Page 23 →Chapter 1 “The language of the heart”

The most basic instruction for the romantic subgenre of epistolary rhetoric was to write “from the heart.” In keeping with The Fashionable American Letter Writer’s designation “the language of the heart,” complete letter-writer manuals taught learners to write romantic letters that sincerely conveyed their heartfelt feelings. For example, in model romantic letters from The Natural Letter-Writer (1813), “the language of [the] heart” is described as marked by “sincerity,” particularly in terms of communicating “emotions of the heart” (Shepard 27–29, 55–57). Frost’s Original Letter-Writer (1867) spells out the potential pedagogical implications of such characterizations of the language of the heart: “Love Letters written in sincerity and faith need but little guidance except from the heart of the writer. The true lover will find the words he seeks flow easily from his pen” (Shields 119). If one truly loves, in other words, he needs no rhetorical training, his letters no rhetorical crafting. The obvious paradox of this instruction is that, if composing romantic epistolary rhetoric relied so simply on feelings, if it required so “little guidance,” then there would be no need for complete letter writers like Frost’s, which went on to offer no fewer than thirty-seven model romantic letters. In spite of The Natural Letter-Writer’s title, its similar elaboration of model letters suggests that sincerely communicating from the heart was no simple or “natural” matter.

Models of the romantic subgenre were necessary, these same manuals taught, because of the twin threats of deceit and flattery. The Natural Letter-Writer further defines the language of the heart by contrasting its sincerity with “deceit and flattery.” Because deceit and flattery are “used to betray the innocent,” the manual continues, rhetors should not simply write from the heart or read letters as transparent windows into the writer’s heart. Instead, writers need to learn how to rhetorically craft language in ways that will “prove the sincerity of [the] heart” so that readers will “have … reason to believe”; readers need to become rhetorically savvy in order to distinguish between “apparent sincerity” and “ample proof of … sincerity” (Shepard 27–29, 55–57).

Outright deception was the most obvious threat to sincerity. Manuals usually represented the risks of dishonesty about love as though men were more likely to deceive women than the other way around. This gendered representation was in keeping with the “rake” figure of epistolary novels and reflected broader cultural anxieties about men deceptively seducing women through letters.¹⁴ Still, manuals advised both men and women to avoid dishonesty. Letter-Writing Simplified Page 30 →(1844) instructs men that “the lover should promise nothing the husband would hesitate to perform … all promises should be carefully made, and always with strict regard to truth” (61). Women were instructed through a lengthy series of letters, titled “From a Father to his Daughters,” which was widely reprinted in countless manuals. In this series, the father warns his daughters against both deceiving and being deceived: “I wish you to possess such high principles of honor and generosity as will render you incapable of deceiving, and at the same time to possess that acute discernment which may secure you against being deceived” (Fashionable American Letter Writer 84).¹⁵

As much a threat as deceit was its twin, flattery. Manuals taught that, because writing from the heart involves communicating feelings of affection, such communication can easily veer into the risky territory of flattery. Letter-Writing Simplified advises, “Extravagant flattery should, by all means be avoided” (61). Frost’s goes further, claiming, “It is best to entirely avoid flattery in such letters” (Shields 119). One risk with flattery, according to Frost’s, is it may undermine actual sincerity and proof of true feeling: “The fact that you love the person to whom [the letters] are addressed is a sufficient proof of your appreciation of any merit or beauty he or she may possess, and the praises of lovers are apt to become too warm to appear perfectly sincere” (119). Rhetors who sincerely felt love were taught to avoid flattery because, however sincere flattering romantic letters were, they may not “appear” as such.

In most cases, though, the risk manuals warned learners about was flattery combined with the intention to deceive. Here especially, men were admonished not to deceive through flattery, women to avoid being deceived by flattery. For example, while complete letter writers consisted primarily of model letters, The Natural Letter Writer includes a poem, “To Young Ladies,” which warns women who “are … beset on every side” by “flattering men” to “believe them not, / The rake, the beau, the drunken sot, / Although they are flattering to your face, / They will leave you in disgrace” (70). Similarly, Letter-Writing Simplified prefaces its models by instructing women to guard against deception through flattery: “The sincerity of the writer is questioned when his language is exaggerated, and ridicule or disgust is excited toward him in the bosom of a woman of sense” (61). The Art of Correspondence (1884) affirms that sensible readers, even if deceived initially, will eventually see through mere flattery: “Hypocritical letters, abounding in overwrought expressions of love, may possibly, for a while, deceive the inexperienced … but the … sensible will penetrate the deceptive film, and expose the treacherous writer to deserved contempt” (Locke 140). Of course, this particular warning was likely intended not for already “sensible” readers but for writers hoping to get away with deceit through flattery.

