Volume 02 Issue 11-2022
88
American Journal Of Philological Sciences
(ISSN
–
2771-2273)
VOLUME
02
I
SSUE
11
P
AGES
:
88-92
SJIF
I
MPACT
FACTOR
(2022:
5.
445
)
OCLC
–
1121105677
METADATA
IF
–
5.963
Publisher:
Oscar Publishing Services
Servi
ABSTRACT
This article deals with the functional aspects of letters, arguing that the epistolary form was appropriated for an
increasing variety of uses. It also charts women's growing familiarity with letter-writing practices. The chapter begins
by looking at the conveying of news in women's correspondence and the ways in which letters performed social
courtesies.
KEYWORDS
Letter-writing, literary device, epistolary fiction, woman writing, female, allegory, a contemporary allegory, female
creativity, feminization, epistolary discourse.
INTRODUCTION
A few centuries ago, letter-writing was the only means
of communication of people who live in far away places
and different countries. If we look into the ancient
history of literature, letter-writing plays a major role in
communicating people. Although diary writing is
another mode of expression one’s experiences, it is not
Research Article
LETTER WRITING AS ALLEGORY FOR THE WOMAN WRITER
Submission Date:
November 05, 2022,
Accepted Date:
November 15, 2022,
Published Date:
November 29, 2022
Crossref doi:
https://doi.org/10.37547/ajps/Volume02Issue11-12
Manzila Nuriddinovna Habibova
Bsmi, Teacher Of English Language Department, Uzbekistan
Journal
Website:
https://theusajournals.
com/index.php/ajps
Copyright:
Original
content from this work
may be used under the
terms of the creative
commons
attributes
4.0 licence.
Volume 02 Issue 11-2022
89
American Journal Of Philological Sciences
(ISSN
–
2771-2273)
VOLUME
02
I
SSUE
11
P
AGES
:
88-92
SJIF
I
MPACT
FACTOR
(2022:
5.
445
)
OCLC
–
1121105677
METADATA
IF
–
5.963
Publisher:
Oscar Publishing Services
Servi
for communication. Diary is about self and it is a record
of the important events that took place in the life of an
individual. Letter-writing varies in its kind. There are
personal letter, official letter and business letter. These
letters express different matters ,experience, needs
and aim of life. The pattern or the method of writing
too differs from one type of letter to another type of
letter. Personal letter is written to the known person in
an informal manner whereas the official and business
letters are more formal. They are written to the people
who are not known or who are officially known.
Whatever the letter is, Letter-writing is a part of
literature. It requires a command over language and
fluency in it. A good letter comes out of one’s good
language and writing skills.
The figure of the woman letter writer can be seen as an
emblem of changing cultural notions of both sexuality
and textuality, since the 1980s women’s epistolary
fiction is not only a site of resistance, but an allegory
for the literary woman writer. By proposing the letter
as “an allegory for the woman artist” I wish to convey
a symbolic reading of the creative act
—
not that
allegories may be read into the plots or that the texts
here analyzed are manifestations of allegories. By
means of the figure of woman-as-letter-writer, the
texts encapsulate a new truth about the woman
writer. If traditional epistolary fiction generated by
men was a reflection of women’s imprisonment,
contemporary women writers tell a different story in
that they use letter fiction to seek self-definition. It is
important to retain the concept of allegory as a literary
device, because we need to acknowledge that the
woman writing a letter at her desk is a demonstrative
form
of
representing
contemporary
female
epistolographers in an extended metaphor. In other
words, it is not limited to the fictional letter writer; it
extends to the historical author, suggesting that the
pictorial instance of a woman writing a letter has a
connection to a reality underlying its rhetorical or
fictional uses. Thus, the letter embodies the
epistolographer and becomes an allegoric form of
communication. As a contemporary allegory of the
woman artist, the letter also tells a less private story
than modern allegories. This shift in contemporary
allegory still points to letters as a symbolic
representation of the creative act, and has therefore a
public dimension that, as we shall see, contemporary
women authors explore in novel ways that empower
their narratives.
In her discussion of how restraints on gender and
sexuality may lead to textual
resistance and subversive writing, Kay Turner suggests
that letter-writing has the
potential to disrupt any conventional boundary for
literary expression because it is linked to the general
history of women’s constraint under patriarchy.
