Category: Epistolary

For countless years, or better to say ever since the mighty pen and paper became customary in our daily lives, people who desired to get in touch with others disconnected by distance had no more than one manner to carry out it, and the way was nothing but writing letters. Letters were the lone way of long-distance communiqué, at least until the time of the discovery of the telegraph in the nineteenth century. No wonder therefore that by the eighteenth century, letter writing was so widespread that one of the earliest prose’s is found to be a novel comprising only of letters of a daughter to her parents, and the epistolary system lent that novel what pragmatism it had. This novel was Samuel Richardson’s Pamela. Subsequently letter writing took a prominent place in literary genre, and all through the eighteenth century, in the wake of the institution of the post office in 1660, a spurt in literacy coupled with a growing middle class, letter writing developed into an all-time universal amusement activity for people in every strata of the society, including both men and women. In this way the letter developed into a type both of private communication and of public speech, where remarkably women were encouraged not just to contribute, but to stand out more significantly The growth of letter writing, in the eighteenth century is inextricably linked particularly with women,. In its personal capacity, letters permitted a woman confined to the boundaries of her home to be in touch with the outside world with both men and women. The variety of published letters was a treasured platform from which freely confirm scholarly aptitudes of women

An authoritative study regarding epistolary or English letter writing is that of How (2003) who in his writing “Epistolary spaces: English letter-writing from the foundation of the Post Office to Richardson’s Clarissa” effectively describes and investigates the nature of letter writing from the establishment of post office. He also explores the term ‘epistolary spaces’, a trend believed to have come into existence in the wake of the Post Office, became accessible to the general public.

The advent and development of postal service is credited with paving the way for a new vogue in literature that is termed as literature or novel in the form of letter writing. Dierks endows us with a better-off and more refined version of post office role in advancing the genre of letter writing. Letter-writing and postal communication all through the Atlantic is associated to the eighteenth century revolution of consumerism, to the middle-class business growth, and at the same time to the manoeuvres of Empire. By the early on eighteenth century, the Royal English Empire created a new-fangled communications infrastructure, which was in fact was a tool of bureaucratic culture and royally control. Moreover, postal services turned out to be bureaucratised in its place of being outsourced to service providers or upper-class dominations. A vital landmark in the field of postal service development in England was the Postal Act of 1711 integrated the royally coast into a fully-fledged royally postal service. This Act came with a number of legal provisions that systematized the postal service in England as national postal service. In the light of this development, letter writing became the common phenomenon of correspondence not only for only royal people, but as well people at large in the society. The availability of Post Office made available cheaper and fast means of communication, and therefore letter writing became the fashion and passion of common people, previously restricted to just royal men and women who were able to afford the high costs of letter writing. In his work How conducts a comprehensive study of five authentic letters, interpreting the letters in relation to their societal and political concerns and attending to such issues in the forms of class, sex, compilations of model letters and the substance of London to English epistolary spaces. He presents epistolary spaces in an assorted manner of illustrations in which he describes the fresh urban culture of London, in the love letters of Dorothy Osborne (1652-4); courtly enclaves, in the diplomatic letters of the dramatist Sir George Etherege (1685-9); and aristocratic redoubts in the letters connecting the Countesses of Hertford and Pomfret (1739-41). How finds Richardson’s ground-breaking novel Clarissa establishing a trend named epistolary novel, which contains a large number of letters defining standard writing of epistolary novels. Letter writing emerged as a powerful medium of correspondence for both common and uncommon people and gradually it finds a place in the literary genre.

However, there came a revolution in post and letter writing in the age of Victorian England, and this revolution was the advent of the Penny Post in 1840, where the Penny Post formed the Victorian comparable of the internet. The Penny Post in true form of post office enabled a revolution in the field of correspondence and letter writing which facilitated the public stay connected We may well suppose that just as the Internet in our times, Penny Post during Victorian England brought about huge brightness with that of enormous anxiety. Economical postage, Penny Post considered as promoting new form of staying connected with the related and loved ones, facilitating couples to arrange clandestine meeting, delivering secret letters at various levels of people in the society. The advent of the modern post office in the form of Penny Post was acclaimed for its usefulness of royal letters, though criticized for generating immorality in private affairs. Nevertheless, Penny Post created true revolution in the field of advent and development of postal service that immensely contributed in the vicinity of letter writing.

