| My work creates a methodology for reading American letters, building from scholarly predecessors such as Susan Fitzmaurice and James Daybell by emphasizing performance in epistolarity. My dissertation argues that the American female letter-writer engaged in a deft, practiced performance each time she picked up a pen. I suggest that the so-called "private," familiar letter should no longer be read as a transparent document or treated as a subset of autobiography; instead, we should see it as the writing mode women manipulated to become public, published authors, an argument that challenges two germinal studies of the public/private spheres in the eighteenth century: Habermas's theory that the eighteenth-century public sphere(s) excluded women and Michael Warner's thesis that the printing press was the sole exclusive catalyst for the republic's formation. Using the archival correspondence of New Englanders, Scottish-Americans, Southern British-Americans, an Englishwoman and others, I show how interconnected transnational and transatlantic female letter-writers were, passing each other poems, essays, and history texts so that their friends could read and share them with legislators, printers, statesmen, newspapers, and other women, forming a tightly interwoven network I call "the epistolary salon." Since many of these women wrote using pseudonyms, I suggest that the letter-writing space allowed them to dress in drag, cross-dressing on paper to discuss the topics (like politics) that would normally "unsex" them.;The first section of the dissertation examines letters written during the late eighteenth century, addressing how women made public their opinions about politics, gender roles, and educational reform via letter-writing. The second section of the project concerns how early nineteenth-century female travel-writers engaged in discussions about nationalism and aesthetics while touring Scotland, France, Italy, and Germany.;My project closes with a discussion of the historical migration of letters into canonical texts, particularly sentimental novels, suggesting that they were as much about flawed exercises in epistolarity as they were about the preservation of female virtue. Through The Coquette, Charlotte Temple, and Female Quixotism, I trace the failed epistolary performances of the novel's main characters, relying on eighteenth-century letter-writing manuals to foreground my argument. |
