Fictions of Authority

Front matter

Fictions of Authority PL

WOMEN WRITERS ANDI NARRATIVE VOICE

PL

Part I. Authorial Voice In a Class by Herself: Self-Silencing in Riccoboni’s Abeille 45

Sense and Reticence: Jane Austen’s “Indirections” 61

Woman of Maxims: George Eliot and the Realist Imperative 81

Fictions of Absence: Feminism, Modernism, Virginia Woolf 102 vii vili

14 15

Unspeakable Voice: Toni Morrison’s Postmodern Authority

Part II. Personal Voice Dying for Publicity: Mistriss Henley’s Self-Silencing Romantic Voice: The Hero’s Text

Jane Eyres Legacy: The Powers and Dangers of Singularity

African-American Personal Voice: “Her Hungriest Lack”

Part III. Communal Voice Solidarity and Silence: Millenium Hall and The Wrongs of Woman

Single Resistances: The Communal “I” in Gaskell, Jewett, and Audoux

(Dif )fusions: Modern Fiction and Communal Form

Full Circle: Les Guérilléres

Contents

223 239

255 267

Acknowledgments

As I hope this book makes evident, writing is not an isolated act. The collective imagination of my students and colleagues has shaped my thinking in ways no longer traceable. Grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Georgetown University, and the University of Maryland at College Park enabled vital spaces of unfettered time. Bernhard Kendler and Kay Scheuer at Cornell University Press, and Lauren Oppenheim provided crucial editorial support.

The project would have faltered long ago without the intelligence and generosity of those who read individual chapters or the entire manuscript, sometimes in several forms. Evelyn Torton Beck was the book’s earliest mentor and continues to inspire me professionally and personally. Mary Wilson Carpenter’s astute and thorough reading of a later version was immeasurably helpful in revising the manuscript. Maria Lima turned her quick mind to assistance both critical and editorial. Sharon Groves, Leona Fisher, Annette Oxindine, Jo Radner, and Mary Helen Washington read and advised. Joyce Kornblatt heard the questions beneath my questions. Jack Undank and Alan Wilde were demanding readers and loving mentors throughout these several years. My deepest gratitude is reserved for Michael Ragussis, whose brilliant and tireless readings of several versions, and whose often daily engagement with problems both momentous and minuscule, far surpassed the mutual attentiveness of close relationship. The distance this book has traveled over the years of its composition is in large measure his gift.

I am not the only one who has dwelt with this work and been subjected to its claims on time, space, and energy. Jo Radner has been ix x Acknowledgments lovingly present and steadily responsive to my questions and concerns. My sons, Steve, Tom, and Chris, who became adults as this project developed, remained good-natured enthusiasts who have learned that a book is never finished until it is in print.

I have sometimes said that I wrote The Narrative Act, with its structures and diagrams, because my father was an engineer. This book is for my mother, who hoped to be a writer and whose life ended before she could find a public voice.

An early version of part of Chapter 2 was published as “Courting Death: Roman, romantisme, and Mistriss Henley’s Narrative Practices,” Eighteenth Century Life 13 (February 1989). An early version of part of Chapter 2 appeared as “Plot, Voice, and Narrative Oubli: Juliette Catesby’s Twice-Told Tale,” in Eighteenth Century Women and the Arts, ed. Frederick M. Keener and Susan E. Lorsch (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1988), copyright © 1988 by Hofstra University. I am grateful to the John Hopkins University Press and to Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. for permission to make use of this material.

S. S. L.

INTRODUCTION

Toward a Feminist Poetics of Narrative Voice

Why this privileged relationship with the voice? —HELENE Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa”

Few words are as resonant to contemporary feminists as “voice.” The term appears in history and philosophy, in sociology, literature, and psychology, spanning disciplinary and theoretical differences. Book titles announce “another voice,” a “different voice,” or resurrect the “lost voices” of women poets and pioneers; fictional figures ancient and modern, actual women famous and obscure, are honored for speaking up and speaking out.' Other silenced communities—peoples of color, peoples struggling against colonial rule, gay men and lesbians—have also written and spoken about the urgency of “coming to voice.” Despite compelling interrogations of “voice” as a humanist fiction, for the collectively and personally silenced the term has become a trope of identity and power: as Luce Irigaray suggests, to find a voice (voix) is to find a way (voie).”

