The Heart in the Glass Jar by William E. French

Author:William E. French [French, William E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8032-8416-6
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Published: 2018-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

What seems so striking to me about this letter is its generic nature. Without either date or return address, it is not unlike many of the other love letters already considered in this section. In many ways, in fact, it is a typical first letter from a male to a potential novia, with the formal “Usted” form used three times in such a brief message (along with other formal forms indicating respect). The reason offered as compelling enough to justify such an intrusion, such a violation of the forms of everyday discourse, what its writer refers to as the “inexplicable feeling that is called love,” serves as a rhetorical strategy that both defines the extent or strength of feelings as reciprocal to the degree that such norms of politeness are being trespassed while, simultaneously, claiming decent and honorable status for both the letter writer and its recipient. Staples of the love letter genre are also present, such as the idea of fate bringing the couple together, for example, expressed in the form of divine intervention; the declaration of love and the hope it will be reciprocated; and some of the tropes of romantic rhetoric including the heart, sentiment, the sublime, love, desire, and happiness. The salutation and closing are typical (Dear Señorita/You know who) if unremarkable, as is the rest of the letter, so devoid of any reference to any characteristics or qualities of the actual woman being addressed. It is as if the form of the letter itself is sufficient to accomplish what the women who wrote it (if they did write it) had intended, that is, to convince judicial authorities of the existence of a courting relationship, if not precisely of a written promise of marriage. As in so many of these cases, the end of the story is, unfortunately, not known, as, within three or four days of beginning the judicial procedure, Matilde’s mother, as was her right, formally desisted from pursuing further legal action, citing the difficulties it imposed on her to appear so frequently before judicial authorities and the desire that she and her daughter be left in peace.

Despite professing to be humble and in the situation of a poor woman, Matilde’s mother, perhaps with Petra’s help, demonstrated her ability to deploy the forms of the lettered city to her own ends. Yet, it still remains to be determined how these forms had been agreed to and passed along. To some extent, the codification of the rules for writing letters formed part of a broader process, the attempt to regulate behavior and manners that, through the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, served increasingly as a means of distinguishing between, on the one hand, those pertaining to “decent” and “civilized” society and, on the other hand, those who did not. In the second half of the nineteenth century, this meant a growing concern with etiquette, a preoccupation that was codified and disseminated, in Mexico as in much of Latin America, by means of the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.