IMAGINING A SELF

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 IMAGINING
A SELF

AUTOBIOGRAPHY
AND NOVEL IN
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY
ENGLAND

PATRICIA MEYER SPACKS

Harvard University Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England · 1976

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Copyright © 1976 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Spacks, Patricia Ann Meyer.

Imagining a self.

Includes index.
1. English fiction—18th century—History and
criticism. 2. Autobiography. 3. Identity
(Psychology) in literature. I. Title.
PR858.I3S6 823'.5Ό9 76-22460
ISBN 0-674-44005-6

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For Nathan Comfort Starr

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 Contents

1 Identity in Fiction and in Fact 1

2 The Soul's Imaginings: Daniel Defoe, William Cowper 28

3 Female Identities 57

4 The Defenses of Form: Edward Gibbon 92

5 The Beautiful Oblique: Tristram Shandy 127

6 Dynamics of Fear: Fanny Burney 158

7 The Sense of Audience: Samuel Richardson, Colley Cibber 193

8 Young Men's Fancies: James Boswell, Henry Fielding 227

9 Laws of Time: Fielding and Boswell 264

10 Selfhood, Given and Formed 300

Notes 317

Index 339

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 1
Identity in Fiction
and in Fact

utobiographies affirm identity. The autobiographer, attesting

A his existence by the fact of his writing, lives through his explana-
tions, tacit or explicit, of how he came to be the person he is. He
claims by his announcement of genre that he presents to the reader
some version of a real human being—perhaps as extravagant a figure
as any novelistic hero but asserted to be no fiction. Yet he exists on the
page by virtue of his story, his shaping of the events of his experience;
he exists as a literary phenomenon for essentially the same reasons
that Tom Jones appears to exist. Indeed, the spacious novels of the
eighteenth century, offering the names of their central figures as titles,
are equally preoccupied with character and with human identity.
Robinson Crusoe, Clarissa, Joseph Andrews, Evelina, Peregrine Pickle
—their stories focus on the intricacies, the paradoxes, and the difficul-
ties of human development. Their stories create them and create the
reader's answering faith and pleasure.
That faith and pleasure differ from the responses accorded to auto-
biography, in which the story is formed from events that presumably
really took place. Knowing that Edward Gibbon really lived and
wrote a great history, one reads his account of himself, assuming its
factuality, mainly to discover how he understands the happenings of
his life. The reader of Moll Flanders seeks different discoveries, curi-
ous about the protagonist's fate. The line between autobiographical
and fictional belief becomes more difficult to draw with someone like

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 Imagining a Self

Laetitia Pilkington—that rare figure, a real-life picaresque heroine—

about whom little is known aside from what she tells. She shapes her
mid-century memoir like a romance; her facts may be suspected to
bear little relation to actuality. Still, because the woman who writes
actually existed in the world, one accepts her version of her past as a
genuine record of identity. She tells who she is by showing how she
sees her experience, and she tells who she is even while lying about
what she has done. The reader who knows the falsity of Gibbon's
claim that all his brothers were also christened Edward is likely to find
it particularly interesting. Its power to reveal character increases if one
realizes that the episode derives from imagination rather than mem-
ory.
Memoir and fiction, however different the kinds of expectation they
create, raise a common problem about the nature of that identity they
assert. What constitutes character? Why does one believe in the con-
tinuity of personality? Eighteenth-century philosophers, considering
the problem as one in life rather than in art, concentrate on the indi-
vidual's subjective awareness of selfhood and what that means. To
know that one exists may seem simple enough. "For if I know I feel
pain," John Locke writes, "it is evident I have as certain perception of
my own existence, as of the existence of the pain I feel: or if I know I
doubt, I have as certain perception of the existence of the thing doubt-
ing, as of that thought which I call doubt. Experience then convinces
us, that we have an intuitive knowledge of our own existence, and an
internal infallible perception that we are." 1 Bishop George Berkeley
feels equally positive: "I do . . . know that I, who am a spirit or think-
ing substance, exist as certainly as I know my ideas exist. Farther, I
know what I mean by the terms I and myself; and I know this immedi-
ately or intuitively, though I do not perceive it as I perceive a triangle,
a colour, or a sound."2 But the self-evident could not survive David
Hume's onslaught. When he looks into himself, Hume reports, he dis-
covers only perceptions, no discernible, separate self. When he sleeps,
in effect, he ceases to exist. Other men, he grants, testify different
sorts of experience. Perhaps they differ in essence; he remains certain
no principle of selfhood exists in him.3 Identity, incapable of unifying
disparate perceptions, "is merely a quality which we attribute to them,
because of the union of their ideas in the imagination when we reflect
on them . . . Our notions of personal identity proceed entirely from

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 Identity in Fiction and in Fact

the smooth and uninterrupted progress of the thought along a train of

connected ideas" (I, 246).
These key philosophers suggest the range of the eighteenth-century
debate on identity, which became, after Hume, increasingly desperate
in tone. Hume himself willingly grants the possibility that others differ
from him, but to allow difference in so crucial a matter precludes
meaningful generalization. Thomas Reid asserts, "The conviction
which every man has of his Identity, as far back as his memory
reaches, needs no aid of philosophy to strengthen it; and no philoso-
phy can weaken it, without first producing some degree of insanity."4
Bishop Butler insists that "all imagination of a daily change of that
living agent which each man calls himself, for another, or of any such
change throughout our whole present life, is entirely borne down by
our natural sense of things."5 But both write in the shadow of Hume,
who demonstrates that such phrases as "our natural sense of things,"
solving no philosophic problems, mislead by substituting assumption
for perception.
A man concerned to prove his own existence could fall back on
memory: even Hume granted that, and Locke and Berkeley. By mem-
ory one possesses his past. The autobiographer converts memory to a
literary resource; the philosopher clings to it as an anchor of certainty.
Personal experience, as well as the evidence of psychoanalysis, leads
twentieth-century thinkers to question the unvarying validity of mem-
ory, but eighteenth-century philosophers (did they ignore their own
experience of fallibility? or was it different from ours?) strikingly con-
cur in their reluctance to wonder seriously about the reliability of
memory.6 Those speculating about memory recognize the theoretical
possibility that the testimony of memory might confuse itself with that
of imagination, but they quickly retreat from the implications of such
thinking. All agree that the difference between memory and imagina-
tion lies in memory's "superior force and vivacity," which speaks
directly to the understanding.7 Hume, going so far as to grant the pos-
sibility that an idea of the imagination might seem sufficiently forceful
to pass for a memory, yet concludes "that the belief or assent, which
always attends the memory and the senses" distinguishes their evi-
dence finally from that of imagination (I, 89). As Reid puts it, with his
customary positiveness, "Perhaps in infancy, or in a disorder of mind,
things remembered may be confounded with those which are merely

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 Imagining a Self

imagined, but in mature years, and in a sound state of mind, every

man feels that he must believe what he distinctly remembers, though
he can give no other reason of his belief, but that he remembers the
thing distinctly; whereas, when he merely imagines a thing ever so dis-
tinctly, he has no belief of it upon that account." 8
Memory declares the continuity of identity with relative certainty;
imagination does not—or so these philosophers assume. The unde-
pendability of imagination, considered as the power that creates
images, seems as clearly implied in eighteenth-century philosophic
discussion as the solidity of memory. But novel and autobiography,
the two developing genres that flourished during the century, raise in
their very natures some disturbing questions about the imagination
and its relation to the reality attested by memory. An autobiography
might be assumed to tell some truth about some self; yet contempo-
rary readers and writers perceived a danger of falsification in the very
fact of concentration on a single self. Moreover, by Hume's reasoning
the idea of selfhood itself exists only in the imagination, although it is
based on the testimony of memory. Autobiographers, therefore, from
the outset are dealing with fictions.® Novels, more dangerous still,
avowedly lie, their characters' identities corresponding to no literal
persons. Yet, bearing a troublesome resemblance to accounts of real
life, novels might violate for their readers the distinction between
memory and imagination.
The first thinker to articulate this problem with any clarity was
David Hartley, whose Observations on Man, published in 1749, codi-
fies and elaborates the theories of associationist psychology. Hartley,
concurring in the general faith in memory, yet recognizes the possible
effects of imagination. "The frequent Recurrency of an interesting
Event, supposed doubtful, or even fictitious, does, by degrees, make it
appear like a real one, as in Reveries, reading Romances, seeing Plays,
&c."10 In revery one may brood on a single episode until it seems real.
In reading romances and seeing plays "Recurrency" must consist
rather in the persuasive sequence of related events. Later (I, 377),
Hartley grants that confusion between imagination and memory need
not depend on repetition but may in fact be universal. His recognition
of the likely and dangerous confusion between revery and recollection
emerges forcefully in his treatment of the pleasures of imagination and
the function of art.
The poet—as a type of the literary artist—in Hartley's view sets out

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 Identity in Fiction and in Fact

consciously to obviate the distinction between the real and the imag-
ined. He deliberately chooses scenes and characters to produce strong
emotional effects. "In all these things the chief Art is to copy Nature so
well, and to be so exact in all the principal Circumstances relating to
Actions, Passions, &c. i. e. to real Life, that the Reader may be insen-
sibly betrayed into a half Belief of the Truth and Reality of the Scene"
(I, 431). Aiding the betrayal is the fact that "Poetry, and all fictitious
History" actually constitute "Imitations of real History," thus achiev-
ing special power over the emotions (I, 432) and thus becoming dan-
gerous. The pleasure of imagination may lead participants "to the
Knowledge of many important Truths relating to themselves, the ex-
ternal World, and its Author" (II, 244), but indulgence in the arts, as
creator or as enjoyer, may also distract from the good, encourage evil,
waste time and money. Morality, therefore, must control artistic
endeavor and artistic pleasure.
But can it? If imitations of real history may affect the mind like
direct experience, it follows that the writer possesses incalculable
power to subvert morality. Samuel Johnson, writing at mid-century,
expresses great anxiety lest novelists concern themselves too much
with the accuracy of their imitation, without dwelling sufficiently on
the problem of what should properly be imitated; they may cause a
reader to "lose the abhorrence of [characters'] faults, because they do
not hinder our pleasure, or, perhaps, regard them with some kindness
for being united with so much merit." 11 Since the writer of fiction need
not confine himself to literal truth, Johnson argues, he should feel free
to exhibit "the most perfect idea of virtue," thus fulfilling the moral
obligation that should take precedence over all merely literary or psy-
chological notions of the novelist's function.
By his reference to the pleasure of the reader, Johnson clarifies a
point implicit also in Hartley's argument: the power of literature to
sway depends on the reader's enjoyment, which increases his vulner-
ability. His enjoyment derives partly from his imaginative identifica-
tion with the characters. As Johnson points out in another Rambler
essay, "All joy or sorrow for the happiness or calamities of others is
produced by an act of the imagination, that realises the event however
fictitious, or approximates it however remote, by placing us, for a
time, in the condition of him whose fortune we contemplate; so that
we feel, while the deception lasts, whatever motions would be excited
by the same good or evil happening to ourselves."12 The word decep-

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 Imagining a Self

tion suggests again the danger inherent in the capacity of the imagina-
tion to obviate the crucial distinction between reality and illusion,
generating pleasure precisely through that loss of distinction.
The kind of identity possible for a character in fiction thus depends
on the novelist's purpose and function in manipulating his imitation of
the real. Fielding had offered his readers in Tom Jones a "feast" of
human nature, claiming realism as his sanction, his good characters
containing blemishes, like the good in everyday life. The identity of a
hero in his fiction, then, presumably duplicates the elements that con-
stitute literal human identity, whatever that means. Yet Fielding more
explicitly than any of his contemporaries or immediate followers ac-
knowledges fictional artifice, directly asserting the author's power as
contriver and manipulator of events. Leading his readers to involve
themselves in the imagination's deception, he also calls attention to
that deception as it takes place. And his very justification for the real-
istic complexity of his characters emphasizes a moral purpose suffi-
ciently powerful and well-defined to satisfy, one might think, even
Johnson. "The foibles and vices of men, in whom there is great mix-
ture of good, become more glaring objects from the virtues which con-
trast them and show their deformity; and, when we find such vices
attended with their evil consequence to our favorite characters, we are
not only taught to shun them for our own sake, but to hate them for
the mischiefs they have already brought on those we love." 13 Such talk
of loving and hating invites the reader to respond to Fielding's char-
acters as to real people, but his insistent concern with vice and virtue,
and with the means of leading the reader toward the good, stresses
authorial contrivance. The novelist implicitly recognizes the danger of
imaginative involvement in terms similar to Johnson's, but believes
that he can control his reader by using emotional effects for moral
purpose.
Characters in a novel do not have lives of their own, we do not
know the extent of their memories, and their futures are more impor-
tant than their pasts. Their becoming, more than their being, compels
our attention. Their identities derive, at least partly, from their func-
tions in a narrative; they exist in subordination to an author's pur-
poses for them (in the eighteenth century, usually his announced
moral intent). On the other hand, virtually all fiction writers in the
eighteenth century also claimed the authenticity of their imitation of
human life. As Fanny Burney puts it, discussing the nature of the

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 Identity in Fiction and in Fact

novel, "It is, or it ought to be, a picture of supposed, but natural and
probable human existence. It holds, therefore, in its hands our best
affections; it exercises our imaginations; it points out the path of
honour; and gives to juvenile credulity knowledge of the world, with-
out ruin, or repentance; and the lessons of experience, without its
tears."14 The moral power of fiction, Miss Burney points out, depends
on its psychological validity. Only if the life it reveals seems "natural
and probable" will it involve the reader's emotions and imagination
enough to lead him painlessly toward the paths of virtue. Johnson's
wish that the novelist depict "the most perfect idea of virtue" therefore
could not be gratified, even so devoted a disciple as Fanny Burney
realizes, because the idea of perfection bears little relation to the
"natural and probable."
Tom Jones's response to his situation (even Evelina's response) often
corresponds to our expectations of how real people might react in real
life. If sometimes a hero or heroine reacts as he or she should rather
than as they would, we make due allowance for the novelist's pro-
fessed moral intent. But fictional characters also diverge in less readily
accountable ways from what we think of as reality. The characters in
eighteenth-century fiction show less capacity for essential change than
we like to believe possible in life, and the limited possibilities for
change they have depend on external kinds of learning about the
world outside themselves. Jane Austen's heroines, in contrast, through
undergoing their confined and decorous experience, alter in minute
but important ways: Emma's final capacity to admit herself wrong
does not, like Tom Jones's prudence, constitute a quality added to her
earlier characteristics but an actual reversal of a previous set of as-
sumptions, and it derives from her increased understanding of what
lies within. On the other hand, even the central character of a novel so
unnervingly fluid in form as Tristram Shandy remains—to his pain
and our satisfaction—unalterable, his nature established by the cir-
cumstances of his conception and the events of his birth, both consti-
tuting his doom and creating his comic triumph.
Of course the very notion of literary characterization, like the no-
tion of character in life, implies fundamental consistency of personal-
ity. A character must, by definition, remain recognizable. But Fielding
and Sterne in particular elevate the principle of consistency almost to
one of rigor. Tom's gaiety, impetuousness, good will, his capacity for
sympathy and respect, govern him always; Blifil's concern for the

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 Imagining a Self

appearance rather than the reality of virtue remains equally steady.

Tristram Shandy, with his belief that a man's fate is virtually deter-
mined at his birth, articulates (and heightens to comic intensity) what
many eighteenth-century novels imply—although probably few nov-
elists would have admitted the implication. Human identity is abso-
lutely fixed.
This novelistic view of identity may reflect a nervousness resembling
that of the philosophers about the possible implications of change.
The more a character is permitted to change, the harder it is to pre-
serve the vital faith in personal continuity. The more he investigates
himself, the more problematic is the evidence of his undeviating real-
ity. Eighteenth-century novelistic characters, although a great deal
happens to them, testify their stability far more eloquently than their
flexibility. Fixed in their moral natures, uncorruptible by their experi-
ence, containing in their characters from the beginning the justifica-
tion of their secular salvation, they refute the philosophers by declar-
ing that identity, far from problematic, remains solid against all
external pressure, the substantiality of their being in itself suggesting
their virtue.
To remain essentially the same, in many eighteenth-century novels,
constitutes the central character's triumph. People are rewarded, in
those books, for being themselves: a way of defining the comic per-
spective that pervades the century's fiction. (Even Clarissa, of course,
presumably wins her heavenly reward.) The principles of orthodox
novelistic structure, to be sure, always demand both that something
happen to people in a novel and that the people remain themselves in
the face of all happening. Tom Jones both changes and remains invio-
lable; the same description applies in different degree to Dorothea
Brooke in Middlemarch, published 122 years later. But the eighteenth-
century hero and the nineteenth-century heroine in their ways of
growing diverge sharply. Tom learns what the world will and will not
permit and how much Sophia can tolerate; he governs his actions
accordingly. When he claims that from the first moment of hoping for
Sophia's hand he found other women no longer objects of desire to
sense or heart, we do not believe him. He may be able to refrain from
tumbling into the wrong beds hereafter, but no evidence leads us to
credit his claim of a shift in his emotional potential. That claim be-
longs to the realm of rhetoric. Dorothea, on the other hand, learns

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 Identity in Fiction and in Fact

what her feelings are and mean. Those feelings justify as well as ac-
count for her actions: outer knowledge versus inner, change in action
versus change in feeling. It is more important to point to Dorothea's
change than to her consistency but more meaningful to insist on Tom's
essential lack of alteration, the distinction a matter of emphasis.
For if the optimism of the nineteenth century focuses on the possi-
bilities of change, that of the eighteenth depends on the reassurances
of stability. Nor is it only because (as the gloomy Tory satirists pro-
claim) change often implies decay but more simply, because change is
unpredictable. Novels and autobiographies of religious conversion
provide acceptable contexts for the dramatization of significant
change specifically because they render alteration comprehensible and
recognizable by placing it in a scheme that defines, limits, and justifies
it. On the whole, though, the most hopeful eighteenth-century view of
experience suggests that men, like nations, flourish by becoming more
fully themselves and by believing—insisting on their belief—in them-
selves as consistent entities.
Moll Flanders, Pamela, Tom Jones, and Evelina—one might add
most of Smollett's heroes—all face the problem of discovering and
defining their proper social positions. The atmosphere of social fluc-
tuation so familiar in the eighteenth-century novel contrasts sharply
with the personal stability that I have been trying to describe. Indeed,
the claim to rise in the world made by the four characters mentioned
depends largely on the inviolability of their personal identities. Moll,
epitomizing (as many commentators have recognized) the values of a
capitalistic society, unwavering in her concern with personal security,
achieves security and status as a direct result of that unwavering con-
cern. Pamela wins the right to be a lady by her insistence on being her-
self; Tom's embodiment of Squire Allworthy's kind of personal nobil-
ity makes him the squire's natural heir; Evelina's purity in the face of
social corruption fits her to marry the true aristocrat. If one considers
this group of novels as exemplifying the moral purposes their authors
consistently profess, it seems necessary to conclude that virtue, for
these writers, depends upon an uncomplicated integrity of identity—
and a very specifically personal identity. However much writers of
fiction speak of general human nature or general moral truth, their
interest centers in the individual and in an awareness of individual
complexity. Most definitions of the traditional novel assume that fact.

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 Imagining a Self

The aspects of Moll that make her different from other women, Tom's
idiosyncrasies, noble and ignoble, Tristram's disturbingly plausible
though bizarre peculiarities compel our attention.
"The novel like every form of art," A. A. Mendilow has observed,
"is the product of the close cooperation between writer and reader."15
Writer and reader between them establish the illusion of identity in
fictional personages, creating and discovering in the characters' re-
sponses to experience that solidity of personality that Hume declares
so elusive in self-perception. We speak confidently of character in
eighteenth-century fiction; it is inconceivable to doubt its continuity.
Hume describes the mind as "a kind of theatre, where several percep-
tions successively make their appearance; pass, repass, glide away,
and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations." He adds,
though, that the theatrical metaphor points only to the dynamic suc-
cession of perceptions: we have not "the most distant notion of the
place where these scenes are represented, or of the materials of which
it is composed."16 The metaphor suggests that when we reflect on our
perceptions we discover (or invent?) a drama, an action, that assures
us of our own reality. We believe in the existence of the theater—the
continuing self that we cannot directly perceive—because we believe
in the action that takes place within it.
Someone else invents the action of a novel, which declares the
stability of the personalities who enact it. The reader, asked merely to
suspend his disbelief, need give only temporary assent to the reality of
those personalities. But his assent, however temporary, may be pro-
found. For the duration of the novel, its characters have absolute
authority. Before any other purposes they may be assigned, they ful-
fill the purpose of simple self-assertion. Telling their own stories or
acting as subjects of a narrator's story, they declare the overwhelming
fact of their own existence: existence in and through story.
They exist because they are imagined and perceived, and they are
perceived more confidently (although within a conditional frame-
work) than we can perceive ourselves. The structure of cause and
effect that contains them makes more sense than the haphazardness of
real life. Even such an imitation of haphazardness as Tristram Shandy
reveals an inexorable logic. Tristram, unique in this respect as in
others among the fictional protagonists of his time, sometimes doubts
his own identity, but no reader can doubt it. The very consistency of
his voice affirms it and the weird consistency of his experience. The

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 Identity in Fiction and in Fact

reader believes in a character's identity not because the character be-

lieves in it, not on the basis of the character's memory, but as a result
of that character's existence in a succession of moments recorded, ulti-
mately, in the reader's memory as part of his experience. Moll Flan-
ders, who purports to write her recollections, yet appears to exist only
in the present. Pamela, Clarissa, Evelina, the dramatis personae of
Humphry Clinker—all, writing their endless letters, assert their pres-
ence moment by moment.17 Affirming their identities in action, they
help us to affirm our own by claiming the comprehensibility and con-
tinuity of experience. Like Dr. Johnson kicking the stone to declare the
reality of the objective world, the novelists of the eighteenth century
insist on the ease with which Hume's doubts can be refuted.
Finally, of course, the characters in novels live and move and have
their being in our minds. Fictional characters can possess our imagina-
tions and exploit our memories, which supply us with the evidence of
common experience, common humanity. Authors claim only that
their characters imitate humanity and demand of their readers only
the suspension of disbelief, not the total credulity that makes Partridge
admire Claudius, thundering like a real actor, more than he does
Hamlet, that little man who feels only what anybody would feel. He
believes in Hamlet not as performer but as experiencer. Fielding's tacit
warning to his readers, through Partridge, about the danger of uncriti-
cal faith in the reality of artifice acknowledges the moral problem
implicit in the creation of fictional characters, the problem understood
by Dr. Johnson and by Hartley. Altering our imaginations, fiction
may alter our lives. Novelistic characters in realistic fiction may serve
various functions for their creators: spokesmen or targets (as in Eve-
lina), surrogates for forbidden or impossible action (Moll Flanders,
Robinson Crusoe), playthings and puppets (Tom Jones), alter egos
(Tristram Shandy). Always, though, the novelist has the characters
more or less under his conscious or unconscious control. He may
claim that his imaginary people take over the action, developing
minds of their own. Still, he can always stop writing; without him
those people would not exist. As for the reader, once fictional person-
ages enter his imagination they do exist, their power over him greater
than his over them. (He can close the book, but the characters sur-
vive.)
By giving their characters distinct and compelling human identities
the novelists of the eighteenth century created potentially perplexing

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 Imagining a Self

moral issues. A few years before Richardson and Fielding began writ-
ing, the literary world had been wracked by dispute over the moral
effect of The Beggar's Opera. Young men responding to the charm of
Captain Macheath, moralists feared, would go and do likewise, per-
suaded to sin by the glamor of the highwayman's life. The moralists
even found case histories to prove their point, deathbed confessions
by reprobates willing to declare their downfall Gay's fault. They did
not believe uncritically, like Partridge, in Macheath's reality or his lit-
eral irresistibleness to women. But the highwayman as lover provided
a potent image that, entering the imagination, affected action as well
as thought.
Moral responsibility depends on consistent identity. Philosophers
agreed on this point, recognizing that madmen could not be held
responsible for their acts specifically because their altered conscious-
ness made them, to all intents and purposes, different people from
their sane selves. But as Dr. Johnson suggested, all power of fancy
over reason is a degree of insanity. Novels, stimulating the fancy and
encouraging vicarious enlargement of identity, thus endangered sanity
in its most rigorous definition by disturbing the clear preeminence of
memory. By making imagination as vivid as memory, by creating
characters whose identities persuaded readers' belief, they threatened
the truisms about continuity and responsibility.
Putting the problem in those terms makes it rather quaint. Certainly
no mature modern reader will concern himself seriously with the
possibility that reading Fielding or Smollett may lead him to depravity
or, for that matter, insanity. We make firm distinctions now between
the literary life and the life of action—although such figures as Nor-
man Mailer may raise doubts about exactly how secure those distinc-
tions are. Yet the fundamental question that Johnson and Hartley tried
to articulate remains significant, becoming even more compelling if
one wonders about the nature of personal identity. And such wonder-
ings are, of course, still with us. A contemporary psychoanalyst
writes, "Self and identity are not facts about people; they are ways of
thinking about people."18 He adds that self means "my body, my per-
sonality, my actions, my competence, my continuity, my needs, my
agency, and my subjective space . . . self is a way of pointing" (p. 53).
Identity in fiction seems more secure than in literal experience. Robin-
son Crusoe has a solidity of being that we might hesitate to assert of
one another in real life. How does the firm identity of fictional charac-

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 Identity in Fiction and in Fact

ters function for the reader? or of autobiographical characters?—for

such questions refer properly not only to the novel but to autobiogra-
phy as well. When we see Pamela turning her life into story, we
recognize the degree to which her fantasy imposes on reality, under-
standing how she creates herself through her letters. Real people,
asserting their identities in prose, also to some extent create them-
selves. Can we, then, worrying about the problem of literary identity,
make any significant distinction between the selves evoked in fiction
and those established by records that claim to be factual?
David Hume, the great questioner of personal continuity, vividly
asserts his own. He wrote his eleven-page autobiography—"the pane-
gyric on himself which he calls his life," as James Boswell describes
it19—in 1776, when he was sixty-five years old and knew himself
mortally ill. It begins, "It is difficult for a man to speak long of himself
without vanity; therefore I shall be short." 20 The author's further
defense against vanity, he adds, is that he proposes to present a narra-
tive that "shall contain little more than the history of my writings" (p.
v), justifying the device by the fact that "almost all my life has been
spent in literary pursuits and occupations."
Roy Pascal, one of the few theorists of autobiography, has com-
mented, "It is with relief, we feel, that [many autobiographers] . . .
write about their achievement, their gift, their attitude, solid, com-
forting realities as compared with themselves."21 He also observes,
"The purpose of true autobiography must be 'Selbstbesinnung', a
search for one's inner standing" (p. 182). Hume, for all his claim to
write about "little more" than the history of his writings (and we feel
unmistakably the relief with which he retreats from the vanity of self
to that of the author), uses that "little more" to assert an "inner stand-
ing" based on his invincible equanimity, attested, according to him, in
his response to every adversity. He was "naturally of a cheerful and
sanguine temper" (p. vii); hence the failure of his Treatise of Human
Nature did not long trouble him. His Inquiry Concerning Human
Understanding and a collection of his essays were also overlooked by
the public, but "such is the force of natural temper, that these disap-
pointments made little or no impression on me" (p. ix). "Not being
very irascible in . . . temper," he never involved himself in literary
squabbles. He "was ever more disposed to see the favorable than
unfavorable side of things; a turn of mind which it is more happy to
possess, then to be born to an estate of ten thousand a year" (p. x).

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 Imagining a Self

And so on. Once he confesses to having been discouraged, at the

reception of the initial volume of his history, which sold forty-five
copies in the first year. But he soon recovered, "now callous against
the impressions of public folly" (pp. xii-xiii). Facing death, he says, he
has "never suffered a moment's abatement of my spirits" (p. xv);
indeed, this final period of his life seems to him the happiest. Finally
he summarizes his own character: "a man of mild disposition, of
command of temper, of an open, social, and cheerful humor, capable
of attachment, but little susceptible of enmity, and of great modera-
tion in all my passions" (pp. xv-xvi).
Many of these formulations about his personality suggest the defen-
sive function of such a self-image. The value of his nature, as he
understands it, derives from its power to protect against the vicissi-
tudes of literary life. His triumph consists in his development of
callousness. He describes himself often in terms of negatives: not very
irascible, never suffering abatement of spirits, little susceptible of
enmity. After his description of his happiness at the end of life, he
summarizes, "It is difficult to be more detached from life than I am at
present" (p. xv). Detachment represents the ideal to which all his
cheerfulness contributes. The mildness, moderation, and self-com-
mand of which he boasts encourage lack of full involvement in intense
relationships, and his claim to be "capable of attachment" lacks con-
viction in the face of the autobiography's abundant evidence of his
tendency to withdraw and protect himself from danger embodied in
other people.
Hume's self-affirmation and self-justification—necessary aspects,
probably, of all autobiography—express themselves principally in
self-defense: against outer and inner forces. He must guard himself from
the world, but also, we may surmise, from his anger at the world. He
does not claim, in his statement of intent, to offer any picture at all of
his psychic life; yet the account he provides emphasizes the omnipres-
ence of his inner poise as a central truth. Denying all rage, almost all
depression, insisting on the consistency of his emotions, he declares
an identity based on feeling—while professing to declare one resting
on his literary vocation—and based specifically on the utter predicta-
bility of his emotional life. It may still be true, in his age as in his
youth, that he finds within only a bundle of perceptions and
emotions, no distinctive discernible self. But looking back over a life-
time's perceptions and emotions he discovers often repeated the exper-

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 Identity in Fiction and in Fact

ience of responding cheerfully to adverse circumstance. And he finds

that he displays always a distinctive character. Speaking of himself in
the past tense, looking at his life in the perspective of his death, he
appears to feel no doubt about his consistency of self. If this identity is
simplified almost to the point of caricature, it becomes more emphatic
for being that. Against all doubt (the doubt of audiences unconvinced
by his interpretation of metaphysics or history, the doubt of the self
about the self) he asserts his certainty: he knows who he is, or was. "I
cannot say there is no vanity in making this funeral oration of my-
self," he concludes, "but I hope it is not a misplaced one; and this is a
matter of fact which is easily cleared and ascertained" (p. xvi). His
vanity, in other words, is justified by the facts; in emotional simplifi-
cation lies truth. We know, and surely Hume knew too, that no man
ever lived an entire life unmarked by anger, fear, misery, however
powerful his self-command. Yet his vision of successful disengagement
provides him with an interpretation of his experience 'hat helps him
to face death, that ultimate disengagement, as a true culmination.
Autobiographies, of course, provide interpretations, not merely
records. The defensive function of self-interpretation seems striking in
other eighteenth-century life stories besides Hume's. Hume presents
himself as though the cheerfulness that others might suspect to be a
mask instead embodies his ultimate substance. Colley Cibber glorifies
his own follies; his daughter, Charlotte Charke, insists against all
evidence on her fundamental identity as good daughter; Laetitia Pilk-
ington declares that she wants only to be a good wife while demon-
strating that she also wants something quite different: financial
independence and literary fame. In all these cases, the reader is left
with an uneasy conviction that important matters have been left out.
But we read all autobiographies "not as factual truth but as a wrestling
with truth," Roy Pascal explains (p. 75). All autobiographers wrestle,
specifically, with the truth of personal identity: trying, perhaps, to
record that ineluctable sense of self to which some philosophers
testify; trying, perhaps, to discover it or to manufacture it. The
individual autobiographies I have mentioned so far, in which the
effort to assert a distinct identity seems a way to defend against the
world's encroachments on the self, all suggest some attempt to invent
a valid identity for defensive purposes. Such autobiographies do not,
of course, like novels devise the happenings that will create conscious-
ness of character in the mind of the reader. We assume that the hap-

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 Imagining a Self

penings of autobiography are more or less given, although the writer

obviously selects among his memories and shapes them to his
purposes. Events in autobiography, then, do not create character in the
same way as events in fiction. Yet one may feel that the central char-
acter of an autobiography has created a self, then written the book to
validate the creation. The writing itself may constitute the creation.
Hume, looking back over his life, facing the imminent prospect of his
death, mythologizes himself as a man virtually devoid of passion and
therefore impervious. Setting down the myth, he fabricates the
identity he cannot simply perceive. Mrs. Pilkington reflects on her
long, chaotic struggle for survival and the endless insults to which she
has been subjected. However indistinct her version of her being, she
can yet interpret herself as heroine, forced by events to behave
sometimes in dubious ways, but pure in heart and womanly in intent
if not in action. Her prose converts her into a person of significance,
defending her against the world's reluctance to take her seriously.
The atmosphere of self-invention about these autobiographical
records of course raises doubts about the firmness of the personal
sense of identity they presumably assert. James Boswell, who invents
himself, in various versions, before the reader's eyes ("I have discov-
ered," he writes, "that we may be in some degree whatever character
we choose" 22 ) epitomizes the uncertainty—not unmixed with exhilara-
tion at the range of possibilities—that afflicts some of the century's
autobiographers. Writing journals rather than formal retrospection,
he is, like Hester Thrale and Fanny Burney (and like Pamela and Clar-
issa in fiction), an autobiographer of the moment, concerned with the
pattern of a day or a week rather than a life. Unlike his female coun-
terparts, he demonstrates no paramount need to defend against the
opinion of others, although his concern with appearances yields to
none in its intensity. His writing exists less to make an impression on
the world than to explain himself to himself. The journals embody an
endless struggle to make sense out of his life, a struggle of interpreta-
tion in which one form of self-understanding gives way to another in a
conflict-ridden sequence that creates drama from the act of writing. If
novelists like Richardson and Fielding assert the stability of identity,
Boswell insists on the converse. Identity, he suggests, is made.
That is a rather frightening idea, whether it gives each individual
vast responsibility for his own nature or makes him the victim of what
happens to him. The associationist psychologists, with their vision of

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 Identity in Fiction and in Fact

every external cause creating a lasting internal effect and contributing

to a structure of associations that determine individual responses, hint
a similar view, suggesting that people become who they assert them-
selves to be. Of course, they believe that the process naturally has a
happy ending.23 But the actual process of becoming does not neces-
sarily feel so secure. Some autobiographers, looking back over an
expanse of experience, have a large stake in understanding their lives
as structures of necessity—for good or for evil. William Cowper,
unable to accept melancholia as a psychic state with only internal
meaning, must explain his emotional life as evidence of his relation to
God. His isolation and his precarious and hard-won sense of com-
munity both belong to his drama of salvation. If Hume, Cibber, and
Mrs. Pilkington exemplify autobiography as defense, and Boswell
epitomizes autobiography as invention, Cowper writes the autobiog-
raphy of rationalization. Unlike Boswell, he cannot afford to explore
alternative ways of "making sense"; he must cling to one way. The
interpretation shapes the experience; every aspect of his life has mean-
ing given to it from a source outside himself.
Cowper, we think, was intermittently insane; thus we may explain
the peculiar intensity of his explanation. But the self-rationalizing
autobiography, clinging to the certainties that make the chaos of
human existence appear a reasonable sequence, belongs not only to
the insane. Edward Gibbon, turning from the history of empires to his
own, finds in his past a series of events so subject to rational elucida-
tion that he feels tempted to believe his destiny fixed from birth,
although his customary self-protective irony makes him avoid saying
so. Citing Hume as a precedent in autobiography, he really does what
Hume claimed to do. He describes his life in terms of his vocation.
Childhood prepared him for that vocation, the earliest accomplish-
ments of infancy assume meaning in relation to it, and the exclusions
of his life justify themselves through it. Like Cowper, although in rad-
ically different terms, he discovers a reason for everything, discovers a
life that makes triumphant sense. If an identity based on the work one
does seems at the outset rather superficial, Gibbon persuades the
reader of its profundity. His work comprises his nature; his nature
expresses itself fully through his work. Nothing exists for him outside
that circle. But the externality of such an emblem of identity suggests,
once more, greater philosophic uncertainty than one discovers in nov-
els. Such an autobiographer discovers who he is—that he is—through

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 Imagining a Self

inspection of what he has done. He deduces a self and accounts for it.
The deduction derives from memory. In this respect, at least, all
autobiography confirms the philosophers' views about the founda-
tions of identity. It asserts the solidity of personality on the basis of
the past. But how much—to return to an earlier question—does imag-
ination contribute to the shape of that past? The question did not
apparently occur in this form to eighteenth-century theorists or practi-
tioners, who generally believed in the firm distinction between stories
invented and stories recalled. One can argue, though, that the fact of
story is more important than its nature and that story implies inven-
tion. Narration, Richard Gilman says, is "precisely that element of fic-
tion which coerces and degrades it into a mere alternative to life, like
life, only better of course, a dream (or a serviceable nightmare), a way
out, a recompense, a blueprint, a lesson." And Lionel Trilling remarks
that "a chief part of the inauthenticity of narration would seem to be
its assumption that life is susceptible to comprehension and thus of
management. It is the nature of narration to explain; it cannot help
telling how things are and even why they are that way." 2 4 Autobiogra-
phies as much as novels depend on narration, provide explanations,
and insist on the comprehensibility of life. If Pamela's story creates her
identity, so does Mrs. Pilkington's, and in both cases the story differs
from the experience it records, although we can rarely ascertain
exactly how or to what degree.
Every lie tells some truth: knowing that Heinrich Schliemann's
autobiography is largely the product of his fantasy, we perhaps know
more about him—how he wishes, how he dreams—than we would
have learned from a meticulously factual report. 25 His identity as
comprehended by his readers, then, derives from his imagination
more than his memory, and one suspects that his sense of subjective
identity, too, rests largely on the testimony of imagination. The auto-
biographer's "fiction" is stronger and more telling than his "truth."
Man's need to understand his life as a story and his need to tell that
story suggest that the subjective faith in continuous personal identity
depends on the explanations provided by the imaginative process of
story-telling as well as the bare recollections of memory. Moreover,
the conversion of life into story reflects the human need to declare not
only the identity but the larger-than-life significance of the self. "Liter-
ary shape cannot come from life," Northrop Frye points out; "it comes
only from literary tradition, and so ultimately from myth." 26 By

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 Identity in Fiction and in Fact

myths man dignifies his condition. Shaping his life into a pattern de-
rived from his imagination and his literary experience, he insists that
he is both real and important. From a rigorous philosophical point of
view, of course, the kinds of explanations provided by imagination—
"false" as they are—only deceive, creating the basis for an illusory
belief in continuity and blurring the vital distinction between real and
unreal. But novels and autobiographies reflect another point of view,
answering Hume's unanswerable question about how one can be
assured of his identity simply by shifting its terms.
Autobiography assures its author of his existence beyond all possi-
bility of philosophic denial. Through it he comes to terms with his past
or exorcises it. The psychoanalyst Helene Deutsch, writing her own
memoir in her late eighties, testifies that through the process she redis-
covered buried "memories that have even eluded thorough psycho-
analysis." 27 The author presents for public contemplation a version of
the self that he wants or needs or chooses to offer, rarely recognizing
distinctly the imaginative components of that version. (Such highly
self-aware twentieth-century autobiographers as Vladimir Nabokov
and Mary McCarthy, of course, do realize how much self-depiction
derives from imagination and exploit this fact. But such realization is a
modern phenomenon; one discovers no evidence for its equivalent in
the eighteenth century.) A sense of identity and a conception of the
past put into words obviously differ from their equivalents existing in
the mind, if only by their objective status. We quite readily assume
now that, to varying degrees, people do make themselves up. This is
what Hume realized, looking within: people invent the selves they
cannot directly perceive. The realization severely limited his capacity
for certainty about personal identity. But it may also enlarge the sense
of certainty, although locating the certain on shaky philosophic
ground. It is certain that man must believe in his own distinctive exist-
ence, however his isolated reason denies it; Hume supports this point
by his autobiography. It seems certain now—although apparently it
didn't in the eighteenth century—that people remember less than they
think they do, that they imagine part of what they believe they re-
member, and that they are unable to distinguish, in such contexts, be-
tween memory and imagination. Imagination, then, both helps to
create developed subjective identity and testifies to that identity in
the same way that memory does. To read an autobiography is to
encounter a self as an imaginative being.

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 Imagining a Self

This statement describes autobiographies written in the eighteenth

century, whose authors would not have assented to its truth, as accu-
rately as those composed with full consciousness of the power and
ambiguity of imagination. We need not know (although we may) the
facts about Hume's intermittently precarious psychic health or his epi-
sodes of irascibility to feel that the portrait he draws in his autobiogra-
phy is more fanciful than realistic. Even without awareness of such
facts, we understand that Hume's autobiography, or Cibber's, or
Cowper's, reveals something of how a man sees his reality and that
self-perception—like one's perception of other people—draws on
other resources than factual knowledge.
Characters in fiction exist as the objects of someone else's imagina-
tion. The heroes and heroines of autobiography achieve identity as
objects of their own imagination. Both assume new life in the imagina-
tion of the reader. The nature of that life depends on the plots they
inhabit and on the patterns of psychic action that underlie plot. Auto-
biographies and novels alike must achieve form, by discovery or by
invention.28 The possibilities for shaping the events of a real life into a
pattern that reveals their true meaning may seem more limited than
the novelist's infinite opportunities for inventing happenings as well as
the patterns to contain them, but the challenge facing the
novelist—the challenge of the infinite—is surely equally perplexing.
Novelist and autobiographer must find the causality that produces
plot: this, therefore that; this and this and this, therefore me; and,
deeper still, the laws of motivation that generate psychic action: the
answer to the question, Why this and that?
One may arrive at some understanding of the web of psychic action
by inquiring what the characters of novel or autobiography really
want. Moll Flanders, like everyone she encounters, wants security.
Pamela wants to preserve her honor, perhaps to heighten it; Squire B.,
her antagonist, wants precisely the same thing. Tom Jones and Blifil
and Thwackum and Square and the rest want to establish their places
in the world. Of course, each of these simple formulations implies
complex psychological and moral perceptions, since the meanings of
such terms as security, honor, place in the world reflect the individual
orientations of those thinking about them. In fact, the conflicts
depicted in those novels center on the clashing meanings of such
words and the clashing self-interests of those concerned with them.
The same is true in autobiographies. Boswell wants to choose

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 Identity in Fiction and in Fact

among the plausible characters he can manufacture. Gibbon wants to

declare his control of experience through vocation. Hume wants to
achieve superiority to events. Mrs. Thrale wants to assert her impor-
tance. Other figures besides the protagonist in eighteenth-century
autobiography often seem extremely shadowy; so the pattern of psy-
chic action rarely involves the entire cast of characters in autobiogra-
phies as it usually does in novels. But, as in novels, it organizes and
unifies the presentation of character; indeed, it helps to establish that
a character has a character.
Real life, as I have already suggested, seldom manifests such orderly
and revealing patterns as one finds in its literary renditions. Action of
the sort I have been describing belongs to literature; it belongs ulti-
mately, as Frye would argue, to myth. To turn lives into words—
whether those words claim to render fiction or fact—involves some
act of the mind that discovers the logic of happenings in memory or
imagination, although such logic seldom emerges in immediate experi-
ence. Putting a life into words rescues it from confusion, even when
the words declare the omnipresence of confusion, since the act of de-
claring implies dominance.
But if life is precarious, hard to hold onto in memory, often non-
sensical in the living, words are also undependable. Eighteenth-cen-
tury philosophers alluded to this fact frequently and plaintively.
Locke expresses an Alice in Wonderland sense of language: "Every one
will always have a liberty to speak as he pleases, and to apply what
articulate sounds to what ideas he thinks fit, and change them as often
as he pleases."29 Berkeley, with an air of comic desperation, explains
that since "words are so apt to impose on the understanding, I am
resolved in my inquiries to make as little use of them as possibly I
can." 30 Hartley adds that individual differences in association neces-
sarily create confusions of communication.31 All these thinkers con-
clude that in practice people somehow manage to communicate with
one another, just as in practice they assume the stability of their own
and other people's identities and of objects existing in the external
world. Yet the philosophers' doubt about the dependability of words
and objects and human identities defines a dilemma of particular con-
cern to the century.
All these problems of dependability derive from the nature of
human consciousness. Words lack absolute clarity because they must
mediate between one unknowable consciousness and another. Objects

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 Imagining a Self

can be demonstrated to exist in an observer's perception, but since we

are trapped in our perceptions we can never prove—can only assert as
self-evident—the reality of anything beyond them. The sense of con-
tinuing identity is intuitive, a product, once more, of our conscious-
ness; yet rigorous examination of that consciousness as a phenomenon
existing in time demonstrates that it consists necessarily of a series of
experiences of the moment. We cannot, therefore, even prove our
own identities, however certain we may feel of them. Consciousness,
our only instrument for understanding self and world, makes secure
understanding impossible; we can never fully become conscious of
that consciousness, as thinkers long before Freud were aware.
It has been persuasively argued that the problem of insubstantiality
so pervaded eighteenth-century English thought that it determined the
form and content of much literature in the second half of the period. 32
The efflorescence of novel and autobiography as genres may represent
a significant response to this problem. Both save individual identity
from pure subjectivity by converting human beings into objects: quite
literally: pages with words on them: illusions of consistent substan-
tiality. The words may not be true; certainly in no case can they con-
vey the full complexity of self-awareness, or even the full potential of
imaginatively grasped identity. Still, their objectification of the un-
graspable creates a new order of stability. To offer the self as an object
of contemplation rather than a subjective consciousness and to con-
vert one's awareness of self and others into a new image of person-
ality—such acts of creation assert the possibility of making and pre-
sent the world with something made.
Objects as well as subjects constantly change: the tree we call the
same tree we saw yesterday has new leaves; the chair has infinitesi-
mally decayed. The paper on which the novel is printed will rot. But
the novel as object nonetheless possesses a kind of substantiality
lacking in the individual human consciousness, its existence subject to
verification as the private consciousness is not. Life stories, fictional
and factual, bear a different relation to time and space from that of
lives. The act of reading, like all acts, occurs in time. Yet the life
recorded has been rescued from temporality. The familiar paradoxes
of time remain—everything exists in a perpetual present, past and
future can only be theoretical—but the present of autobiography or
novel has a different status from the eternal present of experienced
life. The succession of moments has been stabilized, given perma-

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 Identity in Fiction and in Fact

nence; the imposition of form and meaning on the flux of experience

creates a reassuring image of causality. Neither the autobiographer
nor the novelist offers any real answer to the questions Hume raises,
but both provide convincing illusions of answers. They affirm the sig-
nificance of the identity of imagination as well as that of memory;
they demonstrate that a sense of identity can be put into words, that
the mysteries of personality can be expressed, through the operations
of memory and imagination, in objectified form, that identity, in
short, can be made substantial and communicated as substantive fact.
The novels and autobiographies of the eighteenth century convey
both the period's doubts about the substantiality of identity and one
way of dealing with those doubts: by firm denial or firm and complex
assertion of the reality and importance of consciousness operating on
experience.

