In Rainbow Rowell’s Attachments, shortly before making out with Lincoln O’Neill on the floor of an abandoned office breakroom, Beth Fremont says to him, “I kept thinking about how this would work in a book or the movies. If this were a Jane Austen novel, it wouldn’t be so bad – if you were intercepting my letters, and I was peeking over your garden hedge… Computers make everything worse” (Rowell 317). Setting aside the obvious irony that Beth and Lincoln are, in fact, in a novel, and the subjectivity of the sentiment expressed that technology makes a situation like Beth’s and Lincoln’s “worse”, it is worth considering her point that the advent of communication via computer, as opposed to the kind that would feature in an older novel, makes quite a lot of things undeniably different.

One of the oldest epistolary novels we can compare Attachments to in many ways is Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, which coincidentally will cause the discussion to focus on the first and last novels covered in this course – a testament to how far apart these two novels are in time, format, writing style and content. Nonetheless, they still share the common element of an in-story, outside observer of a private correspondence: Mr. B in Pamela, and Lincoln in Attachments. Therefore, we can certainly address how these similar instances are shaped by the technological differences in the media used to correspond. The shift in epistolary media from physical letters to email necessitates key shifts in format due to the lower degree of disclosure realistically seen in modern emails; it also affects narratively not only the circumstances in which a character intercepts private correspondences, but also the result and implications of said interception. 

In Richardson’s Pamela, the titular character writes letters to her parents out of a desire to keep them updated on her daily life and complicated relations with Mr. B, but also to “ease her mind” – that is, using her letter-writing as somewhat of a stand-in for journaling (Richardson 100). Thus, her letters are often long and detailed, and Richardson uses them and the letters Pamela receives back as the sole vehicles through which he tells her long and detailed story. In the 1740s, though Pamela was still definitely considered someone who wrote letters quite a lot compared to the average person, this was still within the realm of realism: Pamela did not have any other means of lengthy conversation with anyone but those in immediate physical proximity to her, and the postal methods at that time could take days and weeks at a time between letters. Because of these reasons and also simply contemporary convention, it would make sense that the letters Pamela writes and receives are so thorough that they are enough for Richardson to use exclusively, as opposed to Rowell’s mixed-format approach (Haggis and Holmes 173).

Rainbow Rowell, indeed, separates her novel into separate, alternating forms of epistolary via email and third-person narration instead of solely using the emails. This is definitely in part because as opposed to Pamela, the narrative focus of Attachments lands more on the experience of the clandestine reader of these messages, but can also be considered a symptom of some clear differences between physical letters as they were used in 1740 and emails as they were used in 1999. In a 2011 journal article Jane Haggis and Mary Holmes discussed interviews conducted with modern long distance couples who communicated via email, call and text, and found that the drastically increased temporal immediacy of digital communication has caused written messages on the whole to shorten and become less formal (Haggis and Holmes 177). Jennifer and Beth can not only email, but also call one another, and visit each others’ homes relatively quickly with modern transportation. Already there is a reasonable excuse for “offscreen” interactions to be omitted; add to that the fact that the emails we as readers get to see are only those flagged by an automated filter program on Lincoln’s computer, and it’s understandable that technological differences are the reason Rowell must supplement her epistolary novel with more traditional third-person chapters to provide the kind of context and narrative detail we already receive the bulk of in Pamela’s letters alone.

That automated filter program, called WebFence by Rowell, also provides an excellent example of how technological differences have had profound effects on the narrative content of these two books. The fact that the novelty of email in the late 1990s made necessary (according to some, like the paranoid management of a newspaper company) the paid position of reading others’ emails directly facilitates the premise of a character like Lincoln falling in love with someone by reading their messages to other people. Additionally, it creates a clear difference in agency and power between Lincoln and his parallel, Mr. B, when it comes to intercepting those messages in the first place.

In Pamela, Samuel Richardson takes care to involve the process of writing and sending letters throughout his story. He doesn’t simply tell a story that happens to be in the form of letters; the fact that the letters are “copied, sent, received, shown about, discussed, answered, even perhaps hidden, intercepted, stolen, altered, or forged” is an integral part of and influence on the events of the story (McKillop 36). Therefore, Mr. B’s acts of intercepting Pamela’s physical letters to read them for himself – whether by removing them from where they are hidden in her clothing (Richardson 12), preventing them from leaving the house with the postman (Richardson 22), or plenty of other instances – are instrumental in establishing Mr. B as the type of man who would do such a thing on purpose, and as someone in a position of power over Pamela. 

