Letter-Writing: A Tool in Feminist Inquiry

Ann Margaret Sharp

Introduction

There is a growing recognition among feminist critics that letter writing can be a valuable source of insight for critical inquiry. Letters reveal the cognitive and moral experiences of individuals, experiences that escape formalistic theories of moral and political principles, sbstract standards of justice, equality and individual freedom. They contain what Bakhtin calls "prosaic wisdom," the abiity to convey the fundamental "messiness" of the world, the flux of events that cannot be reduced to any set of explanatory principles. Although it is agreed that rules can be helpful, we develop as moral agents by increasing our responsiveness to the irreducible particulatiries of each case. By taking letter-writing into account, feminist critics can better understand the importance of the everday, the prosasic,as a source of indviidual creativity and social criticism. Letter writing reveals the complex dimensions of personhood and the remendous gap that often exists between moral and political theory and practice. It is in this sensethat letter writing is a means of affording feminist theorists opportunities to allow actual experiene of persons to shape their social and political theories.

Reading epistolary, a genre that incorporates letter-writing into the very essence of novel-writing, can also be a tool in helping women become aware of their own oppression. The genre aims at the woman reader, "with women as the producer of their own meaning; meanings that may challenge or suvvert partricarchal readings and undo the traditional hierarchy of gender." 1 Through epistolary, women can discover a multitude of perspectives on matters of imortance and begin to understand the diverse ways in which language shapes these perspectives. Because language used in letter-writing if often close to spoken conversaion, epistolary has the potential not only to raise women's consciousness but to offer them a variety of alternative views of reality to consider as they struggle to make sense of their existence and work toward a more just world.

Feminism and Pragmatism

In recent feminist literature, there is a growing awareness of the affinity between pragmatic philosophy and feminist philosophy.2 Both stress the importance of personal, social experience as the starting point of philosophizing, and both share a commitment to inclusiveness and pluralism. Both question such dichotomies as emotion/reason, knower/known, body/mind and theory/practice. Pragmatism and feminism recognize the importance of attending to specific historical context, the linking of philosophical categories and methodologies with value judgments, the denying of neutrality and pure objectivity on the part of the inquirer, the prioritizing of shared understanding and communal inquiry over detachment, individualism and abstractness. In the realm of ethics, both share a view of the enterprise as one of on-going inquiry, developmental, rather than rule-guided. Further, both attend to ordinary everyday conversation with its metaphorical dimension, its vagueness and ambiguity and allow its theory to grow out of and be constantly revised by daily reflective practice. Finally, pragmatism and feminist view philosophy as a critical and creative enterprise aimed at criticizing the beliefs of the culture that have led to present unsatisfactory conditions in order to radically reconstructsociety in accordance with non-oppressive and cooperative standards. Dewey writes:

Philosophy is criticism; criticism of the influential beliefs that underlie culture, a criticism which traces the beliefs to their generating conditions as far as may be, which tracks them to their results, which considers the mutual compatibility of the elements of the total structure of beliefs. Such an examination terminates whether so intended or not, in a projection of them into a new perspective which leads to new surveys of possibilities. 3

Women have as yet made little contribution to philosophy, but when women who are not mere student of other persons' philosophy set out to write it, we cannot conceive it will be the same in viewpoint or tenor as that composed from the standpoint of the different masculine experience of things. Institutions, customs of life, breed certain systematized predilections and aversions. The wise man reads historic philosophies to detect in them intellectual formulations of men's habitual purposes and cultivated wants, not to gain insight into the ultimate nature of things or information about the make-up of reality. As far as what is loosely called reality figures in philosophies, we may be sure that it signifies those selected aspects of the world which are chosen because they lend themselves to the support of men's judgment of the worth-while life, and hence are most highly prized. In philosophy, 'reality' is a term of value or choice. 4

These words were quite prophetic. Not only were feminist philosophers to begin the writing of very different philosophies but, the mode of philosophical inquiry itself was to change. Feminists began to experiment with different ways of doing philosophy, modes they judged to be closer to lived experience and ordinary daily conversation. They became conscious of the positive role of narrative in highlighting the philosophical dimension of experience. They recognized the novels' enormous potential as a source of moral education. Novels show characters making choices in situations that cannot be represented neatly in laws and systems. Thus, reading novels can sharpen our moral sense of the particular. The novel is distinguished from other genres by its diversity of voices: the characters express their beliefs and values in their individual styles and in different social environments where no view is incontestable.

