Forming letters: Mount Holyoke, Emily Dickinson, and nineteenth-century epistolary compositions.

Abstract

Forming Letters is a literary, rhetorical and socio-historical examination of women's mid-nineteenth-century epistolary writing, which circulated in hybrid letter forms, crossing boundaries with newspaper articles, essays, poems, novels, conduct manuals, rhetorical texts, and educational and social reform writing. The dissertation argues for the central place of women in a culture of letters in New England, where the production and reception of letter forms worked in private and in public, in ways that challenge and complicate our modern understanding of both gender and genre distinctions. Drawing from recent scholarship on epistolarity as well as original research in the archives at Mount Holyoke and the manuscripts of Emily Dickinson, the dissertation demonstrates how women used a variety of forms for participating in the culture of letters. Chapter one examines the work of educational, literary and reform figures such as Sarah Josepha Hale, Lydia Sigourney, Eliza Farrar and Margaret Fuller, foregrounding an understanding of their commitment to both manuscript and print epistolary production as literature. Chapter two examines Mount Holyoke Female Seminary as a site in which a rhetoric of the letter---the privileged discursive circulation of domestic and academic literacies---is central to understanding women's compositional practices. The chapter dispels prevailing and reductive histories offered about student learning in the mid-nineteenth century by demonstrating the rigor and innovation in women's intellectual work. Chapter three situates the correspondence of Emily Dickinson, in both letters and in poems, within the epistolary context defined by the previous chapters: Dickinson's Verse compositions can be understood as lyric letters, in which lyric voice is a figure structured by address. Chapter four concludes the dissertation by performing the pedagogical implications of the first three chapters, suggesting the correspondent nature of rhetoric and <italic>belles lettres</italic>, which composes a literary orientation in the mid-nineteenth century and within the classroom today. This dissertation contributes to the history of epistolary writing by insisting on the need for thorough historicization of women's letter writing culture in nineteenth-century America. It concludes that the manuscript and print practices of Dickinson and her female contemporaries, in their use of convention and invention, worked to redefine and produce both ordinary and extraordinary gendered literary writing.