‘If I Do Not Satisfy My Present Inclination in Writing, It is Very Probable I May Haunt you’: Astral Projection in Bluestocking Letters (1740–1770)

ABSTRACT This article examines the concept of ‘astral projection’ in the letters of the Bluestocking intellectuals Elizabeth Montagu (1718–1800), Elizabeth Carter (1717–1806), and Catherine Talbot (1721–1770). By this term, I am referring to episodes in their correspondence in which they imaginatively project themselves into the physical presence of the letter’s reader, or deploy images of death and haunting to poetically bridge social distance. Exploring this concept through the frameworks of Susan Lanser’s engagement with Bluestocking Queerness, as well as the concept of material remediation of affect drawn from Sarah Ahmed and others, I would like to address this technique as a device for the affective bridging of distance, as well as exploring the central case study of Elizabeth Montagu’s use of astral projection in her letters to Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, Henry Home, Lord Kames, in which astral projection is utilised to bridge not just physical distance, but the barriers of social status, and Montagu’s own outsider status from Scottish Enlightenment philosophical circles. Ultimately, I argue that astral projection acts as a synecdoche for the familiar letter as a uniquely transformative textual space, in which meanings of all kinds are renegotiated and redefined, including the meaning of distance and separation.


Introduction
One of the core functions of the 1 eighteenth-century familiar letter was the erasure of distance.The conceit of absent presence permeates the genre, with letter manuals recycling Ciceronian tropes of letters as written conversation, and the letters themselves being treated as surrogates or stand-ins for the correspondent.Between the time-lag inherent in the act of receiving a letter and experiencing an echo of the emotions described within it, and the fantasy of being intimately present in the domestic spaces of one's correspondent whilst being physically absent, the expression of emotion in letters naturally lends itself to consideration through metaphors of haunting and spectrality.Drawing on the socio-political dimensions of spectrality articulated by figures like Jacques Derrida and Jacques Rancière, this article will explore the ways in which salon CONTACT Jack Orchard,  jack.orchard@bodleian.ox.ac.uk  hostess and literary critic Elizabeth Montagu (1718-1800), classical translator and poet Elizabeth Carter (1717-1806), and fellow poet and essayist Catherine Talbot (1721-1770)  all utilised the trope of communication from beyond the grave as a means of cultivating intimacy and social relationships as well as cultivating the letter space as a utopian frame for their shared practices of reading and interpretation.The intellectual and emotional possibilities of a conceptual space 'beyond death' provided Bluestocking writers with a metaphorical framework through which to articulate ideas that could express in mundane language and explore the playful subversion of normative hierarchies of gender and class.This article is building on the model of scholars like Soile Ylivuori and Felicity Nussbaum, and their exploration of eighteenth-century femininity through the lenses of Foucauldian discipline and a development of his concept of 'technologies of the self, respectively, as well my own research on eighteenth-century letters as sites of discursive power play. 2The unique status of the familiar letter as simultaneously a social contract, an act of self-inscription and a literary work make the application of sociological approaches a fruitful new avenue in tracing intellectual histories which only circulated in manuscript form, such as those described in this article.Carter, Talbot, and Montagu are all first-generation members of the Bluestocking circle, a network of predominantly upper-middle-class public intellectual women which arose in the second half of the eighteenth century.Born into a wealthy upper-middleclass family and married to the M.P. Edward Montagu (1692-1776), Montagu owned both a large estate at Sandleford, Berkshire, and a succession of houses in London, it was the salon she established in her home at 31 Hill Street, Mayfair, which became a core hub for the movement.Montagu's role in this community was three-fold: she maintained the network through her authorship of approximately 8,000 letters; pulled on her massive correspondence network to provide patronage for writers like the classicist Robert Potter, philosopher James Beattie, and Elizabeth Carter herself; and participated directly in cultural discourse by writing her highly influential Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare (1769).Elizabeth Carter, born into a clerical family but given a classical education which she would subsequently pass on to her nephews, is best known for All the Works of Epictetus, which are now Extant (1758), her translation of the Enchiridion and Discourses of the Greco-Roman Stoic philosopher Epictetus (50-135) but is also the author of several collections of poetry which interweave her interest in Newtonian science with an elegiac interest in the sublime associated with the proto-Romantic literary movement known as the Graveyard School, after its most famous example, Thomas Gray's 'Elegy in a Country Churchyard'. 3Catherine Talbot, ward of Thomas Secker (1693-1768), bishop of London, was also a poet and essayist, whose posthumously published Reflections on the Seven Days of the Week (1770) sold over 25,000 copies between 1770 and 1809 due to its 'simpl[e] and practical . . .guidance on how to bring Christianity and politeness together in everyday life'. 4All three of them shared an interest in the relationship between rationality, emotion, friendship, and morality, with the model of friendship being articulated in Bluestocking circles having been identified by scholars as both a site of 'feminist consciousness', in which a mutually supportive network of female friends developed a like-minded community dedicated to reason and education, and a system of 'virtue friendships', in which such mutual spiritual and rational selfcultivation is connected to moral and spiritual self-development. 5This article will explore just one technique through which these Bluestocking writers combined the formal properties and generic fluidity of the familiar letter in order to cultivate both their own intellectual identities, and the form itself as a site of intellectual and affective communion, by exploring the metaphor of disembodied communication, manifested through images of haunting, astral projection, and second sight.

