"A Roome in Your Friendship": Emotional Space in John Donne's Familiar Letters

• In Event: The Limits of Rhetorical Theory in Early Modern English Writing

Abstract

Although John Donne would eventually become the most famous orator in Jacobean England, he was also one of its most socially isolated individuals in the early 1600’s. His correspondence testifies to this fact; his letters famously depict a man with limited friends and a few career prospects in the period after his marriage to Anne More. Yet these letters also insist upon their author’s deep familiarity with a small community of correspondents—a familiarity that often complicates the distinction between authentic friendship and self-interested professionalism. This paper accounts for such complex social engagements in rhetorical terms. Specifically, it shows how Donne employs rhetorical concepts of pathos and memory to imagine psychological spaces (often architecturally-conceived) for emotional and contact between individuals separated by both space and time. In doing so, it suggests that Donne used his spatial imagination to display the ethical and emotional complexity of participating in an aristocratic community.

Author

• Drew J. Scheler, St. Norbert College