In spite of the presumptions about gender that underlay such manual instruction, the lessons for both women and men were clear: be wary of deception and Page 31 →even of flattery, but otherwise write from the heart, sincerely expressing your heartfelt feelings. To write from the heart was the most basic advice manuals gave about romantic epistolary rhetoric. But writing from the heart did not amount to natural or spontaneous expression. Instead, manuals taught that such expression was governed by at least three generic conventions, all with implications for the cultural shaping of heteronormative romantic relations.

The first and most elementary of these heteronormative genre conventions concerns romantic epistolary address. Manuals taught conventions for addressing not just romantic but all epistolary rhetoric: composers were to begin with a left-aligned salutation line, placed just below the right-aligned date and above the body of the letter, and address the immediate, intended audience, usually using the words “Dear” and/or “My.” Instruction in terms of epistolary address amounted to a lesson in what forms of exchange were culturally approved according to the social rank of writers and readers and the intimacy of their relations (Bannet 64–66). In the case of manual chapters focused on romantically intimate letters, instruction in the simple and still familiar conventions for epistolary address offered a lesson in heteronormative exchange. By marking rhetor and audience positions as masculine or feminine, manuals gendered romantic epistolary relations in keeping with heteronormative coupling.

Simply put, in the thousands of model letters categorized as romantic in complete letter writers, every model I have studied is addressed to a reader gendered feminine if the writer is gendered masculine and is addressed to a reader gendered masculine if the writer is gendered feminine (or is about a relationship between one person gendered feminine and another gendered masculine). In other words, manuals normalized opposite-sex couplings between writers and readers—or what are now understood as “heterosexual” relations. To normalize this particular form of relations, manuals needed to mark gender as an organizing feature of romantic epistolary rhetoric. Indeed, while many manuals also marked class (and very few race) in the titles to selected model letters, all manuals consistently marked gender as a defining feature of virtually every model letter. Gender was attributed primarily in the titles above model letters, which framed the terms of address through third-person pronouns as well as gendered nouns. For example, The Useful Letter Writer (1844) includes “From a young Gentleman to a Lady with whom he is in love,” “From a Gentleman to a Lady,” and “From a rich young Gentleman, to a beautiful young Lady with no fortune.” Because manuals listed such titles in the tables of contents and repeated the titles above each model, their gendering of romantic epistolary address occupied a prominent position in the framing of models at the level of both the entire manual and the specific chapter.

Page 32 →In what is perhaps the most striking example, The American Lady’s and Gentleman’s Modern Letter Writer [185-], the entire manual is organized first and foremost by the gender of model rhetors. Whereas most manuals followed their introductions with models organized into multiple chapters by subgenre, this one follows its especially brief introduction with only two sections: “The Ladies’ Hand-Book of Letter-Writing” and “The Gentlemen’s Hand-Book of Letter-Writing.” Within the “Ladies’” half of the book, the gendering of rhetors and their addressed readers is marked in titles to model romantic letters such as “A Lady on Receiving a Letter from a Gentleman, in which He Proposes a Meeting” (28); in the “Gentlemen’s” half, the gendering is made clear through titles such as “A Gentleman to a Lady, Proposing to Pay His Addresses” (20a). Titles aside, however, the overall organization of the book by gender offered a lesson, however inductive, on the organization of gender within heteronormative romantic relations: there were two genders for rhetors and readers, lady and gentleman; they were markedly different from each other, to the point of requiring two separate sections; and, like two halves, they together made up a whole. In this sense, manuals did not merely gender romantic relations as opposite-sex. Manuals also privileged the “couple” form of such opposite-sex relations as “the referent or the privileged example” of what Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner characterize as a culture of “national heterosexuality” (548–49).

This predominantly heteronormative conception of romantic relations as defined by coupling across gender difference carried forward into the model letters themselves. While model titles and manual organization clearly gendered epistolary address, it was in the actual letter models that this address occurred, and it occurred most directly in salutation lines. In chapters focused on romantic epistolary rhetoric, salutations consisted of not only the familiar “Dear” but more gendered terms of address. In The Pocket Letter Writer (1840), for example, the gendered terms of address in salutation lines for initial romantic letters and their subsequent replies include the following: “My Dearest Harriet” and “Sir” (65–66); “Madam” and “Sir” (70–71); “Dear Mary” and “Dear James” (81–82); “My Dear Anne” and “Dear George” (90–91); and, finally, “My Dearest Mary” and “My Dearest John” (96–97). Again, these terms made gender central to epistolary address and normalized opposite-sex address and the heterosexual couple form as characteristic of romantic epistolary rhetoric. Gender was marked so as to make opposite-sex couplings unremarkable—(un)marked by “a tacit sense of rightness and normalcy”—so these relational forms were treated as normative, natural, right, and even inevitable (Berlant and Warner 554).

A second genre convention taught by complete letter-writer manuals was that for dating letters and, by extension, pacing romantic epistolary exchange. Like the Page 33 →conventions for epistolary address, those for dating letters were taught through modeling across the subgenres of epistolary rhetoric: most models included a date in the upper right corner of the letter.¹⁶ Embedded within the bodies of the letters categorized as romantic, however, were more interesting lessons about the relationship between the dating and pacing of letters and the normative temporality of romantic coupling. In a nineteenth-century version of “straight time,” manuals modeled a temporality for romantic epistolary exchange proceeding slowly and cautiously, so as to avert “base” relations.