1. A few titles: In a Different Voice; American Women, American Voices; The Sound of Our Own Voices; The Other Voice: Scottish Women’s Writing since 1808; Finding a Voice: Asian Women in Britain; Territories of the Voice: Contemporary Stories by Irish Women Writers; Radical Voices: A Decade o f Resistance from “Women’s Studies International Forum”; The Indigenous Voice: Visions and Realities.

2. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 209. As my references to Cixous and Irigaray emphasize, even “poststructuralist” feminists have been unwilling to abandon the word voice as a signifier of female power, for women have not as a body (in both senses) possessed the logos that deconstruction deconstructs.

In narrative poetics (“narratology”), voice is an equally crucial though more circumscribed term, designating tellers—as distinct from both authors and nonnarrating characters—of narrative. Although many critics acknowledge the bald inaccuracy of “voice” and “teller” to signify something written, these terms persist even among structuralists: according to Gérard Genette, “in the most unobtrusive narrative, someone is speaking to me, is telling me a story, is inviting me to listen to it as he tells it.”* Narration entails social relationships and thus involves far more than the technical imperatives for getting a story told. The narrative voice and the narrated world are mutually constitutive; if there is no tale without a teller, there is no teller without a tale. This interdependence gives the narrator a liminal position that is at once contingent and privileged: the narrator has no existence “outside” the text yet brings the text into existence; narrative speech acts cannot be said to be mere “imitations,” like the acts of characters, because they are the acts that make the “imitations” possible.

Despite their shared recognition of the power of “voice,” the two concepts I have been describing—the feminist and the narratological—have entailed separate inquiries of antithetical tendency: the one general, mimetic, and political, the other specific, semiotic, and technical. When feminists talk about voice, we are usually referring to the behavior of actual or fictional persons and groups who assert woman-centered points of view. Thus feminists may speak of a literary character who refuses patriarchal pressures as “finding a voice” whether or not that voice is represented textually. When narrative theorists talk about voice, we are usually concerned with formal structures and not with the causes, ideologies, or social implications of particular narrative practices. With a few exceptions, feminist criticism does not ordinarily consider the technical aspects of narration, and narrative poetics does not ordinarily consider the social properties and political implications of narrative voice.* Formalist poetics may seem to fem-

3. Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse Revisited, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 101. I consider this distinction not essential but conventional: narratives have narrators because Western literature has continued to construct reading and listening in speakerly terms. The convention may already be disappearing in an age of mechanical reproduction, bureaucratic discourse, and computer-generated texts. For an opposing viewpoint, see Jonathan Culler, “Problems in the Theory of Fiction,” Diacritics 14 (Spring 1984): 5-11.

4. On the tension between feminism and narrative poetics see Robyn Warhol, Gendered Interventions: Narrative Discourse in the Victorian Novel (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 12—20; my essay “Toward a Feminist Narratology,” Style 20 (1986): 341-63; and my subsequent exchange with Nilli Diengott in Style 22 (1988): 40—60.

inists naively empiricist, masking ideology as objective truth, sacrificing significance for precision, incapable of producing distinctions that are politically meaningful. Feminist criticism may seem to narratologists naively subjectivist, sacrificing precision for ideology, incapable of producing distinctions that are textually meaningful.

These incompatible tendencies, which I have overstated here, can offer fruitful counterpoints. As a narratological term, “voice” attends to the specific forms of textual practice and avoids the essentializing tendencies of its more casual feminist usages. As a political term, “voice” rescues textual study from a formalist isolation that of ten treats literary events as if they were inconsequential to human history. When these two approaches to “voice” converge in what Mikhail Bakhtin has called a “sociological poetics,”’ it becomes possible to see narrative technique not simply as a product of ideology but as ideology itself: narrative voice, situated at the juncture of “social position and literary practice,”° embodies the social, economic, and literary conditions under which it has been produced.’ Such a sociological or materialist poetics refuses the idealism to which both narrative poetics and some forms of feminist theory have been prone, an idealism that has led in the first case to a reading of textual properties as universal, inevitable, or random phenomena, and in the second to the assumption of a panhistorical “women’s language” or “female form.” I maintain that both narrative structures and women’s writing are determined not by essential properties or isolated aesthetic imperatives but by complex and changing conventions that are themselves produced in and by the relations of power that implicate writer, reader, and text. In modern Western societies during the centuries of “print culture” with which I am concerned, these constituents of power must include, at the very least, race, gender, class, nationality, education, sexuality

5. A “sociological poetics” is described in P. N. Medvedev and M. M. Bakhtin, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics, trans. Albert J. Wehrle (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 30. The feminist attention to voice generated by Bakhtinian theory is a welcome new inquiry; see especially Dale M. Bauer, Feminist Dialogics: A Theory of Failed Community (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988). On the whole, however, “feminist dialogics” have not focused on the close formal distinctions found, for example, in Bakhtin’s “Discourse on the Novel,” but have followed Bakhtin’s tendency elsewhere to equate “voice” with discourse in the Foucauldian sense.

6. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 179.

7. I am using “ideology” throughout to describe the discourses and signifying systems through which a culture constitutes its beliefs about itself, structures the relationships of individuals and groups to one another, to social institutions, and to belief systems, and legitimates and perpetuates its values and practices. This definition does not address the question of whether there is a “real” outside ideology that is not itself ideological.

and marital status, interacting with and within a given social formation.

So long as it acknowledges its own status as theory rather than claiming to trade in neutral, uninterpreted facts, a historically-situated structuralist poetics may offer a valuable differential framework for examining specific narrative patterns and practices. The exploration of narrative structures in women’s writings may, in turn, challenge the categories and postulates of narratology, since the canon on which narrative theory is grounded has been relentlessly if not intentionally man-made.” As one contribution to such a feminist poetics of narrative, this book explores certain configurations of textual voice in fictions by women of Britain, France, and the United States writing from the mid-eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth—the period that coincides with the hegemony of the novel and its attendant notions of individual(ist) authorship. Recognizing that the “author-function” that grounds Western literary authority is constructed in white, privileged-class male terms,’ I take as a point of departure the hypothesis that female voice—a term used here simply to designate the narrator’s grammatical gender—is a site of ideological tension made visible in textual practices.

In thus linking social identity and narrative form, I am postulating that the authority of a given voice or text is produced from a conjunction of social and rhetorical properties. Discursive authority—by which I mean here the intellectual credibility, ideological validity, and aesthetic value claimed by or conferred upon a work, author, narrator, character, or textual practice—is produced interactively; it must therefore be characterized with respect to specific receiving communities. In Western literary systems for the past two centuries, however, discursive authority has, with varying degrees of intensity, attached itself most readily to white, educated men of hegemonic ideology. One major constituent of narrative authority, therefore, is the extent to which a narrator’s status conforms to this dominant social power. At the same time, narrative authority is also constituted through (historically changing) textual strategies that even socially unauthorized

8. Noris this true only of formalist critics like Genette, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Wolf gang Iser, and (less egregiously) Seymour Chatman. The work of materialists like Fredric Jameson and even Bakhtin, which has been so enthusiastically embraced by critics working with “marginal” discourses, is androcentric in both its textual canon and its assumptions about literature.

g. On the “author-function” see Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 113-38.

writers can appropriate. Since such appropriations may of course backfire, nonhegemonic writers and narrators may need to strike a delicate balance in accommodating and subverting dominant rhetorical practices.

Although I have been speaking about authority as if it were universally desirable, some women writers have of course questioned not only those who hold authority and the mechanisms by which they are authorized, but the value of authority as modern Western cultures have constructed it. I believe, however, that even novelists who challenge this authority are constrained to adopt the authorizing conventions of narrative voice in order, paradoxically, to mount an authoritative critique of the authority that the text therefore also perpetuates. Carrying out such an Archimedean project, which seems to me particularly hazardous for texts seeking canonical status, necessitates standing on the very ground one is attempting to deconstruct. While I will acknowledge ways in which women writers continue to challenge even their own authoritative standing, the emphasis of this book is on the project of self-authorization, which, I argue, is implicit in the very act of authorship. In other words, I assume that regardless of any woman writer’s ambivalence toward authoritative institutions and ideologies, the act of writing a novel and seeking to publish it—like my own act of writing a scholarly book and seeking to publish it—is implicitly a quest for discursive authority: a quest to be heard, respected, and believed, a hope of influence. I assume, that is, that every writer who publishes a novel wants it to be authoritative for her readers, even if authoritatively antiauthoritarian, within the sphere and for the receiving community that the work carves out. In making this assumption I am not denying what Edward Said calls the “moleésted” or “sham” nature of textual authority in general and of fictional authority in particular, but I am also reading the novel as a cultural enterprise that has historically claimed and received a truth value beyond the fictional.'®

