Abstract
This article examines a selection of immigrant letters from the perspective of absence made present. It provides insights on ways that romantic love correspondence written in contexts of international migration can be employed in historical analysis in order to more fully understand separation, longing, and other emotional experiences that characterize transnational relationships.
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Notes
- 1.
All letters quoted in this article have been translated into English from the original Italian. In my translations, I have attempted to preserve the original style and punctuation. This excerpt and others from the Antonietta Petris-Loris Palma collection are drawn from a large corpus of letters that I am transcribing, and translating for publication. The working title of this manuscript is “Tua Per Sempre” The Love Letters of Antonietta Petris and Loris Palma. The manuscript is contracted to McGill-Queen's University Press. I am especially grateful to the editors of University of Manitoba Press for their permission to reprint a number of letter excerpts from my book, Families, Lovers, and their Letters: Italian Postwar Migration to Canada. University of Manitoba Press, 2010. I am also very grateful to Mrs. Antonietta Petris for the permission to reprint her family’s letters. A special thank you is extended to Annemarie Steidl and the late Edith Sauer for inviting me to the conference, “Migrations: Interdisciplinary Perspectives” at the University of Vienna held on July 1–3, 2010. My sincere thanks are extended to the editors of this collection of essays, Renée Schroeder, Ruth Wodak, and Michi Messer.
- 2.
However, literacy rates in the peninsula – while improving over the decades – remained largely uneven in Italy – especially across the north and south divide.
- 3.
See particularly, William I. Thomas and Florian W. Znaniecki, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America. Vol. II (1918–1920).
- 4.
This notion is in part inspired by Janet Altman’s observation, “epistolary language, which is the language of absence, makes present by make-believe” (Altman 1982, 140).
- 5.
Consider for instance, C. Erickson, Invisible Immigrants (1972); E. Franzina, Merica! Merica! (1979); Cameron, Haines, Maude, English Immigrant Voices (2000); and J. Beattie and H. Buss, Undelivered Letters to Hudson’s Bay Company Men on the Northwest Coast of America, 1830–1857 (2003). See also S. Cancian, Families, Lovers, and their Letters: Italian Postwar Migration to Canada (2010), and, especially the forthcoming collection, “Tua per sempre” The Love Letters of Antonietta Petris and Loris Palma.
- 6.
See, for instance, J. Diamond, Narrative Means to Sober Ends: Treating Addiction and Its Aftermath (New York and London: The Guilford Press, 2000) and Janet G. Altman, Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1982) in which Altman notes: “As a psychotherapeutic device the letter is both the symptom of the neurosis and the instrument for its cure…” (p. 43). In a similar vein, the epistolary undertones of the seventeenth century Letters of a Portuguese Nun also illustrate writers’ release through letter writing (Kauffman 1986).
- 7.
Janet Sayers’s analysis of the love letters of renowned British psychiatrist, Wilfred Bion, written to his wife, offers an interesting example of the interconnections between writing love letters and self-empowerment and inspiration towards professional development of the letter writer (Sayers 2002). On the theme of agency, self-empowerment, and love letters, see also Laura Ahearn, Invitations to Love (2001).
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Cancian, S. (2012). “My Dearest Love…” Love, Longing, and Desire in International Migration. In: Messer, M., Schroeder, R., Wodak, R. (eds) Migrations: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Springer, Vienna. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-7091-0950-2_16
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