Epistolary haunting: the familiar letter as a spectral form
Before engaging with my case studies, and the specifically Bluestocking function they bring to the epistolary form, I'd like to outline the two theoretical strands I will be drawing together in my interpretation.Firstly, I will be reading Bluestocking correspondence through the lenses of hauntology and spectrality as articulated by Jacques Derrida and Jacques Rancière, and the subversive potential they find in the image of the ghost.Secondly, I will be extending Susan Lanser's argument that the correspondence of Carter, Talbot, and Montagu participates in an articulation of queer desire, reflecting the three principles of what she terms 'economies of desire': 'the imaginative management of time and space; the husbanding of signs and tokens; and a sparing and displacing use of bodily figuration'. 6While the final aspect of Lanser's analysis will be apparent throughout my discussion here, I'd like to look in more depth at the first two as they intersect with a range of categories and approaches accounting for the function of incomprehension and discursive invisibility drawn from sociology and literary criticism.I ultimately believe that the application of these methods to historical correspondence provides a valuable opportunity to link the literary techniques and social dynamics at play in these documents.
Lanser's first principle, the imaginative management of time and space, corresponds to the concept of 'temporal polyvalence', as articulated by Janet Gurkin Altman.Altman describes letters as being 'relative to innumerable moments: the actual time that an act described is performed; the moment when it is written down; the respective times that the letter is dispatched, received, read, or reread'. 7While Altman is primarily concerned with fictional correspondence, and the devices used by writers of epistolary novels in negotiating epistolary time lag, and the 'impossible present' which she identifies in it, the preoccupation with unstable time does appear to have preoccupied real correspondents too. 8The Bluestockings themselves share an awareness of this question, their correspondence littered with gestures to the circumstances in which they are writing or receiving correspondence, the vagaries and practicalities of the postal system, and other gestures which mirror the techniques Altman describes epistolary fiction writers utilising to negotiate time lag. 9utside of the fields of fictional and actual correspondence, there is another significant circumstance in which temporal polyvalence, or something very much like it, can be found, and it is through this lens that I am interested in exploring the spectral possibilities of epistolary ghosts.Derrida's Specters of Marx includes the following in its characterisation of the 'spectral': There are several times of the specter.It is a proper characteristic of the specter, if there is any, that no one can be sure if by returning it testifies to a living past or to a living future, for the revenant may already mark the promised return of the specter of living being.Once again, untimeliness and disadjustment of the contemporary. 10hile Derrida's explicit subject is the phantasmal revolution of the essay's title, the concept of the spectre as being insensible yet all-consuming, participating in both the past and the future simultaneously with the present does lend itself to a consideration of the types of affective and creative labour at work in ghost letters, and a wider conception of Derrida's 'hauntology' when applied to familiar correspondence.The 'time of the spectre' is a moment in which the stable categories of truth and untruth must be suspended, and a meaning which is essential but inconceivable is invoked.As we will see, this sense of temporal disengagement enhances the utopian possibilities of the epistolary space and epistolary labour, in creating an epistemological site in which affect and imagination supplant the conventional structures of deference and societal codes.
