How writers portray the cruelity of society?
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Developing a sense of the plot, cast of characters, and language of a given diary or collection of letters is the surest way to begin reading in greater depth. Now we can think further about strategies for moving into the pages of a personal text, entry by entry, letter by letter, looking for how this writer gives us a particular lens through which to see the past by creating herself as a writer at the same time she portrays others and the world around her. Consider again the observation, made earlier, that personal texts are fueled by accounts of key events that occur over time, events which the writer feels are important enough to express: a marriage, a disastrous storm, a daughter leaving home, the routine of work. But events are only a starting point. The tale of events inevitably reveals a pattern of key relationships – the writer’s friendships, kinships, acquaintances and strangers. These relationships, in turn, shape our understanding (just as they shaped the writer’s) of which events are important to tell. A central strategy for us as readers of a text, then, is to understand how the writer joins events and relationships together, each giving the other substance. We can see events and relationships as a kind of dynamic logic – a dialectic – of personal texts which, over time, reveals patterns of choice and characterization by writers, giving each writer a certain style or voice, a distinct way of representing self and others. It also shows that the meaning of events is not static, but changes as correspondents change over time.
In certain ways, personal letters reveal the dialectic of events and relationships more clearly than do diaries. Most family letters are driven by "news," and so they are rich with events which most writers try to characterize in detail. Because there is a distinct "other" being addressed – the recipient of the letter – the writer openly adapts his account of events to the differences among his various correspondents, thus giving us different interpretations of the same event as well as a different sense of the writer’s own intellect and feeling. For example, medical student Joseph Jones responded quite differently in 1853 to letters from his father and mother. Each of his parents had written to express anxiety over the fact that Joseph was cutting up cadavers as part of his anatomy course; each feared he would injure himself morally by disrespecting the human body. Jones defended his study of anatomy (and at the same time inscribed gendered differences in his relationship with his parents) by arguing substantial points of science and religion with his father, while assuring his mother that nothing substantial was at stake. Moreover, letters are especially sensitive to the absence of the other, and to the distance between correspondents which letters are meant to bridge. Although all writers aim to bridge the gap, some emphasize the gap while others emphasize the bridge. This often made the exchange of letters itself an event worth remarking upon, as lovers or parents and children blamed each other for neglect or praised each other for timely and satisfying letters.*
Although the number of letters we have in front of us, and their spacing in time, obviously determine what we can know of both events and relationships, you can develop a set of questions for any group of correspondents: which events – trivial or monumental – do correspondents choose to share with each other? Are any events or topics ignored or skirted? Who among the correspondents seem the most intimate and who seem most at odds? How does each writer seem to value formal respect and careful language, on the one hand, and humor, exaggeration, and slang, on the other? Does one individual seem to be the central person in the correspondence, and, conversely, is there an individual everyone seems to regard as shy or silent? Which relationships seem most stable over the course of the correspondence, which most volatile, and how do events in their lives reveal these qualities? How do all of these relate to the identities of the various correspondents, in terms of gender, class, age?
In certain ways, personal letters reveal the dialectic of events and relationships more clearly than do diaries. Most family letters are driven by "news," and so they are rich with events which most writers try to characterize in detail. Because there is a distinct "other" being addressed – the recipient of the letter – the writer openly adapts his account of events to the differences among his various correspondents, thus giving us different interpretations of the same event as well as a different sense of the writer’s own intellect and feeling. For example, medical student Joseph Jones responded quite differently in 1853 to letters from his father and mother. Each of his parents had written to express anxiety over the fact that Joseph was cutting up cadavers as part of his anatomy course; each feared he would injure himself morally by disrespecting the human body. Jones defended his study of anatomy (and at the same time inscribed gendered differences in his relationship with his parents) by arguing substantial points of science and religion with his father, while assuring his mother that nothing substantial was at stake. Moreover, letters are especially sensitive to the absence of the other, and to the distance between correspondents which letters are meant to bridge. Although all writers aim to bridge the gap, some emphasize the gap while others emphasize the bridge. This often made the exchange of letters itself an event worth remarking upon, as lovers or parents and children blamed each other for neglect or praised each other for timely and satisfying letters.*
Although the number of letters we have in front of us, and their spacing in time, obviously determine what we can know of both events and relationships, you can develop a set of questions for any group of correspondents: which events – trivial or monumental – do correspondents choose to share with each other? Are any events or topics ignored or skirted? Who among the correspondents seem the most intimate and who seem most at odds? How does each writer seem to value formal respect and careful language, on the one hand, and humor, exaggeration, and slang, on the other? Does one individual seem to be the central person in the correspondence, and, conversely, is there an individual everyone seems to regard as shy or silent? Which relationships seem most stable over the course of the correspondence, which most volatile, and how do events in their lives reveal these qualities? How do all of these relate to the identities of the various correspondents, in terms of gender, class, age?
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