, as his 16 July
letter suggests, but it is also his source of imagination with which he can maintain his
idealistic view about himself.31 Very early on we realize that Werther would, for example,
“withdraw into [himself] and discover a world, albeit a notional world of dark desire
rather than one of actuality and vital strength” (31).

The priority of the heart and its imaginative power to maintain a pure condition can
be seen in various forms in the letter collection. Werther recounts another sublime
moment in the second letter. Confessing his inability to represent the moment
adequately—“not a single line”—he admits that he has “never been a greater painter”
(26). The sublime in Nature is beautiful in a self-evident fashion, but that does not mean
that it is easily or necessarily communicable. Werther seems to suggest that what is
contained in the heart alone is enough to withstand the encroachment of the real world

and he alone has the kind of imaginative capacity.32 This idea of mental painting is

 

I u o o o o n
3 In the 16-July Letter, Werther recounts his experiences of accrdental mtrrnacy wrth Lotte. He rndrcates
that the mere thought of Lotte can itself be constituted as impure and corrupted.

Discussing Goethe’s English inﬂuence, Nicholas Boyle lists one of the reasons for Goethe’s eventual
distancing from Shakespeare is because Goethe’s “inﬁnitely reﬁned yet omnipresent subjectivity is

189

 

pursued in a curious way a few letters later:
What I told you [Wilhelm] recently concerning painting is doubtless also true of
poetry: what counts is that one perceives excellence and dares to give it
expression. . .. Today I witnessed a scene which, if written down plainly and exactly,
would be the loveliest idyll the world has ever seen; but why trouble with poetry and
scenes and idylls? Must we go tinkering about with Nature before we can enjoy it?

(35-6). B

For Werther, once nature is preserved in his heart, it should not be represented again

 

through words and brushes. Poetry and paintings can only be a corrupted version of

nature and never the true form, while his perception alone is enough to transcend

corruptions and retain the purity of nature. The idea of mental painting is furthered when

he wants to give Wilhelm a detailed description of the farmer’s “pure affection” (35;

emphasis mine):

Indeed, I should need the gifts of the greatest of poets if I were also to describe his

expressive gestures, the harmony of his voice and the secret ﬁre in his eyes, to any

effect. No, there are no words for the tenderness that was in his entire being, his

 

threatened by the remorseless objectivity of Shakespeare’s all-penetrating sympathy” (8). Werther presents
an unbounded romantic view of himself, whereas for Shakespeare there is no privileged subjectivity.
Nicholas Boyle and John Guthrie, eds. Goethe and the English-Speaking World (Rochester: Camden House,
2002)

190

every expression; everything I could say would only be crude (3 5).
Werther admires the farmer’s force of love, which once ignited, can only be
all-encompassing, akin to the sublime feeling that Werther possesses later. He does not
think that his words could do justice to the “ardent longing of such purity” (emphasis
mine 35). And all he can and should do is to “relive it in my inmost soul,” suggesting not

only a moment of mutual feeling but also the proximity of his soul to a higher ideal, a

 

state of transcendence which beﬁts such purity. What is more, only the farmer, being the i
one who is closest to his professed love and is the lover himself, can see exactly the love
as it is. Musing about describing the farmer’s mistress to Mlhelm, Werther, on second
thought, refuses to do so because it is better for Wilhelm to “see her with the eyes of her
lover” (36). He goes on to suggest that “perhaps she would not appear to my own eyes as
she does now, and why should I ruin the beautiful image I have?” (36). Werther’s
argument is two-fold. Only lovers in love can have the true sight of each other; and being
the outsider, love can only be felt by Werther, lest it should be “ruined.” For Werther,
beauty and love can only be kept in their pure form—in an authentic moment—in the
heart.

To avoid the collapse of his ideal world, Werther warily warns against possible

degradations in his aesthetic judgment. But if writing for Werther is necessarily

191

 

 

corrupting, how does he convey this idea of the mental writing? How does he write about
the impossibility of the indescribable? To solve these problems and avoid the impasses of
paradox, Werther frequently worries about the relationship between writing and purity.
Acknowledging that his letters tend to be digressive, Werther attempts to introduce Lotte
to Wilhelm in the 16 June letter, but ends up confessing that “if I go on like this you will

know as much when I am through as you did at the start” (36). Writing is not only i