To look at eighteenth-century novels in conjunction with autobiog-

raphies from the same period, attending first to the sense of identity
and how it is evoked, uncovers in both genres precisely that subtlety
of interest and richness of attitude that F. R. Leavis, for example, de-
nies to Fielding and Richardson. "There can't be subtlety of organiza-
tion," Leavis writes, with reference to Tom Jones, "without richer
matter to organize, and subtler interests, than Fielding has to offer . . .
Fielding's attitudes, and his concern with human nature, are simple,
and not such as to produce an effect of anything but monotony (on a
mind, that is, demanding more than external action) when exhibited at
the length of an 'epic in prose' . . . By Amelia Fielding has gone soft
. . . It's no use pretending that Richardson can ever be made a current
classic again. The substance of interest that he too has to offer is in its
own way extremely limited in range and variety, and the demand he
makes on the reader's time is in proportion—and absolutely—so im-
mense as to be found, in general, prohibitive."33 Sterne goes in for "ir-
responsible (and nasty) trifling" (p. 11). Fanny Burney matters be-
cause Jane Austen read her (p. 13). And so on.
However outraged by the dismissive condescension of those pro-
nouncements, we understand what Leavis means. Like most
twentieth-century readers, he brings to his encounters with eigh-
teenth-century novels an imagination, a sensibility, informed by his
reading of the novels of the nineteenth century, which make more
manifest and complex claims of their own moral seriousness. Con-

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 Imagining a Self

cerned as they are with the subtleties of moral perception and deci-
sion, Jane Austen and George Eliot have influenced us all in our ways
of understanding life as well as literature. We struggle to achieve in
our own experience the sort of development that George Eliot's char-
acters arduously attain; we believe, as Eliot believed, that such
development is important. By comparison Pamela's struggle to pre-
serve her honor and Captain Booth's to free himself from debt seem to
involve less significant issues.
In contrast with later examples of the genre, eighteenth-century au-
tobiography may also appear relatively superficial. Only in Bos-
well (not, of course, a formal autobiographer at all) do we find the full
and explicit concern with the inner life for its own sake that we have
come to expect and to value in records of the self. Colley Cibber
neglects to mention how he felt; Hume systematically denies
troublesome emotion; even such a journal-writer as Fanny Burney
stresse in her writing the "external action" that Dr. Leavis assures us
appeals only to second-rate minds. The decorum of respectable auto-
biography demanded that the writer offer his life, tacitly or explicitly,
as an exemplum of worldly achievement or vocational dedication or
woman's hardships or Christian salvation. Reading Gibbon or Hume
or even William Cowper, we can hardly fail to realize how much their
stories omit and how rigidly they have controlled their accounts of
themselves. Even Darwin and Mill in the next century, reticent though
both are, leave far fuller evidence. Such twentieth-century autobiog-
raphers as Edmund Gosse and Robert Graves and Lillian Hellman
open possibilities for the form that challenge the achievements of their
precursors.
But one should be skeptical, in literary as in social history, of any
simple doctrine of progress. Our way of looking determines what we
see; we must question the temptation to scorn the novel of "external
action" and the readiness to assume that Gibbon's ponderous tone and
propriety of allusion imply his failure to know or to reveal what
would interest us most about his life. Strategies of dignity and con-
cealment may communicate important concerns.
External action, we have come to know, reflects the internal. Field-
ing and Gibbon clearly knew as much, although their knowledge was
less explicitly formulated than ours. The meanings of action, in eigh-
teenth-century accounts of self or others, involve intricate levels of
implication intimately related to questions of identity. If a person de-

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 Identity in Fiction and in Fact

clares his consistent being by consistently acting, then the novelist's

invention and the autobiographer's selection of actions define the
characters as well as the issues of their works. Dr. Leavis is wrong to
let himself be so readily bored. The account of a young man's struggle
toward maturity speaks, if we listen, to profound human preoccupa-
tions, not merely to our capacity for pleasure or malaise at the orderly
arrangement of happenings.
The eighteenth-century concern with stability of identity (and the
consequent reluctance to emphasize fundamental change) implies
specific kinds of possibility both for character and for story—those
crucial components of autobiography and novel alike—and specific
possibilities for moral insight. The assumption that moral perception
must imply profound change may derive from literature—specifically
nineteenth-century literature—more than from life. George Eliot's
ostentatious claims of moral seriousness can mislead us into believing
that only her kind of insight matters. In fact the morality and the sub-
tlety of stability can be as demanding as that of change. Characters
who strive to maintain their given selves in full potential within the
context of an accepted social status engage in an effort no less impor-
tant because stated in conservative terms. The terms themselves are
often misleading. The moral language of eighteenth-century novels
suggests a universe of unquestioned verities in which heavenly sanc-
tions insure the ultimate reward of virtue and punishment of vice.
Eighteenth-century autobiographies rely often on an equally compla-
cent rhetoric. Such complacencies define the moral context in which
characters—real people and their fictional counterparts—must oper-
ate but not the full range of their imaginations, which may lead them
to remarkable freedoms of action and narration beneath the accepted
concealments of convention. Antigone is not a figure to capture the
eighteenth-century imagination, but Aeneas—the man who, accepting
public responsibility, works within it to realize himself—is. And if
Aeneas does not immediately excite us in the twentieth century, that
fact implies some critical obligation to think seriously about how he
could once have moved so many.
The truth that apparent commitment to conventionality may pro-
tect as well as inhibit experimentation emerges more clearly in autobi-
ography—in which Gibbon manages, for example, to express his rage
at his father, Cibber to glory in the possibilities of unbridled narcis-
sism, Fanny Burney to reveal the strategies of femininity—than in the

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 Imagining a Self

novel, perhaps because the critical traditions that shape our percep-
tions are not so firmly defined for the less literary genre. We can there-
fore see more freely. Autobiographies may help us to understand
novels in new ways: to notice, for example, that the novels of the eigh-
teenth century, beneath their moral rigidity, explore the nature of per-
sonality in action with remarkable insight. Daniel Defoe is not Henry
James but Defoe, too, recognized the subtleties with which the individ-
ual guards himself against the encroachments of his society. He keeps
saying out loud that he does not concern himself with subtleties; we
must listen also to what he says under his breath.
This study proceeds largely by a series of pairings between individ-
ual autobiographies and individual novels, concentrating (though not
exclusively) on works generally agreed to represent the century's im-
portant achievement in those forms. Such pairings automatically pro-
vide fresh perspective. It is instructive to look at Tristram Shandy in
relation to Gibbon's Autobiographies. The novel and its protagonist
are illuminated by the historian's struggle to find a form for his life,
and we can understand the autobiographical effort more vividly in
relation to Tristram's equally intense struggle to record himself. We
escape the restriction of critical cliché (Gibbon is entirely rational,
Sterne committed to the indulgence of emotion) by looking at the two
works side by side. But I would make larger claims for the method on
the basis of the questions it calls to one's attention. "If biographers
taught novelists how to imitate nature by imitating actual memoirs,"
Donald Stauffer observes, "the novelists reciprocally exercised a for-
tunate influence upon the writers of lives: they showed them that the
record of human life may be an art; that the attempt at interpretation
and appraisal may be of more significance than the setting down of
dates, facts, and actions; and that in reviving the dead, the prevalence
of the imagination is less dangerous than its absence." 34 It sounds
plausible—but every term conceals baffling implications. Do novelists
in fact imitate memoirists only because memoir provides a guide to
techniques of realism? In what does the artistry of a record of human
life consist? What kind of interpretation holds value and interest for a
reader? How does the imagination function in setting down a life?
Such questions become impossible to evade when attention is focused
on the ways imitation, interpretation, and imagination operate in
individual instances.
Three large issues emerge from such focusing: the meaning of tech-

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 Identity in Fiction and in Fact

nique, the insistence of theme, and the implications of genre. Tech-

nique is what the early novelist most obviously borrows from the
autobiographer, although he also promptly modifies it and gives it
back in new form to subsequent writers about the self. The modes of
self-presentation that the first eighteenth-century novelists explored,
elaborated, and altered in their fictional adaptations largely determine
what can be said within them. To say new things, one needs new tech-
niques. The relation between modes of expression and conceivable
content leads directly to the question of theme. One quickly discovers
in these books the steady recurrence of various crucial concerns, often
directly related to the significance of writing itself. Such considera-
tions as the proper role of the imagination, the implications of the cre-
ation of fictions, and the relation between writer and audience occur
again and again. The meanings of maturity, gender, and profession;
the emotions associated with growth; the ways of accepting the self
within society: such matters necessarily preoccupy writers whose
attention focuses on real or imagined character. Do such issues present
themselves differently in fictional and factual accounts? That question
returns one to the issue of genre. Does genre make any difference?
Looking at examples will make the question easier to understand, if
not resolve, concurrently opening the way to serious critical inquiry
by describing perplexities that have too long gone unnoticed behind
the elegant facade of this decorous literature.
Even to sketch such central problems before considering particular
examples suggests a false emphasis, since only through the detailed
reading of texts can one begin to resolve the issues and understand the
complexity of their implications and the richness of h u m a n concern in
a literature that may appear to content itself with superficially com-
plicated plot and with established systems of value but in fact reveals
profound awareness of how psychology may challenge morality, the-
ology, and society and how intricate is the relation between language,
illusion, and "the real."

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 2
The Soul's Imaginings:
Daniel Defoe, William Cowper

piritual autobiography as a literary form provides obvious secu-

S rities for author and reader alike. 1 It resolves some manifest dif-
ficulties of rendering stable character in language. Identity, no
longer problematic in the context of man's relation with God, can now
be taken to derive from possession of an immortal soul, unique and
uniquely valuable in every individual. As Pamela observes, at a mo-
ment of stress, "my Soul is of equal importance with the Soul of a
Princess; though my Quality is inferior to that of the meanest Slave." 2
The problem of how much a character can change without losing his
identity disappears in the very structure of the genre: the kind of
change he will undergo is predefined, paradigmatic. Indeed, all large
elements of the narrative appear to be given. The story has a plot
known in advance; the pleasure of reading it derives largely from con-
templating individual variations in the anticipated unfolding of events.
With its acceptance of a set of established categories, spiritual auto-
biography, although it asserts (as all autobiography must) the mean-
ing of the self's experience and even the primacy of the inner life, also
implies meaning determined from outside. One may understand the
writing of autobiography in this shape as an act of piety, but how
should one interpret deliberate fictional imitation of such a form,
which, by diminishing fundamental suspense, stress on idiosyncrasy,
and individually discovered meaning, seems willfully to court dull-
ness? In fact, of course, few readers find Robinson Crusoe dull, and its

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 Daniel Defoe, William Cowper

interest derives from sources far deeper than its accumulation of fas-
cinating physical detail. To examine a late eighteenth-century spiritual
autobiography and one of its fictional analogues (chronologically ear-
lier but psychologically synchronous) suggests the complexities im-
plicit in even a highly conventionalized form, since form, limiting
meaning, also creates it. Robinson Crusoe shares with William Cow-
per's Memoir of his early life a set of conventions. More importantly,
it shares at least intermittently conscious preoccupation with the role
of imagination in spiritual and emotional development. If, as I have
argued in the last chapter, human beings assert their identities through
imagination as well as through memory, the concern with imaginative
growth that permeates this spiritual autobiography and its fictional
analogue suggests that perhaps the "given" identity of the Christian
soul cannot after all, by the eighteenth century, provide adequate sub-
stance for literary representation and that the problems which appear
to be solved by the nature of the genre actually assume new disguises
within it. Crusoe and Cowper discover or invent themselves not only
in relation to God but as unique entities in their feeling and their imag-
ining. Defoe, making fictions, and Cowper, chronicling actual events,
use the form of spiritual autobiography to contain but also to justify
imaginative self-investigation.
Imagination, of course, was for eighteenth-century thinkers a vital
concept. Its ultimate purpose, Joseph Addison implies in his elucida-
tion of aesthetic theory, is to lead man to God. "The Supreme Author
of Being has so formed the Soul of Man, that nothing but himself can
be its last, adequate, and proper Happiness."3 The human imagination
gives God "an infinite Advantage . . . over the Soul of Man" (#421; III,
92). Indeed, Addison, a spokesman for the intellectual stirrings of his
time, often suggests that imagination should be considered itself a
faculty of the soul. And accounts of the soul's development written
during the eighteenth century frequently emphasize, directly or indi-
rectly, the contribution of imagination to spiritual growth, evoking
images rich in psychological as well as theological implication to con-
vey the intricacies of a soul's progress. In Robinson Crusoe, which
adapts the conventions of such accounts to fictional purposes, direct
references to imagination occur frequently. 4 They may help to alert
the reader to some psychological surprises of a story that follows a
straightforward narrative scheme in many ways highly predictable.
Early allusions in Robinson Crusoe emphasize the potential power

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 Imagining a Self

of the image-making faculty to misdirect attention. Crusoe dwells in

false images that lead him to mistaken assessments of his own position
and that incidentally remind the reader how much interpretation can
alter facts. In "the Brasils/' prosperous on his plantation, the English-
man recognizes that he is "coming into the very Middle Station, or
upper Degree of low Life, which my Father advised me to before." But
he dramatizes his position into something quite different: "I used to
say, I liv'd just like a M a n cast away upon some desolate Island, that
has no body there but himself." 5 His later experience of true isolation
makes him realize the moral danger of the imaginative exaggeration
that transforms relative into total solitude and comparative alienation
to entire separation from society, and thus encourages sinful repining.
Moreover, the habit of imaginative transformation becomes a source
of sin because it obviates rational action, as in the boat-building
scheme when the mariner, dominated by his uncontrollable fancy,
spends more than five months making a canoe so big and heavy that,
he estimates, it would take ten or twelve years to dig a channel deep
enough to get it to the water. The self-fulfilling satisfactions of his fan-
tasizing sustain him through the labor of manufacturing the canoe:
given unendurable reality, a man will live in dreams. Sometimes Cru-
soe's fantasies—of physical security within a ring of fortifications, of
supplies arranged in soul-satisfying order in his storeroom—lead him
to constructive alterations of reality. But often they lead him, at least
temporarily, away from reality and away from the crucial question of
just how unendurable it actually is.

O n the other hand, imagination, given Crusoe's circumstances, pro-

vides the only conceivable guide to growth, and the narrative stresses
this function. "Another Reflection was of great Use to me, and doubt-
less would be so to any one that should fall into such Distress as mine
was; and this was, T o compare my present Condition with what I at
first expected it should be . . . I spent whole Hours, I may say whole
Days, in representing to my self in the most lively Colours, how I
must have acted, if I had got nothing out of the Ship" (VII, 150). Such
representation leads inevitably to awareness of "the Goodness of
Providence to me" and a thankfulness for the advantages of the casta-
way's position (VII, 151). Crusoe describes (here and elsewhere) pur-
poseful exercises of the imagination, in which fancy produces piety
rather than self-will. His fanciful reconstructions of how he would
have lived without rum and swords and greatcoats emerge in answer

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 Daniel Defoe, William Cowper

to his demand on himself to acknowledge the positive aspects of his

condition: he is disciplining his imagination.
Crusoe learns to accept as well as to dominate his fancy: "the Power
of Imagination" evokes the possibility of survivors in a shipwreck
(VII, 217), stimulating "secret moving Springs in the Affections" and
thus becoming an instrument of grace through self-discovery and
through feeling. The castaway uses his imagination systematically to
rehearse "the whole History" of his life, dividing it into various seg-
ments and seeking the illumination to be derived from comparing one
portion with another (VII, 227). He deliberately stretches his imagina-
tive powers to try to understand the nature of cannibals (VII, 228). He
allows himself to learn from dreams (e.g., VII, 230). He grows, in
short, through feeling and through fantasy.
In Locke's psychology, Ernest Tuveson points out, "the visual imag-
ination is . . . the very medium of all thought." 6 Such seems to be the
case for Crusoe, whose mental rehearsal of his history and keeping of
written records both involve the recovery or creation of expressive
images to render reality. Almost a year after his shipwreck, he draws
up "the State of my Affairs in Writing . . . to deliver my Thoughts
from daily poring upon them, and afflicting my mind" (VII, 74). For
similar reasons he begins to keep a journal, although forced to recon-
struct most of the first year's record. This device enables Crusoe to
offer three different narrative versions of his first day on the island,
calling attention to the special qualities of the sustained narrative he
provides.
He constructs a hypothetical version of the journal he might have
written if he had kept it from the beginning: it "would ha' been full of
many dull things: For Example, I must have said thus. Sept. the 30th.
After I got to Shore and had escap'd drowning, instead of being
thankful to God for my Deliverance, having first vomited with the
great Quantity of salt Water which was gotten into my Stomach, and
recovering my self a little, I ran about the Shore, wringing my Hands
and beating my Head and Face, exclaiming at my Misery, and crying
out, I was undone, undone, till tyr'd and faint I was forc'd to lye down
on the Ground to repose, but durst not sleep for fear of being de-
vour'd" (VII, 78). This variation of the ancient rhetorical device of
praeteritio (the passage belongs to the journal Crusoe did not write)
emphasizes the importance of time as an element in first-person narra-
tive. The account, as it would have been written close in time to the

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 Imagining a Self

events it reports, contains vivid, specific details occurring in neither of

the other versions: vomiting, hand wringing, self-beating, actual
words cried out. Its sense of immediacy, far from dull, encourages a
richer empathie response than that generated by the other accounts.
The actual journal, in contrast, written a year later, generalizes,
editorializes, and emphasizes internal rather than external happening:

September 30,1659.1 poor miserable Robinson Crusoe, being ship-

wreck'd, during a dreadful Storm, in the offing, came on Shore on
this dismal unfortunate Island, which I call'd the Island of Despair,
all the rest of the Ship's Company being drown'd, and my self al-
most dead.
All the rest of that Day I spent in afflicting my self at the dismal
Circumstances I was brought to, viz. I had neither Food, House,
Clothes, Weapon, or Place to fly to, and in Despair of any Relief,
saw nothing but Death before me, either that I should be devour'd
by wild Beasts, murther'd by Savages, or starv'd to Death for Want
of Food. At the Approach of Night, I slept in a Tree for fear of wild
Creatures, but slept soundly tho' it rain'd all Night. (VII, 79)

The naming of the island and the all-night rain occur only in this ac-
count; the much longer story (VII, 51-53), related in more distant
retrospect, provides yet another set of details (the nature of the tree,
what Crusoe had with him, the fact that he found fresh water and put
tobacco in his mouth to prevent hunger). This extended account em-
phasizes how Crusoe felt and what he thought far more than what he
did. Moreover, in one crucial respect it contradicts the hypothetical
journal, which describes the mariner as exclaiming his misery "instead
of being thankful to God for my Deliverance." The more retrospective
narrative, on the other hand, claims as Crusoe's first action on shore
"to look up and thank God that my Life was sav'd" (VII, 51), with his
"whole Being . . . wrapt up in the Contemplation of my Deliverance"
(p. 52).
One must take as deliberate the fact that the three accounts differ in
general approach and in selectivity: Defoe, if not Crusoe, is surely
suggesting the various nature of descriptive intent. Close to the hap-
pening, the mind hardly judges, content to record details. In the most
distant version, the writer acknowledges by implication the self-indul-
gence of his misery ("All the rest of that Day I spent in afflicting my
self"), and the event has become more importantly emotional than
physical. Incorporated in the full-length "spiritual autobiography," it

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 Daniel Defoe, William Cowper

includes fuller spiritual awareness, even claiming some spontaneous

religious stirrings that foretell the orderly process of conversion.
Demonstrating through these literary examples that a writer's
immediate purpose determines his literary choices, Defoe thus rein-
forces Crusoe's implicit contention that the process of recording—a
process of selecting and preserving images on the basis of their signifi-
cance—helps a man to come to terms with his experience. He also
hints the qualified dependability of all narrators. Meanings change as
feelings alter, stories derive partly from the emotions of their tellers.
Crusoe's story changes with his point of view. The imagination, De-
foe's instrument as well as Crusoe's, affects memory and perception
alike; its value depends on the nature of its instrumentality, but De-
foe also invites recognition of its essential ambiguity.
On the island, Crusoe ranges from fantasies of complete gratifica-
tion to description of a metaphoric death that constitutes a kind of
imaginative suicide ("the Anguish of my Soul at my Condition, would
break out upon me on a sudden, and my very Heart would die within
me, to think of the Woods, the Mountains, the Desarts I was in"; VII,
130). He in fact inhabits a remarkably benign wilderness, quite devoid
of literal deserts and mountains, that his imagination converts into a
severe prison. Surviving his own emotional exaggerations, he learns
to inhabit a "middle state" of feeling, recognizing that he should wish
to be delivered from his island even while understanding its real ad-
vantages.
He must learn also to confront in himself the unattractive emotions
all hearts contain. First, fear. Crusoe's island offers nothing to be
afraid of; yet fear torments him: its pretexts various, its true cause his
essential alienation. 7 The emotional energy of Crusoe's story absorbs
his religious and non-religious experience into a single continuum:
feeling explaining theology, theology justifying feeling. His increasing
awareness of emotion marks a stage of spiritual development; his
spiritual development delineates an emotional progression. Seeing an
inexplicable footprint, he responds as to a ghost (VII, 177), the reader
sharing his utter wonder and the terror of the inexplicable. He returns
to his home "like a Man perfectly confused and out of my self . . . ter-
rify'd to the last Degree; nor is it possible to describe how many vari-
ous Shapes affrighted Imagination represented Things to me in, how
many wild Ideas were found every Moment in my Fancy, and what
strange unaccountable Whimsies came into my Thoughts by the Way"

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 Imagining a Self

(VII, 178; my italics). Crusoe's imagination becomes dangerous to him

when he faces what he cannot understand. His terror increases as he
thinks about it—"contrary," he says, "to the Nature of such Things,"
but not contrary to his own nature with its precarious control of his
fantasies. "I was so embarrass'd with my own frightful Ideas of the
Thing, that I form'd nothing but dismal Imaginations to my self, even
tho' I was now a great way off of it. Sometimes I fancy'd it must be the
Devil" (p. 178). The task of mastering this terror occupies Crusoe for
the next seven years. T o achieve mastery, he must discover himself.
Homer Brown points out that "the island, which is an extension of
himself, has dark areas Robinson has never explored; he is constantly
startled by versions of himself, the voice of the parrot, the dying
goat." 8 Crusoe's fear has made self knowledge difficult. T o interpret
its direct cause as the devil (a fantasy which Crusoe elaborates; p.
179) solves nothing. He imagines innumerable invaders, all looking
for him. "Then terrible Thoughts rack'd my Imagination" (p. 180): the
fantasized savages will return, he fancies, destroy his grain, abduct his
goats; he will "perish at last for meer W a n t . " No practical expedient
can overcome a fear out of all proportion to its nominal cause. Cru-
soe's fantasies disturb him so much that they "put an End to all Inven-
tion" (p. 205). No longer can he sustain himself by his ingenuities,
since he is possessed by images quite unrelated to immediate actuality.
He finds a cave, sees the eyes of some creature in it, fancies this too is
the devil. But he assures himself "that he that was afraid to see the
Devil, was not fit to live twenty Years in an Island all alone; and that I
durst to believe there was nothing in this Cave that was more frightful
than my self" (p. 205).

Crusoe is quite right but in a sense he does not intend. The eyes be-
long to an old goat, which dies the next day. More truly frightful is the
inner self. Partly acknowledging this, penetrating the bowels of the
earth like an epic hero journeying to the underworld, Crusoe begins to
relinquish fearful fantasy. He will subsequently encounter real canni-
bals, but the cannibals of his mind oppress him less than before. In
entering the cave despite his intense fear of the mysterious eyes, he
reminds himself of reality. He has always been better at confronting
immediate causes for fear than at dealing with his own fancies. Now,
five years after seeing the footprint, he starts to escape the paranoid
fantasies it precipitated. By the time English mutineers come to his
island, he can feel easily contemptuous of the sailors' fear of spirits.

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 Daniel Defoe, William Cowper

Fantasies of fear generate, first of all, counter-fantasies of aggres-

sion. Through them Crusoe can see himself as possessing effective
power, not merely as a victim. He will combat fear by imagining
himself a destroyer, burying five or six pounds of gunpowder under
the cannibals' fire or killing twenty from an ambush. His imagination,
he tells us, becomes so totally engaged that he spends days seeking
hiding places and assembling an arsenal; in his imagination (the word,
repeatedly, is his) he puts his bloody schemes into practice. Finally he
tires; then realizes that the savages are none of his business: prudence
and religion alike dictate leaving them to God.
He controls the imagery of his aggressive fantasies by reason and by
Christian morality, but that imagery has combated his fears by assur-
ing him, partly through his repetitive internal reenactments of destruc-
tive triumphs, that he can confront real enemies in the real world.
When the cannibals actually appear in his immediate neighborhood
and justify his aggression by their pursuit of a prospective victim, his
gratification at killing some of them exceeds his pleasure at the con-
comitant rescue of their quarry: he has confirmed his power.
But the universality and completeness of Defoe's "history of the
heart" demand that his protagonist should not only conquer fear and
anger but also progress to human love. Before his island years, Crusoe
has demonstrated little capacity to form or sustain human ties. He
abandons his parents; he sells Xury, his devoted companion in his
own escape from slavery, into further slavery with hardly a qualm
(VII, 37); he scorns his Brazilian neighbor; he engages in the slave
trade himself. Yet he comes to realize the importance of relationship.
Seeing a shipwreck, he feels compelled to search it for some living
creature. The thought of saving someone's life, and thus comforting
his own, "clung so to my Heart, that I could not be quiet. Night or
Day . . . I should be wanting to my self if I did not go" (VII, 219).
Wanting—that is, lacking—to my self. During his long exile, Crusoe
discovers his integrity. When Friday finally appears, therefore, he is
able to love him.
Ian Watt to the contrary notwithstanding,9 the relation between
Crusoe and Friday is in fact reciprocal, marred though it is by the
eighteenth-century Englishman's assumptions about the naïveté of
savages. Recognizing Friday's honesty and his capacity for devotion,
Crusoe says flatly, "I began really to love the Creature; and on his
Side, I believe he lov'd me more than it was possible for him ever to

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 Imagining a Self

love any Thing before" (p. 248). Despite the condescension of "Crea-
ture" and of the assumption that the white man has somehow created
new emotional possibilities for the black (the reverse seems more
clearly to be the case10), this amounts to a direct admission of Friday's
emotional importance to his "master." When Crusoe returns to civili-
zation, he can hardly keep from weeping at an old friend's affection
and benevolence, and he acts generously toward friends, associates,
and sisters. His travels, unlike Gulliver's, have released new emotional
resources.
To have an ally in Friday—and, even more, to have a sense of alli-
ance—protects Crusoe finally against his fearful fantasies. His rescue
comes speedily, once he has decided he does not care about it. His
imagination now reconciled to his reality, he feels himself at peace
(this conviction reflected in his sense of full religious reconciliation)
and fully effective in dealing with any eventuality—cannibals, Span-
iards, mutineers—recognizing real threats but recognizing also his
capacity, with Friday and later with an increasing number of allies, to
confront threats realistically. No longer "wanting to himself," he can
return to the complexities of civilized life and of full community.
Fantasy has helped him prepare for such a return not only by en-
abling him to deal with his emotions but by encouraging in him a
spirit of play. The endless appeal of Robinson Crusoe for children de-
rives partly from this spirit. Crusoe's fertile expedients partake of the
child's inventiveness, and, of course, the story of self-sufficient cast-
away realizes the childish fantasy of omnipotence—a level of the story
implicitly acknowledged in Crusoe's favorite image of himself as king,
first ruling a monarchy inhabited only by a few domestic animals,
later with human subjects as well but always with a solid imagination
of hierarchy, himself at its apex. Crusoe admits the inadequacy of
such fantasy to civilized experience with its infinitely more complex
economic realities: what a man has bearing no necessary relation to
what he needs and his sense of power correspondingly confused. Yet
at the novel's end Defoe goes out of his way to suggest the importance
of playfulness as well as the lasting effects of Crusoe's island confron-
tation with his emotions.
His publisher wanted a few more pages; Defoe supplied some mate-
rial he had lying around about wolves and bears. 11 Despite its irrele-
vance to the central plot, it contributes to the novel's psychic action.
On the island Crusoe's enemies are largely imaginary. But traveling

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 Daniel Defoe, William Cowper

through the mountains on his way from Lisbon back to England, he

finds real antagonists. First two wolves attack the guide and are over-
come by fearless Friday. The other travelers, though alarmed at the
wolves' howling all around them, proceed, to find Friday engaged
with a bear. He makes the encounter a game, facing the monster with
"joy and Courage" (p. 92), promising to give the company a good
laugh; before he kills the bear he turns it into a joke. In subsequent,
increasingly dangerous encounters with wild beasts, Crusoe repeat-
edly organizes his company for successful resistance. When they reach
the town where they plan to lodge, the inhabitants, displaying "ter-
rible Fright" (a phrase twice repeated; p. 101), tell the travelers that
they have dealt with the wolves the wrong way and were successful
only by a kind of miracle. Crusoe confesses, "For my Part, I was never
so sensible of Danger in my Life" (p. 102).
To be sensible of danger differs from being frightened. Crusoe now
demonstrates his awareness of and responsiveness to the real, as does
Friday, his alter ego. Both display conspicuous mastery—in a situa-
tion where others are literally destroyed—by following unconven-
tional procedures based on their personal perception of need and
remedy. The impulse to play, in Friday's struggle with the bear, be-
comes a method of control. Crusoe's fantasies of kingship stand be-
hind his capacity to lead his group. His many years of paranoid imag-
inings about unreal enemies have prepared him to conquer real ones.
Friday's "Joy and Courage" and his master's signal their successful
domination of self and of hostile environment. Crusoe now can trust
his alliance with other men, can assess present danger rather than
imagine a dreadful future, and can do what must be done. As a boy,
absorbed in fantasies about "seeing the world," he could not rest in
stable existence. As a man, he has made stable existence possible for
himself. The story of the wolves solidifies the impression of mature
mastery achieved through solitude, fantasy, and play. 12 The tale of
how a man painfully enlarges his emotional capacities by using the
resources of his imagination is not the story Defoe claims to tell, but
the power of Crusoe's narrative derives largely from its roots in just
such a drama of self-discovery. The imagination subordinated to
God's purposes becomes a salvational force; the imagination through
its own energy helps release the trap of self. In emphasizing the com-
plex functions of Crusoe's imagination Defoe implicitly calls attention
to his own: valuable as a means of serving God, but also valuable

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 Imagining a Self

because it enables him to create a new order of ^actuality, a world out-

side, although still the self's projection.

The crucial literary problem of autobiography is to articulate a sig-

nificant form for the relative incoherence of human experience. The
spiritual autobiographer disclaims responsibility for his own structur-
ing power, attributing to God the meaningful form that he describes in
his life. Assuming the supremacy of Providence as the only depend-
able author, such an autobiographer recognizes the impossibility of
fully grasping the providential plan. In retrospect he perceives in his
experience a design that he believes imposed from without. He ac-
knowledges God's "supreme fiction": the divine artifice that provides
a plot for his life. He appears by his choice of genre not only to dis-
claim responsibility for his own achievement but to avoid the burden
of coming to personal terms with his thoughts and actions: the ready-
made pattern interprets all.
The author of such a fictional autobiography as Robinson Crusoe
manifestly bears a different relation to his material from that of the
literal autobiographer. He, too, may acknowledge God as the plotter
of life stories; he may accept for his fiction the pattern established by
narratives of spiritual fact; yet his imagination, obviously, supplies
the happenings and the characters of his novel. Such a fiction, relying
for its effects on its close approximation of factuality, ostentatiously
demands its readers' suspension of disbelief for the duration of the lit-
erary experience. Its form guarantees its spiritual truth.
To read Robinson Crusoe involves contact with Defoe's imagina-
tion—organizer and inventor of events, conceiver of character—and
with Crusoe's—reflector and enlarger of his own experience. The rela-
tion between the two is ambiguous. If we accept Crusoe's spiritual
odyssey as an allegorical reflection of his creator's, thus declaring
some essential identity between author and character, we must yet
recognize, as Homer Brown puts it, that "the 'real' self of Defoe's var-
ious memoirs . . . is a fictive self. Defoe's confessions are not his con-
fessions at all. The pattern of Christian truth has become the design of
a lie masked as actuality, the plot of a novel." 13 And if we consider the
author totally divergent from his character, we have to ponder his
attitude toward that figment of his imagination. The very form of imi-
tated spiritual autobiography creates uncertainty. The literal genre
records a preordained sequence of events, at every turn satisfying ex-

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 Daniel Defoe, William Cowper

pectation. Its fictional analogue may conform to the identical se-

quence, yet the intervention of that extra figure, the invisible author
behind the narrator, establishes a slippery new dimension. We may
come to understand precisely how Crusoe's imagination contributes to
his development without fathoming Defoe's imagination in its novelis-
tic functioning. Even if Defoe claims to serve God in his writing, he
simultaneously displays the creative vitality that asserts his unique
individuality, although he deprecates it by his choice of form.
Reading the novel, however qualified our belief in its literal truth,
we do not consciously worry about where Defoe is. It is enough to
encounter Robinson Crusoe as richly as we do. But reflecting about
Crusoe as a character, we must come to terms with the obvious but
perplexing fact that he is an imagined character, his experience the
direct product of human fantasy rather than divine ordinance, his
existence confined to the imaginations of author and reader and to the
printed page that mediates between them. Defoe, not God, has de-
vised the plot of his life.
Is the protagonist of literal autobiography any less completely an
imagined character? Are the recorded events of his life any less order-
ly? Such questions become particularly pressing in relation to that
highly conventionalized form that we call spiritual autobiography.
For a man to perceive himself as an actor in God's drama, playing a
part that retrospectively makes perfect sense, requires considerable
imaginative agility. Selecting, repressing, and interpreting his experi-
ence, according himself importance as a Christian soul while denying
his importance as a unique personality, he exercises his fantasy by
making himself into something very like a fictional character. The
autobiographer unites in himself the functions divided in pseudo-
autobiography between novelist and character. Object as well as nar-
rator of his own experience, he in effect bears an ambiguous relation
to himself. Reading his work may provide the same imaginative com-
plexities as experiencing a novel; the presumed difference in authorial
intent between fictional and factual records makes little necessary dif-
ference in effect, though it poses knotty philosophic and literary ques-
tions.
The curious relation between subject and object, narrator and char-
acter—at once the same and different—in spiritual autobiography
may focus critical attention in a new way on the problem of imagina-
tion. The narrator, subordinating his imagination to established

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 Imagining a Self

formal principles, perceives his character—himself—in preordained

ways. He dedicates his imagination to the effort of leading man to
God by demonstrating how he, the hero of his narrative, has been led.
But the character who is the object of his attention has more aspects
than convention allows him. Balancing the greater complexity of the
reader's consciousness of the author in fictional imitations of auto-
biography—his awareness of a literal composer behind the announced
originator of the narrative—is the intricacy of his perception of char-
acter in genuine spiritual autobiography. He experiences some version
of discrepancy between the raw material and its mold, between the
multi-dimensional human being who is subject and object of the nar-
rative and the formalized version of him that the genre demands—
experiences this discrepancy not simply as a theoretical fact but as a
tension of personalities. And since the character in this case is the
author, the tension existing between his imagination of himself as cen-
tral figure of a spiritual odyssey and his need to project his full person-
ality, we come full circle, back again to the problem of how one re-
sponds to the writer—the literal spiritual autobiographer proving in
fact quite as mysterious a being as the figure of Defoe hidden behind
Crusoe.
Barrett John Mandel has considered from a theoretical point of view
the problem of the "unreliable narrator" in autobiography. "The nar-
rator who reveals incongruities between either what he says and the
governing design of the work or between what he shows and how he
analyzes it may be said to be unreliable . . . The novelist's unreliable
narrator is part of the artistic whole, but viewed formally the auto-
biographer's unreliable narrator . . . is a shortcoming in the art of the
piece."14 Mandel acknowledges the possible psychological interest of
discrepancies between intention and effect in autobiography but per-
sists in affirming the artistic failure involved in such divergences (p.
225).
From the perspective I am suggesting, the spiritual autobiographer
almost invariably presents aspects of the unreliable narrator, because
of the necessary discrepancy between willed submissiveness to God
and the elements of personality not contained by that submissiveness.
This kind of discrepancy is particularly striking in William Cowper's
Memoir—a work written in the 1760's, late in the tradition of spiritual
autobiography—because his version of his experience, concentrating
on his extreme passivity, contradicts the activity involved in his com-

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 Daniel Defoe, William Cowper

mitment to writing: an expression of fuller personality. The Memoir

displays both the kinds of incongruity that Mandel designates: be-
tween statement and design, between event and analysis. Yet one
cannot readily dismiss it as an artistic failure, or even as seriously
flawed. Although the memoirist does not invent his world or his char-
acters, although he humbly accepts an externally dictated pattern for
his experience, he expresses through his writing an imaginative and
psychic conflict not fully resolved by conversion. His imagination as
the object of attention reminds the reader of the sinister potential of
energy in the capacity to fantasize, suggesting that the young man's
passivity may have represented an attempt to avoid the dangerous
action to which he felt unconsciously impelled.
The experience of reading the Memoir is enriched by the perception
of such conflict. One might even argue that the account would possess
less artistic power if the author exercised more rigorous, conscious
command over his material, since the complexity of unconscious sug-
gestivity provides a vivid source of energy in the work. But if we reject
the author's capacity adequately to interpret his experience, we sug-
gest that an autobiography's value may derive from qualities unre-
lated to its degree of perceptiveness or artistic control.
Some partial escapes from the resulting critical dilemma readily pre-
sent themselves. To claim that the reader creates the work he values is
manifestly absurd, but one can believe in creative collaboration. The
book we read exists as we read it; the author may control his reader's
response without understanding the nature of his own control. Cow-
per provides us with the raw material to interpret his life in complex
fashion. Defoe emphasizes Robinson Crusoe's religious development,
but he also describes an unconsciously valued imaginative progres-
sion. We can grant both authors hegemony without total awareness.
But to think specifically about autobiography revives critical mis-
givings. The level of dependability involved in the provision of evi-
dence differs in autobiographer and novelist, and not to the advantage
of the recorder of fact. The novelist's knowledge of his character
necessarily sets the standard of completeness. He may not know
everything we wish to be told about Crusoe, but in the nature of
things no one can know more. A person's understanding of himself is
far more problematic, and so is the relation between what he under-
stands and what he tells. If a novelist reveals more than he directly
states about a character, we give him credit for irony or complexity or

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 Imagining a Self

indirection or other such literary virtues. If an autobiographer de-

scribes himself as a good person while providing evidence that makes
us doubt his virtue, we may damn him on both literary and moral
grounds. Reading autobiography, we expect truth, yet always suspect
the reliability of self-interpretation. Norman Holland speaks of the
"tension" with which one evaluates reports claiming to be factual, as
opposed to the relative relaxation of reading fiction. 15 We demand
more of the autobiographer; his unreliability obviously creates a more
pressing issue than that of the novelist.
Twentieth-century autobiographers often deal with this problem by
calling attention to their work's status as artifact, implicitly arrogating
the authority of the artist, the maker, over his material and suggesting
the irrelevance of factuality as a standard of judgment. Their eigh-
teenth-century counterparts more frequently claimed the authenticity
of the naïf, pouring everything out from a simple desire to reveal, or
to teach, or to confess. But naïveté, too, may have the effect of
artifice. Cowper as bland narrator of his experience accounts for every
happening he relates, ostensibly selecting episodes for their fitness to
his announced purpose. Gradually his blandness comes to emphasize
its own insufficiency, the story he tells asserting other meanings than
those he proclaims. The form of his narrative's unconscious psychic
pattern, in fact, partly contradicts that of its rational elucidation. And
the conjunction of forms creates the drama of the telling, in which the
narrator's naïveté calls attention to the central emotional issue.
The form of a story both depends upon and determines the images it
includes. Cowper reports a sequence of internal events; he also pro-
vides some vivid images of his life in the world, characteristically
stressing his helpless passivity. Like Robinson Crusoe, he consistently
judges both internal and external events in terms of orthodox religious
expectation, but his judgment can rarely contain his experience. Cru-
soe acknowledges the possibilities of imagination for discovery, anti-
cipating the theory of modern psychological researchers that fantasy
can lead to fuller grasp of reality rather than confirm a separation
from the real. 16 His energetic activity, directed always toward mastery
(of the external and of the internal), contrasts sharply with Cowper's
characteristic posture of retreat. Yet Cowper's self-depiction has the
absolute authority of authentic emotional experience: the struggle
between imagination—not the shaping force worshipped by Coleridge
and Wallace Stevens but simply Locke's image-making function—and

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 Daniel Defoe, William Cowper

the principles that would control it. Defoe claims the factuality of his
fictions ("The Editor believes the thing to be a just History of Fact;
neither is there any Appearance of Fiction in it"; VII, ix), and we do
not believe him; Cowper defines the meaning of his tale in terms that
the reader cannot fully accept. For both men have done more than
they claimed, leaving us stories of the self that make us respond to the
forces of imagination. Alfred Kazin, arguing for the propriety of con-
sidering some kinds of "autobiography as fiction—that is, as narrative
which has no purpose other than to tell a story," maintains that "the
esthetic effect that gifted autobiographers instinctively if not always
consciously seek would seem to be the poetry of remembered happen-
ings, the intensity of the individual's strivings." 17 Defoe's narrative
and Cowper's manifestly fulfill purposes beyond that of story telling.
But both also expose "the poetry of remembered happenings," both
focus on individual strivings, and both simultaneously glorify and dis-
cipline the imagination, seeking the energies of fiction and of fact. Ex-
amining the ambiguities of imagination, as reported and exemplified
in autobiography and pseudo-autobiography, one discovers that the
novel's rigorous appearance of factuality, the memoir's close adher-
ence to pre-established form, alike may embody efforts to control the
possibly dangerous forces of fantasy.

Obscurest night! involved the sky;

The' Atalantic billows roar'd;
When such a destin'd wretch as I,
Wash'd headlong from on board,
Of friends, of hope, of all bereft,
His floating home for ever left . . .
No voice divine the storm allay'd
No light propitious shone;
When, snatch'd from all effectual aid,
We perish'd, each alone;
But I beneath a rougher sea,
And whelm'd in deeper gulphs than he.

William Cowper composed "The Cast-A way," perhaps his best

known short poem, on March 20, 1799, only a few months before his
death. He had written his only memoir more than thirty years earlier,
ending it with an account of his happiness in living with the Unwin
family in "a place of rest prepared for me by God's own hand." 18 The
declared serenity of assurance in the early memoir and the open de-

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 Imagining a Self

spair of the late poem embody the polarities of Cowper's experience.

The tension between those irreconcilable opposites frequently dis-
turbs the smooth surface of his prose account.
Crusoe's self-depiction and Cowper's both present themselves as
naïve narratives of simple purpose. Crusoe reports an adventure of
survival, physical and spiritual; Cowper interests himself, nominally,
solely in his own religious conversion. In fact, he, like Crusoe, does
more than he appears to realize. The author of "The Cast-Away"—a
poem permeated with the conviction that God has abandoned the
speaker—that author differs dramatically from the writer who asserts
his own spiritual peace at the end of his memoir and invokes the same
peace for the reader. But he is also recognizably the same person. In
almost the way that we glimpse or surmise Defoe as author behind
Crusoe as narrator—never able exactly to locate him—we glimpse or
surmise Cowper in despair behind Cowper claiming religious serenity.
"Man is not a state of being but a process of development, and . . .
he can be known only in the story of his life," Roy Pascal writes. 19
Cowper announces in his first paragraph an intent to organize his
story around a specific process of development, but his tone hints at
some hidden dimension in the story he is about to tell. "I cannot recol-
lect, that till the month of December, in the thirty-second year of my
life, I had ever any serious impressions of the religious kind, or at all
bethought myself of the things of my salvation, except in two or three
instances. The first was of so transitory a nature, and passed when I
was so very young, that, did I not intend what follows for a history of
my heart, so far as religion has been its object, I should hardly men-
tion it" (p. 13). A strong sense of reluctance, or withholding, domin-
ates those sentences with their heavily negative constructions. The
self-historian begins by announcing what he cannot remember. He
then tells us not to pay too much attention to what he proposes to
relate: its only importance derives from its highly special point of
view. The introduction to this account of salvation marks itself by a
tone so depressed that it immediately denies by implication the spirit-
ual resuscitation the speaker prepares to assert.
The two trivial episodes that follow both belong to Cowper's child-
hood. The one for which he so elaborately apologizes concerns a fif-
teen-year-old bully who tormented the memoirist in unspecified ways
from the age of six. (Cowper could, he suggests, specify if he wished to
do so; he "choose[s] to forbear"; p. 14.) The bully's "many acts of bar-

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 Daniel Defoe, William Cowper

barity" so terrified the narrator that "I well remember being afraid to
lift my eyes upon him, higher than his knees; and that I knew him by
his shoe-buckles, better than any other part of his dress. May the Lord
pardon him, and may we meet in glory!" (p. 14). The startling con-
junction of detail—the revelatory image of the little boy's knowing his
persecutor only by his shoe-buckles—and the pious concluding wish,
with its vague, theoretical, willed image, has a dislocating effect. It
epitomizes the tension that pervades the narrative: between experi-
enced misery and willed religious resolution for it. The speaker wants
to hope for a meeting in heaven and declares that hope; yet the pain of
his recollection must challenge the optimism that would resolve earth-
ly conflict in heavenly peace.
Next, changing the focus of his piety, the writer recalls a spiritual
experience connected with the bully. Melancholy and frightened,
expecting only further torment, the little boy, "sitting alone on a
bench," suddenly recalls a text from Psalms: "I will not be afraid of
what man can do unto me." Becoming instantly cheerful, he abandons
his seat to walk "several paces up and down the room with joyful
alacrity." Then follows a strange narrative hiatus: we learn nothing of
what the bully does next, only that Cowper wishes he himself had
continued thus to trust in God. The episode ends with his recollection
that the bully's cruelty "was at length discovered. He was expelled
from the school, and I was taken from it" (p. 15).
The moment of cheerfulness in the account is declared more impor-
tant than all the experience of misery—specifically, the author claims,
because of its source in religious devotion. And the relief of being able
to take "several paces" instead of remaining locked in dismal paralysis
compensates for many torments. Yet the proportions of the narrative
unavoidably force emotional emphasis not on salvation but on the
secular damnation that Cowper was repeatedly to endure. Like Cru-
soe, Cowper faces the problem of self and other. He imagines his cast-
away and himself, in the poem, as perishing "each alone"; he remem-
bers himself as a child "singled out from all the other boys" (p. 13),
isolated in misery. He sits alone and helpless on his bench, awaiting
renewed persecution, an instant of cheerfulness, a moment of action,
the most he can hope or recall. Such are the visions of his imagination,
which manifestly controls his memory. Finally, after an eternity, the
bully is expelled, but his victim, simultaneously, is "taken away" to
the house of an oculist, because his eyes are weak and he is expected to

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 Imagining a Self

lose sight in one of them. Everything happens from without; the pas-
sive constructions of the final sentences emphasize the child's power-
lessness. He remains a victim of outside forces even after the bully is
removed.
The condensation of summary emphasizes the pain in this narra-
tive, offered as an early instance of positive religious consciousness,
but pain exists clearly enough in the text. So, too, with the next epi-
sode: the child (about nine years old by now) walking across a grave-
yard is hit on the leg by a skull cast up by a gravedigger. It supplies
"an alarm to my conscience" (p. 15) through its reminder of mortality.
The boy, feeling his own energy, briefly entertains a familiar youthful
fantasy: "Perhaps I might never die." Soon, though, he is "struck with
a lowness of spirits, uncommon at my age, and frequently had intima-
tions of a consumptive habit." Although he understands these "inti-
mations" to foretell his death, he never reveals them, "for I thought
any bodily infirmity a disgrace, especially a consumption." Again,
hiatus: we do not learn the source of this idea or the result of the con-
sumptive intimations. Cowper concludes his account, "This messen-
ger of the Lord [presumably he means the signs of consumption],
however, did his errand, and perfectly convinced me that I was mor-
tal" (p. 16).
This time the terrible isolation seems to stem from pride: unwilling-
ness to risk whatever disgrace might be involved in confessing bodily
weakness—and, for that matter, psychic weakness. The autobiog-
rapher, failing to acknowledge his "lowness of spirits" to anyone,
remarks on its uncommonness with some apparent gratification in
being thus marked as "special." But the tonal pattern reiterates that of
the previous episode: a moment of cheerfulness, when the boy imag-
ines his own immortality, and a surrounding emotional miasma. The
brief fantasy of everlasting life yields to more prolonged imaginings of
imminent death, assertedly emanating from God. Even as a child, it
seems, Cowper could not allow himself the comfort of self-indulgent
image-making. He substitutes a masochistic indulgence of fear that
deprives him of even interior sources of reassurance.
Robinson Crusoe proceeds through a series of actions to compel
interest and assert meaning, the individual episodes creating a larger
pattern of action that might be formulated as "to take care of the self."
Crusoe originally expects to fulfill the self's needs by realizing his boy-
ish fantasies. Then, settling in Brazil, he seeks wealth as the proper

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 Daniel Defoe, William Cowper

means of taking care; in further pursuit of money he embarks on the

voyage that ends in his shipwreck. On the island, taking care of the
self first involves meticulous attention to physical requirements. Cru-
soe's religious experiences, however, direct him in new ways, until his
understanding of self comes to include soul, hence moral perception
and purpose. He learns to confront and control his own emotions. Re-
turning to civilization, he demonstrates his capacity to take care of
himself in several senses: to protect himself against external danger, to
function as a man in society, and to conform to his own standards of
right. When his imagination impedes him from external action, this
fact receives emphasis. Usually Crusoe's imagination leads him to
direct confrontation with the obstacles of the external world, and
Defoe's imagination concentrates on the evocation of such confronta-
tion.
Cowper works differently, creating images rather than pieces of
action: repeated visions of isolation, separateness, ard uniqueness,
ambiguous in their nature and expressing the ambiguity of a state that
might epitomize the "specialness" of election or damnation. To con-
vert this set of images into an action of salvation without sacrificing
their somber implication demands remarkable imaginative grasp: the
capacity to imagine the gap between God's ways and man's, yet not to
abandon personal experience in favor of theory. The action in this
instance is God's; the protagonist of the memoir remains locked in
stasis.
Cowper's memoir announces a drama of spiritual triumph but re-
ports a process of development that stresses an opposite movement.
John Morris sees it as a narrative of heroism. "Cowper's autobiog-
raphy may be described as an account of the attempt to wrest meaning
from the experience of guilt." "It seems likely to me that, in his asser-
tion of his uniqueness, the sufferer may sometimes be proclaiming at
the same time the integrity of his self that refuses to submit finally to
the sanctions of a religion that in its inclusiveness promises—or, as it
appears to the self, threatens—salvation at the price of identity."20
Both these comments emphasize the struggle in Cowper's Memoir: to
wrest meaning and to avoid submitting. Whether the struggles succeed
or fail remains ambiguous, partly because one can hardly determine
what would constitute success in any given instance. The story of the
poet's first attempted suicide and of the events leading up to it epito-
mizes the perplexities of his entire career.

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 Imagining a Self

He asks a relative (his cousin, Major William Cowper) to grant him

a sinecure in the House of Lords. His desire for the position itself orig-
inates, he explains, in imaginative sin: he has wished the death of the
Clerk of Journals so that he might take his place. "It pleased the Lord,"
he summarizes, "to give me my heart's desire, and in it, and with it, an
immediate punishment for my crimes" (p. 23). Major Cowper offers
him two "profitable places," which he accepts, "not immediately re-
flecting upon my incapacity to execute a business of so public a na-
ture" (p. 23). After a miserable week, though, the young man resigns
the offered posts, requesting instead a less public job. To his distress,
it turns out that even this position, given the immediate political cli-
mate, requires a public examination at the bar of the House. "They,
whose spirits are formed like mine, to whom a public exhibition of
themselves, on any occasion, is mortal poison, may have some idea of
the horror of my situation; others can have none" (p. 26). He tries to
study but cannot. He takes drugs that do not help. He wishes "earn-
estly" for madness as his only escape, anticipating it "with impatient
expectation" (p. 30). Then comes the idea of suicide: he will poison
himself in a ditch with the half-ounce of laudanum he has purchased,
thus avoiding that "mortal poison" of self-display. Having sought and
found solitude in the fields, he suddenly decides instead to flee to
France. Returning to his rooms to pack, he shifts again. Now he plans
to drown himself in the river, but the tide is out and a porter is watch-
ing. One fantasy succeeds another. Back to his room: he will drink the
laudanum after all. "A conflict that shook me to pieces suddenly took
place; not properly a trembling, but a convulsive agitation, which de-
prived me in a manner of the use of my limbs; and my mind was as
much shaken as my body" (p. 35). An "invisible hand" stops every
attempt to drink. So it continues. Paralyzed fingers interfere with
drinking; a mysterious impulse makes him throw the laudanum away;
he unlocks his door under the impression that he is locking it; when he
tries to stab himself the penknife is broken at the tip. Fantasy and real-
ity merge and interchange; he cannot assess actuality. Two attempts
to hang himself fail because of inadequate supports. In a third effort
he actually loses consciousness before the garter by which he hangs
breaks. He returns to bed, summons Major Cowper, tells him what
has happened. His cousin assures him he need not retain the post.

