“Unresolved implicative dilemmas: A cognitive-constructivist reading of Emma Donoghue’s The Sealed Letter.”

Abstract

The protagonist of Emma Donoghue’s historical novel The Sealed Letter (2008), Emily “Fido” Faithfull, is a New Woman, a campaigner for women’s rights, whose involvement in a scandalous divorce that shocked the London society of 1864 was overtly silenced. In an attempt to unearth her role as one of the leaders of first-wave feminism, Donoghue explores the nature of female friendship through her unfortunate attachment to a troublesome woman with a duplicitous nature and her resentful husband. Considering the game of perspectives displayed in the narrative as propositions for the coexistence of a plurality of truths, this article will venture towards the understanding of the implicative dilemmas characters have to unravel in face of each other and of Victorian mores, as these have been defined by constructivist epistemology and, more specifically, within the framework of constructive psychology.

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Irish Studies Review
ISSN: 0967-0882 (Print) 1469-9303 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cisr20
Unresolved implicative dilemmas: a cognitive-
constructivist reading of Emma Donoghue’s The
Sealed Letter
Marisol Morales-Ladrón
To cite this article: Marisol Morales-Ladrón (2018) Unresolved implicative dilemmas: a cognitive-
constructivist reading of Emma Donoghue’s The Sealed Letter, Irish Studies Review, 26:2,
252-266, DOI: 10.1080/09670882.2018.1442119
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09670882.2018.1442119
Published online: 01 Mar 2018.
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IRISH STUDIES REVIEW, 2018
VOL. 26, NO. 2, 252266
https://doi.org/10.1080/09670882.2018.1442119
Unresolved implicative dilemmas: a cognitive-constructivist
reading of Emma Donoghue’s The Sealed Letter
MarisolMorales-Ladrón
Dpto Filología Moderna, Colegio San José de Caracciolos, Universidad de Alcalá, Alcalá de Henares, Spain
ABSTRACT
The protagonist of Emma Donoghue’s historical novel The Sealed
Letter (2008), Emily “Fido” Faithfull, is a New Woman, a campaigner
for women’s rights, whose involvement in a scandalous divorce
that shocked the London society of 1864 was overtly silenced. In
an attempt to unearth her role as one of the leaders of rst-wave
feminism, Donoghue explores the nature of female friendship
through her unfortunate attachment to a troublesome woman with
a duplicitous nature and her resentful husband. Considering the
game of perspectives displayed in the narrative as propositions for
the coexistence of a plurality of truths, this article will venture towards
the understanding of the implicative dilemmas characters have to
unravel in face of each other and of Victorian mores, as these have
been dened by constructivist epistemology and, more specically,
within the framework of constructive psychology.
How can I be substantial if I do not cast a shadow? I must have a dark side also if I am to be
whole; and inasmuch as I become conscious of my shadow I also remember that I am a human
being like any other.1
Set in London in 1864, Emma Donoghue’s The Sealed Letter (2008) is the third of a series of
historical novels taking place in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Britain,2 which attempt
to restore the decisive role of women in history in order “to contest directly received mas-
culinist constructions of history and nation, thus sustaining a critique against normative
aective and gender structures”.3 As such, they succeed at challenging the legitimacy of
grand narratives that had ignored them and advocate the need for a gendered approach to
ideological her/historical discourses.4 Retaking the author’s interest in drawing on uncon-
ventional female gures that undergo extraordinary circumstances, as was the case with
the unscrupulous Mary Saunders in Slammerkin (2000) or with the daring Sapphic Anne
Damer in Life Mask (2004),5 the novel that is the object of this discussion likewise explores
deceit and betrayal in female friendship and its dramatic consequences, not only for the
characters involved but for the impact in the development of rst-wave feminism in Britain.
The protagonist, Emily “Fido” Faithfull, is a New Woman, a campaigner for women’s rights,
whose involuntary involvement in a scandalous divorce that shocked British society at the
© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
KEYWORDS
Constructivism; feminism;
historical fiction; Emma
Donoghue
CONTACT Marisol Morales-Ladrón marisol.morales@uah.es