 

digressive and sometimes meaningless; it can also be ﬁctive and omissive. Werther opens if
his 19 June letter with
I no longer recall where I had got to in my story the other day. . .if I had had you here
to talk to, instead of writing, I might well have kept you up until daybreak (43).
While writing is the general means of sharing information, it always seems less reliable
than orality, which is of course closer to the heart. And writing would be insufficient, if
not opaque; or as Werther ponders, “How can these cold, dead words on the page convey
the divine ﬂowering of her spirit?” (71). Werther seems to constantly question the
validity of writing, allowing him to keep a safer distance when it is necessary. Therefore
instead of writing the things he wants to share, he chooses to remain silent in order to

either show a kind of writing that is almost like mental writing or indicate textual

aposiopesis:

192

And what distresses me, \Vrlhelm, is that Albert does not seem as happy as—he

hoped—or as I—should have expected to be—if—I do not care for all these dashes,

but there is no other way I can express this—and I imagine this is clear enough (95).
The multiple dashes in that sentence make it really difﬁcult to understand the actions and
meanings conveyed; but importantly, Werther might just be using the dashes to indicate
“the rest,” a kind of omission.33 Therefore he imagines “this is clear enough” because
some things just cannot be described, just like the mental pictures that only exist in his
mind. That is why Werther has to constantly tell Wilhelm “ifl only I could describe it to
you” (101, 91), since writing as an extension of the mental picture can no longer be
dependable. Similarly, orality is no exception. Using his story with the children as an
allegory of writing, Werther muses,

Sometimes I have to invent a detail, which I forget in the second telling, whereupon

they instantly tell me it was different the time before. . .. It taught me that when an

author writes a second, revised version of his story it must needs be bad for the book,

 

33 From a different angle, Roland Barthes provides similar comments on Werther’s writings in his Lovers’
Discourse: “the amorous subject wonders, not whether he should declare his love the loved being. . .but to
what degree he should conceal the turbulences of his passion: his desires, his distresses: in short, his
excesses” (41 ). Roland Barthes, A Lover Is Discourse, translated by Ricard Howard (New York: Hill and
Wang, 1978), 41-7. Although this is not necessarily applicable to all love letters, Barthes does point out that
Werther’s love is always portrayed in a controlled manner, so that there is a congenial state between what
he writes and who he is. But what is worth further investigation is the discrepancy between the number of
letters he sends to Lotte and the number he sends Wilhelm. Does that suggest that in order to show his
excessive love to Lotte, he has to always conceal his excesses? This seems to merit further investigation.

193

however great the poetic improvement. (64)

For Werther, who is clearly obsessed with essence and purity, even a few improvised
details would be considered corrupting, despite their poetic improvement. Werther
carefully lays out what should have been and what should not have been done in terms of
letter writing to ensure that his textual existence remains congenial to his own life.

In a sense, Werther’s letters become a critical index for writing letters and writing in
general}4 It is no wonder that the editor would be repeating Werther’s aesthetic
instructions in his own editorial decisions. In the Werther collection, Werther constantly
reveals Wilhelm’s absence by reminding him, “You should have seen. . ..”35 Conversely,
Werther projects Lotte as his interlocutor in his 20-January Letter: “I hear you say” (78).
Indeed, in Werther’s own letters, he controls everything in them.36 He does not yet
possess the capability to access the character’s mind—or else it would not be a letter; yet
he is on the verge of doing so, at least pointing out such tendency.

But it is here that one starts to see the crumbling of Werther’s idealized textual world.

For if these moments of intersubjectivity are possible, they are also denied by Werther.

 

34 ,
Bruce Duncan’s chapter on “Goethe, Werther, Reading, and Writing” documents an array of essays and
books on the topic. In particular, he talks about the role of editor in Werther as interpreted by various critics.

Bruce Duncan, Goethes Werther and the Critics (Rochester: Camden House, 2005), 107-33.

35 . . .
There are multiple references to thrs 1n Werther (46, 51).

36 This is certainly related to Werther’s idea of the sublime. In the I 8-A ugust Letter, Werther recounts his
experience of the sublime as god-like: “I felt as if I had been made a god in that overwhelming abundance,
and the glorious forms of inﬁnite Creation moved in my soul, giving it life.”

194

After all, he is the one who claims that “it is never easy for men to understand each other
in this world” (64). And despite his effort of making Lotte the symbol of purity, and
therefore placing her only in the realm of the ideal, Werther also has this lingering
physical connection to Lotte. He ends his ﬁrst letter to Lotte (although we know that he
has probably already been corresponding with Lotte given the tone and the length of the
letter/note) reminding Lotte about his love for her:

One thing, though: if I might ask you not to use sand to dry to notes you write me. . .?