The second category to which Lanser refers, 'the husbanding of signs and tokens', has been explored extensively in the Bluestocking context by scholars like Elizabeth Eger, Madeleine Pelling, and Anni Sairio, who have explored the significance which material objects, 'tokens', and shared communal language, 'signs', have had on the cultivation of friendships and identities within the group. 11Reading these signs through the lens of spectrality, however, provides us with an opportunity to address the affective function of the empty spaces between meanings, in what Derrida calls 'hauntology': 'The logic of haunting would not be merely larger and more powerful than an ontology . . . it would comprehend . . .but incomprehensibly'. 12This concept of an eternally recurring but unknowable entity, which still bears a huge affective and epistemological force can be easily mapped onto the function of the spectral in Bluestocking correspondence.The Irish salon hostess Elizabeth Vesey (1715-1791) is repeatedly identified across the letters of Montagu and Carter as 'the Sylph' and associated with protean transformation, otherworldliness and incomprehensibility, due to her physical slightness and stream-ofconsciousness epistolary style. 13One of the elements of Vesey's style which resonates particularly with the Derridean focus on incomprehensibility was her notoriously difficult handwriting.As Deborah Heller has documented, her fellow Bluestockings identified her handwriting as constituting a rejection of established linguistic convention: 'Instead of her "scratch" or "scrawl", her friends spoke of Vesey's "magick characters" and "hieroglyphics", agreeing that her writing was decipherable not by the eye or mind, but by the heart'. 14While Heller deploys an autographic reading of Vesey's letters as acts of becoming, arguing that she was 'in quest of standards that had not yet been born', I believe that we can usefully consider the collective Bluestocking Sylphic fantasy as a playful foray into the functional incomprehensibility of the Derridean spectre.Vesey's difficult handwriting is not merely a code to be deciphered by her friends, but an opportunity to make the performance of decoding into an affective act, replacing models of epistolary formality with playful unreason. 15The final theoretical framework which can help us engage with the spectral aspects of epistolary incomprehensibility, as well as engaging with the models of creative and affective work in which they participate, is the sociological concept of the 'the distribution of the sensible'.Where Derridean hauntology has provided a framework for considering the epistemological modes at work in ghost letters, Jacques Rancière's 'distribution of the sensible' allows us to both concretise the power relations which underpin the 'emergent' aspect of Bluestocking epistolary discourse.Rancière defines this concept as follows: 'It is a delimitation of spaces and times, the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise that simultaneously determines the place and stakes of politics as a form of experience.Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it'. 16As is the case with the inherent strangeness of epistolary temporal polyvalence or Vesey's rejection of standard structures of signification, Rancière conceives of the invisible as a space outside of political discourse, cut off from normative structures of meaning.The invisibility of the powerless which Rancière identifies, and which Lucy Arnold, in the article from which I draw my literary application of his theory here, applies to the invisibility of Muslim women at Jeddah airport in Hillary Mantel's Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (1988), invites a consideration of the modes of discourse which exist outside of the space of the politically 'visible'.The performed invisibility of Bluestocking ghost letters will, as will hopefully be indicated by my case studies, provide a discursive framework for articulating modes of political subjectivity and community which, while not as invisible as the communities described by Mantel, were inaccessible to women of Carter, Talbot and Montagu's class and status in the mid-to-late eighteenth century.

'Surprized by a posthumous visit': Carter and Talbot's affective hauntology
The first of my core case studies is the series of letters by Elizabeth Carter which open A Series of Letters between Mrs Elizabeth Carter and Miss Catharine Talbot (1809), edited by Montagu Pennington (1762-1849), which remains a core source for Carter and Talbot's relationship, despite his now widely acknowledged editorial interference. 17ennington prefaces his collection with a letter to Carter from Thomas Wright (1711-1786), the astronomer and personal tutor to Catherine Talbot's friend Jemima Grey (1723-1797), who facilitated the introduction of Carter and Talbot.It is in Carter's response to Wright's letter of introduction, that we find Carter making the following request: 'Pray make [Talbot] a thousand compliments and apologies for my haunting her in the manner I have done, and still intend to do . . .Is there no possibility of my conversing with Miss Talbot except in dumb show through my fan sticks?Is she absolutely inaccessible?I cannot long support this playing Pyramus and Thisbe.Must I never hope for a nearer view till I meet her glittering among the stars in a future state of being?. . .I could dwell on this subject for ever, but must descend from the stars and Miss Talbot, wretch as you are, to you, and in the language of mere mortals acquaint you that I left my name at your door this evening. 18is passage, which is one of the sources which directly inspired Susan Lanser's queer analysis of Bluestocking correspondence, powerfully embodies her thesis that 'in the Bluestocking letters, spectral metaphors become a strategy for realizing the desire for intimacy by projecting it into imaginary space or time'. 19A closer examination of this imaginary space and time through the lenses outlined above, however, indicate that it does not just represent a utopian space in which clandestine affects become conceivable, but that it constitutes a critique of purely rational intimacy itself.Carter's opening description of her feelings towards Talbot aligns the concept of 'haunting' with the language of obsession in a manner strongly reminiscent of the Derridean spectre.Derrida's spectres are characterised by a 'frequentation' of appearances which provoke 'strict introspection . . .violent search [and] implacable concatenation'.As he goes on to discuss in the context of Marx himself, the spectre periodically appears, provokes a crisis of incoherence and disruption and then disappears before the cycle is repeated again. 20While Carter describes herself as the subject, haunting Talbot by thinking about her, the psychological challenge offered by the Derridean visitation is apparent through Carter's performed crisis of subjectivity.Her inability to engage with Talbot is figured as a series of insufficient modes of communication, 'dumb show through . . .fan sticks', 'playing Pyramus and Thisbe', and 'the language of mere mortals'.This series of metaphors articulates a hierarchy from the vapid insipidity of polite sociability, through the language of conventional Romance, in which the obstacle becomes a provocation to greater affection, to a consideration of worldly forms of speech in general, all of which are proven to be insufficient. 21This hierarchy also constitutes an interrogation of sensory experience more broadly, first through sight (dumb show) then through sound (Pyramus and Thisbe communicating through a wall) before uniting the two with 'the language of mere mortals'.By aligning this ultimately futile communication ('violent search') with the irresistible but inarticulate collapse of the boundaries between herself and Talbot ('implacable concatenation') and disembodiment into a spectral form ('strict introspection') Carter's ghost letter models the incomprehensibility of a Derridean haunting.