Only lately, however, has attention been paid to letter-writing as a valuable source for critical inquiry. Letters are pieces of evidence that one can use in constructing a story of how certain concepts and categories came into being. Feminist social and political inquiry has much to learn from the letters of the oppressed and the oppressors.Feminist ethical inquiry can discover how concepts of good, right and evil have evolved and been used in language. Letters often reveal the thinking processes of persons leading to ethical, social and political judgments in their lives. Once in script, this thinking process can be analyzed critically in terms of its coherence and consequences for all members of the society.

Letter-Writing as a Liberating Process

For a woman, letter-writing can be an instrument in moving towards a critical awareness of self and the society. Often letters provide a record of an active struggle to figure out for oneself what kind of world one wants to live in and how one might be successful in attaining one's ends, while the reading of other people's letters can help an individual understand the many forces that shape one's oppression, and, in so doing, begin the work of overcoming them.

Rorty points out that women women who find themselves oppressed, and desire freedom, must come to realize that there are many perspectives on reality. To accept the description of reality offered by the oppressor is counterproductive. To use the ethical or metaphysical categories of the oppressor in describing the world is to sink deeper into slavery. Rorty advises those seeking freedom: "Do not walk within the boundaries of their moral universe or you will be lost." 5

Oppressed women must also learn how to conjure --dream up a reality of their own by inventing an ideal world and constructing ways of bringing it into existence. Like Dewey, Rorty holds that the ideals that shape human behavior are not given - they are generated through imagination. Dewey cautioned, however, that "they are not made out of imaginary stuff. They are made out of the hard stuff of the world of physical and social experience. New visions do not arise out of nothing, but emerge through seeing, in terms of possibilities, that is, of imagination, old things in new relations serving a new end which the new end aids in creating."6

World-building is not easy. It takes courage. After the initial excitement that comes with feeling that one is finally escaping the world of oppression, a woman finds oneself, as Marilyn Frye, says "on the edge."7 It is as if she is flirting with meaninglessness; she finds herself caught between social, and in particular, linguistic practices, that she is unwilling to use anymore. However, she has not yet succeeded in creating a new world view accompanied by new language and new practices.

The process of creation is experimental and continuous. The artist, scientific man, or good citizen, depends upon what others have done before him and are doing around him. The sense of new values that become ends to be realized arises first in dim and uncertain form. As the values are dwelt upon and carried forward in action, they grow in definiteness and coherence. Interaction between aim and existent conditions improves and tests the ideal and conditions are at the same time modified. Ideals change as they are applied in existent conditions. The process endures and advances with the life of humanity.8

To attempt to reconstruct reality puts one in a very vulnerable situation. Because there are no blueprints of ideal societies waiting to be transcribed verbatim and put into existence, when challenged by the status-quo, women creators appear vague or zany at best, and often, incoherent. They, who have had little experience in bringing things into existence other than babies, can give little details of their ideal world or means to bring it about before they take the first step. And then they are condemned to take one step at a time, observing what works and what doesn't, always willing to change direction when they see that the means they are using will contradict their ends-in-view. Further, when questioned in depth, they have to admit that all they have is an end-in-view. Even what they consider ideal at the present time will, in all probability, change as the experiment in world-building proceeds.

