Political Ideology in the Letter Manual (France, England, New England)

P olitical Ideology in the Letter M anualzyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcb (France, England, N ew England) J A N E T G U R K IN A L T M A N But then as I was hurrying off in another direction, I am called back from my flight, as it were, and have my ear tweaked by a band of secretaries who are charged with the correspondence of princes. “What about us,” they say, “not worthy of mention, like the Megarians?” The truth is that it would be difficult to give any direction to those whose pen is not free. Just as Martial directs that a cook should have his master’s palate, so they are compelled to defer to the whims of princes. Erasmus, D e conscribendis epistolis (On the Writing of Letters, 1522) In France, unlike England, the models for letter-writing from the Ren­ aissance through the eighteenth century were provided primarily by liter­ ary figures. Letter manuals were frequently anthologies of letters by prestigious writers. It is therefore tempting to approach French letter manuals with an aesthetic question: what do we learn about the literary values (e.g. developments in prose style) being illustrated by anthologies that are presented as “bouquets of the most beautiful flowers” or “letters by the most beautiful minds” in France? Although aesthetic questions have productively guided critical readings thus far, this essay will address a less probed aspect of the letter manual: the ideology that underpins the selection of letters offered to the reading public for imitation or edifica­ 105 106 / ALTMAN tion. Letter manuals were one of the widely diffused print genres during the early modern period in Europe and North America, but thus far there has been relatively little inquiry into the way that they presented them­ selves as models for cultural behavior. In this essay, I would like to suggest that in the production and diffusion of letter manuals a political unconscious appears to be operating, independently of the artistic talent displayed in the manual’s letters. Let us begin with the French tradition, which will be the primary, though not exclusive, focus of this essay. As a first case in point let us observe that, contrary to a common myth, Madame de Sevigne (1626-1696) was not considered a model epistolarian1 or appropriated by letter manuals until well into the Enlightenment, whereas the letters of other major seventeenth-century epistolarians were solicited and pub­ lished as models for letter-writing during their lifetimes or shortly after their deaths. What we can discover, by surveying the broad spectrum of correspondence published in France between 1624 and 1725, is that the publicly valued forms of letter-writing during that period—reflected in the published correspondence of all model epistolarians, from Guez de Balzac (1624) and Malherbe (1630) to Voiture (1649) and Bussy-Rabutin (1697) —simply did not allow for the kind of epistolary freedom that Sevigne exercised with her daughter, in both personal style and range of subject matter.2 During the period following the religious wars in the early seventeenth century, conventions for respectability in model letter­ writing became quite rigidly codified in France. With the founding of the Academie Fran?aise in 1635, the requirements for model authorship like­ wise became institutionalized. Indeed, since the forty immortals were always men, and since it was typically the letters of these men that were published and widely cited as models of epistolary art during the seven­ teenth century, it is doubtful whether a woman’s letters would have been considered publishable as model writing. Certainly not a woman’s writ­ ing to her daughter, in any event, since even Malherbe and his editors had excluded from his publishable correspondence the letters that he wrote to his son, his wife, and his close friend Peiresc. What was published as model epistolary writing in seventeenth-century France was ZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCB not what we call “familiar” letters (that is, letters to close friends and family, repre­ senting one’s interior life and world view to a person addressed as an equal), but only those letters that situated the epistolarian as the humble servant of courtly milieux revolving around an absolute monarch. Let us consider, by...