Catherine Talbot herself was likely intended as a secondary recipient of Carter's letter, with Wright being expected to have shared it with her, in another gesture towards the impossibility of direct communication discussed in the letter itself. 22When Carter does take the step of contacting her directly, she extends her spectral metaphor, as well as the fantasy of 'glittering among the stars': I believe you will the sooner pardon the present trouble I give you, when you know that if I do not satisfy my present inclination in writing, it is very probable I may haunt you, for I have drawn Mr. Wright into the scheme of a romantic voyage to the Goodwin sands, where it is one to a hundred I may be drowned, and you will readily compound for the impertinence of a Letter, rather than run the hazard of being surprized by a posthumous visit.However, if this should happen to be the case, I promise to accost you in the most agreeable manner possible, in the dress and attitude of Mrs. Rowe's etherial beings, or, (what would make me appear to still greater advantage) like one of your own beautiful ideas put into form. 23 with the previous letter, Carter's juxtaposition of the practice of writing with that of haunting attests to the Derridean concept of 'invocation', or obsessive reconstitution of the ghostly experience.Here, the surrogating of the letter itself for Carter's own spectral presence plays evocatively with the conceit of Lamb's fluid continuum of truth and lies discussed above.Extending her playful epistemological chaos of the previous letter, she collapses self/other life/death, presence/absence and ideality/physicality in this extraordinary death fantasy.Making a significantly queer use of temporal polyvalence, Carter constructs a dual timeline in which her 'romantic voyage to the Goodwin sands' with Thomas Wright -romantic in the sense of sublime, but nevertheless a private encounter which could certainly be read to imply romance in the modern sense -is overlaid by the distinctly less heteronormative narrative, of this journey leading to Carter's death, and the words of the letter becoming the physical manifestation of a spectral longing unacknowledgeable in the chrononormative structures of conventional language. 24The fantasy of death becomes a liberating image of escape from social strictures, and the possibility of an emotional intensity denied to mortals is realised through communication beyond the imagined grave.
Carter's promised appearance 'in the dress and attitude of Mrs. Rowe's etherial beings' or one of Talbot's 'beautiful ideas' extend the theme of incomprehensibility through intertextual references.Carter first explicitly names Friendship in Death (1728), the series of fictional letters from the dead to the living by Elizabeth Singer Rowe (1674-1737).She also appears to refer to Talbot's own iteration on the same theme, the nascent 'Letters to a Friend on a Future State' which, like the rest of her works, was unpublished until after her death, but which seems to be implied by the overt collocation of Talbot's 'ideas' with Rowe's text. 25Friendship in Death encapsulates many of the themes we have been discussing so far -transcendent incomprehensibility, the manipulation of time and distance, and the use of ghostly metaphor in the articulation of inexpressible effects and modes of subjectivity.Letter III, for example, explores the juxtaposition of divine and worldly time.It is a letter written to a mother by her son who died at the age of 2, but in heaven has aged into an adult capable of expressing his emotions: 'The only Sentiment of my Infant State was conscious of, was a Fondness for you, which was then pure Instinct and natural Sympathy, but is now Gratitude and filial Affection'. 26A visionary narrative, in which the child grows into an adult in heaven, is laid over the worldly timeline, in an act of temporal polyvalence parallel to Carter's fantasy of the Godwin sands, in service of the articulation of incomprehensible feeling.One of the central themes which has been identified in Rowe's work is the use of affective or amatory language in the service of 'an effective appropriation of sentiment and enthusiasm in the name of religion'. 27As Melanie Bigold argues, Rowe does this by 'offer [ing] her readers an easily identifiable script with which they can embark on their own religious epiphany' through a series of examples of 'morally concerned readers/writers (of letters) who learn to question themselves and, in the process, find the rationale to act virtuously'. 28A consideration of this process through the lens of Derridean haunting reveals the same self-interrogation provoked by the irrevocable return of the terrifyingly incomprehensible -like Derrida's Marx, the haunted recipient of Rowe's ghost letter is compelled to acknowledge the influence of the incomprehensible and, in Rowe's case, identify this with the divine.
