Wo/Men of Letters: Writing and Identity in "Armadale"

The chapter explores the close relation between writing and self-construction in “Armadale”, one of Wilkie Collins’s major novels, whose thematic variety and palimpsestic structure are analysed from different perspectives in the volume. By drawing on Bakhtin’s and Derrida’s theories, Mariaconcetta Costantini examines the plethora of meanings Collins attached to ‘letters’ to represent identity as an elusive construct always ‘in the making’. What the chapter demonstrates is that Collins’s characterisation of ‘epistolary’ and ‘lettered’ figures is instrumental to his revision of socio-psychological as well as narrative categories. The “wo/men of letters” portrayed in the novel not only expose the relational and psychic consequences of a modernising process that was altering the Victorian communication network. They also reveal the author’s concerns with gender and professional issues that were prominent at the time.