Today I raised it hastily to my lips, and was left a gritty crunching in my teeth

(55-6).
Werther is referring to his fetishistic relationship to Lotte’s note. What is more, it reminds
the readers once again that the letters in Werther are not just words, but also possess a
physical presence of their own. In another letter, in order for Werther to retrace “the
memory of those happy, irrecoverable days,” Werther has been kissing Lotte’s bow “a
thousand times over” (68). The physical presence of Lotte is always substituted, just like
Werther’s heart, which is always extenuated. Even though Werther tries to maintain a
platonic type of love with Lotte, the material world that he vehemently warns against will

always get in the way.37

 

37 . . . . . . . . . .
Werther even develops a fetishistic relationship wrth Lotte’s prstol he borrows to end hrs lrfe. In hrs ﬁnal

195

 

As for his prioritizing of orality instead of the written, he also often contradicts

himself. He warns Wilhelm about the “second telling,” yet he repeatedly falls into the

habits of “telling” Wilhelm stories that he has heard from other people. After telling a

story that he hears from Lotte, he turns around and writes, “Those are her words! But oh,

Wilhelm, who can repeat what she said!” (71). Werther seems to suggest that once stories

get to be retold, they become bad copies themselves. Given such a perspective, one might

say that many of Werther’s letters fall into the same category of a bad copy of the original,

 

unable to preserve the purity and authority of the originating sentiment. Despite
Werther’s conviction that he will not resort to “second telling,” he often digresses into
this mode. Several of his letters rely on his ability to retell another’s story or to retell
others telling the story. And despite his assurance in the 4 September letter that the story
about the farmer has not been “exaggerated or in any way embroidered,” Werther still has
to tell Wilhelm: “If only I can show you the man as he stood before me, as he still stands
before me! If only I could tell it as it ought to be told” (91). The lingering problem of
second telling will always compromise Werther’s letters, and eventually catch up with his

ideal of epistolary purity.

 

letter, he writes, “they have been through your hands, you wiped the dust off them, I kiss them a thousand
times, you touched them!” (131).

I96

V

By now it should be clear that the editorial rearrangement of the Werther ending
derives largely from Werther’s aesthetic desire to transcend the excesses of writing. And
with all the careﬁrl additions and omissions by the editor, Werther’s letter collection
remains a sort of pastiche, in terms of the mixture of genres, voices, and aesthetic ideals.
But perhaps one of the biggest problems of Werther’s aspiration and its impact is yet to
be answered, if we look at the idea of second telling from a different angle. Indeed, there
is always a problem of second order feeling throughout the novel, for midway through
the narrative, we learn that there is a “diary” that Werther keeps. He tells Wilhelm,

I am astounded to see how I went ahead in all this, step by step, in full awareness of

what I was doing! How clearly I saw my position, and yet how childishly I behaved;

and I still see it clearly now, and yet there is no sign of improvement (5 8).
The presence of the diary reminds us that, with Werther, the letter always has a
counterpart in the diary. Or maybe it is the other way around. We of course have no way
of telling which one is written ﬁrst, and the line between the letter and diary is already
thin, as Pamela’s diary entries attest.“8 Yet, the haunting image of the diary keeps

reminding us that the Werther letters themselves derive from somewhere else, even if

 

3 I O O
8 The second half of Pamela mostly consists of Pamela’s letters to her parents originally recorded rn her
diary.

197

they are chosen by the editor to show a certain credibility of the Werther account. In a
sense, if Werther keeps a diary as a kind of reference to his letters, now the editor uses
Werther’s letters only as a kind of reference to the ending of Werther. They are already
bad copies and fail to maintain the kind of aesthetic purity demanded by Werther.