On the other hand, Lincoln is required by his job to begin reading Beth and Jennifer’s emails in the first place, and it is only by a comparatively passive decision to let the emails continue to come to him via automated programming instead of issuing the warning that would halt their arrival, that he assumes a more voyeuristic, less innocent role (Rowell 72). Also, being in possession of others’ correspondence does not give Lincoln the same kind of power as Mr. B; if he were to use his position to stop Beth and Jennifer from sending the kind of emails that get flagged by his program, they would not be out of options to communicate like Pamela and her parents are upon Mr. B’s interception.

Moreover, it’s worth mentioning that in direct contrast to Mr. B’s motivations in reading Pamela’s letters – i.e. a desire to stop them from being sent because they may be about him – Lincoln has no desire to stop the emails from being sent especially when he discovers some are about him. However, this distinction actually sheds light on a much larger similarity between Pamela and Attachments despite vast technological differences: the power of the writer of correspondence to influence how they and others are perceived. In her article in The Fibreculture Journal, Esther Milne reveals how traditional letter writing contains an element of “both performance and interpretation” in which “the letter writer performs a version of self and the recipient reads that performance” (Milne). This is evident in the themes of unreliable narration we see in Pamela – the question of whether or not she is in fact as virtuous and pure as she exhaustively purports, or simply crafting an ideal image for herself for the recipient of her letters. Later in her article, Milne then goes on to challenge the idea that email is necessarily that different in this manner; she likens email correspondence, especially anonymous, to a theater performance, and even mentions suggestions that an online presence amplifies the decontextualization and dematerialization of the subject (Milne). Lincoln mentions himself that since he doesn’t know what Beth looks like, he is essentially falling for the idea of her he imagines from her emails (Rowell 170).

Mr. B initially resents Pamela’s letter writing because it casts him in a bad light, and Lincoln cherishes Beth’s email writing (in part) when it casts him in a good light. Mr. B then begins to reform his behavior because of the virtue he discovers in Pamela as a result of reading her letters, just as Lincoln begins to fall for Beth because of the elements of her personality he gleans from reading her emails. In Lincoln’s semi-confession to Beth – in a written letter, coincidentally – near the end of Attachments, he explains that “reading your email made me like you” (Rowell 302). This is clearly indicative of both Beth’s and Pamela’s power to influence the actions and feelings of their perceiver, and thus the events of their respective books. In this instance, the role of technology no longer separates, but instead connects, these two novels from nearly three hundred years apart.

There are countless more ways in which comparisons can be drawn between email correspondence in the late nineteen-nineties and physical letter correspondence in the eighteenth century, but Richardson’s and Rowell’s novels encapsulate several quite neatly. One can’t help but acknowledge that if the events of Attachments were to occur in Beth’s imaginary Jane Austen novel, a fascinating exploration of the implications and ethics of an imposition on a private online presence, plus a believable and endearing pretense for Lincoln’s actions, would be lost. (And if the events of Pamela were to unfold in the late nineties, Mr. B would be promptly and summarily arrested.) Beyond it all, though, we find proof that technological advancements have not kept our dear epistolary novels from enduring since their conception centuries ago; rather, they have simply shifted and evolved. 

Works Cited

Haggis, Jane and Mary Holmes. “Epistles to Emails: Letters, Relationship Building and the Virtual Age.” Life Writing, vol. 8, no. 2, 2011, pp. 169-185.

McKillop, Alan D. “Epistolary Technique in Richardson’s Novels.” Rice Institute Pamphlet, vol. 38, no. 1, 1951, pp. 36-54.

Milne, Esther. “Email and Epistolary technologies: Presence, Intimacy, Disembodiment.” The Fibreculture Journal, no. 2, 2003, https://two.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-010-email-and- epistolary-technologies-presence-intimacy-disembodiment/. 

Richardson, Samuel. Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded, edited by Thomas Keymer and Alice Wakely, New York, Oxford University Press, 2001.

Rowell, Rainbow. Attachments. New York, Plume, 2011.