Others have written about the blog as affording a writer the opportunity to construct a “self” discursively. A central thread of our discussion about blogs (and about the epistolary novel) has been the idea of response. Bloggers write into a community, who is then invited to respond; similarly, the authors of letters enter a dialogue. Both kinds of writers, then, seek not only to construct a self, but also to position it in relation to others.

In “Self-Making,” Jerome Bruner (1991) recalled Roman Jakobson’s assertion that “Language is a system not only for communicating, but also for organizing attention” (p. 73). Bruner (1991) went on to detail how the organizing function of language is essential in the construction of a coherent narrative of self—events happen; it’s how we “pattern” them that gives us a story of the self (p. 74). In reading blogs, and in reading Clarissa over the course of the semester, the importance of how that narrated self is interpreted by others has emerged as a key concern.

In the case of Clarissa, much of what’s at stake early in the novel is her ability to convince her parents that they should still view her as the dutiful daughter she attempts to construct in her letters. Her parents refuse to read those letters, preferring their own construction of her as willful and selfish. It’s paradoxical that Clarissa’s parents should have so much authority to create the Clarissa they believe they know (the Clarissa who is “perversely” willing to run off with Lovelace) in the face of their acknowledgement that Clarissa is so powerfully able to shape her own identity. Clarissa attempts to narrate an identity in her letters to them; she writes and she writes and she writes, but ultimately she’s unsuccessful. This is indicative to me that there is more involved in the construction of an identity than self-narrative. To some extent, there also has to be external assent to the version of “self” one creates. As Bruner (1991) put it “self-making is powerfully affected not only by your own interpretations of yourself, but by the interpretations others offer your version” (p. 76). No one, including Clarissa, is completely free to author a “self,” as such a thing is always defined with and against others and their perspectives.

The blog, as a communicative technology, highlights this interdependence. It calls attention to the “distributed” nature of the self (Bruner, 1991, p. 76). There has been much work on the “online diary” quality of many blogs, but virtually all of that work has acknowledged that the public nature of the blog, at the very least, fundamentally alters how we can think about their “diary-ness.” A different kind of blog, like Radical Faggot for instance, offers an identity, but it offers an identity explicitly for the purpose of public participation with its meanings. This is what I see as the most important connection between blogs and the epistolary novel; identity as and in dialogue. The creation of an “I” is impossible in a vacuum. It requires the presence (if not attention) of an “other.”