Narrative Agency at the Interface of Embodiment and Emotions: The North-American Epistolary Diary of Barbara Bodichon

ABSTRACT

Body and emotions have traditionally been contentious sources of (self-)knowledge in epistemological debates—often regarded as impediments to rational thinking and autonomous moral decisions. Drawing on feminist philosophers who have sought to bring back body and emotions as central elements in the constitution of the self and the world (Catriona Mackenzie, Alison Jaggar, Kym Maclaren and Sara Ahmed), this paper unpacks how the interaction body-emotions can act as a (problematic) source of female agency. To do so, it examines the epistolary diary which mid-Victorian English feminist, artist and philanthropist Barbara Bodichon wrote during her honeymoon in North-America (1857–1858). This paper teases out the extent to which Bodichon’s lived affective encounters during her honeymoon were translated into an ambiguous narrative outcome: an agentic epistolary self-projection that concomitantly essentialised Others in her descriptions of North-American society.

KEYWORDS:

• Narrative agency
• epistolary diary
• feminist self-fashioning
• narrating/narrated bodies
• affective encounters

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Babs Boter, Ernestine Hoegen and Leonieke Vermeer for inviting me to join them in their study of the body in diaries. Our discussions and their comments on my paper have permitted me to develop and polish my argument. I would also like to thank editor Maureen Perkins and the anonymous referees for their insightful comments and patience.

Notes

1 For a discussion of the epistemological challenges of drawing on an edited collection of letters see Simon-Martin (2020), especially Chapter 5.

2 For a discussion of Bodichon’s letters as forms of travel writing see Simon-Martin (2012, 2016).

3 Ahmed uses the term ‘queer’ to refer to non-heteronormativity. In this paper, the term is used as gender nonconforming in a broader sense.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Meritxell Simon-Martin

Meritxell Simon-Martin is Visiting Researcher at the Faculty of Education, University of Brasilia (Brazil). Her research lies at the crossroads of women’s/gender history, history of education, narrative inquiry and epistolary studies. She is author of numerous publications on Barbara Bodichon, where she problematises the use of letters as evidence in historical investigation. Her most relevant titles are Unfolding Feminism. Barbara Bodichon’s Epistolary Education (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020); ‘Barbara Bodichon’s Travel Writing: Her Epistolary Articulation of Bildung’, History of Education 45.3 (2016): 285–303; ‘Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon’s Travel Letters: Performative Self-Formation in Epistolary Narratives’, Women’s History Review 22.2 (2013): 225–238; ‘“More Beautiful than Words & Pencil Can Express”: Barbara Bodichon’s Artistic Career at the Interface of her Epistolary and Visual Self-Projections’, Gender & History 24.3, 61–79. She is co-editor of the History of Education Researcher (History of Education Society UK) and member of the editorial board of the European Journal of Life Writing. She runs a blog on epistolarity: https://meritxellsimonmartin.wordpress.com/