In reference to a recent request, here’s the information on Michael McKeon’s article on Dror Wahrman’s Making of the Modern Self.
McKeon, Michael, Recent Studies in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century. SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 – Volume 45, Number 3, Summer 2005, pp. 707-771.
Someone directed me to Michael McKeon’s review of The Making of the Modern Self in Studies in English Literature, and I wanted to put a few things up in reference to McKeon’s review.
I’m not going to lie, I was having some issues with Wahrman’s work – I think he’s right when he talks about identity being a bit more unstable in the early 18th century than it was/is in later eras, but I certainly was having a hard time with his declaration that identity was so unstable, and eighteenth-century people were not considering it, to the point that they actually believed that people transformed into an identity that matched their dress (hence my earlier post about the fake marriages and fake priests). McKeon has this to say:
“When the Earl of Shaftesbury, Smtih, and James Boswell look within themselves and posit, in the interiority of the self, two distinct dimensions of selfhood, Wahrman inexplicably indicts them of believing in the literality of that distinction and of failing to meet the standard of interiority because they attribute the constitution of the self to external forces…Nor is it any part of Wahrman’s understanding that the very impulse to inquire into the nature of personal identity in the way that begins in earnest with Locke is itself the most evident sign that interiority has become an explicity postulate in English culture” (717)
McKeon’s analysis highlights a part of Wahrman’s argument that I found the most bizarre (McKeon calls this ‘baffling”). That internal experiments are not capable of yielding results that posit a stable internal self might be true of the eighteenth century. It is not true, however, that external knowledge and social experience fails as a determiner of identity.
McKeon continues:
“I think it makes a good deal more sense to understand that the modern category of individual and interior selfhood emerges in dialectical relation with the category of collective and external society. In fact, it is the dawning awareness that the determinant force of the external is not divine but human, not absolute and pre-ordained but contingent and social, that enables an awareness of the self as something that may be separated out from what need no longer be seen as the immutable cause of all effects…” (718).
McKeon also discusses the problems he has with Wahrman’s conception of the early novel – that Wahrman “ignores all counterevidence not only in the early novel itself, but also in the early theory of the novel” that characters are not, as Wahrman argues “universal types” (717).
I know that Wahrman’s book won an ASECS award for book of the year; this is why I find his work so perplexing. It also brings to mind an important issue that I face as a scholar – how do I evaluate a work as important, or interesting, or good, when it has so many flaws? How do I look past the unfortunateness of Wahrman’s mistakes, to find the things in his book that valuable? Do I simply say to myself “Well, okay, he goes a bit overboard, he makes a lot of generalizations that don’t stand up against the evidence, but he’s likely right when he notes a shift, even if I’m not sure his proof is solid?” I guess this is where my own knowledge of the time period has to come in; I guess this is why we read so many books on the same things. I feel this same confusion around other “important” texts – Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction, which to me feels somewhat forced, and Gilbert and Gubar’s Madwoman in the Attic, which is problematic in so many ways. There’s no doubt these texts are valuable, but how do I reconcile that value with their obvious drawbacks?
It never ceases to amaze me how often I forget that Samuel Richardson, and his novels, were incredibly pervasive in English literature. I’m reading Millennium Hall right now, and I’m just at the point where it’s revealed that Miss Mancel would have been assaulted by Mr. Hintman had he not died three days before she was to go visit him from a “fit of apoplexy” (Broadview Edition, pg 100). Shortly after his death is revealed, we discover that Hintman bragged that he would be “rewarded for long expectation, and boundless expence; for he should then, he said, be sure of her person, and had long secured her heart” (101). Hintman is then overheard telling his friends that though Miss Mancel has scruples and prejudices that might cause him difficulty, his “steward in a parson’s habit would lull them all to sleep” (101). That is, of course, an indication that Mr. Hintman was planning to trick Miss Mancel into believing that the pair had been legitimately married.
No one who’s read Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa can read this passage without having little bells going off in their heads – the predatory male who is, in some fashion, responsible for the maintenance of a young, innocent woman (by kidnapping, in Richardson’s novels, by ostensible generosity in Scott’s), the planned fake wedding – are all echoes of Richardson’s work. I’m continually amazed by how eighteenth-century authors, both men and women, felt the necessity to respond to Richardson’s work.
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On a completely different note, though perhaps connected, I just finished Dror Wahrman’s book The Making of the Modern Self. I was thinking, as I was writing that little bit on Richardson, how curious the idea that the role of the ‘parson’ can be filled by just anyone. Considering Wahrman’s contention that to wear someone’s clothes was to become that someone, that this role was so easily assumed by any old schlub that came by doesn’t initially seem that odd. Except that a priest had official duties, and an official capacity, and though Wahrman seems to suggest that eighteenth-century society would have seen a person dressed as a priest as a priest, this was one of the roles, I think, that couldn’t be assumed simply by changing costumes. A wedding performed by someone dressed as a priest would, in Wahrman’s context, be seen as legit, because to assume a priest’s clothing was to actually be a priest. Of course, we know that this isn’t the case in reality at all. A fake priest can only perform a fake wedding. I wonder how Wahrman would account for this. After all, if his argument about eighteenth-century notions of self is accepted, and an eighteenth-century audience would have believed that that David Garrick, while dressed in the costume of King Lear actually became King Lear, then wouldn’t a servant dressed like a priest become a priest?
I’m going to be straight with you: a blog was about the last thing I ever expected to have. You know how blogs usually are, people write about the mundane events in their lives, and then their even more boring friends read them…oh boy!
BUT, I’ve been reading some really good blogs lately (see the blog roll), and I wanted to see what would happen if I threw one together. That being said, if you’re looking for mundane events, you’ve come to the wrong place (though, as a grad student, I could probably give you some of the most mundane. How about: “July 4th. Today I read five chapters of a book. I also ate a sandwich, and watched a re-run of Oprah.”) My intention is to create a space where I can indulge my academic proclivities: namely, eighteenth-century literature and the like.
My plan is to write a post now and then about things I’m working on and thinking about, and hopefully I can get some comments that can help me think about things in a way that either helps my arguments along, or changes how I’m looking at things. Feel free to add your two cents. Feel especially free if you can trace my title’s reference. I’ll post something soon, I swear.