The 'beautiful ideas' to which Carter alludes are most likely some form of Talbot's writings that would come to ultimately be published as 'Letters to a Friend on a Future State, in the Character of a Guardian Angel', a series of three letters which are unusual among Talbot's collected writings in that they do not appear in either Reflections on the Seven Days of the Week (1770), nor in her Essays on Various Subjects (1772), they first appear in Montagu Pennington's 1809 edition of Talbot's Works, suggesting that Carter chose not to publish herself, but Pennington, receiving it with the rest of Talbot's papers on Carter's death, added it to the collection. 29These letters combine Rowe's mystical ecstasy with Talbot's own preoccupation with the integration of spiritual activity into everyday life, as evinced by the structure of weekly devotional practice in Reflections on the Seven Days of the Week.While Talbot's guardian angel reiterates the theme of incomprehensibility, framed through allusion to Corinthians, 'Know you not that "eye hath not seen nor ear heard" those things which Almighty goodness hath prepared', they do so in a letter which is delivered with the regular, quotidian, post, as indicated by the opening sentences of letters 2 and 3: 'The week is come round, and you expect to find another Letter', 'Your eye is impatiently cast every morning on your table'. 30This balance of the mundane with the sublime carries through to Talbot's encapsulation of the moral guidance offered by these letters: 'Think frequently of these solemn, these exalting subjects, but think not too intensely, Let not the speculations of eternity encroach on the duties of time'. 31Where the affective function of Rowe's letters was grounded in the intense feeling of amatory fiction, Talbot's is based on the quiet integration of an awareness of the eternal into the experience of the everyday.As Soile Ylivouri has argued, Talbot's practice and promotion of 'ascetic exercises and time management' to cultivate 'a sense of rational, autonomous identity and ethical selfhood' constitutes a reclamation of power when examined through a Foucauldian lens. 32The incorporation of the divine into the everyday is such an act of self-empowerment, allowing a space for rational spiritual self-cultivation for people whose daily existence denied them the time for such practice.Parsing this distinction through the Derridean framework of haunting as an epistemological crisis and self-confrontation, the 'continual repetition' of Talbot's 'important lesson' emerges as a radical act. 33The spiritual self-examination provoked by 'Letters from a Friend', overtly categorised as repeated labour like Derrida's 'visitations', becomes the hidden and unacknowledged affirmation of women's spiritual activity, just as Carter's ghostliness shrouded and made incomprehensible the queer poetics of her letter to Talbot.

'A state of pre-existence': the distribution of the sensible in the correspondence of Elizabeth Montagu and lord Kames
While Derridean hauntology can help us considering the articulation of women's emotional labour in Carter and Talbot's ghost letters, it is Jacques Rancière's 'distribution of the sensible', with its overt association between visibility and categories of political identity, which can provide a frame for considering our second case study -the Neoplatonic fantasies and play of identity deployed by Elizabeth Montagu in her correspondence with the Scottish philosopher and pioneer of the stadial model of history, Lord Kames (1696-1782).
Following an introduction by education theorist Dr John Gregory (1724-1773) on a visit to Edinburgh in 1766, Montagu and Kames exchanged 41 letters over the next 16 years, whilst Kames was composing two of his most celebrated works, the ever-expanding compendium of his theories on aesthetics and human nature, The Elements of Criticism (1762) and Sketches on the History of Man (1774).Sketches is the text with which Kames secured the allegiance of the Bluestockings, with a thesis that not only treated women's status in society as an index of social progress, but advocated improved female education in one of its chapters, 'Rise and Progress of the Female Sex'.This work concluded with the statement that 'in an opulent monarchy [which Kames believed Great Britain to be] female education is of high importance, not singly with respect to private happiness, but with respect to the society in general'. 34This sympathy of attitudes in relation to women's education and social role has strongly informed critical reception of Montagu and Kames' relationship in recent years.Karen O' Brien and JoEllen DeLucia have both addressed this correspondence, with O' Brien finding an essential agreement between Scottish Enlightenment historiography and Bluestocking feminism, and DeLucia positioning Montagu and Kames' letters discussing the Ossian controversy within a broader analysis of parallels between Bluestocking feminism and Macpherson's sentimentalised translation.Both highlight ideological overlaps between Montagu and Kames' interests, rather than exploring the trajectory of their relationship as manifest in their letters. 35ooking past the ideological agreement between Montagu's feminism and Kames' interest in the historical role of women, one can see the real disparities of power within their relationship.Revisiting the correspondence between Montagu and Kames as a whole, and exploring the discursive and interpretative dynamics at play within it, reveals the gulf between interpretative agreement and the dynamics of 'mutual assistance, friendship, and encouragement', which constituted true Bluestocking sociability. 36nstead, what we see in the letters between Montagu and Kames is a discursive battleground, in which both Montagu and Kames try to assert their control over the terms of their relationship and intellectual identity, through a series of discussions of texts, ideas, and the correspondence itself.The correspondence is rich in philosophical and historical topics, but a close examination of both sides reveals that Montagu is the primary instigator of philosophical discussion, and Kames is far more likely to rebuff her provocations.The high point of this process, a full discussion of which is outside the scope of this article, is Kames' plagiarism of two pieces of Montagu's writing for his Elements of Criticism in its 1769 fourth edition. 37While the philosophical ideas the two held may have been in agreement, the fact that the two of them were in such opposition as to what exactly their relationship was created a severe imbalance of power, which registered in terms recognisable through the concept of the distribution of the sensible.