IRISH STUDIES REVIEW 253
time was overtly silenced in historical records. In an attempt to unearth her role as one of
the leaders of the Reform movement, Donoghue narrates her unfortunate attachment to
the troublesome Helen Codrington and her resentful husband. However, the sordid triangular
relationship is not fully disclosed until the end of the novel. The plot deftly interweaves dif-
ferent discourses that question the validity of truth, including the writing of letters and
other kind of missives, which are employed to hide rather than to unveil the inner motivations
of characters, ultimately puzzling the reader.
Digging into the complexity and inextricability of the mind in order to explain human
behaviour within the delimited context of a literary artefact involves exploring the variety
of voices and perspectives exhibited in the narrative. This enables the reader to identify with
characters that hold divergent viewpoints on reality. In The Sealed Letter, Donoghue engages
in a divorce case from such diverse angles that taking sides turns into an impossible endeav-
our, even though most critics have pointed at Helen’s duplicitous nature and ruthlessness
as the source of most misfortunes.
6
The reader’s capacity to sympathise with the three central
characters is possible because none of them are free from criticism. Fido’s symptomatic
naiveté and idealism is complemented with Helen’s mischievous personality and both are
balanced out by the Vice-Admiral Codrington’s stern moral composure and meanness.
Considering the game of perspectives displayed in the novel as propositions for the coex-
istence of a plurality of truths, this article will venture towards the understanding of the
implicative dilemmas characters have to unravel in face of each other and of Victorian mores,
as these have been dened by constructivist epistemology and, more specically, within
the framework of constructive psychology. To that end, I will rely on George A. Kelly’s Personal
Construct Theory (PCT, hereafter) in order to deepen into the main characters’ inner motives
for their actions, with the aim of shedding some light on the intricacies of human cognition,
the complex regulation of emotions and the subsequent behaviours that are examined in
the novel.
Diverting from empiricism and associationism, constructivism is an epistemological pos-
ture that gravitates around the question of how human beings acquire and generate knowl
-
edge. It basically argues that reality is not revealed to us as a copy of the outside world that
can be stored in the mind, but that we are active in the production of its meaning.7Human
beings construct and, therefore, make sense of reality in accordance with their individual
schemes of thoughts, cognitions and preconceptions within a socio-aective context of
shared cultural values, in a way that is consistent and coherent with their own self-images
and beliefs.8 This is so because psychological processes, which include emotions, views or
attitudes, as well as the way we act, react and behave, are the result of the meanings we
attach to experience. As psychologist Guillem Freixas explains, people construct and con-
stantly revise theories of themselves and of their environment, since the resulting narratives
are socially shared and experienced through all kinds of relationships.9 Within this sphere,
cognitive psychology focuses, thus, on the structure and function of the inner workings of
the mind, the system of beliefs, the attributions, the cognitive strategies and the expectations
through which human beings process information.
The relation between cognitivism and constructivism has not been exempted from con-
troversy, as the latter has been considered a cognitive theory as much as a humanistic or
even a phenomenological approach.10 Framed within the paradigm of constructivist psy-
chology, Kelly developed a system that registered each person’s idiosyncratic constructions,
which were deeply rooted in their personal histories, and which he termed the PCT.11 Kelly

254 M. MORALESLADRÓN
proposed that the personality was structured around individual constructs, or dimensions
of meaning, hierarchically organised, whose network of relations shaped conduct and iden-
tity, depending on weather they were nuclear or more peripheral. Whereas the nuclear
constructs are more resistant to change because we shape reality through those lenses, the
peripheral could be modied more easily, given the right circumstances. The Repertory Grid
Technique was, latter, designed as an instrument of clinical psychology to systematically
obtain the constructs that dened a person. Within this “ideal conceptual and methodolog-
ical framework”, cognitive conicts could be studied and dealt with in personal counselling.
12
In the context of psychotherapy, the patient is asked to ll in a grid with salient constructs
as regards signicant bonds and three dierent stages in time: the self at present, the past
and the ideal self. The result is a comprehensive net of relations, which provides a detailed
picture of how the patient constructs his or her self and interprets the world, as well as the
kind of conicts or dilemmas that need to be disentangled. In sum:
PCT emerges from a proactive view of human beings as active agents … who regulate their
motivational and emotional processes as well as their actions, based on the congruence or
discrepancy between their construction of “self ” and “ideal self” … Thus, it is understandable for
the person to encounter dilemmas or conicts when having to reconcile themselves with their
personal values in a decision-making process (although the person might not be consciously
aware of those conicts).13
Within such framework, this discussion will deepen into the workings of the minds of Helen
and Fido, “women who did not accommodate to the available models of femininity”,14 and,
to a lesser extent, of the Vice-Admiral Codrington, with a view to explore their subjective
constructions of reality and subsequent cognitive conicts, formed as a result of implicative
dilemmas that they are unable to resolve.
The Sealed Letter revolves around the reappraisal of the life of Emily Faithful, a women’s
right activist, “campaigner, lecturer, publisher, editor, journalist, and novelist”,15 whose
involvement in the Codringtons’s divorce case and the suspicion that she might be a lesbian
kept her story hidden in the annals.16 She was a businesswoman in a society ruled by men,
whose many achievements included the running of the weekly paper The Friends of the
People, her acknowledgement as printer and publisher to the Queen in the Victoria Press,
her successful claim to the University of Cambridge to allow women entering into examina-
tions and her commitment to SPEW (the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women).
In the novel, after seven years of separation, Fido bumps into Helen Codrington in the streets
of London, a whimsical and impulsive woman with whom she had developed a closed attach-
ment in the past. As they resume their friendship, Helen manipulates Fido into thinking that
she is trapped in a loveless marriage that has driven her towards a love aair she is unable
to conclude. Fido’s distrust for Helen occasionally clashes with her own naiveté and she
proves incapable to separate her position as a married woman from the unethical stance
she is pressurised to adopt.
Fido met the Codringtons for the rst time when she was only 19 and the couple had
made her feel part of the family, even to the point of adopting her as “Aunt Fido” for their
daughters.
17
When Fido recollects those years, she admits to have always been in the middle
of their unhappy marriage, trying in vain not to take sides, as their bond only served to
increase Helen’s detachment from her husband, who “couldn’t help but stand awkwardly
outside the magic circle of the women’s intimacy”.
18
By means of what it is possibly the most
malicious lie in the whole novel, Helen makes Fido believe that, one night when they were

