This dissertation examines the role that maternal correspondence plays in the work of Marcel Proust, Elizabeth Bishop, and Marianne Moore. "Part One: Proust's Envelope" examines thirdness and metonymical strategies of the letter; in In Search for Lost Time, Proust's envelope appears as a dynamic rhetorical figure that turns writing inside out. By tapping into the maternal currents of correspondence via scenes of letter-writing and appearances of the posthumous letter in the Search , as well as actual letters between Proust and his mother, the essay investigates how maternal rêvenance forms a power-line to writing. Proust stages an epistolary play of ventriloquism and maternal lineage; this haunted and haunting geneaology reverberates with the sublimity of the letter that continues after the death of its sender. We trace these echoes in order to better understand how maternal correspondence speaks to alterity and the work of the book.

"Part Two: Eminence" looks at the mentorship of Marianne Moore to Elizabeth Bishop in order to gloss a relation that approaches mother-daughter, master-disciple, but remains apart from its absolute rigor. While it may be tempting to argue that Moore filled the gap left by the death of Bishop's mother, their correspondence plays on a field of thirdness that displaces surrogate thinking. As such, the logic of the surrogate-as-replacement, and the maternal as a singular figure, cease to be productive modes of understanding. The maternal instead acts as a propelling and interpellative force, the voltage that powers language, and the system that monitors its effects. I point to Bishop's description of Moore's eminence in "Efforts of Affection," in which the MM of Moore's monogram appears as an index to a maternal breeding ground. A play of intimacy and criticism unfolds in which there are multiple mothers afoot: the house of Moore becomes a department of corrections whose codes of grammar and propriety are established and breached in correspondence.