Abstract
Jürgen Habermas suggests that with the rise of the epistolary genre, the eighteenth century finally feels at ease in the terrain of subjectivity. The study contends, however, that the Enlightenment subjectivity is never self-enclosed but fragmentary at best. Indeed, the sub-texts that one reads in Locke, Rousseau, and Kant reveal that these philosophical minds are constantly baffled by the discrepancy between memory and writing, reason and passion, to name a few. Through the study of eighteenth-century epistolary novels, such as Clarissa, Julie, and Evelina, one can start to see how the demand for authenticity by epistolary writers turns their attentions to the uncanniness of the human subjectivity and its displacement of the functions of memory.