In My Power: Letter Writing and Communications in Early America (review)

In recent years, the social practices and cultural forms constitutive of modern letter writing have received increasing attention from historians, who have pursued such varied subjects connected with correspondence as family and kinship, popular literacy, the development of postal communications, and international population movements. Some recent studies of historical epistolarity have profited greatly from interdisciplinary analysis, demonstrating familiarity with linguistics, communications theory, discourse theory, studies of epistolary fiction, and various schools of psychology that examine the nexus of personal identity and interpersonal relations.

Dierks’ elaborately conceived, well-documented study is a significant contribution to the contemporary literature of historical epistolarity. It departs, however, from the direction of much of this recent literature, which has generally been concerned with the liberating psychological and social effects of letter writing for ordinary people, who are thought to have entered the expanding worlds of global modernity through postal communications and authorship of their own texts. Dierks manages to carve out a unique territory within a subject matter that is, for the most part, the frequently surveyed territory of British and Anglo-American middle-class letter writing. This work’s primary inspiration derives more from a wide ranging, critical engagement with the historical literature of the British American colonies, and a profound hostility to myths of American exceptionalism, than from dialogue with other disciplines. What distinguishes Dierks in this book is his interpretation of the normalizing functions of middle-class epistolarity within an eighteenth-century colonial social system founded upon racism, imperialism, genocide, and class and gender inequalities. It is also likely to be controversial and, for many students of historical epistolarity, greatly unsatisfying from interpretive and analytical perspectives.

Dierks’s title comes from the phrase, in my power, which he finds repeated often in the correspondence of his middle-class letter writers, for whom the usage signifies an eagerness to use the powers given them by literacy and mastery of the letter form to satisfy their correspondents’ request for a written response. For Dierks, “in my power,” however, emerges as a metaphor for the limitations in self-determination, indeed the self-imposed powerlessness, of the emerging colonial middle class; middle-class literacy ultimately served only the narcissistic ends of consumption and social mobility. The mastering of letter writing, which often consisted of uncritically copying the forms of contemporary cultural authorities—such as the writers of instructional manuals—made middleclass correspondents more assured of their own virtue. That women and even children could participate served to give the impression of letter writing as an activity accessible to everyone willing to cultivate it, a notion belied by class and racial inequalities, ultimately serving to brand vast parts of the population as inferior. Thus, letter writing tended to create a self-satisfied, largely depoliticized bourgeois social formation, which became the bedrock of a new American civilization, and which was characterized from its inception by an incapacity for self-reflection and a willingness to live with exceptionalist myths of its own and its nation’s moral innocence.

As becomes clear in the author’s afterword, “The Burden of Early American History,” this deeply felt and often passionately argued, if frequently digressive, book is nothing less than a moral intervention in both American historiography and national discourses of American identity. It is hardly just another effort to fill a gap in the literature. One must be grateful for the author’s seriousness of purpose. He means to set us straight as a nation about our guilt, past and present, for a wide variety of crimes, and to offer us a totalizing counter-narrative of the past, which demands, in effect, that all historical phenomena, including personal, interpersonal, and seemingly innocent ones, be conceived both as political and as directly serving functions that sustain the injustices and crimes that are not merely incidental to but constitutive of the American past. Yet it seems obvious that such phenomena as literacy and letter writing could be considered morally multifaceted activities. Moreover...