The earliest form of post office might be traced in the 16th century correspondence system when horses were used for transporting royal letters. King Henry VIII of England during the 1530s AD appointed Sir Brian Tuke for supervising the royal correspondence system and travelled routes from London to Edinburgh, Scotland, Holyhead, Falmouth, Dover, and Dublin. In this route, between junctures or posts there was distance somewhat twenty miles in measurement lengthwise. Following this distance, exhausted horses were deployed for fresh stand-in. From 1574, at every destination in the route there was posted one Post Master who possessed at least three horses presented for exercise of correspondence or corresponding royal letters. However, post office came into existence in real sense when a public postal service was established in 1635. Post-boys used to carry out letters riding on horses, although because of the dismal condition of the roads the running of this post office system was sluggish and tough for the post-boys and horses. The post-boys used to wear scarlet livery and hardly toured more than three miles per hour in those early on days. Correspondence or letters were used to carry from post to post by post-boys and were delivered to the local postmaster or postmistress, who used to take away the letters for the locale and had them collected or delivered, and subsequently the post-boy would go on to the next post, moving the remaining of the letters or correspondence.

The Penny Post is attributed to facilitating people from all sections of the society with similar rights to correspond at low rates. Moreover, Penny Post paved the way for developing a new wave of socialising in British society working for advancement of learning in the area of letter writing, where ethical concerns were not less considered. Therefore postal reformers found this advancement in worldwide communication networks (in terms of both the post and the telegraph) influential in keeping up royal associations and structuring the communication of global Anglo-Saxonism telegrams. In this framework Postal advent and growth raises significant issues as regards the ceremonial dynamics of Victorian age letter writing, studying which a complex issue in relation to the portrayals of postal networks documented to be controlled by the prejudices of gender, class, sexuality, and race. Undeniably, Postal Pleasures adds vital input to the enormous literary creations during the nineteenth century. To put it more precisely Postal Pleasures covered up the void created by Penny Post, paving way for a new genre of letter writing and correspondence. It also created a new literary genre encompassing the social realities of gender, class, sexuality, and race.

The novel Dreaming in Cuban by Cristina Garcia is about three Cuban women from one large family who are generations apart. The storyline has particularly placed focus on Celia and her daughters, Felicia, Lourdes, and her daughter Pilar. In this novel, each woman has their issues and their way of dealing with them. However, they have a thing in common: memory and the past is a big part of their identities. Christina Garcia uses numerous techniques to develop the story and the main idea behind it. She uses epistolary and flashback and flashforward techniques to develop the theme of memory and the past. Memory and the past plays a huge part in the main characters’ life that they can’t erase.

The author used the flashback and flashforward technique to show how memory and the past had played a role in the characters’ life. Celia remembers ‘Jorge’s mother and sister playing dominoes in the dining room until late, delaying her sleep, her only solace’ (p. 41) while her husband, Jorge, was on business trips. Celia has experienced these kinds of violence from Jorge’s family. The way Jorge’s family treated her in her early years of marriage, trying to erase remembrance in her mind, has left a mark in her. Even when Celia ‘took Ofelia (Jorge’s sister) aside and told her in confidence’ (p. 42) that she was pregnant, her misery increased. She even decided to leave everything and travel to Spain if she had a boy. She would then forget everything and live her life in hopes of finding her old lover. However, the letters she writes to her ex, Gustavo, show that she did not forget anything and still remembers it.

Another technique that Cristina Garcia used to develop the theme memory and the past is by epistolary. Celia writes Gustavo letters every month that she never sent, telling him everything like ‘if it’s a boy, she would leave Jorge, and sail to Spain, to Granada, to his kiss.’ (p.50) These letters, I believe, demonstrate that the memories are important to Celia since she kept them without sending them to Gustavo. The letters became more like journals that she puts in everything that happened each month, what happened in the past. But when her granddaughter was born, she wrote her last letter stating, ‘I will no longer write to you, mi amor. she will remember everything.’ She stopped writing the letter after confirming that her granddaughter will carry on the family’s memory. And this is how Celia showed how important memory is to her.