IRISH STUDIES REVIEW 255
sharing her bed and Fido had taken her medicine for asthma, the Vice-Admiral had climbed
into it and had tried to abuse her: “He made a joke about it being a cold bed with two women
alone in it and something coarse about the re needing poking. He grabbed your nightgown
and – [sic] ”.
19
Since Fido fails to recall such appalling incident, Helen insists that she was under
the eects of laudanum and that her mind must have blocked it. Consequently, Fido is
entangled in a wretched marital conict with alleged accusations of adultery and of same-
sex love between them, to be followed by counter accusations of male depravities. It is
interesting to note how the closeted identity is never fully revealed. It is rather hinted at
through a language dened precisely by the absence of a signier, by its refusal to refer to
the unnameable word – in the most Beckettian sense.20
As unconventional female characters, both Fido and Helen defy social conventions. Fido’s
practical looks, her refusal to wear a corset, her “bachelor-style” life in her own apartment
reading the Times in the mornings, as she admits, “rather scandalizes my maid”.21 At the same
time, Helen’s childhood and adolescence in Calcutta and Florence have made her “the most
un-English of Englishwomen; she’s always waltzed her way around the rules of woman-
hood”.
22
The two characters are aware of how laws are made by and for men to keep women
in their domestic sphere, as the married ones are mere commodities with no right over their
bodies – though Helen had denied her husband “his sexual rights” – their children or their
possessions, and those who remain single are seen with suspicion. However, they nd diver-
gent ways to rebel against the patriarchal order.23 Fido, self-assured, freethinking and
informed, earns her living openly challenging a male-oriented society, engages in discussions
on “the unfavourable sex” and deals with sabotage in her journal. Helen, less educated, less
versed in women rights or edifying readings and less resourceful, relies on the “hidden
power”24 of marriage to escape from a dull domestic life, employing subtle strategies with
which she transgresses the constraints of society, mainly turning into a “sexually voracious
wife”,25 while pretending to conform to Victorian values.
Considering that in the nineteenth-century femininity was strongly linked to issues of
morality and prudency, Helen’s resistance to yield to the patriarchal order can only nd its
way of expression through manoeuvring, lying, plotting and ultimately redressing truth.
According to O’Callaghan, “[a]s an adulterer Helen is maligned as the negative gure in a
dominant gendered binary”.26 Hence, she will not be able to succeed in bypassing social
mores without experiencing conict, both within her and with society, often feeling “like a
puppet, with no knowledge of who or what’s pulling her strings”.27 Unable to live up to
societal expectations or to repress her sexual agency, she is caught in between a private and
a public self. However, her mask clashes with her constant rages, her whimsical states, her
impulsive nature and her lack of control over her emotions, which make her appear either
dysfunctional or evil, more in tone with the patriarchal Victorian construction of the hysterical
woman.
28
Her determination to lead a “double life” triggers an internal conict, or implicative
dilemma, within the framework of constructivist psychology. This mainly refers to the inter-
pretations human beings generate as a result of their particular way of giving meaning to
experience and to their socio-emotional relationship with others.29 In this like vein, Helen’s
need to reclaim her body, denying her husband to enter her bed and fullling a sexual life
outside marriage, must be seen as the result of the shaping of an identity that challenges
female Victorian morality, which invariably leads her to distort the truth and to coldly detach
herself from others. Similarly, Fido’s gullibility and readiness to be constantly cheated by
Helen – living up to her surname – is the result of her constructed self as a prudish woman

256 M. MORALESLADRÓN
of the time, asexual to the public eyes, but rather bearing a problematic sexuality, a repressed
homoerotic attraction for Helen. However, as a non-normative gender behaviour, Fido’s
identity as a lesbian cannot be granted a space in the text without being considered a per-
vert. Therefore, her awareness of such internal conict becomes the source of much distress
and psychological tension, which is enacted in the narrative through a symptomatic lack of
emotional regulation. In fact, as Donoghue explains in a nal note, her looks “carried sinister
implications of what doctors were starting to call ‘inversion’, ‘sex perversion’, or
‘homosexuality’”.30
Richard J. Davidson denes emotional regulation as “a broad constellation of processes
that serve to either amplify, attenuate, or maintain the strength of emotional reactions”,31
and human beings learn to regulate the expression of emotions through a socialising process
of adaptation. Although it is sometimes dicult, even for professionals of psychology, to set
clear-cut boundaries between normal and pathological mood disorders, its intensity or its
persistence in time are usually used as variables to be looked at. In the case of Helen, her
eorts to conceal her repressed “other” are materialised in an uncontrolled fury, a dissociation
between her will and her actions, arguing that her rage and not herself is to be blamed for
her incessant devious machinations, as she informs Fido:
‘If I ever give you … [sic] misleading impressions, it’s because I don’t know what I’m doing from
one minute to the next, or I’m ashamed to admit even to myself how far I’ve slipped. When I
love, I can’t hold back. I can’t help myself,’ says Helen in a choking voice. ‘You know that about
me, don’t you? You’ve always known’.32
Seen under this light, it could be contended that the characters of Helen and Fido typecast
the classical divide between reason and emotion that fuelled the literature of the times.
While Fido has turned society’s inequality into her own struggle for the improvement of
women’s rights, and her prudishness and repressed sexuality reveal how much she is in
control of her emotions, Helen appears, to the eyes of the Victorians, as the hysteric, the
enraged female who needs to be controlled. Considering that respectable women were
signicantly marked as asexual and that the sexuality of the married ones was reduced to
functioning as passive receptacles of the male’s drives, Helen’s deviation was a menace that
had to be constrained. Curiously, it is another woman, the mischievous Mrs Watson, who
forbids Helen to see her own daughters on grounds of being “a foul-mouthed hysteric”.33 As
a malady, hysteria was a common diagnosis for nonconformist women in the nineteenth
century, which basically masqueraded ignorance, fear for the unknown and a need to control
women’s power and intelligence. The novel wittily exemplies such a claim through the
letter Fido receives from Cambridge University, nally allowing women to enter into local
examinations, providing that she made “all necessary arrangements for dealing with any
candidate’s faints and hysterics [sic] ”. 34 In the case of Helen, even though she becomes aware
of her inner tensions, and that instances of her fears to lose sanity inform much of the nar-
rative, Donoghue refrains from making her play the role of the madwoman in the attic. In
fact, although during the trial the lawyer suggests that her only way out is to make the jury
believe that the stories of the escorts were the result of her imagination, she refuses to
conform to gender traps, assuring that: “I’d rather every paper in the country called me a
harlot than a pathetic lunatic who only imagines that men desire her”.35
Helen’s unresolved internal conict, between her private and public domain, is symbolised
in the text by the image of the splitting self. Blinded by desire, she is incapable of taking
responsibility on her actions or on her cynicism and evilness. Denial is, thus, the defence