The Letters of Simone De Beauvoir

One such world-builder was Simone De Beauvoir, a woman who found herself in an oppressive situation and through her writing and thinking began the process of conjuring up a different world, more just in nature. De Beauvoir's letters to Jean Paul Sartre, published this year, are of particular interest to feminist philosophers, as are Sartre's letters, also just published. De Beauvoir's letters are love letters to the man she loved most consistently over a lifetime, as lifelong lover, intellectual partner, and soul-mate. What becomes apparent as one studies these letters is the extent to which De Beauvoir used letter-writing to create a world in which she could live with herself and others. It's as if every experience had no real significance until it had been re-told to Sartre in a letter. In studying her letters, together with Sartre's, we learn that their relationship was not as honest as she initially thought. Sartre's letters in Witness to My Life reveal a deep disloyalty. To one lover, he wrote, "I would trample on the world for you, including De Beauvoir."9 And yet it is Simone De Beauvoir, the author of The Second Sex, who helped trigger the feminist movement. It is revealing that someone so entrapped in an oppressive relationship for a good part of her life could be the author of such a liberating work for other, mostly younger, women. Could it be that caught between the patriarchal world of the dominant French society, nd her ideal world, in which all women would have the same opportunities to develop as men, the writing of The Second Sex was De Beauvoir to conjure up a world that would be most compatible with her ideal self? The very writing of the work itself might have been De Beauvoir at her most autonomous self? Like Sartre, Simone DeBeauvoir used letter-writing to create an identity she deemed worthwhile out of the intellectual, social and psychological forces of her society. She succeeded in making her life an exemplum , but not always in accordance with her own ideals. Her letters show us how much she was an illustration of women obsessed by romantic love that she herself criticized in The Second Sex. In that sense she bears some similarity to Mary Wollstonecraft, the l8th century author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, who, in her relationship to her lover and later her husband was a romantic victim, subject to betrayal by her own feelings. Perhaps De Beauvoir writes so well about this subject because she was betrayed so often herself. Autobiography objectified becomes theory.10

Epistolary as a Feminist Literary Genre

There is another genre that has tried to incorporate letter-writing into the very essence of novel-writing. It is called epistolary and is increasingly becoming more important in feminist literature. Some examples are Clarissa, The Letters of a Portuguese Nun and The Three Marias: New Portuguese Letters that contain chapters of Heloise's letters to Abelard. Several novels use letters to reveal the thinking processes of their characters. Some are novels that contain love letters or letters that discourse about the relationship between love and letter-writing. For example Viktor Shklovsky's Zoo and Letters Not About Love (1923) and Nabokov's Lolita (1955). There have also been novels that use letter-writing to focus on the reconstruction of the self. One such work, published in 1961, in America, was Saul Bellow's Herzog. Others were Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook (1962), Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1986), Possession by A.S. Byatt, (a novel that just won numerous literary prizes) and Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1982).

Epistolary is a powerful genre for writers interested in using the novel to examine critically modern society and present, a schema, of a world better than the one we have. Since Letter-writingreveals the thinking processes of the characters it has the potential to make the letter a vehicle of social criticism. Language and the adequacy of language come under careful scrutiny.

One way to change people's perception of the world from a male mode to a gender-free mode is to change the language that we use to describe the world. If one wants to change the emotional reactions of people, one must create a new language that will facilitate new reactions. Letters are a clue to this new, changing language, especially if the letter-writing is carried out by characters recognized as oppressed. Simple things, like calling a head of department, "chairman," or using "man" to describe all of humanity can actually cause revulsion on the part of the reader, whereas 20 years ago, one would not notice a problem.

The philosopher John Austin, writing on the connection between language and our conception of reality, makes a most revealing statement:

Our common stock of words embodies all the distinctions men have found worth drawing, and the connections they have found worth making, in the lifetimes of many generations.11

While it is certainly true that it would be anachronistic to assert that Austin was restricting the meaning of the word 'men' to males, it is also true that women, till recently, have had little or no input into the shaping of language, that shapes the consciousness of those who use it. Whether Austin meant it or not, it is the case that women have not made significant distinctions or connections during most of human history. Marilyn Frye points out in her Politics of Reality, that it is not that some connections and distinctions are not worth drawing , but rather that men have not had the perception to draw them. Claims about reality are always political. The power to Name is exercised by the dominant forces in society, but rightly belongs to every human being. This includes women and children, as well as men. 12 Not only have most women been erased from most of history but they have had very few roles to play in the intellectual history of the human race. It is still the case that many women only exist to the extent that they are intimate with famous men or associated with the projects of men. The problem for women is to find an appropriate language in order to invent a self in that language. Letters are a valuable clue to providing this new language.

Alice Walker and The Color Purple

Another woman who has chosen to use epistolary to conjure up a more just world is Alice Walker. An African-American novelist, her works can be viewed as studies of the creative intellectual and social forces that drive powerless individuals to reconstruct reality in such a way that they can begin the work of world-building.

