In French literature letter-writing achieved a status more elevated and lasting than in any other national tradition. For over 200 years beginning in the late 16th c., letter-writing continued to diversify, until throughout the 18th c. it occupied a central position on the literary horizon.
Letter-writing is not a genre but a form with different manifestations—letter manuals, private correspondences collected for publication,
The depersonalized use of the letter, which valorized correct form over individual expression, paradoxically helped generate more personal manifestations of the epistolary form, the great correspondences and novels which make up its golden age. Manuals first grouped together letters dealing with different subjects, then arranged them so that a plot was implied from their order, thereby paving the way for the epistolary novel.
The 18th-c. epistolary explosion was initiated in the second half of the 17th c. by writers who made letter-writing synonymous with personal intimacy. In addition, the major epistolary successes of this time, notably the Lettres portugaises, made letter-writing the expression of what Richardson, who knew his French precursors well, called ‘writing to the moment’, the exploration of the fullness of the present tense and narrative immediacy. Finally, these texts suggest that women have privileged access to epistolary communication and almost make letter-writing synonymous with women's writing. By the time the first major French correspondence, Sévigné's, was edited in the early 18th c., the age of the epistolary novel was under way. However different their style and content, its masterpieces—notably La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782), and Richardson's novels, which were immensely influential in Prévost's French translation—all present the letter as the privileged mode of immediate and full personal revelation and reinforce the association between women and letter-writing.
The importance of letter-writing in literary history can be seen as a function of the degree to which it questions the limits of literature. Sévigné's correspondence, for instance, has been admired both for its sophisticated literary technique and for the absence of such sophistication, for its instinctive impulse. Similarly, the Lettres portugaises has been praised alternately as a literary masterpiece and an outpouring of authentic sentiment. This endless conflict about the nature of the form can be traced to the absence of a clear distinction between public and private spheres of discourse.
It is, for instance, rarely certain that the vast majority of 16th- and 17th-c. epistolary texts were destined for publication. Moreover, their various contexts of publication often recast them in formats so radically dissimilar that the text's meaning was repeatedly transformed. Witness the example of Sévigné's letters, which were edited only in 1725, 30 years after her death. Over the next 30 years the first four editions of her correspondence appeared. In each of these, and in virtually all the numerous editions that appeared over the next century and a half, the correspondence appears in a new light—at times exclusively personal (a mother's letters to her daughter), at times exclusively political (a high-born woman's view of a powerful court). The first epistolary masterpiece in the French tradition, the letters exchanged by Héloïse and Abélard in the 12th c., shared a similar fate when they became famous in French translation in the 17th c. Now celebrated as a powerful expression of personal passion, these letters were domesticated by being infused with the worst excesses of preciosity.
Similar problems are associated with virtually all the vast early-modern epistolary production. To what extent can we consider a work edited for publication as the creation of the individual listed as its author? To what extent is our reading of a letter influenced by the certainty that it is an authentic record of its author's private thoughts and opinions, intended only for its original recipient? Such issues, today the foundation of any critical reading of letter-writing, were largely responsible for the form's immense success in the early-modern period, when the voyeuristic gaze onto another's private life was a new-found pleasure and when letter-writing was central to the project of opening literature to the personal.
The 18th c. also inaugurated the golden age of personal correspondence. Inspired by the epistolary novel's cult of narrative immediacy, individuals carried on intense, long-term epistolary involvements. Some of these, e.g. Du Deffand's correspondence with Walpole, have become celebrated. The age's best-known writers (Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot) composed voluminous correspondences—and wrote increasingly with the sense that they would be edited for publication.
It may have been the letter's prominence in the second half of the 18th c., when the modern French pedagogical system was being created, that brought about the form's eclipse. Until the early 20th c. letter-writing was an integral part of the French curriculum. Famous letters were included in all pedagogical manuals—once again as models of sociability and eloquence. Thus domesticated and distanced from its partnership with immediacy and authenticity, letter-writing ceased to be a French passion.
[Joan Dejean]
Bibliography
- ‘La Lettre au dix-septième siècle’,
Revue d'histoire littéraire de la France , 78 (1978), 6 - L. Versini, Le Roman épistolaire (1979)
- J. Altman, Epistolarity (1982)