IRISH STUDIES REVIEW 257
mechanism she activates to overcome the confusion and pain of the resulting psychological
tension. After the incident in Fido’s couch where she has sexual intercourse with Captain
Anderson, Fido confronts her, but she downplays the importance of the incident and calls
her hypocrite for defending women’s emancipation and not accepting to be the intermediary
of her love aair. However, when she manipulates Fido again to agree on another date in
her apartment where she will meet her lover, the narrator digs into her emerging divided
self:
The woman’s solid arms wrap around her [Fido], and for a moment Helen feels dizzy, because
both versions are true: in the back of her head she’s laughing at the spinster’s naïveté, and yet
she’d like nothing better than for Fido to sort out her life for her, somehow. Helen’s acting and
she’s sincere, at the very same moment: she wants to summon a cab and rush around the corner
to join her lover, ands he wants to stay here all evening, rocked like a baby in these strong arms.36
Helen’s weakness and vulnerability contrasts here with her apparent agency, as she seems
to be at the mercy of passion and instinct, rather than of reason. As Beverly Costa and Jean-
Marc Dewaele have explained, although the concept of splitting is multifarious, psychologists
usually address it as the “process of separating the self from dicult emotions and experi-
ences in order to defend from pain. This can serve a protective function or it can result in a
distorted view and disconnection from the self and others”.37 In her acknowledgement that
her splitting self is constituted by two personalities moving in contrary directions, Helen
eases conict by way of dissociating from her “other” self through denial. Noticeably, when
she is eventually cut- o from all ties, including her daughters and acquaintances, she arms
that “it’s a measure of my state that I can feel nothing but a numb blankness”.38
Instances of Helen’s ability to dissociate from an unbearable reality occur in several
moments along the novel, coming to a climactic ending during the trial, when she recurs to
laudanum and experiences a “strange detachment: she listens to the harangue as if it con-
cerns some other women altogether”.
39
Her struggle to protect herself against pain through
denial prompts her unresolved implicative dilemma, which not only concerns her problem-
atic position as a married woman with sexual agency in Victorian society but moreover in
cognitive terms. Within the PCT,
the notion of implicative dilemma emerged to designate those conicts in which the desired
change (for example, stop being depressed) implies, in the context of the network of constructs
forming a personal meaning system, undesired changes in one’s vision of oneself (for example,
becoming “unpleasant”). When these conicts occur in the construct system of an individual,
his or her capacity for change becomes blocked, which would be relevant to explain both the
onset of clinical symptoms as well as the resistance to treatment. Although these cognitive
conicts can coexist with interpersonal conicts and with secondary gains as postulated by
other theoretical approaches, they are independent from these and represent an innovative
contribution of PCT.40
This is so because, as self-armation theory explains, whenever human beings face feelings,
thoughts or actions that threaten their positive self-image, they respond by rearming their
selves rather than attempting to resolve the conict, since this would involve admitting the
dissonance between the private and public self-image. Such circumstance allows self-esteem
to appear unaected by the contradiction and derived tension.41 As O’Callaghan has main-
tained, Helen “presents a woman not only wilfully breaking her marital vows but doing so
simply for lust and the thrill of desire”.42 As she cannot change either her cognitions or societal
expectations, she resorts to creating distorted versions of truths and rearms herself alleging
that she was brought up outside Britain, under codes that allowed married women to have
escorts, while she is being judged by values with which she does not identify.

