Epistolary Narratives of Transmission and Transgression

Abstract

ALL EPISTOLARY NOVELS contain a double narrative: a narrative of the events and a narrative of the letters that precipitate or report the events. This double narrative is produced within a textual society created for the reader by the private correspondence of its members. The most complex textual societies exist in Briefwechselromanen, such as Clarissa, La nouvelle Heloise, and Les Liaisons dangereuses, whose distinctive features are an exchange of letters among multiple correspondents (as opposed to the single correspondent of Pamela or the unexchanged letters of Humsphry Clinker) and an editorial framework to transmit the letters to the reader.1 In a Briefwechselroman, the narrative techniques for exchanging letters complicate the sequence of events by keeping the characters unequally informed, while the reader has access to every letter published by the Editor.2 In the case of Samuel Richardson's The History of Clarissa Harlowe (1747), Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Julie, ou la nouvelle Heloise (1761), and Choderlos de