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ACTS OF DECEIVING AND WITHHOLDING IN IMMIGRANT LETTERS: PERSONAL IDENTITY AND SELF-PRESENTATION IN PERSONAL CORRESPONDENCE
| By David A. Gerber |
University at Buffalo (SUNY) |
| Those who do analytical work with personal letters soon become aware of the problem of being tempted to take for granted that what is written in them is a true account of the letter-writer's condition, intentions, or general state of mind. It is not only that in the individual case we become suspicious of a particular letter-writer's motives and accounts. It is in a more general sense that we, like the letter-writers themselves, are citizens of the world of interpersonal relationships. We are birth-right citizens of that world, but in a social sense, we are also naturalized citizens, for in order to participate actively in anything but rudimentary interactions with others we have had to learn that much that may be said is unspoken, and that much else is couched in ways that serve a speaker's varying interests. A moment's reflection tells an experienced adult who reads other people's personal letters that there is more going on than appears on the surface of the text, precisely because this is true in our own lives. In this essay, I would like to open up a discussion of what is at once a significant and, by its nature, a profoundly elusive (and, hence, underconceptualized) subject: what is not made explicit, and is hidden or held back, and the untruths that are told, in historical personal correspondence. The larger project is analysis of the strategies of interpersonal relations, by which interactions between family, kin, and friends are maintained and regulated by correspondents in the absence of the opportunity for physical proximity and conversation. |
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I shall be using examples from my own research in British (English, Scottish, and Irish Protestant) immigrant correspondence of the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century. These letters, exchanged between immigrants to Canada and the United States and family, kin, and friends in Britain were—like all immigrant personal correspondence—the transnational lifeline of communications in relationships rendered especially vulnerable by separation. Prior to the advent of steam transportation across the Atlantic, which lessened both the duration of the journey (from a month, or as long frequently as six weeks, to approximately a week to ten days) and the dangers and discomforts involved, these separations were more likely to be permanent. Many immigrants found the thought of offering themselves up to another sea voyage, whether to return to resettle permanently or for a visit, unpleasant, if not terrifying. Permanent separation was even more likely to be the consequence of the immigrants' own material and social aspirations. In contrast to many European international migrants of the age of steam travel and the industrial era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, who often targeted their migrations for brief durations of time to take advantage of both short-term fluctuations in labor markets and cheap, rapid transportation, the immigrants of the earlier period were more likely to be inclined toward permanent resettlement. Influenced by the wide-spread pessimism about Britain's future in the decades after the Napoleonic Wars and by hostility to modernization, these immigrants were venturesome conservatives who often desired to realize an Acadian ideal of rural self-sufficiency in the North American hinterland. Their ranks were not selected from the proletarianized poor, but from middling groups of urban artisans and small farmers, who were able to afford migrations of completed nuclear families, though sometimes in stages across considerable periods of time. Though chain migrations often also included adult siblings and friends, ample numbers of significant others, including most prominently aging parents, remained behind and formed the homeland basis for the cycle of personal correspondence.1 |
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