in:
Women's writing
Wallingford:
2014
,
357 - 384 S.
Weitere Informationen
| Einrichtung: | Ariadne | Wien |
|---|---|
| Verfasst von: | Heller, Deborah |
| In: | Women's writing |
| Jahr: | 2014 |
| Sprache: | Englisch |
| Beschreibung: | |
| In Elizabeth Vesey's correspondence with fellow Bluestockings Montagu and Carter, handwriting and Vesey's struggle with the pen are constant themes. Although Vesey demonstrably could write legibly when she took time and care, her letters more resembled “hieroglyphs” than the ordinary Roman alphabet. This was not mere carelessness; her pen, Vesey complains, prevented her from writing a legible hand. Vesey's discourse of the recalcitrant pen is metonymic for her alienation from the experience of free will. A progression is seen from the excuse of incapacity to the reality of incapacity. What began as exculpatory pleas or exaggerations of diminished agency ended as an actual incapacity to write. At a deeper level, the excuse of the alien pen conceals a deep-seated anxiety about her need to “write herself” (“autography”)—a guilty desire to soar beyond the constraints imposed by the linguistic, aesthetic, social and sexual conventions of her day. For Vesey, as for everyone, the world of material objects was more than a collection of physical entities; it was a collection of value-objects, use-objects and practical objects. The pen was experienced by Vesey as necessary in her quest to transcend boundaries, yet it represented also the constraining force of an alien will. | |
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