I have chosen to examine texts that engage questions of authority specifically through their production of narrative voice. In each case, narrative voice is a site of crisis, contradiction, or challenge that is manifested in and sometimes resolved through ideologically charged

10. See Edward Said, “Molestation and Authority in Narrative Fiction,” in Aspects of Narrative: Selected Papers from the English Institute, ed. J. Hillis Miller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), 47—68. On the status of fiction see also Peter J. McCormick, Fictions, Philosophies, and the Problems of Poetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988).

technical practices. The texts I explore construct narrative voices that seek to write themselves into Literature without leaving Literature the same. These narrators, skeptical of the authoritative aura of the male pen and often critical of male dominance in general, are nonetheless pressed by social and textual convention to reproduce the very structures they would reformulate. Such narrators often call into question the very authority they endorse or, conversely, endorse the authority they seem to be questioning. That is, as they strive to create fictions of authority, these narrators expose fictions of authority as the Western novel has constructed it—and in exposing the fictions, they may end up re-establishing the authority. Some of these texts work out such dilemmas on their thematic surfaces, constructing fictions of—that is, about—authority, as well.

When I describe these complexities in some women’s writings I am not, however, suggesting any kind of “authentic” female voice or arguing that women necessarily write differently from men. Rather, I believe that disavowed writers of both sexes have engaged in various strategies of adaptation and critique that make their work “dialogical” in ways that Bakhtin’s formulation, which posits heteroglossia as a general modern condition, may obscure.'' It is possible, for example, that women privileged enough to write literature are particularly susceptible to what Margaret Homans describes as “a specific genderbased alienation from language” born of the “simultaneous participation in and exclusion from a hegemonic group.”'” My reading suggests that different communities of women have had different degrees of access to particular narrative forms. I am especially interested in those female narrators who claim public authority, since within the historical period I am studying it has not been voice in general so much as public voice that women have been denied. As I will suggest further on in this chapter, these concerns lead me less to a new narrative poetics than to a poetics attentive to issues that conventional narratology has devalued or ignored.

11. Bakhtin’s formulation that all novelistic discourse, if not all discourse, is irreducibly double-voiced makes more difficult the differentiating of specific ways in which the words of a disauthorized community are “entangled, shot through with shared thoughts, points of view, alien value judgments and accents,” and dwell in “a dialogically agitated and tensionfilled environment of alien words” (The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist [Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981], 276).

12. Margaret Homans, “‘Her Very Own Howl’: The Ambiguities of Representation in Recent Women’s Fiction,” Signs (1983): 205. Homans’s suggestion that this ambiguity characterizes all women’s discourse seems to me problematic insofar as it presumes that all women are simultaneously inside and outside a hegemony.

Before describing more fully the focus of this book, I want to illustrate the complex dynamics that may govern a specific production of female voice by turning to a curious document that appeared in Atkinson’s Casket in April 1832:'°

FEMALE INGENUITY.

Secret Correspondence-—A young Lady, newly married, being obliged to show her husband, all the letters she wrote, sent the following to an intimate friend.

I cannot be satisfied, my Dearest Friend! blest as I am in the matrimonial state, unless I pour into your friendly bosom, which has ever been in unison with mine, the various deep sensations which swell

with the liveliest emotions of pleasure

my almost bursting heart. I tell you my dear husband is one of the most amiable of men, I have been married seven weeks, and

have never found the least reason to

repent the day that joined us, my husband is in person and manners far from resembling ugly, crass, old, disagreeable, and jealous monsters, who think by confining to secure; a wife, it is his maxim to treat as a bosom-friend and confidant, and not as a play thing or menial slave, the woman chosen to be his companion. Neither party he says ought to obey implicitly;—

but each yield to the other by turns—

An ancient maiden aunt, near seventy,

a cheerful, venerable, and pleasant old lady, lives in the house with us—she is the delight of both young and old—she is ci-

vil to all the neighbourhood round, generous and charitable to the poor—

I know my husband loves nothing more than he does me; he flatters me more

than the glass, and his intoxication

(for so I must call the excess of his love,)

13. I discovered this letter accidentally some years ago in The Genteel Female, ed. Clifton Furness (New York: Knopf, 1931). On that book’s endpaper is reproduced the page from Atkinson’s Casket that includes this letter, sandwiched between a commentary on angels and directions for calisthenic exercise. For a discussion of other aspects of the letter, including its “plot,” see my essay “Toward a Feminist Narratology,” 346-57.

often makes me blush for the unworthiness

of its object, and I wish I could be more deserving of the man whose name I bear. To

say all in one word, my dear, , and to

crown the whole, my former gallant lover

is now my indulgent husband, my fondness

is returned, and I might have had

a Prince, without the felicity I find with

him. Adieu! May you be as blest as I am un-

able to wish that I could be more happy.