Jack Halberstam has theorized “straight time” as a normative timeline for the development of relationships (Queer Time). Within straight time, futures are imagined not only to be heterosexual but also to operate according to heteronormative bourgeois logics. One moves, over time and through so-called stages of life, from birth to marriage to reproduction to death. One lives so as to enable certain forms of reproduction and family, reduce risk and maintain safety for the sake of longevity, and plan and save for the inheritance that will ensure further reproduction. Within “queer time,” in contrast, futures are imagined as operating in ways “unscripted by” such “conventions” (2).¹⁷ Related questions of temporality figure across queer studies in a number of ways as detailed by Thomas R. Dunn: at the micro level of daily life, in terms of the straight time of schedules and routines for normative family formations, and, at a more macro level for scholarly work, in terms of queer temporalities in historiography itself (“(Queer) Family”).¹⁸ My analysis of genre instruction approaches temporality specifically in terms of normative timelines for moving from one stage of relationship development to the next. Nineteenth-century letter-writing manuals, in their instruction in genre conventions for dating letters and pacing epistolary exchange, scripted such development in keeping with a “straight time” that required restraint.

The exercise of studied restraint with respect to timing was taught as a way to keep in check “base” passions. In The Pocket Letter Writer a series of model letters represents a temporal slowing of romantic relations as a virtuous response to and even a punishment for baseness. The series begins with a letter titled “From a lady to a gentleman, in answer to a dishonorable proposal,” in which the lady “scorn[s]” the gentleman’s “highly improper letter” and its “baseness,” insisting on her own “virtue” (92–93). Following “The gentleman’s apology,” the lady answers again, this time expressing her willingness to continue relations in the future, but only after a period of time in which she may study his conduct. She writes, “If … at the expiration of six months, your conduct has been that which I hope and expect … you may then return, and claim both my heart and my hand. But any efforts on your part to shorten this period will be unavailing, my resolution being not to see you till the period I now mention, which, permit me to add, is a very mild punishment when compared with your offence” (94–95). Page 34 →Through this model and its emphasis on timing, The Pocket Letter Writer teaches a normative temporality for romantic relations, in which the slowing of relations is a virtuous punishment for baseness, one that allows time to study the gentleman’s conduct further. This temporality is also predictably gendered: it presumes an opposite-sex relation defined by gender difference, such that the base letter was from a rhetor gendered masculine and the virtuous and punishing response from a rhetor gendered feminine.¹⁹

Manual instruction in heteronormative relations also taught rhetors to use studied restraint as a precaution against hastiness. The Art of Correspondence asserts, “Of all letters those on matters of love and marriage should be written with mature deliberation—not under the influence of hasty impressions, nor sudden impulses” (Locke 141). Chesterfield’s Art of Letter Writing Simplified (1857) is especially cautious about epistolary rhetoric deemed “hasty” or “precipitate” (63). Chesterfield’s spells out what The Pocket Letter Writer implies about the relationship among cautious restraint, timing, and the study of conduct. In one model, a “lady” writes, “Let us not … be too hasty in our conclusions—let us not mistake momentary impulse for permanent impression; let us seek rather to know more of each other, to study each other’s tempers, and to establish … sincere esteem” (64).

Such slow study was crucial to crafting epistolary rhetoric restrained in both timing and intensity, so as to avoid passionate outbreaks. In another model titled “To an acquaintance of long standing,” the rhetor preempts concerns about potential haste by explaining as follows: “From constantly meeting with you, and observing the thousand acts of amiability and kindness which adorn your daily life, I have gradually associated my hopes of future happiness with the chance of possessing you as their sharer. Believe me, dear Miss ——, this is no outbreak of boyish passion, but the hearty and healthy result of a long and affectionate study of your disposition. It is love, founded on esteem” (Chesterfield’s 64). This rhetor insists that he engages in constant observation, observation of a thousand acts, and so his expression of affection is based on long study, and his love is true. His writing from the heart is far from an unrestrained expression, a momentary impulse, or a passionate outbreak. Complete letter writers thus instructed learners in how to date their romantic letters as well as how to pace their romantic relations. In teaching genre conventions for the pacing of romantic exchange, manuals also taught cultural norms for the exercise of restraint with respect to heteronormative relationship timing and even intensity.

This exercise of restraint within romantic epistolary rhetoric was normative not merely because it facilitated a particular timing for relationship development. Nor was this timing normative only because of its association with a conventional script that, if followed, could aid rhetors in averting “baseness” or “passionate outbreaks” (though certainly the cultural and material risks were real, Page 35 →especially for women, if letter writers moved too quickly—if “base” passions interrupted the normative progression with pregnancy occurring before marriage). Rather, what made the “straight time” taught by manuals most significantly normative was its orientation to a heteronormative telos for romantic epistolary rhetoric.

