Penn State Deluge - Vol. 2 No. 1 - Spring 2004

The beginnings of epistolary fiction coincide with the early stages of the modern novel in English. Most critics recognize British author Samuel Richardson as the father of both forms. While he may not have been the first person to use imagined letters to convey a fictionalized narrative, his two most famous novels—Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740-41) and Clarissa; or, The History of a Young Lady (1747-48)—became the standard against which critics measured later novels and their inevitable parodies. In Pamela, Richardson maintained two separate but related didactic goals. On the one hand, he wanted to instruct people of lesser education in the proper decorum of corresponding with one another (World Literature Criticism 2889-91). Simultaneously, he hoped that Pamela would instill proper virtues in young women and warn them against the dangers of seduction.

This latter intention remains at the center of much epistolary fiction as the genre enters the annals of American literature. Two of the first novels written expressly for an American audience—The Power of Sympathy; or, the Triumph of Nature by William Hill Brown and The Coquette; or, The History of Eliza Wharton by Hannah W. Foster—communicate their lessons and warnings in letter form. Most, if not all, of these early authors of epistolary fiction tried to legitimize their appeals to ladylike virtue by advertising their stories as truthful, or at least firmly based on true events. The authors' cover pages and prefaces make this point emphatically, in the hopes of eliciting a requisite sympathy from their readers. Thus, any consequences to befall each novel's characters should be real deterrents for all those for whom a dissolute life might offer temptation. The authors seem to be saying: "I do not lay before you these sordid tales for your mere titillation, but for your moral instruction and that of the young women in your care. Any entertainment value is purely coincidental." Still, many epistolary novels became bestsellers in their own time, and readers flocked to them not just for instruction but also for enjoyment.

The epistolary authors did indeed derive some of their source material from stories or scandals spread by the press or word-of-mouth, but each author also took the liberty to create a "truth" about the evils of seduction and the importance of creating a moral society, which was stronger than the mere facts could express on their own. The presence of these lessons in the form of believable letters only contributed to the sense of realism, because—besides newspapers—written correspondence was one of the main ways people expressed their hopes and dreams to each other across the miles.

However, the success or failure of the epistolary novel during the second half of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries relied partly on readers trusting that such a full-bodied narrative could be drawn out from the mere letters people sent to each other. Literary merit aside, this basic assumption was probably rather believable then. The correspondents in these early novels are mostly of a class that would have had time to sit down and hold forth on their feelings, their thoughts, and their activities. In most books from that time, even if they are written poorly, readers receive enough content to extract character sketches of each person, to figure out what each thinks about the others, and to gain an understanding of the plot and subplots.

But sometimes, a published pile of imaginary letters is not enough. Soon after the crystallization of the epistolary form, some authors saw the need for other framing devices to relate vital facets of the story and provide an alibi for the pretext that readers have just stumbled upon a box of actual correspondence among strangers. The Sufferings of Young Werther by Goethe incorporates a prime example of such a provision. [3] The "editor's note" that concludes the novel picks up the story where Werther's own correspondence trails off. It remains hard for a man who has just committed suicide to finish giving an account of his sufferings, and readers must rely on the editor's observation to know that "no clergyman was present" (Goethe 96) at Werther's stark burial.

Some of these traditional threads—didacticism, appeals to truth, and auxiliary framing devices—appear in modified form in the e-mail novels to be examined. But the technological landscape that now embraces e-mail has changed much from the time when letters were the main form of remote communication. These latter-day novels are not simple translations from the world of quill-scrawled epistles on parchment to pixel-printed memos on a monitor. For today's individual correspondents, e-mail is only one corner of the electronic world of communications that includes recorded music, computer- and phone-based instant messaging, mobile telephony, satellite television and more. Because these modes are tempting and all so readily available—to those of a certain means—today's readers can surround themselves with a variety of outlets and inlets simultaneously. No doubt there were distractions during the era when the epistolary novel saw its vogue, but there existed fewer media of communication and information exchange. Penning a letter was more of an encompassing activity, and a deeper sense of permanence lay in creating such correspondence. Even unsent letters lasted and spoke volumes—a detail that A.S. Byatt takes up in her 1990 novel about a Victorian epistolary romance, Possession.

