Voices in a love story: Merida letters from the eighteenth century

The letter is the written genre, which in the past was nearest to orality, and it was used in the eighteenth century as a very important way of communicating officially and privately. The corpus of 33 letters under study constitutes a dialogue which discusses the issues concerning the marriage of a young mulatto girl with a slave. The corpus introduces 16 subjects-speakers and listeners or readers and writers in different production formats-instantiating the voices in this story. These voices represent conflicting ideologies-social and religious-but also conflicting interests in the development of the action. The study takes the corpus as a single text and interprets the plurality of voices as polyphony in the Bakhtinian sense.