Third and finally, complete letter writers taught the generically conventional rhetorical purpose for romantic letters. The rhetorical purposes taught for other subgenres concerned with business, friendship, and family were varied. But in the case of the romantic subgenre, the purpose was quite limited. Even as manuals advised that romantic epistolary rhetoric was to express heartfelt feelings of love, model letters were directed to a narrowly defined type of love relationship. Manuals taught learners to compose letters not to develop just any sort of romantic correspondence or relationship but with the particular goal of courting and being courted in pursuit of a heteronormative telos and generic end: union through marriage between a man and a woman.

This normative telos is apparent throughout the various elements of manual instruction in romantic epistolary rhetoric. Consider, for instance, these typical titles to chapters about the subgenre: “Love, Courtship, and Marriage” (Pocket Letter Writer 65), “On Love, Courtship, and Marriage” (Fashionable American Letter Writer 56), “Letters on Love, Courtship, and Marriage” (Turner 95), and “Letters of Love, Courtship, and Marriage” (Useful Letter Writer 91). Some of this repetition within and among chapter titles was a function of nineteenth-century textbook production and compilation practices.²⁰ But the consistent ordering of the key words in chapter titles—love, courtship, and then marriage—characterized romantic love, however heartfelt, as teleological. This ordering figured romantic epistolary rhetoric as a subgenre for moving from love through courtship to marriage.

Chapter contents were predictably in keeping with these common titles, in that most model romantic letters were concerned with marriage. In those few manuals that did not include the word “marriage” in the chapter title, such as Frost’s chapter “Love Letters,” more than half of the models link love and courtship to the end of marriage. Among Frost’s thirty-seven models, a majority of twenty are unquestionably oriented to marriage proposals and responses to those proposals or to maintaining, fortifying, or terminating an engagement to be married. Consistent with other complete letter writers, for example, the first model in Frost’s chapter is a “Letter from a Gentleman to a Lady Offering her his Hand,” followed by a “Favorable Reply to the Foregoing” and an “Unfavorable Reply” (Shields 119–21). Other models include a letter “From a Gentleman to a Lady Seeking to Renew a Ruptured Engagement,” also followed by both a favorable Page 36 →and an unfavorable reply (133). Moreover, even in romantic models less obviously directed toward the rhetorical purposes of negotiating marriage proposals and engagements, the exchange in process is oriented to the normative telos of marriage. The content within a model reply to a “Letter from a Gentleman to the Father of the Lady he loves, Requesting Permission to Pay his Addresses” makes clear, for instance, that “addresses” is simply a euphemism for “marriage proposal,” because in the favorable response, the father answers that the gentleman is “acceptable … as a son,” welcoming him into the “family” (121–22).

In actuality, romantic epistolary exchange could facilitate a range of relational acts occurring alongside or entirely outside the heteronormative progression from love to courtship to marriage: the development of any romantic relationships that does not pursue (or is not allowed to pursue) marriage; the enjoyment of flirtations that do not develop into anything more; the facilitation of extramarital affairs; the construction of discursive realms for discussion of extraromantic concerns such as politics; the arrangement of meetings in person for erotic or sexual encounters; or the appreciation of romantic language for its own sake. But this range of possibilities was not represented within the many generic models provided by heteronormative manual instruction.

The normative teleological orientation of romantic epistolary rhetoric was reinforced not only by the narrow presentation of manual models but also through direct commentary about the genre. In Chesterfield’s account of the romantic letter’s rhetorical purpose, the manual includes a reference to writing “of the heart” but specifies that this writing is directed to marriage: “Affairs of the heart—the delicate and interesting preliminaries of marriage, are oftener settled by the pen than in any other manner” (54). That romantic epistolary rhetoric conventionally settled marriage is more bluntly put by Hill’s Manual of Social and Business Forms (1883): “The love letter is the prelude to marriage” (110). Manuals clearly taught that romantic letters were composed not for the sake of themselves or romantic love or “the heart” but for marriage.

This goal of heteronormative marriage was prioritized even over the cultural valuing of sincerity and honesty, though manuals emphasized the importance of writing from the heart, being sincere, and avoiding deception. In fact, manuals warned against deceptive romantic rhetoric because of its potential to interfere with a relationship’s culmination in marriage. Where Letter-Writing Simplified advises a “strict regard to truth” and avoidance of “extravagant flattery,” the manual reminds readers that “In honorable minds courtship is always regarded as the porch to marriage” (61). Similarly, in one of The Natural Letter Writer’s many models of fathers warning daughters to be wary of deception and flattery, the father writes, “guard yourself against the snares and temptations designing men throw in the way of young inexperienced girls. Young girls are too apt to persuade themselves that young men who fawn over, and flatter them, wish to Page 37 →make wives of them; but no mistake can be more fatal” (Shepard 72). This model reinforces advice throughout complete letter writers to resist being persuaded by flattery, not simply because of its questionable sincerity but because flattery within romantic epistolary rhetoric did not lead to the telos of marriage.