For those who believe in a “women’s language” that is “polite, emotional, enthusiastic, gossipy, talkative, uncertain, dull, and chatty,”'* or “weak, trivial, ineffectual, tentative, hesitant, hyperpolite, euphemistic, and...marked by gossip and gibberish,”’” this text might be hailed as perfect evidence. Its self-effacing writer, who blushes at her own “unworthiness,” nonetheless cannot “say all in one word”; repetition, hyperbole, convolution, and grammatical anomaly are the pervasive structures of her text. It has been argued that such selfdeprecating, uncertain, and verbose discourse, which women in certain circumstances have supposedly been encouraged to adopt, also undermines its own authority. "°

But let us recall that this bride was obliged to show the letter to her husband; a note at the bottom of the Casket entry tells us that “the key to the above letter, is to read the first and then every alternate line”:

I cannot be satisfied, my dearest Friend! unless I pour into your friendly bosom,

the various deep sensations which swell

my almost bursting heart. I tell you my dear I have been married seven weeks, and repent the day that joined us, my husband is ugly, crass, old, disagreeable, and jealous[;] a wife, itis his maxim to treat as a

play thing or menial slave, the woman

he says ought to obey implicitly;—

14. Cheris Kramarae, “Proprietors of Language,” in Women and Language in Literature and Society, ed. Sally McConnell-Ginet, Ruth Borker, and Nelly Furman (New York: Praeger, 1980), 58.

15. Dale Spender, Man Made Language (London: Routledge, 1980), 33.

16. Robin Lakoff, Language and Woman’s Place (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), 7-

An ancient maiden aunt, near seventy,

lives in the house with us—she is the de-

vil to all the neighbourhood round,

I know my husband loves nothing more than the glass, and his intoxication

often makes me blush for the unworthiness of the man whose name I bear. To

crown the whole, my former gallant lover

is returned, and I might have had

him. Adieu! may you be as blest as I am unhappy.

If the surface letter is virtually a sampler of what has passed for “women’s language,” this “subtext” is an equally striking example of what might stereotypically be called “men’s language”: it is “capable, direct, rational,” “strong,” ” “forceful, efficient, blunt, authoritative, serious, effective, sparing and masterful.” !? This narrator, writing for a sister’s eye, shows herself angry, decisive, judgmental, acutely aware of her husband’s deficiencies and her own lost opportunities. Beneath the putatively feminine voice of effusive self-effacement lies the putatively masculine voice of indignant self-assertion, which the writer cannot inscribe in the more public version of her text. These formal differences between the letters, which share the same originating female voice, are clearly not differences in the sex of the narrator, though they may be attributable to differences in the sex of the narratee. The “feminine style” of the surface text, that “powerless,” nonauthoritative form called “women’s language,” here becomes a powerfully subversive mask for telling secrets to a woman under the watchful eyes of a man. In Irigaray’s terms, the surface letter is a “disruptive excess,” a “mimicry”: it deliberately adopts a “feminine” position that is exaggerated into subversion by exposing the mechanisms of its own abjection (thereby revealing at the same time its dependence upon “the words of the powerful”).’? The female voice conforms in order to “con” form: “women’s language” becomes a calculated response to alienation and censorship, an evasion of material threat.

I will argue, however, that this discourse is not simply “women’s language”—or even, as some linguists would have it, a universal “lan-

17. Kramarae, “Proprietors of Language,” 58.

18. Spender, Man Made Language, 33.

1g. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 76—78; Sheila Rowbotham, Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1973), 32.

guage of the powerless”—but the product of a particular set of stereotypes that become codified in Victorian gender ideologies. This language is associated specifically with the “lady” who maintains her position through a conscious or unconscious discourse of devotion to the men who control her life. It is less the language of women than the language of wives: the woman in this text—the independent human of female sex—is in fact represented by the voice whose language would be called “masculine.” In other words, in this blatantly dialogized discourse, both voices are female; “female voice” is not an “essence” but a variable subject position whose “I” is grammatically feminine. The particular characteristics of any “female voice,” then, are a function of the context in which that voice operates.

