Voices in a love story: Mérida letters from the eighteenth century

Abstract

The letter is the written genre, which in the past was nearest to orality, and it was used in the eighteenth century as a very important way of communicating officially and privately. The corpus of 33 letters under study constitutes a dialogue which discusses the issues concerning the marriage of a young mulatto girl with a slave. The corpus introduces 16 subjects — speakers and listeners or readers and writers in different production formats — instantiating the voices in this story. These voices represent conflicting ideologies — social and religious — but also conflicting interests in the development of the action. The study takes the corpus as a single text and interprets the plurality of voices as polyphony in the Bakhtinian sense.