Ultimately, manuals taught learners to compose romantic epistolary rhetoric from the heart, sincerely expressing their love but in keeping with generic conventions for the gendering of epistolary address and the temporality of exchange. These generic conventions were significant, manuals instructed, so that rhetors could learn to craft romantic exchanges that accomplished rhetorical purposes in keeping with cultural norms. As a generic means of accomplishing the “ends [one] may have” in the nineteenth-century United States, romantic letters were to constitute opposite-sex relations that developed in keeping with “straight time” and its progression toward the heteronormative telos of marriage between a man and woman.

The most basic instruction for romantic epistolary rhetoric—to write from the heart with sincerity—was especially open to queer challenge given manual Page 38 →instruction in the invention strategy of copying model letters. Certainly a manual such as Frost’s provided a model “Letter from a Gentleman to a Lady Offering her his Hand” so that readers could study it in order to learn how a gentleman proposes to a lady. Whereas the model rhetor expresses his “true, abiding love,” asks if his feelings prompt “any response in [the lady’s] heart,” and then proposes, learners were expected to write their own letters, from their own hearts (Shields 119–20). They were to express their true feelings, though in keeping with genre conventions for heteronormatively proceeding toward marriage. But, while the letter may have been offered as a model of conventional rhetorical practice, written from the heart, this model could be copied outright. In other words, a learner could copy what was allegedly written from another’s heart as though it were his own. This susceptibility to copying is important to understand because of its role in making possible the forms of queer generic invention I discuss next.

The practice of inventing romantic letters by copying what was written from another’s heart was widely discussed across nineteenth-century epistolary culture, especially within other manuals that did not take the complete letter-writer form. Not surprisingly, much of this acknowledgment appeared as criticism that complete letter writers and their provision of models were culturally suspect. Consider, for instance, Loomis’s Practical Letter Writing, which was structured by parts of letters and clusters of numbered tips, rather than chapters of models in each subgenre. Loomis criticized the more common complete letter-writer form because learners “fall into the habit of copying these almost word for word, instead of writing original letters. This is a bad practice; it is better to send a poorly constructed letter, of which you are the author, than a copied ‘model’” (67). Bothered by this copying of models, Loomis warned of its consequences, particularly in the case of romantic correspondence: “A young man who copied and used such a letter proposing marriage, received a reply saying, ‘You will find my answer on the next page.’ It was a polite refusal” (67). In other words, because the letter’s recipient discovered that this man had copied his proposal from a manual, he was directed to view the next letter in the manual, which was a model for how to reject that proposal. In another manual, The Youth’s Letter-Writer (1836), the conduct author Eliza Ware Rotch Farrar offered an even stronger critique, claiming that complete letter writers “are filled with absurdities, vulgarisms, and the flattest nonsense,” with “models calculated to mislead the rising generation and pervert their taste” (vi, 125). Nor were Farrar and Loomis alone in their criticism.²² Manuals frequently warned of model copying gone wrong and, in the case of romantic epistolary rhetoric, almost always with the same consequence: a marriage proposal declined.²³

Complete letter writers themselves acknowledged the susceptibility of their models to invention through outright copying and the resulting risk that romantic letters would not be written from the heart. The preface to Chesterfield’s Page 39 →declares, “The fact is a complete letter writer is a complete sham and absurdity. People want to write letters, ‘out of their own heads,’ and it is impossible to give them ‘ready made’ letters, which like ready made shirts, shall fit every subject that may require clothing” (8). Not without a sense of humor, Chesterfield’s illustrates the “absurdity” of copying “‘ready made’ letters” by representing a scenario in which an “uneducated” rhetor struggles to invent a letter,

… and eighteen cents are expended on that very remarkable work, “The Lady’s and Gentleman’s Complete Letter Writer, 90th edition.” The time comes for another letter; the “Complete Letter Writer” is dragged out from the darkness of the drawer … and an hour is spent in the search for a model letter that will just express the writer’s feelings and ideas. But, alas! among the three hundred and forty-seven specimens of every style of correspondence, there is not one in which … Eliza is reminded that Walter still hopes to meet her, with sentiments unchanged, when she next visits New York…. As to the “love letters,” the writer thereof has made no provision for Jemima’s acceptance of Joseph on condition that he will at once shave off his moustache, and take to all-around collars, and give up punning at the dinner-table. (7)

Lest readers presume these absurd examples are the “sham,” Chesterfield’s offers yet another: “We know a case of a gentleman—at least, a person—who offered his hand to a lady with the help of a letter writer. The letter began, ‘Reverend Miss;’ how it finished the reader need not be told, but of course the lover was rejected” (8). And lest readers presume the problem in this example is the not-so-gentlemanly person’s inadvertent mistake, Chesterfield’s continues, “Perhaps he should have copied it ‘Revered Miss,’ but he should not have copied it at all” (8). Chesterfield’s concludes, “The first step, then, towards attaining the art of letter-writing is, to tear up the ‘Complete Letter Writer’” (8).

