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“Words Survive”: Death and Dying in Women's Letters

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“Words Survive”: Death and Dying in Women's Letters Copyright by Lee Anne Gallaway-Mitchell 2008 The Dissertation Committee for Lee Anne Gallaway-Mitchell Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: “Words survive”: Death and Dying in Women’s Letters Committee: Carol Hanbery MacKay, Supervisor Samuel Baker, Co-Supervisor Ann Cvetkovich Coleman Hutchison Pascale R. Bos “Words survive”: Death and Dying in Women’s Letters by Lee Anne Gallaway-Mitchell, B. A.; M. A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin December 2008 Dedication To my parents, Dale and Debbie. And to my husband, Tim. Acknowledgements I would like to thank my committee members for their enthusiastic support of my project. Carol MacKay, Sam Baker, and Ann Cvetkovich provided invaluable feedback and encouragement from the very beginning of my dissertation. Even though they had not worked with me before, Cole Hutchison and Pascale Bos generously agreed to work with me, read through drafts, and attend the defense. I especially appreciate my committee’s encouragement and support while I finished this project from a distance. To my parents, I owe my love of words and my work ethic. My husband, Tim, would not let me quit writing and kept me laughing. Their love and support have been unwavering. v “Words survive”: Death and Dying in Women’s Letters Publication No._____________ Lee Anne Gallaway-Mitchell, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2008 Supervisors: Carol Hanbery MacKay and Samuel Baker During the nineteenth century, the publication of letter collections, often titled “Life and Letters,” became very popular and let the public in on the private lives of public figures. Women from literary families all wrote letters with an awareness of the possibility of the world reading them. Even as letters were viewed as ostensibly private forms of communication, they were serving an intimate public as a vehicle for public feelings long before publication. Exploring the epistolary remains of three nineteenth- century women writers from literary families, I focus, in particular, on how these writers confronted illness, grief, and death, all things that kept them isolated from others and made correspondence necessary. Sara Coleridge wrote about the deaths of those closest to her in order to learn from and plan her own death. While Alice James concentrated almost entirely on her own demise, Charlotte Brontë did not write about her death, even preferring that others at least hold off speculating on it while she was still living. Instead Bronte focused on her sisters’ vi deaths, knowing that their deaths would shape how her life got written. Indeed, the family narrative would never lose its association with death. Throughout the study, Virginia Woolf acts as a mediating figure who both engaged in these epistolary practices of bereavement and read and wrote about letter collections from the past. The significance of these letters is how they reflect attitudes towards death and dying in the nineteenth century, particularly in how narratives get worked into an epistolarity of death in which the narrating of grief itself provides a means to manage the challenges of bereavement. The work of death and the writing of it are creative acts that build toward leaving a written corpus more permanent, or at least more durable, than the body and less vulnerable than life. vii Table of Contents Chapter 1 Literary Remains: An Epistolarity of Death........................................ 1 Histories of Letters .................................................................................... 6 Death and Letters ..................................................................................... 16 Women and Letters .................................................................................. 22 Durable Epistographies............................................................................. 29 Literary Remains ...................................................................................... 48 Chapter 2 "Tabernacle of the flesh": Sara Coleridge's Epistolary Death Work ... 55 "a plain figure of mere prose" ................................................................... 61 Valuable Testimonies ............................................................................... 74 "making the vestibule of my letters a doleful sickroom"............................ 86 "memory is almost a religion"................................................................... 96 Chapter 3 "Labour is the only radical cure for rooted sorrow": Writing and Rewriting Grief in Charlotte Bronte's Letters ...........................................................103 "Home is not the home it used to be" .......................................................108 "If I live…" .............................................................................................122 "the memory of one loss is the anticipation of another"............................130 "I am better now".....................................................................................142 Chapter 4 Alice James's "Ghost Microbes": Collaborative Death Writing in James's Diary and Letters.....................................................................................154 Her "mortal career"..................................................................................158 "the practical problem of life"..................................................................168 "so here goes, my first Journal!" .............................................................179 "seizing the right moment of eclipse" ......................................................188 Chapter 5 "[T]o tell the truth about the dead": The Life and Death of Letters....203 Sara Coleridge: The Caretaker and the Undertaker...................................211 Charlotte Brontë: Encountering Objects...................................................220 viii Alice James: Imagining and Writing Death .............................................228 The Death of Letters ...............................................................................234 Bibliography ....................................................................................................242 Vita ...............................................................................................................250 ix Chapter 1: Literary Remains: An Epistolarity of Death My letters! all dead paper, mute and white! And yet they seem alive and quivering Against my tremulous hands which loose the string And let them drop down on my knee tonight. The opening lines of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnet 28 capture the paradoxical power of letters, objects that while “dead paper, mute and white” can suddenly “seem alive and quivering.” At first the source of animation seems to come from the speaker’s “tremulous hands,” but by the end of the poem there is no question that the letters themselves have their own peculiar force. Once the papers are loosed from the string and the physical narrative of their courtship falls onto the speaker’s knee, the letters are no longer mute, and as bodies of text, they stand in for the absent body of the speaker’s lover. Because the speaker is the addressee in this collected correspondence between lovers, she is also a reader who shares with the sonnet’s audience the intimate contents of both the letters and her heart. The lines that follow describe each letter and how the speaker responds to each one of them. In the first letter, her correspondent expresses a desire to see her, emphasizing the condition of absence, which necessitates writing a letter in the first place: This said—he wished to have me in his sight Once, as a friend: this fixed a day in spring To come and touch my hand. a simple thing, Yes I wept for it—… (5-8) 1 The letter sets the terms for future physical contact; at the same time, the writer has touched the paper and left his mark on it, in a sense offering a preview and a promise of real physical contact. The next letter, she lifts up, and remarks, “this . the paper's light. .” (8). Yet the weight of the letter belies the message, “Dear, I love thee” (9); she describes her reaction to it then (and quite possibly now): “I sank and quailed / As if God's future thundered on my past” (9-10). She describes the following letter, which reads, “I am thine…its ink has paled / With lying at my heart that beat too fast” (11-12). The faded ink does not indicate a diminished love; rather, the acts of reading and rereading, of pressing the letters to her chest during a prolonged absence, have worn the ink. Significantly, the action in relation to the addressee-speaker’s body moves from hand to chest or heart. Up until the last two lines, the speaker quotes the letters and lets them speak; then the speaker withholds the contents of the last letter: “And this . 0 Love, thy words have ill availed/If, what this said, I dared repeat at last!” (13-14) We do not really know just what it is that she cannot repeat. The words have been written; they have a physical presence, but she hesitates in speaking them. It seems that the letters and the messages within all foretold on paper what would happen to her. They served as promises or warnings of physical meetings and declarations of love. While the letters can bring the speaker closer to her lover, they also serve to remind her that he is absent. Whether the message contained
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