And this realization that the letters in Werther are already corrupted proves to be
most destabilizing and detrimental to Werther’s epistolary ideals. Even if Werther had
abided by his own aesthetic rules and had never been representing events at a second
remove, these letters will never beﬁt Werther’s ideal. Sent by Werther, strayed from their
original author, and possessed by the addressees, they are only by chance—“I have
diligently collected everything,” the editor reminds us—returned to the Werther
Collection. They never are meant for the editor to collect, and they are never just
references for the editor to “retell” what happens. If anything, the one-man narrative of
Werther keeps reminding us of the missing half: if the editor has indeed diligently
collected everything, why is it that those letters received by Werther are never shown?39
What is the reason behind the editorial ellipsis? What is it that makes them

un-Werther-like and therefore becomes unﬁt for Werther? It seems to me that Werther

 

39 The editor provides us with the only reference in Werther that might give us a clue as to where these
letters might be. He tells us in the third-person narrative that Werther “sorted out his papers, tore up a great
deal and threw it into the stove, and sealed 3 number of bundles which he addressed to Wilhelm” (131).
While these letters might be lost to the ﬁre, but it seems to me that these “papers” speciﬁcally refers to
Werther’s own writing, not the letters he receives from Wilhelm or Lotte.

I98

 

therefore ironically tells us how even the best efforts to keep epistolary novels “pure,”
whatever that might mean, and free of contaminating elements can end up becoming a
story about the letter’s multiplicity. As we move on into the concluding chapter, we have
to wonder if the epistolary novel proves to be so persevering, why does it come to a
sudden decline in the early nineteenth century? If the epistolary novel is always bound up
with a mixture of genres, why do we still need it? Why do we still feel there is something
unsatisfactory about the third-person narrator that the Editor adopts? If excess is in the

essence of the epistolary novel, how do we mark a true decline from another?

199

Frankenstein’s Mutilated Texts and Fate of the Letter

Numerous literary critics tell the same story about the fate of the eighteenth-
century epistolary novel: the epistolary novel wanes, both in production and popularity,
as it moves into the nineteenth-century. Frank Black’s pioneering study on the late
eighteenth-century epistolary novel reveals the gradual decline of the epistolary novel
and suggests that it has something to do with the “types of novels coming into popularity
at the close of the century.”I Franco Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees painstakingly tracks
the production and popularity of distinct novel types and comes to the conclusion that
like many other novel genres in the eighteenth century, the epistolary novel follows a
similar thirty-year span of ebb and ﬂow, meeting its end toward the end of the eighteenth
century.2 Elizabeth Cook shows us that as the Enlightenment comes to a gradual end, we
ﬁnd the expulsion of the letter from the literary dominance it once enjoys.3 Others notice

the formal features of the epistolary novel, suggesting that it is the insistence on the letter

 

I Frank Gees Black, The Epistolary Novel in the Late Eighteenth Century (Eugene: University of Oregon
Monographs, 1940), 108.Without much explanation, Black treats John Cleland’s Fanny Hill and Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein as epistolary novels. It seems to me that the extensive uses of the letter in the novel
ghould be an indicator of an epistolary novel.

Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, ﬂees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (New York: Verso, 2005).
Please see his ﬁrst chapter for more details on the life-span of literary genres.

Elizabeth Heckendom Cook, Epistolary Bodies: Gender and Genre in the Eighteenth-Century Republic
of Letters (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 171-2.

200

form that eventually hinders the progress of eighteenth-century epistolary novels. One
thing is for sure, as the epistolary novel transits into the nineteenth century, it does not
produce the kind of immediate eighteenth-century sensations we see with Pamela, Julie
or Werther. As this dissertation comes to an end, I will try to answer two other lingering
questions that might further help us understand the implication of epistolary novel’s
excess and its seeming decline. What is it that makes the epistolary novel no longer
appealing in the eyes of nineteenth-century readers and authors? What becomes of the
epistolary form when the history of the novel begins to privilege high realism in the
nineteenth century? This chapter will use Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a seemingly non-
epistolary novel, as a point of departure for considering the submergence of the epistolary
novel in the nineteenth century and the fate of the letter’s apparent ability to adapt as its

quality of excess suddenly disappears.

11
While rarely thought of as a novel-of-letters, there is something epistolary in
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein that reminds us of one, and especially those we have

discussed so far.4 Frankenstein has a framed letter structure in which the diegesis itself

 

4 . . . . . .
Readers tend to focus on Dr. Frankenstein’s narrative instead of seeing it as a letter or a series of letters.