Chesterfield’s still went on to provide countless models, much like any other complete letter writer. But the concerns in Chesterfield’s echo those of Farrar and Loomis: the advice that romantic letters be written from the heart could be challenged by learners who invented epistolary rhetoric by copying models instead of composing their own from the heart. The heartfelt sincerity of these rhetors was then in question. They might make mistakes when copying—consequential mistakes that closed down the possibility of courtship proceeding to heteronormative marriage. Or, worse yet, these letter writers might be unable to find, even in a complete letter writer, a model fit for what was peculiar to their rhetorical situation. Of course, this sort of completeness would be unnecessary if a wide variety of models were available not for the simple practice of complete copying but for the more complex practice of invention through partial copying in combination with adaptation.²⁴ Indeed, for particularly inventive composers, models Page 40 →could be adapted in order to invent romantic epistolary rhetoric that further “pervert[ed]” genre conventions and cultural norms—though perhaps not in the ways Farrar had in mind.²⁵

All three of the already discussed genre conventions were susceptible to queer challenge because of how complete letter-writer manuals provided model romantic letters. In teaching the first genre convention for romantic epistolary address, manuals marked the gender of rhetors and readers such that address was heteronormative, but these same manuals provided at least some resources for composing queerly category-crossing forms of address. Models indicated to learners what was considered appropriate or how manual users should address their romantic epistolary rhetoric on the basis of gender. However, manuals could not guarantee how learners would use the models. Because of how models were presented as resources for invention—not merely as models of writing from the heart but as models with the potential for invention through copying and adaptation—these same models could be copied and adapted in ways that crossed gender categories.

Part of what disposed the generic conventions for romantic epistolary address to gender crossing was the way manuals made the same models available to all learners regardless of gender. There were some manuals, especially conduct and etiquette guides, titled specifically for either men or women. But most complete letter writers, in their bid to be “complete” by providing instruction for all letter writers in all situations, offered the same set of models to both men and women. Complete letter writers even emphasized the usefulness of their models to “both sexes.” For example, the preface to The Complete Art of Polite Correspondence (1857) states that the “volume is particularly recommended to … both sexes” (10). Similarly, The Complete Letter Writer (1811) and R. Turner’s Parlour Letter-Writer (1835) include in their subtitles the following phrasing: Containing Letters … Adapted to the Use of Both Sexes. Thus complete letter-writer models not only made the same model romantic letters available for use across sex and gender but also hinted at the possibility of uses involving gender-crossing adaptation. In the subtitles just mentioned, for instance, reference to “the Use of Both Sexes” is preceded by the word “Adapted.” In terms of romantic epistolary address, learners in same-sex romantic relationships were especially likely to pursue possibilities for using and adapting models regardless of how manuals marked the gender of rhetors and readers.²⁶ In short, such learners could copy the models made available by manuals but adapt those models by crossing gender categories in order to compose same-sex romantic epistolary address.

Consider how such a hypothetical learner might use a model from The Complete Letter Writer (1811). Imagine this learner as a woman in a same-sex, cross-class relationship with another woman from a wealthier family. Much like Chesterfield’s Page 41 →example of the hypothetical rhetor Jemima, who finds no model for how to accept Joseph “on condition that he will at once shave off his moustache” (7), our imagined learner searches the table of contents for a model of how to address another woman. Though no such model is provided, she finds the letter “From a Gentleman to a young Lady of a superior Fortune” (vi, 102). This model is intended for rhetors who are gentlemen, but because all models are available for use and even adaptation by “both sexes,” the hypothetical manual user selects this one from the table of contents. She then uses the model as a resource for inventing her own romantic epistolary rhetoric, copying from the model yet adapting it by crossing gender in order to address “a young lady of superior Fortune.” Through this sort of model adaptation, gender-crossing forms of romantic epistolary address could, in Thomas’s terms, “detach subjects from gender and sexual subjectivities that then reattach to queer effect” (37).

Some manuals suggested outright, rather than merely hinting at possibilities for, detaching and reattaching with “queer effect.” As already discussed, Chesterfield’s is critical of how most complete letter writers provided models, claiming that “it is impossible to give … ‘ready made’ letters” (8). But the same manual does provide what it calls “skeletons of love letters” (58a). These ready-made skeletons include an introductory paragraph and a closing paragraph to be copied, and rhetors are advised to “fill up between the bones to suit themselves” (58a). While most of the skeletons are written by men, presumably because romantic letter writing comes more naturally for women, “Nevertheless, some of the above skeletons, or parts of them, could be adapted by ladies into letters to their lovers, if they were hard up for ideas” (61a). Chesterfield’s encourages learners to copy from and adapt models “to suit themselves,” including by crossing gendered subject positions for rhetors and readers. While most manuals did not directly encourage such gender crossing, all of them at least provided an extensive array of model romantic letters. These models were available for invention through copying and adaptation, leaving the genre conventions for romantic epistolary address subject to queer challenge through gender-crossing forms of address.