Despite the Marx Brothers flavor of summary, in Cowper's telling

the story, recording bitter and unresolvable internal conflict, contains

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 Daniel Defoe, William Cowper

no comic elements. Recognizing its bizarre aspect, he seems a little un-

certain how he should relate it. "It would be strange, should I omit to
observe here, how I was continually hurried away from such places as
were most favourable to my design, to others, where it was almost
impossible to execute it" (p. 34). Again, the passive verb form: Cow-
per can only understand his actions in terms of external forces acting
upon him. God, he explains, has intervened to keep him from the sin
of self-murder.
In terms of the psychology of his era, Cowper's approaches to and
retreats from suicide demonstrated the operations of a disordered
imagination.21 When Robinson Crusoe speaks of his own imagination,
he is referring to the image-making faculty, which has no power to
assess the validity of the pictures it creates and which may function on
the basis of mistaken and misleading association of ideas. The images
of devil and cannibal that haunt him misdirect his attention away
from God and away from his proper functioning on the island because
he attributes to them more reality than they possess, allowing fancy to
triumph over sensation. The madman makes precisely the same mis-
take. Cowper's imaginings of the horror of public examination assume
preeminence over direct impressions from experience; his visions of
successful suicide ignore immediate physical realities. As he tells the
story, he emphasizes how fantasies replace one another so rapidly as
to make each impossible to realize.
Almost consistently throughout his narrative, he reports dangers of
the imagination, a force leading him ever toward separation, isola-
tion, and dramatic misery. "There never was so abandoned a wretch;
so great a sinner!" he tells himself (p. 43). The attempt at suicide itself
declares that he is special. Ten years later he again tried to hang him-
self, believing this time, apparently, that he was sacrificing himself to
God. "When the attempt failed, he thought that he had so displeased
God that his Maker barred him from all hope of salvation."22 The fan-
tasy that he had committed the unforgivable sin had come upon him,
in a different form, during his earliest attack of madness, shortly after
the first suicide attempt. And the sense of himself as specially set apart
and doomed remained in one form or another through most of his
adult life. Cowper uses the word alienation to allude to his terrible
separation from God (p. 50), and he describes constantly and pain-
fully his experience of separation from other men.
Suicide constitutes an act of aggression—obviously toward the self,

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 Imagining a Self

less obviously toward the others whom it reproaches for inadequacy

to the victim's need. After Cowper's conversion, he finds himself dis-
turbed by ariger, although "sensual gratification" had previously been
his main temptation. "Being naturally of an easy quiet disposition, I
was seldom tempted to anger; yet, that passion it is which now gives
me the most disturbance, and occasions the sharpest conflicts" (p. 59).
He seems to perceive it as an alien force imposed from without on his
"easy quiet disposition," but one may speculate that anger had always
troubled Cowper more than he knew. His report of his early life
stresses his difficulty in human relationships. Never alluding to his
parents except to emphasize the shock of early separation from a lov-
ing mother (who died in childbirth when he was six), and reporting
himself as isolated among his peers, Cowper describes himself before
the suicide attempt in harmonious relation only with Major Cowper,
who offered him the poisoned blessing of public office, and with two
virtual strangers encountered in coffee houses, who encouraged him
to suicide. Paranoid fantasies always tempted him. Reading the para-
ble of the barren fig tree, he feels persuaded "that when our Saviour
pronounced a curse upon [the tree], he had me in his eye; and pointed
that curse directly at me" (p.44). A newspaper story that he feels refers
to him encourages him to suicide. The world, as he understands it,
focuses malignly on him. He describes himself as early passive under
the devil's suggestions (p. 17); his sense of incapacity persists.
The history of the heart, as Cowper relates it, records a struggle to
love: to love God, others, the self. In some respects he resembles Alex-
ander Selkirk—a manifestly angry man who chose to be marooned on
his desert island—more than Robinson Crusoe, who was doomed to
isolation but increasingly yearning for community. Cowper feels
tempted by solitude, a manifestation of anger rather than of serenity
and tempted, always, to turn his anger on himself. He does so even in
his account of his life, although he also betrays his sense of grievance
against the world.
Crusoe's dramatic development derives from increasing self-aware-
ness and increasingly fruitful action; Cowper delineates a drama of
denial. His inclusive, theological explanation of his experience defends
him against full realization of his suffering. Yet his imagination, too,
becomes a means of self-assertion, despite all his efforts to subordinate
it. The complexity of his narrative, a narrative entirely ordered by the
conventional form of spiritual autobiography, reflects the conflict

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 Daniel Defoe, William Cowper

between personal and orthodox meanings of the imagery he employs.

Summarizing his career since his conversion Cowper observes, "No
trial has befallen me since, but what might be expected in a state of
warfare" (p. 58). His understanding of life as endless battle has more
than its Christian meaning. Imagery of warfare occurs on almost
every page: allusions to fighting, wounds, enemies let loose upon the
speaker, rebellion, weapons, the artillery of Satan. The struggle rages
between Cowper and the devil, but also between him and God, and
between him and his heart.
The heart, source of spiritual and emotional energy, is most charac-
teristically alluded to in negative terms, as hardened, sinful, sick. The
very form of spiritual autobiography partially accounts for this fact:
stress on the unregenerate character of the sinner intensifies the glory,
and the significance, of his salvation. As a confirmed Christian, Cow-
per can berate the self he used to be; he can also testify to the anguish
he had endured, as though tortured on the rack: frightened by his own
insensibility (a crucial paradox; p. 16); "lying down in horror, and
rising up in despair" (p. 17); afflicted by terrors of the mind (p. 43);
yearning "to stupify my awakened and feeling mind; harassed with
sleepless nights, and days of uninterrupted misery" (p. 45). "Every
thing preached to me," Cowper says, adding "and every thing preach-
ed the curse of the law" (pp. 44-45).
Robinson Crusoe expresses his fears through imagery of the threat-
ening other; the danger is being eaten. Cowper's fears of others center
on the horror of rejection. "I never went into the street, but I thought
the people stood and laughed at me, and held me in contempt" (p. 45).
His most compelling images evoke terrified isolation. "I dined alone,
either at the tavern, where I went in the dark, or at the chop-house,
where I always took care to hide myself in the darkest corner of the
room. I slept generally an hour in the evening; though it was only to
be terrified in dreams . . . I reeled and staggered like a drunken man.
The eyes of man I could not bear" (p. 45). For him as for Crusoe, rec-
onciliation with God involves reconciliation with man. He values
solitary communion with God, which leads him to the unexpected joy
of feeling his "heart . . . full of love to all the congregation" when he
goes to church (p. 62). His association with the Unwin family, he
believes, confirms his salvation, furthering his knowledge of Christ by
"communion with his dear disciples" (p. 67). He sums up the joy of his
conversion as "the ardour of my first love" (p. 58).

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 Imagining a Self

Images of love, like those of battle, belong to the conventional rhe-

toric of Christianity by which Cowper controls his imagination. By
spiritualizing his experience he in effect protects himself against it. If
the agonies of approaching madness and of madness experienced
attest God's concern to rescue a sinner through a heart softened by
suffering, misery becomes more tolerable; the disordered imagination
is retrospectively ordered, not by reference to the external world but
in relation to the Christian scheme.
Yet spiritual interpretation cannot totally account for the reported
psychic events. For one thing, conversion does not entirely solve
Cowper's problem. "Oh that the ardour of my first love had contin-
ued! But I have known many a lifeless and unhallowed hour since;
long intervals of darkness, interrupted by short returns of peace and
joy in believing" (p. 58). From the Christian point of view, every "un-
hallowed hour" represents a relapse into sin (although, of course, the
pattern of repeated relapse and rejuvenation is characteristic of the
convert). But Cowper's rescue from his intermittent misery, although
he naturally attributes it to God, comes in fact through the agency of
man and depends upon his acceptance of responsibility for his own
action even when that action temporarily appears to defy divine auth-
ority.
The mental state embodied in the poet's "lifeless and unhallowed"
hours is presumably a version of that described in his elaborate narra-
tive of attempted suicide: conflict that makes self-determination im-
possible. Trying repeatedly to kill himself, but trying to fail as well, he
tries also to avoid responsibility for himself, arranging matters so that
Major Cowper rather than he decides he must not accept the clerk-
ship. His suffering associates itself with passivity. He is the bully's vic-
tim, the victim also of consumptive symptoms, of depression, of
anguish of mind, of backslidings, of Satan: the potentially shipwrecked
sailor (pp. 27-28) but never the sailor at the helm. His conversion
occurs by shafts of joy, gleams of sunlight from without. He can do
nothing for himself.
After his move to Huntingdon, Cowper reports, he suddenly experi-
ences his situation as "a state of desertion," his communion with the
Lord interrupted (p. 64). At this juncture, William Unwin takes the
initiative of friendship, providing relief. Later, it occurs to Cowper
that he might board in the Unwin family. "From the moment this
thought struck me, such a tumult of anxious solicitude seized me, that

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 Daniel Defoe, William Cowper

for two or three days I could not divert my mind to any other subject.
I blamed and condemned myself for want of submission to the Lord's
will; but still the language of my mutinous and disobedient heart was,
'Give me the blessing, or else I die' " (p. 66). Unable to resolve this
clash of desire and guilt, he finally brings himself to focus attention on
something else. A Biblical text comes into his mind; he feels convinced
that the words, which seem to justify his wish, "were not of my own
production" (p. 66). Thus fortified, he begins "to negocíate the affair"
(p. 67); his admission to the Unwin family constitutes for him a sym-
bolic resolution to his conflicts.
The account both parallels and reverses the narrative of attempted
suicide. Again panic attends the impulse to action; the resulting
"tumult" of anxiety paralyzes the writer, as anxiety has always para-
lyzed him. Despite his self-condemnation, he condones the gratifica-
tion of impulse by attributing to some outside agency its verbal sanc-
tion. He thus achieves the single self-determined action of the entire
memoir.
Reality cannot save Cowper from his depressed fantasies. Reality
has nothing to do with them. No Alpine wolves will test his courage
and command. The only arena lies within. The threat of public office
depends not on the office but on Cowper's fantasies about it. The
appeal of the Un wins derives from his imagination. The episodes that
provoke severe anxiety involve the need to function in the external
world. Cowper is enabled so to function, on a single occasion, by an
imaginative event: words suddenly appear in his mind. Imagination
creates and intensifies his pain—drives him even into madness—but
Christian piety can interpret and thus control the imagination, as real-
ity cannot. It brings secular as well as religious salvation. Without it,
Cowper finds it impossible to assert himself; with it, he can find the
devious means of self-assertion that leads him finally to harmonious
relationship with others: rescue of the heart as well as the soul.
In Robinson Crusoe the emotional level of narrative reinforces the
religious, adding a dimension of meaning beneath explicit statement.
Crusoe's development of Christian insight parallels his emotional
growth. In Cowper's Memoir the clash between the memory which
reports mainly pain and the interpretation which affirms a positive
meaning for pain produces a drama that belongs both to his life and to
his life story. His experience of isolation, persecution, paranoia, and
helplessness would be intolerable without the descent of grace that

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 Imagining a Self

retrospectively justifies his misery. "A sense of self-loathing and

abhorrence," Cowper tells us, "ran through all my insanity" (p. 52).
He "became so familiar with despair" that not even hell could terrify
him. Then, dreaming "that the sweetest boy I ever saw came dancing
up to my bed-side," he awakens "for the first time with a sensation of
delight on my mind" (p. 55). This joy, he says explicitly, seemed mys-
terious to him and to those about him. As it increases and endures, he
comes to believe it the work of God. His physician obviously thinks it
another manifestation of madness, but Cowper persuades him other-
wise. His grip on sanity depends, he feels, on his preservation of reli-
gious faith with its possibilities of joy. His interpretation, which be-
longs to his shaping of his story, is also part of his experience. Mem-
ory declares the disproportion of misery to joy; interpretation insists
on joy's ultimate validity. Memory tells of repeated sequences of psy-
chic sinking; interpretation affirms a larger pattern of growth, culmin-
ating in the momentary assertion of independent decision and action,
a deliberate seizing of happiness understood as something given from
without.
Francis Hart, writing of the nature of autobiographical form,
distinguishes between "the emergent narrative patterns of the
recovered life" and "the dramatic patterns of the evolving act of
recovery." 23 The distinction helps to focus attention on the striking
contrasts of Cowper's Memoir, in which the narrative pattern of the
life delineates a battle won—the experiencer constantly victimized by
his own passivity yet asserting the triumph of faith—while the drama
of the telling depends on the teller's vivid awareness of the encroach-
ment of despair. One feels the pathos of Cowper's need to assert a line
of growth (that line which shapes Crusoe's story) against the
experience of psychic decay, and one feels the degree to which the
assertion itself constitutes growth.
Hart's distinction is particularly useful for understanding Cowper's
Memoir because it emphasizes the significance of the act of writing.
Cowper tells of himself the only story he can bring himself to tell, its
shape determined by the formulae of conversion. The spiritual auto-
biography is by definition a success story, a record of sanctioned
change in the service of incontrovertibly acceptable goals. To impose
its form on troubled experience, forbidding the imagination to conjure
more sinister meanings, might alleviate anxiety and confirm the
possibilities of passivity. The man who has been given all that he has,

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 Daniel Defoe, William Cowper

actively taking nothing, allows himself also to be given the forms of

self-understanding.
But although he is given the form, he yet must write the book: an
active process, taking place in time and involving the imagination.
Evoking the images of isolation, struggle, and anger that possess his
mind and making the reader feel the threatening paralysis of depres-
sion, he accepts through his writing more responsibility for himself
than he directly admits. The narrative of Robinson Crusoe's adven-
tures acknowledges from the outset the relation between imagination
and action. Imagination can lead to fruitless or self-destructive action
(building the giant canoe, needlessly elaborating fortifications) or to
fulfillment (rescuing Friday, defeating the wolves). Or it can lead to
writing, an act meaningless or valuable according to the degree of
understanding that informs it. Cowper's account of himself nowhere
explicitly grants the connection of imagination to action. It proceeds
as though action comprises no part of the human obligation. The
writer evades his responsibility for the crucial action of seeking
admission to the Unwin household, claiming inspiration from
without. Yet the writer writes: an action controlled by his religious
commitment but putting him in constant contact with his unruly heart
and making him vivify the forces that he declares subdued by his
acceptance of Christian revelation. He was later to prolong his
salvation by functioning as a poet, another activity encouraging the
expression of greater complexity than Cowper would consciously
acknowledge.

Given the notion that the imagination properly functions to draw

man toward God, there need be no discrepancy between focus on the
spiritual life and concentration on imagination as one of its
components. But the fact remains: the imagination may lead also in
other directions. Spiritual autobiography, literal or fictional, asserts
the permanence of God's patterns. In it the writer delivers "his life up
to a preestablished, sanctified model, allowing the genre, as much as
anything, to communicate the meaning of the life." 24 Yet the
imagination that fills in the pattern's details simultaneously reminds
the reader of the reality of possibilities rejected by the engaged human
will. At its best, in fact or fiction, the literary form that appears to
assert the sufficiency of considering each individual a soul in need of
salvation demonstrates, in its eighteenth-century exemplifications,

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 Imagining a Self

how many elements of mind and heart must be controlled in the order
of narration and the order of comprehension, to maintain that
orthodox view. The spiritual autobiography can reveal the intricacies
of the imagination: a force leading man toward or away from God in
the living and the telling of lives, a force thus defining his ultimate
identity.

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 3
Female Identities

o employ the conventions of spiritual autobiography has social

T as well as literary implications, declaring the writer's total con-

formity with a religious orthodoxy. Behind the screen of such
conformity he may find the freedom to render intimate details of his
psychic experience, even discovering unexpected meanings for that
experience as he fits it into the established mold. Literary conventions
with less obvious relation to a public system of belief may serve
similar functions of concealment and revelation in projecting a version
of self. Women wrote most of the novels of the eighteenth century
(although few of those now read for pleasure), employing the highly
artificial conventions of the romance or those of dreary domestic
didacticism—and sometimes unlikely combinations of both. 1 They are
on the whole minor writers—third-rate, fourth-rate, tenth-rate—gen-
erally assumed to have only historic importance, filling in the space
between Defoe and Richardson and closing the gaps around Fielding
and Sterne. But in fact their novels are worth considering for psycho-
logical as well as historical reasons. They suggest some special rela-
tions between women and convention, some special purposes for
which women used even the most seemingly empty literary forms, and
some special strategies enlisted in the assertion of female identity.
Women—eighteenth-century women—employ the writing of nov-
els to affirm the social order that limits them. They characteristically
define a heroine by her weakness, showing how weakness and passiv-

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 Imagining a Self

ity become social resources, but they acknowledge the cost of weak-
ness, either in terms of the diminishment a woman allows herself to
endure or the anger induced in her by social necessities. Female good-
ness in novels does not go unrewarded; someone always appreciates
the heroine. With its possibilities for glorifying the capacities and the
virtues of women, fiction provides ready opportunity for wish fulfill-
ment. The relation between the enlargement and the diminishment of
female capacity as rendered in novels by women exemplifies the com-
plexity of the psychic maneuvering involved in such work.

"Women should always be women," observes a male character in a

novel by Charlotte Lennox; "the virtues of our sex are not the virtues
of theirs. When Lady Cornelia declaims in Greek, and Miss Sandford
vaults into her saddle like another Hotspur, I forget I am in company
with women: the dogmatic critic awes me into silence, and the hardy
rider makes my assistance unnecessary." 2 Two pages later the novel
supplies superior versions of the sporting and the learned lady. The
good sports-woman follows the chase only in order to save animals;
the good intellectual "is surprised, confused, to find her superiority
acknowledged by those, whose higher attainments she considered
with awe" (II, 167).
Entirely gratuitous in the action of the novel, this treatment of
proper female conduct gives Charlotte Lennox the opportunity to
endorse the conventional view that a woman may achieve only if
apologetic. She must ask assistance, show her timidity, display con-
fusion; thus she can justify competence at riding or Greek. One may
take the whole episode as a covert apology for the author's presump-
tion in writing novels. Other women apologize directly for them-
selves: "Convinced that I have not wrote a line that conveys a wrong
idea to the head or a corrupt wish to the heart, I shall rest satisfied in
the purity of my own intentions and if I merit not applause, I feel that
I dread not censure." 3 Like the good sportswoman, the good female
author justifies herself by the claim that she has done no harm. Eliza-
beth Boyd requests her readers "to excuse the Errors of a Female Pen:
The Book having been writ when its Author was very young, whose
ill-state of Health hath not permitted her to make it so correct by far,
as otherwise it had been." 4 Again, in the "Advertisement," she
explains that she has published only in order to support her aged
mother. Such women offer weakness, harmlessness, youth, ill health,

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 Female Identities

lack of ambition, financial need—in short, femaleness—as excuse for

presumption. Unlike the arrogant sportswoman, they desire under-
standing and assistance; unlike the confident speaker of Greek, they
employ dogmatism only to reiterate their subordination. Their inade-
quacy supplies the rhetorical basis for their claim to attention.
In imagining heroines, on the other hand, women often create char-
acters who appear to require no apology and to reveal no weakness.
Mrs. Boyd's Amanda, for example, ideally beautiful and serene of
soul, knows languages and science—"nay, dar'd the Sex that would
monopolize them, in every Art, once taught her, to be more perfect.
Would thus our Fair of Worth improve their Minutes, Woman would
shine the Sun of Jove's Creation. Say, ye triumphing Learn'd, what
bars the Species? Have we not Souls as rich, and Wits as pregnant?5
The fantasy of a woman so accomplished as to "dare" compete with
those men who "would monopolize" the pleasures and prerogatives of
learning emphasizes female superiority, women functioning in
potential as the "Sun" of creation. But Mrs. Boyd finally suggests that
the value of female education consists in making women more worthy
of the good man's love ("Say, can the Man of Desert fond the Simple,
or truly love the rude, unpolish'd Bride?"). A fantasy of feminine
strength has transformed itself mysteriously into one more confession
of inadequacy.
Women in fiction, like women in fact, discover restriction, forced to
confine themselves to needlework because "reading and poring over
books would never get me a husband."6 The obligation to get a hus-
band involved a woman's fundamental duty in life. Jane Barker's her-
oine Galesia castigates herself by reflecting "how useless, or rather
pernicious, Books and Learning are to our Sex. They are like Oatmeal
or Charcoal to the deprav'd Appetites of Girls." 7 Her mother assures
her that she is frustrating the ends of her creation by living in solitude;
she must strive, rather, to be a good wife, governess, and "friendly
Assistant" to all (p. 80), or risk eternal damnation. Galesia, full of
disgust for matrimony, yet makes every effort to meet her mother's
standards.
The novels that contain such statements often demonstrate that the
accomplished woman manages nonetheless to get her husband,
proving herself, despite her peculiarity, a conventional woman at
heart. Written largely for female readers, these books exploit contra-
dictory appeals, suggesting that a woman may differ from her kind

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 Imagining a Self

without penalty but also assuring the reader that, even in the remote
country of romance, orthodox definitions of virtue apply and
compliance will be rewarded. The hints of strain and resentment that
such should be the case rumble just beneath the surface.
Woman's weakness often supplies the basis for plot and detail.
Pregnancy is weakness: a woman dies, "weak with many Children,
Lifes common End with the too pregnant Fair." 8 Women's dependence
on reputation makes them vulnerable.9 Women recognize that their
sex may be naturally wicked and that, in any case, men believe it
so—yet a further social and psychological liability. When a woman
behaves nobly, another comments on how glad she is to find before
she dies "one Woman, whose Excellence of Nature will preserve my
Sex from those Imputations the monstrous Wickedness of Berillia
wou'd else draw on it." 10 Her readiness to predict negative generaliza-
tion from a single instance strikes the authentic note of female self-
deprecation. Sufficient reward of virtue may be peaceful death and
long remembrance; for women to combat their natural and necessary
inadequacies in life amounts to a full-time occupation.
Pregnancy, reputation, wickedness: all relate to the great danger of
passion. "Oh, my dear girls," Susannah Rowson beseeches—"for to
such only am I writing—listen not to the voice of love, unless sanc-
tioned by parental approbation: be assured, it is now past the days
of romance: no woman can be run away with contrary to her own
inclination: then kneel down each morning, and request kind heaven
to keep you free from temptation, or should it please to suffer you to
be tried, pray for fortitude to resist the natural inclination when it
runs counter to the precepts of religion and virtue." 11 If a woman ad-
mits her passionate feelings, her "natural inclination," she may be
unable to set limits to her yielding. Passion may best be dealt with by
flight. "I wish our Sex would use these Precautions frequently, and not
trust their selves with themselves, there would not be so many Ship-
wrecks of Honour." 12 A woman, unable to trust herself with herself,
can certainly not trust her feelings for another. In one eighteenth-
century narrative, sexual passion leads Louisa to union with a scoun-
drel. He abandons her, the worthy lover of her youth proposes once
more, but Louisa cannot interest herself in him. "Strange caprice of
the human heart! whose motions nought can regulate, while, like a
meteor, it shoots along, too oft portending ruin." 13 References to,
images of, the human heart as portending ruin abound in all these

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 Female Identities

popular novels by women. 14 Even the ineluctable fidelity of females

destroys them. An Irish Catholic married to an English husband in
seventeenth-century Ireland is the blameless object of his jealousy and
rage because she remains childless. When a priest comes to warn her
that a Catholic mob is likely to destroy their house, the husband beats
the clergyman to death and confines his wife in a garden hut, from
which she escapes when the house is burnt. She thinks her husband
dead, but he reappears, having hidden in a cave. Transported with
joy, she brings him sustenance and shares his hiding-place. Their sex
life improves, she bears and nurses a daughter; her spouse becomes
"the tenderest, best of husbands: as was Elvira, spite of her distressful
circumstances, the most contented of wives." 15 But the fugitives are
discovered, the man condemned to death for killing the priest; Elvira
happily joins him in a prison suicide.
Unrealistic though this narrative is (despite its grounding in histori-
cal fact), its central fantasy of triumphant female masochism winning
total appreciation illuminates reality at least as powerfully as
Robinson Crusoe's devising of fortifications. It demonstrates how fan-
tasy converts experienced weakness to imagined strength. All aggres-
sion belongs to the male in this interpretation, all virtue to the female.
Proving her goodness—the faithfulness in love that a Jane Austen her-
oine would claim as a defining attribute of her sex—she creates her
power: one more version of the energy of defeat. For the fable dem-
onstrates the woman's ineffectuality as clearly (though probably not
as consciously) as her strength. In society the heroine feels herself
helpless; her husband, rejecting her, finds abundant other resources
for exercising his emotional and physical energies. She, on the other
hand, has none. Only in isolation and social alienation can she func-
tion effectively. Then she can demonstrate her fortitude, her faithful-
ness—even her sexuality, denied and obscured before. And her story
ends in death, expressing anger against the male but also perhaps the
devaluation of the self. Elvira initiates the plan for suicide and pro-
vides the dagger.
Many eighteenth-century narratives by women share the theme of
self-punishment. Although some conclude in happy marriages, the
events that precede those alliances and the illustrative episodes that
cluster about the main plot insist on the desperation of women's
condition. And quite commonly the account of an imagined woman's
career will end not in happy marriage but in happy death. "Being

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 Imagining a Self

loved," a twentieth-century woman psychoanalyst writes, "not only is

part of woman's natural life in the same way as it is part of man's , but
it also becomes of necessity her profession."16 Truer still in the eigh-
teenth century and cause for female resentment: a profession neces-
sary rather than chosen constitutes a burden. Perhaps this fact helps to
explain the degree to which eighteenth-century women wrote about
their emotional and sexual capacity as weakness—involving them in a
necessary profession—rather than strength.
The avoidance of sexual love, however, rarely solves a heroine's
problems. A man and a woman, in an early epistolary novel, wary of
love and marriage, have agreed to sustain a Platonic friendship by
correspondence. They tell each other anecdotes, engage in political
argument, exchange banter. When Artander declares himself eager to
be Berina's lover rather than merely her friend, she refuses to believe
him. Several letters sustain the interchange of protestation and denial.
At the book's end, Artander is about to come to town to throw
himself at Berina's feet, while she continues to proclaim her
incredulity. "Deliver me from Cupid's random Shots," she begs, "and
make my firm Resolution a Racket to repel 'em." But she also recog-
nizes—in the same context—"the dismal Effects of not loving, to be
call'd Ill-natur'd, and an old Maid, who wou'd not rather chuse to be
undone?"17 Undone, of course, carries a specifically sexual meaning:
the heroine perceives as her alternatives the destructions of love or the
dismal sterility of chastity. Women in novels sometimes praise
virginity, but not often convincingly. The Artander-Berina plot, in
which all real events are held in abeyance through the entire action of
the novel, demonstrates as clearly as those tales in which disaster
succeeds disaster the conviction that to yield to love means ruin,
psychic if not social. And Berina embodies anew the antithesis of in-
tellect and emotion. Like Congreve's Millamant, her weapon is her
wit. She can forestall all happening—this her apparent goal, since all
that can happen to a woman is likely to involve love or other forms of
disaster—by her verbal dexterity, which keeps her lover at a distance
yet enthralled. But woman's wit amounts only to temporizing, and the
novel ends evasively like other minor novels, suggesting that, given all
the freedom of fantasy, the female author finds herself unable to
imagine, even for a perfect heroine in an unreal world, any solution to
women's psychic dilemma.
Many works of fiction endorse a rigid punitive sexual morality.

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Women must be punished more severely than men for their lapses: the
innocent girl seduced and betrayed will die in subsequent childbirth,
her seducer, repentant, punished only by fits of melancholia. 1 8 The
fundamental fantasy that sexuality represents total destruction for
women involves also a belief that only severe external restraints will
control their potential looseness. Mrs. Griffith's "novellettes" show
sexual weakness eventuating in death. A moment's sexual indiscretion
produces at best a lifetime's remorse, yet the danger of being
overwhelmed by passion is omnipresent. Love must be, yet cannot be,
controlled by duty: a hopeless female dilemma. Some writers find
more ingenious punishments than death for failures of discretion: a
minor character in a Jane Barker novel, for example, becomes a
merman's paramour as a consequence of her indulgence in
extra-marital sex. "She that refused the honest Espousals provided by
her Father, became Wife to a Monster; she that disgraced herself and
her Friends by unlawful Lust, was a Prostitute to a Fish." 1 '
The point is not simply that eighteenth-century popular novels
reflect the rigid and simplistic morality to which the society paid
lip service: one could assume so without reading them. More interest-
ing is the fact that female novelists, upholding the established system,
find images and actions to express profound ambivalence. They con-
vey the energy of impulse as well as of repression; asserting that
women are to be valued for their goodness, they wistfully hint a
yearning for other grounds of value. The ineptitude of their writing
and the improbability of their plots have prevented critics from taking
them seriously; yet their special kind of expressiveness—the capacity
to convey through conventional structures the private intensity of
divided impulse—illuminates not only the condition of women but
that of the novel. Even in its more amateurish manifestations, it
seems, the novel can contain and express through its patterns of action
complexities of feeling that it nowhere directly acknowledges: com-
plexities, indeed, often contradicted by its explicit, moralistic
statements. Even the most conventional fictions find ways to convey
the personal. Most eighteenth-century novels by women emphatically
communicate the world's impingements on the personal, while
expressing also the fantasies through which women combat impinge-
ment—enthusiastic endorsement of the system at the same time com-
prising a subtle mode of combat.
Although women imagine themselves destroyed by their passions,

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they see also ambiguous possibilities of power over others implicit in

their sexuality. Like Artander, other lovers hold forth, with presum-
able sincerity, the promise that their beloveds will continue to wield
the power in marriage, the men "being all Obedience." But women
know that male obedience will not survive female compliance. The
possibility of pleasing diminishes once a woman yields. The dominion
women appear to possess is given them by men, who can withdraw it
at will; it is only another form of dependency. Although many women
imagine glamorous heroines, rich, intelligent, beautiful, seductive,
with men at their feet, conquered or eager to be conquered, they do
not imagine that even such marvels are able to retain their ascen-
dancy. Indeed, the woman who gives up in advance, some novelists
suggest, wins greater rewards than the one who aspires. The plot of
Euphemia is particularly instructive. In the main line of action (there
are many subplots), the heroine contracts a loveless marriage in com-
pliance with her mother's wishes. When she accompanies her husband
to America, her devoted friend Maria comments, "To die for the man
she loves, is not an act of such heroism, as to chuse misery with the
man one has no reason to love, because we consider it to be our duty
to do so" (II, 63-64). Acts of such heroism comprise Euphemia's life.
She performs in every respect like a model woman, although Neville
consistently refuses to accept her admirable advice, considering her
suggestions, however wise, "a liberty not to be endured in a woman
and a wife" (IV, 5). Despite her distaste for the man she has married,
Euphemia bears him a son and a daughter; when her son drowns in
childhood, she endures the loss with Christian fortitude. In Volume
IV, she gets her reward. The drowned son comes to life: he has been
captured by Indians. Her husband's rich uncle makes it possible for
them to return to England and then dies, leaving Euphemia a large
inheritance in her own right, explicitly in order to prevent her hus-
band's control of it. Her attractive son assumes the place of lover in
her life, in all but a literally sexual sense, and Euphemia's final happi-
ness derives from her possession of her son and her hope of controlling
his destiny.20
Never failing in compliance to mother, husband, and socially ac-
cepted principles of conduct, Euphemia does not allow herself the
weakness of sexuality. Her flawless passivity amounts to effective
invulnerability. Agreeing to marry because her mother likes a man,
Euphemia protects herself from emotional damage, just as her pas-

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sivity before God and her ready acceptance of conventional pieties

protect her from damage in the loss of her son. In the long run, the
novel demonstrates, a disagreeable husband need hardly hamper a
woman. Euphemia has, in effect, pursued the logical implications of
the many romantic novels that detail the damage women suffer by
allowing themselves love. Superficially she too suffers damage in the
form of economic and physical misfortunes—and, of course, at least
temporarily in the loss of her son. But the lost is found and misfor-
tunes compensated; the novel's conclusion displays a note of smugness
missing from the books that end in marriage. The author has imagined
a blameless way for a woman to attain her own money, her own
power. To give up sexual love is a small price to pay, since love,
woman's profession, is also often her doom.

The novels here discussed are, on the whole, clumsily written,

sometimes to the point of incoherence, and their tones are therefore
difficult to interpret with certainty. Yet although most of their hero-
ines manifest apparently complete acceptance of the values of their
society, leaving minor characters or wicked ones to articulate discon-
tent, the patterns of action do suggest at least the possibility of hidden
female anger. Euphemia does not complain, nor do the fictional young
women who disguise themselves as men, suffer attempted seduction
and rape, are abducted or even enslaved in the process of proving
themselves worthy of the men they love. The plots in which they
figure bear little obvious relation to workaday reality. But the consis-
tency with which women suffer and endure—men being typically the
causes and the agents of their pain—obscurely declares some psychic
meaning: masochism, rage, or both? At the very least, the fact that
even in fantasy women see themselves always as victims suggests their
dim awareness of social victimization and their resultant sense of help-
lessness. Through the conventions of romance women tell themselves
and one another the meaning of their fate.
Philosophers have pointed out that periods define themselves more
cogently by the questions they fail to ask than by those they actually
formulate. The eighteenth century did not inquire why a woman's
profession must be love, although individual women were quite aware
of the fact as a problem; nor did eighteenth-century thinkers investi-
gate their assumption that men and women differ so fundamentally as
to seem almost members of different species. Most women novelists

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agree that women are weaker than men; sometimes they argue that
women are also more naturally virtuous—although the equation of
weakness and wickedness tempts many. They do not explain how
they feel about their assumptions, and their society's.
Two novels by women, one written early, the other late in the cen-
tury, use rage at the female condition as a shaping force, thus demon-
strating another way in which weakness can yield literary strength.
Jane Barker's A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies appeared in 1723;
Mary Wollstonecraft's Mary: A Fiction in 1788, four years before her
Vindication of the Rights of Women. In all obvious respects, the two
books differ enormously. Mary Wollstonecraft, committed feminist,
writes a more or less realistic novel dominated by a clear moral intent,
inventing episodes to make points, relying on a stilted though empha-
tic polemic style. Her predecessor, lacking any apparent focused, con-
scious purpose, produces an almost incoherent melange of happenings
related to one another only by the often peripheral involvement of the
heroine and interspersed with samples of her poetry, including several
recipes in verse. Like Jane Barker's earlier collection of Entertaining
Novels, A Patch-Work Screen seems at first merely an outpouring of
fantasy. The title suggests a structure of random pieces stitched to-
gether in decorative fashion. Yet ostensible randomness and ostensible
purpose create similar effects: the reader encounters in both cases the
writer's genuine fury.
A Patch-Work Screen purports to continue the story begun in The
Amours of Bosvil and Galesia, an elaborate tale of unrequited love
included in Entertaining Novels.21 Galesia, in the earlier account,
appears afflicted by vanity, but she displays her genuine powers by
running a country estate and by learning what her brother is willing to
teach her. She decides to study syntax as compensation for being
thwarted in love; her brother, who procures for her a grammar book,
expects her to give up her effort at the first difficulty, since beauty is
for women easier to achieve than learning. Galesia persists in her
devotion to internal rather than external cultivation and is duly pun-
ished for her presumption: Bosvil, whom she loves, marries another.
One might expect A Patch-Work Screen to bring its heroine to a
more satisfactory conclusion, educating her to achieve happiness in
wedlock. On the contrary. Galesia never manages to marry, the book
ends in medias res with her mother's death and a series of poetic medi-
tations on religious subjects, and the heroine's failure to unite herself

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with a man has come to seem oddly like a triumph. A bit past the
middle of the novel, Galesia produces a poem praising "A Virgin
Life." It begins,

Since, O good Heavens! you have bestow'd on me

So great a Kindness for Virginity,
Suffer me not to fall into the Powers
Of Man's almost Omnipotent Amours.
But let me in this happy State remain,
And in chaste Verse my chaster Thoughts explain.22

The "almost Omnipotent" power of men pursues her; her successful

evasion of it, although she never offers open defiance, constitutes a
triumph.
On the other hand, not to be courted would be a disaster: a woman's
failure to attract men suggests that she bears some moral flaw. Bitter
consciousness of male power, equal consciousness of the demand that
women attest their virtue by attracting men, awareness of the need for
female passivity and the fact of male arrogance: these perceptions
control women. Neither Galesia nor her creator demonstrates in
words any anger more open than that hinted by the verses on virgin-
ity. The novel's action, on the other hand, makes anger apparent. The
deaths of two would-be husbands rescue Galesia from the necessity
of marriage. One young man commits the "detestable Frolick" of a
robbery, simply for the sake of adventure, and is duly hanged (p. 38).
Galesia feels alienated even from her own sex. She can neither share
her society's values nor believe in her right to adhere to others. She en-
counters a woman who has been dreadfully wronged by a man of ap-
parent piety; the experience heightens her sense of alienation (p. 55).
People seek her advice in illnesses; valued as a doctor, she feels obliged
to apologize for her resulting self-esteem. Other betrayed women
cross her path. At her mother's insistence, she agrees to marry Lysan-
der, whose mistress thereupon causes him such vexation that he kills
himself (p. 88). Galesia begins "to be displeas'd at my-self, for hoping
or expecting any thing that tended to Happiness" (p. 89).
The final significant event of Galesia's narrative before her mother's
death concerns a kinswoman who has married a seemingly eligible
man. Shortly after their marriage, it appears that he is also sleeping
with a servant, who bears him a child each year. The wife, myster-
iously, "became a perfect Slave" to her husband's paramour, "and, as
if she was the Servant, instead of the Mistress, did all the Household-

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Work, made the Bed, clean'd the House, wash'd the Dishes; nay,
farther than so, got up in the Morning, scour'd the Irons, made the
Fire, &c. leaving this vile Strumpet in Bed with her Husband; for they
lay all Three together every Night" (p. 98). The husband tries to rid
himself of the "Strumpet," since he wishes no more children. His wife
announces that if the other woman leaves, she will go along. Per-
suaded of the idleness of this threat, the husband evicts his mistress.
The wife, proclaiming the other woman her truest friend, accom-
panies her into the country, and subsequently back to London. After
the husband's death, the wife begs in the street to support her friend.
Not even the offer of a pension from the queen persuades her to
abandon her husband's ex-mistress. The listener to whom Galesia tells
the story can only conclude that "this poor Creature was under some
Spell or Inchantment" (p. 105). Galesia herself draws no conclusions
and offers no explanation.
One can hardly fail to notice, however, that no man in the entire
narrative manifests comparable fidelity. Jane Barker tells of women
betrayed by men, of men only occasionally punished for their irre-
sponsibility. She recognizes, as does her heroine, the social expecta-
tion that women be dependent and inadequate, and she recognizes the
inadequacy of the expectation. In the grotesque story of wife and
paramour, she exemplifies her mode of presenting socially acceptable
opinons and undercutting them by fictional action. All judgments
given on the unaccountable loyalty of one woman to another echo the
social assumptions that a woman's concern for keeping a man must
supersede all other interests, that sexual rivalry governs the female
psyche, and that any woman will yield to pressure. Yet the events
deny such assumptions, affirming the loyalty and fortitude of women,
their capacity for devotion to their own sex, and, in these respects,
their essential superiority to men. Such devotion may be folly or mad-
ness (insanity, by Voltaire's definition in Dictionnaire philosophique,
is "a brain disease that keeps a man from thinking and acting as other
men do") but folly or madness morally superior to that of engaging in
robbery for a prank.
No one, however, says so. Nor does anyone suggest that Galesia
may be justified in preferring her studies and her writing of poetry to
social maneuvering. The novel provides no alternative authority to
her mother, who believes her wrong. It only provides implications:
male weakness implied in the pattern of male betrayal, female hostil-
ity implied in the ways that men come to bad ends, and the value of

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poetry-writing contrasted to that of face-painting. To say that the

book fails to use these implications is to say, among other things, that
it is a weak novel, lacking integration of plot, character, and point of
view. Social perception does not produce literary strength, although
in such episodes as the story of wife and mistress it generates con-
spicuous imaginative energy. Galesia's career, like the interpolated
tale of the woman devoted to her husband's paramour, raises the pos-
sibility that genuine female self-fulfillment may demand the pursuit of
other goals than happiness. The ostentatious incoherence of Barker's
novelistic structure, amounting to a disclaimer of serious intent, re-
leases a complaint with revolutionary implications.
Mary Wollstonecraft, taking an openly bitter view of the assump-
tion that happiness and marriage bear any relation to one another,
appears more conscious of her revolutionary message. Mary: A Fic-
tion offers as its first surprise a portrayal of an inadequate mother,
exemplifying the failures of female education. "She was chaste, ac-
cording to the vulgar acceptation of the word, that is, she did not
make any actual faux pas; she feared the world, and was indolent; but
then, to make amends for this seeming self-denial, she read all the sen-
timental novels, dwelt on the love-scenes, and, had she thought while
she read, her mind would have been contaminated; as she accom-
panied the lovers to the lonely arbors, and would walk with them by
the clear light of the moon. She wondered her husband did not stay at
home. She was jealous—why did he not love her, sit by her side,
squeeze her hand, and look unutterable things? Gentle reader, I will
tell thee; they neither of them felt what they could not utter." 23 Woll-
stonecraft clearly perceives the human stupidity enforced by social
conditions, which, in this instance, allow a woman to indulge herself
in reading that separates her from actual experience. The harsh diver-
gence between the sentimental vision of love inculcated by romantic
fiction and the horrible actuality of sexual alliance forms much of the
novel's action. While explicitly rejecting the sentimental novel, how-
ever, Wollstonecraft relies on its structures and devices, subjecting her
heroine to the traditional series of hardships in order to enforce a new
point. 24
At her father's insistence, Mary is married to a young man whom
she does not really know. The marriage unconsummated, her husband
travels on the Continent with his tutor; Mary takes her consumptive
friend Ann into her household. Gradually she develops strong feelings
of disgust toward her absent husband. She loves no other man, but

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"her friendship for Ann occupied her heart, and resembled a passion"
(p. 51). Mary takes Ann to Lisbon for her health and there meets and
falls in love with Henry, who enjoys discussing "very important sub-
jects" with her while everyone else plays cards and to whom she tells
her story after Ann dies. He urges her at least to tolerate her husband,
but she insists that love cannot be feigned. Besides, "she knew she was
beloved [by Henry]; and could she forget that such a man loved her,
or rest satisfied with an inferior gratification" (p. 112). Returning to
England, Mary settles near Ann's mother, spending her small sub-
stance in doing good. Henry too comes back to England, where he
dies, having given Mary her first real pleasure in life by allowing her
to nurse him. He urges his mother to adopt Mary, who spends some
time traveling with the older woman after their mutual loss. An inter-
mediary effects a reunion with her husband. She wins permission to
spend a year traveling alone; then agrees to live with him. "The time
[of traveling] too quickly elapsed, and she gave him her hand—the
struggle was almost more than she could endure. She tried to appear
calm; time mellowed her grief, and mitigated her torments; but when
her husband would take her hand, or mention any thing like love, she
would instantly feel a sickness, a faintness at her heart, and wish,
involuntarily, that the earth would open and swallow her" (pp. 184-
5). The book concludes with the prospect of her imminent death.
When she contemplates it, "a gleam of joy would dart across her mind
—She thought she was hastening to that world where there is neither
marrying, nor giving in marriage" (p. 187).
Although this novel contains some strikingly new elements in fic-
tion by women, it also recapitulates familiar themes: the woman's
compliance with parental wishes, involving her acceptance of social
expectation; her loyalty to a female friend; her effort to assert her
worth by intellectual pretension (talking of serious subjects with
Henry while others play cards); her essential helplessness in a man's
world, despite what gifts she possesses. Unlike A Patch-Work Screen,
Mary supplies a portrayal of a good man, among the male weaklings
and would-be seducers. Henry represents the ideal of a man with
woman's virtues, capable like Mary herself of loyalty, fortitude, and
endurance, devoid of aggressive and obvious male pride. He can only
die, since his continued presence would render Mary's position intol-
erable. Like many other heroines, she does only what is good, and she
manifests the woman's habit of nurturance not merely, like Galesia, in
caring for dying parents but in nursing her friend and her Platonic

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lover. She demonstrates that virtue finds adequate reward only in

heaven, and her negative formulation of the desired reward—the
absence of marital ties—emphasizes the fierce detestation of woman's
lot that informs the novel.
The consequence of making love woman's profession, Mary argues
by its action, may be profound sexual loathing. Although nominally
the book directs its most powerful opposition to the social monstro-
sity of arranged marriages, it suggests—even more emphatically than
A Patch-Work Screen—a more radical position than it explicitly sup-
ports. Marriage as a social institution in eighteenth-century England
implies, like many other social institutions, the subordination of
women. In friendship with another woman, in Platonic alliance with a
man, a woman can assert her equality and maintain her freedom. In
Mary Wollstonecraft's final, unfinished novel, Maria or The Wrongs
of Woman, published posthumously in 1798, her heroine, wrongfully
confined in an insane asylum, wonders, "And to what purpose did she
rally all her energy?—Was not the world a vast prison, and women
born slaves?" 25 This vision of women's lot informs the earlier work as
well. The sickness and faintness Mary feels when her husband takes
her hand express intense passive defiance. The good characters die,
one after another, unable to survive reality. More vividly than any
fiction preceding it, Mary reveals how the novel might lend itself to
women's purposes of complaint and opposition. Such purposes in the
eighteenth century rarely produced good fiction, perhaps partly be-
cause of the necessities of disguise. But the tedious and improbable
novels of female suffering and insufficiency affirm as energetically as
the fictional masterpieces of the period the inevitability with which
fiction conveys psychic truth, and they affirm a particular kind of
truth nowhere directly stated until the end of the century. Women
transform their experience of social oppression to make their apparent
compliance the mark of their protest.

The term masculine in psychology, Freud concluded in 1933, means

active; the term feminine means passive. These equivalents represent
the best approximate definitions anyone has arrived at, but using
them, the analyst observes (an addendum often forgotten), "seems to
me to serve no useful purpose and adds nothing to our knowledge." 26
The numerous theorists who have struggled with the problem of
definition in the past fifty years have not progressed far beyond this
point of bafflement. Many people who believe that gender makes a

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psychological as well as a social difference find it impossible to de-

scribe the difference it makes.
As a social description, at any rate, Freud's formulation is useful—
more useful in relation to women of the past than in the present. The
women described in the novels we have been considering, active
though they may be in caring for others or in conventional female
occupations, are strikingly passive—even Mary Wollstonecraft's
heroine—in accepting the suffering inflicted upon them. Cowper's
self-described passivity seems pathological, justifiable only by the
rigid theological scheme that converts it into acceptance of God's will.
Euphemia's willingness to marry the man her mother chooses may
strike the reader as ferociously misguided, but it is by no means out-
side a common range of eighteenth-century possibility. Women of the
period knew their appropriate social stance and their assumed social
condition to be passivity; in this sense, at least, the term defines the
female state.
Women produced many eighteenth-century autobiographies as well
as many novels. 27 To write about themselves for the public eye repre-
sented significant activity, defying the social expectation of female
inertness and invisibility. In autobiographies of the period we can see
in purer form than in novels the operations of social convention, since
scanty literary convention existed for such writing by women. Spiri-
tual autobiography provided a respectable mode of expression for the
regenerate female; actresses and women of dubious repute published
their life stories as part of their more or less scandalous self-display.
Throughout the eighteenth century women of reputation almost never
offered for publication accounts of their own lives except with heavy
overlays of piety. In some ways, therefore, we might expect the most
revealing female autobiographies of the century to emerge from col-
lections of letters or diaries not avowedly intended for the public eye.
When one puts such collections side by side with the sensationalized
life stories of female adventurers, however, surprising similarities
reveal themselves. A self-flaunting literary entrepreneur and an aristo-
crat living in retirement tell in some respects a single tale, reveal a
similar sense of self.
The impulse to speak of the self must find forms for its fulfillment;
social like literary conventions provide categories of interpretation.
Making themselves heroines of their own life stories, women auto-
biographers describe their lives in ways analogous to those in which
fictional careers are depicted. Many of the women pioneering in the

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genre demand attention, respect, and understanding for their neces-

sary insufficiency. The identities they define derive mainly from their
exploration of vulnérabilités: sexual, social, psychic. As they describe
themselves, women of the century demonstrate how powerfully social
fact shapes personal perception and how, therefore, it may shape
autobiography.
More emphatically than fiction, eighteenth-century autobiographies
reveal the claims women wish to make. With great variety of episode,
technique, and focus, they display a tendency to stress what has been
done to the protagonist more intensely than what she herself has done
—even when she has done a great deal. The fact that the enlargements
of self-depicting fantasy assume this form in women means not simply
that the female of the species has traditionally been victimized; it
indicates that she makes a mythology of her victimization, verbally
converting it into the badge of her freedom. Letters, diaries, memoirs
sketch a drama of self-defense: women writing about themselves
defend integrity both by the declaration of the self implicit in the writ-
ing process and by the retelling of what they have endured, individu-
ally and generically.
Four divergent examples may demonstrate these points: Lady Mary
Wortley Montagu, whose Clarissa-like early career resolved itself not
in edifying death but in unhappy marriage; Hester Thrale, bourgeois,
semi-intellectual friend of Dr. Johnson; Laetitia Pilkington, expelled
by her husband and seeking sustenance in Grub Street; and Charlotte
Charke, daughter of the poet laureate Colley Cibber, struggling to
support herself by means as diverse as stage acting and selling oil.
Despite their great differences of social class, education, experience,
and literary sophistication, these women shape their stories (formal
autobiographies by Mrs. Pilkington and Mrs. Charke, voluminous
diaries by Mrs. Thrale, a collection of letters by Lady Mary) to
emphasize similar themes and preoccupations.
Society approves identities for women achieved through relation-
ship rather than accomplishment. Charlotte Charke admires her own
spirit of constant endeavor but cannot esteem what she does since she
invariably fails. Dr. Johnson reminds Mrs. Thrale of her total lack of
public achievement, inquiring why she thinks her husband should be
interested in her, since she knows nothing about anything that mat-
ters. 28 Mrs. Pilkington's pride in what she has suffered far exceeds her
pride in her authorship; Lady Mary gains satisfaction from raising

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silkworms but knows that she can claim no outside recognition for
such activity. In three out of the four instances the crucial relation-
ships through which the women more successfully identify themselves
are filial. Lady Mary, the exception in this respect, finally centers her
emotional life on the relationship with her daughter, Lady Bute, where
she can offer a kind of intellectual nurturance. She is sadly aware that
it will not necessarily be valued but achieves her own satisfaction in
the act of giving. Even she makes vivid woman's emotional depen-
dency. Remaining at a distance in her Italian exile, unable to interfere
directly in the lives of her English descendants, she sustains her precar-
ious tie with her daughter only by her extreme tact—and the degree of
that tact is the measure of her neediness.
The father-daughter bonds described by the other three help liter-
ally to define the women through their weakness and subordination.
Fathers—these fathers, at any rate—encourage their daughters' charm
and quasi-sexual affection. Content to see herself as the "something"
her father fondled (p. 281), Mrs. Thrale preserves a vivid conscious-
ness of the art necessary to maintain herself in that role. And she
comes to know its penalties. "Matches enough were offered to be sure,
some of 'em good ones—tho' God knows my heart, I never regretted a
Refusal in my Life—but my Father was by this Time so attached to
me, who alone could please his very particular Temper; that the least
mention of a Proposal to his Daughter put him in the most violent
passion imaginable; & as his 111 humour generally fell heavy on my
poor dear Mother, who I thought had already suffered sufficient
Misery; I used to keep clear of Solicitations to Marriage with more
Assiduity than other Girls use to procure them." (p. 296). Like many
passages from Mrs. Thrale's writing, this one establishes all the terms
of her sexual drama: her claim of her lack of sexual passion (evinced
by her never regretting a refusal) and her attractiveness (to her con-
temporaries and to her father), her sense of the male threat to women,
her implicit identification of herself and her mother as fellow victims,
her reiteration of her virtue (defined with stress on chastity and filial
devotion). Her ambivalence about her father's feeling toward her
never disappears. His love amounted to tyranny (his final tyrannical
act his death from apoplexy in a rage over Henry Thrale's proposal),
but it testified, in Hester's fantasy, her power over him. Like her intel-
lectual gifts, this power, manifested by the refusals that kept her from
entering womanhood, seemed strangely allied to weakness. The girl's

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attachment to her father, however, persisted long after his death.