201

morphs into its back-ﬂame letters without a proper distinction, much like Shamela. Like
the editor and Werther in Werther, Frankenstein also expresses concern about his own
narrative and therefore avows to Captain Walton, “I would not that a mutilated one [i.e.
letter] should go down to posterity” (emphasis mine 207).5 Signiﬁcantly, Frankenstein’s
monster gradually structures his identity and values by reading Goethe’s Werther.
Goethe’s novel utilizes a mixture of genres and voices that Frankenstein will come to
resemble, suggesting that Shelley is drawing upon a familiar repertoire of epistolary
gestures. Lastly, as I discussed in the Goethe chapter, we have another eponymous
epistolary hero (Frankenstein) who cannot end his own narrative except through Walton’s
letters at the end. But what decidedly makes Frankenstein non-epistolary, however, is the
lack of correspondence at the principle diegetic level: in other words, Dr. Frankenstein
does not recount the story using an epistolary form. For the same reason, many novels
have perhaps letters addressing the editor or an author’s letter as a preface or forward, but

they would not be considered epistolary.‘5 Such distinction may seem arbitrary and

 

Frankenstein can be a Gothic novel, a romantic novel, a proto science ﬁction, but rarely do people talk
about Frankenstein as an “epistolary novel.” What this indicates is that readers or critics are perfectly ﬁne
with not acknowledging Frankenstein’s epistolarity. After all, even though one may treat Dr. Frankenstein’s
narrative as embedded in Captain Walton’s ﬁ‘ame letters, Dr. Frankenstein’s story lack the kind of formal
epistolary feature, not even the kind of self-reﬂexivity as in Werther.

All references to Frankenstein will be in parenthesis. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (New York: Barnes &
Noble, 2003).

Frankenstein has been recognized by a few critics as an epistolary novel, although we aren’t always told
why, just as we aren’t always told why Frankenstein is not an epistolary novel. Epistolary Histories
mentions Frankenstein as an epistolary novel that traces the English anxiety about otherness. Black lists

202

contingent, but it may be necessary to think through such distinctions when one is
pursuing the history of a form or genre.

Yet as the reader continues to read and ﬁnishes Dr. Frankenstein’s main narrative,
he or she comes to the realization that the main narrative itself is also a kind of letter or,
better, a series of narratives nested in an epistolary correspondence. After all, like many
of the letters we have seen before, Frankenstein is telling the story from a ﬁrst-person
perspective similar to Werther’s. Even the Monster has his own “I” narrative with the
whole chapters devoted to the Monster alone.7 Moreover, the Monster’s story is treated as
embedded narration, as his account is framed with quotation marks. As Clare Brant points
out, eighteenth-century correspondence is often compared to conversations between
parties.8 They could potentially become or resolve into letters, as we have demonstrated
before in the letter/note dynamic. That there is a complex narrative dimension to
Frankenstein should not be overlooked. Indeed none of the narrators here have complete
control over their own words: Walton’s letters are sent to his sister while he is at sea;

Frankenstein’s words are kept by Captain Walton in a journal (22); and ﬁnally, the

 

Frankenstein as an epistolary novel. What makes it epistolary, however, is not clear. Amanda Gilroy and W.
M. Verhoeven, eds. Epistolary Histories: Letters, Fiction, Culture (Charlottesville: University Press of
Virginia, 2000), 13.

Chapter XI to XVI are narrated entirely by the Monster, although this is transcribed by Victor
Frankenstein in the body of his narrative-letter.

8 Clare Brant, Eighteenth-Century Letter and British Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 21-4.

203

Monster’s self-narrative has to be transmitted by Frankenstein. Like the modernist
aesthetics a century later, Shelley has shown an experimental side on her novel, in which
she is very much aware of the presentation on form.9 We have seen a gradual transition
from the letter genre, to a self-narrative, to a narrative within a narrative and one can
already see the difﬁculty in maintaining a clear-cut boundary between forms of discourse.
In many ways, Frankenstein is as much a narrative composite as its Monster is a
corporeal one, and thus it presents us with a stark example of the ﬁ'aught nature of
epistolary excess.

Still, there is something decidedly epistolary about Frankenstein. In the ﬁrst
ensuing letter in the back frame, Walton admits to his sister that

you have read this strange and terriﬁc story, Margaret (206).
For most of the novel, we “hear” the narrations of Dr. Frankenstein and the Monster. We
might even pretend to “peep” into Captain Walton’s journal when we read the chapters.'0
Shelley arranges the central narratives as “chapters” instead of a series of letters enclosed
in Captain Walton’s frame letters. But what we read for most of the novel is also “sent”

by Walton to his sister. That there is a letter or a series of letters pertaining to Dr.

 

9 Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is a good example of the modemistic awareness of form. Like
Frankenstein, it also has an outside narrator retell the story of Marlow retelling the story of Kurtz.
Everything therefore is layered and the “meaning” of the story therefore lies not solely in the content but in
the form as well.