Amorous letterwriting has for centuries been
Volume 02 Issue 11-2022
90
American Journal Of Philological Sciences
(ISSN
–
2771-2273)
VOLUME
02
I
SSUE
11
P
AGES
:
88-92
SJIF
I
MPACT
FACTOR
(2022:
5.
445
)
OCLC
–
1121105677
METADATA
IF
–
5.963
Publisher:
Oscar Publishing Services
Servi
trivialized as a woman’s art while elevated to an art for
when authorized by a male writer. Letter-writing
became a site of self-invention for women; on the page
they expressed a version of the self in excess of what
was consider
ed ‘appropriately female’ in a male world,
or as Benstock expresses in Textualizing the Feminine:
On the Limits of Genre (1991), letter-writing became a
site for thinking about the potential subversiveness of
women’s letters as “they attempt to create an i
mage
of self and are the effect of such an effort”. As
previously mentioned, for Benstock letters as a
“private” form of writing, have the potential to disrupt
conventional boundaries for fixed identity and desire,
revealing the idiosyncratic self-interpretation of the
individual letter-writer.
A fictional text represents the individual’s self
-
interpretation at the interface of writer’s life
experiences of the physical, cultural, or social. Texts, as
“man
-
made products,” regardless if they are work
s of
fiction, are invaluable means for examining and
communicating human matters. Susan Lanser’s The
Narrative Act (1981) confirms that a text “is essentially
ideological as well as aesthetic, for the act of writing,
indeed the act of using language, is defined,
constrained and conventionalized according to a
system of values, norms, and perceptions of the
world”. Writing subjects make sense of the world
around them by interpreting their cultural situations
and experiences, creating scenarios for themselves
and others to easily imagine in their reading and
expanding their perception of the world and
themselves.
Sherry Benstock confirms the idea of letter writing as
emblem for the woman artist. She shows that, in the
historical context and development of the genre,
women were “separated from male enterprise and
worldly activity” but “women established links with
others through correspondence; they represented
themselves through the written word and substituted
the act of writing for the action of living, finding in the
blank page the occasion to create an ideal version of
themselves”. This being the case, women’s epistolary
writing seems to represent a trope of their selves as
having been historically linked to an amorous
heterosexual discourse where “
everything that is
related to the image of the beloved” [becomes] “the
repository of all identity and desire” (Linda
Kauffmann).
The historical trajectory of women’s letters and the
fictionalization of their letter writing have led to the
feminization of the genre, but at the expense of
women’s artistic originality. Benstock observes that
“the exchange of women’s letters for a literary genre
based on women’s letters, initiates a series of
substitutions, including the appropriation of female
creativity
under the guise of heterosexual desire”. The
idea that female’s literariness materialized through
letter-writing, which then becomes a genre of
Volume 02 Issue 11-2022
91
American Journal Of Philological Sciences
(ISSN
–
2771-2273)
VOLUME
02
I
SSUE
11
P
AGES
:
88-92
SJIF
I
MPACT
FACTOR
(2022:
5.
445
)
OCLC
–
1121105677
METADATA
IF
–
5.963
Publisher:
Oscar Publishing Services
Servi
“absolute rigid law,” that limits women’s artistic
visibility, is precisely what the contemporary woman
artist challenges in her literary self-portrait. If
historically letters have been made to serve the law of
the genre, how do women writers transgress
epistolary generic laws in order to not only debunk
“the generic claims’ of amorous epistolary discourse,”
(Turner) but to make a statement about their artistic
creativity? Monteserrat Abumalham’s short epistolary
novel is a case in point for how women artistically
deconstruct amorous epistolary discourse in order to
defy fixed literary binaries between men’s and
wom
en’s writing.
CONCLUSION
Letters were penned in dining rooms, parlours and
closets, by firesides, and on desks and laps. In their
letters, women projected images of themselves
scribbling epistles to friends in order to maintain their
mental intimacy. Space was both real and imagined
and the physical realities of a hand-written and hand-
delivered letter gave way to the imaginative
possibilities brought by networks of epistolary
exchange and the alternative spaces of creative
thought. By reinstating the home more fully in the
history of female intellectual experience, a more
nuanced view of the domestic arena can be developed
: one that sees the home not as a site of exclusion and
confinement, but as a space for scholarship and
exchange.
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