Manual instruction also offered at least some invention resources for rhetors interested in romantic relations nonnormative with respect to the second genre convention. Most of the romantic letters included in manuals modeled how to write in keeping with conventions for restraint in the pacing of romantic epistolary exchange according to “straight time.” Usually manuals only alluded to but did not include within their pages romantic epistolary rhetoric that was emotionally unrestrained and urgently timed. For instance, while The Pocket Letter Writer includes the model “From a lady to a gentleman, in answer to a dishonorable proposal,” it also includes “The gentleman’s apology” but does not provide a Page 42 →model of the gentleman’s dishonorable proposal (93). There were, however, some exceptions.

Later in The Pocket Letter Writer’s chapter on romantic epistolary rhetoric, the manual does include a series of three models that more ambiguously teach the genre conventions and cultural norms for the timing of romantic letters and relations: “From a gentleman to a young lady, proposing an elopement,” “The lady’s answer, consenting,” and “The lady’s answer refusing.” Not surprisingly, the third letter, modeling refusal, gets the final say. In keeping with the predominant manual instruction, the rhetor characterizes the proposal to elope as “repugnant to decorum, prudence, and female delicacy.” She insists that, while she feels “equally anxious” for their “union,” their “separation will be for a few months only,” so they must exercise restraint until “that period so long desired arrives” (103–04).

But the other two letters in this series offer manual users models for how to develop romantic epistolary exchange nonnormative in its urgency and intensity. One of these is a model response in which the rhetor does consent to the proposal of elopement. She writes, “Your letter has agitated me greatly; indeed I know not how to conduct myself.” But rather than restraining herself and the pace of their relations, she concludes that, while “reason condemns the step you are so anxious for me to take … my heart decides in your favor,” praying “that nothing unpleasant may attend our rash expedition” (102–03). The other letter included in the series even models how to compose such a “rash” proposal. While the rhetor admits his proposal is of a “hazardous and delicate nature,” he implores the reader to respond “without delay,” in hopes that “every arrangement shall be made for the journey by to-morrow’s sunset” (102–03). He signs the letter, “Yours in anxious expectation” (103). At the very least, manual users copying from these two models would find language for making and accepting proposals to elope quickly. While ultimately leading to the normative telos of marriage, eloping did not proceed in keeping with the propriety of “straight time.” Epistolary proposals to elope in a rush defied the heteronormative temporality for proceeding cautiously from love, through courtship, to marriage—and thus were, in the manual’s terms, “repugnant to decorum.” Even where manual users did not copy the language of such proposals directly, the inclusion of these models suggests to learners the possibility of epistolary rhetoric in defiance of genre conventions and cultural norms for the pacing and intensity of romantic relations.

Chesterfield’s goes even further in suggesting this possibility, offering manual users resources for composing letters both urgent and intense. In keeping with the predominant manual instruction, where Chesterfield’s provides the model “From a young Lady, in answer to the proposal of a gentleman who had met her the previous Evening,” the manual does not also include the gentleman’s “precipitate” proposal (62–63). But Chesterfield’s does provide one exceptional Page 43 →letter characterized by an unadvised urgency and intensity. Titled “From a young Man, avowing a passion he had entertained for a length of time, and fearful of disclosing it,” this model lacks restraint in its intensity of expression. Though the rhetor has entertained his passion “for a length of time,” he describes his process as one not of constant dispassionate study but of constant obsession. He writes that he has “so long struggled with [his] feelings”; he “is continually agitated”; he has “been oppressed with a passion that has entirely superseded every other feeling of [his] heart”; and he is “unable to entertain but one idea, one thought, one feeling” (61). This rhetor obviously composes precisely the “outbreak of boyish passion” avoided in the more normatively paced Chesterfield’s model that I discussed in a previous section (64). As though realizing the extent to which he is not exercising restraint, he writes that he is “throwing aside hesitation,” is “alarmed at [his] own boldness” but nonetheless will “lay open [his] whole heart.”

Chesterfield’s cautions, “we should not recommend this letter for imitation; but people will send such letters” (61). In spite of such caution, the manual did provide this model. Again, the letter was marked as a model of what not to do. But in the hands of at least some rhetors, the letter could be imitated to do precisely what manuals otherwise taught to avoid. Even in instructing people in normative restraint and temporality, manuals provided models for inventing romantic epistolary rhetoric that threw aside the careful study and caution of “straight time.”

Third and finally, through instruction in genre conventions for rhetorical purpose, complete letter writers taught the romantic subgenre as teleologically oriented to heteronormative marriage. But again, manuals simultaneously rendered this same convention open to queer repurposing. While the categorization of romantic epistolary rhetoric into chapters titled “Love, Courtship, and Marriage” served to emphasize the normative purpose distinctive of the subgenre, other aspects of manuals’ extensive use of categories came with queer effects. The categorization of purposes, subgenres, and relationships throughout manuals was beset by slippages that created openings for nonnormative repurposing.

