Determined by structures of banishment, displacement, separation and distance, letters and epistolary novels constitute an important source for understanding the early modern conceptualization of exile and its spatial dimensions. One of the most outstanding examples in France in this respect are the Lettres Portugaises (1669), a collection of five letters supposedly written by a woman, Marianne, from a Portuguese convent to a lover who has abandoned her and does not reply. Made into a particular genre by Susan Carrell in her Le soliloque de la passion féminine ou le dialogue illusoire (1982), the dialogue suggested in the letters is actually a monologue, while intimacy develops in terms of a very conscious and solipsist act of observing and representing one’s own emotions.
It will be argued that the multifaceted spatial imagery of exile in Les lettres Portugaises communicates a paradoxical, anemic subject that precisely results from these dynamics of self-representation. This situation clearly opposes cases of stoic or mystical discipline in which spatial confinement and reclusion reveal a self-presentation that does not involve loss of being through objectification, like de Sales’ Traité d’Amour de Dieu (1616) shows. It is maintained furthermore, that reversing an originally mystical context and applying space(s) as a code of anemic subjectivity is part of the broader cultural and literary context at the time, something that will be shown by concisely going into to the correspondence of Mme de Sévigné (1626-1696).
Prison/Exile: Controlled Spaces in Early Modern Europe 