| While many contemporary scholars have examined the function and trajectory of the epistolary novel, most have paid little or no attention to letters in works of fiction that are written but not sent. Existing within the framework of the epistolary genre, the unsent letter is a site of complex self-disclosure closely associated with the categories of autobiography, diary, confession, memoir and testimony. Unsent letter or letter-like communications in Ama Ata Aidoo's Our Sister Killjoy, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Edwidge Danticat's "Children of the Sea," Christina Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban, Sylvia Molloy's Certificate of Absence, and Toni Morrison's Beloved are potent discursive forces in the production, exploration and assertion of identity within the cross-cultural universes of these texts. The communications in these fictions of social change are not easy, static, or unproblematic models of speaking the self, but they do provide significant insight into the complex negotiations between the public and private and their renderings through cultural forms. This dissertation demonstrates that by disturbing the form and fixed sequence of the letter genre, unsent letters reroute the principles/principals in a sending system, a rerouting that allows for alternative understandings of spatial and temporal patternings, plot, character and self/consciousness in the six works of fiction discussed. The study is divided into three thematic areas which highlight the unsent letters' unique characteristics: first, the writer's intense focus on the addressee; second, the anxieties inherent in the (public) utterance of the self; and last, the effects of the constant interplay of absence and presence that lingers in letter-like communications which remain with the speaker/writer. |