258 M. MORALESLADRÓN
Nevertheless, Helen’s behaviour, regardless of the clash in cultural beliefs, is often dys-
functional. Bearing in mind that: “Virtually all forms of psychopathology involve some abnor-
mality in emotional processes”,43 it is worth noting how her emotional reactivity often
contrasts with a cold and plotting attitude, while her inability to regulate emotions could
make a case for an aective disorder. As the employment of any clinical psychological theory
to analyse an aesthetic work is an insucient tool to distinguish between pathological emo-
tional processes from other kinds of manipulative distortions of reality, the focus will rather
be placed on Helen’s decient social skills as she is a distinctively unempathetic character.
Although human beings are born with an innate capacity to interact with others that devel-
ops throughout life, Helen acknowledges her failure to connect with people and to engage
in positive exchanges. When she goes all over town to search for her daughters, she begs
Fido to face the people, contending that she has a likeable “winning face”, while Helen’s
“ostentatious loveliness puts people’s backs up”.44 A lack of empathy moves her to act, dis-
sociating herself from her mask, and turning it into a weapon with which to nd her way
across norms. Writing to Anderson after he has revealed the news of his impending marriage,
she considers the possibility of resuming their aair, making herself sound “as high-minded
and persuasive as she possibly could; she tried to write it in the voice of another kind of
woman altogether”.45 However, the coexistence of these competing selves make Helen realise
that there must be something awry in her: “She’s coming to see that she was born with
something missing. She has talents, she even has virtues, but something’s lacking that would
bind them all together”.46 This “something’s lacking” is nothing more than her incapacity to
interpret people’s emotions and consequently respond to them empathically. In fact, the
more Helen lies, the more detached she feels from the reality she has made up. The false
accusation of rape is seen, in this context, as nothing more than Helen’s subconscious denial
that something so deviant and forbidden that could not even be named took place between
herself and Fido.
Considering that the novel delves into the importance of construction – of reality or of
the self – in the search for truth, it does not surprise that false impressions and wrong per-
ceptions play a relevant role, as Fido nally comes to realise: “People are never what they
seem, not even to themselves. Harry Codrington tried to rape her, after all, she reminds
herself – and all these years she’s managed to deny it. How murky the human mind can be”.
47
But in her steady performance, Helen only manages to deceive Fido, since she appears to
the rest of characters as a whimsical and provocative woman driven by ambition and lust.
On hearing about the adultery, the Vice-Admiral’s brother informs him that the family soon
guessed that she was an uncommon woman who never followed rules. He then wonders
whether he self-deceived himself to make his life easier. Also, Helen’s father had written a
letter to the Vice-Admiral the year before because he was concerned with his daughter’s
inappropriate behaviour. But, by far, the most unsympathetic character towards Helen is Mrs
Watson, who has witnessed how she was too close to men in Malta and accuses her of being
wild, careless and frivolous. She is also the one who convinces the Vice-Admiral and the
lawyer that Mrs Codrington is guilty of adultery and who contrives to play the trick of the
false letter. Mrs Watson’s wickedness, in this sense, equals Helen’s, although the former func-
tions as a clichéd character devised by Donoghue to exemplify how gendered power struc-
tures were perpetuated by women who supported patriarchal values. One should also add
here that Donoghue nds mischievous characters utterly appealing: “I do have a verbally
malicious side, which nds its outlet in my books. I love writing arguments in which people
say cruel, cruel things to each other”.48 However, in sustaining Helen and Fido’s friendship

IRISH STUDIES REVIEW 259
on interest and disloyalty, as much as Fido’s betrayal by her female colleagues when she got
involved in the court case, or even Mrs Watson’s scheming nature,49 the novel falls into
reproducing and ultimately perpetuating negative stereotypes commonly associated to
women, such as petty jealousy, revenge and evilness. As Donoghue elaborates on female
malice and trouble, The Sealed Letter also exposes how women had to beware and fear of
one another, while the male characters of the text seem to be liberated from such
deviousness.50
Just as characters are seen in light of one another, a further major aspect of the novel that
needs to be address from the perspective of constructivist epistemology is the way Donoghue
highlights the conicting dimensions of the trial from the points of view of the three main
characters, thus emphasising how reality and truth are mere constructs of relative signi-
cance built on the subjective, the temporal and the contextual. In a BBC4 radio interview,
Donoghue revealed that she always avoids taking sides and that in The Sealed Letter her
sympathies were divided among all three main characters.51 This explains how, once the
Vice-Admiral’s mind is fully disclosed, he emerges not without fault and no less cold-hearted
than his wife, in fact, as a “creeping, plotting, spy-hiring man. A skeleton puppet of a hus-
band”.52 Even more, in such patriarchal culture in which men’s rights were unlimited, it
appears as somewhat hideous that he defends himself against the accusation of rape claim-
ing that Fido wasn’t attractive enough: “not in my wildest dreams, not even if delirious or
demented would I ever consider carnal relations with you”.53 Moreover, once he has discov-
ered Helen’s indelity, his aim is to prove to the rest of the world that she is unworthy of him,
his only fear being that nymphomania would be a “congenital trait” that her daughters might
inherit.54 For her part, Fido’s appealing decency also distresses her, as she has signed a con-
fession made up by Helen and she is torn between loyalty to her friend and the defence of
a fake truth that positions her as nothing more than a “panderess”.55 Interestingly, she blames
the failures of female education for her approval of an adavit she never read, arguing that
women were taught nothing about law. As Donoghue has explained, what hooked her to
the story “was the idea of an earnest feminist businesswoman getting dragged into a mucky
divorce case to testify for the wife – and ending up, in a bizarre twist, speaking in support
of the husband instead”.56
In The Sealed Letter characters not only form their own idiosyncratic views on reality,
history also emerges as a discursive construction that needs to be told, retold and revised.
In fact, as if reproducing Donoghue’s own views on certainty, the solicitor remarks at one
point that: “There’s no objective way to tell a story”.57 In order to abound on a plurality of
meanings, the narrative plays with dierent formal devices that do away with the linearity
of the story and with truth. Chapters are devised as telescopes from which to present the
character’s dierent viewpoints, only to be challenged in subsequent sections. Italics are
used to introduce inner thoughts or recollections from the past, and to embed letters and
notes. In fact, and in spite of their apparent scarce and mere formal presence, it is precisely
letters, telegrams, notes and other kind of missives that move the action, connect all char-
acters and events, complicate the plot and become the source of much conict and tension.
Sentences and phrases written in such metatexts are often intertextually recalled or remem-
bered by characters and are quoted in dierent moments, establishing a dialogical relation-
ship with the original text, and evoking the dangerous quality of the written word. In addition,
the title of the novel already points at the potential of the letter to create meaning in what
ought to be kept secret.