Some of these openings were the queer effects of baggy, catchall categories such as “miscellaneous” and “etc.”A number of manuals included an entire catchall chapter with “miscellaneous” in the title, in effect signaling that new model letters had emerged beyond the prior or conventional categories of relationship and subgenre.²⁷ How to Write Letters (1886) states as much directly when offering a definition of “miscellaneous letters.” The manual defines miscellaneous letters as “those letters of an accidental or unusual character, to which our complicated relations to society give rise; in short, all letters not elsewhere classified” (Westlake Page 44 →13). That the “complicated relations to society” that “give rise” to “unusual” letters could include complicated romantic relations is indicated in Chesterfield’s use of another catchall category, “etc.” This catchall is added to the manual’s unusual title for a chapter on romantic epistolary rhetoric: “Love, Courtship, Marriage, etc.” (53). The open-ended extension of the romantic chapter title more common throughout complete letter writers reveals the inability of conventional categories of relationship and subgenre to ever be complete—as well as the likelihood that actual romantic purposes would exceed manual attempts to categorize them.

Throughout manuals, the use of catchalls such as “etc.” and “miscellaneous” suggested that manual users, like textbook makers, might need to break with conventional categories in order to adapt models when inventing “unusual” romantic epistolary rhetoric. This opening to adapt models across subgenre categories could also give way to related adaptations for rhetorical purposes in defiance of the normative telos for romantic relations. A model exceptionally susceptible to adaptation through queer repurposing is “Female Ingenuity,” a cryptogram presented in at least one edition of The Fashionable American Letter Writer (1832).²⁸ This letter’s title is unusual in that, rather than clearly describing a rhetorical situation, the title hints at more ambiguous purposes, of ingenuity. Manual users selecting this model for adaptation would find it particularly useful for pursuing queer romantic purposes.

The model cryptogram is preceded by an explanation that “A young lady, newly married, being obliged to show to her husband all the letters she wrote, sent the following to an intimate friend” (178). Importantly, this is a letter to a friend about romantic relations, rather than one written within a romantic relation. It is also a letter written by an already married person, rather than for the purposes of pursuing marriage. The model’s title and preceding explanation acknowledge explicitly the gendered power dynamics at work within nineteenth-century marriage and, more implicitly, how such dynamics constitute a rhetorical situation in which women might desire ingenious ways of subverting norms. The model is followed by directions for reading cryptogram letters: “The key to the above letter is to read the first and then every alternate line only” (179).²⁹

Not decoded, the letter first reads as praise for the rhetor’s husband and her life with him. But in following the cryptogram’s instructions, readers discover that the letter, if literally read between the lines, complains about the marriage and expresses desire for a former lover. For instance, the letter first seems to say that the rhetor is “blest … in the matrimonial state,” as her “husband is the most amiable of men,” and she has “never found the least reason to / repent the day that joined” them. Once decoded, however, her epistolary rhetoric indicates she does “repent” the marriage. By the first account, her “former gallant lover / is now [her] indulgent husband,” whereas in the second decoded account the former lover “is returned,” and she grieves that she “might have had / … / him” Page 45 →rather than her husband. In the first account, the rhetor is “un- / able to wish that [she] could be more / happy.” In the second, she is “un- / … / happy.”

While this woman writes about and participates in marriage, her epistolary rhetoric suggests purposes that surpass the normative marriage telos taught by manual culture. She subverts norms for marriage by composing a letter with a less teleological rhetorical purpose: instead of using the letter to pursue the ends of marriage, she more mischievously navigates genre conventions and cultural norms. This model cryptogram would be instructive not only for married women but for any rhetors whose romantic relations were not entirely in keeping with heteronormativity, whose purposes were not met by the conventional genre of the romantic letter.³⁰ Taken together, the manual’s inclusion of this cryptogram along with “miscellaneous” romantic letters suggests that even the “ends [one] may have” for romantic epistolary rhetoric were subject to the “queer effect” of repurposing across conventional categories of genre and to nonnormative relational ends (C. Miller 165; Thomas 37).

Thus, while complete letter-writer manuals instructed rhetors to write from the heart in keeping with generic conventions, these same manuals also taught rhetorical strategies of invention with “queer effect.” Given this instruction in invention through copying and adapting models of language written from others’ hearts, manual users may have challenged genre conventions by composing gender-crossing address, exchanging letters with urgency and intensity, and repurposing the romantic subgenre to nonnormative ends. As such, the rhetorical education for romantic engagement through complete letter writers taught conventions for the romantic subgenre of epistolary rhetoric in ways that shaped citizens as heteronormative subjects, yet may have enabled inventive composing in pursuit of same-sex and other queer relations.