Seventeen years after her marriage, Mrs. Thrale met the Italian
musician Piozzi. Her first reference to him in her journal includes the
comment (in a footnote), "He is amazingly like my father." 29 Shortly
after Thrale's death, his widow finds herself possessed by passion for
the Italian. She will die, she says repeatedly, if she cannot marry him.
She has already played out, with her first husband, her fantasy of
total subordination to the demanding male; now she will find emo-
tional security in guiltless alliance with an image of her father.
Her mother too figures in the drama. If the father embodies passion,
the mother exemplifies control. Father is a rake, mother a silent suf-
ferer (and an advocate of silent suffering) unwilling to be separated
from her daughter. Mrs. Thrale reports her husband's courtship as
taking place entirely under her mother's eye. She herself never felt
passionate love for Thrale; her mother, she believes, did. Marrying
him, Hester thus enacted a permissible Oedipal fantasy, though the
reenactment of her second marriage proved more enjoyable. But she
continued to accept her mother's guidance, discipline, and example
and to remain at her side (Mrs. Salusbury lived with the Thrales),
until the mother's death. 30 Her compliance with her parents' wishes
declare to her her goodness: her identity of passivity.
Less successful than Hester Thrale in asserting their status as good
daughters, Charlotte Charke and Laetitia Pilkington both record more
openly ambiguous relationships with their parents. Mrs. Charke writes
her autobiography, she insists, as an effort toward reconciliation with
her unaccountably alienated father, Colley Cibber. Her adult encoun-
ters with him have apparently been marked by conflict. She tells two
stories, both of which she declares apocryphal, about their recent
clashes. Fact or fantasy, they express intense hostility. In one, her
father meets her when she is working as a fishmonger; she slaps him in
the face with a flounder. Again, disguised as a highwayman, she
knocks him down and robs him. But the hostility, she declares, does
not truly belong to her. Other people—principally Charlotte's step-
mother—have created the antagonism between father and daughter.
As a matter of fact, in Mrs. Charke's version of things, Cibber has
been at fault himself in encouraging his daughter's aggressive self-will
by his own indulgent fondness in her childhood.
Like Mrs. Thrale, Mrs. Charke believes that "nature" preserves love
between father and daughter, regardless of appearances. She too com-

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bines a faint tone of reproach with her claims of devotion, and she dis-
plays a familiar ambivalence, both priding and condemning herself
for her self-will. Her autobiography, apologizing constantly for her
personality, character, and career, insists simultaneously on her
remarkableness. Its narrative incoherence (a frequent characteristic of
early women's autobiographies) reflects her manifest difficulty in
coming to terms with herself. Rarely does she sound a note of cer-
tainty. On one point, however, she is clear: reporting her girlhood
state "in the happy Possession of my Father's Heart; which, had I
known the real Value of, I should never have bestowed a Moment's
Thought in the obtaining Mr. Charke's, but preserving my Father's."31
Hester Thrale's father had to die before she could marry; Charlotte
Charke's father inconveniently failed to die, thus perpetuating her
dramatic sense of conflict between sexual and filial feeling.
Her childhood relation with her father, unlike Mrs. Thrale's, did
not center on feminine wiles or efforts to charm through intellect,
beauty, and personality. Indeed, Charlotte entered into early compe-
tition with Cibber. As a small child, she won attention, amusement,
and even praise by evidence of such competition. She dressed herself,
at a tender age, in her father's wig and hat and appeared early in the
morning in the street; at the age of four or five, she mounted herself on
an ass's foal and led a train of ragged children into town, provoking
her father to strong utterance: "God damme!" he observed, "An Ass
upon an Ass!" (p. 22). But her performances became more serious, in-
volving her mother as audience and recipient of her force. Her mother
feared robbers; Charlotte gathered up all the firearms in the house and
shot them out the window when the dog barked, in order "to acquire
the Character of a couragious Person" (p. 46). When a gardener left,
Charlotte plotted to make sure no one else was hired, digging furi-
ously in the garden to convince her mother "of the Utility of so indus-
trious a Child" (p. 44).
Charlotte's ceaseless efforts to make her utility equivalent to that of
a boy, despite her female nature and body, have considerable pathos.
She found herself alienated from her father not only, as she readily
grants, by her sexual alliance with another man, but more seriously by
her futile insistence on accomplishment. Her efforts were usually
ludicrous, always ineffectual, and perceived as such by the performer,
but they represented her continued ambivalent defiance of her female
role. Desperately wanting both her father's love and his admiration,

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imagining admiration attainable only through direct competition, she

also evidently knew that a woman wins approval from men for
weakness rather than for strength. Her compulsive failure in life
declares the division of impulse that also informs the writing of the
autobiography, at once an appeal to and a defiance of her father.
More passive in her relationship with her father, Laetitia Pilkington
found it almost equally difficult to preserve a tender tie with him, her
mother intervening at every point to frustrate father-daughter devo-
tion and her father protecting her against maternal severity. By the
time she was thirteen years old she had many lovers, "and no doubt
but I should have been happily disposed of in Marriage, but that my
Mother's capricious Temper made her reject every advantageous
Proposal offered, and at last condemn me to the Arms of one of the
greatest V s, with Reverence to the Priesthood be it spoken, that
ever was wrapt up in Crape." 32 No external evidence supports Mrs.
Pilkington's claim that her mother bore responsibility for her
disastrous marriage, but she blames her mother and exculpates her
father for every eventuality. Her husband quarrels with her father,
forbidding her to see him. Explaining that she owes a superior duty to
father, she promptly goes for a visit. Received coldly because of her
connection with Pilkington and ordered to leave, "I took the Hint, and
departed from him, in such inconceivable Sorry, as I never in my Life
experienced before, because I really loved him more than any thing in
the World" (I, 182). Never does she lavish comparable language on
husband or lover. When she hears that her father has been stabbed,
she rushes to his side. Her mother and sisters try to prevent her, but
determined, she steals to her father in the middle of the night, finding
the sister who was supposed to be watching fallen asleep—because,
Laetitia blandly explains, she loved her father less. In this competition
of love, Laetitia wins, "curing" the dying man with hot wine. A few
days later, however, he falls into a consumption and dies in her ab-
sence.
One may doubt, again, the authenticity of narrative detail, but not
the truth of the emotional conviction that the father focuses the
energies of a woman's love. A daughter's love for her parent is no
safer than an acceptable erotic attachment: Mrs. Thrale, Mrs. Charke,
and Mrs. Pilkington all record tumultuous, sometimes destructive,
father-daughter relationships. No safer: but more intense? more
natural? Lady Mary in 1784 expressed astonishment that her

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daughter's husband continued to care for her. 33 Almost forty years

earlier, before her own marriage, she had expressed concern about the
probability that her suitor would become bored with her. 34 Women
did not expect their husbands' continued love. Emotional investments
in fathers, made earlier and enduring longer, paid off more depend-
ably, although sometimes stormily. Women identifying themselves as
daughters thus declared their dependency, their need, and their sense
of where that need might be gratified, asserting their identities to
inhere in their roles rather than their deeds.

Mrs. Pilkington emphasizes her narrative's intimate truth. After a

highly literary display of melancholy, after proclaiming her desire for
rural retirement, she considers what effect she may be having: "My
Readers will, I hope, acknowledge I deal candidly with them, when I
not only acquaint them with my Actions, but reveal to them even the
inmost Recesses of my Soul as freely as to Heaven" (II, 155). The
reader's acquaintance with the writer's soul in fact derives less from
her announcements of what emotions she believes herself to have felt
than from her shaping of her story. All four of the writers at hand
construct their stories in similar ways. If a story emerges from letters
and diary, it must issue from necessities deeper than the author's plan-
ning, but the self-proclaimed autobiographies too reflect more
unconscious than conscious design, organized by a principle closely
akin to free association.
Although the four women employ three different genres, one can
readily postulate similar needs behind their writing. Cowper needed to
place himself in a divine scheme. Mrs. Thrale, Mrs. Pilkington, Mrs.
Charke, and Lady Mary demonstrate little desire to rationalize their
experience by locating it in some system. They seem to need simply to
authenticate their lives by setting them down, sometimes even—at
least in Mrs. Pilkington's case, probably in Mrs. Charke's, and
possibly in Mrs. Thrale's—to authenticate them by fictionalizing.
They declare the self's reality and significance by heightening its ex-
perience. To turn happenings into stories, to tell somebody, makes the
trivial seem to matter.
With an almost mythic insistence all four of these women reiterate a
theme common in the century's fiction: the female apology, heavily
tinged with resentment, for the life of the mind. Men think, therefore
exist; women, who—men believed—hardly think at all, have there-

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fore perhaps a questionable hold on their own existences. On the other

hand, they endanger their reputations and their value to others by any
apparent commitment to the intellectual. The curious emphasis of
these autobiographical records attempts to resolve both sides of this
dilemma: to assert the reality of the protagonist and her mental life
but also to declare that she is nonetheless a good and valuable woman.
Hester Thrale, taught in childhood to use her mental powers to charm
a rich uncle and an erratic father, thought at first that her feminine
value derived partly from her cleverness. Her first husband, however,
failed to admire her achievements; her second husband undervalued
them. Her mother, who had encouraged her youthful display, insisted
once she was married that she devote herself to her babies. In her old
age she explained to her nephew that learning in women, never a
means to love, would probably produce misery rather than
satisfaction for its possessor.35 She published some books—anecdotes
of Dr. Johnson, collections of her letters and his, accounts of her
travels, and a fanciful exploration of etymology—and projected
grander ones than she ever published, but she continued to express
her dissatisfied recognition that to be a woman was to be insufficiently
valued. Lady Mary, with more sophisticated ways of incorporating
and expressing her similar belief, used quickness and learning as
private ornaments. She possessed considerable reputation as a wit
(some of her poetry and prose were printed during her lifetime); yet
she professed that a woman must conceal much of what she knew and
thought, though knowing and thinking were vital female resources. A
girl should study English poetry, she explains to her daughter Lady
Bute; it "is a more important part of a Woman's Education than it is
generally suppos'd. Many a young Damsel has been ruin'd by a fine
copy of Verses, which she would have laugh'd at if she had known it
had been stoln from Mr. Waller." 36 This ironic, charming justification
of poetry as a branch of feminine study emphasizes that women need
every means of self-protection as they endlessly guard their natural
condition of vulnerability by which, finally, they must justify them-
selves.
They do what they can, but as they describe their efforts they depict
the pitfalls of their dangerous state: "teach [your daughters] not to
expect or desire any Applause from [learning]. Let their Brothers
shine, and let them content themselves with makeing their Lives easier
by it, which I experimentally know is more effectually done by Study

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than any other way. Ignorance is as much the Fountain of Vice as

Idleness, and indeed generally produces it. People that do not read or
work for a Livelihood have many hours they know not how to
imploy, expecially Women, who commonly fall into Vapours or
something worse." 37 Boredom, vice, and neurosis menace the idle
woman; criticism threatens the woman who displays her learning. A
girl improves her life by study through what she forestalls, not
through what she gains. Not even so accomplished and self-sufficient
a woman as Lady Mary suggests that she can hope to do more than
make a bad situation better.
Learning, in fact, often made a bad situation worse. Mrs. Pilkington
explains the disasters of her life as results of her early commitment to
intellectual pursuits, beginning in her "earliest Infancy," when she
displayed "a strong Disposition to Letters," frustrated by her mother,
who regarded "more the Beauty of my Face, than the Improvement of
my Mind," and forebade her learning to read (I, 13). Her father, on
the other hand, encouraged her precocity, praising her prowess in
memorizing poetry. Married young to a clergyman, she became ac-
quainted with Jonathan Swift, who interested himself in her
intellectual and literary development, displaying his concern by
pinching her each time she used an inelegant phrase (I, 108). A Mr.
Smith observed that she was a better poet than her husband; the result
was her husband's contempt (I, 117). Her husband viewed her "with
scornful, yet with jealous Eyes," although she never presumed to com-
pete with him, both because she respected his "natural Talents" and
because she thought herself admired only conditionally, since
anything beyond ignorance seemed surprising in a woman (I, 119).
She observes that men cannot endure their wives' writing because "it
seems to set them too much upon a Level with their Lords and
Masters" (1,122). Her husband wished to get rid of her, trying in vain
over a long period to lure her into compromising sexual situations
with other men. (So, at any rate, Mrs. Pilkington claims.) Finally he
caught her with a man "at an unseasonable Hour in my Bed-Chamber;
but Lovers of Learning will, I am sure, pardon me, as I solemnly de-
clare, it was the attractive Charms of a new Book, which the
Gentleman would not lend me, but consented to stay till I read it
through, that was the Motive of my detaining him" (I, 230).
The wild implausibility of this anecdote raises the possibility that
Mrs. Pilkington's self-depiction may owe more to fantasy than to

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memory, but her report becomes in some respects even more com-
pelling as a product of the imagination. Autobiography as well as
fiction provides opportunities for reshaping experience closer to the
heart's desire. The hard facts of Mrs. Pilkington's life included her
gradual alienation from her husband, her separation from him, and
her desperate financial need as a woman alone. In her interpretation of
those facts, she chooses to emphasize her devotion to learning as an
emblem of her hopeless lot and that of women in general. The weak-
ness of women, she implicitly argues, derives from the insecurity of
men, who need always to demonstrate their superiority. Conse-
quently, her manifest pride in her intellectual attainments (in fact
her poetry, liberally interspersed in the memoir, is atrocious) mingles
with her awareness that such achievement produces dire social effects.
The illiterate and stupid woman will be chosen for love before her
gifted sister. Mrs. Pilkington's specific example of her own betrayal by
reading—the man in her bedchamber while she engrosses herself in
his book—is less than convincing, but the example, invented or
distorted though it may be, epitomizes her repeated experience of
finding her gifts turning always to her disadvantage. Her sense that
she is not allowed fully to use her own gifts provides her ultimate
self-justifying rationalization: how can she be more than she is al-
lowed to be7 Her greatest financial success comes from permitting a
Mr. W to print her poems as his own. He pays her for the privi-
lege; she thus wins, as rewards for her literary achievement, anonym-
ity and cash. Anonymity, she feels (as do her female contemporaries),
is women's essential condition, emblemizing their weakness.
All four of these autobiographers imply the same conviction that
the revelation of a woman's effort to develop her mental capacities
will make her more rather than less vulnerable to male aggressiveness.
Even Charlotte Charke, a woman, unlike the others, whose claim to
notoriety does not depend on her literary accomplishment, explains
her inability to succeed in the world as resulting from the positive and
negative aspects of her education.

I was never made much acquainted with that necessary Utensil

which forms the housewifely Part of a young Lady's Education,
call'd a Needle; which I handle with the same clumsy Awkwardness
a Monkey does a Kitten, and am equally capable of using the one,
as Pug is of nursing the other.
This is not much to be wondered at, as my Education consisted

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chiefly in Studies of various Kinds, and gave me a different Turn of

Mind than what I might have had, if my Time had been employ'd in
ornamenting a Piece of Canvas with Beasts, Birds and the Alphabet;
the latter of which I understood in French, rather before I was able
to speak English, (p. 17)

Later she refers to the fact that she has learned geography, "which, by
the Bye, tho' I know it to be a most useful and pleasing Science, I
cannot think it was altogether necessary for a Female" (p. 26). What
kind of "Science" is necessary for a female? To ornament a piece of
canvas with beasts, birds, and alphabet seems insufficient exercise for
a rational being. Mrs. Charke's scorn for the skills she has failed to
acquire emerges as clearly as her embarrassment about her own awk-
wardness in woman's arts. Like Mrs. Pilkington (and Lady Mary and
Mrs. Thrale) she takes pride in what she knows; yet she recognizes all
the while that her superiority in knowledge, always interpretable as its
opposite, will be perceived by men as an instance of feminine
inadequacy. Women should do needlework.
These autobiographical records are linked to one another, such
examples suggest, more by common elements of narrative content
than by struggles with form or choice of genre. The experience that
women share gives to their accounts of themselves often a characteris-
tic subterranean tone as well as subject. Behind Lady Mary's irony,
Mrs. Thrale's resignation, Mrs. Pilkington's aggressive self-justifica-
tion, one hears a single note of complaint and feels the bitter tensions
of passivity; a social condition, a fate, embodying the concealment
rather than the absence of force.
Although she often strikes an inadvertent note of self-parody, Mrs.
Charke speaks in some grotesque way for her sex, creating a comic
version of justification by weakness. She defiantly dedicates her book
to herself, lacking other worthy objects, and having failed to win her
father's approval for its early installments. But she has to face the
question always implicit in formal autobiography: why am I worth
writing about? Her ingenious answer avoids any claim of significance:
"those that like to laugh I know will encourage me; and, I am certain,
there is none in the World MORE FIT THAN MYSELF TO BE LAUGH'D AT. I
confess myself an odd Mortal, and believe I need no Force of
Argument, beyond what has been already said, to bring the whole
Globe terrestrial into that Opinion" ( p. 86). It is almost the note of
Tristram Shandy, although without Tristram's self-awareness. Mrs.

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Charke's self-mockery pervades her accounts of her failures as

"Oil-woman and Grocer" (p. 70), of her repeated incompetence, of her
position as "a Sort of Creature that was regarded as a favourite Cat or
mischievous Monkey about House" (p. 65)—always self-deprecating,
yet making global claims of uniqueness. "If Oddity can plead any
Right to Surprize and Astonishment, I may positively claim a Title to
be shown among the Wonders of Ages past, and those to come" (p.
13). Her worthlessness creates her worth: she will be laughed at if she
cannot be praised, claiming preeminence as an oddity if unable to win
it as an artist.
It seems a sad resolution for the child's desire to be admired, for her
effort to win esteem by filling male roles. In her adult life, Mrs.
Charke spent many years dressed as a man, for reasons that she refuses
to divulge. Women fell in love with her, she acted out her aggressive
wishes. But she could not claim respect for acting forcefully as though
she were a man. She could only claim eccentricity as a woman who
admitted and realized her desire to act forcefully and who thus became
ridiculous. She does not take refuge in the cynicism and bitterness
discernible in Lady Mary and Mrs. Thrale, although her self-pity
seems as strong—and probably as justifiable—as Mrs. Pilkington's.
For she feels, as all four of these women feel, that male oppression
creates female misery. Mrs. Pilkington puts it in sexual terms: "Of all
Things in Nature, I most wonder why Men should be severe in their
Censures on our Sex, for a Failure in Point of Chastity: Is it not
monstrous, that our Seducers should be our Accusers?" (I, 167). But
her point can be extended. Men also establish the system that makes
Hester Thrale sit home and tend her babies; then they find her boring
for her limited interests. A man lures Lady Mary into the romantic
elopement that springs the trap of marriage; she escapes only through
exile. Men supply the models for Charlotte Charke, and mock her
ludicrous attempts to follow them. She even tries to write like a
man—and a twentieth-century male commentator suggests the kind of
assessment she thereby invites: "The effect produced by her narrative
is one of undirected power, thunderous and murky, masculine." 3 ' Un-
directed power, murkiness, and masculinity become an implicit flaw:
Mrs. Charke reveals the impossibilities of her hope to evade female
limitations.

Because they are weak women are at the mercy of their passions.

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Female sexuality amounts, in female perception, to weakness: that

point is clear enough in women's fiction. All four autobiographers feel
tricked by sexual feeling into life-destroying relationships. One may
speculate about the connection between their unsatisfactory marriages
and their impulse to write about themselves. Certainly Hester Thrale's
need for self-exposure did not vanish after her second, happy
marriage; yet her drive toward justification, like that of the others,
must bear some connection to her sense of being perpetually underval-
ued, first by her parents and then by the men in her life. 39 Mrs. Thrale
and Mrs. Pilkington married with parental consent, although the
point is slightly ambiguous in the latter case. The memoirist claims
that her parents pretended to disapprove a marriage that her mother,
at least, had actively encouraged. Lady Mary eloped, foiling her
family's plans for a more profitable alliance, and Charlotte Charke
married young, rashly, against opposition. All four, finding
surprisingly revealing ways to write about their sexuality, thus deline-
ate identities partly shaped by the effort to preserve channels for feel-
ing despite the rigidities of social demand. The force of their narrative
often seems to derive from the conflicts it does not altogether
consciously contain.
Because of her high degree of self-awareness, Lady Mary provides
the most interesting case of such profit by conflict. Her premarital
pose—especially in relation to Wortley—emphasized her emotional
immunity. Writing to the man she was soon to marry, she announces,
"If you expect Passion I am utterly unacquainted with any. It may be a
fault of my temper. Tis a stupidity I could never justify, but I do not
know I was in my Life ever touch'd with any. I have no Notion of a
Transport of Anger, Love, or any other." 40 Although her apologies
acknowledge the social assumption that women should be dominated
by strong feeling (she suggests that her own lack of such feeling may
be "fault" or "stupidity"), the strength of her denial testifies awareness
of potential danger within. Other dangers surrounded her. When she
writes of the social misfortune of remaining unmarried, the force of
her language suggests that passionate intensity she would not admit.
"I have a Mortal Aversion to be an old Maid, and a decaid Oak before
my Window, leavelesse, half rotten, and shaking its wither'd Top,
puts me in Mind every morning of an Antiquated Virgin, Bald, with
Rotten Teeth, and shaking of the Palsie." 41 The equation of decay with
preserved virginity delineates her emotional dilemma: to yield physi-

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cally to a man implies acknowledgment of vulnerability, an end to (or

a modification of) self-protective denial; to refuse to yield implies
desuetude and rot. She tried to compromise by allying herself with
Wortley while preserving her dignity, claiming some untouched es-
sence, refusing to grant that passion influenced her decision.
For almost a quarter of a century after her marriage, Lady Mary
continued to claim total lack of interest in sexual matters. But in 1736
she found herself prey to a hopeless and devastating passion for the
young Italian Francesco Algarotti. Robert Halsband tells the story in
detail; 42 Lady Mary's letters only imply it. Bisexual or perhaps entirely
homosexual, Algarotti encouraged the rivalry of the middle-aged
woman (twice his age) who adored him and the powerful courtier
Lord Hervey, also fascinated by the Italian. Lady Mary pursued him
to Italy; he evaded her. She wrote him intense, self-revealing letters;
he ignored them. Finally she resigned herself once more—with new
knowledge—to a life devoid of passion, resigned herself, in fact, to
boredom. She understood now from harsh experience what she had
earlier deduced: sexuality can destroy women, both by its effects in
the outer world and by its devastation from within.
To submit to passion means to abandon the controls by which
women even more than men—given their social condition—must live.
"I no longer know how to write to you. My feelings are too ardent; I
could not possibly explain them or hide them. One would have to be
affected by an enthusiasm similar to mine to endure my Letters. I see
all its folly without being able to correct myself . . . What has become
of that philosophical Indifference that made the Glory and the
tranquility of my former days? I have lost it never to find it again, and
if that passion is healed I foresee nothing except mortal ennui." 43 "One
must have a Heart filled with a strong passion, to be touched by trifles
which seem of such little importance to others. My reason makes me
see all its absurdity, and my Heart makes me feel all its importance.
Feeble Reason! which battles with my passion and does not destroy it,
and which vainly makes me see all the folly of loving to the degree
that I love without hope of return." 44 To endure in the conviction of
one's own foolishness is a hard fate, but also a paradoxical success. "I
am torn by a thousand conflicting feelings," Lady Mary writes, "that
concern you very little." 45 Perhaps the last clause simply acknowl-
edges Algarotti's lack of interest in her, but the writer may be saying
more. Recognizing and clinging to her private possession of her emo-

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tions, she suggests that those emotions, stimulated by Algarotti, yet

do not center entirely on him. Her feelings do not concern the man
because they belong to her alone, and her heart declares to her their
importance. Reason's relative feebleness in comparison with passion
provides cause for regret, but also for triumph. Lady Mary pays lip
service to the view that reason should dominate; she knows that she
has lost forever that "philosophical Indifference" she once treasured
and that ennui will succeed the excitement of love. Yet she declares
loving a self-sufficient occupation. Fully admitting, even glorying in,
her vulnerability—having confessed her infatuation to a man who
does not reciprocate it—she makes it an index of strength. Yielding to
that passion so long kept at bay, she proves her womanhood in the
energy of her emotion and her willingness to rest in hopelessness.
In the story of her life told by the collected letters, the Algarotti
episode provides a nexus for the forces of social pressure and personal
need. It has almost the flavor of allegory, exemplifying women's
resources for self-identification in the eighteenth century. Here most
clearly Lady Mary affirms who she is: a woman, a feeling and
thinking being, a member of society, herself. She tells a story in which
the man has all the weapons, the man gets what he wants and only
that, and the forces of society mass to make the woman ludicrous.
"Except to the heroine of such a love affair," Halsband writes, "there
was something ridiculous—or so the world would judge—in the
spectacle of a lady past middle age and physical charms hurling herself
at a handsome young stranger. Fortunately for her, as her impulses al-
ternated between head and heart, she herself could see, even in the
midst of her passion, how ridiculous it would seem to the world." 46
She was discreet enough; yet she implies in every letter her willingness
even to be laughable and her perception of some value system by
which she would be quite the reverse. In such implication she finds
herself. The emotional power of her letters derives from their firm
sense of self. Despite Lady Mary's full awareness of her limited oppor-
tunities for action or public status, she constructs a self-image by
recognizing the positive possibilities of richly acknowledged vulner-
ability.
The other three women whose presentation of selfhood and
personal history we have been considering neither knew nor acknowl-
edged so much. Mrs. Pilkington tells of terrible humiliations and
degradations, of a life involving the steady diminishment of dignity.
She claims that Pilkington publicly accused her of having killed her
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 Female Identities

father and three of her bastards, of poisoning her husband, of being a

common prostitute (II, 90); that he attempted to sell two of their chil-
dren as slaves (II, 135-138); that she was forced to increasingly
desperate expedients by his slander and by the limited possibilities
open to a woman alone (e.g., II, 160-161). The Gentleman's
Magazine, commenting on her record of herself, observes, "To those
who read her life she cannot surely have lived in vain since she has
scarce related a single incident which does not concur to prove that no
natural excellence can attone for moral defects nor any power of
pleasing others secure an equivalent for the chearful independence of
honest industry."47 The standard of virtue for women is absolute. The
critic dismisses Mrs. Pilkington for her "moral defects"; she insists
about herself that her apparent defects imply actual virtue. The act of
defiance involved in writing her book insists on the dignity of her deg-
radation, which embodies her determination to preserve her
autonomy. Even Charlotte Charke's self-mockery testifies to her
almost unbelievable persistence of survival and self-assertion. The
dedication of her book to herself, defiantly asserting her self-sufficien-
cy, conveys her determination to celebrate herself if no one else will
celebrate her, to endure and to value her endurance, however
unappealing its modes. Mrs. Thrale, recognizing the necessity for a
woman not to encroach on male privilege, recognizes also that
woman's special power derives paradoxically from her lack of threat.

The power of one Sex over the other does certainly begin sooner, &
end later than one should think . . . I should not have the same Pow-
er myself over Johnson's Spirits or Sir Philip Clerke's, if I were not a
Woman; they would neither of 'em have trusted their own Sex with
such Secrets as they have entrusted to me.
They may well compare Notes as sometimes they do;—each little
thinking how much t'other is my Slave! (p. 423)

If her smug superiority strikes a disagreeable note, the rest of her

journal accounts for it. She knows that women's power comes from
their weakness; they are trusted because they are not dangerous. Her
life teaches her the severe limitation of her effectual force and the need
of affirming what she is: a being willing to accept only conditional
power.

Autobiographies and novels, in different ways, concern the relation

between public and private versions of the self. The autobiographer
must reconcile some form of the face he presents the world with an ac-
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 Imagining a Self

ceptable rendition of his personal self-image. Thus Cowper qualifies

his despair by his image of public piety. One uses such terms as role,
image, appearance, even pose, to describe the public self, but the
reality of self-presentation in action to the world is in fact as meaning-
ful as that of feelings largely concealed, perhaps only dimly
recognized. The novelist, revealing his characters through their
feelings and through their actions, also exploits the complex relation
between the appearances a human being offers to his society and his
experience of his own existence.
The nature of public and private selves, these eighteenth-century
texts suggest, is for women, in some ways, the reverse of what it is for
men. The face a man turns to the world, much literary evidence
indicates, typically embodies his strength. Cowper presents himself as
convinced Christian; Robinson Crusoe, when he is among other men,
functions as leader, not victim of his fears. For women, on the other
hand, as we have seen, the public self often stresses weakness.
Passivity and compliance comprise the acceptable poses that fictional
and factual heroines alike employ. Autobiographers reporting their
activity boast their passivity; women in novels who openly manifest
aggression are inevitably and harshly punished. The extreme inco-
herence of Charlotte Charke's autobiography manifestly derives at
least partly from the tension between the writer's desire to share male
prerogatives and her awareness that the only acceptable models for
her sex involve self-deprecation and yielding. Mrs. Charke and Mrs.
Pilkington alike have to manufacture villains of almost mythic pro-
portions (stepmother in one case, husband in the other) in order to
justify their own expression of anger.
Anger, aggression, forcefulness belong to the inner self. Mary
Wollstonecraft's heroine never tells her husband she loathes him; she
quietly dies. Euphemia acknowledges no wish to control the lives of
others; the ideal huntress acknowledges no wish to hunt. Mrs. Thrale
presents herself to the world as self-sacrificing wife and mother, con-
fiding only to her diary her resentment at being insufficiently appreci-
ated. Lady Mary occupies herself in decorous domestic pursuits, her
anger emitted in maternal confidences. The distance between public
and private selves is no greater for such women than for their male
counterparts, but one must suspect that the psychic cost of concealing
force to assert passivity, with the resulting experience of diminish-

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 Female Identities

ment, exceeds that of the opposite kind of concealment.

At any rate, it has clear literary consequences. The apologetic pose
characteristic of so many woman writers, their plea to be judged
leniently because their sex provides excuse for all inadequacies,
reflects the same realities as the fictional and factual narratives they
produce. To write forcefully and coherently about subjects that
matter constitutes significant self-assertion. Women novelists claim to
offer lessons to their sex, not to offer interpretations of the world or to
inaugurate new ways of writing. Women autobiographers who con-
sciously intend their narrative for publication write often clumsily, at
odds with themselves. Of the writers here considered, only Lady Mary
consistently writes well—energetically, purposefully, wittily, with
sensitivity to the structure of sentences, paragraphs, arguments—and
she is writing private letters.
It would be, of course, far too simple to maintain that the eigh-
teenth century lacked powerful women writers because social condi-
tions encouraged female self-suppression. In fact, the powerful writers
soon emerged. Jane Austen was born in 1775, product of the same
social conditions, and hardly more than a quarter-century after
Pamela, Fanny Burney produced diaries as compelling as the
published privacies of any male contemporary and novels, if not equal
to those of Richardson, Fielding, or Sterne, better than most in her
era. But Burney and Austen, after their fashions, confirm the
implications of works by less obviously gifted women. Their strength
derives from successful exploitation of the dichotomy between public
passivity and private energy that weakened those women unable to
use their sense of division as material for strong images of female ex-
perience. The most successful women writers of the century richly
examine what others only imply: the fact that society makes women
dwell in a state of internal conflict with necessarily intricate psychic
consequences.
To assess the precise literary merit of women autobiographers and
novelists, however, is relatively unimportant here. More significant to
my purposes are the implications of their production for an under-
standing of their world and of the genres in which they wrote. Novels
by women shaped experience into imaginative patterns in order to
convey female identities strikingly similar to those evoked in autobio-
graphical records. Women asserted identities of weakness. In life, their

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 Imagining a Self

discovery of social inferiority might produce quickly suppressed

anger, resentful acceptance, and qualified triumphs of self-assertion.
In fiction, weakness could be glorified as leading to happiness through
suffering, or understood as hopelessly incompatible with happiness on
earth. Through fiction some women radically reject their sexuality,
which virtually all women writers of the eighteenth century appear to
have associated directly with female vulnerability. Charlotte Lennox,
Jane Barker, and Mary Wollstonecraft suggest that women can defy
their sexual subservience by avoiding passion and focusing their
interest elsewhere, by evading marriage, or by dying in order to
demonstrate their total rejection of their fate on earth. The anger
implied in such positions clarifies some possible suggestions of less
manifestly aggressive novels, in which apparent acceptance of the
necessity that female life consist mainly of suffering may conceal
resentment that such should be the case.
Clumsy or subtle, self-revealing or self-concealing, these writers
help to define what it means to perceive works of imaginative litera-
ture partly as social documents. Tom Jones describes the kinds of in-
terchange that commonly occur in eighteenth-century inns; Charlotte
Temple tells how a proper young woman occupies her time. But both
reveal also, in their very textures, the values that informed contem-
porary perceptions and—more important—how those values affect
private experience. Similarly, Laetitia Pilkington's modes of self-justi-
fication and the forms and limits of Lady Mary's resignation outline a
society's definitions of possibility. Even the romancer who sets her
scene in fanciful realms and allows her heroine trials and triumphs
outside the norms of probability shows by what she can imagine and
by the feeling she conveys the effects of cultural pressure on personal
definition. Because eighteenth-century women experienced such
pressure more restrictively than most men, the testimony they offer
reveals with particular clarity the inadequacy of any understanding of
self and its presentations that fails to consider also the fact of society
and its shaping force on identity and identity's documentation.
Lacking our vocabulary of ego and buried life, women of the eigh-
teenth century yet reveal as powerfully as their more self-conscious
twentieth-century successors deep currents running beneath the
placidities of social conformity. Their psychic strategies of survival
unconsciously shape their stories of self and of others.
Of course, the highly conscious structuring of life stories may also

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 Female Identities

reveal psychic depths even in writing with the highest respect for
privacy and decorum. Edward Gibbon, a professional author in a far
more total sense than any woman of his time, obsessively rewrote his
autobiography to convey precisely the correct view of his own
history, presenting himself as the public figure he essentially was. His
careful, dignified, reworked, final self-presentation shares with the
more spontaneous utterances of his female contemporaries and
predecessors the capacity to reveal unexpected and hidden truths,
emphasizing what has been suggested both by Cowper's conventional-
ized spiritual autobiography and by the memoirs of socially conven-
tional and unconventional women. The very fact of writing about the
self, whatever techniques of concealment an era recommends or an
autobiographer adopts, implies profound exposures. The disguises of
formal rhetoric, like those of fiction, may function finally as instru-
ments of revelation.

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 4
The Defenses of Form:
Edward Gibbon

he autobiographer and the novelist must struggle alike to de-

T vise or to discover the narrative form that will reveal and con-
ceal as they wish. Defoe and Cowper, employing a clearly de-
fined préexistent form as the mold to shape recorded experience,
demonstrate the expansive possibilities of even a limited genre. Al-
though their decision to write spiritual autobiography seems to imply
a predictable mode of interpretation for the lives they report, they
demonstrate how the securities of the genre allow them to investigate
unmapped territories of imagination and feeling.
At the opposite extreme of formal predictability stand two late
eighteenth-century writers who, obsessively concerned with discov-
ering the proper literary form to reveal their particular varieties of
truth, demonstrate yet more perplexing ways in which structure can
obscure or convey meaning. Edward Gibbon and Laurence Sterne, by
the accounts of orthodox literary history, embody opposite ideologi-
cal commitments: to pure rationality and to indulged emotion. But
Gibbon as literal and Sterne as fictional autobiographer both
heroically investigate the possibilities of pattern. The ostentatious
formlessness of Tristram Shandy, the extreme formality of Gibbon's
memoirs, embody extensive explorations and remarkable achieve-
ments of revelatory and defensive literary structure.
The relation in autobiography between the self depicting and the
self depicted may prove, as Cowper's example suggests, richly com-

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 Edward Gibbon

plex. Gibbon's accomplishment as depicter depends heavily on his

achievement of a careful, ironic, balanced style. The high gloss of the
surface he presents has misled some critics into believing that surface
is all, that Gibbon exists essentially only as a stylist. Thus Donald
Stauffer says: "With Gibbon the turn of a phrase takes the place of
passion, and he lives in his prose . . . His philosophy of life is hardly
inspiring; his career was indeed dull; nothing ever happened to him
because he spent his life in making it certain that nothing ever
would." 1 But Roy Pascal (not writing specifically of Gibbon) suggests
a more useful perspective: "The value and truth of autobiogra-
phy—and its value is always linked with its truth—are not dependent
on the degree of conscious psychological penetration, on separate
flashes of insight; they arise out of the monolithic impact of a person-
ality that out of its own and the world's infinitude forms round itself,
through composition and style, a homogeneous entity, both in the
sense that it operates consistently on the world and in the sense that it
creates a consistent series of mental images out of its encounters with
the world." 2 Through composition and style Gibbon indeed makes a
homogeneous entity of his life. He concerns himself with form in its
large and minute meanings—the shape of the narrative, the structure
of sentences, the choice of metaphor and vocabulary— and with form
as technique and as philosophic grasp. The form he achieves in his
narrative (despite the fact that the autobiography was never com-
pleted) allows him finally to display an extraordinary degree of psy-
chological penetration into himself as object of contemplation and to
demonstrate how much actually happened in that superficially un-
eventful career. The historian setting down the story of his life shows
himself a master of marmoreal style. The boy and young man he de-
scribes, struggling toward mastery, is finally defined by his suffering,
which, as boy and young man, he cannot comprehend but which as
mature writer he can accept, judge, and contain. His final style of con-
tainment allows him to reveal what he remembers, what he wonders,
what he concludes and to reveal the indecorous interior beneath the
surface of flawless decorum.

The first of the six autobiographical fragments that Gibbon wrote

announces that "truth, naked unblushing truth, the first virtue of
more serious history, must be the sole recommendation of this
personal narrative." 3 The phrase "naked truth" recurs in a letter to

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 Imagining a Self

Lord Sheffield, Gibbon's most intimate surviving friend, written ten

months before the historian's death. He has decided, he confides, to
"undraw the veil before my state of health, though the naked truth
may alarm you more than a fit of the Gout. Have you never observed
through my inexpressibles a large prominency circa genitalia. It was a
swelled testicle which as it was not at all painful, and very little
troublesome I had strangely neglected for many years." 4 He had
neglected it, in fact, for more than three decades. Friends, noting the
great swelling at Gibbon's groin, lacked the temerity to urge him to
notice it. In his next-to-last attempt at autobiography (written in
1791), Gibbon observed of himself that "the play of the animal
machine still continues to be easy and regular" (p. 292). Four feet eight
inches tall, he had by this time grown so fat he could hardly move. He
estimated, in the same memoir (p. 294), that by the laws of probability
he still had fifteen years before him. Less than three years later he was
dead, after an operation on his insistent hydrocele. 5
His continued veiling of the facts of his physical condition, in
autobiographies and in social intercourse, suggests how much his
notion of truth depends upon the context in which it is to be commu-
nicated. Decorum demands that he ignore genital disabilities; the fal-
sity of tone with which Gibbon reports his ailment to his friend sug-
gests, in fact, the impossibility of his finding a language in which to
convey such realities adequately.6 And the tonal uneasiness, like his
prolonged denial of physical fact, emanates from his characteristic
posture of defensiveness. To study his successive versions of his life
story in chronological sequence reveals the evolution of a brilliant
strategy of defence. Gradually discovering an acceptable form for his
life story, Gibbon uses that form as a means finally to come to terms
with his experience.
After Gibbon's death, Lord Sheffield consolidated into a single
narrative the six distinct versions of the historian's autobiography that
had survived his many attempts, in the four years before his death, to
compose an adequate life story. 7 For a century this composite version
comprised the received text. 8 Even now, critics who praise Gibbon's
autobiography are usually referring to this or a succeeding eclectic
version. 9 But Gibbon in fact left, instead, a kind of autobiographical
palimpsest. Deciphering its successive layers, we can perceive the
drama and the meaning of his efforts to achieve appropriate form.

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 Edward Gibbon

The search for form—a form for his life to be created by the telling
of his story—involves first of all a struggle to find appropriate
content. In the first version of his memoir, a thirty-page fragment,
Gibbon speaks of himself only indirectly. The first-person pronoun
occurs mainly in judicious appraisals of others: "I can pronounce with
more confidence on his writings than on his person" (p. 325). He
focuses attention instead entirely on his ancestors. His memoir was
uncompletable, one suspects, because it would have been difficult to
shift emphasis to himself, given the almost obsessive single-minded-
ness of his treatment, which he implicitly rationalizes in a separate
undated fragment, declaring that interest in one's forebears derives
from "some common principle in the minds of men. Our imagination
is always active to enlarge the narrow circle in which Nature has con-
fined us . . . We stretch forwards beyond death with such hopes as
Religion and Philosophy will suggest, and we fill up the silent vacancy
that precedes our birth by associating ourselves to the authors of our
existence" (p. 349).
Although he claims that his insistence on interests apart from him-
self constitutes imaginative enlargement, consciousness of limitation
and frustration pervades this memoir. The man who believed history
"little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of
mankind" perceived the careers of families as resembling those of
empires.10 So he tells of his predecessors, stressing revenge, murder
(an ancestor beheaded by an angry mob for the sin of encouraging
grammar schools), loss, improvidence, and emphasizing always the
patterns behind particulars. At the age of twenty-five, he had
criticized a study of the Greeks for "attributing more consequence to
the particular Characters of men, often ill drawn, than to the general
manners, character, and situation of nations." 11 In this first draft of
his autobiography, his resolute subordination of "particular Char-
acters" to general truths attempts to master retrospectively a past pre-
ceding his own existence and to dominate it by understanding it. On
the other hand, his imagery acknowledges the impossibility of finally
controlling a world in which "hereditary splendour" turns into a
"chain," businessmen are "buried" in the "ruins" of their schemes,
thirty years' labor can be "blasted in a single day," the gaming table
becomes a "dark and slippery precipice," and cobwebs and clouds
create subtle obstacles. Conflict, gloom, and danger lurk always be-

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 Imagining a Self

neath the surface. Recognition of omnipresent frustration and loss

must qualify the ironic satisfactions of contemplating patterns of
ancestral experience.
The immediate personal issue—and its intimate pain—involves the
historian's relation with his father, its nature emerging even through
the guarded and judicious summary he offers. "Economy is seldom the
virtue of a gay and sanguine temper; my father's youth had been
penuriously stinted; he was dazzled by a sudden influx of gold; but his
possessions proved inadequate to his hopes, and his expences soon
exceeded the measure of his income" (p. 319). Gibbon is saying—as he
would continue to say in varying tones—that his father squandered
his money. He chooses the stance of the moral philosopher to confront
this painful subject, in the fashion of Pope suggesting divine wisdom
as the source of paternal wastefulness (a "wise dispensation," he ex-
plains, makes idleness "the heir of industry"). By summarizing his
father's financial difficulties as reflecting the inadequacy of posses-
sions to hopes, the historian distances his private dilemma and
assimilates it to a favorite theme: the vanity of human wishes. Hope,
"the best comfort of our imperfect condition" (D & F, I, 40), consis-
tently leads its possessor astray. Who learns not to hope has learned
not to be deceived, but the lesson is, in fact, unlearnable, as later frag-
ments of Gibbon's autobiography testify.
The heavy use of generalization here as elsewhere demonstrates his
achievement of control: lacking power over his father, Gibbon yet can
shape his father's story. The balance of his sentences and the measure
of his cadences proclaim his mastery. In his telling, the father bears no
responsibility for profligacy. Passive constructions and grand general-
izations remove paternal guilt while demonstrating the son's effective
power: to praise, to blame, to withhold praise and blame, to shape his
father's story and his own.