260 M. MORALESLADRÓN
One should note at this point that from its origins in the eighteenth century, the epistolary
form has functioned as a narrative strategy that gave expression to a private, intimate and
confessional self. Both epistolary narrative and the diary soon became genres associated
with the female experience since the privacy of writing allowed women to express them-
selves more freely. As letters could be intercepted, they were often used as a vehicle to hide
rather than to convey meaning. And this is precisely the signicance Donoghue has conferred
to this novel, perceptively introduced in the opening poem by Eliza Cook. In The Sealed Letter,
if the excuse for the development of the plot is an absent letter – Fido’s apparent failure to
answer Helen’s while she was living in Malta – an unanswered telegram sent by the Vice-
Admiral triggers the climax and conrms Helen’s adultery. Furthermore, its eventual resolu-
tion will be signalled by a mysterious sealed letter, whose content is not revealed until the
end. Ironically, they are all the result of fabricated lies, both by Helen and the Vice-Admiral,
in their conspiring against each other that catches Fido in the middle.
The role of language in The Sealed Letter is crucial to understand how reality is constructed.
Characters are constantly dressing and re-dressing truth. Words from letters and notes often
resonate in their minds. When Helen fails to answer her husband’s telegram urging her to
return home as their young daughter is seriously ill, the Vice-Admiral’s puzzlement is re-en-
acted in the text through the incessant invocation of his own words: “Nell gravely ill, come
home at once [sic] ”. 58 Besides, when the verdict is made public, Fido considers how treach-
erous and hazardous words can be; an assertion that bears signicant implications since she
is a “femme de lettres [sic] ”,
59
who has struggled to set up a respectable literary magazine that
has turned into a fruitless endeavour precisely as the result of the power of language to
distort truth. Her motto, “Liberty! Let every woman do that which is right in her own eyes”,60
only demonstrates through Helen’s conspicuous treacheries how arbitrary right and wrong
can be, as its signicance is conveyed through language. This is how in the novel, creating
meaning/s turns into a source of power, since the one who controls language controls truth.
An evident instance is found in the covering of the court process by the Times – the news-
paper that reported the trial – which oered nothing more than “a peculiar distorted ver-
sion”61 of what really happened when, as Fido notes, “the truth is so much more complicated
[sic] ”.
62
During the trial all witnesses exaggerate facts, alter truths and lie, making Helen wisely
realise that “a courtroom turns nobodies to tyrants for an hour, giving them a stage on which
to spin their most inventive lies”.63 The struggle to gain power turns then into rhetoric, into
a discourse articulated around the ways language folds rather than unfolds its true meaning.
Likewise, when Fido discusses the content of the sealed letter with the lawyer, she concedes
a trial is a play on language, on things said and unsaid, in “an endless, sickening spiral”.64 The
ultimate irony of the trial lies in that the proof of the accusation rests on a letter that was
never written, but whose seal incites to terrible insinuations that are treated as truth. For
Pettersson, “the rupture of the sealed letter serves as a metaphor for the neo-Victorian mode
itself as this historical subgenre dives into the secrets of the past in an attempt to ll in the
blank pages of history”.65
Besides the treachery of the sealed letter, it is even more to the point observing how, as
an immoral act, the homoerotic desire between Fido and Helen needs to be repressed. That
is why its inexistence can only be secured in the blankness of the paper. More to the point,
Pettersson argues that even though “the Victorians were aware of lesbian aection, this was
not spoken of, due, in part, to the lack of terminology to describe same-sex desire between
women”.
66
Therefore, it does not matter whether lesbianism is not explicitly addressed in the

IRISH STUDIES REVIEW 261
novel, Donoghue was interested in showing how Helen and Fido’s special bond widened
the scope of common friendship:
This was a society that still relied on pair-bonds between women; women quite often shared
beds, lived with their married friends, even went along on honeymoons … Traditionally, physical
closeness between women was seen as harmless (because no penis was involved), and their
emotional closeness was thought of as helpful to society in general and marriage in particular.
What’s unusual in the story of the Codringtons is not the moment when young Fido moved in
with the couple, but the moment years later when Harry asked her (for reasons his lawyer later
claimed he’d noted down in the ‘sealed letter’) to move out. You get a sense from the court
records of a society just waking up to the terrible possibility that, in this generation of New
Women, who were asking for the vote and higher education, running businesses and living
independently of men, devoted friendship might morph into something subversive of marriage
rather than supportive of it.67
When the trial is over, Helen, the troublesome woman and the origin of most tension, aban-
dons the narrative. Her strength as a character that stood outside and beyond social expec-
tations was such that Fido’s stature as a reformer weakened, losing her space and protagonism
until the (masculine) law is eventually restored and she is drawn back to the margins of
society. Helen’s reappearance with immaculate looks, as the new Helen Smith, does so to
declare that she was never understood, that she was not “a sentimental Emma Bovary” and
that her place now is in “that universal no-place … the demimonde”.68 As a misplaced woman
within the moral strictures of the time, she can only occupy an ex-centric liminal position
from which she will be able to transgress the xity of centres and margins and coming centre
of stage in Donoghue’s narrative. Fido’s ending does not dier much, as her death was “fol-
lowed by a conspiracy of silence on the part of her comrades, who wrote her out of the
history of the rst British women’s movement”.69 Restoring her life and accomplishments
from the silence of history, Donoghue is challenging the validity of gendered biased versions
from the past.
In the present discussion, I have explored the presence of implicative dilemmas through
the lens of constructive psychology with a view to oer an in-depth study of the complex
relationships and personal quandaries that emerge in the narrative, and of how these are
inextricably connected with nineteenth-century social mores. I have furthermore tried to
demonstrate how a constructivist approach to analyse the pillars upon which The Sealed
Letter is erected enhances the reading of a narrative that revolves around the illusory nature
of objectivity and truth.70 Reality is a construction that originates in perception and comes
to existence through language. The way human beings perceive reality inuence how they
attribute meaning and make sense of it, thus creating their own narratives, their own histo-
ries. In this novel, Donoghue toys with perspective, angle and voice to oer the reader
alternative sides to the same story, the scandalous Codrington divorce case that shocked
British society in mid-nineteenth century. The novel narrates the opposed lives of two women
who did not full the female Victorian stereotype and who followed dierent paths to con-
struct their female subjectivities against the ground. While Helen’s maladaptation to society
decentred and drove her to the marginal position that a woman with sexual agency could
occupy, Fido’s achievement as a women’s reformer has only come to the fore through
Donoghue’s articulation of a narrative that has moved her back from the margins to the
centre of history. Although their spaces within the text alternate their protagonism, both
discourses gravitate around feminine subjectivity, agency and denial, diering in their indi-
vidual beliefs and cognitive processes, and complementing each other’s needs and lacks.

