The letter as mirror : the construction of the self in three recent epistolary novels

This study explores the function of the letter in three recent epistolary novels--Lee Smith's Fair and Tender Ladies, Alice Walker's The Color Purple, and Ana Castillo's The Mixquiahuala Letters. For the protagonists of these novels, the letter serves as a mirror in which medium each can deconstruct the self she sees, a self that has been defined largely by ideologies, and can then reconstruct a noncoherent or fragmented self. This study examines these novels in light of theories of self explored in discussions by Jacques Lacan, Elizabeth Grosz, Catherine Belsey, and Toril Moi. It then observes the effects achieved by each protagonist as a result of her letterwriting. These effects include being able to juxtapose contradictory beliefs, or even contradictory selves, next to one another by placing two different letters next to each other in the collection; being able to say "I" in a variety of ways, and calling attention to the material quality, or the constructedness, of the letters themselves. The dissertation concludes that through their use of the epistolary form, the protagonists of these novels achieve an awareness of ideological definitions as arbitrary and constructed rather than "natural," and that through their achievement of this awareness, they recognize a fragmented rather than a unitary self, thus liberating themselves.