In Memoir B, continuing to seek appropriate form, Gibbon dis-

covers a more satisfactory principle of control and of defense against
dangerous emotion. His vocation now begins to dominate his
narrative, as it would explicitly govern all succeeding versions, and
he depends upon a sense of destiny not altogether reassuring but richly
elucidating.
From one point of view, Gibbon's father determined much of his
early experience. His mother in his memory hardly matters—or so he

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 Edward Gibbon

implies in this version of events. He recalls a single encounter with her:

driving with him to his school, she explained that now he was going
into the world where he must think and act for himself. When he was
ten years old, she died. Both parents, he believed, neglected him (p.
135). Having little hope of his survival, they bestowed on him, he
reports, "the favourite appellation of Edward," only to provide "a
substitute, in case of my departure, by successively adding it to the
Christian names of my younger brothers" (p.97). In fact only one of
his five brothers had Edward as a middle name; three were christened
James. None survived childhood. Gibbon's erroneous memory reveals
his powerful fantasy that his parents did not care about him, thinking
him an interchangeable part for which any of his brothers might
adequately substitute. His father demanded his submission to
arbitrary whims and made him suffer as a consequence of parental
self-indulgence. Without reflection, we are asked to believe, the father
sent fifteen-year-old Edward to Oxford. There, ungoverned by
precept or example, the boy converted himself (with the aid of books)
to Catholicism, eliciting yet another arbitrary paternal decision: he
must go to Lausanne to be reconverted. Still financially dependent on
his father, Gibbon could not leave Lausanne, have a personal servant,
or pay his gambling debts. Nor could he marry the woman he claimed
to love. When he was slightly older but still conventionally filial, he
could not avoid—since his father desired it—four years' service in the
militia. He could not prevent his father from squandering his
patrimony. The details add up to a picture of a boy and a young man
victimized by selfish and uncaring parents, deprived alike of maternal
and paternal love. When Gibbon reports his own compliance in
financial arrangements that would increase his father's supply of
ready cash at the sacrifice of part of the son's inheritance, he
summarizes, "The priests and the altar had been prepared, and the
victim was unconscious of the impending stroke" (p. 134): a highly
charged evocation of powerlessness.
Yet although he supplies the details and even the images of victim-
ization, he does not in fact delineate himself as weakened by his
father's authoritarianism. His vigorous denial produces a counter-af-
firmation that he and his father alike functioned as instruments of
some large, impersonal force of destiny. In retrospect he links his own
"religious folly" (evidenced in the brief Catholic episode) with his
father's "blind resolution" in sending him to Lausanne as fortuitous

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 Imagining a Self

events that ultimately "produced the effects of the most deliberate

wisdom" (p. 131). Fate, in other words, may operate through
apparent chance. Looking back, Gibbon perceives his life's necessi-
ties.12 Even his father's extravagance and his forcing the young man to
militia service produced unexpected and valuable benefits.
Robert Folkenflik has observed the implication in Gibbon's memoir
manuscripts that he "had a great deal of trouble deciding how to de-
scribe" the episode with Suzanne Curchod. 13 In his first attempt to tell
this story he summarizes in two sentences: "On my return to England,
I soon discovered that my father would not hear of this strange
alliance, and that, without his consent, I was myself destitute and
helpless. After a painful struggle I yielded to my fate; the remedies of
absence and time were at length effectual, and my love subsided in
friendship and esteem" (p. 130). Earlier in the memoir, Gibbon has
remarked of himself in his younger days, "The wanderings of my
fancy subsided in the historic line" (p. 104). The subsiding of fancy
into the historian's discipline and of love into friendship and esteem
both belong to a single pattern, of the historian's yielding to his fate.
We need not conclude, although many critics have reached exactly
this conclusion, that Gibbon did not love Suzanne Curchod or that he
was incapable of true love. 14 "I understand by this passion," he writes,
"the union of desire, friendship, and tenderness, which is inflamed by
a single female, which prefers her to the rest of her sex, and which
seeks her possession as the supreme or the sole happiness of our being.
I need not blush at recollecting the object of my choice; and though
my love was disappointed of success, I am rather proud that I was
once capable of feeling such a pure and exalted sentiment" (p. 129).
We may feel in this statement, which concludes in a characteristically
self-deprecating irony, the crucial conflict between the historian's de-
sire to control his experience by generalizing it and his awareness of
diminishment in the repeated choice of such control. His emotional
resources, like his fancy, have atrophied, as Darwin's capacity to
appreciate poetry was to wither—and for the same reason: sacrificed
to ardent intellectual commitment. 15 Unlike Darwin, however, Gib-
bon did not fear that to enfeeble his emotions would weaken his intel-
lect, nor does he worry about his moral character.
But his emotions, Gibbon insists, have not been sacrificed to his
father. Although he makes it clear that filial obedience (along with his
open-eyed awareness of economic reality) dictated his initial

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 Edward Gibbon

renunciation, his choice of detail in telling the story (Mile. Curchod's

virtues of mind, body, and conduct, the financial arrangements
involved or implicit in his plans, his fiancée's subsequent economic
hardships and—this a cause for curious pride on his part—her
eventual splendid marriage) insists on the Tightness of the renuncia-
tion. His father may have been selfish, shortsighted, and dictatorial,
as usual. Gibbon believes, at least in retrospect, that his own
compliance derived from a necessity of his destiny, a destiny
involving loss (of love and fancy) as well as gain, forcing his subordin-
ation to larger purposes. By comparison his father becomes
insignificant. T o declare that insignificance is an important, if
presumably unconscious, function of Gibbon's theory of personal
destiny.
Similarly, his theory of destiny enables him to triumph in the telling
over the other miseries of his life: illness, awkwardness, social failure.
His nature is, he appears to believe, given. Gibbon, like Cowper,
often presents himself as acted upon, receiving impressions and sup-
plied with form from outside. He claims no active involvement in his
own education; he refrains from action in order to allow benign ful-
fillments. "I never handled a gun, I seldom mounted a horse; and my
philosophic walks were soon terminated by a shady bench, where
I was long detained by the sedentary amusement of reading or
meditation" (p. 139). His refrainings, like his incapacities, cut him off
from the conventional life of his era and class. Yet his reading and
meditation, which are not quite self-justifying, belong to his destiny,
detaining and amusing him so that he can become successfully him-
self, a historian.
"After his oracle Dr. Johnson," Gibbon writes, "my friend Sir
Joshua Reynolds denies all original Genius, any natural propensity of
the mind to one art or science rather than another. Without engaging
in a metaphysical or rather verbal dispute, I know, by experience, that
from my early youth I aspired to the character of a historian" (p. 165).
He will leave to others the explanations, remaining himself certain of
the fact. The "natural propensity" of his mind to history, the founda-
tion of his self-presentation, enables him to unite an external with an
internal view of the self.
Stephen Shapiro has written, "Truth in autobiography is not merely
fidelity to fact or conformity to 'likeness,' to the way one appears to
others, but rather the projection of a story of successive self-images

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and recognitions or distortions of those self-images by the world; it is

the story of identity as the tension between self-image and social
recognition." 16 Similarly, Stephen Spender points out that the autobi-
ographer "is confronted not by one life—which he sees from the out-
side—but by two. One of these lives is himself as others see him—his
social or historic personality—the sum of his achievements, his
appearances, his personal relationships. All these are real to him as,
say, his own image in a mirror. But there is also himself known only
to himself, himself seen from the inside of his own existence." 17 Both
commentators assume—as a moment's introspection would make
almost anyone assume—some inevitable discrepancy between what
the autobiographer sees in himself and what he believes the world may
see. Gibbon virtually denies "the tension between self-image and
social recognition." He seeks in his experience a universal logic. The
struggle for autobiographical form in which he engages involves an
effort to assert the ultimate validity of the "social or historic person-
ality," to discover how a public sense of self can guard against the
dangers of the alternative, private, mode of self-perception. Memoir
Β does not explicitly justify itself by any claim to truth. At its begin-
ning Gibbon suggests that as "author of an important and successful
work" he must be of interest to the public and that he is necessarily
best qualified "to describe the series of my thoughts and actions"
(p. 91). The word series suggests how orderly will be the sequence he
presents, and his explanation of motivation prepares for a memoir in
which his role as author will dominate his depiction. 18
Robert C. Elliott, describing the problems of coming to terms with
fictional first-person narrative, writes: "Ordinarily, when a writer
commits his opinions and ideas to the printed page, the situation
between him and his readers is like that of a man beginning a new
social relationship. According to Erving Goffman, society is organized
in such a way that upon entering the presence of others an individual
'projects a definition of the situation and thereby makes an implicit or
explicit claim to be a person of a particular kind.' By this claim 'he
automatically exerts a moral demand upon the others, obliging them
to value and treat him in the manner that persons of his kind have a
right to expect'." 15 To think of Gibbon in terms of social self-presenta-
tion directs attention to the emphatically public character of his ver-
sion of himself. The complexity of his moral demand on his audience
derives from the complex self-evaluation concealed beneath his

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whole-hearted participation in a role that he can formulate with

deceptive simplicity. He projects a narrow self-definition—"I am a
historian"—and systematically enlarges it. His claim on his readers
depends partly on his insistence, stylistic as well as substantive, on
costs paid and sacrifices made in the service of vocation. As the
historian offers his weighty rhetorical structures and his orderly
sequences of cause and effect, he demonstrates the implications of his
commitment to a public personality, systematically deprecating the
importance of merely private experience and elevating that of his
historian's role, which he shows as absorbing more and more of his
being.
Through his metaphors he hints how fully his vocation has come to
contain his most intimate experience. He systematically enforces, for
example, his conviction that his intellectual history involves natural
growth, through frequent references to "ripeness" and "unripeness,"
allusions to the "shoots" of childish fancy, the "fruits" of his time at
Oxford, and, conversely, the "first shoots of learning or genius,"
which at Oxford "rotted on the ground without producing any fruits
either for the owners or the public." His social intercourse in Paris,
which brought him in contact with important thinkers of his time,
produced "new shoots, spreading branches, and exquisite fruit." Such
metaphors, declaring his career inevitable and natural, suggest that it
cannot be questioned.
Gibbon not only contemplates but experiences the processes of in-
tellectual commitment. The seriousness with which he considers his
life work emerges by indirection through the sexual metaphors that he
sparingly but revealingly employs in Memoir B. (He would use more
such images later.) One expresses his revulsion at the briefly enter-
tained fantasy of a military career. "In the first sallies of my enthusi-
asm I had seriously wished and tryed to embrace the regular profes-
sion of a soldier. The military feaver was cooled by the enjoyment of
our mimic Bellona [the exercises of the militia], who gradually un-
veiled her naked deformity" (p. 161). The metaphorical potentialities
of "embrace" prepare for the elaboration by which the goddess,
"enjoyed" by her devotee, reveals ugliness beneath apparent beauty.
The image conveys with unexpected intensity the historian's emotion-
al rejection of an alternative to his real commitment as "man of
letters."
That commitment too can be expressed in sexual terms. "I still

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shrunk from the press with the terrors of virgin modesty/' Gibbon
observes (p. 145) and later, in a logical development, "I have expatiat-
ed on the loss of my litterary maidenhead; a memorable era in the life
of a student, when he ventures to reveal the measure of his mind" (p.
147). Fear of and desire for exposure: both images reveal the special
kind and degree of importance Gibbon attaches to first publication, a
symbolic giving that marks his life choice as inexorably as a woman's
first sexual yielding might determine hers. Writing and publication for
him replace enduring heterosexual relationship, emotional or physical.
Female sexuality implies generative power; Gibbon's devotion to his
own creativity involves the rewards of procreation as well as the dan-
ger of vulnerability.
Through his metaphors he implicitly acknowledges what he will not
confess directly: the ambiguities of his submission to his vocation.
Like a growing plant, like sexual feeling in men and women, his pro-
fession as he lives it has a life of its own. It demands sustenance from
its practitioner. Gibbon employes imagery of food to suggest a
disturbing aspect of his avid purpose. Eating is good and necessary to
sustain bodily life, but bad when greedy. His metaphorical allusions
to it suggest both value judgments, dwelling on nourishment but hint-
ing at the danger of excessive appetite and conveying a need to incor-
porate that amounts to an addiction. Taking in knowledge, Gibbon
establishes a viable relation with the external world. The world thus
gives him what he needs to survive; conversely, he struggles to gratify
an insatiable appetite by taking what he wants. Like the metaphors of
growth, those of eating associate intellectual development with
natural process, while implying awareness of the extravagant intensity
in the historian's yearning for sustenance from without.
Everyone experiences his own uniqueness; everyone belongs to a
species. Gibbon, trying to record his history as he might set down that
of an empire, wished to see himself in both ways. His metaphors de-
clare that his personal predilections, analogous to universal processes,
do not separate him from mankind. As he contemplates more directly
the fate he shares with his species, he finds new sources of uneasiness.
"The first moment of animal life may be dated from the pulsation of
the heart in the human foetus; but the nine months which we pass in a
dark and watery prison, and the first years after we have seen the light
and breathed the air of this world, must be substracted [stc] from the

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period of our rational existence. When I strive to ascend into the night
and oblivion of infancy, the most early circumstance which I can con-
nect with any known aera is my father's . . . election" (p. 98). Only
Tristram Shandy, besides Gibbon, pauses in the eighteenth century to
contemplate in print himself as a fetus in the womb. Gibbon's recog-
nition that he cannot think about this hidden period, or about his
early infancy, dictates his metaphors of prison, night, and oblivion.
What reason cannot grasp must remain dark and confining; rational
existence does not include his beginnings, which reason cannot
comprehend. He shares this history of nine-month confinement and
blank babyhood with the rest of the human race, but not all his
striving enables him to understand it.
Similar uneasiness emerges in the account of Suzanne Curchod.
Discoursing on the nature of love, Gibbon explains that he does not
mean merely "the grosser appetite which our pride may affect to dis-
dain, because it has been implanted by Nature in the whole animal
creation, 'Amor omnibus idem.' The discovery of a sixth sense, the
first consciousness of manhood, is a very interesting moment of our
lives; but it less properly belongs to the memoirs of an individual,
than to the natural history of the species" (p. 129). Recognizing the
ridiculousness of disdaining what everyone shares, as well as the easy
temptation of such disdain, Gibbon reveals his own attempt to rise
superior to his animal nature in the irony of "very interesting." The
pubescent youth's discovery of lust feels interesting to him because it
feels unique; the historian's ironic understanding informs him of
egotism's erroneous perception, but memory assures him that he has
shared it. All the historian's training and discipline and knowledge do
not, after all, enable him to control his own past as he may pretend to
control his father's. Much remains inexplicable.
Yet his profession supplies solace. The central metaphors of
sexuality and eating suggest Gibbon's feeling that through his work he
has established some viable relation between inner and outer worlds.
Memoir Β ends with an account of young Gibbon's visit to Paris,
emphasizing his reading. It concludes on a note of anticipation: "And
thus was I armed for my Italian journey" (p. 180)—that journey on
which he would conceive the idea for The Decline and Fall. The auto-
biographical fragment, in other words, reports not the great work but
the preparation for it. Despite the heavy reliance on passive verb

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forms and the stress on what the boy and the young man were given
from without, it shows the youth assuming responsibility for himself
through his gathering sense of an unknown commitment.
The writer of the autobiography, of course, knows the commit-
ment, although his subject—that very different person, an untried
youth—cannot. He recalls the pain but also perceives the logic of his
development, and denies the one for the sake of the other. What he
can do and be guards him from feeling the anguish of what he cannot.
His youth created him in a shape he can acknowledge and admire:
"Such as I am, in Genius or learning or manners, I owe my creation to
Lausanne: it was in that school, that the statue was discovered in the
block of marble" (p. 131). Elsewhere, although with hesitation, con-
fusion, and restriction, he claims directly to be his own creator. "In
the life of every man of letters, there is an aera, from a level, from
whence he soars with his own wings to his proper height, and the most
important part of his education is that which he bestows on himself"
(p. 118). Despite the anomalies of sentence structure, the point
remains clear: his own wings, his proper height—he has discovered his
destiny. If he cannot do much in the world, he can yet do something
well. Specifically, he can read, taking in but also evaluating and
finally using what he absorbs. The proportion of active verbs in-
creases as he relates his intellectual activity in Lausanne. Through the
historical and philological controversies in which he engaged by cor-
respondence, and through his active study, he developed an increasing
sense of personal capacity. His preparation for greatness absorbed all
his energies. Narrowness, Memoir Β implies, creates depth.

Memoir Β announces the major themes and sketches the major

images that dominate Gibbon's succeeding autobiographical attempts.
Why, then, did he not continue it, instead of breaking off the
narrative just before his epochal trip to Italy? He had not yet found
the right story. Memoir C, composed later the same year (1789), con-
taining fewer pages but much more material, suggests how Gibbon
had earlier failed to solve his problems of self-definition and
self-presentation. In Memoir Β he had not yet understood what his
self-dramatization as historian might mean. In C he evokes more fully
the significance of his vocation.
Memoir C creates an immediate impression of bareness, offering no
reflection on the possibilities of autobiography, no excuses for

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writing, only a flat account in the first paragraph (recast from a later
paragraph of B) of where, when, and to whom the historian was born.
The succeeding narrative of ancestors, much reduced from the
previous telling, suggests that Gibbon's interest in generalization has
materially diminished. References to his time in the womb and to the
natural history of the species have disappeared. No longer does he
preface his account of Suzanne Curchod with a disquisition on the
nature of love, or his story of the militia years with general reflections
on the militia's function. The marked condensation of this account
reflects a view that experience justifies itself.
The special qualities of the writer's sensibility and style display
themselves once more with particular emphasis in the story of aborted
romance, where he conveys a complex attitude toward his father and
himself. "The romantic hopes of youth and passion were crushed, on
my return, by the prejudice or prudence of an English parent. I sighed
as a lover, I obeyed as a son; my wound was insensibly healed by
time, absence, and the habits of a new life; and my cure was
accelerated by a faithful report of the tranquillity and chearfulness of
the Lady herself" (p. 204). 2 0 Brilliant use of the passive construction
emphasizes the young man's relative powerlessness, the result not
only of his dependent role but of the comparative evanescence of his
motivation, which, produced by youth, passion, and romanticism,
embodies a particularly treacherous version of the universal human
malady of hope and is far less permanent than the prejudice or pru-
dence that opposes it. These alternative definitions of his father's
motivation reveal the narrator's continued resentment as well as his
mature perception of the possibility that parental opposition stemmed
from wisdom rather than blindness. His metaphors of crushing and
wounds declare his pain, but he readily admits the subsequent cure.
The mildness of his response "as a lover" helps to account for his
obedience as a son; he says of himself, in effect, that he lacked both
force and motivation for effective opposition. Once more he invokes
natural process in his report of his healing. His tone declares that all
has been for the best, although growth has involved suffering. The
confidence of assertion, the reliance on condensation and understate-
ment, and the absence of elaborate explanation point to a new stylistic
freedom as this memoir develops.
Freedom, in Memoir C, is both a stylistic fact and a psychological
issue. Behind the writer's accomplishment of freedom lies his history

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of emotional deprivation. In this memoir, for the first time, he

observes specifically of his mother that because her "heart was solely
devoted to her husband" (p.187) she severely neglected her son, an
admission of defeat in the Oedipal conflict tht betrays continuing re-
sentment. Gibbon's truncated account of his stay at Oxford again
emphasizes neglect, and he insists that the Catholic Church also
neglected him in his Swiss exile, never making the slightest overture to
her beleaguered convert. Church and university thus prove as unsatis-
factory as the mother for whom they substitute. Gibbon also describes
his physical and social ineptitudes as a young man, emphasizing his
failure to achieve the graces of personality that attract others or to
manage even minimal physical competence. More vividly than before,
he demonstrates that the historian's positive sense of self desperately
depends on his intellectual achievements, since he claims not to hope
for love from others or for success in diverse accomplishments.
For his emotional problems Gibbon sought an intellectual solution.
Yet to separate emotional and intellectual is only a convenient formu-
lation: in fact his solution involved a merging. Suffering a
fundamental wound to self-love in recognizing his mother's preference
for another, he repaired that wound by aggressively insisting on his
own unworthiness ("you made me feel inadequate, look how incom-
petent I've turned out to be"), by identifying with his lost mother even
in his account of his intellectual endeavors (through increasingly
numerous metaphors of female sexuality), and by redirecting his emo-
tional intensity away from people (who betray one) and toward ideas.
Thus, Memoir C suggests, he finds internal freedom from his anger
and from his love.
The intensity of passion redirected becomes apparent, in this
memoir, through metaphoric and literal statement alike. The naked
deformity of Bellona and the terrors of virgin modesty survive from
the previous version; we find also a reference to the "pregnant" state
of a young mind and, more crucially, to the "moment of conception"
of The Decline and Fall, both underlining the procreative implications
of earlier metaphors. Gibbon now asserts directly that his sexual
passion lacks intensity. He puts his youthful friendship with
D'Eyverdun into the same sentence as his attachment to Suzanne,
suggesting the equivalent importance of friendship and love. Later he
observes that his passions never, after his youthful indiscretion, led

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him to think of marriage. On the other hand, he confesses his true and
continuing emotional focus: "The love of learning was so deeply
implanted in my mind, as an amusement and even as a passion, that it
could no longer be eradicated by any change of place or circumstance"
(p. 211). "My temper is not very susceptible of enthusiasm, and the
enthusiasm which I do not feel I have ever scorned to affect. But at the
distance of twenty-five years I can neither forget nor express the
strong emotions which agitated my mind as I first approached and
entered the eternal City" (p. 227). The nouns passion and enthusiasm
acknowledge that intellectual experience assumes for Gibbon the place
that sexuality and religion take in other lives. Although he claims in-
ability to express his feelings, the intellectual realm defines his area of
expressiveness in which feeling need not be constricted or suppressed.
The story this memoir tells, concentrating on the contrasted exper-
iences of freedom and restriction, describes how Gibbon's feeling
found new channels. Events internal and to some extent imaginary
often determine his course: the myth that his parents named all his
brothers Edward, which here recurs, and the childhood of bizarre
physical ailments, which may have been due to infantile rheumatism
but must surely have involved some psychological component. 2 1 His
father's erratic decisions, his aunt's permissiveness (he here calls her
"the mother of my mind," thus resentfully deprecating the importance
of his real mother), his self-con version, his promiscuous reading, his
trip to Rome: none of these facts or events seems intrinsically remark-
able, but Gibbon makes us feel their significance. They forced him to
realize the psychic necessity of freedom and prepared him to achieve
it.
After his childhood of extreme restriction, resulting from his illness
and from his father's arbitrary decisions, after his few months at
Oxford, where the complete absence of external control—heightening
his awareness of missing internal direction—urged him toward the
imagined securities of Catholicism, the youth found himself an exile in
Switzerland, deprived of comfort and impeded from conventional
self-gratification. Here he discovered internal guidance. He metaphor-
ically suggests that his mental voraciousness did not imply the aban-
donment of distinctions: he could achieve nutrition as well as pleasure
from his "litterary food" (p. 200). His freedom meant to him the op-
portunity to concentrate; the self-determined choice of narrowness

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 Imagining a Self

seems very different from the suffering of externally imposed limita-

tion.
Now Gibbon can afford to be relatively charitable toward his
father, because he understands that he has won their battle—partly as
sons usually win, by surviving, but partly also by the increasing
clarity of his dealing with his past. He recognizes as an issue in that
past his lack of control over his own life (p. 233), a problem not only
because of his father's tyranny but because of his own inability to
commit himself to a profession that would define his role and authori-
ty in the world. Financially dependent, unable to claim the obligation
of any externally dictated duties, Gibbon endured, as he poignantly
recalls, endless petty obligations: to go visiting with his father, to
converse with his stepmother, to attend family meals. He did not, he
protests—and perhaps protests too much—ever wish for his father's
death, although he recognized that it would mean enlargment of pos-
sibility. When that death occurred he realized that "the tears of a son
are seldom lasting. I submitted to the order of Nature, and my grief
was soothed by the conscious satisfaction that I had discharged all the
duties of filial piety. Few, perhaps, are the children who, after the
expiration of some months or years, would sincerely rejoyce in the
resurrection of their parents; and it is a melancholy truth, that my
father's death, not unhappy for himself, was the only event that could
save me from an hopeless life of obscurity and indigence" (p. 245).
Literally saved by his father's death (although subsequent images of
entangling nets and necessary sacrifice suggest how his father's power
persisted, as the son tried to disengage himself from financial com-
plexities), he found himself in a condition of perfect external freedom:
enough money but not too much (twice in this memoir he insists on
that point), no demanding alliances, no professional commitments.
He frees himself from retrospective guilt for the joy of his indepen-
dence by asserting that all sons feel the same way; the death of fathers
and the resulting liberation of children belong, like the dark months in
the womb, to the natural history of the species.
This memoir ends at a moment full of possibility. Gibbon had, he
tells us, conceived the idea of The Decline and Fall, although he had
made little progress toward executing his grandiose undertaking. He
had succeeded in selling one piece of his father's property, thus al-
leviating immediate financial anxieties; he had settled his stepmother
at Bath. The world lay all before him, thirty-five years old, rich in his

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consciousness of unrealized potential, and asserting the power of his

freedom.
That freedom, declared in the writer's capacity to choose a voca-
tion, would be affirmed by his success. His increasingly numerous and
adventurous metaphors, in Memoir C, reflect his experience of libera-
tion. When Gibbon speaks of himself as being "permitted to crawl as
high as the third form" (p. 189) or congratulates himself for not having
"herded with the young travellers" of his own nation (p. 205), his lan-
guage has new imaginative vigor, condemning by implication all the
forces impeding self-assertion. The outside world provides obstacles
as well as help. He is offered only "dim light"; the "elasticity" of his
mind is almost "compleatly broken" by Oxford. Threatened by the
"servitude of superstition," he subsequently recognizes the "heavy and
intolerant yoke" of Calvinism; he must submit to sacrifices, fetters,
domestic bonds, military servitude, the yoke of education, the intri-
cate net of his father's finances. Old metaphors and new mingle in a
structure full of linguistic energy that counteracts the metaphors' dark
implications. Such imagery reinforces the memoir's explicit emphasis
on freedom as a theme. Yet, like its predecessors, this fragment proved
impossible to complete.

Each of us has a history, the sequence of actual events that

comprises his individual past; Gibbon, who thought history
generically superior to fiction in interest and in vitality, believed him-
self to be writing a history of himself.22 As he provides successive ver-
sions of it, he implicitly raises questions about the nature of his enter-
prise. Cowper's Memoir suggests that autobiography may thrive on
sources of energy unsuspected by its author; Gibbon's succession of
memoirs raises the possibility that it thrives from the creation of
meanings which themselves constitute fictions: stories issuing from the
author's imagination.
The aspects of Gibbon's narrative that evolve most unmistakably
from his imagination involve the ordering rather than the invention of
happenings. The first three memoirs in fact report different events: in
Memoir A the happenings of a partly legendary past, in Β and C,
those of the historian's own memory and surmise. The divergencies of
substance and technique create an impression of fictionality, height-
ening our awareness of the invention involved in narrative.
Obviously, Gibbon could not successfully describe his life by avoiding

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the subject, as he attempted in A. Neither could he adequately

describe it by insistence on the explanatory power of destiny, the
effort of B. In C, the major themes of his story were announced: freed-
om, control, and vocation justified by providing both at once. Yet the
story itself did not satisfy its author. As historian and writer, he still
felt the need to reshape it.
As historian. Gibbon's discussions of his vocation thus far have not
investigated specifically that vocation's nature, only its organizing
and justifying function in his own psychic life. But in writing his auto-
biography, his personal history, he necessarily demonstrates some-
thing of what he believes the writing of history to mean. How does a
man recapture the past? Gibbon's metaphors of eating and his
allusions to the emotional intensity with which he encountered histor-
ical settings suggest his passionate desire simply to incorporate. His
efforts at reporting his own life, on the other hand, reveal that the
struggle to recapture the past constitutes, in practice, an attempt to
remake it.
Alfred Kazin has pointed out that when a good novelist reuses in
autobiography material "he has already used as fiction, it is obvious
that he turns to autobiography out of some creative longing that fic-
tion has not satisfied." 23 Similarly, Gibbon's reflection on the great
themes of human destiny and human error in relation to his own
career suggest that something in him remained unsatisfied by his
enormous historical achievement with its contemplation of those same
themes in the affairs of nations. To dominate by intellect and imagina-
tion the chaotic course of centuries may metaphorically represent the
perhaps more difficult undertaking of dominating one's own life.
Cowper assumed the theological context through which he interpreted
his youth; the reader finds that context inadequate. Gibbon feels
obliged to create the proper context, which will both emerge from and
shape the appropriate story. 24 The reader, following his successive
attempts, feeling with him their inadequacy, participates vicariously
in the struggle to find the "objective correlatives" for subjective emo-
tion, to convey and justify that emotion without allowing it entirely to
dominate the record of the events that have elicited it.
The unique experience of contemplating so many false starts, which
allows the reader to ponder the nature of their falsity, must provoke
speculation about autobiography's literary power. Gibbon makes us
realize that autobiography—even one man's autobiography—allows

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 Edward Gibbon

many ways of telling a story, involves a choice of kinds, and uses its
strategy to various purposes. It issues, like other forms of artistic
expressiveness, from an author's compulsions; it dramatizes, often
inadvertently, his psychic struggles.
In Memoir D, written in 1790-91, Gibbon retreats from some possi-
bilities that C had opened. Twenty-one pages long (C contained sixty-
eight pages), it relates the historian's career from his birth to his fath-
er's death, adding little to the material of preceding versions but excis-
ing much. Scanty in its use of figurative language, it systematically
eliminates or distances references to feeling. Gibbon seems again, as in
A, to wish not to tell his story: his history as the narration of a consec-
utive series of events, yes, but not an imaginatively linked series or a
narrative with form, feeling, and climax. "In later life," one of
Gibbon's critics asserts, "as soon as he felt, he began at once to think
and, by taking thought, usually stifled the emotion before it disturbed
his repose."25 If this had proved the last of Gibbon''-, revisions, it
would have supported such a view of him. Coming as it does at the
middle of the sequence, preceded and followed by memoirs different
in kind, it suggests, rather, a man struggling to make reason a defense
against the dangers of emotion.
Awareness of response withheld dominates the memoir. The first
paragraph now reports the bare fact of birth, eliminating all commen-
tary—eliminating even the observation that Putney was a "pleasant"
location. The account of Pavilliard relies on negatives: "Nor will my
gratitude for the virtuous Pavillard allow me to extend his praise
beyond the merits of kindness, assiduity, and a pleasing method of
inculcating the general principles of human learning" (p. 331). Merits
enough, one might say, but Gibbon chooses to stress the limits rather
than the extensiveness of his praise. The Suzanne Curchod affair now
merits a single sentence: "I felt (and I am proud that I felt) the beauty
and merit of a Lady who has supported with equal propriety the
scenes of fortune, from the daughter of a country clergyman to the
wife of the first minister of the Finances of France" (p. 337). The feel-
ing in which Gibbon declares his pride amounts to a rational acknowl-
edgment of value. The grotesque reductiveness of the account, its
aggressive presentation of irrelevant information (about Suzanne's
fortunes) in place of relevant (about the relationship) epitomize
Memoir D's deliberate refusal of intimacy.
Like its predecessor, Memoir D relates the origin of The Decline and

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 Imagining a Self

Fall, with more emphasis than the preceding version on the union of
thought and emotion that precipitated it. Rome's "heroes and her
writers," Gibbon says, "were present to my mind, and the flame of
enthusiasm was blended with the light of critical enquiry. I must not
forget the day, the hour, the most interesting in my litterary life. It
was on the fifteenth of October, in the gloom of evening, as I sat
musing on the Capitol, while the barefooted fryars were chanting their
litanies in the temple of Jupiter, that I conceived the first thought of
my history. My original plan was confined to the decay of the City;
my reading and reflection pointed to that aim; but several years
elapsed, and several avocations intervened, before I grappled with the
decline and fall of the Roman Empire" (p. 339). He introduces only
two minor visual details as new facts. Earlier, the friars were Francis-
cans; this time Gibbon observes, instead, their bare feet; previously
the scene took place at the close of evening, now in evening's gloom.
These tiny specificities heighten immediacy. In Memoir C Gibbon
remarks that his journal records this moment, which he summarizes
from the journal's account. No journal intervenes between historian
and reader in D, and the author directly characterizes the event as "the
most interesting in my litterary life": a startlingly subjective assertion,
given the usual bareness of this memoir. Moreover, the account of the
conception invites the reader's emotional response to the ironies of
barefoot Christian friars in pagan temples near the ruined Capitol of a
culture long gone. Gibbon's own reaction to these ironies issued in a
"thought," one product of his characteristic, arduous combination of
"the flame of enthusiasm" and "the light of critical enquiry." The
direct force of "before I grappled with the decline and fall" exemplifies
his willingness now to confess both the direction of his energies and
the difficulty with which he focused them.
Although Memoir D discovers a form far from fictional, betraying
the historian's reluctance to tell a story, it creates an image of
character partly defined by the narrator's declared distance from his
imagined reader. Gibbon's effort to make his profession identical
with his nature shapes this version of himself. The static quality of
Memoir D, its lack of driving narrative force, intensifies the impres-
sion that it invites assessment of an achieved man. It claims for
itself, as for the character it depicts, a creative transformation of limi-
tation.
Gibbon's sincerity depends on formality. In this way especially, his

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style mirrors his character. He defines himself as a definer. A twenti-

eth-century commentator invites approval for Gibbon on the ground
that "he was personally an admirable man. He was a good son—more
difficult still, a good stepson—a good nephew, a good friend . . . And
he was certainly a good citizen of the world, a friendly link between
three countries."26 Memoir D makes those characterizations singularly
remote. All very well, it suggests, to be a good friend, son, citizen, but
how unimportant such virtues must seem in comparison with the
grand passion by which Gibbon here justifies his own life. His passion
operates through his reason; so he will demand of his readers only the
assent that reason can give. Presenting himself as a man who with-
holds, he demands the reader's acknowledgment that total devotion to
the life of the mind must preclude other forms of closeness.
Invited to judge the created image of a man as the embodiment of
pure and passionate reason, we must also come to terms, as when
reading a novel, with the document that incorporates the image.
Gibbon declares himself a monolith, but his memoir exemplifies a
process. It shows him constructing his defenses while refusing to
acknowledge what he is defending against. In his final attempts to
come to terms with his life, he would confess more openly the nature
of his pain and admit more fully the dynamic necessities of narrative.

In Memoir E for the first (and last) time Gibbon manages to bring
his record of himself to the present, even to project it into the future.
Only one previous account had extended even as far as 1772. Now the
author contemplates his entire past while considering the prospect of
his death. He focuses his attention on the "ends of being," making the
reader feel both the splendor and the severe limits of his achievement.
The E text creates a curiously disjunctive effect. Its first eleven pages
contain a new version of all the material of Memoir C's sixty-eight
pages: the first thirty-five years of Gibbon's life; the thirty-five
succeeding pages recount the next nineteen years. Eleven pages for
ancestors, childhood, adolescence, Oxford and Lausanne, conversion
and reconversion, mother's death and father's, Suzanne Curchod, the
Grand Tour, the militia, the author's early literary efforts, the incep-
tion of The Decline and Fall·, thirty-five pages for a period in which
little happened. A sharp break in tone divides the two parts. At the
beginning, Gibbon largely rewrote previously formed material,
creating an atmosphere so emotionally denuded that it seems an

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attempt to deny the importance of the narrative's substance. The last

three-quarters of the memoir, on the other hand, displays a new ex-
pansiveness, which suggests a different kind of story. And the final re-
flectiveness amounts to a self-assessment more forthright than Gibbon
had offered before—an explicit interpretation, in fact, of what his
account implies.
In the early pages of Memoir E references to freedom and its al-
ternatives provide the clearest emotional focus in an account sys-
tematically purged of most allusions to feeling. Thus Gibbon reports,
rather vaguely, the fact of his childhood illnesses; then remarks that
he does not share the "fashionable" envy and regret for lost youth,
since "I never could understand the happiness of servitude" (p. 251).
Remembering boyhood so, he does not choose to recall its details, ex-
cept for the significant paradox that "the long hours of confinement to
my chamber or my couch"—an image of lack of freedom—"were
soothed . . . by an early and eager love of reading"—source of the true
freedom of the mind (p. 251). The Catholic episode, like the Oxford
experience, almost disappears from this account; the youth's
conversion is summarized as entrapment in "the toils of sophistry and
superstition," through which "my growing reason soon broke" (p.
252). Again, the mind creates freedom from a bondage sustained by
influence from without. He returns from Switzerland, to be "in-
dulged" by his father "with a decent allowance of money and liberty,"
subsequently "stealing" from his family duties hours to be "deliciously
passed in a library" (p. 254). More emphatically than before, he refers
to his yearning to be "master in my own house" (p. 257). When his
father died, he reminds the reader, enlarged liberty and "domestic
command" resulted for the surviving son. Orphanhood allows him
possession of "the solid comforts of life," but, far more important,
"these advantages were crowned by the first of earthly blessings,
independence. I was the absolute master of my hours and actions; nor
was I deceived in the hope that the establishment of my library in
town would allow me to divide the day between study and society.
Each year the circle of my acquaintance, the number of my dead and
living companions, was enlarged" (p. 260).
These sentences indicate not only freedom's importance but its
function for Gibbon. Unlike domestic life, which demands that one
"steal" time from human obligations for intellectual pursuits, his inde-
pendence allows him full control over his time and creates the possi-

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bility of reconciliation: he need hardly distinguish between his dead

and his living companions. Freedom depends on the absence of pro-
found human ties, the choice of many companions whose inanimate
status precludes their making inordinate demands, and the satisfaction
of human needs by "society" and "acquaintance" rather than passion
or devotion.
In the more leisurely bulk of this narrative, the theme of freedom
acquires complexity. Gibbon attempted some kinds of action apart
from his central vocation, becoming a Member of Parliament, sitting
on the Board of Trade: occupations producing prestige and financial
reward. Stripped of his "convenient salary" from the Board of Trade
(p. 276), he was promised a seat at the board of customs or excise,
"but the chance was distant and doubtful, nor could I solicit with
much ardour an ignoble servitude which would have robbed me of the
most valuable of my studious hours" (p. 277). Although Gibbon had
in fact sought preferment with apparent eagerness,27 his retrospective
summary of his good fortune in reachieving the freedom of his study
points to a profound truth. Elsewhere in the memoir, he sums up his
service in the House of Commons and the Board of Trade by remark-
ing, "My personal freedom had been somewhat impaired . . . ; but I
was now delivered from the chain of duty and dependence" (p. 279).
Having discovered his true arena of freedom, he could understand
alternatives only as forms of slavery, excluding from his life conven-
tional occupations despite the acknowledged threat of resultant in-
significance.
The single persuasively rendered instance of inner struggle in
Memoir E centers on the issue of liberty. (To be sure, Gibbon claimed
to have suffered conflict over Suzanne Curchod. Conflict recollected
in such tranquillity, however, seems hardly real.) Thus he summarizes
his first decision to settle with his friend D'Eyverdun in Switzerland:
"Before I could break my English chain, it was incumbent on me to
struggle with the feelings of my heart, the indolence of my temper,
and the opinion of the World, which unanimously condemned this
voluntary banishment. In the disposal of my effects, the library, a
sacred deposit, was alone excepted . . . Since my establishment at
Lausanne more than seven years have elapsed, and . . . not a day, not
a moment has occurred in which I have repented of my choice" (p.
278). Struggling with heart and "temper" (i.e., temperament) as well
as with public opinion, the historian achieves the choice that he can-

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not even momentarily regret: exile for the sake of freedom. The
"sacred deposit" of his library (elsewhere he calls it his "seraglio"; p.
288) helps to effectuate that choice, reminding him and his readers
that by giving up much he preserves what he values most. The
rejection of England completes what the rejection of Suzanne began: a
systematic cutting away of irrelevancies, including much that most
men find essential.
The desire for liberty and the hatred of bondage belong to the
human species. Like his relief at his father's death, Gibbon's unwilling-
ness to follow a conventional career can be explained as deriving from
a trait he shares with all mankind. The artfulness of Memoir E as nar-
rative stems from its imposition of a single pattern on diverse experi-
ence, achieving literary unity through tactics of emotional defense.
Yet the apparent effort to minimize the personal creates resonant
tensions as Gibbon finds himself forced, after all, to acknowledge his
own "specialness."
The ideals of the French Revolution, Gibbon feels, constitute a
"disease" marked by "wild theories of equal and boundless freedom"
(p. 290). His rage at revolution reflects his recognition that freedom
depends on its bounds; the uniqueness of his personal solution consists
in his choice of bounds. After producing three volumes of The Decline
and Fall, Gibbon tells us, he hesitated about writing more. He could
read now simply for pleasure, indulging his private tastes. "Yet in the
luxury of freedom I began to wish for the daily task, the active pursuit
which gave a value to every book, and an object to every enquiry"
(p. 276): only enacting his compulsions could make "freedom" mean-
ingful. His "final deliverance" from The Decline and Fall is an
ambivalent experience. "After laying down my pen I took several
turns in a berceau, or covered walk of Acacias, which commands a
prospect of the country, the lake, and the mountains. The air was
temperate, the sky was serene, the silver orb of the moon was reflected
from the waters, and all Nature was silent. I will not dissemble the
first emotions of joy on the recovery of my freedom, and perhaps the
establishment of my fame. But my pride was soon humbled, and a
sober melancholy was spread over my mind by the idea that I had
taken my everlasting leave of an old and agreable companion, and
that, whatsoever might be the future date of my history, the life of the
historian must be short and precarious" (pp. 282-3). Nowhere else in

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 Edward Gibbon

any memoir does Gibbon so carefully establish an inanimate

scene—not the miniature drama of friars singing in a ruined temple,
but the idealized, generalized eighteenth-century vista of temperance,
serenity, and commanding prospect. He "sees," in literary terms
("silver orb") or in terms of classical painting, generalized country,
lake, and mountains, not particularized objects in a setting. But at
least he sees. His "deliverance" enables him suddenly, and unusually,
to turn his eyes outward instead of always inward and backward. First
he thinks of "freedom," forgetting how often freedom for him has
meant firm commitment, and of fame, forgetting its evanescence. His
subsequent melancholy implies both recognitions. The arduous
historical enterprise has provided his equivalent of companionship, a
stay against confusion and drifting. Lacking this stay, he finds himself
thinking of death.
And continuing to think of it through the final pages of this
memoir, where he assesses himself in full awareness of his mortality,
he simultaneously avoids and embraces the personal. Never does he
acknowledge any terror of death. His account of his health emphasizes
the positive, deprecating his attacks of gout and stressing how much
better he feels now than he did as a boy (p. 292), and ignoring the
malady of which he was to die. Fontenelle and Buffon claim that old
age is the most agreeable stage of life; Gibbon feels inclined to agree.
Yet, turning on himself the sharp gaze of the seeker after truth, he
recognizes how desire may affect perception in such matters. Because
he fully recognizes the comfort of Fontenelle's doctrine, he cannot
after all succumb to it. He must contemplate what the prospect of his
death means.
Facing but also trying not to face that prospect, he offers a new
self-assessment permeated with a melancholy sense of lost alterna-
tives. He has "drawn a high prize in the lottery of life," born to a
wealthy family in a free country and having survived, against the laws
of probability, beyond the age of fifty. Conscious of his good fortune,
he will "fairly estimate the present value of my existence in the three-
fold division of mind, body, and estate." His conscience, he claims,
does not reproach him. He finds himself cheerful and moderate with
"a natural disposition to repose" rather than to action; his single pas-
sion is "the love of study, a passion which"—unlike its sexual counter-
part—"derives fresh vigour from enjoyment" (p. 291). His mental

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faculties have not decayed; "but it may be questioned whether some

flowers of fancy, some grateful errors, have not been eradicated with
the weeds of prejudice" (pp. 291-2).
Gibbon's evaluation of his mind thus concludes on a dubious note.
Something, he suspects, has been lost in his making of himself into a
historian: something beautiful perhaps, some source of pleasure from
which he has separated himself. His consideration of "body" reveals
only determined optimism; his assessment of "estate" again ends
oddly, after more optimism, with the statement that he has never had
to appear in a court of law. He then continues: "Shall I add that, since
the failure of my first wishes, I have never entertained any serious
thoughts of a matrimonial connection?" (p. 293). The flowers of fancy
are dead indeed when matrimony can be subsumed, along with
litigation, under an economic self-assessment.
Reference to what he has given up leads the historian to contempla-
tion of what he has gained: literary fame. His work, he testifies, has
formed him. To be sure, the freedom of his writing has provoked
negative criticism. No matter: like Hume he boasts that "my nerves
are not tremblingly alive" (p. 295). He values "the fair testimonies of
private and public esteem," and fantasizes that "he is imparting some
degree of amusement or knowledge to his friends in a distant land;
that one day his mind will be familiar to the grandchildren of those
who are yet unborn" (pp. 293-4). Only through his writing and his
fantasies about it can he satisfy that desire for closeness unfulfilled by
marriage and frustrated by the death of his few intimate friends. In
his pursuit of order, harmony, and rational hierarchy, he has sacri-
ficed the satisfactions of heightened sensibility, nerves tremblingly
alive, intimacy, but he has sacrificed some emotional rewards for the
sake of others: the happiness of work and of fame, the gratification of
imagining that his mind—that best part of himself—means something
to other minds unknown, even unborn, and the achievement through
writing of an imitation of friendship in some respects more
satisfactory than real relationship.
If we, modern readers, feel some sense of strain in this rosy
summary, so does the historian himself. He concludes Memoir E not
with further personal statement but with a powerful formulation of
distilled general truth. "I must reluctantly observe that two causes,
the abbreviation of time and the failure of hope, will always tinge with
a browner shade the evening of life." Buffon and Fontenelle notwith-
standing, the best is not yet to be. He deals summarily with "the ab-
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 Edward Gibbon

breviation of time," an experiential fact to which all aging mortals

must testify. Then, in a moving peroration, with the equally inevita-
ble "failure of hope": "The warm desires, the long expectations of
youth, are founded on the ignorance of themselves and of the World:
they are gradually damped by time and experience, by disappoint-
ment or possession; and after the middle season the crowd must be
content to remain at the foot of the mountain, while the few who have
climbed the summit aspire to descend or expect to fall. In old age, the
consolation of hope is reserved for the tenderness of parents, who
commence a new life in their children; the faith of enthusiasts who
sing Hallelujahs above the clouds, and the vanity of authors who pre-
sume the immortality of their name and writings" (p. 295). Gibbon's
Johnsonian alternatives define the dreadful limitation of possibility:
time and experience necessarily produce the wisdom that destroys the
bliss of ignorance; to get what one wants will prove as frustrating as
not to; to ascend the mountain generates alienation and fear; to re-
main at the bottom means failure. That hope springs eternal only
comprises the ultimate irony: man must protect himself against
knowledge of his condition. The lasting hopes Gibbon specifies com-
plete his self-evaluation with recognition of his own participation in
the flaws historians discover in others. First he suggests two sources of
consolation that he himself has deliberately rejected. Yielding Suzanne
Curchod, he avoided the possibility of parenthood; relinquishing
Catholicism, he gave up forever significant religious faith. Other
choices would have meant other compensations. As it is, he possesses
only one: the vanity of authors. To recognize its fallaciousness does
not protect him from the belief in the "immortality of [his] name and
writings" that fulfills his deepest emotional needs. Trying always to be
rational, he has learned that emotion outlasts reason. Yet he demon-
strates rationality's triumph in the act of declaring its defeat: by rea-
son he assesses himself. Frail because human, aware of that terrible
frailty, he asserts his magnificent use of freedom: to create and fulfill
his destiny as historian, to understand what he lacked and what he
possessed, to know himself in his inadequacy and his achievement, to
embody the full possibilities of rational control while understanding
its futility. To epitomize the paradoxical nature of man.

Where could he go from there? With a sinking heart one approaches

Memoir F, "the latest and most perfect" of the memoirs. 28 Having
risen to eloquent universality at the end of E, Gibbon might display
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his doggedness by starting over once again, but surely he had by now
said what he had to say.
In fact, he had not. In Memoir F for the first time he discovers how
to express the personal. This version incorporates every fact contained
in the earlier texts (down to 1753, where it abruptly ends), adds many
fresh items of information, and displays an altogether new atmo-
sphere of liberty: to reveal true feelings (the historian did not feel
close to his mother, did not respect his father, does not regret the early
death of his brothers—deep emotions summarized in negative terms),
to make slightly bawdy jokes (about the love lives of his ancestors,
even about the possible sexual activity of William Law), to expatiate
on his similarity to and his difference from mankind at large. With an
almost argumentative tone, Gibbon now explains himself. He is a man
shaped by his pain, the suffering he shares with the rest of his species,
and—perhaps even more important and more remarkable, in his
century, as a subject—the anguish implicit in his unique family
situation. Insisting that through a describable sequence of happenings
he came to be his necessary self, he finds a narrative form that richly
realizes the paradox of reason sustained by and sustaining emotion. 29
Reporting his experience of the family drama, Gibbon begins with
the birth and death of brothers and sister. He claims not to grieve for
the loss of his brothers. "They died so young, and I was myself so
young at the time of their deaths, that I could not then feel, nor can I
now estimate their loss, the importance of which could only have been
ascertained by future contingencies. The shares of fortune to which
younger children are reduced by our English laws would have been
sufficient, however, to oppress my inheritance; and the compensation
of their friendship must have depended on the uncertain event of char-
acter and conduct, on the affinity or opposition of our reciprocal
sentiments. My five brothers . . . I shall not pretend to lament" (p. 24).
Retreating from the complexities of love to the relative simplicity of
money, Gibbon ironically contrasts his inability to "estimate [the]
loss" of his brothers with his precise awareness of the loss of fortune
implicit in their survival. He can confess his feelings about the
real—money and laws—but will not permit himself to feel about the
hypothetical: dead brothers, the dead grandfather who, long before
the historian's birth, deprived his descendant of a fortune that he
might by greater discretion have preserved. Perhaps his brothers'

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natures would have "compensated" for their incursions into his

fortune, but perhaps not. Using the language of finance to defend
against the danger of emotion, he states his refusal to grieve for what
might have been, implying an attitude that would protect him also
against conceivable pain from the rupture with Suzanne Curchod and
from his father's death. Marriage might have enlarged his emotional
life; it would certainly have strained his finances and restricted his
freedom. His father's longer survival might have meant happiness; it
must have implied further waste of money. Discarded alternatives do
not exist; Gibbon interests himself only in what does. His concern
with money anchors him to the real.
But not always. He admits to having "deeply and sincerely regret-
ted" the loss of his sister, mainly because he longs for "familiar and
tender friendship with a female." The affection of brother and sister,
he adds, is "perhaps softened by the secret influence of sex, but pure
from any mixture of sensual desire, the sole species of Platonic love
that can be indulged with truth and without danger" (p. 24). Females
play a small part in this version of Gibbon's story, which ends with
the Oxford years and before Suzanne Curchod. A tear again trickles
down his cheek at the memory of his nurturing aunt, still termed the
mother of his mind, and he uncovers more fully his view of his actual
mother. "My mother's attention was somewhat diverted by her fre-
quent pregnancies, by an exclusive passion for her husband, and by
the dissipation of the World, in which his taste and authority obliged
her to mingle" (p. 39). His father is to be blamed, in other words, for
his mother's neglect. The child Edward's frailty demanded "the most
tender assiduity" of care, which his mother was unprepared to offer.
She drove with him once to school, and "admonished" him that he
must learn to think and act for himself (p. 37): his sole specific
memory thus emphasizes her rejection. Then she died, leaving "the
image of her person and conversation . . . faintly imprinted in my
memory" (p. 39). To his anger at her neglect, the boy added
resentment of his father's protracted mourning for her, "much beyond
the term which has been fixed by decency and custom" (p. 39), which
emphasized how fully the father had possessed the beloved object. "As
I had seldom enjoyed the smiles of maternal tenderness," Gibbon sum-
marizes, "she was rather the object of my respect than of my love" (p.
38).

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His earliest memory, Gibbon now reports for the first time,
involved anger at his father. After being whipped, in "childish
revenge" he shouted out the names of his father's opponents in a par-
liamentary election (p. 29). If he objects to his father's mourning as a
widower, he also resents his mother's apparent inability to control
"the passions of an independent husband" (p. 27). His father spent
too much money: a grievance the son can openly acknowledge.
Behind it looms the other, more fundamental grievance.
Barely concealed contempt and anger at his father, resentment and
a sense of deprivation about his mother are closely related to that
other anger. Gibbon repeats once more the significant myth about all
his brothers having been christened Edward in denial of the only
child's "specialness." His father kept his mother pregnant, another
pretext for maternal neglect; the child lacked both siblings to love and
the parental attention that should have been accorded the sole sur-
vivor. His fantasy of a sister's tender love, which might substitute for
that of the mother of whom he felt deprived and the wife to whom he
could never commit himself, expresses both the rage and the longing
produced by his family situation. Such a fantasy allows him to avoid
the danger of competition inherent in the relation to male siblings and
the danger of sexuality implicit in relations to other women.
Gibbon now for the first time declares his acceptance of pain as a
molding force: his identity derives partly from what he has suffered.
This account offers a more detailed exposition than any of its prede-
cessors of his incredibly numerous and miserable childhood ailments.
In Memoir F, Gibbon makes a serious attempt—of a kind unprece-
dented in his own era and rare for long afterwards—to explain, for
himself as well as his readers, why, in response to suffering, he turned
to books. Although he can offer only the lame explanation that "the
assiduous perusal of the Universal history" accounts for his
intellectual direction (p. 48), he also tries, with great energy and with
a manifest sense of frustration, to recapture much earlier stages of his
mental history: stages of unremembered suffering.
Birth involves pain; the autobiographer looks back with some
wistfulness on the unrecoverable peace that preceded it, no longer
dismissed as a prison. "Decency and ignorance," Gibbon writes, "cast
a veil over the mystery of generation, but I may relate that after float-
ing nine months in a liquid element, I was painfully transported into
the vital air. Of a new-born infant it cannot be predicated 'he thinks,

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 Edward Gibbon

therefore he is;' it can only be affirmed 'he suffers, therefore he feels' "
(p. 28). Suffering testifies reality. The historian striving for accuracy
realizes with wonder his past dependence. "During the first year I was
below the greatest part of the brute creation, and must inevitably have
perished, had I been abandoned to my own care . . . Slow is the
growth of the body: that of the mind is still slower . . . I strive without
much success to recollect the persons and objects which might appear
at the time most forcibly to affect me" (p. 29). What he cannot
remember remains important and perhaps contains the hidden cause
of that grand effect, his vocation.
What he can remember equally affirms the universality of misery.
Men who claim childhood's happiness lie or deceive themselves. "I
would ask the warmest and most active Hero of the play-field whether
he can seriously compare his childish with his manly enjoyments;
whether he does not feel, as the most precious attribute of his exis-
tence, the vigorous maturity of sensual and spiritual powers which
Nature has reserved for the age of puberty. A state of happiness
arising only from the want of foresight and reflection shall never
provoke my envy; such degenerate taste would tend to sink us in the
scale of beings from a man to a child, a dog and an oyster, till we had
reached the confines of brute matter, which cannot suffer because it
cannot feel" (p. 51). The vigor of Gibbon's prose emphasizes his
startling suggestion that the capacity to suffer implies the power of
intellection, lack of "foresight and reflection" corresponding to the
oyster's relative inability to feel pain. Gibbon, like Gray (whose Eton
College ode he cites just before this passage) but without Gray's nos-
talgia, rejects the bliss of ignorance—not, like Gray, because one must
inevitably grow up, but because the choice of maturity, meaning full
awareness of suffering, alone embodies adequate acceptance of human
responsibility. More passionately than ever, Gibbon describes the
suffering of the schoolboy (p. 51). He grants—deducing necessity
from what seems universality—that "such blind and absolute depend-
ence may be necessary, but can never be delightful: Freedom is the
first wish of our heart; freedom is the first blessing of our nature; and,
unless we bind ourselves with the voluntary chains of interest or
passion, we advance in freedom as we advance in years" (pp. 51-2).
This statement of general truth epitomizes the story of Gibbon's life
as he finally chooses to tell it: a progress of freedom, if also of hope's
abridgement. Lacking freedom to love (deprived by death of his

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 Imagining a Self

siblings, by life of his parents, by illness of normal schoolboy friend-

ships), he had liberty to think, the strait and narrow way of intellectu-
al discipline leading to a heaven of opportunity. Through it he could
understand, even embrace, the pain that formed him; he could
develop the power of discrimination that would enable him to write
his books and to master his sense of grievance; he could assert the
"specialness" that his parents denied him; he could achieve gratifica-
tion. He could triumph over his father.
Now he understands, and increasingly emphasizes, his own unique-
ness, describing with mingled pride and irony his early intellectual ac-
complishments. At Oxford he might be treated like "live stock" (p. 69),
but he had already proved himself something more. Emphasizing the
enormous psychic importance of the Oxford episode (the previous
memoir had avoided its implications through scanty summary),
Gibbon states directly that the university functioned for him as a
symbolic parent that he deliberately rejected (pp. 56-7). He obses-
sively stresses his responsibility for his own conversion to Catholi-
cism. No outside influence intervened, he insists; by books he per-
suaded himself. Other wise men have done the same—he cites Bayle
and Chillingsworth—and have thought it no shame to reverse their
decisions subsequently. His rejection of the Church of England, no less
significant for being impermanent, marks his escape from the father of
whom Gibbon blandly observes, "his affection deplored the loss of an
only son" (p. 75). In a single, self-determined act the young man had
freed himself alike from real and symbolic parents. 30
His story, in Memoir F, ends here, inadvertently but appropriately:
subsequent choices would merely confirm the implications of this one.
To be sure, his father reclaimed ascendancy, forcing him into
dependence in Switzerland, forbidding his marriage, and controlling
his inheritance. Nonetheless, Gibbon had freed himself, declaring his
mind his kingdom. In his intellectual freedom he found immediate
gratification. His repeated metaphors of treasure, eating, and sexual-
ity—all associated with reading and writing—testify to that. Money,
food, and sex—the pleasures of the body—come to Gibbon through
the mind. In early 1793 he wrote to Lord Sheffield, "Of the Memoirs
little has been done, and with that little I am not satisfied: they must
be postponed till a mature season, and I much doubt whether the book
and the author can ever see the light at the same time." 31 Yet he had, in
fact, written a history of his own mind that vividly depicted the re-

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 Edward Gibbon

wards and penalties of the intellectual life and the way that his choice
of such a life developed from and compensated for his sense of child-
hood deprivation. Declaring himself triumphantly rational, Gibbon
gives more explicit emphasis than any other autobiographer of his
century to psychic pain. His insistence on understanding leads him
finally to acknowledge not only the compensations but the sufferings
of total commitment to vocation and to perceive and record the
connections between private internal experience and public achieve-
ment.

