Narrative Agency at the Interface of Embodiment and Emotions: The North-American Epistolary Diary of Barbara Bodichon

Abstract

ABSTRACT Body and emotions have traditionally been contentious sources of (self-)knowledge in epistemological debates—often regarded as impediments to rational thinking and autonomous moral decisions. Drawing on feminist philosophers who have sought to bring back body and emotions as central elements in the constitution of the self and the world (Catriona Mackenzie, Alison Jaggar, Kym Maclaren and Sara Ahmed), this paper unpacks how the interaction body-emotions can act as a (problematic) source of female agency. To do so, it examines the epistolary diary which mid-Victorian English feminist, artist and philanthropist Barbara Bodichon wrote during her honeymoon in North-America (1857–1858). This paper teases out the extent to which Bodichon’s lived affective encounters during her honeymoon were translated into an ambiguous narrative outcome: an agentic epistolary self-projection that concomitantly essentialised Others in her descriptions of North-American society.