The key context for Montagu's correspondence with Kames was that she was invested in engaging with the luminaries of the Scottish Enlightenment as a set of intellectual equals, with presiding interests in the development of a moral society comparable to her own.Her correspondences with figures like Gregory, Kames and Hugh Blair (1718-1800), as well as her long-running patronage of Aberdeen poet and philosopher James Beattie (1735-1803), her visits to Edinburgh in the 1760s, and her readings of texts like Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776) and Adam Ferguson's Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), all attest to this investment. 38With this in mind, let us look at this letter from 1766, which appears to have been crafted by Kames as something of a manifesto for their correspondence as a whole: At once, to bury ceremony in the bottom of the sea; I proposed this Letter as an example of mere chit-chat, confined to no subject nor rule.Hereafter the writing to Mrs Montagu I shall consider as but thinking aloud; for I am sensible that the least restraint between friends or companions Soon becomes painful. ..Beware therefore of duty, obligation, apology and all such connections as bind together the common herd of mankind.Among friends affection and inclination ought to be the only connecting principles.Here I vow that you never shall have a letter from me but when my inclination prompts me; and if you will be governed by the same rule, I foresee a long and agreeable correspondence. 39 formalising the conceit of letters-as-conversation, and emphasising the hedonistic aspect of correspondence to the point of darkly predicting a cessation of correspondence should Montagu fail to write with the same deliberate lightness of touch that he employs, Kames attempts to impose his own discursive framework on the correspondence.Unlike Montagu, his framing is based on diminishing the discursive power of the epistolary genre and divorcing it from debate or intellectual improvement.Kames is attempting to feminise his correspondence with Montagu.In later letter, we even see Kames openly batting down her attempts to engage with him as an intellectual peer.His response to such an attempt in 1767 is one of mock-serious affront: 'You behave to me like a buskin'd Queen acting a capital part in a capital play, without once admitting me behind the scenes into any degree of ease or familiarity.The Professor is the only subject; not a word of my concerns; not a word even of your own. 40' Whilst this reprimand is playfully delivered, Kames is reflecting a serious concern over the nature of his relationship with Montagu.Engaging with Kames as an intellectual equal, here characterised as 'The Professor', is portrayed as participating in an insincere performance, stepping outside of her prescribed feminine role.The image of Montagu as a queen conveys Kames' central argument, that she has overstepped her role as socialite-correspondent by attempting to engage him as a fellow philosopher. 41Perhaps, Kames' cruellest invocation of this restriction occurs in a letter from October 1767, when he enters into what appears to be an extension of the type of moral anthropological philosophy he practiced in his published works, only to reveal at the end of a lengthy excursus, that it was all merely an elaborate means of praising Montagu's sociable virtues: Of the animal man Some are made for themselves who have no principles of sociality because Such principles in them would be of no use to others.Such beings of the insect kind, crawling upon the face of the Earth do certainly exist; but my Correspondent is none of these: nay she is the reverse in every respect.Her social connections extend so wide, that it is not easy for her to perform any action or almost to move a step without affecting others. 42mes is evidently intending an act of self-parody, playing with the conventions of his preferred genre as a means of 'admitting [Montagu] behind the curtain', to use his own phrase, but the end result is merely sinister.Montagu is bracketed into Kames' system, and 'defined' as essentially affective and sociable.In short, Kames utilises the discursive fluidity of the epistolary form as a way of systematically shutting Montagu out of meaningful intellectual discourse.If we read this self-conscious bracketing of Montagu into a hedonistic space of social, ephemeral feminine conversation through the lens of Rancierian 'distribution of the sensible', then we can better understand both the power dynamics at play in the correspondence, and Montagu's own appeal to spectrality to counter Kames' discursive tyranny.As we have seen, Rancière's core argument is that 'politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it', turning acts of silencing, like that Kames is practicing here, into a process of rendering Montagu the intellectual politically and discursively invisible, inconceivable (in Derridean terms) and ultimately, spectral. 