The process of growth that comprises a necessary subject of all

autobiography functions also as a dynamic principle in Gibbon's
sequence of memoirs. He reports his life as a progress toward freedom
involving sacrifice and pain. He demonstrates through his successive
attempts at personal history how arduously he achieves formal
freedom and how intimately it involves self-confrontation that
contains its own obvious suffering, implied by the acknowledgment of
how deliberately the writer has diminished himself for the sake of his
accomplishment. Yet the impression of pain does not, at last,
dominate the series of memoirs. Stephen Shapiro has argued that
autobiography is necessarily a comic genre because it "asserts the ego's
transcendence of circumstance." 32 Gibbon's sequence dramatizes that
transcendence through its succession of false starts. The search for
form involves a struggle for the appropriate—both true and emotion-
ally acceptable—image of transcendence, involving a just balance
between fact (embodying circumstance) and interpretation (through
which the writer triumphs over circumstance).
The various versions of himself that Gibbon supplies in their co-
existence emphasize for the reader autobiography's status as artistic
achievement. The author seeks the strategies that will convey his
reality. In this instance, his full self-rendition must include his
defensiveness; through his strategies of defense he finally reveals
himself. "Style," Gibbon had observed in Memoir A, "is the image of
character" (p. 296). His style—increasingly ironic, unfailingly
balanced and weighty—conveys a character concerned at once with
self-protection and with truth. In Memoir F Gibbon establishes the
truth of his pain and his mastery of it—the understood truth of
freedom through vocation—while maintaining decorum and the
judicious style of the evaluating mind. The decorum may obscure the

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 Imagining a Self

shocking truth, as Gibbon's conversation and his "inexpressibles"

concealed the shocking truth of his hydrocele. Yet truth remains and
remarkably remains expressed. What other writer of the eighteenth
century would so openly expose his anger at mother and father, his
lack of concern for lost siblings, his preference of books to people, his
hatred of childhood, even (at least in hints) his regret for the lost
securities of the womb? The psychological authenticity of Memoir F
represents a laborious and highly personal achievement. It suggests
the revolutionary possibility that a book can say anything at all, if it
finds the proper mode of saying. The degree of freedom Gibbon
finally demonstrates is matched only by that of the century's most
ostentatiously liberated work, Tristram Shandy.

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 5
The Beautiful Oblique:
Tristram Shandy

aving developed a sufficiently complicated public voice,

H Gibbon succeeds finally in revealing through it his private, suf-

fering humanity. His six distinct versions of himself emphasize
story's way of creating meaning. In his final attempts at a memoir, he
suggests that self-discovery and self-depiction partly depend upon the
acknowledgment of limits that dominates the important eighteenth-
century novels of education. Tom Jones learns that he cannot enjoy
with impunity every woman who fancies him, and Robinson Crusoe
finds that he cannot forever live as a king; so Gibbon comes to
recognize that the emotional fulfillment he has dreamed of as a result
of literary achievement will always elude him.
Acceptance of human limitation belongs to a comic vision of life;
refusal to accept defines the tragic. Gibbon's self-renditions are
"comic" not only because they belong to the autobiographical mode
that asserts the ego's transcendence but because they employ a per-
spective in which the vanity of hope, the pretension of aspiration, and
the impossibility of ultimate knowledge epitomize not only the misery
but the absurdity of the human condition. Yet the describer as writer
also asserts his own dignity, the dignity of man, in the clarity of his
vision and the authority of his pronouncements. His control of
literary form, defending against the disorder of experience, implies the
possibility of secular salvation.
In contrast, Tristram Shandy, a fictional autobiographer, denies

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 Imagining a Self

even the conceivability of telling a story. His history of himself delib-

erately imitates chaos. He describes his life and opinions as a farce,
undercuts all attempts at dignity (his own and other people's),
perceives nothing but limitation. Although with every sentence he
invites the reader to laugh, he records only mishap. His narrative
begins, "I wish . . . " and hopeless yearning for the contrary-to-fact
continues to its end.
Tristram, doomed to be a private man, finds a "public" voice
unachievable and would believe it ridiculous if achieved, just as
Walter Shandy's pomposities are ridiculous. The idea of destiny,
which richly reassures Gibbon, underlines Tristram's hopelessness.
Isolated in his privacy (as all men, he believes, are isolated), he has
only himself as a stay against the void, and he does not know himself
("—And who are you? said he. Don't puzzle me; said I." 1 ) or, ap-
parently, believe in the possibility of such knowledge. But his narra-
tive like Gibbon's, though through very different means, demands
attention to its form: ostensibly its formlessness. Through form it too
contains and judges experience, even while denying all containment
and judging. Through form it consolidates an intricate drama of
defense, not against society but against mortality. And this most ec-
centric of the century's novels in some ways provides a paradigm of
the novel's conventional course, an illustration of its implications.2
Constantly stating what narrative cannot do, it simultaneously
demonstrates what it can. It shows how language creates the meaning
Tristram denies it, how story declares identity, though the teller
barely believes in his own continuing existence.3 It shows the inevita-
bility and the power of form.
The novel's relation to autobiography, in one sense obvious from its
very title (The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman),
has been less fully investigated than its affinities to other genres—bur-
lesque, satire, anatomy, and rhetorical persuasion.4 Tristram, like a
real autobiographer, must convey the intricate relation between the
narrator as observer and recorder and the same person as object of
observation. D. W. Jefferson has observed that "Tristram Shandy
breaks off before the hero is mature enough to become what in litera-
ture is recognized as a character." 5 The statement is not quite true even
in the sense he intends. By his second trip to France, the character,
Tristram is a grown (though perhaps hardly a mature) man. But it
calls attention to the divergence as well as the identity between Tris-

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 Tristram Shandy

tram the narrator, a complexly realized, grown-up, and unchanging

character, and Tristram the object of narration, for most of the novel
a small boy if not an infant, fetus, or "homunculus," thus hardly a
character at all. In both his roles, Tristram like Gibbon faces the
problem of his pain, which presents itself to him as one of control. The
drama of Tristram Shandy plays itself out as a series of conflicts over
control: between fictive author and reader, between fictive author and
characters, between characters and their environment, animate and
inanimate. And, because this is fictional autobiography, the real
author's control, an assumed but invisible fact, presents an additional
dilemma for the reader.

The eponymous hero of Tristram Shandy—his balance of reason

and passion precarious at best, his existence a losing struggle with
death, and his goal unachieved and unachievable—exemplifies failure,
except in the fact of his book. He is an anti-hero before his time. W. J.
Harvey has summarized the notion of identity in the "classical" novel
as lying "precisely in the unique pattern of past changes which
constitute one's individuality."6 Tristram's despairing sense of self
derives partly from his perception that no "past changes" make the
slightest difference: apparent change (and change, in his depressed
view, can be only apparent) merely reinforces the necessities that
draw him toward failure. This tendency toward failure, like Gibbon's
drive for success, organizes the events of his history of himself.
The symbolic accidents of his earliest days—his injuries of nose and
name—together with the yet more loudly symbolic later episode of his
near castration establish the limitations that determine his nature. We
are not sticks and stones, Tristram has occasion to point out, nor yet
angels, but creatures of body and imagination. Both epitomize the
hopelessness of attempts at control, and the relation between them
increases the complexity of every problem. The birth-damage to
Tristram's nose begins a sequence of difficulties with the body, each
made more intense by the imagination. An injured nose in itself would
seem a minor mishap; its importance derives from the phallic signifi-
cance that the imagination attaches to noses. Tristram's early
experience tells him of his subjection to his own imagination and to
that of others. When he comes to face the problems of his maturity
—loving, living, and writing—he remains unable to control depend-
ably either outer or inner reality. His potency is not in his power;

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 Imagining a Self

neither is his survival nor the ordered perception of events that might
generate coherent history. Indeed, his imagination is not in his power.
"It was an axiom of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century psychiatry
that as imagination obtained greater control over the mind, men
tended to think about fewer and fewer things and finally to become
entirely preoccupied with one or two ideas. Willis took this to be one
of the chief symptoms of insanity and his opinion was echoed repeat-
edly by later writers."7 Tristram's imagination, less obsessive than his
father's or his uncle's, demonstrates its force by its erratic direction,
controlling the mind to no clearly focused purpose: a troubling
approximation of madness.
Tristram's sense of self involves his awareness of his body, impotent
and ill and thus uncontrollable, as well as his imagination, potent but
also uncontrollable. His sexual self-definition, most fundamental and
unchanging focus of identity, is as precarious as his mastery of his
imagination. Masculinity, in its traditional, assumed signification,
implies power: assertiveness, aggression, dominance, effectuality. The
men who inhabit Tristram's world, however, exercise little force,
bring few actions to completion, and have difficulty dominating even
domestic animals or inanimate objects. Tristram has no effective
masculine models in the process of growth and education he reports.
As subject of his own narrative he prolongs the ambiguities of his en-
gendering: he can never fully discover himself as a sexual being.
The principal sexual emotion depicted by Tristram Shandy is not
lust but fear: of the sexual imagination, of passion, of castration and
impotence. Tristram shares with Sterne an awareness of the potential
sexual stimulation of his readers' imaginations, and he affects, like
Sterne, to consider this propensity dangerous, although of course he
takes pains to exploit it. Everywhere in Tristram's experience
conscious and unconscious purposes and interpretations clash with
one another, the unconscious a perpetual embarrassment to all protes-
tations of propriety. Thus the dramas of noses and whiskers and hot
chestnuts—dramas, all, of the imagination, of the incursions of the
unconscious into the realms of day and its relentless infection of fan-
cy, dramas reflecting the fear of sexual danger and of lost control.
Slawkenbergius's tale of the traveler with an amazing nose issues in
"riot and disorder . . . occasioned in the Strasburgers fantasies" (p.
255). The affair of the whiskers endangers the associations of all com-
mon objects: "beds and bolsters, and night-caps and chamber-pots"

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 Tristram Shandy

(p. 347). The man who finds a hot chestnut in his breeches, provoked
into instantaneous fantasies of genital damage (fantasies everywhere
in the background if not the foreground of Tristram Shandy), allows
himself free imaginative elaboration—entirely unjustified—about
what has happened and what it means. Walter Shandy makes it "the
whole business of his life" to keep sexual fancies out of his wife's head
(p. 600), recognizing imagination as the source of action. Tristram
himself finds his imagination so "overheated" by the notion of
sticking a finger into a pie that he can hardly proceed with his story.
The unbridled sexual imagination expresses itself in fancies about
crevices and whiskers, in midnight tossings and turnings, in masturba-
tion beneath nuns' habits but rarely in heterosexual intercourse. The
focus on imagination in Tristram's world reflects the pervasive fear of
real sex. By substituting mental for physical life, a man can avoid the
dangers of his animal nature. The real meaning of "hobby-horses" in
the novel involves this perception: through their hobbyhorses men
deny their physicality, avoiding or postponing the obligations of their
sexual needs and the frightening emotional demands associated with
them. Hobbyhorses quite literally replace mistresses for Uncle Toby
and Walter Shandy (pp. 95, 225). Literal hobbyhorses, of course, sup-
ply instruments for childhood masturbation as well as play. Walter
and Toby alike defend against the dangers of adult sexuality by substi-
tuting infantile gratifications.
Sterne identifies his notion of the hobbyhorse with the traditional
concept of the ruling passion: "The ruling passion et les égarements du
coeur, are the very things which mark, and distinguish a man's char-
acter;—in which I would as soon leave out a man's head as his
hobby-horse." 8 The redirection of passion toward the construction of
imitation battles or the reading of learned books substitutes a situation
of potential mastery—Toby and Trim control their battlefields,
Walter takes what he wants from his books—for one that promises
defeat or, at best, incomplete control, since another, unpredictable
human being partakes in the sexual situation and since men, in the
world of the novel, feel unconvinced at best of their effective sexual
force.
"Man's recurrent fear that he will be found wanting," the psycho-
analyst Leslie Färber writes, "makes him peculiarly vulnerable to chal-
lenge. And that fear, as life proceeds, becomes vague and amorphous
in his experience, imposing its painful claim not only on sexual perfor-

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 Imagining a Self

mance itself but also on intellectual, emotional, and even spiritual

realms."' Dr. Färber is describing life, not literature, but Tristram
Shandy elaborates his point in every conceivable direction. Walter
Shandy fears to be found wanting not only through sexual incapacity.
If he performs successfully, he will exemplify another form of failure.
"—That provision should be made for continuing the race of so great,
so exalted and godlike a Being as man—I am far from denying—but
philosophy speaks freely of every thing; and there-fore I still think and
do maintain it to be a pity, that it should be done by means of a
passion which bends down the faculties, and turns all the wisdom,
contemplations, and operations of the soul backwards—a passion,
my dear, continued my father, addressing himself to my mother,
which couples and equals wise men with fools, and makes us come out
of caverns and hiding-places more like satyrs and four-footed beasts
than men" (pp. 644-5). Because he defines himself first as philosopher,
Walter fears losing himself in the act of merging, which couples wise
men with fools by making them perform like male fools and by literal-
ly uniting them with female fools. The more fully he uses his animal
nature, Walter believes, the more he endangers his intellectual and
spiritual essence. Walter copulates, Toby tells Dr. Slop, only "out of
principle" (p. 116). He thinks love folly, the body an ass that must at
all costs be subdued. To act as a man means to be "found wanting" as
a philosopher; he chooses, therefore, to act as little as possible, be-
coming finally a monument of ineffectually, one of the novel's
troubling images of male passivity.
The more conventional version of sexual failure, total or partial
impotence, provides another focus of fear and a subject for frequent
rationalization. Tristram's precarious begetting takes place after his
father has suffered several months' sexual disablement from a sciatica.
Readily distracted during the sexual act, Walter barely manages to
bring it to completion. Women in the novel have considerably more
sexual gusto than the men—another cause, perhaps, for male fear.
The Widow Wadman allows her servant to pin together the bottom of
her nightgown during the long nights of her widowhood, but when
Toby stirs her affections she kicks away the pins. Her intense concern
with the degree of his sexual power (her dead husband, too, was
subject to sciatica) reflects her acceptance of her own physical nature.
The young widow who marries Trim's brother and the young nurse
who patiently strokes Trims's upper leg testify to female sexuality.

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 Tristram Shandy

Women, Tristram frequently hints, masturbate; men, so far as this

novel is concerned, do not, except metaphorically. Even the lascivious
readers whom Tristram imagines are predominantly female.
Of course literature abounds in jokes about the libidinous longings
of women. The context of Tristram Shandy, however, gives special
force to this particular joke. Women are randy, men impotent.
Tristram, unable to perform sexually (p. 517), describes himself
standing, garters in hand, "reflecting upon what had not pass'd" (p.
518). What his Jenny has to say on the subject remains concealed by
asterisks, but the figure of Tristram reflecting on what has not
happened looms over the novel. Provoked by Walter's theorizing,
Toby announces that he would not beget a child to please the greatest
prince on earth. Would, Walter points out, hardly matters; the ques-
tion is whether he could, and Walter doubts it (p. 586). Toby's ambig-
uous wound may or may not interfere with his potency; at any rate,
his realization that the Widow Wadman cares about such matters
cools his regard for her. Corporal Trim, stroked for weeks by his
beautiful nurse, never has an erection. Of course, it requires the las-
civious imagination of a reader to make this point. What Corporal
Trim actually says is, " 'It was not love'—for during the three weeks
she was almost constantly with me, fomenting my knee with her
hand, night and day—I can honestly say, an' please your
honour—that * * * * * * o n c e . . . It never did, said the corporal" (p.
572). The corporal's criterion of love obviously underlines the novel's
pervasive concern with physical potency, emphasized also by the fact
that even the Shandy bull proves incapable of impregnating the
neighborhood cows. To summarize the narrative as the tale of a cock
and a bull emphasizes not only its ostensible pointlessness but its ob-
sessive concern with male sexuality and the fears associated with it.
And those fears, in the novel as in life, indeed spread outward.
William Holz describes "one of the grand comic themes in Tristram
Shandy: the general inadequacy of man's abilities to his conceptions,
the disparity between his apirations and his accomplishments."10 Men
(and women), aspiring to exercise control, accomplish only what they
do not intend. Even with his hobbyhorse, a carefully defined, small
area for control, no one achieves the mastery he imagines: Toby is
frustrated by external events (the breaking of his bridge, the Peace, the
lack of equipment), Walter by his own incapacity for commitment,
Tristram by his inability to ascertain just how his story should be told.

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 Imagining a Self

Tristram Shandy imitates the action of impotence: the ever failing

effort to exercise masculine power in the world. It perceives impotence
as a genuine action, not an inaction, involving a series of defensive sub-
stitutions for direct, natural experience. By his manifest difficulty and
circuitousness in telling a story, Tristram dramatizes the difficulty of
all human endeavor. Death, which makes all men impotent, stalks the
author and reminds the reader of the sense in which Tristram, as an
Everyman, must trace the shapes of failure.

The imitation of an action of impotence need not imply a total

experience of impotence, nor is Tristram's masculine identity his only
identity. For all its intertwined assertions and imitations of failed
control, Tristram Shandy can also be understood—and its nominal
author occasionally so understands it—as epitomizing the possibility
of mastery exactly where Gibbon found it: through vocation. Not that
Tristram is ever so presumptous as to claim a vocation; his single
book seems yet another accident of his life, one more area of unpre-
dictability: "Ask my pen,—it governs me,—I govern not it" (p. 416).
Yet as author merges with character, he begins to articulate the saving
possibilities of that imagination from which his book emanates.
John Preston observes that Sterne fills his "novel with people who in
various ways wish to remake the conditions of reality. His novel is
about the fictive imagination. It is a novel about authors and quasi-
authors." 11 Tristram cannot in life control his begetting, his birth, his
education, or his emotional or physical capacity to love; he cannot
extend by will the term of his existence. By imagination, on the other
hand, he can dominate all those uncontrollable facts. He can populate
a desolate plain, make barrenness abundance through his mental
capacity to make rich use of whatever and whomever he finds (p.
536). He dances across France in an exaltation of fancy, the flight from
death transformed into a celebration of life. At "every step that's
taken," he points out, "the judgment is surprised by the imagination"
(p. 539). And the imagination embodies life-force: "but where am I?
and into what a delicious riot of things am I rushing? I—I who must be
cut short in the midst of my days, and taste no more of 'em than what
I borrow from my imagination" (p. 495). Imagination, opposing itself
directly to death, offers its possessor vicarious life so rich and tumul-
tuous that it compensates for the brevity of physical existence.
The imagination has ostensible dangers, for possessor and observer

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 Tristram Shandy

alike. Yet imagination also makes Tristram's triumphant "play" pos-

sible: with his readers and their imaginations, with language, and with
his experience. Experience, language, and readers remain the same
despite his manipulations; yet all are also temporarily mastered and
transformed as Tristram absorbs them into his imagination, not
operating like his father or his uncle from obsession, but declaring the
freedom of the inner life in the face of the fully recognized forces of
determinism.
Beneath the structure of Tristram Shandy as narrative lies, as in
Gibbon's memoirs, a reality of pain. The psychoanalyst John E.
Mack, writing of the biographer's problems, remarks that the most
valuable psychological data "are those documents . . . which are
written in pain and which reveal most clearly the subject's struggles to
master his psychological realities and personal conflicts. Although one
eye always remains on posterity in such writings, the inner self gains its
own ascendancy and its own stage through the psychological priori-
ties that accompany pain. It is harder to hide our inner selves when we
are in the throes of dealing with conflicts that are incompletely mas-
tered." 12 Conflict evoked generates drama. Experienced rather than
written about, it produces pain. Tristram tells the story of his conflicts
and frustrations, producing a document not necessarily "written in
pain," but one reporting pain and struggle and conveying an inner self
by dramatizing a protagonist "in the throes of dealing with conflicts
that are incompletely mastered."
"The inner self gains . . . its own stage." Exactly. Tristram, setting
the scene for others, bringing down curtains, wheeling off ordnance,
and inviting pity or condescension or ridicule for father, mother,
uncle, simultaneously stages quite another drama, an inward action
that uses the ludicrous activity of others as a way to express the self.
His imagination declares the self-reference of all happening. His
central conflict pits his desire to control his own life against his desire
that life should not be controlled—superego against id, mind against
body, reason against emotion. Toby and Walter Shandy find
mechanisms to contain their fears, but Tristram recognizes the inade-
quacy of mechanism. Art serves man far better: Tristram is an artist of
his own life.
But art—at any rate eighteenth-century art—involves the im-
position of form on experience and so leads us back to the original
problem, of Tristram Shandy's apparent formlessness. If Tristram's

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 Imagining a Self

imagination truly compensates for his failures of control, it must pre-

sumably assert some control itself. Yet Tristram as author repeatedly
insists that no design operates through his narrative and that the prin-
ciples of its construction are as arbitrary as those of life. His assertions
of his narrative's lack of integral form, however, belong to the novel's
comedy with its insistent perceptions of disparity. As Huckleberry
Finn proclaims the absence of moral significance in his story, thus
stimulating generations of critics to seek morals, Tristram challenges
the critic (of whose existence he is vividly aware) to penetrate the
tangle of his prose and discern what principles lie beneath. To claim a
narrative's formlessness in some respects resembles Walter Shandy's
opposite insistence on his choices' utter rationality. Both assertions
deny significant facts. Henri Fluchère's penetrating account of
Tristram Shandy's "absurdity" emphasizes absurdity's origin in the
gap between the nature of human minds and the nature of the world
outside. "The world is absurd in so far as it refuses to present itself to
man as his mind chooses to conceive or imagine it when it follows the
laws of reason or of common-sense." 13 Moreover, "the mind also is
absurd, trying to impose its own order on the world in the face of all
probability" (p. 137). But the flexible order, the form, of comedy
evades the absurdity of Walter Shandy's rigidity and qualifies the
nihilism of Tristram's explicit statements.
Tristram trains his readers. 14 The reader learns that his expectations
will be consistently violated, experiencing a sequence of frustration
and confusion essentially duplicating Tristram's experience of life.
And he learns what Tristram knows, how to take pleasure in con-
templating the spectacle of his own offended sense of logic and
decorum. This is a novel of education in which the hero, incapable of
change himself, succeeds in altering the perception and knowledge of
the reader who encounters him.
The reader's altered perception informs him, rather disturbingly, of
the comedy of life, which Tristram has noticed first, recognizing that
misery provides an appropriate target for mockery. Tristram ac-
knowledges the universality and necessity of suffering with no spirit of
acceptance. By converting anguish to the material of play, he masters
it, but he knows that in the form of death it will finally master him.
And before death, conflict abides. Dr. Slop and Susannah throwing
cataplasms at one another provide a slapstick version of fundamental
truth, their physical clash precipitated by their rival (and equally

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 Tristram Shandy

false) claims to "know" one another. No one really knows anyone in

this novel—not husband and wife; nor lover and mistress; nor parent
and child. Nor can the individual fully know himself.
But Tristram's comic imagination finally provides him a way of
self-knowledge and self-definition and of understanding the world.
The perspective it supplies generates the book's form and meaning.
The novel's central character, as inflexible as King Lear and as inevita-
bly doomed as Lear to suffer from his inability to make reality
conform to his expectations of it, is perceived—perceives himself—so
differently that we hardly notice how painful is the universe he in-
habits. Tristram's laughter declares his capacity to see, to face the con-
sequence of his seeing, and to record his vision in all its disorder. His
narrative of failure, fully realized, exemplifies his success. Tristram
Shandy and Gibbon's memoirs duplicate one another in their reliance
on dynamic form and in their exemplification of how one's way of
telling a story creates the story's meaning. To think back to Gibbon at
this point may help to illuminate the triumphant achievement of
Tristram's imagination. (I am accepting, for the moment, the novel's
explicit claim that the imagination at work belongs to Tristram rather
than to Sterne.) Both Gibbon and Tristram seek ways to record and to
defend against their pain, which derives from identical sources: the
conflicts of family life, the helpless wretchedness of childhood, the
arduousness of relationship, and the inevitability of death. Tristram
recognizes more clearly than Gibbon the defensive function of his
writing, which like Toby's hobbyhorse and Walter's helps to
compensate for his experience and has its masturbatory aspects. "I will
answer for it the book shall make its way in the world, much better
than its master has done before it—Oh Tristraml Tristraml can this
but be once brought about—the credit, which will attend thee as an
author, shall counterbalance the many evils which have befallen thee
asa man" (p. 337). Through writing he transcends his impotence; just
as Gibbon uses his high reputation as historian to counteract his con-
viction of personal awkwardness and insufficiency.
The formal dynamism of Gibbon's memoirs depends on their
evolution. Reading the autobiographies as sequence rather than
composite, one participates vicariously in the drama of their growth,
a succession of literary changes reflecting a psychic action of
development. On the one hand the historian's assertion of his destiny
and his vocation implicit and unchanged from his earliest years; on

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 Imagining a Self

the other, his demonstration of how gradually and with what manifest
difficulty his techniques for setting down personal history evolved.
Tristram too opposes his static sense of self to his protean forms of re-
cording. And the two historians share, although Tristram is more
highly conscious of his own perception, a sense of writing as a struggle
to control experience. Writing thus both epitomizes a central psychic
conflict and exemplifies the possibility of resolving it. The tension of
Gibbon's evolving form and of Tristram's ungraspable one defines the
authors' natures.
The difference between Gibbon's and Tristram's ways of telling a
story depends largely on the difference of their views about the
meaning of their pain. Perhaps it can be argued that comedy distin-
guishes itself from tragedy entirely by its point of view. In fantasy,
though not in fact, even death and madness can become subjects for
humor. The stature of the hero, the possibilities for his reconciliation,
and the significance of events: all depend on how a pattern is seen. To
battle windmills may be ludicrous or splendid; to disown the daughter
who loves you exemplifies man's tragic blindness or his ridiculous
propensity for making mistakes. One defies the nature of things: how
magnificent and how ominous! One stamps his foot at the universe:
how grotesque!
Gibbon's view of himself, comic though it ultimately is, partakes of
his tragic vision of human destiny as a whole and is heavily qualified
by irony. Men and empires alike are created to fall. The historian,
aware of this fact and aware also of the universal yearning to survive,
perceives both the absurdity and the tragedy of the resultant
inevitable conflict—the conflict that Tristram and Shakespeare also
perceive between wish, a structural principle of the mind, and fact,
the principle of external reality. Asserting the dignity of the universal,
he succeeds finally in subsuming private pain to general truth,
accepting pain as the necessary ground of life.
Dignity evades Tristram. Although he recaptures some details of his
begetting and his birth, he like Gibbon recognizes these as formative
experiences beyond memory or control. His childhood, solitary rather
than communal, feels as unpleasantly powerless as Gibbon's. His
brother, who competes with him for parental attention, dies, leaving
him, like Gibbon, sole focus of his father's fantasies but never helped,
cared for, or educated enough. Seeing his family's career shaped like
his own, he yet refuses to understand reduplicated patterns of

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 Tristram Shandy

unhappiness as inherent in the nature of things. His destiny, he claims,

belongs to him alone. His father's fate and his uncle's are likewise
unique. He deprecates whereas Gibbon exalts, the self. His self-depre-
cation and his refusal to dignify establish his authenticity as a self-per-
ceived comic hero.
Gibbon, writing of himself in a comic genre, yet sees himself often in
tragic terms. Tristram, writing a mock-autobiography permeated by
awareness of death, denies the tragic. 15 Both, in opposed modes, use
their enveloping imaginations to evoke the same tensions of
self-depiction; both create meaning through tension.

Every literary product involves three crucial aspects beyond the

writer: the document itself, the reality to which it refers, and the audi-
ence that apprehends it. Tristram's references to the writing of the
historical document suggest, as we shall see, his difficulty in keeping
under control the infinite possibilities of story, the temptations of
digression. The primary reality to which the document refers is his
self; we have already encountered some of his difficulties in coming to
terms with that perplexing being. The audience seems, by comparison,
to offer tempting possibilities for Tristram to exert the mastery un-
achievable elsewhere.
David Thomson argues that Sterne's consciousness of the reader
defines the form of his novel. "His 'plan' is not to create a literary
shape, but to implant his work in human curiosity, amusement,
protest and surprise. He had such an intimate feel for these recesses
that he may be said to have invented the reader." 16 He also bullies the
reader, trying to control him through alternate poses of aggression
and intimacy. Tristram appears to believe that his reader probably re-
sembles him, but given his unpredictability, the idea is much less re-
assuring than Gibbon's faith in the universal availability of rational
response. Yet even his declarations of common interests and natures
have a cutting edge, for his faith in the reader is tinged with a mockery
that, although it partakes of self-ridicule, finally communicates a
categorical sense of superiority.
Tristram's friendly addresses to his readers, concentrating on their
possession of the imagination that he urges them to use while reading,
sometimes intimate his dependence on their participation. He yearns
for the reader who will simply yield his imagination (e.g., p. 182). But
such readers may not exist. And even the reader willing to cooperate

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with Tristram may lack capacity. His bliss at the imagined prospect of
gifted readers (e.g., pp. 194-5) emphasizes his lack of satisfaction with
the readers he believes himself to have. At present, despite his declara-
tions that all mortals resemble one another, he feels all too conscious
of the disparity between his powers and his readers, and that con-
sciousness is, of course, made bitter by the fact that readers function
also as judges, the reader Tristram professes to love often turning into
the critic he fears and detests. As he develops his fantasy of a world
richly endowed with wit and judgment, he fancies that universal wit
would produce universal conflict, everyone displaying his energies by
attacking his neighbor. But universal judgment would make all right
again: "though we should abominate each other, ten times worse than
so many devils or devilesses, we should nevertheless, my dear crea-
tures, be all courtesy and kindness . . . " (p. 195). He thus alludes to
his own use of wit and judgment: wit justifying his contempt for his
fellow man, his reader; judgment concealing that contempt beneath
the disguise of courtesy. Contempt and its disguise are both exempli-
fied in the phrase "my dear creatures," suggesting the affection one
offers to a dog.
The difficulty of knowing how readers will respond, how the rela-
tionship between them and the author should be understood exists, of
course, for every writer. Incorporating the subject into Tristram
Shandy and implying that it vies in perplexity with the problems of
identity and of narration Sterne defines for his century and even for
ours the technical and emotional difficulties of novel-writing. The
novelist, in fact, shares those difficulties with the autobiographer,
although almost no early autobiographer confessed concern over
audience reaction (Colley Cibber being a striking exception to this
generalization) except through pervasive self-justifications against the
charge of vanity. Tristram achieves much of its fascination from its
careful elucidation (behind the facade of carelessness) of such dilem-
mas as that of the writer's relation to his hypothetical reader. That
reader embodies the author's wishes (for admiration, reward, and
love) and his fears (of disapproval, rejection, and love lost). He can-
not be dealt with in theoretical terms, and Tristram fully demonstrates
that point. But he also illustrates, through his triumphant achieve-
ment, the possibility of compelling the reader's attention by doing
things his own way.
When readers emerge as critics, Tristram treats them with exagger-

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 Tristram Shandy

ated courtesy ("Gentlemen, I kiss your hands, —I protest no company

could give me half the pleasure"; p. 84). Although he claims to respect
the critics' power, he realizes his own more fully. Critics may slash his
jerkin as they wish, he will treat them as Uncle Toby treated the fly,
observing that "the world is surely wide enough to hold both thee and
me" (p. 162). The fly analogy underlines Tristram's contempt for
those presumptuous enough to criticize him. Those who try to label
Tristram's failings only display, from his point of view, their intellec-
tual and emotional inadequacy.
Sometimes Tristram browbeats his readers openly, accusing them
of inattentiveness, ignorance, and dirty minds, urging them to go back
and reread the previous chapter, reminding them of his power over
them. He simultaneously mocks the reader and declares his own supe-
riority

No wonder I itch so much as I do, to get at these amours—They are

the choicest morsel of my whole story! and when I do get at 'em—
assure yourselves, good folks,—(nor do I value whose squeamish
stomach takes offence at it) I shall not be at all nice in the choice of
my words;—and that's the thing I have to declare.—I shall never get
all through in five minutes, that I fear—and the thing I hope is, that
your worships and reverences are not offended—if you are, depend
upon't I'll give you something, my good gentry, next year to be
offended at . . .
And now that you have just got to the end of these four volumes
—the thing I have to ask is, how do you feel your heads? my own
akes dismally—as for your healths, I know, they are much better—
True Shandeism, think what you will against it, opens the heart and
lungs . . . (pp. 337-8)
Tristram's self-absorption and total involvement in his literary task
emerge as distinctly as his impatience with those who refuse to
respond as he would have them. As he contemplates the likelihood
that others will be offended by his inventiveness, he reverts to the rhe-
toric of a child ("I'll give you something . . . to be offended at") and to
a childish insistence that he's doing something good ("True Shandeism
. . . opens the heart") although it may be mistakenly thought bad. He
resents the possibilities for error inherent in the very fact of readers.
Like a child, he reiterates that nothing is his fault; like a child he blus-
ters about his omnipotence: "But courage! gentle reader! . . . 'tis
enough to have thee in my power" (p. 486). The childishness of his
responses, particularly his aggressive ones, helps to guarantee his

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 Imagining a Self

authenticity, his status as "natural man." "I wish she may ever remain
a child of nature," Sterne remarked of his daughter, when she objected
to having her hair "frizled"—"I hate children of art." 17 Tristram pre-
sents himself consistently as a child of nature, opposed to disguise and
artifice, on sufficiently intimate terms with his readers that he can
afford to insult them.
But what, exactly, does Tristram's spontaneity amount to? The
"small hero" uses it as excuse, pretext, justification for his outrageous-
ness, and his verbal maneuvers contain clear evidence of deliberation.
He addresses his readers as "your worships and reverences" just before
declaring his intent to offend them next year; he shifts rhythmically
from high rhetorical dignity to colloquial freedom and back again
several times in a paragraph; he parades the logic of his mental pro-
cesses ("the thing I have to declare . . . the thing I hope . . . the thing I
have to ask") while enveloping the reader in a chaos of loosely related
concerns. All these systematic violations of expectation reflect pre-
meditation. Tristram's game of artlessness imperfectly obscures his
compelling need to dominate his readers and his frustration at their
inevitable reluctance to submit their minds entirely to his. Whatever
the benefits of "true Shandeism," this indefinable state of feeling and
of being is only available to a true Shandy: to Tristram, his father,
and his uncle, defending themselves against their misery by the struc-
tures of their fantasy. If they could impose those structures completely
on others, their enlarged defenses would guard them more securely.
But others elude Tristram in their roles as readers or critics, just as
they elude Toby in their roles as interested onlookers: Widow Wad-
man, professing her interest in military strategy, has her own purposes
in mind. She exemplifies the difficulties Walter and Toby and Tris-
tram find in other people: separate and unknowable selves with
unknowable, or unbearable, private purposes.
Tristram cannot exert force adequately in his life or in his book.
History, the book itself, seems manifestly impossible, given the histor-
ian's conflicting needs for order and for chaos. The lives to which the
book refers are incomprehensible even to those who live them. And
finally the readers, whom Tristram wishes to entertain, persuade, and
enthrall, remain unknown quantities; the author cannot infer their
submissiveness. "The theme of human ineffectually," as Martin Price
comments, "runs through all the main characters . . . [Walter's and
Toby's and Yorick's] disabilities of temperament are as crippling as

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 Tristram Shandy

Tristram's physical misadventure, and we see the two becoming one in

the temperament of Tristram as author—unable to sustain connected
narrative, fantastic and whimsical, emotionally undisciplined, as
much the victim as the author of his book" 18 —and, one might add, of
his world.

The distinction between narrator and character, this discussion will

already have suggested, is difficult to maintain, since Tristram repeat-
edly becomes the focus of his own attention specifically in his role as
writer. Moreover, the problems he faces as writer duplicate those
which he and others confront elsewhere in their lives. For instance,
there are the difficulties of language as an instrument of communica-
tion that serves equally the purpose of obfuscation. "Language is . . . a
more or less elaborate mask of false modesty, a prime example—
though an example only—of the disguises with which human beings
deceive themselves and try to deceive each other." 19 The pleasure of
using words derives partly from the fact that they lack essential mean-
ing and, therefore, can be manipulated arbitrarily for personal pur-
poses. On the other hand, language constantly generates new signifi-
cances. Words supply the gratification of play, but also the substance
of work. The paradoxes of language define the novel's characters,
reveal the necessities and the structures of their defenses, and link the
difficulties of living with those of creating narrative.
"The unsteady uses of words," Tristram remarks early in the novel,
"have perplexed the clearest and most exalted understanding" (p. 86).
This general observation precedes the more emphatic and particular
one about Uncle Toby: "By heaven! his life was put in jeopardy by
words" (p. 87). Toby's inability to find the right words for things
endangers him, but he discovers how to move from words to the
things they represent. Frustrated in his attempts to explain to visitors
the intricacies of scarp and counterscarp, half-moon and ravelin, he
turns not to definition but to enactment. The dramatization of history
absorbs him to the point that the initial purpose of communication
disappears; bloodless battles occupy his life and Trim's.
Tristram, on the other hand, presents himself through words. Allu-
sions, illustrations, and metaphors provide his materials for self-dis-
play and self-protection. The writer guards against his critics with an
impenetrable screen of language. Words, the orthodox instruments of
communication, often prevent interchange from taking place. Alter-

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 Imagining a Self

nately, the writer may choose to substitute blankness: the empty page
on which a reader can enumerate his own mistress's charms, the black
one that mourns Yorick's death, the dashes and asterisks that invite
speculation. If the asterisks are as readable as the English language
(e.g., when the maid invites Tristram to piss out the window, without
a word written down), Tristram's point becomes more emphatic:
words, unnecessary at best, only limit possibilities, darken hypotheses
(p. 200), and interfere with the illusion of communication between one
mind and another. Toby and Walter communicate with extreme diffi-
culty, despite all their verbiage. Mr. and Mrs. Shandy communicate
hardly at all, the wife's language of assent conflicting with the hus-
band's determination to find opposition. Uncle Toby remarks that
Mrs. Shandy may not choose to let a man come so near her * * * * .
All conceivable ways of completing the sentence will evoke distinct
response; incomplete, it remains provocative, potential—the state of
being for which Tristram himself always yearns.
Metaphors, with their special possibilities for ambiguity, might
seem to offer the solution to Tristram's linguistic problems. His father
adores them, declaring that "the highest stretch of improvement a
single word is capable of, is a high metaphor" (p. 405). His metaphor
of national distemper, caused by the movement of men and money
toward the metropolis, enables him to ignore his wife's immediate
needs. Ramifying, it leads him ever farther from the particular situa-
tion, insuring his blinkered vision of possibilities and protecting him
from the real. Nor need language be metaphoric to fulfill this impor-
tant function. Considering the nature of the ideal curse, Walter does
not contemplate unduly the reasons for a need to curse. Reading over
all that has been said about dress or circumcision, he can avoid con-
fronting the painful implications of his son's accident. His regard for
auxiliary verbs exemplifies his interest in the manipulation of language
for its own sake and his tendency to separate words from the reality to
which they allegedly refer. You can talk about a white bear endlessly,
he points out, without ever seeing one; the joy of the enterprise would
vanish if the possibilities diminished to what one knows of a literal
bear. The "offspring of propositions" (p. 409) likely to result from
linguistic manipulation proves far more controllable than the human
offspring produced by sexual activity. Much earlier in the book, Tris-
tram, commenting on his father's propensity to theoretical extrava-
gance, has observed, "It is the nature of an hypothesis, when once a

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 Tristram Shandy

man has conceived it, that it assimilates every thing to itself as proper
nourishment; and, from the first moment of your begetting it, it gener-
ally grows the stronger by every thing you see, hear, read, or under-
stand" (p. 151). The apparent manageability of language, which can
create structures capable of drawing everything into themselves,
makes it a tempting resource. Yet the metaphors of procreation, like
Gibbon's, suggest how much displaced energy Walter's theorizing
involves. And the very words through which Tristram declares the
fulfilling, natural development of linguistic structures undercut them-
selves, since the inevitable growth of hypotheses has its monstrous
aspect, apparently unrecognized by the speaker.
Tristram is more skeptical than his father about words, but he
knows that "mere words" (p. 624) embody great power, if not
knowledge, as his tedious story about the abbess of Andouillet testi-
fies. Two nuns, in this tale, reduce words to sounds. Two syllables
spoken by one person constitute sin; the same syllables divided be-
tween two people remain sinless because meaningless. All meaning is
arbitrary. Reflecting on his disastrous christening, Tristram reports a
theological controversy about how to obviate its effects. If the offici-
ating clergyman had said "Gomine" instead of "Nomine," by the
change of letter destroying meaning, that mistaken letter would nul-
lify the baptism. Language's power derives from meanings assigned by
faith. The for« e of words, Tristram Shandy indicates repeatedly,
comes from the .r lack of essential connection with reality. Language is
the historian's only tool for preserving truth, but in its very nature it
increases his distance from truth.
Language, like most other things, depends on imagination. Defini-
tion can maintain no power against usage. Whiskers mean—who ever
said otherwise?—hair on a man's chin. Cough a few times at the men-
tion of whiskers, smile, touch your eye, blush: " 'Twas plain to the
whole court the word was ruined: . . . the word in course became
indecent, and (after a few efforts) absolutely unfit for use. The best
word, in the best language of the best world, must have suffered under
such combinations" (p. 317). Noses, the narrator reminds us, have
endured a similar fate. Tristram claims to fear the corrupted imagina-
tions of his readers, realizing that his own attempts to impose meaning
can never resist meanings imagined by others. He inhabits a world like
that of Through the Looking-Glass, where weirdly dangerous words
elude all control. It is better, from some points of view, to talk to a

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 Imagining a Self

mule than a man. Tristram always enjoys such conversation as an

exercise of imagination, unrestricted by any discipline of responsive-
ness and supporting the indulgence of private emotion.
For Tristram, as for his father, language supplies material for play.
"What . . . could be more splendidly sincere," George Santayana
inquires, "than the impulse to play in real life, to rise on the rising
wave of every feeling and let it burst, if it will, into the foam of exag-
geration?" 20 Tristram appears to "play" in precisely this sense, rising
with his feelings and bursting into exaggeration, his discourse with the
mule one of his many games. He claims to exemplify the sincerity of
spontaneity and the genius of the unconstrained man, unlike his pro-
fessedly rational father. Yet the romantic vision of spontaneity and
direct expressiveness that Santayana offers only calls attention to the
strain in the Shandys' kind of play. "Splendidly sincere"? The contra-
dictory perspectives on language that the novel supplies in fact
emphasize the incongruity and the willfulness of adult play whose
purpose is to protect. Since language itself consists of artifice, the only
conceivable sincerity lies in silence: play derives part of its value from
its opposition to sincerity. Language betrays. By playing with it Tris-
tram declares not his authenticity but his precarious power, shared by
all writers: to control temporarily what ultimately evades human
mastery.

As a writer striving to tell the story of himself and his family, Tris-
tram faces the problem of narration and recognizes its metaphysical
implications. Behind the question of how one relates a history lies the
question of where the material for that history comes from. Does fate
determine the course of events? Or do the participants? Or is the his-
torian himself responsible for the sequence he reports? Jean-Jacques
Mayoux suggests the ambiguity of Tristram's position about the
sources of happening and of meaning. " Ί,' or Tristram, is at first a
series of necessities, pre-and post-natal, which make nose, name, the
asthma that you have—this asthma' from which you will die and
which you got from skating against the wind in Flanders. Between
what is done without you and what you have done without thinking
about it or at least without wanting to do it, it seems that all is deter-
mined. But you are the subject, you are the unforeseeable content and
form of each moment of your existence, the series of your discoveries
and finally your microcosm, the total image of a world. Τ is the par-

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 Tristram Shandy

ticular form that one gives to all one perceives, all that one feels, all
that one thinks." 21
The critic seems to say that Tristram's sense of self and his
knowledge of the self's surprises guards him against the implications
of his subjective awareness of powerlessness and his objective percep-
tion of the powerlessness of others. In fact Tristram as author protects
Tristram as character. By linguistic manipulation he asserts his superi-
ority to fate, implying that the acts of will involved in his operations
with narrative themselves attest his freedom. He defines himself as
character not grandly (like Walter Shandy, who sees himself as victim
of heaven's artillery) but deprecatingly, as "sport of small accidents"
(p. 166). But he also uses a pose of arrogance: as historian, he
triumphs over fate by recording its operations. This view leaves him
vulnerable to the recognition that fate governs the writing of history
(p. 207); yet his tone proclaims his power as writer, despite his fre-
quent admissions that he finds himself composing unexpected se-
quences and unable to keep up with his life. By writing he escapes the
quandaries that trap Toby and Walter. His endless history creates for
him the vital illusion of autonomy. To record—to form chaos into
order, even a parody of the high order of formal history—is the arche-
typical novelistic function.
As a historian Tristram usurps some functions of fate; he feels him-
self in the position of stage manager or director for a cast of characters
existing at his disposal. The metaphor expresses both his power—to
shift his characters about, bring the curtain down at will—and its limi-
tations: he has not written the play he directs. It is all very well to see
the world as a stage, but the metaphor can backfire: to comprehend
men and women as merely players underlines their lack of freedom
and their incapacity even to understand their own roles. The reader
may separate himself from the helpless instrumentality of the Shandy
family as characters; thus Tristram invites him "to look down upon
the stage, and see [Walter Shandy] baffled and overthrown in all his
little systems and wishes" (p. 55). But to look down and pity creates
further illusion; the reader may thus forget his own participation in
the divine comedy, or tragedy, or farce that incorporates Walter.
The large references to the world as a stage, organized by a myster-
ious Planner in the background (p. 236), belong to Tristram's struggle
to maintain some distance from his grotesque family by his superior
perception of their (and his own) helplessness within the great design

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 Imagining a Self

and to separate himself from his readers by his greater willingness to

acknowledge the implications of common humanity. (For the reader,
Tristram knows, the Shandy family are merely characters; for Tris-
tram, author and subject, they function both as characters and as
defining realities.) Because such allusions hint that Shandean triviality
partakes in some large plan, they have a paradoxical (and temporary)
dignifying effect. But Tristram's shifts of feeling lead him also to theat-
rical metaphors that emphasize his own arbitrary power—not over
what happens in the world but over the communication of happening.
He can convert all events to artifice, thereby displaying at least in
limited ways his manipulative skill and his triumphant casualness.
Gibbon's belief in the logic of events comforts him but Tristram
glimpses the possibility that destiny may manipulate happenings as
arbitrarily as he does himself. If he insists that the reader acknowledge
how he, Tristram, makes things happen, he also recurrently recog-
nizes that he makes them happen only on the page. Such power, in
some states of mind, means a lot; it means much to Gibbon, content as
historian. But Tristram, unable to satisfy himself with any single role,
shifting from recorder to manipulator of events, finds in the concept
of fatality one more reminder that his attempts to control recalcitrant
reality, even as autobiographer, like his father's and uncle's end in
failure.
In Tristram's conception his record too comprises a history. He dis-
cusses in detail precisely the problems implied by Gibbon's obsessive
reshaping of his life story. How can a writer form his record of events
to convey his sense of who he is? How can he discover the connections
between who he is and what has happened to him? What are the para-
meters of private history?
The historian, Tristram maintains, need only "represent the matter
of fact, and render it credible to the reader" (p. 321), which is not so
simple a task as it may sound, given the need also to understand the
impossibility, and the falsity, of straight lines.