E-mail is not a mere replacement for the letter; it plays a vitally different role in how we communicate—and its role continues to change faster than most published novels can truly attest. The form originated about three decades ago when the idea of connecting disparate computers had just begun to attract attention among a select few specialists. E-mail began as a communication tool for the worlds of business and science, but gradually became a means of personal interaction as well. Proprietary services such as CompuServe, Prodigy, and America Online (AOL) later helped to bring the medium to a broader, consumer-based audience, as it spread from industry and academia into the home. By 1980, 430,000 electronic-mail users were exchanging about 95 million messages a year (Hafner). [4] As the internet grew, e-mail and electronic messaging persisted as applications central to online traffic. The Pew Internet & American Life Project recently estimated that 57 per cent of people in the United States use the internet, and nearly all of them—93 per cent—send and receive e-mail on a regular basis ("Internet Activities").

But back in July 1985, the Rand Corporation, a government-related think-tank that was quick to see the promise and impact of personal computers, released a report called "Toward an Ethics and Etiquette for Electronic Mail." The pamphlet prophesies, "The effects, and side-effects, of this new communication medium can be substantial" (Shapiro et al iii). At this relatively early date amid e-mail's gradual acceptance by the mainstream, the Rand authors recognized that electronic mail was a "fundamentally new medium"; and thus, users might benefit from knowing about its inherent weaknesses, as age-old human nature trickled into the bits and bytes of computer networks. The potential for misinterpretation, the authors wrote, was rather high. They noted that the speed with which someone can type an electronic message and send it opens the door for unbridled emotions to slip into correspondence more easily than in handwritten letters, which require more effort and thought to send. The authors provided a list of recommendations about how to use e-mail effectively and to avoid such mistakes. Their main audience was work-based users who had some familiarity with the mode of communication. But we can also read the report as a list of things that can go wrong and thereby enflame drama in an e-mail exchange. One can imagine what could happen if fictional e-mail correspondents do not heed the Rand recommendations—if they do not "assume that any message [they] send is permanent;" do not "avoid responding while emotional;" and do "insult or criticize third parties without giving them a chance to respond" (Shapiro vi). The report is a model of foresight, because the same problems that the Rand authors seek to stem will continue to lie beneath much of e-mail confusion for the next two decades, and fiction writers have mined these rich deposits for some of the conflict that drives their stories.

By no means does this essay pretend to be an exhaustive look at the appearance of e-mail correspondence in fiction. Several modern authors, who previously established themselves with more traditional epistolary novels or books in diary form, have dabbled in going digital with their narratives. In 1998, children's book authors Paula Danziger and Ann Matthews Martin told the story of two girls writing to each other via "snail mail" in P.S. Longer Letter Later, and continued the tale through e-mail messages in 2000's Snail Mail No More. Other recent books to use the e-mail format include The Metaphysical Touch by Sylvia Brownrigg (1998) and Letters from the Fire by Alma A. Hromic and R.A. Deckert (1999). Updating the plot of a 1940 film, The Shop Around the Corner, screenwriter Nora Ephron replaced postal romance with anonymous love via e-mail, naming her screenplay after AOL's popular log-on greeting—You've Got Mail. [5] In fall 2002, Meggin Cabot, who also publishes a series of diary fiction as Meg Cabot, released The Boy Next Door, a screwball romance written in e-mail form. Even Jonathan Franzen includes an e-mail exchange between two of his characters—one based in Philadelphia and the other in Lithuania—in The Corrections, his epic 2001 look at a dysfunctional family from the Midwest.

Not everyone sees the promise of this storytelling technique. A reviewer for the Boston Globe, Diane White, dismisses The Boy Next Door at the end of one of her monthly columns. White worries that authors who craft works entirely in e-mail force themselves to create artificial-sounding missives that cram plot, exposition, character development, and dialogue into an otherwise short-format medium. White sums up a common obstacle in creating believable fiction through a pair of inboxes filled with e-mail messages. Some contemporary authors have found better ways to integrate electronic mail more fully into the complex lives of their characters.

But regardless of the success of each author at crafting a long-lasting piece of literature, the four novels examined here take up the palate of electronic mail to provide a glimpse into the light-speed development of the internet and its shifting and varied effect on modern lives. The presence of e-mail as the primary or supplementary means of narrative signals an underlying commentary in each work on what the internet means to people at a given time, place, or node during the past 10 years or so. As the often-ephemeral messages that comprise much of e-mail exchanges make their way into published works, the stories each book tells about the internet become snapshots from the ether, even as common usage advances beyond the point each author has depicted.

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[ Contents | Abstract | Intro | I | II | III | IV | V | VI ]
[ Notes | Works Cited | Appendix ]

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