It is arguable that Jane Austen’s very decision to put pen to paper and write Lady Susan was a feminist act. Writing in an epoch prior to the foundations of a female literary canon being established, Austen not only utilised the epistolary form to give her female characters voice and agency, but framed the novel around a central female character who unapologetically contravenes patriarchal social expectations. Lady Susan is a middle-aged and widowed mother and yet eminently desired and overtly sexual; a member of the upper echelons of rigid British society, yet uniquely witty, outspoken and vulgar. Lady Susan’s subversion of societal conventions, and Austen’s manipulation of the epistolary form, can be seen most distinctly in letter two, from ‘You were mistaken my Dear Alicia’ to ‘I will send you a line, as soon as I arrive in town.’

Austen utilises the epistolary form in Lady Susan to articulate the otherwise concealed consciousnesses of her female characters, and to exhibit relationships, friendly or otherwise, between women. In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf muses that she cannot ‘remember any case in the course of [her] reading where two women are represented as friends…. Almost without exception they are shown in their relationship to men’. In Lady Susan, Austen defies this literary convention, using the epistolary form to expose the discourse between the novel’s female characters, excluding male opinion from the narrative in the process. This is particularly evident in letter two, written by Lady Susan to Mrs Johnson, and its distinct tonal alteration from letter one, from Lady Susan to Mr Vernon. Where letter one uses formal, laudatory language, and adheres to social expectations of women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – ’I can no longer refuse myself the pleasure of profiting by your kind invitation…’ -, letter two is crude and scattered with double entendre and innuendo, revealing Lady Susan’s true character and intentions to her close female confidant – ‘Charles Vernon is my aversion, and i am afraid of his wife’. This tonal disparity in Lady Susan’s voice is not only an example of Austen’s irony, but is also a clear example of how the epistolary form is used to access the otherwise hidden consciousness of women, and to exhibit the inner workings of relationships between women, independent of men.

The female skew of Austen’s narrative structure is particularly remarkable given the era in which she was writing, when very little precedent had been set in terms of a female literary tradition. In 1852, G.H Lewes remarked that ‘To write as men is the aim and besetting sin of women; to write as a woman is the real task they have to perform.’, and this Austen arguably succeeds in doing with ‘Lady Susan’, using letters to intimately portray what Woolf calls the ‘curious silent unrepresented life’ of women, which was otherwise unrecorded in the literary canon up to that point. Woolf goes on to remark that ‘A woman might write letters while she was sitting by her father’s sick bed. She could write them by the fire while the men talked without disturbing them.’, and that Austen’s work had ‘no tragedy and no heroism’. Here, Woolf alludes to how Austen was able to portray the everyday, domestic lives of women in a language familiar to them, devising a ‘perfectly natural, shapely sentence proper for her own use’.

Austen further deviates from patriarchal conventions of literature in her portrayal of Lady Susan as a mother. Ann Oakley remarks that ‘the “good woman” is the mother, domesticated and non-sexual: the bad woman is the non-mother, desired because she is sexual.’ Although she has a daughter, Austen presents Lady Susan as a ‘non-mother’, prioritising sexual manipulation and her own whims over the wellbeing and happiness of her daughter. Lady Susan’s utter lack of maternal instinct is typefied in letter two, with Austen, through the voice of Lady Susan, describing Frederica as ‘the greatest simpleton on earth’. This hyperbolic insult is indicative not only of Lady Susan’s self-superiority, wit and boldness, but also serves to exemplify her unwillingness to be defined by motherhood. In The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan argues that under patriarchy, maternity is seen as the defining characteristic of women, ‘that women can know fulfilment only at the moment of giving birth to a child…. There is no other way for a woman to dream of creation or of the future. There is no other way she can even dream about herself, except as her children’s mother, her husband’s wife.’ The domestic, dependent position Friedan describes is one Lady Susan is shown to shirk throughout the novel, writing to Mrs Johnson of her plans to ‘deposit [Frederica] under the care of Miss Summers’, although ‘the price is immense, and much beyond what [she] can ever attempt to pay’. Through this distinct lack of maternal instinct, though cruel and unfair, Austen portrays Lady Susan as a woman whose life is not defined by her familial or domestic duties and, as Genevieve Brassard asserts, ‘applauds’ her ‘pursuit of freedom and rewards her maternal indifference.’

