Censored Sentiments: Letters and Censorship in Epistolary Novels and Conduct Material (review)

??? COHPAnATIST that "poetic" has been a term ofhigh praise in describing the style ofmany novelists —Dickens, James Proust, Joyce, most ofthe great moderns. Indeed, José Saramago, the new Nobel Prize laureate, recently stated that the novel is gradually returning toward the condition ofpoetry, thus reversing the direction that it formerly took. Marino, working in Romania, has consulted a remarkable number ofsources, as displayed in 1 15 pages ofnotes. His book is notable for organizing a wealth of ideas under a single heading, and comparatists will find it useful in relating one literary period to the others. Ashley BrownUniversity ofSouth Carolina BARBARA MARIA ZACZEK. Censored Sentiments: Letters and Censorship in Epistolary Novels and Conduct Material. Newark: U of Delaware P, 1997.105 pp. Barbara Maria Zaczek, who comes from Poland, studied English and Italian there; later she did advanced studies in England, Italy, and the United States. She is now a professor ofItalian at Clemson University. This book is thus the work ofone who moves with ease among several languages and cultures. Its subject is the epistolary novel, a genre of fiction that flourished in eighteenth-century Europe, especially England and France. It was a great age ofpersonal correspondence, and several writers (such as Madame de Sévigné and Horace Walpole) are now known mainly for their letters. Many women of the upper and middle classes had the leisure to participate in this activity, some ofthem making fiction out ofa well-established habit. By the end ofthe century the majority ofnovelists in England were women. Perhaps the pioneer in this genre was the remarkable Aphra Behn, a Restoration figure—dramatist, woman ofthe world, an alleged spy as well as a novelist— whose Love Letters between a Noble-Man and his Sister (1683) was ahead of its time. This novel boldly presents a heroine, Sylvia, and her passionate love for Philander , who is married to her sister; she is in fact his sister-in-law, not sister, but there is a hint of incest, which may add some piquancy to the affair. At any rate, since they certainly defy convention, they usually communicate through letters. At the end they flee to a seaside cottage. Barbara Zaczek's main interest in such a novel is the way in which the letters written by the heroine are "censored" by the authors ofthe so-called conduct books that were supposed to provide the model to govern women's behavior. Such guides to polite decorum apparently were taken seriously by the upper and middle classes, who ofcourse were more or less literate. Presumably the lower orders were not affected by these things. It would be interesting to have Defoe's Moll Flanders brought into the discussion; even though it is not an epistolary novel, its presentation ofan independent woman's career in this period is authentic, and as a novel it has considerable merit. The great example ofthe epistolary novel is ofcourse Richardson's Clarissa (1748-49), whose heroine puts up a lengthy resistance to the advances ofthe unscrupulous Lovelace in volume after volume ofan exceedingly long novel. But she is drugged and raped; eventually she dies. Lovelace is killed in a duel by her cousin. Although the novel could easily be reduced to a melodrama, it is in fact a subtle presentation ofthe situation. For one thing, Richardson brings more than twenty correspondents into his scene with appropriate shifts in style. We can tell by the style ofhis letters that Lovelace is a man of"reading, judgment and taste," and thus VcH. 24 (2000): 181 BOOK NOTES he can act the loyal friend rather than the seducer. He is well aware ofthe conventions ofthe conduct books and can even use their typical vocabulary, as Barbara Zaczek points out. The author devotes a chapter to Clarissa in order to demonstrate how letters can control and manipulate behavior. Richardson, she thinks, identified with the heroine and "effectively masked his own role in imposing censorship on unruly sentiments." He was, it would seem, a stem moralist who appealed to a largely female audience in a novel that is, in a sense, a novel about letter writing. Barbara Zaczek might have devoted more attention to Choderlos de Laclos' Les...