43Kames' appeal to the form of conversation, as opposed to recognising correspondence as its own medium, is also accounted for in Rancière's theory.Whilst discussing print rather than manuscript writing, his argument for the distinction between written and spoken language remains relevant here: 'Writing is not simply a sequence of typographic signs whose printed form is distinct from oral communication.It is a specific distribution of the sensible that replaces the representative regime's ideal of living speech with a paradoxical form of expression that undermines the legitimate order of discourse'.The radical potential inherent in creating the epistolary discursive space, in which established discourses may be disrupted and reconstituted, is erased in favour of a surrogate for oral conversation, in which 'living speech' or, in Kames' terms 'idle chitchat' never run the risk of destabilising the extant power relation between Montagu and  Kames.Turning to the other side of the correspondence, we see Montagu utilising the same techniques of temporal and spatial dislocation we have seen in the Talbot Carter correspondence, as a means of fighting against the enforced discursive entrapment with which Kames threatens her.Where Carter deploys a direct fantasy of writing from 'beyond death', Montagu instead opts for a neo-platonic fantasy of extra-terrestrial existence, and a fantasy of pre-existence, writing the following to him in early 1767, describing their first meeting: I am convinced that we have been acquainted in a state of pre-existence, I do not know when, nor indeed where, whether we first met on the Orb of this Earth, & had a short Coquetry in the Planet Venus, or a sober platonick love in Saturn, but I am surer we did not first meet at Edinburgh in the year 1766, therefore, the doubts that would be pardonable in a new friendship, cannot become us.Your Lordship may remember our souls did not stand like strangers at a distance, making formal obeisances, the first evening we supped together at our friend Dr Gregorys, we took up our story where it had perhaps ended some thousand years before the creation of this Globe; if we gave it a prefatory compliment, it was only as ye customary form to the new edition of a work before publish'd. 44 we see this as Montagu's counterpoint to Kames' 'chit chat' letter quoted above, we can see her deftly transforming his attempts to silence her into a transcendent metaphor of temporally polyvalent dislocation.Taking her cue from Kames' association of her with idle sociability, Montagu offers a cosmic fantasy of human relationships existing beyond the physical and temporal bounds of mortal life, drawing on long-defunct humoral associations of the planets with various emotional states.Her use of such an elevated conceit combines a witty overextension of Kames' assertions of playfulness with a tacit mockery of his own tendency to weaponise 'philosophical' discourse, as in the October 1767 letter we've already seen.By pushing the terms of the relationship to the breaking point of absurdity, Montagu undermines Kames' attempts to do so through his own 'elevated' register.The projection of Kames and Montagu's relationship to 'one thousand years before the creation of this Globe' invites all the associations we have seen in the Carter-Talbot correspondence, but to subtly different effects.Where Carter utilised the temporal polyvalence of hauntology to conceptualise a space of impossible community for herself and Talbot, unrestricted by structures of normativity, Montagu's spectral pre-existence is a space where Kames cannot benefit from those same structures.Disembodied and trapped in Montagu's time bubble, Kames loses both his home turf advantage in the Scottish Enlightenment community, and his right to define the terms of conversation with her.The power imbalance created by his institutional authority as a court judge, social power through his centrality to the Scottish Enlightenment, and the wealth and status that came with the commercial and intellectual success of his published works (the Elements of Criticism went through six editions before 1790), is effaced by Montagu's rhetorical device.The imbalance in class in this relationship is less significant than in, for example, the well-documented conflict between the working-class poet James Woodhouse and Montagu herself, with both Montagu and Kames as wealthy owners of large estates. 45However, Montagu's ownership and management of a set of coal mines in Denton, Northumberland, and the identity of a business woman which she assumes across her correspondence allow her to consider her outsider status from Kames' intellectual community in terms of a conflict between middle-class commercial labour and upper-class idleness. 46This imagined class disparity is epitomised in her correspondence with Kames through an extended image of herself as a 'Pedlar', to juxtapose her own worldliness with his philosophical detachment. 47t is only by metaphorically collapsing the pair of them into spatial and temporal impossibility, or Rancièrian 'invisibility', that Montagu can confront this imagined distance.She directly practices the redistribution of the sensible which Ranciére associates with inscription as opposed to oral communication.Her final comment, identifying their introduction in 1766 as a 'prefatory compliment . . . to the new edition of a work before publish'd' reconstructs their relationship as not merely inscribed, but printed.In stark contrast to the deferral to the 'living word' of contemporary social propriety on which Kames sought to ground their 'letters-as-conversation', Montagu's 'letters-asromance/novel/text' reflects a delight in the subversiveness of textual manifestation which we have seen Rancière discussing above.