The Color Purple is the only epistolary novel depicting African-American world-building in all of its concreteness and struggle. In this novel Walker sets up an analogy: Women are to men as black is to white. She explores this analogy through the juxtaposition of two sets of letters: Celie's letters to God and Nettie's letters to her sister. Celie is a poor black, barely literate woman. Her letters to God and Nettie's letters to Celie make the novel a fine example of the epistolary tradition, for like Heloise or Herzog, Celie writes to God, as a means of not only coming to understand herself but, in the process, coming to create a new identity. What distinguishes Walker's novel is the question of race. In order to deal with this issue, she fuses epistolary with slave narrative, creating a dialogical mixture that is most powerful. She depicts the horrors of colonization both in America and Africa, shifting the frame of reference back and forth to reveal the parallel structures of oppression in both places, giving voice to those whose collective histories have been eradicated or silenced. 13

Initially, Celie can only think of God as a white father-figure who is punishing her for sins that she did not commit but, for which, she still feels guilty. She thinks of herself as some cursed daughter of Ham. Cornel West in his latest work on race describes how the dominant Protestant ethos in America impressed on Black Americans a view of themselves as people less than fully human. 14 The message ingrained in black slaves was that they should accept any oppression as a sign of God's plan. To do so humbly and silently would be their only hope of preparing themselves for their ultimate reward in the next world. To even think of a society in which Blacks are not separated from Whites in schools, churches and other public places would be not only looking for trouble, but in the end, evil. To rebel against the "way things are," is ultimately a rebellion against God himself.

As in other epistolary narratives from Clarissa to The Handmaid's Tale, Celie's letter-writing springs from an order from her father who has just raped her. "You better not tell nobody but God. It'd kill your mammy."15 The fact that Celie begins writing to God reveals a good deal about her mental life. When Celie writes, "I have always been a good girl. Maybe you can give me a sign letting me know what is happening to me," we can't help but be moved by her innocence. Her letters reveal the gradual unfolding of her own innermost thoughts, thoughts that help us understand how Celie has constructed her view of reality. She is not only asking God to explain to her the nature of evil but to give her some justification for the injustice that she experiences. She starts to wonder if she is responsible for her own rape. Could it be that she committed some terrible sin that she has forgotten? Her inability to express her powerlessness compels the reader to see how, deprived of an understanding of the forces that control her world, she is impotent to change her situation. It is as if she is doomed to be pathetic.

Walker depicts women as slaves, terrorized byfathers and father-figures (ministers, doctors, congressmen, mentors and the like. ) Celie's father arranges for her a marriage to a brutal husband who marries her in desperation because he needs someone to cook, clean and take care of him and his four children. Celie is passed on like a piece of property from one cruel man to another. The rest of the novel is Celie's struggle to create an identity and gain some self-respect. At first fighting back doesn't seem an option, survival seems the most she can hope for. For slaves, merely to survive is a form of resistance She stands silent, like a tree, and as her husband beats her she thinks, "that how come I know trees fear man." In one of her letters to God, Celie writes, "I don't know how to fight. All I know is how to stay alive."

Nettie's letters to Celie describe what it is to escape from oppression. She relates in detail the thrill of visiting for the first time the Northern part of the U.S, discovering Harlem with its art and music and ethos. Nettie tells of her travels to Africa and how she experienced deep pride when she discovered that many Black people have achieved great things throughout history. As she discovers alternatives to the society of her childhood, Nettie's letters reveal her changing concept of self. No wonder the letters, can inspire such anger in Celie when she discovers that they were hidden from her by her husband over the course of years.

Celie's letter-writing is experimental. She takes one step at a time to construct the person that she would like to be, using the the existing conditions in which she finds herself. The emphasis on oral discourse is a way of Celie and Nettie bringing each other as well as the reader to a consciousness of what it is to be female, black and oppressed. For the sisters, their letter-writing is a substitute for speaking to one another. The vitality of the letters arise out of their closeness to everyday speech, the particular sound of two black women talking to each other in a concrete situation. Their vivid imagery, and musical rhythm are most unique. Alternation of letters between Celie and Nettie bring to mind the call and response pattern that one hears in Afro-American churches. Celie speaks in her own voice, not the voice of her oppressors. Her words are part of the self that Celie is eventually able to affirm and transcend. Celie tells Albert, her husband, "We all have to start somewhere if us want to do better, and our own self is what we have to hand."17

The fulfillment of spirit is always freedom. Hilde Hein posits that this spirit manifests itself in an individual's refusing to merely cope with one's existence but in creating an ideal vision and working towards the realization of this vision. Freedom for Hein is always an impetus from within, not merely a reaction to the old social order. Autonomy grows as one grows. Freedom is women's capacity to formulate purposes for themselves and act in accordance with them. 18 Often these purposes are expressed in works of art. The Color Purple is such a work.