262 M. MORALESLADRÓN
Fido’s homoerotic attraction for Helen, silenced in the text in the blank page, symbolises the
eventual denial of a space in society for such deviant women. The Sealed letter is ultimately
a novel about the possibilities conveyed by language, “subtle and perceptive, rather than
descriptive”71 in its power to redress and distort reality, and in its playing around the idea of
folding and unfolding, hiding and disclosing bits and pieces of unattainable truths.
Notes
1. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, 35.
2. The Sealed Letter was awarded the Joint Winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction,
and was longlisted both for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and for the Orange Prize.
3. García Arranz, “The Whole City’s our Bawdy-House, My Lass”, 97. I have discussed elsewhere
the signicant contribution of contemporary Irish women writers – such as Mary Morrissy, Lia
Mills, Julia O’Faolain or Donoghue– to the renewal of historical ction and the unearthing of
forgotten or silenced gures from the past, for which I have applied the theories of Hayden
White, Paul Ricoer, Pierre Nora and François Lyotard. See in this regard Morales-Ladrón (2009
and 2016).
4. I am invoking here the concept of Grand narrative or master narrative as it was coined by
François Lyotard in his well-known study, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge,
in which he criticised normative ideologies.
5. See Morales-Ladrón (2009) for a detailed analysis of Slammerkin, which ctionalised the largely
unknown story of a real young woman who brutally murdered her mistress with a cleaver in
1763. Life Mask, also set in London in the 1790s, dealt with a love triangle that involved the
actress Eliza Farren, the Earl of Derby and the sculptor Anne Damer. According to Donoghue,
these novels form a historical trilogy that sought to oer alternative perspectives to the British
politics and society of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the author’s words: I see
The Sealed Letter as completing a sort of trilogy of investigations of the British class system,
from the desperation of poverty in Slammerkin, though the complexities of the genteel in Life
Mask, to the bourgeois embarrassments of The Sealed Letter in her personal webpage, http://
emmadonoghue.com. The Sealed Letter, on the other hand, has also been discussed as a neo-
Victorian postfeminist novel by O’Callaghan (2013) and Petterson (2013).
6. See Cokal, “Suering Suragist”; Lawlor, “Emma Donoghue’s Historical Novels”; Taylor, “The
Sealed Letter by Emma Donoghue”; and Bianchi, “The Sealed Letter by Emma Donoghue”.
7. Balbi, “Epistemological and Theoretical Foundations of Constructivist Cognitive Therapies”, 16.
Balbi explains that its history
spans the works of Giambattista Vico, Immanuel Kant, Hans Vaihinger, other scientists in
the eld of psychology, and the genetic epistemology of Jean Piaget. In the last twenty
years constructivist meta-theory has had a decisive inuence in the cognitive branch
of psychotherapy, an inuence that has led to the development of alternative models
which question the foundations of their forerunners and oer newer explanations and
methodologies.
8. See Winter, “Construct Relationships, Psychological Disorder and Therapeutical Change”.
9. Freixas, “Constructivismo y psicoterapia”, 309–10.
10. Chiari, “Emotion in Personal Construct Theory”, 249–50. See also Raskin, “Constructivism in
Psychology”, for discussions of the TPC and a review of the dierent positions that both align
and separate the two approaches.
11. Although Kelly’s theory dates back to the 1950s, it is still current and it has been revised in
later decades by Fransella, in International Handbook of Personal Construct Psychology; Walter
and Winter, in “The Elaboration of Personal Construct Psychology”; and more signicantly by
psychiatrist Vittorio Guidano through his contributions to Post-Rationalist Cognitive Therapy.
12. See Freixas et al., “Ecacy of a Dilemma-focused Intervention for Unipolar Depression”. The
term “cognitive conict” was initially proposed by Jean Piaget in the context of evolutionary
psychology and genetic epistemology in 1975.

