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

The value of letters has always been recognized by their writers, recipients, and the people who have studied them, but the understanding of their meanings is currently undergoing a shift. Scholars working in an interdisciplinary fashion across the fields of history and literary studies have moved away from considering letters primarily as historical records, valuable for the access they offer to the motivations driving famous people or for the information they provide about important events of the past. These scholars see letters as performative and multivalent texts negotiating axes of identity, difference, and social, cultural, and political power. Important books by Eve Tavor Bannet, David A. Gerber, Elizabeth Hewitt, and David M. Henkin have begun to excavate the interventions letters have made in transatlantic history and culture during the seventeenth through early nineteenth centuries. Konstantin Dierks's impressive book is the most recent contribution to the body of interdisciplinary scholarship that forms the emerging field of "epistolary studies."

A key challenge for anyone writing about letters is how to position individual letters or letter writers in relation to larger narratives of historical change over time. Dierks, an elegant writer, explains the quandary in this manner: "Together, letter writing and communications were associated with the grandest of scales—the material strength of an empire or nation—as well as the smallest—the capability of an adult or child" (282). Dierks does not back away from the challenge of working with these two scales, deftly balancing a sweeping historical narrative with considerations of particular people who contributed their epistolary mite to history. With a historian's eye, he trains his perspective on the establishment and maintenance of empire throughout the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, arguing that the development of a "communications infrastructure" (xiv) with letter writing at its center was crucial to England's rise as an imperial power and, later, to colonial Americans' ability to successfully revolt against that power.

Not content with taking on the rise and fall of empires, this ambitious book also offers an epistolary history of the rise of the middle class. Across the span of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Dierks asserts, the middle class brought itself into being through the "new social practice" (xii) of letter writing, which soon became routinized and ubiquitous. Dierks's interest early in the book lies in how particular letter writers innovated as they invented the conventions and functions of the form, and, later, how they deployed their mastery of letter writing to amass social and cultural power. The "power" that Dierks references in his title and recurs to throughout the book is the negotiation of individual agency that he finds embedded in the expressions of countless letter writers. Writing a letter was a means of acting in and on the world, of making a meaningful claim that had real, if often limited, effects. The power of letter writing resided in "the exclusionary possession of social and cultural resources to cultivate skills, to sustain family connections, and to pursue economic opportunities" (1). In Dierks's telling, writing letters allowed the middle class in England and colonial America to gain "ascendancy while imagining itself as outside any will to power," since the power of letter writing operates for Dierks as a "covert mode" distinct from more overt forms exercised through domination (1). Enveloped in an illusory sense of their own innocence and morality, with their attention squarely trained on ideologies of self-improvement, middle-class Americans detached themselves from any "ethics of social power" (8), especially in relation to slavery, the treatment of American Indians, and class issues. As Dierks concludes, "it was letter writing that helped confine certain kinds of people inside their own privilege and blind them to their own power" (8).

Dierks's interest in epistolarity is admirably multidimensional; he is not content to plumb the ideological meanings of letter writing but also investigates the material aspects of the practice, one of the most...