The (inoperative) epistolary community in Eliza Fenwick’s Secresy

Abstract

Eliza Fenwick’s epistolary novel, Secresy [sic]; Or, The Ruin on The Rock (1795), expresses a form of community based on different kinds of “betrayals” – not only of secrets but also of various forms of property more widely, including even the proper self. Through a close analysis of how love and friendship tend, in the novel, to resist what Georges Bataille might call a restricted economy of expenditure, Fenwick enters into the dialogue between Jean‐Luc Nancy and Maurice Blanchot concerning the fate of community. For both Nancy and Blanchot, community is understood as a risky form of sharing, where what is shared is neither possession nor property but rather the very existential limit of singular beings. In other words, both thinkers reconceive the subject in light of the finite Dasein but refuse Martin Heidegger’s solipsism, taking human beings as, rather, constitutively open to one another. Precisely this kind of openness skews community’s assimilative exigency in Secresy. A rhythm of departure‐in‐arrival – a pattern of intimate misses – troubles the dialectical demands not only of particular characters who would like to master social space but of the letter’s claim to communication and the epistolary community formed through its circulation.