When a man sits down to write a history, —tho' it be but the history
of Jack Hickathrift or Tom Thumb, he knows no more than his
heels what lets and confounded hinderances he is to meet with in his
way, —or what a dance he may be led, by one excursion or another,
before all is over. Could a historiographer drive on his history, as a
muleteer drives on his mule,—straight forward;—for instance, from
Rome all the way to Loretto, without ever once turning his head

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aside either to the right hand or to the left, he might venture to fore-
tell you to an hour when he should get to his journey's end;—but
the thing is, morally speaking, impossible: For, if he is a man of the
least spirit, he will have fifty deviations from a straight line to make
with this or that party as he goes along, which he can no ways
avoid, (pp. 36-7)

The problems of writing history, Tristram suggests and demonstrates,

duplicate those of life. Historians like other mortals discover their
own passivity, led one way or another by excursions not consciously
chosen. The sentences in which Tristram describes the problem also
exemplify it, their eccentric punctuation, their vaguenesses, their dis-
tracting metaphors and allusions embodying the difficulties of
straightforward narrative. And the final hint that the "man of spirit"
encounters particular obstacles points to Tristram's emotional ambi-
guity about this matter as about all others. In a bit of doggerel, Sterne
confessed, with comparable ambiguity, to the incorrigible deviousness
of his own mind:

For to this day, when with much pain,

I try to think strait on, and clever,
I sidle out again, and strike
Into the beautiful oblique.
That is not form'd, like the designing
Of the peristaltick motion;
Vermicular; twisting and twining;
Going to work
Just like a bottle-skrew upon a cork. 22

Unlike Gibbon, with his need to discover the straight line beneath
the apparent confusions of personal history, Sterne, in his own voice
as well as Tristram's, insists on the inaccuracy—while longing for the
ease—of the direct. And he implies through his metaphors of peristal-
sis and corkscrew his belief in the necessity and value of the indirect,
the "beautiful oblique." Not even a cabbage planter, Tristram points
out, can hope to maintain his furrows if a girl passes by (p. 539). His
imagination, interfering with his straightforward intent, thus demon-
strates the power of fancy to dominate reality. But reality can also
interfere with fancy: Corporal Trim can never tell the story of the
King of Bohemia with his seven castles, mainly because of other
people. Tristram claims to tell only a fraction of his story, and when
he diagrams the tale as he has told it he discovers a series of fantastic

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shapes, approaching, he claims, the straight line but not really ap-
proaching very near. Straight lines may represent a theoretical ideal
for history, but formal elaboration conveys more meaning, however
obscure its precise significance.
In his excursions on this subject, too, Tristram describes universal
obstacles for writers of narrative: the falsity of any conceivable form,
the compulsion to avoid misleading order, the necessity to find a way
of proceeding, even knowing the wrongness of all ways. His struggles
with time—the effort to render time as a psychic component of exper-
ience, to make the time of narrative correspond to that of real happen-
ing, and to suggest the felt overlappings of time present and past—
epitomize his futile endeavor to make history bear some real equiva-
lence to fact. Selected truths, he knows, are in some sense false;
straight lines are false—but so are crooked ones; experience must
always be more complex than its records. Gibbon confronted some of
these facts without defining them; all serious tellers of stories must
confront them. Most simply accept at last the necessary inadequacy of
narrative; what else, after all, can they do? Tristram himself does
nothing more—except to comment on what he is doing.
Not only the proper form but the sources of history constitute a
problem for the would-be historian. The self, subject and origin of
personal records, generates the solipsism that endangers Tristram in
his writing as in his life. Perhaps the words on which he relies have
only private meanings. He knows that the shape of his story, personal
to the point of idiosyncrasy, may prove incomprehensible to others;
he can only conclude, toward the very end of his narrative, that the
world must "let people tell their stories their own way" (p. 623), at
whatever cost of incoherence and confusion—even if chapter XVIII
unaccountably follows Chapter XXV. In Volume IV, where he
chooses to omit Chapter XXIV altogether, Tristram rationalizes his
procedure: "For my own part, I am but just set up in the business, so
know little about it—but, in my opinion, to write a book is for all the
world like humming a song—be but in tune with yourself, madam, 'tis
no matter how high or low you take it" (p. 315). To be in tune with
yourself may or may not imply self-knowledge; it certainly implies a
standard of integrity that honors personality as the principle of art.
But such a standard only diminishes the feasibility of satisfactory
history, since personality remains elusive even to its possessor. In a
crucial passage of Book IX, Tristram half-mockingly describes a pro-

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 Tristram Shandy

cess of self-investigation initially focused on the difficulty of writing

an adequate digression. He does not know, he explains, how to invoke
the proper creative powers. Fancy? Wit? Pleasantry? None will come
the faster for calling. He resolves the problem by dressing himself ele-
gantly—an infallible remedy, since "the soul and body are joint-
sharers in every thing they get: A man cannot dress but his ideas get
cloath'd at the same time; and if he dresses like a gentleman, every one
of them stands presented to his imagination, genteelized along with
him—so that he has nothing to do, but take his pen, and write like
himself" (pp. 614-617).
The view of men as beings "cloathed with bodies, and governed by
our imaginations" (p. 361) implies the immense difficulty of the his-
torian's situation, historians being merely human. Men so clothed, so
governed, live with incessant self-contradiction. At best they may
achieve some temporary congruence, dressing their bodies in the hope
of giving their ideas acceptable form, creating for themselves a style.
A man can write only by adopting a style, though he recognizes its
necessary falseness. Tristram as historian seeks the form that will
express his self, the content that will constitute authentic history. He
seeks, like Gibbon, a way of telling the truth, only to find truth as dif-
ficult to discover as to tell—partly because the self describing merges
with the self described, both evading dependable perception.

All roads, in investigating Tristram Shandy, lead back to the pro-

tagonist's selfhood, finally identical in fictive author and fictive sub-
ject. Tristram calls attention to the intimate relation in his narrative
between self and story, demanding, in an arbitrary shift of scene, that
the reader leave behind the people and situations that have come to
interest him in favor of something new; he concludes, "Let us leave, if
possible, myself:—But 'tis impossible,—I must go along with you to
the end of the work" (p. 442). Although he may temporarily ignore
himself as the subject of the narrative, concentrating on other men's
stories, he inevitably remains the subject, if only because his con-
sciousness creates and records. There is no way for him not to report
his "life and opinions": whatever he sets down constitutes a report.
Tristram, to whom the shifting nature of reality becomes increas-
ingly apparent, believes finally in the integrity if not the knowability
of his shifting self. Although he writes with awareness of his contem-
poraries' debates about identity, he affirms, even while questioning,

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 Imagining a Self

identity's reality. "Every man's wit," Walter Shandy maintains, "must

come from every man's own soul,—and no other body's" (p. 147). He
finds this proposition as difficult to prove and to use as his other dicta,
yet it contains a truth—not merely a truism—that the entire novel
supports. For a man to discover the wit that belongs uniquely to him,
learning to tell his story in his own way, comprises a major achieve-
ment, with moral as well as psychological and aesthetic significance.
Yorick's sermon, early in the novel (pp. 125-40), provides moral
underpinning for the novel's action, although it may appear to be only
one more digression. 23 The sermon's nominal concern with conscience
enlarges into a discussion of the difficulty, and the absolute moral
necessity, of self-knowledge. A man must surely know, the preacher
begins, the true state of his conscience: "If a man thinks at all, he can-
not well be a stranger to the true state of this account;—he must be
privy to his own thoughts and desires;—he must remember his past
pursuits, and know certainly the true springs and motives which, in
general, have governed the actions of his life . . . In other matters we
may be deceived b y false appearances . . . But here the mind has all the
evidence and facts within herself;—is conscious of the web she has
wove;—knows its texture and fineness, and the exact share which
every passion has had in working upon the several designs which vir-
tue or vice has plann'd before her" (pp. 125-6). The reader's self-aware-
ness may suggest that self-examination will not necessarily prove so
simple. At any rate, the preacher's language stresses the undependabil-
ity of memory, the difficulty of any certain knowledge, the ease with
which one can be deceived, and the intricacy of the web woven within
the mind. Far from relying only on such implication, Sterne next
details at impressive length some specific obstacles to self-knowledge:
habits of sin, excessive self-love that biases the judgment, "little inter-
ests below" that "rise up and perplex the faculties of our upper regions, "
and the distortions of "favour and affection," of wit, of self-interest, of
passion (p. 127). After several instances of how men turn their con-
sciences to their own advantage, he observes, "If any man . . . thinks it
impossible for a man to be such a bubble to himself, —I must refer him
a moment to his own reflections, and will then venture to trust my
appeal with his own heart" (p. 131). The sermon then argues that reli-
gion must buttress morality and morality religion, since man needs
both internal and external principles of right to keep him from stray-

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 Tristram Shandy

ing. "Conscience is not a law" (p. 140); God and reason make the law,
but conscience—as opposed to passion—enables man to keep it.
Sterne's implied description of the human mind suggests the inevita-
bility of internal conflict, passion warring with reason, conscience
with impulse, the mind always striving to justify its base desires. Ap-
pealing directly and indirectly to the reader's sense of self, Sterne
through Yorick's normative utterance claims more openly than he can
through eccentric Tristram the universal applicability of this descrip-
tion of the psyche. One must never trust what presents itself as reason
or conscience, because passion can subvert both. Higher and lower
impulses battle continually. Where one can accept external sanctions,
like those of Christianity, he finds help, but the sanctions themselves
can mislead—the Inquisition being, Sterne points out, a "Christian"
institution. Nonetheless, Christianity aids the divided man toward
moral security.
But where can he find psychological security? Such extension of the
questions implied by Yorick's sermon seems everywhere implicit in
Tristram Shandy, where men bubble themselves, suffer the distortions
of self-interest and passion, and reveal their inadequate self-awareness
even while congratulating themselves on their virtue. Not only to be
good but to be happy, one must find the proper balance of reason and
passion, somehow untangling the web the mind weaves. Only thus
can he discover right ways of thinking as well as of acting and modes
of understanding that lead to goodness, happiness . . . and to the writ-
ing of books.

Tristram Shandy parodies two genres as well as imitates an action.

As a novel that is not quite a novel and a travesty of autobiography, it
raises profound questions about the nature and meaning of form.
As a novel, Tristram denies what it affirms and affirms what it
denies. Explicitly declaring the falsity of form, the illusoriness of
meaning, and the precariousness of language, it simultaneously dem-
onstrates the necessities of form and meaning and the necessities of
language as the instrument for achieving both. Although it provides
no plot and no moral, it offers a unified and unifying action in the
multifarious efforts of its characters to achieve control, and that ac-
tion has moral import. Its determined trivialization of large concerns
like destiny and death reverses the customary technique of eighteenth-

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 Imagining a Self

century novels, but partly for ends similar to theirs. Domesticating the
grand, like declaring the importance of the small (a maidservant's
encounter in the summerhouse in Pamela or Tom Jones's meal at an
inn), suggests the paramount significance of individual human experi-
ence and of what the individual makes of his experience. Tristram
Shandy as anti-novel demonstrates the vitality of the novel and indi-
cates some directions the genre would later pursue.
Its relation to genuine autobiography involves yet more perplexing
problems. In the first place, Tristram Shandy shares with Laurence
Sterne much, both of experience and character—a point susceptible of
endless documentation. Critics, indeed, have found themselves con-
fused about which was which. When Sterne's scholarly biographer
wishes to report the novelist's first trip to Paris, he quotes, without
apology or qualification, from Tristram Shandy, as if the novel pro-
vided dependable testimony of the author's experience.24 Sterne's
letters frequently sound as though they had been written by Tristram;
the values they articulate and the language they use echo or foretell
the novel. Thus a characteristic letter refers to "me inconsiderate Soul
that I am, who never yet knew what it was to speak or write one pre-
meditated word." 25 Again, Sterne affirms his intention to "write as
long as I live, 'tis, in fact, my hobby-horse." 26 One feels tempted to use
such statements as evidence about Tristram, and, conversely, to use
Tristram's to illuminate Sterne.
But no matter how close the identification between author and
character, Tristram Shandy is known to be a fiction—unlike Gibbon's
memoirs, which despite their obvious authorial manipulation of events
are read with the expectation that they record fact. The contrasts of
tone, style, form, and psychological and philosophic orientation be-
tween the two documents are vast. Does the difference in their genres
really matter? It can be argued that all fiction (and poetry and philoso-
phy and painting) ultimately constitutes autobiography, the artist
inventing, whatever the purported aim of his creation, only a series of
metaphors for the self.27 Conversely, one can maintain that all autobi-
ography is fiction, the imposition of form and the discovery of mean-
ing automatically converting life into its imitation. 28
Sterne writes in a letter, "These strokes in the Dark, with the many
Kicks, Cuffs & Bastinadoes I openly get on all sides of me, are begin-
ning to make me sick of this foolish humour of mine of sallying forth
into this wide & wicked world to redress wrongs, &c. of w c h I shall

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 Tristram Shandy

repent as sorely as ever Sancha Panca did of his in following his evil
genius of a Don Quixote thro thick & thin." 25 Tristram complains of
how the critics have slashed his jerkin: "pell meli, heiter skelter, ding
dong, cut and thrust, back stroke and fore stroke, side way and long
way, have they been trimming it for me . . . You Messrs. the monthly
Reviewers!—how could you cut and slash my jerkin as you did? —
how did you know, but you would cut my lining too?" (p. 162). We
recognize a single sensibility. Tristram's conviction of persecution
resembles his creator's, as does his use of physical analogues for psy-
chic suffering, and of course Tristram's complaint literally refers to the
same events as Sterne's. But, invited by the fact of fiction to bring a
different perspective to bear on Tristram from that we apply to a liv-
ing man, we judge the fictional figure by his fictional context. Depict-
ing a group of people conspicuously lacking in serious self-knowledge,
the novel Tristram inhabits suggests appropriate standards for judging
its characters. We understand Tristram's inadequacies as he under-
stands his father's and his uncle's; we feel that we perceive more than
the characters can.
If a true autobiographer fails in self-knowledge, we may deduce his
failure from our own knowledge of real people in the real world; we
may judge him and his book morally inadequate; we may conclude
that the book is better than the man and the writer's personal insuffi-
ciencies transcended through his art. Our responses to a fictional auto-
biographer have extra dimensions. We do not judge Tristram as we
judge our acquaintances nor can we yield entirely to his assessment of
himself. Responding to him first as a fictional creation, we admire the
vitality with which he has been imagined. Evaluating him as an actor
in his own drama, we see through two sets of spectacles: Tristram's
and Sterne's. Tristram's announced purpose of relating his life and
opinions forms his desperate attempts to tell a story. His desperation
justifies him to himself; he invites sympathy for his frustration in life
and in literary endeavor, and, converting disaster to comedy, he in-
vites admiration for his exuberant play with his own frustration. We,
the readers, respond as we are invited to with sympathy and admira-
tion; similarly, reading Gibbon on Gibbon, we feel the admiration we
are requested to feel. But Sterne's purposes do not altogether coincide
with Tristram's. The novelist claims an intent to "redress wrongs" of
the "wide & wicked world," an intent of wider scope than any Tris-
tram offers. 30 His characters and their histories exist to reinforce his

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 Imagining a Self

point; he shapes his novel more purposefully than Tristram could

claim to shape anything. Admiring and loving Tristram's exuberance,
we are also led, by Sterne's ways of placing him, to recognize his limi-
tations more specifically than he can. The novel's other characters
help: Uncle T o b y and Walter Shandy, revealing how a man protects
himself against the real by clinging to his hobbyhorse, clarify the mad-
ness Tristram shares. If Sterne, by his own confession, shares it too,
he yet has an imagination large enough to contain his characters. The
fact that Tristram inhabits a fiction demands that we look at him in a
special way; the complexity of reading such fictions derives partly
from the tension between the character's way of seeing and the au-
thor's implied vision. Tristram values his own comic mask and claims
it as essential truth. Sterne allows the possibility that the mask is
partly false, defending Tristram from awareness of his own intense
hostility (toward the reader, toward women, toward his father, to-
ward all who survive when he must die) and from full recognition of
his self-limitation.
W e may surmise, finally, that the hostility and the self-limitation
belong to Sterne as well as to Tristram—returning, thus, to an identifi-
cation of author with character. But the circuit that precedes the re-
turn makes a difference. Even if Sterne is only talking about himself
after all, his deliberate creation of a fiction has released the energies of
indirection. His letters, exuberant though they too are, cannot achieve
the complexities of Tristram Shandy. Fictional worlds illuminate the
real world; fictional characters acquire meaning partly because they
tell us something about real people. The unimaginable confusions of
Tristram's existence bear recognizable relation to the confusions of
our own. Fiction brings us round again to fact, with our perceptions
heightened; it testifies to the writer's existence but also to possibilities
beyond the subjective.
But autobiography too declares more than selfhood; the effective
autobiography, like the effective novel, gives the reader more than he
would expect. Gibbon and Sterne alike, I have argued, rely on formal
literary tensions for effect. The ultimate manifestation of that tension
involves manipulation of the reader's expectation. The various com-
posite versions of Gibbon's autobiography, although they contain the
revelations of the historian's personal pain, do not discuss the struggle
of the memoir's making. The separate documents of his autobiogra-
phy's evolution, on the other hand, insist on the laborious process

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 Tristram Shandy

through which a man discovers the meaning of the story he has to tell.
Gibbon's six memoirs, dramatizing the extent to which an author must
always create what he records, thus refute the assumption that autobi-
ographies simply record what exists.
T o play with his reader's expectations is part of Sterne's literary
program, not an accident of interrupted composition. The author con-
stantly calls attention to the tension between what the reader expects
and what he is given. Gibbon shows himself discovering the meaning
of his story; Sterne shows a storyteller unable to comprehend the
meaning of his. With all the freedom to invent, the novelist, claiming
to imitate life, insists that life offers no coherent pattern to imitate.
Gibbon denies his reader the traditional satisfaction of believing in the
autobiographer's plain sincerity; Sterne refuses him the luxury of
recognizing the satisfying order of fiction. Both reveal unexpected and
rather alarming flexibilities of genre.

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 6
Dynamics of Fear:
Fanny Burney

s novelist and as writer about herself, Fanny Burney takes a posi-

Ä tion in every respect opposed to Laurence Sterne. Committed to

propriety as he to its opposite, apparently unaware of the formal
possibilities or implications of her conventional plots, feeling that the
most important question about novels concerned their moral influ-
ence, she reminds the reader that Tristram Shandy's conviction of the
impossibilities of art does not represent the only conceivable view-
point. The moral and psychological organization of her fiction and
her diaries insists on the order of life itself. Keeping an intermittent
record of herself for more than seventy years, she reveals not the
chaos of experience but the reiteration of pattern. The rational struc-
ture of her prose helps her to assert the significant structure of her life.
A woman's vision? It seems important to say so. Tristram Shandy is
organized to reveal the pervasiveness of male fear, demonstrating in
form and in substance how the terror of impotence spreads through
every endeavor. The entire mass of Fanny Burney's writing forms
itself as centrally in relation to female fear—not of the absence of
power but of failure of goodness and consequent loss of love. Tris-
tram's fears reduce his life to disorder; Miss Burney's (and her hero-
ines') have ordering force, defending against chaotic possibility.
Unique in her century in having left to posterity both a group of
novels and the rich private record of voluminous letters and diaries,
Miss Burney also provides through her published work a basis for

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 Fanny Burney

investigating the relationship between avowedly autobiographical and

purportedly fictional accounts of experience. Previous critics have
perceived this as a rather simple issue in her writing. Thus Ernest
Baker writes: "Fanny Burney's importance in the history of the novel
is . . . that she came so near to what may be called a direct transcript
of life . . . There is only, as it were, a narrow and vanishing margin
between literature and life. Scores of pages in her diaries may be put
side by side with pages from her novels to illustrate this." 1 Edwine
Montague and Louis L. Martz comment about Evelina: "People who
enjoy the Diary enjoy finding Fanny Burney in the novel too; and so
the book becomes a kind of appendix to the Diary."2 But neither nov-
els nor diaries in fact offer anything like a "direct transcript." Both
demonstrate the shaping of experience by a special sensibility, the
artistry of pattern almost as manifest in letters and journals as in fic-
tion. The pattern of Fanny Burney's life as she perceives and interprets
it resembles the structures that shape her fictions, both converting
psychological defense into literary tactics.
The two volumes of Fanny Burney's early diary, the six volumes
first edited by her niece Charlotte Barrett, and the four volumes that
have thus far emerged under Joyce Hemlow's editorship comprise an
enormous mass of disparate material. 3 They record public as well as
private events: Miss Burney lived at Court for five years as Second
Keeper of the Robes to Queen Charlotte; her subsequent marriage to a
French emigré involved her at least peripherally in post-Revolution
French politics. They demonstrate the literary and personal virtues
with which their author has always been credited: her sharp ear for
speech rhythms, her eye for social detail, her sensitivity to manners as
an index of moral quality, her devotion to her family, and her extreme
propriety. The interpretative structure that forms her account of her
life's happenings depends upon strategies of concealment. The idea of
virtue provided Fanny Burney—as it has many women—a first line of
defense. Goodness has always been a source of female force, a guard
against enemies without and within. Miss Burney, hiding behind her
impeccable morality, protects her inner life.
Two episodes reported at different times of her life exemplify Fanny
Burney's characteristic moral stance. Writing of her beloved hus-
band's death, which took place in 1819 (she was sixty-seven years
old), she dwells in retrospect on her inner conflict over whether she
would invite the priest to return after a single visit to the dying man's

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 Imagining a Self

bedside. (D'Arblay, bred a Catholic, had preserved only a nominal

allegiance to his church during his English residence. His wife, moti-
vated by a sense of fitness, called a priest to administer the last rites.)
She summarizes the dimensions of her psychic struggle: "The fear of
doing wrong has been always the leading principle of my internal
guidance." 4 (In this instance, she adds, she finds herself "overpow-
ered" by her inability to decide what was right and consequently un-
able to resolve on any course of action at all.) More than thirty years
before, while she was still at Court, she had talked with the Reverend
Charles de Guiffardière (always referred to in her journal as "Mr. Tur-
bulent") about good conduct. He inquires whether she has ever done
something she repents. Sometimes, she replies, but not often, "for it is
not very often that I have done anything." What has saved her from
misbehavior? Mr. Turbulent suggests prejudice, education, and acci-
dent. Miss Burney agrees, but adds fear. "I run no risks that I can see
—I run— but it is always away from all danger that I perceive." Surely,
Mr. Turbulent exclaims, such is not the "rule of right." Once more his
interlocutor agrees, concluding the discussion, rather smugly, "I must
be content that it is certainly not the rule of wrong" (Jan. 1788; III,
392).
Both these encounters, in addition to their psychological interest,
suggest the literary possibilities of Miss Burney's principle of self-
interpretation, an essentially dramatic view of her experience because
it involves imagining goodness as precariously won and preserved and
constantly to be defended, rather than as an achieved state of being.
The active consciousness of danger that Fanny Burney reports empha-
sizes the potential drama within her quiet life, despite the fact that, as
she confesses, she actually does little. Indeed, her refrainings them-
selves partake of her drama.
Reading the mass of the journals, one gradually realizes the energy
of the decorous woman's verbal self-presentation, structured by her
determination to be perceived as good, and her fear of negative judg-
ment. The action of Fanny Burney's vast collections of journals and
letters, like that of most women's writing in her century, derives from
her attempt to defend—not to discover, define, or assert—the self.
Both her choices and her ways of describing them testify to her pro-
ductive and self-protective solution to unescapable problems of wom-
en's existence. That solution provides psychic space for her imagina-

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 Fanny Burney

tive life, thus making her literary career possible, and also shapes the
operations of her imagination.
The relation between Fanny Burney's loudly proclaimed concern
with virtue and her impulse to write was an early theme of her diaries.
Virtue and writing, it seemed in her youth, made utterly opposed
demands. At the age of fifteen, she consigned to a bonfire all her liter-
ary production to date. Almost fifty years later, she explained why.
"So early was I impressed myself with ideas that fastened degradation
to this class of composition [fiction], that at the age of adolescence, I
struggled against the propensity which, even in childhood, even from
the moment I could hold a pen, had impelled me into its toils; and on
my fifteenth birth-day, I made so resolute a conquest over an inclina-
tion at which I blushed, and that I had always kept secret, that I com-
mitted to the flames whatever, up to that moment, I had committed to
paper." 5 She sounds as though she is reporting a struggle against sex-
ual sin ("propensity," "its toils," "an inclination at which I blushed,"
"secret") and the language of battle in which she records her suppres-
sion echoes the vocabulary in which her fiction relates her heroines'
conflicts between reason and passion ("struggled against," "so resolute
a conquest"). Writing fiction seemed to her, at the beginning, a fatal
self-indulgence and writing fact, only slightly less menacing. Her
friend Miss Young warns her that keeping a journal "is the most dan-
gerous employment young persons can have—that it makes them
often record things which ought not to be recorded, but instantly for-
got." 6 A few pages earlier (1,14), the diarist has inadvertently exposed
two other hazards of her literary occupation: keeping a diary encour-
ages a hunger for fresh experience, and it fosters undue reflectiveness
about the experience one has. Miss Burney feels apologetic about her
literary activity; she spends the morning on needlework, thus proving
herself a good little woman, in order to justify an afternoon of reading
and writing. But although she has burned her youthful novel, she con-
tinues her journalizing: a necessity of her psychic life.
In a letter to her "Daddy" Crisp, one of the older men who played
important roles in her life partly as guardians of morality, Fanny,
granting the "general superiority" of men to women, concludes that
women's weakness stems from defects of head rather than heart (1774;
I, 272). Women, therefore, must trust their emotions: hence, presum-
ably, Fanny Burney's own adherence to fear as a sufficient guide to

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conduct. Yet they must also recognize the danger of their feelings.
"Talking of happiness and misery, sensibility and a total want of feel-
ing, my mama [i.e., her stepmother] said, turning to me, 'Here's a girl
will never be happy! Never while she lives!—for she possesses perhaps
as feeling a heart as ever girl had!' " 7 To write a novel, Fanny believes
as a girl, is to venture into dangerous realms of feeling and fantasy. To
write a journal, on the other hand, may provide a way to deal with
feelings as well as to express them. In the Early Diary, written for "no-
body" (this strategy itself a youthful instance of the writer's defensive
self-deprecation), we see the author struggling with moral and emo-
tional dilemmas, using language to construct her defenses. The later
journals, composed for various members of her family, show the pro-
cess at a more advanced stage: writing now a means of consolidating
and proclaiming already established defense systems. By the end of
the Early Diary, Fanny Burney has rejected her first suitor, declaring
her intent to live single. No further suitor presented himself, as far as
we are told, until the man she accepted. She had defined clear chan-
nels for her emotional life.
Fear provided partial solutions for the crucial problem of a woman's
relations with others. Twenty-one-year old Fanny mentally questions
the conduct of Miss Bowdler, who "lives exactly as she pleases"; she
concludes her account, "I can by no means approve so great a con-
tempt of public opinion" (Early Diary, I, 221). Two years earlier,
Fanny had encountered another young woman, a Miss Allen, who
seemed to her possibly "too sincere: she pays too little regard to the
world." The observer cannot decide what to think of such a pheno-
menon. She disapproves of the woman's ready disdain for "harmless
folly," but she recognizes how "infinitely tiresome" such folly can
seem and applauds the honesty of openly acknowledging the fact (I,
128).
These two sets of observations sketch the issues of social relations as
Fanny Burney understood them. Suffering from the impingement of
conventional pressures on individual lives, she yearned for freedom.
Yet convention, she understood, guarded feelings. The individual who
boldly expressed her personal preferences (like Miss Bowdler's for
men) or distastes (like Miss Allen's intolerance for folly) might hurt or
mislead others. Despite Miss Burney's half-articulated desire to con-
trol her own destiny, she could not finally approve "contempt for
public opinion." Manners and morals—as her four novels were to tes-

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tify—reflected one another, in her conviction; the minutiae of socially

acceptable conduct provided orthodox means for expressing consider-
ation and concern for others. Fear of offending supplied a more potent
principle of action than distaste for being offended.
As Fanny Burney discovered more and more emphatically the uses
of fear as a principle of guidance in her life, she found also the way to
tell her own story and came to understand the nature of the story she
was constructing. "The act of journalizing," a theorist of autobiogra-
phy writes, "intensifies the conflict in any autobiographer between life
and pattern, movement and stasis, identification and definition, world
and self." 8 The observation applies hardly at all to Miss Burney as
journalizer. Writing down her experience, she seems, on the contrary,
to resolve potential conflicts between life and pattern and world and
self. Discovering the structures of her life, she finds out how to feel
about the world. As a result she contradicts also, essentially if not
technically, the common generalization that, however highly wrought
its individual entries, a "diary or journal as a complete work will
never reflect the conscious shaping of a whole life for one informing
purpose." 9 One can speculate about how conscious the diarist's struc-
turing could have been, but the sense of an informing purpose shaping
her existence in the living and in the recording becomes increasingly
strong. That purpose—to defend the freedom of the self by asserting
fear of wrongdoing and commitment to virtue—involved familial,
social, and literary relations, dictated action and restraint, and re-
solved as well as created conflict.
Often, particularly in Miss Burney's adolescence, the desire for free-
dom appeared to clash with the need to avoid offending. The conflict
between the two dominates her Early Diaries.

O! how I hate this vile custom which obliges us to make slaves of

ourselves!—to sell the most precious property we boast, our time;
—and to sacrifice it to every prattling impertinent who chooses to
demand it!—Yet those who shall pretend to defy this irksome con-
finement of our happiness, must stand accused of incivility,—
breach of manners—love of originality,—and . . . what not. But,
nevertheless . . . they who will nobly dare to be above submitting to
chains their reason disapproves, them shall I always honour—if
that will be of any service to them! For why should we not be per-
mitted to be masters of our time?—Why may we not venture to
love, and to dislike—and why, if we do, may we not give to those
we love the richest jewel we own, our time? (1769; I, 49)

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Miss Burney's sequences of reflection, in those early years, repeat-

edly duplicate the structure of this passage. The strong impulse to
reject custom's slavery wavers in the face of anticipated charges of
incivility. When the impulse returns to dominance, it has changed
form: the author no longer imagines defying convention herself, only
honoring those brave enough to do so, with an edge of self-contempt
for her own ineffectuality. She can conclude her consideration only in
unanswerable questions that express her resentment of the course of
conformity she has chosen. Similarly, we find her meditating on love
(I, 9-10), confessing that she wishes "truly, really, and greatly . . . to
be in love" and committed to a feeling devoid of rational justification,
self-sufficient and satisfying. But soon she condemns such a longing as
"foolish and ill-judged!" explaining that she does not really know
what she says, she cannot mean it. Feeling leads in opposite directions.
When Mr. Barlow proposes to Fanny, that point becomes painfully
apparent. She has long associated marriage with lack of freedom. The
prospect of her own marriage reduces her to panic. Manifestly admir-
able though Thomas Barlow is, her heart tells her that she cannot
unite herself with him. Her revered father and her "Daddy" Crisp
argue his case; her deep desire always to comply with their wishes
wars with her disinclination to marry. She thinks about "the duty of a
wife": how hard it must be, "practised without high esteem!" Her
reluctance, it seems, is sexual. But she continues, "And I am too spoilt
by such men as my father and Mr. Crisp to content myself with a
character merely inoffensive" (II, 51). She prefers a father to a hus-
band. Her father, opposing male reason to female emotion, urges seri-
ous consideration of Barlow's suit. Fanny, realizing that reason offers
her no support, creates a lavish display of emotion, unable to eat, con-
stantly weeping, feeling more misery than ever before "except when a
child, upon the loss of my own beloved mother, and ever revered and
most dear grandmother!" (II, 69). The prospect of marriage threatens
another terrible loss: that of her father and her established dependen-
cies. Unable to face it, she opposes her father's professed wishes, re-
tains her single state, and immediately (twenty-three years old now)
begins thinking that no one will ever love her.
In this conflict as in the other internal struggles recorded in the diary
of the pre-Evelina years, one feels an adolescent uncertainty of iden-
tity but little uncertainty of action. Miss Burney possesses already a
strong impulse to reject: to push away impropriety and to forestall

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impingement. The force of public opinion has for her the status of a
concrete reality with high potential for personal damage. By avoiding
impropriety, she can avoid notice and consequently threat. She wants
also to preserve the securities of her protected role as daughter. The
issues of her life are already defined. How can a woman evade atten-
tion, yet assert her self? How can she protect that selfi How can she
avoid wrongdoing without resigning herself to total passivity? What
can she say without dangerous exposure?
Writing Evelina in secrecy and publishing it anonymously, she al-
lowed herself some self-exposing "saying." Her resultant sense of dan-
ger and fear dominates her journal and published letters for years after
the book's publication. "All that I can say for myself is," she summa-
rizes, "that I have always feared discovery, always sought conceal-
ment, and always known that no success should counter-balance the
publishing my name" (Diary and Letters, I, 166). She has supported
this statement in advance with abundant instances of a terror of dis-
covery that seems, like her early guilt about writing, to bear a dis-
tinctly sexual aspect. When Mrs. Thrale accuses her of "an over-deli-
cacy that may make you unhappy all your life," she explains that she
had thought herself "as safe" with the publisher Lowndes as when her
manuscript lay in her own bureau drawer. To be "known as a scrib-
bler" threatens her impregnability (I, 97). She "trembles" and worries
about her possible "downfall" as a writer (I, 126-7). "I would a thou-
sand times rather forfeit my character as a writer," she explains, "than
risk ridicule or censure as a female" (I, 162). At the age of sixty-two,
looking back over a successful career, she remarks that "never yet had
the moment arrived in which to be marked had not been embarrassing
and disconcerting to me, even when most flattering" (VI, 112).
To be marked, discovered, known as a writer, and, therefore, per-
haps not a proper female, perhaps a woman unforgivably addicted to
self-display: this idea focused Fanny Burney's terror of doing wrong.
To make oneself known as a writer invites people to look; to offer
one's fantasies for the perusal of others invites violation. For a woman
to be looked at or talked of means, at best, loss of dignity, at worst,
loss of reputation. 10 Lured into discussion of "learning in woman,"
Miss Burney confesses her belief that "it has no recommendation of
sufficient value to compensate its evil excitement of envy and satire"
(IV, 222). When her half sister, Sarah Burney, visits her after her
mother's death, Fanny acknowledges her virtues and skills but com-

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 Imagining a Self

plains at length about the fact that the young woman (twenty-five
years old) wishes her accomplishments recognized. "She has many
excellent qualities . . . but she is good enough to make me lament that
she is not modest enough to be yet better." 11
Loss of modesty amounts to loss of virtue; only by strict decorum
can a woman protect herself. From 1786 to 1791, her journal and let-
ters make clear, Miss Burney committed herself absolutely to propri-
ety in her service to Queen Charlotte. Her court experience, as she
reports it, emphasizes the degree to which her life was assuming what
seems in retrospect the symmetrical development of a carefully
worked-out drama. First had come the questioning adolescence, in
which social fear triumphed over daring impulse without ever quite
extinguishing it; then followed a social pattern paralleled by that of
Miss Burney's literary life, in which the writing of a second novel (to
be published in secret) succeeded the destruction of the first, which she
had felt to be entirely impermissible. Finally came the young adult
years in which Fanny Burney struggled with the sense of exposure cre-
ated by successful authorship. She wrote a comedy but withdrew it
from public view at her father's suggestion of possible impropriety.
She labored over a second publishable novel of unimpeachable moral-
ity, explaining, to the point of tedium, her impeccable purposes, solic-
iting and accepting frequent advice from all her mentors, as if to lessen
the potential burden of notoriety and the conceivable imputation of
seeking it. But no amount of self-guarding or protestation could re-
solve her guilt at self-display. Acceptance of the court position repre-
sented an attempt to find solution at the opposite extreme. Sinking
herself in a role, giving up writing for publication, governing herself
entirely by external expectation, she tried by total self-subordination
to eliminate all conflict. 12
She never fancied the court position would provide personal plea-
sure. In accepting it, she wished above all to please her father, al-
though she realized that her new commitment would involve relin-
quishing indulgence of her vital private affections. Compliance is the
theme of her time at court. She comes to love the Queen, and from the
start she adores Mrs. Delany, the old lady who introduced her to the
royal family and whom she continues to see in her new position. Sub-
ordinating herself to such women, she believes herself thus to escape
all danger of wrongdoing. But despite her devotion and her eagerness
to serve, to please her father, the Queen, and Mrs. Delany, to be good

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 Fanny Burney

and avoid evil—despite these forces urging her toward contentment,

she feels bitter and unending abhorrence of her lot. She suffers from
the capricious tyranny of Mrs. Schwellenberg, her immediate supe-
rior, to whom the Queen feels so deeply attached that Fanny cannot
complain to her. She suffers from deprivation of real human fellow-
ship, from the boredom of repeated ritual, and from the intense physi-
cal strain of her position.
To her sister, Mrs. Phillips, she writes, in August 1786, confessing
her misery and outlining her proposed solution to it: "If to you alone I
show myself in these dark colours, can you blame the plan that I have
intentionally been forming—namely, to wean myself from myself—to
lessen all my affections—to curb all my wishes—to deaden all my sen-
sations?" (Ill, 9). To wean, to lessen, to curb, to deaden: a program of
deprivation and reduction. A few months later, in her journal, she
puts it in more positive terms.

Now, therefore, I took shame to myself, and Resolved to be

happy. And my success has shown me how far less chimerical than
it appears is such a resolution.
To be patient under . . . disappointments . . . to relinquish, with-
out repining, frequent intercourse with those I love; —to settle my-
self in my monastery, without one idea of ever quitting it;—to
study for the approbation of my lady abbess, and make it a princi-
pal source of content, as well as spring of action;—and to associate
more cheerily with my surrounding nuns and monks; —these were
the articles which were to support my resolution. (16 Jan. 1787; III,
161-2)

Despite the talk of happiness, patience, and cheeriness, she still advo-
cates for herself suppression, submission, and resignation. She knows
her absolute dependence on those around her. Struggling to convert it
into a fact of positive meaning, she demands of herself something al-
most equivalent to religious conversion—her metaphor of the monas-
tery suggesting her recognition of exactly this point.
The terms of the conflict between the need for self-assertion and the
desire for self-concealment through conformity become more vividly
defined during the record of the court years. The conflict itself, in fact,
was probably more intense than at any other time of Fanny Burney's
life because now her solution could not readily resolve the internal
oppositions. Before and after her service to the Queen, Miss Burney
used her fears and proprieties as means of guarding her inner life, her

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writing life. At Court, on the other hand, she did not write to any pur-
pose, although she began several tragedies in an evident effort to ex-
press and contain her inner turmoil. As the imbalance increased be-
tween the demands of the world and the needs of the self, the solution
was in danger of becoming the problem. Previously the young writer
had met both demands simultaneously, strategies of self-concealment
providing means of self-assertion. Now the strategy no longer
worked. Because the journal has already established its clear vision of
the personal possibilités implicit in the life of subordination, it can
also sharply convey the experience of something going wrong, possi-
bilities closing off. But it conveys, further, the consequent growth of
new certainties.
During these years at Court, with their vivid experience of suppres-
sion, Fanny Burney appears to have reflected on the essential experi-
ence of women. Her own life—like the lives of her fictional heroines—
confronted her with severely limited alternatives. What could she do if
she left the Queen's service? She could only live with her father,
doomed to be his burden unless another man took her off his hands.
She could, of course, once more write for publication, but the idea of
achieving independence through writing did not yet appear to occur to
her. What did occur to her, although perhaps not quite consciously,
was that other women in different ways duplicated her fate. She sees
around her painful results of arranged marriages and subordinated
female lives. In her conversations with "Mr. Turbulent," we learn of
her attitudes about women. The Reverend de Guiffardière figures
largely in Miss Burney's account of her court years. Apparently hap-
pily married, he nevertheless indulges in extravagant flirtation with
Miss Burney, his purpose unclear. Deliberately provocative, he chal-
lenges her cherished evasions. Thus, when Miss Burney declares her
unwillingness to countenance "error" in other women, Mr. Turbulent
accuses her of hypocrisy. "This brought me forth. I love not to be
attacked for making professions beyond my practice; and I assured
him, very seriously, that I had not one voluntary acquaintance, nor
one with whom I kept up the smallest intercourse of my own seeking
or wilful concurrence, that had any stain in their characters that had
ever reached my ears" (III, 116). The dialogues between Mr. Turbu-
lent and Miss Burney dramatize the tensions of "bringing forth" such a
woman. She withdraws; he pursues. She shows herself; he triumphs.
What she says makes no difference to him, only whether she is willing

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 Fanny Burney

to say anything at all. Although she prides herself on not engaging in

debate, he forces her to participate. Finally she makes the fact of his
forcing the source of her victory.

"And pray, Mr. Turbulent, solve me, then, this difficulty: what
choice has a poor female with whom she may converse? Must she
not, in company as in dancing, take up with those who choose to
take up with her?"
He was staggered by this question, and while he wavered how to
answer it, I pursued my little advantage—
"No man, Mr. Turbulent, has any cause to be flattered that a
woman talks with him, while it is only in reply; for though he may
come, go, address or neglect, and do as he will,—she, let her think
and wish what she may, must only follow as he leads." (19 Feb.,
1787; III, 215)

In dancing, in company, in life, a woman "must only follow." Given

the social demand for such subservience, compliance becomes mean-
ingless; behind her expert cooperation, the woman thinks and wishes
as she will. True, she cannot act upon her thoughts and wishes.
Equally, she cannot be compelled to expose them. Mr. Turbulent is
quite naturally "staggered." No matter what he drives Miss Burney to
say, she can claim finally to have said it for his sake, not her own. Her
thoughts and wishes remain her own—not to be "brought forth,"
never shown. Beginning to identify her tactics and her need for them
as consequences of her sex, she gains force in her modest self-asser-
tions, now able to claim the power of her privacy without justifying it
by literary productivity. Such journal sequences as the account of the
conversation with Mr. Turbulent have more profound literary merits
than their authentic renditions of speech. They reveal a rich imagining
of the conventionally disguised self. Miss Burney convinces the reader,
just as she convinces Mr. Turbulent, that much lies beneath her com-
pliance. Without revealing her own depths, she evokes their mysteri-
ous existence. Her life of emotional deprivation gradually gives her
the survivor's strength. Unhappy, she learns to maintain herself; her
diaries evoke the drama of her survival and her strengthening.
Miss Burney's elaborate fears, with the avoidances they generate,
create for her in her maturity a rather distinct identity, although one
which would require formulation in largely negative terms. She identi-
fies herself as a woman in hiding, the product of a feminine discipline
of fear, but this identity does not altogether satisfy her. Her youthful

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 Imagining a Self

concern with freedom has not vanished. Although she reaps psychic
benefits from her flawless conformity, she also pays large costs. Mrs.
Schwellenberg insists that she keep the window down on her side of
the carriage, to provide air. A sharp wind seriously inflames her eyes.
Her father, seeing the consequences of obedience to such authority,
orders her to insist that the glass remain raised on subsequent expedi-
tions. "I was truly glad of this permission to rebel, and it has given me
an internal hardiness in all similar assaults, that has at least relieved
my mind from the terror of giving mortal offence where most I owe
implicit obedience, should provocation overpower my capacity of for-
bearance" (27 Nov., 1787; III, 337). Permission to rebel! Yearning for
freedom, Fanny Burney requires that it be given her. She pleads with
her father to allow her to abandon court life, which has not only dam-
aged her health but forced her to live "like an orphan—like one who
had no natural ties, and must make her way as she could by those that
were factitious" (1790; IV, 392). Claiming her entitlement to parental
nurturance, her right to a woman's life of feelings, she returns to the
original safety of her father's house.
This choice, however, seems not to have been so regressive as it
may appear. In some ways it indeed involves a return to the status and
the feelings of adolescence. Fanny begins writing again—"merely
scribbling what will not be repressed"—thus providing "a delight to
my dear Father inexpressibly great." 13 He hardly cares what she writes;
neither, apparently, does she. She makes no attempt to publish any-
thing, still fully convinced of the danger of exposure. At the age of
forty she writes, "the panics I have felt upon entering to any strange
company, or large party even of intimates, has [sic], at times, been a
suffering unspeakably, almost incredibly severe to me." 14 Fear contin-
ues to provide the principle not only of her conduct but of her very
being.
Such a woman, it seems evident, could hardly hope to marry, to
make a positive commitment that would separate her from her be-
loved father. Yet marry she did, uniting herself with a man of different
culture and religion, a man capable of providing no economic secu-
rity, and most startling of all, one whom her father thought an inap-
propriate match. Her father did not attend her wedding. The psychic
process that made it possible involved the rationalization of old pat-
terns into new forms. As feeling urged her in unfamiliar directions, she
discovered how the fear of wrongdoing could justify satisfying her

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 Fanny Burney

desires. M. D'Arblay's position as persecuted victim of political injus-

tice made it seem wrong to cause him further unhappiness by refusing
to gratify him. Moreover, the Frenchman, it turned out, could assume
a position in Miss Burney's life morally comparable to that of Mrs.
Delany and Queen Charlotte. If they had functioned for her as substi-
tute grandmother and mother (she suggests these terms herself), M.
D'Arblay could take the moral stance of father—that posture charac-
teristic of all Fanny Burney's novelistic heroes, beginning with Eve-
lina's Lord Orville. In early April 1793, Fanny writes to her sister: "His
nobleness of character—his sweetness of disposition—his Honour,
Truth, integrity—with so much of softness, delicacy, & tender hu-
manity—except my beloved Father & Mr. Lock, I have never seen
such a man in this world, though I have drawn such in my Imagina-
tion." The man of her dreams, in short, must be a moral paragon. She
has no doubt of her suitor's power to make her happy; she only ques-
tions her own reciprocal capacity. 15 The next month, he rebukes her
for failing to write her sister frequently enough. "I own I had an odd
feel at the sort of authority that might seem implied in the reproof. But
this noble Creature will spare no one & no thing that he holds wrong. I
vindicated myself . . . He heard my justification with a look of serious
attention that made me internally smile & look forward—for it said, Ί
MUST ALWAYS FULLY understand that you do RIGHT. —' 'Tis well I have
no intention to do otherwise!—Oh my Susan! if it should, indeed, be
my lot to fall into the hands of one so scrupulous in integrity, how
thankfully shall I hail my Fate!" 16 Her rhapsodic tone, inspired by his
rigorous demands on her, sounds perfectly genuine, as does her for-
mulation of marriage as a commitment requiring only passive accep-
tance. Because M. D'Arblay assumes the position of moral mentor,
she can avoid wrongdoing by marrying him, for she is both helping a
needy man (her pension from the Queen supported them both) and
submitting to the guidance of one whom she considers her moral supe-
rior. Her union with him marks the climax of her story. Reporting it,
she emphasizes the degree to which it confirms her identity, while
enlarging her sense of possibility.
"Can you conceive any thing equal to my surprise," one of her sis-
ters wrote to another, "at hearing our vestal sister had ventured on
that stormy sea of matrimony."17 Fanny explains that she married in
search of happiness, which for her must derive from "Domestic com-
fort & social affection." Moreover, "M. d'Arblay has a taste for litera-

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 Imagining a Self

ture, & a passion for reading & writing as marked as my own; this is a
simpathy to rob retirement of all superfluous leisure, & ensure to us
both occupation constantly edifying or entertaining. He has seen so
much of life, & has suffered so severely from its disappointments, that
retreat, with a chosen Companion, is become his final desire."18 Thus
she fantasizes an ideal situation (an ideal, incidentally, which she very
nearly achieved): retreat from the world and final commitment to the
life of avoidance with a husband unable to find employment in Eng-
land; a life of the affections as well, that existence of feeling and emo-
tional security for which she had yearned; pseudo-parental permission
to indulge her passion for reading and writing at the side of a man who
shared and condoned it.
Mme. D'Arblay knows the general astonishment at her marriage
and professes that her own amazement exceeds that of "all my Friends
united."19 From the new safety of matrimony she asserts a distinct and
positive sense of self. Despite, or perhaps because of, her long training
and eager participation in the rituals of female compliance, she has
developed a "specialness" of character and taste that any conceivable
husband must conform to rather than hope to change. Only with such
a man would the hazard of marriage diminish, its promise expand,
and the likelihood of happiness seem greater than that in a state of
such autonomy as a single woman could hope to achieve. In fact au-
tonomy, for Fanny Burney, felt less desirable than sympathy. Liberty
of feeling and expression would be infinitely less dangerous if someone
shared her feelings and approved her expression. Long accustomed to
following external dictates, she could best discover her own will
through another. Thus, writing to Mrs. Waddington about her preg-
nancy, she reveals her physical terror of childbirth and comments,
"My Partner, however, who daily encreases the debt I owe him of my
life's happiness, rejoices—& I must be a wretch of ingratitude & insen-
sibility to regret whatever he can wish." 20 Still formulating her respon-
sibilities in terms of what she must not do, she attributes the wish for
parenthood to her husband alone and gains moral strength for her
ordeal by interpreting it as something done for the sake of another.
Through the "Social Simpathy" she found with D'Arblay, the writer
once more could write for the public, her sense of the potential inde-
cency of such display counteracted by her conviction that her writing,
too, served the interests of others, helping to support her husband and
son. "I had previously determined," she observes, "when I changed

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 Fanny Burney

my state, to set aside all my innate & original abhorrences, & regard &
use as resources MYSELF, what had always been considered as such by
others." 21 Others had long valued the products of her fantasy. Now
she could value them herself, as the source of economic security, and
she expresses openly her desire to drive the best possible bargain for
her work. No longer wrongdoing to be avoided and less vividly an
inlet for danger, the writing of novels had become virtuous. It pro-
vided a way of articulating her own good principles and of exorcising
her dangerous impulses, and provided also means of supporting her
family.
The mature identity asserted in the journals depends on a rich ac-
ceptance of roles. Mme. D'Arblay conveys herself as wife, mother,
and writer. The three roles comfortably interchange and merge, the
first two creating a screen for the third. Secure in her understanding of
her writing as means to a noble end, she need worry no longer about
why she feels compelled to write. Her fears of the world are held at
bay by the solidity of her domestic position. She writes charmingly
and perceptively of her son's development and expresses with increas-
ing ease and freedom her opinions about the vexed affairs of her ex-
tended family, rich in disastrous marriages, unexpected elopements,
unmentionable adulteries, all of which Fanny contemplates serenely
from her domestic retreat. She survives twelve years of post-revolu-
tionary France with aplomb, occupying herself with her last novel,
intended to support her son at Cambridge University. Hostile criticism
seems less terrifying than it had earlier appeared. Income matters
more than praise or blame.
Yet Fanny Burney never outgrew her woman's dependence on the
approval of those she loved. She had been right in her premarital
assessment of her husband. His sympathy with her wishes and
purposes was almost total. But when, in 1800—she was forty-eight
years old—her father disapproved an attempt to produce her comedy,
"Love and Fashion," she reveals the continued potency of early
conflict. Withdrawing the play, she yet movingly begs her father to
allow her the liberty he claims for himself. "Leap the pales of your
paddock," she urges him to tell her—"let us pursue our career; and,
while you frisk from novel to comedy, I, quitting Music and Prose,
will try a race with Poetry and the Stars." (Dr. Burney was writing a
long poem about astronomy.) Immediately, guilt ensues: "I am sure
my dear father will not infer, from this appeal, I mean to parallel our

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work. No one more truly measures her own inferiority, which, with
respect to yours, has always been my pride. I only mean to show, that
if my muse loves a little variety, she has a hereditary claim to try it"
(V, 461). The same emotional ambivalence (here manifest even in
sentence structure: is she comparing her inferiority to his inferiority?)
controlled much of her life: on the one hand, the longing to "leap the
pales," on the other, the inability to do so without parental permis-
sion. Her tone indicates resentment of enforced inferiority although
she asserts her pride in the inferiority that has constituted a woman's
(or a girl's) security. The devious appeal to parental emotion, with the
reference to "hereditary claim," possibly recalls to the reader if not
the writer that earlier deviousness by which Miss Burney reminded her
father that he had caused her to live "like an orphan" at Court. Play-
ing on her father's guilt and revealing her own, she suggests how she
has both used and been controlled by fears that originate in the child's
dependent condition.
It may appear that I have been telling the story of Fanny Burney's
life. In fact I have been summarizing her story of her life as it emerges
through the evolving record of the letters and diaries. Only by the
diarist's interpretation do we learn that the important aspect of pub-
lishing a novel is that people look at you and that her husband's moral
impeccability makes her marriage possible. The story of her life, as the
journals and letters tell it, dramatizes the freedoms and the restrictions
of fear. Its narrative strength derives from its singleness of interpreta-
tion. The principles of self-concealment that appear to have controlled
Fanny Burney's life control her telling of that life (and are reinforced
by that telling), giving to her story, despite the fact that it is composed
of disparate small units, integrity of purpose and coherence of form.
The unmastered conflict that muddles Mrs. Pilkington's and Mrs.
Charke's literary intent, the self-pity and self-importance that mar
the proportions of Mrs. Thrale's story here yield to literary and moral
clarity. Although such clarity implies the embracing of limitation, it is
a principle of power. At least as consciously as her predecessors,
Fanny Burney writes of herself specifically as a woman. Her grasp on
a woman's resources, however, extends to their literary possibilities.
Virginia Woolf, reflecting on her own keeping of a diary, wrote:

There looms ahead of me the shadow of some kind of form which

a diary might attain to. I might in the course of time learn what it is
that one can make of this loose, drifting material of life; finding

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 Fanny Burney

another use for it than the use I put it to, so much more consciously
and scrupulously, in fiction . . . I should like it to resemble some
deep old desk, or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of
odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come
back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted
itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteri-
ously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of
our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a
work of art. 2 2

The mysterious process of "sorting" and "coalescing," the tranquillity

of a work of art—these descriptions apply also to Fanny Burney's
journals, a miscellaneous repository in which dynamism and unity
alike derive from the implications of commitment to fear of
wrongdoing as an operative principle and as the action of the writer's
life and work. O f course, to understand the journals in this way
involves ignoring many of their details in an effort to perceive the
underlying principle of coherence. But that principle, I would argue
(as Virginia Woolf presumably would too), gives to the utterances of
diary and letters their fundamental literary strength.

