| This dissertation investigates four epistolary works by modern women writers of color where the issues of gender, genre, and culture or race interconnect, in the hope of providing a better understanding of how the mode of the unsent/unanswered letter breaks the borderline between the public and the private as well as between the central and the marginal. The introduction describes two paradigmatic instances of the unsent/unanswered letter, the Heroides and Les Lettres portugaises. The first chapter highlights the nature of the diary-letter of Mariama Ba's Une si longue lettre (1980) and indicates how an active dialogue with her addressee, her husband, and her self helps the Muslim woman overcome her pain. The second chapter, on Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1982), first analyzes how Celie develops from epistolary enclosure to expansion in the interrelationship of sisterhood, patriarchy, and the circulation of the letter and then examines colonial discourse in the two sisters' letters. The third chapter, on Ana Castillo's The Mixquiahuala Letters (1986), concentrates on the motif of travel and analyzes the female protagonist's search for womanhood and ethnic identity. The last chapter interprets Li Ang's An Unsent Love Letter (1986) as a rewriting of the "pure sentimental love stories"--a genre considered by patriarchy to be the domain of women writers. This study concludes by pointing out five common features of these four fictional epistolary works: the recognition and reverse of patriarchy, the motif of a journey, the sense of the "other," the presence of multiple subjectivity, and the multi-direction of the letter.;In today's global community, these women writers of color have received many kinds of literary, cultural, and political impacts. They do not write in isolation but in interaction with the world. They may or may not be conscious of the Ovidian tradition or the Portuguese type, but their awareness of modern epistolarity may be sharpened by the western academic training they have received in either American or French colleges. This awareness may in turn help them translate their awareness of women of color into their work. At the same time that these four texts reverse the Ovidian tradition in various degrees, they manifest the post-modern properties of the letter--misdirection of the letter, the epistolary triangle, and the letter as a medium of one person's power over another. Although it may be unwise to say that these four women writers of color use the letter form--the mode of the unsent/unanswered letter--because of these properties, it may be valid to say that these epistolary properties help translate the "common context of struggle" of "women of color."... |