10 Captain Walton records this strange tale in his journal (22).

204

Frankenstein’s story marks the condition of all letters, or indeed, of all texts: for if Dr.
Frankenstein’s story is at once his story and Walton’s letter, then perhaps any narrative is
potentially a missing letter, a narrative double that could have been written yet is
nonetheless repressed—note that these central chapters are never written in the letter
form nor are they taken to be one. Like Derrida’s idea of “différance” in which the word
difference gains primacy only through a simultaneous omission (oblivion) of its other
différance (both words have the same pronunciation in French), Frankenstein’s
highlighting of textual doubleness also calls into question any self-presence in which a
Ietter’s supposedly transparent self is no longer assured and that arbitrary divisions
cannot sustain themselves. In this sense, Frankenstein’s suggests that the epistolary novel
can often be passed for other genres.

There is more to this complication. Shelley’s use of narrative frames suggests
some narrative excesses are inherent in all epistolary genres. In fact, Frankenstein is a
novel readily concerned with excess and epistolary miscommunication. The last chapter
of the main narrative, for example, morphs into a letter without any warning, and thus
blurs the line between the supposed main narrative and the back frame. Indeed, this
theme of the dynamic interactions between the novel’s frame and its main narrative is

carried out at several junctures in the novel: if we are to read the Frankenstein story told

205

 

through Dr. Frankenstein’s point of view, then we also have to take into account the fact
that the story depends on its status as Walton’s letter. In other words, Walton is needed as
the witness to the main narrative. Conversely, the monster’s story as told by Dr.
Frankenstein also forms an inner correspondence with the main narrative. In this sense,
the monster’s story as narrated from Dr. Frankenstein’s perspective cannot be a settled
story because of their antagonistic relationship. Moreover, Walton now becomes the
unwitting addressee of the Monster’s letters. These layered texts therefore resist any easy
categorization. Marshall Brown has noted in his Gothic Texts that the “gothic of
Frankenstein is thus deﬁned by its disjunctrress. Whatever the “consistency” of its

internal narrative, the story as a whole lacks continuity.”ll

He goes on to suggest that
Shelley composes Frankenstein like a child’s tale, and in many ways it consists of
“incoherence” and “broken form.”'2 However we read Frankenstein then depends on its
contiguous narrative frames without a deﬁnitive formal anchor to stabilize the story. In
other words, the letter/narrative dynamic creates a metonymic effect in which each
narrative gains meaning only through being adjacent to each other. If this is the case, then

the reader’s expectation of the letters’ ostensible self-dependence as tools of

communication also seems questionable. In fact, despite addressing his sister back in

 

H Marshall Brown, The Gothic Text (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 190.
‘2 Brown, 200.

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England in the opening letters, the use of her as an addressee comes to be less and less
obvious. Unlike the previous letters, the ﬁfth letters, for instance, does not have the
numbering V, and it does not have any addressee. It can also be read either as a real letter
which has no addressee, or as another entry within the fourth letter. Or it can simply be an
addendum or an accidental note. In a sense, this letter functions like the main narrative,
recounting events and awaiting chances of correspondence. Similarly, the letters in the
back frame do not have any particular addressee as Walton does not name the addressee
at the beginning of each letter.

That these letters should start to lose their function or meaning need not come as a
surprise. After all, Frankenstein is a hybrid text with an incoherent form. But more
importantly, it also concerns itself about the creation of monstrosity. ’3 Indeed, what
makes the Monster monstrous is not its horrible deeds or the constant references to being
“daemonic”; rather it is the Monster’s doubleness inherent in its “detested form” (99). It
is not just that the Monster is the doppelganger of Dr. Frankenstein—after all, the
Monster’s narrative cannot survive without Dr. Frankenstein’s account and Dr.

Frankenstern’s rnclusron of the Monster’s narrative authenticates hrs own confessrons.l

 

'3 Frankenstein is the “author” of the Monster, just like Shelley is the author of Frankenstein (89).