IRISH STUDIES REVIEW 263
13. Ibid.
14. Pettersson, “Not the Kind of Thing Anyone Wants to Spell Out”, 13.
15. Donoghue, The Sealed Letter, 395.
16. As the author explains in the nal note, Fido spent the last years of her life with Charlotte
Robinson, to whom she left a few possessions in her will, as she had “made the last few years
of my life the happiest I ever spent”, in The Sealed Letter, 395.
17. Ibid.,17.
18. Ibid., 18.
19. Ibid., 190.
20. Donoghue has explained in a radio interview that what drew her to the Codrington divorce
in the rst place was
the unlikely conjunction of these two worlds, the rather scandalous circumstances of
the divorce, a military man trying to divorce his highly adulterous wife, and then this
very earnest starchy business women, Emily Faithfull, getting dragged into the wife’s
witness. She attempted to avoid testifying, she actually ed the country and when she
was dragged back she was ended up testifying more to support the husband’s case than
the wife, so it was an irresistible source,
in Lang, “I nterview with Donoghue on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row”. Pettersson has also argued that
Donoghue “deliberately uses eusive language to depict Emily Faithfull and Helen Codrington’s
relationship”, in “Not the Kind of Thing”, 16.
21. Donoghue, The Sealed Letter, 10.
22. Ibid., 12.
23. This was so under the 1857 Divorce act. However, in light of this law, their divorce seemed very
modern as Helen was already living a separate life from her husband, with separate friends
and rooms. Donoghue has added that throughout the research for her novel she found out
that this case was
one of the rst in which a wife took advantage of a new rule that let her make counter-
charges, and Helen certainly threw the book at her husband, accusing him of everything
from neglect, to cruelty, to attempted rape of her former best friend, Emily “Fido” Faithfull,
in Roulston, “The M Word”; and O’Callaghan adds to this that Donoghue’s novel reveals how
its nineteenth-century feminist concerns still prevail, in “Smash the Social Machine”, 64.
24. Donoghue, The Sealed Letter, 28.
25. O’Callaghan, “Smash the Social Machine”, 70.
26. Ibid., 72.
27. Ibid., 59.
28. In his discussion on madness and other kinds of mental transgressions, Peach connects such
liminal behavior with Foucault’s conception of illness as a social construction, ambiguous,
threatening and beneting from it:
In art and literature the mentally ill have come to occupy an ambiguous position. They are
perceived as posing a threat to the existing order, and are thus subject to denunciation,
while simultaneously, beneting from a Foucauldian view of madness, may be seen as
holding a mirror up to the social order, expressing fundamental, often uncomfortable,
truths about it,
in The Contemporary Irish Novel, 177.
29. Procter, “El sistema de constructos familiares”.
30. Donoghue, The Sealed Letter, 396.
31. Davidson, “Aective Style and Aective Disorders”, 307–8.
32. Donoghue, The Sealed Letter, 111.
33. Ibid., 178.
34. Ibid., 46.
35. Ibid., 283.
36. Ibid., 81.

264 M. MORALESLADRÓN
37. Costa and Dewaele, “Psychotherapy Across Languages”, 21.
38. Ibid., 217.
39. Ibid., 255.
40. Freixas et al., “Ecacy of a Dilemma-Focused Intervention for Unipolar Depression”.
41. Steele, “The Psychology of Self-Armation”.
42. O’Callaghan, 76.
43. Davidson, “Aective Style and Aective Disorders”, 319.
44. Donoghue, The Sealed Letter, 176.
45. Ibid., 156.
46. Ibid., 204.
47. Ibid., 240.
48. Charney, “Emma Donoghue”.
49. Sadly, when the verdict was made public in 1864, the Alexandra Magazine and English Women’s
Journal published a note stating that Miss Faithfull had no connection with them. No matter
how false this armation could be, it proved successful at pushing Fido outside history until
Donoghue recovered her story.
50. This is one of Donoghue’s elds of expertise, since she wrote her PhD dissertation on male
and female friendship in eighteenth-century literature, and later published the historical
monograph Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture 1668–1801.
51. Lang, “Interview with Donoghue on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row”.
52. Donoghue, The Sealed Letter, 145.
53. Ibid., 325.
54. Ibid., 225.
55. Ibid., 278.
56. Roulston, “The M Word”.
57. Donoghue, The Sealed Letter, 195.
58. Donoghue, The Sealed Letter, 97.
59. Ibid., 385.
60. Ibid., 170.
61. Ibid., 316.
62. Ibid., 207.
63. Ibid., 271. Donoghue has added that this was one of the most fascinating aspects of her research:
A court case, I realised, is the perfect source for a novelist because it is very detailed and
full and yet it is absolutely crumpled with lies. It is nobody’s testimony you can take as
absolutely reliable. You can smell the bias coming o them,
in Lang, “Interview with Donoghue on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row”.
64. Donoghue, The Sealed Letter, 334.
65. Pettersson, “Not the Kind of Thing Anyone Wants to Spell Out”, 37.
66. Pettersson, “Not the Kind of Thing Anyone Wants to Spell Out”, 13.
67. Roulston, “The M Word”.
68. Donoghue, The Sealed Letter, 386.
69. Ibid., 396.
70. As O’Callaghan has argued, the relevance of the historical approach to question its validity as
factual truth relies on its being as true today as it was in the nineteenth century: “Donoghue’s
representation of women’s sexualities reconstructs sexist and misogynistic responses to female
sexual behaviours from the nineteenth-century past that parallel attitudes expressed in the
new millennium, and which are the renewed subject of postfeminist criticism” (65).
71. Pettersson, “Not the Kind of Thing Anyone Wants to Spell Out”, 14.
Disclosure statement
No potential conict of interest was reported by the author.

IRISH STUDIES REVIEW 265
Funding
The research carried out for the writing of this article has been nanced by the “Vicerrectorado de inves-
tigación y Transferencia” of the University of Alcalá (Madrid, Spain), research project CCG2016/HUM-014
and by the “Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad”, research project FFI2017-84619-P.
ORCID
Marisol Morales-Ladrón http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2100-7346
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