This context, moreover, is less simple than it appears. Because the letter is deliberately coded, the subtext makes the surface letter seem only a fiction and the hidden message all the “truth.” In this case “women’s language” becomes a code adopted to confuse a male “public,” as if privately— that is, to another woman—a woman can simply say what she means. But this opposition deconstructs itself when one asks how two such disparate narratives can produce a continuous text. The articulation between surface and subtext, the syntactic hinge that binds and finally transforms the whole, is a set of negative constructions that the decoding process pares away:

I [...have never found the least reason to] repent

my husband is... {far from resembling] ugly, crass, old... a wife, it is his maxim to treat... [not] as a plaything [Neither party], he says, ought to obey implicitly

I am un{able to wish that I could be more] happy—

This negativity turns out to be more than the link between texts; it makes the surface text not simply a proclamation of one woman’s marital happiness but an indirect indictment of marriage itself. In its negations, the surface letter written “for” the husband describes as normative the kind of marriage the writer claims to have escaped; each statement about the speaker’s good fortune implies a norm in which brides repent their marriages, husbands are monstrous, and women are “playthings” or “slaves.” Thus, by saying what one marriage is not, the surface text shows what its narrator expected marriage to be. While the subtext condemns one husband and laments one bride’s fate—suggesting that the writer has merely married the

“wrong” man—the surface letter condemns marriage itself, presenting as typical the conditions that seem in the subtext to be individual. The subtext, with its portrait of a miserable bride, thus becomes an illustration of the surface text rather than its antithesis, and it is fitting that the two versions meet only in a shared dissatisfaction, in the single line that does not change: “I cannot be satisfied, my dearest Friend!”

Even without the subtext, then, the surface letter is already double-voiced, representing in one discourse both the uncritical acceptance of one marriage and a critical rejection of marriage itself. This doubleness also means that the surface letter is at least as authoritative as the hidden undertext, that authority resides not simply in “men’s language” (which in this case is asserting only an individual, experiential “truth”), but also in the indirection of a censored and stereotypically “feminine” form. Nor is this letter simply a “palimpsest” in which “surface designs conceal or obscure deeper, less accessible (and less socially acceptable) levels of meaning,””° for this “surface design” turns out to carry meanings at least as disturbing as the subtext it purports to protect.

I have explored this letter in some detail not to reinforce notions of discursive sexual difference but, on the contrary, to suggest the complexity and specificity of (women’s) narrative practices even in obviously coded texts. Underscoring crucial differences of function and form between “private” and “public” discourse, the letter represents its own formal practices as neither arbitrary nor simply representational, but as responses to situational imperatives produced by the relations of power that acts of telling entail. Narrative status, contact, and stance are revealed to be mutually constitutive: the ways in which narrators represent themselves, the relationships they construct with narratees, and the ideological and affective positions they take are dynamic and interdependent elements. In illustrating the intricacies of narrative strategy in a culture that censors female voice, and the specificity of different narrative constructions for different audiences and purposes, the letter asks those who would not be deceived “husbands” not only to read beneath surfaces but to read surfaces anew, not only to read manifest “content” but to read the content of manifest “form.” And if the letter as private correspondence seems to figure the male as the duped reader and the female as the ideal

20. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 73- one, the letter as a public document has as its audience the unidentified reader of either sex who, presented with the text as it appeared in Atkinson’s Casket, can read beyond the immediate context of the letterwriter’s circumstances to understand “female ingenuity” as cultural critique.

Finally, the publication of this letter in 1832, in a city where African- American and white women were becoming involved in abolitionist activity (the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society was founded in 1833), suggests that the relationship between patriarchy and slavery implicit in the reference to the wife as a “menial slave” may be more than casual: it both raises the problematic history of white women’s appropriation of slavery by analogy”' and reminds us that American slaves also made extensive use of coding in order to evade censorship. It seems doubly appropriate, then, that “ingenuity” means not only a paradoxical blend of skillful design and apparent openness but also, according to the OED, “the quality or condition of being a free-born man.” In theory, writing becomes a powerful site of transformation to this “condition” of freedom insofar as writing may be detached from its producing subject. The public circulation of texts by women has thus posed a pervasive threat to patriarchy, as the public circulation of slave writings posed a pervasive threat to slavery, and these threats may explain why the forms and performances of women and peoples of color have often been devalued as mere “ingenuity.”