'4 They always chase each other, and literally become double-gangers, or double-walkers. For more details
on the idea of gothic doubles, please see Aya Yatsugi’s Website. Aya Yatsugi, “The Double in Gothic
Romance: A Study of The Monk, Frankenstein, ‘William Wilson,’ The Strange Case of Dr Jeckyll and Mr

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Rather it is the Monster’s ambivalent body that produces doubled affects on Dr.
Frankenstein:
How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch
whom with such inﬁnite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs
were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful!--Great
God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath;
his hair was of a lustrous black, and ﬂowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but
these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that
seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set,
his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips (55).
The reader’s reaction is probably similar to that of Dr. Frankenstein: “How can I describe
my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch?” After all, Dr. Frankenstein
never really explains why the Monster is monstrous physically based on what he has
given us here in this passage. On the contrary, the evidence of the opposite is more
prevalent. The Monster is “beautiful,” and is combined from “these luxuriances.” We can

therefore only surmise that it is the very fact of the Monster’s hybrid condition that makes

 

Hyde, and The Picture of Dorian Gray” <http://www.ube-k.ac.' /~ atsu i/r- atsu i. f> (30 July 2009).
For Ronald Thomas, “The monster desires society, discourse, and integration as Frankenstein ﬂees them.
The effect of Frankenstein's narrative is to indict him as that of the monster exonerates him. Frankenstein's
story only conﬁrms the very thing that he tries to deny in it: the self cannot be divided; the monster is
himself.” Ronald Thomas, “In the Company of Strangers: Absent Voices in Stevenson's Dr: Jekyll and Mr:
Hyde and Beckett's Company,” Modern Fiction Studies Volume 32, Number 2 (1986): 166-7.

208

it monstrous and dangerous. Moreover, Dr. Frankenstein has seen the Monster before and
after his coming to life. Again, witnessing the Monster’s status from immobility to
mobility, from inaction to action, from death (the Monster consists of dead body parts) to
life, he does not see any change in the Monster’s physicality. Now, he suddenly decides
to renounce his identiﬁcation with his own creation and instead embrace an antagonistic
relationship with the Monster, almost in an amnesiac manner. It is the Monster’s ability to
simultaneously evokes different feelings—one serene and canny, and the other one
abject—in Frankenstein that marks its dangerous excess; not just the Monster’s
incompatibility to any categorization but also its incommensurability to any reasonable
explanation. Frankenstein’s bewilderment is also ours because like Frankenstein, we are
also at loss with the hybrid body of Frankenstein.

Thus, what makes the Monster monstrous (not in any sense negative) is its
hybridity, wherein something should come to be more than itself and not from any single
source. While Frankenstein seems to always depend on Walton’s single framed voice—
whether they are his journal, notes, letters, or his ﬁnal narration of his encounter with the
Monster—it is nonetheless multiple in essence, the Frankenstein narrative mirroring the
Monster’s patchwork body. This seems even more obvious in one of the ﬁnal scenes:

Frankenstein discovered that I made notes concerning his history: he asked

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to see them, and then himself corrected and augmented them in many
places; but principally in giving the life and spirit to the conversations he
held with his enemy. “Since you have preserved my narration,” said he, “I
would not that a mutilated one should go down to posterity” (207).
Just like the way he attempts to create and control the Monster’s body, Dr. Frankenstein is
still trying to give “life and spirit” into Frankenstein so as to make it a uniﬁed whole—“I
would not that a mutilated one should go down to posterity.” Still, both attempts fail,
because the body of Frankenstein is also a patchwork like the Monster. As Frankenstein
further reveals, the main narrative so far only consists of “notes” that potentially can be
“corrected and augmented,” and thus entail other narratives, further complicating the line
between notes and narratives. Indeed, even after these afﬁrmations, these fragments can
never amount to the whole story. In other words, as a reader, one is reading the central
narrative as a copy void of its original and as a letter without its addressee. In a sense, Dr.
Frankenstein does have to worry about his textual existence as manifested in the notes, as
it is already “mutila ”: his identity is dispersed throughout the notes, and therefore

among the letters, whose addresser and addressee are always a question mark already.

III

210

 

As we can see in Dr. Frankenstein’s reaction to Monster’s piecemeal body,
epistolary genres can contain a narrative desire that is at once in a form of repulsion and
attachment. Even at its popular height, Pamela is Richardson’s ideological project for the
well-mannered genre and bourgeois morality, as well as “an affront to all that is ﬁxed,

”'5 What is at stake here in Frankenstein is the epistolary doubleness

uniform, lapidary.
that “demystiﬁed supposed natural distinctions and categories” that the eighteenth
century has come to embody. '6 Elizabeth MacArthur provides another argument that
since “the epistolary novel is one of the most important eighteenth-century narrative
forms associated with play on meaning rather than the establishment of a ﬁxed,
authoritative signiﬁcance,” the nineteenth century starts to see it as a threat to a “more
uniﬁed, static social system.”'7 According to MacArthur, critics until recently tended to
consider “the eighteenth-century novel, and in particular the epistolary form, primarily as

either an obstacle or a development in a mighty progress toward its more perfect

descendant in the nineteenth century.”'8 In this sense and ironically the epistolary form

 

'5 Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), 136.
16
Castle, 136.