Conclusion

If feminist crtitical theory want to create a more inclusive, more expansive, more just society, they must cease appealing to the current sexist and racist practices as unreal, or to some ideal world, perfect in nature, to which they think society ought to correspond. Instead, they must take it upon themselves through their writings, teaching and socio-political action to dream up a more just world anddevise means for bringing it into existence.

How can letter-writing be a tool in such critical world-building? What can women learn from letters? They can learn how others perceive the world and how they view matters of importance. They can begin to understand their own view of reality and how language and history played a role in not only shaping their consciousness and identity but in influencing their judgments regarding social, moral, and political matters. Letters are often a first person account of the very personal, private, inner thoughts of individuals, who they think they are, how they define important concepts, think through problems, make judgments and change over time. Moreover, it is through the letters of individuals that we can begin to piece together the intellectual history of a period, and the social history of a people.

Letter-writing can be a form of self-education. As with the letters of Celie in The Color Purple, one can use the medium to understand oneself, critically evaluate one's society and reconstruct one's view of reality out of the stuff of one's physical and social experience. In the process, one can experiment with language that makes sense in describing this ever-changing conception of the boundaries of one's world. One's own letter-writing can be a critical tool in the struggle to bring into being an identity, and perhaps vision of the world, that is deemed worthwhile. Such letter-writing can empower women to become critical and creative world-builders.

If we conceive of philosophy as an experimental, critical reconstruction of the beliefs that have been responsible for the oppression of many individuals, perhaps we will begin to taste of the normative and creative possibilities of philosophy itself as it might effect the lives of all people. As women set out to reshape and revise philosophy through reflections on their own experience, one can envision that their critical writings will not be the same as their male colleagues. Feminists today are in the forefront addressing social and political issues that effect women, children and all of society. As the critical inquiry of women becomes more available not only to philosophers, but to the general society, the discipline itself will change.21 Modes of presentation will change. Issues deemed worthy of inquiry and reflection will change. New issues will emerge as central to the enterprise. Although one would hope that the appreciative and analytic component of philosophy would always have its place, perhaps it is time that women bring into focus the speculative, creative and critical dimension of the discipline. It is then that we can truly begin again the hard work of world-building—bringing into existence original visions of ethical, metaphysical and aesthetic relationships that will serve as the infrastructure of a better world.

Endnotes

1 Mary Jacobus. Reading Women: Essays in Feminist Criticism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986, p, xiii.

2 Seigfried. Op Cit. pp. 14 and 15.

3 Richard Rorty, ÒFeminism and Pragmatism,Ó Radical Philosophy, Autumn 1991, p. 5.

4 Ibid. p. 7.

5 Ibid.

6 John Dewey. The Common Faith, New Haven: Yale University Press. p. 49.

7 Marilyn Frye. The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory. New York: The Crossing Press, 1983, p. 7.

8 John Dewey. The Common Faith, p. 50.

9 Jean Paul Sartre. Witness To My Life. p. 32.

10 Elaine Hoffman Baruch, Women, Love and Power: Literary and Psychoanalytic Perspectives. New York: New York University Press, 1991, p. 241.

11 quoted in Marilyn Frye, The Politics of Reality, p. 161.

12 Ibid.

13 I am indebted for much of the analysis of The Color Purple to Donna Haisty Winchell, Alice Walker (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992, pp. 85-99) and Linda Kaufmann, Special Delivery: Epistolary in Literature. University of Chicago Press, 1992. pp. 94-128.

14 Cornell West, ÒMarxist Theory and the Specificity of Afro-American Oppression,Ó in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture.

15 Alice Walker, The Color Purple, Simon and Schuster Publishing Company, 1982, p. 1.

16 Ibid. p. 278

17 Hilde Hein, ÒLiberating Philosophy: An End to the Dichotomy of Spirit and Matter,Ó in Carol Gould (ed) Beyond Domination: New Perspectives in Women and Philosophy (1984) pp. 123-41.

18For a good example of this, see Martha Nussbaum, ÒA Feminist Theory of Justice,Ó in The New York Review of Books, October 1, 1992, p. 17. In this article, Nussbaum reviews Susan Okin's new book in political theory, while at the same time bringing the issue of gender and economics associated with mothering to the consciousness of the people.