This extra-terrestrial fantasy of disembodied existence is not Montagu's only deployment of the spectral in her relationship with Kames.We also find her in 1772 projecting herself across the almost 450 mile distance from her home in the bustling urban centre of London, into the grounds of Kames' estate of Blair Drummond, which takes its name from a small village close to Stirling.While the estate and village were not necessarily as defined by rustic majesty as implied by Montagu's exuberant prose, Kames himself having pursued the agricultural reform of the landscape since 1766, the juxtaposition of urban with rural and populous with isolated, clearly inform Montagu's sense of the physical gap which separates their two worlds. 48Montagu imaginatively collapses this gulf of space and time to have an imagined meeting: As next Summer & Blair Drummond are at a great distance, it is happy for me that I have a rapid imagination which shoots through space & time feaster than the fiery footed steeds of Phoebus, whose progress may be markd by shadows, & counted by clocks.I am come, I am arrived, I am actually at Blair Drummond.I am sitting by your Lordship on the seat you marked with my name[.] 49 a surreal combination of concrete and spatialised with the abstract and supernatural, Montagu places an invisible surrogate of herself into Kames' presence, while he is reading her letter.In a parody or subversion of the language of romantic intimacy, Montagu goes on to describe the scene around them in sublime detail, describing 'the River . . .swelling over the pebbles <sic> or foaming among the Rocks' and the mountain of 'Benloman lift his scornful brow frowning with proud disdain on the vainly emulating hills & humble unaspiring vales beneath him'.By representing this scene through the already uncanny lens of her astrally project surrogate, Montagu's description participates in the most literal form of the sublime as conceived through Keatsian negative capability, the pleasant and composed comprehension of that which exceeds understanding.Playfully transcending space and time, she communes with the Scottish landscape, accessing the sublime eternal feeling of the landscape itself. 50This is thrown into sharp relief by the rest of her long descriptive paragraph, which amounts to a stadial history of the village and government of Blair Drummond, with Kames himself identified as the driving agent of its development.Montagu's utopian vision sees 'envy & jealousy', 'Drunken riots' and 'party and faction' replaced with 'the social greetings of friendly neighbours'. 51More surprisingly, given her long-standing celebration of Celtic Scotland, she claims that 'the rough and barbarous Chieftain has left the Castle, where tyranny & oppression were protected, to give place to a Lord accomplish'd in all the arts of peace'.Montagu concludes their imagined 'Walk' by saying 'I wish my imagination could further represent to me the Chapters of your book, which I know your Lordship wd read to me on such an occasion . . .I can only build Castles in the air, I cannot therefore at all substitute my empty visions in lieu of it'. 52What Montagu appears to have done, however, is exactly what she has said was impossible, applying Kames' own formula of social progress to his estate, she has made him a subject in her own philosophical history, a philosophical history which also manages to undermine its own form through its misrepresentation of the Scottish past as we know Montagu saw it.Her 'Castle . . . in the air' is the stadial narrative Kames has just read, a realisation of the disruptive space Montagu conceived at the start of their relationship, in which her right of definition over him is asserted by virtue of her spectral connection to the sublime Scottish landscape and its history, in which his games of development and improvement are ultimately ephemeral.
In the case studies presented above, we can see some of the ways in which Bluestocking writers explored the concept of writing 'beyond death' as providing a framework through which to consider and articulate their creative and intellectual identities, build relationships, and play with the subversion of the social and epistemological structures around them.The metaphorical conceit of death itself, as manifested in the Carter correspondence discussed here, allows for an escape from the strictures of time and place, allowing her to fall back on either Neoplatonic universals, as she does in her poetry, or Singer-Roweian explorations of posthumous feeling.The creative work of constructing these expressions of emotion, like the readers of Vesey's stream-of-consciousness correspondence, becomes an affective act, in which Carter's work of constructing the expression of feeling, and Talbot's intellectual exercise in reading the letter, enhance and define their relationship.As we have seen, Derridean hauntology, with its exploration of the challenge offered by the unknowable and incomprehensible, provides an effective framework for considering the affective work of the ghost image in letters like Carter's.The intense dislocation Derrida associates with the political revenant applies just as well to the emotional intensity of Carter's fantasy of death and would, I believe, be equally well applied to other letters written in the legacy of Rowe and the Graveyard school of poetry.For Montagu, the conceit of writing 'beyond death' brings with it an even more metaphysical set of opportunities.For her, the disruption of Lord Kames' attempts to constitute the 'distribution of the sensible' lead to her playfully not only inhabiting the spectral realm of the invisible herself, but dragging her interlocutor with her into the space of the invisible and immaterial, where his attempts to capitalise on his status in the Scottish Enlightenment community as providing him with a right to ontological truth proved ineffectual.Applying the principles of hauntology and distribution of the sensible to these episodes allows us to interlink the languages of inexpressibility and indefinability to the articulation of socially and culturally suppressed identities.The discussion of these concepts in the realm of correspondence specifically, with its moment-by-moment expression of self, and inherently spectral elements of temporal polyvalence and dislocation will, I hope, open out the field to allow for deeper analyses of the spectral imagination in other correspondences in which class, race,