17 .

Elrzabeth J. MacArthur, Extravagant Narratives: Closure and Dynamics in the Epistolary F orm
(Princeton: Princeton University Press), 23, 17. She also suggests that the epistolary text forces us to
“challenge closural theories of narrative” so often stemmed from the nineteenth-century ﬁction (15).

'8 MacArthur, 11. In her Epistolary Responses, Ann Bower notes that for its readers, the twentieth-century

epistolary novel is encumbered by its structure. Ann Bower, Epistolary Responses: The Letter in 20'”-
Century American Fiction and Criticism (London: The University of Alabama Press, 1997), 10.

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has to disappear, just like the F rankenstein/Monster’s patchwork body has to be
recognized as horror instead of the beautiful in order for Frankenstein to be passed for a
“perfect descendent.” Furthermore, as Thomas O. Beebee observes, as the epistolary form
“no longer held the same ﬁctional and ideological power” for nineteenth-century writers,
they are “forced to ﬁnd ways of neutralizing or parodying epistolary form, of employing
the letter in new ways.”'9 The appearance of the letter as a device in Sir Walter Scott’s or
Jane Austen’s novels becomes what Beebee terms “the ghost of epistolarity,” because
their novels still retain the features that eighteenth-century epistolary novelists use.20 The
appearance of the letter turns into a kind of textual haunting, but the letter lives on in a
marginal role.

Finally, by offering this reading of Frankenstein, I hope to point out a possible
link between the rise of realism and the temporary disappearance of epistolary novels in
the nineteenth century. Despite Frankenstein’s non-epistolary nature, the letter keeps
coming back, forcing us to recognize that its temporary disappearance might just be
another facade. After all, if the epistolary novel tends to be excessive with its mixture of

genres, then it is beﬁtting for it to be more and more so as the epistolary novel necessarily

 

'9 Thomas O. Beebee, Epistolary Fiction in Europe I 500 — I 850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1999), I70.

20 Beebee, 169.

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exhausts itself. Werther mostly follows a single voice without a normal addressee.
Frances Burney’s Evelina (1778), in this regard, sacriﬁces the narrative obliqueness of
epistolarity—the way events are reported according to Janet Altman—for a more linear
plotline.21 Evelina’s letters that address the same character consecutively will be marked
as “Evelina in continuation” as if these letters create a linear temporality. This dissolution

of letter genre echoes Cook’s idea that i

 

Obviously, the epistolary novel did not vanish at the end of the eighteenth century.

Its rhetorical strategies and generic conventions were incorporated, albeit in

fragmented form, into ﬁrst- and third- person narrative types.22
Cook lists the enclosure of letters in the nineteenth-century novel as an example of such
“ﬁagmented form.” We might even recall from our discussions in epistolary ﬁagrnents in
previous chapters, that a certain paradoxical situation marks the essence of epistolarity:
only when the letter is in its most fragmented state will it come to be an authentic letter.
In this sense, Frankenstein becomes such a case of the nineteenth century epistolary
novel: it has to be fragmented so as to be recognized as an epistolary novel. As a result,

we can’t speak of an end of epistolary genre, because it adopts other forms in order to

 

2' For Altman, “Letter narrative proceeds through a doubly oblique narration. Narrated events are always

reported by someone to someone.” Janet Gurkin Altman, Epistolarity: Approaches to a From (Columbus:
Ohio State University Press, 1982), 207.

22 Cook, 174.

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continue its unruliness and its excess, just like the end of Frankenstein starts not with
Walton’s letters, but in another ambivalent state. Walton’s ﬁnal letter ends in such a way
that it no longer looks like a letter (e. g. no self-reﬂection, no indication of his presence in
the narrative as the monster gradually disappears), and these letters are attached to the
chapters instead of the supposed back frame. For this, I would like to offer Derrida as the

end of my postscript: “Mixture is the letter, the epistle, which is not a genre but all genres,

literature itself.”23

 

23 Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1987), 48.

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