However, one should hesitate before venerating Lady Susan as a feminist figure; though she prioritises her own independence and agency in what Brassard calls a ‘heroine’s rebellion.’, her schemes to marry Frederica off to Sir James – which she ironically describes as ‘the sacred impulse of maternal affection’- arguably make her a culpable agent of the patriarchy herself in her adherence to societal perceptions of the importance of the so called ‘marriage-market’

Throughout Lady Susan, Austen presents men as being vulnerable to the manipulations of women, often through sexuality, and chiefly by Lady Susan herself. Brassard remarks that ‘Lady Susan is wholly calculating in her pursuit of men’, using them as ‘playthings and objects on which to test the limits of her power.’ Letter two demonstrates this exploitation of female sexuality, with Lady Susan describing to Mrs Johnson how she ‘bestowed a little notice’ upon Sir James ‘in order to detach him from Miss Manwaring, in an attempt to force him into a marriage with Frederica. The coolness and laxity with which Lady Susan describes her flirtation with Sir James is symptomatic of her general nature; she is perpetually aware of the effect her beauty and sexuality have on men, and uses this to her advantage without remorse. A sense of male vulnerability pervades the novel further due to Austen’s omission of any male system of communication; the reader is privy only to the correspondence of women, and thus men are presented as unconscious subjects of a domestic female domain. This is particularly evident in letter two in Lady Susan’s description of how her time at Langford has ended – ‘The females of the family are united against me.’. Although it is the men of the household who have been the victims of her whims and flirtations, Lady Susan is ultimately shunned by the women in a wholly female realm. Brassard asserts that ‘“Men’s will” cannot control or contain Lady Susan’s desire to play against the rules.’

“THE WHITE TIGER” is an epistolary novel, which is written in a form of a letter, in which the narrator composed more than seven evenings to the Chinese prime minister Wen Jiabao; it is a narrative of bondage, financial thriving, and murder. The tale utilizes a first-individual teller of tales, Balram Halwai, whose extraordinary, wry voice helps the peruse through his existence in ‘new India.’ Balram composes the letter in the brightness of an announcement he heard on the radio, ‘Mr. Jiabao is on a strategic: needs to know reality with regards to Bangalore.’ Balram is a specialist in reality with regard to the brutal substances and shrouded savageries of India. In the next two paragraphs, I will speak about the lightness and darkness in this epistolary novel.

From the light side point of view, in this epistolary novel, the narrator presented his moving in Delhi (as an example of light India) from Laxmangarh (as an example of dark India) as one of the light sides in India. His life and the life of the other people in Delhi are too different from Laxmangarth. The lightness in this epistolary novel also is presented to throw the economy growing by society’s corruption.

From the dark side viewpoint, in this epistolary novel, the narrator presented the darkness throw the rural places in India and also through the poor people, who are in a very large amount. Another dark part of the novel is also the Ganges River. Another imagery utilized is the Ganges River. I think that it’s upsetting that a novel portrays a waterway considered sacred, for example, the Ganges as dirty, dim, and tense. It is the place all the plant squanders stream. Diminishing the heavenly waterway to an unimportant grimy and irrelevant waterway, like that of a sewer, the novel takes it off with any supplements. The tale’s depiction fills in as the direct opposite of how another amazing contemporary Indian tale, A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth, portrays the Ganges River. A voluminous artistic work, A Suitable Boy delineates the Ganges River as the grave, blessed and quiet. The epic even acknowledges the stream’s dark-colored waters as something excellent. Be that as it may, the last novel is set in the 1950s while Adiga’s is in the contemporary. In this way, a few noteworthy changes have just happened. In this manner, The White Tiger’s depiction of the Ganges River is reasonable though pitiful and unsuitable. It just gives us how industrialization weakens nature including the profound haven Ganges River.