If the collection of Fanny Burney's journals and letters creates the

effect of autobiography, a coherent narrative implying an imaginative
grasp of experience, her four novels also have aspects of psychic auto-
biography. O n e can readily perceive in them versions of the journals'
central theme: the discipline and the liberation of a woman's fears of
disapproval and of being found wanting—fear, in fact, of the other
people who comprise society. But novels, with their capacity to
express wish and fantasy as well as reality, allow Fanny Burney to
enlarge her communication of her own nature. Her fiction illustrates
complex feminine identities of indirection.
Ian Watt, noting that women wrote most novels in the eighteenth
century, hints also—in terms more tactful than mine—that most of
those novels were bad. In Jane Austen, he suggests, we first encounter
an unmistakable example of the fact "that the feminine sensibility was
in some ways better equipped to reveal the intricacies of personal rela-
tionships and was therefore at a real advantage in the realm of the
novel." 2 3 He does not explain why earlier female writers had proved
unable to exploit this advantage. Indeed, the fact—like many facts
about literary quality—is profoundly inexplicable. One can describe
the aspects of Fanny Burney's novels that make them more moving

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and more meaningful than Jane Barker's, and it is possible to demon-

strate how Jane Austen excels Fanny Burney. Why is another matter;
why reduces one to vaguenesses like talent and genius.
To define the strengths and weaknesses of Fanny Burney's fictional
achievement, however, may lead at least to speculation about the
reasons for her superiority to her female contemporaries. Her
strengths are more far-reaching than has been generally recognized.
Evelina has been praised as though it consisted only of a collection of
skillful character sketches.24 Joyce Hemlow has demonstrated its
affinities to the "courtesy book," as an effort to outline a scheme of
acceptable womanly conduct.25 It has been admired ever since its own
time for the accuracy of its social detail and conversation. But it also
manifests a high level of psychological insight closely related to the
self-knowledge that emerges from even the youthful diaries. Fanny
Burney may write better fiction than other women of her era partly
because she has come to terms more fully than they with the realities
of the female condition. She is therefore "equipped to reveal the intri-
cacies of personal relationships" as they actually exist in the world and
is not blinded by wishful fantasy or by anger, although both manifest
themselves in her work.
Self-discovery of a woman in hiding constitutes the subject of the
novels, as of the journals. Fanny Burney's heroines hide specifically
because they are women, driven to concealments in order to maintain
their goodness. They do not, except in brief moments, openly resent
their fates. Yet the tension suggested by a formulation that asserts the
simultaneity of discovery and hiding pervades Miss Burney's fiction.
She constructs elaborate happenings to articulate conflict, locate hap-
piness, and apportion blame. Her transformations of life in fiction,
while insisting on the essential order of experience, also hint their
author's awareness of the psychic costs of such affirmation. Anxiety
dominates the Burney novels, despite their happy endings. However
minute its pretexts—and often they seem trivial indeed—its weight is
real, deeply experienced by the central characters and, to a surprising
extent, shared even by readers who can readily dismiss its nominal
causes. In fact, the causes lie deep; the heroines suffer profound con-
flicts.
Evelina, of the four heroines, has the fewest and most trivial real
problems. Like Cecilia and Juliet in The Wanderer she is in effect an
orphan (her father, though alive, has refused to acknowledge her), but

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 Fanny Burney

she has a benevolent guardian and devoted friends. A summary of the

novel's plot will suggest, though, how profoundly it involves itself
with fundamental questions of identity. Evelina is the unacknowl-
edged daughter of an English baronet secretly married to a young
woman, half French, who died in childbirth, leaving her infant to the
guardianship of a benevolent clergyman until the child's father is will-
ing to admit his marriage as well as his paternity. At the narrative's
opening, Evelina, after seventeen years of rural seclusion, goes to visit
a friend who soon takes her to London. There she encounters, by
chance, her vulgar and disagreeable French grandmother, Mme.
Duval, who insists that she associate with equally vulgar English rela-
tives. Evelina, however, feels drawn to the aristocracy. She is sexually
attracted to Lord Orville, extravagantly courted by Sir Clement
Willoughby. Much of the action concerns her efforts to identify her-
self with the upper class—her manners are already upper class man-
ners—and to evade her kinship with the bourgeoisie. Finally she
claims acknowledgment by her true father, only to face absolute rejec-
tion as an impostor, since he believes another young woman to be his
daughter. A nurse's confession reveals an earlier baby-switching trick,
and the novel ends with Evelina in happy possession of, in effect, three
fathers: her paternalistic new husband, Lord Orville; her virtuous
guardian, Mr. Villars; and her genuine father, Sir John Belmont. All
three confirm her identity of true aristocracy and virtue.
The difficulties the novel nominally concerns itself with, according
to its writer's direct assertion, derive mainly from Evelina's social
inexperience. Nothing happens except "little incidents," but virtue,
feeling, and understanding finally receive their just reward, the
heroine's "conspicuous beauty" providing the means to this appropri-
ate end. 26 More obviously than stories such as Jane Barker's tale of
a merman and his paramour, this tale represents a familiar female fan-
tasy: a potent vision of virtue recognized and rewarded despite its
incidental errors—specifically, in this instance, Fanny Burney's own
kind of virtue. But the novel has a level of realism lacking in many
other fictions by female writers. It concerns itself with a young
woman's entrance into a genuinely imagined social world, dominated,
like Fanny Burney's own, by forms and manners, and very real in its
pressures, cruelties, and arbitrary benignities. "The right line of con-
duct," Evelina's guardian, Mr. Villars, tells her, "is the same for both
sexes" (p. 217). But Mr. Villars lives quite out of the world. Right

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though he is in theory, and confirmed in his Tightness by the wish ful-

fillment of the ending, he does not understand the practical problems
of a woman's following the right line of conduct. Evelina has to come
to terms with the disparity between his ideals (which are also hers) and
the way life actually takes place in the world, but she also must avoid
relinquishing, or even modifying, the standards that attest her virtue.
Like Tom Jones, she must learn prudence. 27 But prudence for her, as
for Fanny Burney, constitutes mainly avoidance, and she too is
perpetually, and increasingly, dominated by fear of wrongdoing.
Direct comments in the novel about the world emphasize its danger,
its superficiality and hypocrisy, and its sinister power. The world
threatens individual identity. Mr. Villars, living in retirement, fears its
effects on Evelina. He also recognizes the world's inescapable power.
Only the frivolous wholeheartedly accept worldly values, but no one
escapes them. The choices for women consist mainly of options to
refuse or to accept rather than possibilities to act. Evelina acts
meaningfully and independently once, when—in an improbable and
overwritten scene—she snatches the pistols from a suicidal young
man. She then faints. "In a moment, strength and courage seemed lent
me as by inspiration: I started, and rushing precipitately into the
room, just caught his arm, and then, overcome by my own fears, I fell
down at his side, breathless and senseless" (p. 182). Even when the
woman possesses and displays strength and courage, she understands
(or explains) them as given to her from outside, and her own powerful
fears counteract her impulse toward action, reducing her to the pas-
sivity more characteristic of the female state and more unarguably
blameless. Women aspire to the negative condition of blamelessness.
Evelina is constantly beset by fears of being thought bold, or rude, or
unwomanly. She fears acting. She writes to Mr. Villars, "Unable as I
am to act for myself, or to judge what conduct I ought to pursue, how
grateful do I feel myself, that I have such a guide and director to coun-
sel and instruct me as yourself!" (p. 160). And, much later (p. 306),
she appeals in similar terms to her lover, Lord Orville. The proper line
of conduct is not the same for both sexes. Men guide and instruct;
women are guided and instructed. Evelina makes quite explicit her de-
sire (which she shares with her creator) to find a lover or husband to
fill the same role as father or guardian. She assumes the utter propri-
ety of remaining as much as possible a child: ignorant, innocent, fear-
ful, and irresponsible.

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 Fanny Burney

Proving her sagacity, her lover values her for precisely these quali-
ties. Like Evelina's guardian, whom in many respects he resembles, he
believes the world is opposed to rationality and values the woman
who knows nothing of it. Shortly before he proposes, he summarizes
Evelina's character for a group of his fashionable friends, explaining
the occasional "strange" elements in her behavior as effects "of inexpe-
rience, timidity, and a retiring education," praising her as "informed,
sensible, and intelligent," and glorifying "her modest worth, and fear-
ful excellence" (p. 347). Fearfulness has become an index of goodness.
Lord Orville recognizes the positive qualities of Evelina's mind, but he
praises more the elements of her personality that encourage her to
hold back from experience. Strikingly often in all Fanny Burney's nov-
els, the terms of praise applied to women—artless, blameless—empha-
size the negative: the refrainings induced by fear.
But Evelina also contains one minor woman character who does not
refrain: the redoubtable Mrs. Selwyn. "She is extremely clever; her
understanding, indeed, may be called masculine; but, unfortunately,
her manners deserve the same epithet; for, in studying to acquire the
knowledge of the other sex, she has lost all the softness of her own" (p.
268). No one likes Mrs. Selwyn, and since a woman's fate in the world
depends largely on the degree to which she is liked, this fact alone pre-
sumably urges negative judgment of a female who feels entitled on the
basis of her strong mind to act aggressively in company. She alone,
for instance, feels free to remark devastatingly (and accurately) on
masculine idiocy in the presence of its perpetrators. Evelina observes
that this habit makes enemies; she does not comment on the accuracy
of Mrs. Selwyn's judgment. Fanny Burney, disclaiming responsibility
for Mrs. Selwyn through her heroine's disapproval, yet allows her to
remain a provocative image of female intelligence and force. The nov-
elist thus suggests that she is aware, although she has not yet fully
acknowledged it, that Evelina's choices, proper as they are, do not
exhaust the tempting possibilities for intelligent women.
Evelina chooses dependency and fear, a choice no less significant for
being thrust upon her. It amounts to the declaration of the identity
that achieves her social and economic security. The identity she cares
about most is given her from without by husband and father. The
problem in achieving her woman's identity differs from its male equiv-
alent, from Tom Jones's search for his identity, for example. Her edu-
cation in society teaches her not to relinquish but to use her innocence

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and her fears. 28 The discovery of prudence enables her to form new
dependency relations. No better solution for women is fully realized in
the novel. Yet that disturbing figure, Mrs. Selwyn, who expresses
female hostility toward the male without suffering any penalty be-
yond general dislike, whose mind and money make her sufficiently
powerful to resist or endure dislike, suggests an alternative to the
dominant fantasy of the woman rewarded for innocence by the dream
of scorning the world's judgment while forcing its notice.
But the dominant dream of female withdrawal that preserves indi-
vidual integrity, protects private feeling, and attracts the perfect lover
suggests more clearly than any utterance in her diary the young au-
thor's longings and hopes. Evelina, like the letters and journals, con-
centrates on a woman's attempt to preserve and defend herself with
the few obvious resources at her disposal. The success of that attempt
reaffirms Fanny Burney's personal decisions.
Novels—at least eighteenth-century novels—differ from autobiog-
raphies and journals partly in their detailed attention to characters
other than the protagonist. Women novelists on the whole had trouble
dealing with this aspect of their craft; rarely did they succeed in evok-
ing more than the single female character at the center of their narra-
tives. (In some instances, of course, not even the heroine, paragon
rather than recognizable person, was convincingly evoked.) Fanny
Burney, on the other hand, seemed to find multiple characterization a
vital expressive resource. Through the people she makes Evelina en-
counter she manages to convey considerable, and rather complicated,
hostility. Lord Orville and Mr. Villars, both exemplary males, actu-
ally engage little of her attention: they remain wooden presences. But
the large cast of distasteful aristocrats, the equally unattractive petty
bourgeoisie, sadistic Captain Mirvan, and vulgar but vigorous Mme.
Duval—these figures come splendidly to life. Their satiric portrayal
enables the writer to express and to justify her vivid antagonisms.
Mrs. Selwyn provides a direct mouthpiece for aggressive impulses,
but Miss Burney also conveys aggression through her derogatory
character sketches and through her repeated invention of actions ex-
pressing extreme hostility: Captain Mirvan's plot to make Mme. Du-
val think herself beset by highwaymen, the race of two ancient women
arranged by the aristocrats, the scene in which Sir Clement is bitten by
a monkey.
As autobiography, in other words, this novel reveals more than the

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diaries. Allowing Miss Burney to articulate repressed aspects of her

personality, it reminds us of the degree to which her constant profes-
sions of fear and her insistent withdrawals represent not true timidity
but a socially acceptable device of self-protection. The writing and
publishing of novels—a public act—also involves self-protection; no
one holds the author personally responsible for Captain Mirvan's
sadism or Mrs. Selwyn's ferocious commentary. Through imagining
such sadism and such commentary, she permits herself the impermissi-
ble. She both declares the high value of her own mode of dealing with
the world and compensates for the restrictions of her propriety.

After Evelina came Cecilia, insistently moral, carefully controlled,

much too long, and containing some disturbing implications. The
power of wealth gives its heroine initial security; her experience teaches
her insecurity. Altogether a more sinister fable than Evelina, despite
its insistent morality, Cecilia acknowledges more openly the high psy-
chic cost of female compliance. The permeating sense of anxiety here
derives largely from the increasingly explicit recognition of the diffi-
culties and inherent limitations of women's social position. Cecilia
has wealth, intelligence, beauty, adequate social status, and the nomi-
nal freedom to do whatever she wants. In fact, as she discovers, she
possesses all the concomitants, but no real freedom and no power. She
must use her energies for self-suppression. "Her passions were under
the control of her reason, and she suffered not her affections to tri-
umph over her principles." 29 She must learn to give up, yielding her
money as sign and symbol of larger relinquishments. Never does she
question—any more than Evelina questions—the necessity to be good.
Like Evelina, she is rewarded by marriage. But the diminishment she
undergoes in order to achieve it and the torments she endures along
the way suggest a dark view of women's fate.
The heroine of Camilla suffers yet greater diminishment. Like Eve-
lina, Camilla is inexperienced, powerless, and poor; like Evelina, she
learns that she must preserve inexperience, use powerlessness, and
emphasize her dependency. Unlike Evelina, she perceives some alter-
natives to this procedure before discovering their impossibility.
Because of her lack of knowledge of the world, Camilla cannot deal
with sophisticated values. Her fiancé Edgar feels that she should not
try: she should stay out of the world rather than endeavor to confront
it. Knowledge for a woman, from his point of view, constitutes a

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moral equivalent of rape. Men encourage women to remain ignorant,

foolish, and cowardly. They are captivated by the sight of a beautiful
woman agitated by a bull: "What lovely timidity!—What bewitching
softness!—What feminine, what beautiful delicacy!—How sweet in
terror." 30 How sweet in terrori To please a man, a woman, preserving
and using her fears and her reluctances, must withdraw. Edgar sees
clearly that any "public distinction"—i.e., any social self-assertion—
will threaten his plans for Camilla, spoiling "her for private life" (III,
278). The explicit moral of Camilla's experience—the moral she herself
accepts—supports Edgar's view. The ideal woman will be neither too
beautiful nor too rich; she will be properly humble. Fearful, sweet,
ignorant, and utterly dependent, she acknowledges the superior wis-
dom of the male to whose guidance she eagerly submits. The lessons
Camilla learns elaborate the implications of Cecilia's learning and Eve-
lina's. She discovers that apparent sources of power disintegrate in a
woman's grasp, that her fears offer more dependable guides than her
ambitions, and that only through dependency can she find female suc-
cess. The world she inhabits contains more multitudinous causes for
terror even than Cecilia's: prison, illness, death, betrayal, and pov-
erty. The anxiety, which in Evelina issued most often in the heroine's
repeated experience of confusion, now has far more serious correla-
tives.
The balance struck in Evelina between acceptance of female self-
concealment as a useful strategy and resentment against the world that
makes hiding necessary for women becomes with each successive
novel more precarious. Yet Fanny Burney's personal life was increas-
ingly happy; her letters state explicitly that marriage brought her un-
precedented contentment. Camilla, composed in the joyful period
after the birth of her son, expresses a jaundiced view of the world. Per-
sonal happiness, one may speculate, weakened Miss Burney's commit-
ment to her own discipline of social fear. More and more in the novels
she came out of hiding.

None of these first three novels directly protests women's lot, al-
though each more vividly than its predecessor implies the author's
awareness that women's fears acknowledge the intolerable dilemmas
of their social position. Yet the ideal marriages that conclude the sto-
ries suggest that by willing acceptance of fear and restriction women
can achieve happiness. Unhappy marriages also exist in these novels,

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 Fanny Burney

but their moral causes are carefully specified. The heroines have only
to avoid the weaknesses that produce them. Fanny Burney glorifies a
fugitive and cloistered virtue as uniquely appropriate for women.
Still, the strong women of whom she and her heroines disapprove and
the trains of disaster that pursue young women aspiring to even mild
independence, hint at some resentment of the social necessities appar-
ently so fully accepted.
In 1792 Mary Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights
of Women. Some time before 1800, Fanny Burney began writing her
last novel, The Wanderer: or, Female Difficulties, published in 1814.
There is no evidence that she read Mary Wollstonecraft. Yet The
Wanderer articulates female protest in terms vividly analogous to the
social critic's, although nominally only to refute such protest. Mary
Wollstonecraft's attack on the existing system of female education and
on the assumptions that governed women's conduct focuses on issues
already implicit in Fanny Burney's first three novels. Infuriated that a
woman should be made to consider her proper function that of pleas-
ing men, Mary Wollstonecraft inveighs particularly against the en-
couragement of female passivity: "listless inactivity and stupid acqui-
escence."31 She remarks that women are "kept in ignorance under the
specious name of innocence" (p. 23), a comment precisely applicable
to Camilla's "education." Men expect of women, she points out, only
negative virtues, if any: "patience, docility, good humour, and flexi-
bility—virtues incompatible with any vigorous exertion of intellect"
(p. 64). "Kind instructors!" she inquires passionately, "what were we
created for? To remain, it may be said, innocent; they mean in a state
of childhood. We might as well never have been born" (p. 68).
Concerned with possibilities of social action, Mary Wollstonecraft
interests herself in the question of collective female identity: how
women can understand themselves as women. Fanny Burney, as a
novelist, involves herself rather in the development of individuals, but
The Wanderer implies some relation between collective and individual
possibility through the striking character of Elinor Joddrell, a young
and attractive woman of good family who under the influence of revo-
lutionary ideas from France has developed a rather remarkable vision
of her own resources and rights. She claims "the Right of woman, if
endowed with senses, to make use of them," moving to eloquent ques-
tions about larger privileges."32 "Must even her heart be circumscribed
by boundaries as narrow as her sphere of action in life? Must she be

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taught to subdue all its native emotions? To hide them as sin, and to
deny them as shame? . . . Must every thing that she does be prescribed
by rule? . . . Must nothing that is spontaneous, generous, intuitive,
spring from her soul to her lips?" (I, 405).
These questions, which describe with only slight exaggeration the
emotional program followed by Fanny Burney herself, justify Elinor
from her own point of view in boldly declaring her love for a man
who has indicated no romantic interest in her, claiming her individ-
ual right to violate social expectation, and enlarging for herself alone
the narrow boundaries of permitted emotional expression. The novel's
action makes a fool of her. The man she loves does not reciprocate her
feelings. She threatens and attempts suicide repeatedly in increasingly
melodramatic fashion but never quite achieves it. She strikes grand
attitudes and makes grand speeches, finally to disappear from the
scene and reform in quiet obscurity. Juliet, the novel's heroine, con-
curs in her lover's judgment that Elinor needs to be brought to her
senses.
Elinor, like Mrs. Selwyn, exists to be refuted, and like Mrs. Selwyn
she survives refutation. However foolish her actions and her extrava-
gant emotional displays, she raises issues that cannot readily be laid to
rest. She articulates a point never explicitly acknowledged in Miss
Burney's previous books (a point implicit also in the novels by other
women treated in an earlier chapter): a woman's individual sense of
identity depends necessarily on her generic identity. Men (Mary Woll-
stonecraft duly noted this fact) have more varied possibilities for ac-
tion and feeling within the context of their social definition. Woman's
nature has been so specifically defined that it largely excludes idiosyn-
crasy. A girl's individualistic impulses must hide themselves; Elinor
must learn on a personal level the inevitable failure of revolutionary
hope.
Although Elinor's message rings more powerfully than may be in-
tended, it does not speak unambiguously for the author. Yet, more
systematically than Cecilia or Camilla, The Wanderer expresses con-
scious resentment of the female condition. The "female difficulties"
alluded to in the subtitle impede the heroine's attempt to achieve eco-
nomic and personal independence. Juliet, like Cecilia, is an orphan;
like Evelina she suffers from her parents' secret marriage and the resul-
tant mystery about her birth and status; like all the Burney heroines,
she falls in love early but faces countless external obstacles to love's

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 Fanny Burney

fulfillment. Unlike any of her predecessors, though, she must depend

on her own resources for emotional and economic survival. An exile
from France, where she has been educated, penniless as a result of an
accident, forbidden to reveal her origins, background, or even her
name, she must make her own way in England. She herself under-
stands her problem, in its particular ramifications, as peculiar to her
sex and as illustrating the limitations of social definitions of the female
state. "How insufficient, she exclaimed, is a FEMALE to herself! How
utterly dependant upon situation—connexions—circumstance!" (II,
197). An ideal of self-sufficiency dominates Juliet throughout the
events that demonstrate its impossibility. She finds female experience
to involve utter dependency, endless difficulty, and constant negative
judgment from without of all attempts at self-assertion. Like Mary
Wollstonecraft, she discovers how women's education forestalls their
significant accomplishment: women do not learn to do anything.
When Juliet laments to Elinor the severe difficulties of a female trying
to make her way in the world, Elinor insists that she need only forget
that she is "a dawdling woman" and remember that she is an "active
human being," and her difficulties will vanish (III, 36). But Elinor has
never faced and cannot even recognize the external difficulties that
confront Juliet. Juliet is right, as Mary Wollstonecraft is right. But
what use is such Tightness?
The most interesting aspect of The Wanderer is the degree to which
Juliet has internalized the social expectations that nullify her continu-
ing struggle. She wins limited social recognition by demonstrating her
mastery of the ladylike accomplishments of harp-playing and singing,
and her competence in "the useful and appropriate female accomplish-
ment of needle-work" (1,163). Forced against her will to appear in pri-
vate theatricals, she thus acquires a further opportunity to display the
range of her talents and skills. Perhaps more significantly, the play
enables her to demonstrate "those fears of self-deficiency . . . which
. . . often, in sensitive minds, rob them of the powers of exertion" (I,
199). In its first scene, she shows herself a totally incompetent actress
because of her fears; later she rouses herself to triumph (I, 204). Im-
possible not to think of Miss Burney with her consistent social display
of her fears, but one may be surprised, in the particular novelistic con-
text, to find fear glorified as an index of sensitivity. Juliet brings her-
self to give harp lessons in order to earn a living, but when her ambig-
uous status and background make her lose pupils, she is unwilling to

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 Imagining a Self

use her talents in a public musical performance—partly because Har-

leigh hints that to participate in such an undertaking might obviate
the possibility of honorable marriage. Although financial necessity
drives the heroine to determine upon performance at last, on the ac-
tual occasion she faints before she has to play. She then takes a job as
companion to an irascible and tyrannical older woman, effectively
dramatizing her social condition of dependency.
Increasingly Juliet finds herself relying—always limited, of course,
by considerations of propriety—on financial, emotional, and physical
help from men. Money embarrasses her, as it did her creator. 33 She
needs it nonetheless, and she needs the self-esteem of winning it by her
own efforts, but almost equally she needs the quite opposed self-esteem
derived from never even appearing to do wrong. Like Fanny Burney,
Juliet comes to recognize that to act as little as possible, if it does not
ensure doing right, at least prevents wrong. Her situation forces her to
act; her femininity urges her toward passivity.
Elinor points out how inconsistently men—hence, the world—judge
women. They declare women unable to act as meaningfully as men
because of their natural limitations, although men have in fact barred
women from action by controlling their education. On the other
hand, while estimating woman below themselves, they also elevate
her above, requiring "from her, in defiance of their examples!—in
defiance of their lures!—angelical perfection" (III, 42). Juliet, who
attempts—largely unsuccessfully—to defy the prohibition of mean-
ingful action, entirely accepts this other impossible standard with its
goal of "angelical perfection." For her virtue rather than her action,
she wins reward: the man of her choice.
Before the reward, though, apparently hopeless entanglements de-
velop. Juliet, it turns out, is married already. Her commitment to pas-
sive virtue has led her to self-sacrifice for the sake of her guardian,
when his life is threatened by revolutionaries. One of these wretches
demands Juliet, for the sake of her fortune, promising her guardian's
life as her price. She marries him; then before consummation she es-
capes to England, but when he claims her she must acknowledge his
right. In this crisis, her passivity markedly increases. Harleigh begs
her not to let "your too delicate fears of doing wrong by others, urge
you to inflict wrong, irreparable wrong, upon youself !" (V, 163), but,
like her creator, Juliet is dominated by terror of public wrongdoing.
She is rescued from her nominal husband, in one instance, by a male

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 Fanny Burney

friend who commands her "to attend her own nearest relations"; oth-
erwise she would not attempt to evade her fate, controlled as she is
"by an overwhelming dread that to resist might possibly be wrong"
(V, 326). She can turn only to piety, by which she denies or in fantasy
avoids "all present and actual evil," concentrating instead on "an en-
thusiastic foretaste of the joys of futurity" (V, 208). Her conflicts, mul-
titudinous and irreconcilable, reduce her to total immobility. Her exis-
tence becomes one loud plea for help. When her lover describes her as
"wholly independent; mistress of her heart, mistress of herself—", she
protests: "No, Mr. Harleigh, no! I am not so independent! . . . Had I
an hundred hearts,—ten thousand times you must have conquered
them all!" (V, 364-5). Her triumph derives from her relinquishment of
all claim to self-sufficiency.
On the novel's final pages, the author summarizes Juliet as "a female
Robinson Crusoe, . . . reduced either to sink, through inanition, to
nonentity, or to be rescued from famine and death by such resources
as she could find, independently, in herself" (V, 394-5). But only in
brief intervals has her survival depended on herself. Elinor seems right
about the limited possibilities for women in existent social conditions,
although wrong in her hope of enlarging them. Much earlier, Harleigh
has complained of the "dangerous singularity" in Elinor's character (I,
376). In the end, he urges Juliet not to worry about the other young
woman, who "has a noble, though, perhaps, a masculine spirit." (Ap-
plied to Elinor, as to Mrs. Selwyn, masculine is a harsh designation.)
She will come to see the error of her ways, he continues, returning "to
the habits of society and common life, as one awakening from a dream
in which she has acted some strange and improbable part" (V, 370-
71). Juliet, too, is recovering from her dream of independence. Fanny
Burney's imagining of a female Robinson Crusoe is an imagining of
despair. For Juliet as a heroine must struggle not only with the obsta-
cles supplied by a hostile physical and social environment but with
those created by her own standard of femininiy; no psychic or reli-
gious conversion can rescue her. Femininity wins; all else is only a
dream. Juliet and Elinor in different ways illustrate a female fantasy of
self-realization and self-definition through action rather than avoid-
ance. Testing that fantasy, Juliet discovers its frailty. The fear of doing
wrong finally controls her, teaching her her helplessness.
"There is no doubt but that The Wanderer is Fanny Burney's poor-
est novel," Michael Adelstein writes.34 Virtually all critics have con-

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 Imagining a Self

curred, from the time of first publication to the present. Its elaborate
plot, didactically disposed characters, and old-fashioned rhetoric
compose a moralistic artifice rather than a realized fiction; it seems an
imitation of theory, not of life. Yet its relation to life as Fanny Burney
knew it lies deeper than one might suppose. What Joyce Hemlow per-
ceives as a schematic arrangement of virtuous and morally defective
characters may be seen also as Fanny Burney's most detailed rendition
of the female strategy of virtue, its costs, and its rewards.35 That strat-
egy involves manipulation rather than simple acceptance of weakness.
To use goodness as a stance toward the world (the tactic adopted by
the character Juliet as well as by her creator) embodies some claim of
strength: Juliet achieves moral superiority if not economic success. But
it is an underdog's device, understood explicitly as such by the charac-
ter who employs it. Goodness amounts to Juliet's only viable resource;
her obsessive fear of wrongdoing implies her terror of losing her single
weapon for battling the world. And her resentment of being so handi-
capped in life's struggle expresses itself in her repeated recognition that
women know nothing and can do nothing to help themselves. They
must allow themselves to be helped and must invite infantilization;
they must avoid so much that finally they virtually avoid life itself.
Given the detailed realizations along the way of what the female plight
means, the happy ending of The Wanderer and the novel's artifices of
plot and character seem to comprise a bitter mockery, so inadequate
are artifices of plot to solve the problems here richly exposed. Fanny
Burney was unable to integrate her deep perceptions of the female
condition into a believable fiction—perhaps her habits of fear and
avoidance made her fear and avoid the implications of her insight. But
The Wanderer too contains its autobiographical revelations. Less care-
ful than the journals, the novel reveals that the longing for freedom,
confessed in moments of despair at the restrictions of Court life, ex-
tended farther than Fanny Burney directly acknowledged, vividly re-
flecting her awareness that fear of wrongdoing as a principle of action
itself exemplifies the severe restrictiveness of female possibility.

No one now reads Fanny Burney's novels, except for Evelina, where
comedy and youthful exuberance qualify the pervasive anxiety and
one can even smile at the anxiety, for its causes are, by and large, so
trivial. Yet the later novels, creaky of plot and increasingly impenetra-

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 Fanny Burney

ble in rhetoric, seriously explore the possibilities for women to assert

individual identities. More clearly than Fanny Burney's letters and
diaries, the novels betray her anger at the female condition, although
she also acknowledges the possibility of happiness within that condi-
tion. Imagining female defiance, she imagines also its futility in those
heroines dominated, like herself, by fears of doing wrong. The atmos-
phere of anxiety she vividly evokes suggests what conflicts attend a
woman's search for identity. The Burney female characters face end-
less struggle between what they want to have (independence, specific
husbands, friends, pleasure, work) and what they want to be (angelic-
ally perfect): between the impulses to action and to avoidance. How-
ever important or negligible the specific images of this conflict, it
stands behind the action and the characterization of all the novels.
The record of the journals, extending chronologically far beyond the
writer's marriage, makes it clear that her commitment to D'Arblay,
fulfilling as it was, did not mark the happy ending to her experience as
it did for all her fictional heroines. Marriage resolved or simplified
conflicts, granting Fanny Burney permission to act (through writing)
while yet remaining conspicuously good; it thus provided energy. It
also generated new dramas: classic Oedipal struggles, symbolic dilem-
mas about where and how to live, and conflicts of interest between
Fanny's old family and her new—dramas that the journals expose more
freely than they had revealed the problems of the author's youth, al-
though in fact the problems remain in many respects essentially the
same. The plot of the diaries thus necessarily differs from that of the
novels, which never explore post-marital experience.
Yet the fictional inventions uncover the inner realities of the writer's
mature as well as her youthful life. Indeed, comparison of Fanny Bur-
ney's personal record with her novels suggests the possibility that fic-
tion may more vividly than autobiography delineate the shape of an
author's private drama. The external events of Miss Burney's life, as
reported in her diaries, supply small excitements, minor clashes, and
tiny resolutions. The events of her novels increasingly emphasize im-
portant happenings—in The Wanderer, political as well as personal
happening. Her heroines must cope with grotesque misunderstand-
ings, malicious enemies, and bitter strokes of fate. They suffer more
than they can comprehend—more perhaps even than their author
comprehends. They express both their creator's wishes and her con-

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 Imagining a Self

viction that such wishes must be punished: the real essence of the inner
drama that is more palely reflected in the relatively trivial events she
chooses to record in diary and letters.
Fiction is fantasy. Both the strength and the weakness of Fanny Bur-
ney's novels derives from this fact. The books betray their author's
longing for more grandiose experience than her powerful sense of de-
corum would allow her even to know she wanted. All except Cecilia,
that fable of the poor little rich girl, rely on the deeply satisfying fairy-
tale structure in which the hero (in these cases the heroine) with no
apparent assets survives a series of demanding tests, winning by the
power of goodness, triumphing over those seemingly more advan-
taged, and finally achieving the royal marriage that symbolizes lasting
good fortune. But Fanny Burney betrays conflicting fantasies, which
lessen her fiction's energy: on the one hand the dream of self-assertion
and success in the face of all obstacles, on the other the fearful fantasy
of nemesis for female admission of hostility and female attempts at
self-determination. However she heightens happenings to melodra-
matic impossibility, ignoring logic and straining rhetoric to insist on
the importance of her tale, her stories work against themselves. In her
direct accounts of herself, with her sense of morality firmly in control,
the conflict between the impulse to freedom and the commitment to
propriety—its resolution in action always predictable and its emo-
tional dynamics often compelling—shapes a persuasive narrative. But
the world of fiction holds forth the possibilities of greater freedom,
possibilities that Fanny Burney could not adequately handle, although
they enabled her to reveal herself.
Fiction is form, and form is fiction. The forms that tempted Miss
Burney, in life and in literature, were moral structures that assured her
that virtue found its reward. Around her she could see evidence to the
contrary, particularly in female fates. Her stepsister Maria and her
beloved sister Susanna both married brutes and suffered dire conse-
quences. Susanna died after some years of Irish exile necessitated by
her husband's arbitrary decisions. Marriage in real life constituted
punishment as often as reward. The structures of fiction, as structures
of moral order, made sense of experience. They could be imposed also
on records of life. Fanny Burney's narrative of herself, in diary and
letters, interpreting all conflict as moral conflict and every choice as
an effort to determine the good, rationalizes her relatively quiet life as
a struggle for virtue and her happy marriage as virtue's reward. It thus

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 Fanny Burney

creates shape out of a life's random sequence of events—but a shape,

significantly, of conflict.
Fiction is public communication. Fanny Burney's consciousness of
this fact expresses itself, characteristically, most often in statements of
what she has left out of her novels in order to avoid contaminating
young minds. Thus, she boasts that Camilla contains no politics be-
cause "they were not a feminine subject for discussion" and "it would
be a better office to general Readers to carry them wide of all politics,
to their domestic fire sides."36 As usual, she is avoiding wrong. But
public communication has a positive as well as a negative aspect. In
the youthful diaries, writing for "nobody," Fanny expressed a depre-
cating sense of self; all her letters and diaries insist upon her modesty.
The more impersonal expression of fiction enabled her to enlarge her
self-image by splitting herself into infinitely virtuous heroines and
ingeniously aggressive minor characters, by dramatizing her sense of
virtue through those heroines who suffer endlessly in their efforts
toward the right, and by expressing ideas that she could not allow her-
self to endorse through such figures as Mrs. Selwyn and Elinor Jod-
drell. Only in rare moments of the private record—as when she com-
plains that Mrs. Thrale showers her with too many gifts—does Fanny
Burney betray her hostility. The open record of fiction provided
greater protection: she could simultaneously convey both anger and
her disapproval of anger. Much more successfully than her female
contemporaries, she found ways to manipulate and use her own psy-
chic experience, not simply to avoid it through wishful fantasy or ethi-
cal didacticism.
Fiction, finally, may constitute autobiography. Through Fanny
Burney's novels, through their flaws and their positive achievements,
she conveys her private self more emphatically, more explicitly, than
she does in the diaries. Not needing to exercise reductive moral control
over every character, she can use her fantasies to communicate her
feelings and her conflicts, the interior drama that her decorous life
largely concealed. She quotes Mme. de Genlis: "The life of every
Woman is a Romance!" 37 The remark, implying an interpretation of
actual experience in terms of literary categories, suggests a useful way
to read the diaries and letters—perceiving the extent to which, even in
her personal record, it is Fanny Burney's fictions that reveal herself.
Writing novels, she allows herself to convey the impermissible sides of
her nature and to enlarge the permissible. Writing journals, she con-

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 Imagining a Self

fines herself largely to the surfaces of her life; yet she uncovers the
depths by the unchanging form of her self-interpretation, by her wist-
ful, persistent fantasy of flawless virtue, and by her insistence on
shaping her account of all that happens to her in terms of the struggle
for virtue. She tells the story of an uneventful life as a romance rich in
drama.
Fanny Burney's novels and her journals alike reveal the dynamics of
fear in a woman's experience. They also reveal some ways in which
the imagination deals with emotion, demonstrating how useful are the
disguises of fiction in clarifying the truths of personality and how
much the forms and perceptions of fiction become necessary material
for the autobiographer.

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 7
The Sense of Audience:
Samuel Richardson, Colley Cibber

oes the act of writing about the self have intrinsic meaning?

D None of the writers encountered so far seriously considers the

question, in fictional or factual context. Hume, by denying his
vanity, asserts a specific absence of motivation for his autobiography
without ever seriously investigating the meaning of his enterprise.
Gibbon, offering similar disclaimers, fails to confront the significance
of his obsessive reworking of his life's material or of the fundamental
desire to depict the self, despite his full awareness that style creates an
image of character and his lengthy construction of an autobiographi-
cal palimpsest. Fictional Tristram, suffering entrapment in his self,
clinging to words as salvation, does not associate self and words as
problems. Robinson Crusoe, William Cowper, aware as they are of
the purposes of their narrations, neglect to contemplate the perplexing
fact of narration. Writers claim their wish to make money or to achieve
reconciliation or to reform or educate their readers; seldom do they
think in print of their literary activity in its meaning for themselves—
if, indeed, they think about it as a phenomenon at all. Evelina, that
prolific letter-writer, is oddly unaware of her logorrhea.
Her forebear Pamela, on the other hand, recognizes her own writing
as an important fact, and other characters in the novel she inhabits
also accord it intrinsic significance. The official first heroine of the
English novel has an incorrigible urge to write herself down. Critics
have frequently noted the advantages and disadvantages of the episto-

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 Imagining a Self

lary convention as Richardson employs it. It creates an illusion of

immediacy—"something that may pass for the spontaneous transcrip-
tion of the subjective reactions of the protagonists to the events as
they occur." 1 It allows us to perceive events through the consciousness
of the person they happen to, thus encountering incident and response
simultaneously. On the other hand, it generates manifest narrative
artifice, prolixity, and rhetorical implausibility. Pamela sounds some-
times so much like a philosopher (or perhaps a cultivated London
printer) that even her devoted apologist B. L. Reid grants, "Her rheto-
ric is superb, but in terms of character it is also absurd." 2 Brian W.
Downs complains about the fact that "the characters consistently view
the situations in which they or their friends find themselves, not so
much as personal experience, as 'copy' in the journalistic sense of the
word." 3 And many commentators have joked about the improbability
or perversity, or both, of Pamela's determined writing on the very day
of her marriage.
Only recently have critics begun to consider the possible value of
Pamela's obsessional turning of life into "copy" for the total plan of
the novel and for the character herself. Thus A. M. Kearney points
out the double purpose of Pamela's writing "in the moral scheme of
the novel: first it brings Pamela herself to public recognition, and sec-
ondly it propagates her thoughts as influence." 4 He adds that Pamela's
role is defined as "that of the novelist himself: by bringing literary
ability and sufficient reflection to bear upon the crude stuff of per-
sonal experience, he shapes it as didactic art" (p. 37). Even more pro-
vocative is Robert Folkenflik's observation: "Pamela's problem is to
create an interior space through the private consciousness constituted
by her writings." 5 If these statements are true, Pamela's writing sup-
plies evidence both of her private self-awareness and of her capacity
for public moral utterance. It resembles in those respects the work of
real autobiographers, necessarily concerned with public statement,
more than of real letter-writers, usually composing for an audience of
one. (Pamela literally writes at first only for her parents; gradually her
readership expands, initially without her knowledge, later with her
full awareness. ) As the public function of the heroine's letters evolves,
so does her sense of self. She uses the letters not only to assert her
identity—and preserve her "interior space," to repeat Folkenflik's per-
haps too Freudian phrase—but to enlarge it, through a process of
communication and dramatization that may exemplify universal as-

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 Samuel Richardson, Colley Cibber

pects of writing about the self. And she uses them, quite consciously,
to tell a story, the awareness of plot and possibility belonging expli-
citly to her as well as to her creator.
An accident of timing caused Pamela to reach publication in the
same year (1740) that saw the appearance of Colley Cibber's Apology
for his life. Taking advantage of that coincidence, Fielding mockingly
claimed to perceive a significant connection of approach between the
two books: both shared an "affectation" that, he explains in his pre-
face to Joseph Andrews, "proceeds from one of these two Causes,
Vanity, or Hypocrisy: for as Vanity puts us on affecting false Charac-
ters, in order to purchase Applause; so Hypocrisy sets us on an En-
deavour to avoid Censure by concealing our Vices under an Appear-
ance of their opposite Virtues." 6 Vanity is Cibber's sin; hypocrisy,
Pamela's. To unite those vices under a common label helps Fielding to
define his satiric target; it also calls attention to a universal problem of
autobiography and the fiction that imitates it. Fielding is enraged by
the high artifice of self-presentation, noticeable alike in novel and
memoir—an artifice the more conspicuous for the ostentatious claims
of sincerity and truthfulness that Cibber and Pamela make. The neces-
sary artifice of writing about the self derives partly from the discrep-
ancy between the importance that the writer assigns to his self and his
awareness that the world at large is unlikely to share his assessment.
To deal with this discrepancy demands a complicated set of poses: one
must not appear to claim too much, yet the autobiographical enter-
prise in its essence amounts to an insistent demand for attention.
Apology of one sort or another is built in to the undertaking. Cibber
and Pamela, real autobiographer and created character, share con-
sciousness of the complex power of story and of the omnipresence of
audience. Conveying that consciousness, they remind the reader of
autobiography's intrinsic unnaturalness: to tell stories of the self auto-
matically commits the teller to the vice of affectation. But—as Fielding
failed to see—it also provides the means by which affectation tran-
scends itself, artifice leading to profound sincerities.
An atmosphere of unceasing activity marks novel and autobiogra-
phy; the activity of both accounts is partly, and importantly, that of
writing itself. Both call attention to writing as pleasure, as control,
and as significant action. Cibber admits directly that the act itself is so
gratifying that he could go on forever; he makes no mention of pos-
sible rewriting. The convention of Pamela also dictates the impossibil-

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 Imagining a Self

ity of rewriting: we take journals and letters by definition to be at least

relatively artless forms. (The artfulness of such imitations of artless-
ness is of course another matter.) And by the time of the heroine's
wedding we readily assume that she too would happily continue end-
lessly. Autobiography and novel alike suggest the creation of a life
through writing about it, the writing itself literally affecting the course
of action in Pamela and making psychological sense out of action past
in the Apology. In both works we can study writing as performance
and as process and writing as revelatory affectation.

Pamela reveals herself most conspicuously by her language.

Richardson prefaced to the second edition of his novel excerpts from
various laudatory letters, one of which mingles with its praise some
minor suggestions for improving Pamela's literary style. Specifically,
the letter-writer objects to the character's use of naughty as an epithet
for her master, claiming its inappropriate mildness. Another unnamed
critic, refuting such suggestions, vehemently endorses naughty. Alter-
native adjectives, he points out, "wou'd have carried Marks of her
Rage, not Affliction—whereas naughty contains, in One single signifi-
cant Petulance, twenty thousand inexpressible Delicacies!—It insinu-
ates, at once, all the beautiful Struggle, between her Contempt of his
Purpose, and tender Regard for his Person; her Gratitude to Himself
and his Family; her Recollection of his superior Condition.—There is
in the elegant Choice of this half-kind, half-peevish, Word, a never-
enough to be prais'd speaking Picture of the Conflict betwixt her Dis-
dain, and her Reverence!"7 The overwrought discriminations of this
critique, recalling Pamela's own mental habits, emphasize how care-
fully selected at least some of Pamela's vocabulary may be. In a report
to her parents she moralizes, "O how can wicked Men seem so steady
and untouch'd, with such black Hearts, while poor Innocents stand
like Malefactors before them!" (I, 34). The next paragraph relates a
specific interview with her master: "Good Heaven, said I to myself,
give me Courage to stand before this naughty Master! O soften him,
or harden me!" Choosing the childish epithet naughty, she thus delib-
erately rejects a more forceful language of denunciation ("wicked,"
"black Hearts") also available to her. When she stands before Squire
B., needing to feel "hardened," she reverts to relatively exculpatory
diction that suggests her wish to see the evil he represents as relatively
venial. Her vocabulary indeed hints interior conflict—if not between

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 Samuel Richardson, Colley Cibber

"Disdain" and "Reverence," certainly between desire and fear. Despite

the fact that Pamela writes usually for and to her parents, in effect for
her superego, she reveals also the force of the id and the nature of its
necessary disguises. Elizabeth Hardwick points out that the use of let-
ters in fiction "modifies the inner life of the characters as we know
them. A letter is not a dialogue or even an omniscient exposition. It is
a fabric of surfaces, a mask, a form as well suited to affectations as to
the affections." 8 Affectation, this comment suggests, is implicit in the
very form Richardson has chosen, which reveals Pamela's masking as
well as, through subtleties of diction, the reality beneath. The recourse
to letters thus makes affectation a subject of Richardson's novel as
well as of Fielding's parody.
Pamela shows herself conscious of linguistic values not only in her
disputes about such terms as honour or saucebox but in her attitude
about the fact of her writing, which becomes increasingly important
as a component of her story. Words supply a defensive resource in
speech and in writing: "When you forget what belongs to Decency in
your Actions, and when Words are all that are left me, to shew my
Resentment of such Actions, I will not promise to forbear the strong-
est Expressions, that my distressed Mind shall suggest to me" (I, 289).
Her running narrative of her experience, most of which she cannot
find means to send her parents during her stay in Lincolnshire, defends
her against her life's psychic inroads. Her master will not allow him-
self to become her lover (as opposed to her would-be seducer) until he
has seen what she has written. He demands that she yield him more
and more of her prose, and while refusing to yield her body she does
in fact give up, in successive batches, all of that manipulated version
of self, her story. This symbolic capitulation is important partly be-
cause it involves direct communication of feelings. Her story, "not
deceitful," containing no falsehood, achieves its "sincerity" (I, 314) by
its consistent interpretation of fact through feeling.
All stories have generic as well as particular aspects, belonging to
established types or patterns, although the events they relate possess
unique specificity. Mr. B.'s initial sense of story is entirely generic.
Seeing his sexual overtures to a servant girl as belonging to a pattern
so familiar as to be virtually devoid of meaning, he finds Pamela's
resistance puzzling as well as angering. She wants her story to con-
form to a different genre: Young Girl Makes Good rather than Seduc-
tion and Betrayal. Mr. B. gradually develops a bemused sense of him-

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self as only a character in Pamela's fiction. "I long to see the Particu-
lars of your Plot, and your Disappointment, where your Papers leave
off. For you have so beautiful a Manner, that it is partly that, and
partly my Love for you, that has made me desirous of reading all you
write; tho' a great deal of it is against myself: for which you must ex-
pect to suffer a little. And as I have furnish'd you with a Subject, I
have a Title to see the Fruits of your Pen.—Besides, said he, there is
such a pretty Air of Romance, as you relate them, in your Plots, and
my Plots, that I shall be better directed in what manner to wind up the
Catastrophe of the pretty Novel" (I, 316-17). Although he claims deci-
sive power over the "Catastrophe," Pamela as author has ultimate
control. Mr. B.'s sense of weakness permeates his speech. Reduced to
demand the manuscript on the basis of his having provided the sub-
ject, he reveals his conviction that only by seeing all Pamela writes can
he hope to win any dominance over her. Her plots and his plots be-
long to the real world, but by recording them she has made them effec-
tively fictional. The writer has power of interpretation, of selection,
and consequently of creating meaning and order; by comparison
Squire B.'s claim of control sounds like pure bluster.
"My Story, surely, would furnish out a surprising Novel, if it was to
be well told," Pamela observes (II, 5). Lady Davers, on the verge of
reconciliation with Pamela, begs to see her "rare . . . uncommon
Story" (II, 299). The story's "uncommonness" depends on its happy
ending: had Pamela become Mr. B.'s mistress, her tale would hardly
have been rare. In a sense her pride as author protects her virtue. Cer-
tainly she manipulates events with a steady awareness of their drama-
tic potential. Although she relapses into unconsciousness at every
moment of crisis, her consciousness remains sharp in less desperate
situations. She uses imagination and memory alike as resources. Mem-
ory recorded, the operations of imagination set down—these create
story, Pamela's self and her salvation.
In an episode of presumably inadvertent comedy, Pamela, discus-
sing with her lover her prospective occupations, assures him that her
"scribbling," after marriage, will be entirely dedicated to the house-
hold accounts (II, 31). In effect she promises voluntarily to relinquish
the mysterious power her writing has won. By writing she has de-
clared her identity, insisted on her own version of her story and on its
significance and won her way into the upper class. And by writing
after her marriage—of course she lied in promising to give it up—she

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continues to assert her moral dominance of her husband and her mid-
eighteenth-century version of the Restoration grace, wit. "I cannot
live without a Pen in my Hand," she confesses—the occasion being her
infant's smallpox, which provokes her to two poetic effusions (IV,
238). When, in one of the few real crises of Pamela II, her husband
appears to have taken a mistress, Pamela uses every opportunity to
write about the problem. After she and Mr. B. work out their difficul-
ties, he asks to see how she has recorded them. Her narrative, he ex-
plains, "shall be a standing Lesson to me for my future Instruction; as
it will be a fresh Demonstration of your Excellence, which every Hour
I more and more admire" (IV, 200). Her "Excellence," intellectual and
imaginative as well as moral, must be attested by her prose. She needs
pen in hand to affirm and indeed to manufacture the capacity that
enables her not only to defend herself but to maintain and enlarge her
value for her audience.

Like Pamela, Colley Cibber, famous actor and theatrical manager,

apparently felt compelled to write. Like Pamela he reflected about
what his writing meant; more explicitly than Pamela he recognized an
identity between story and self. Pamela, with a social role severely
limiting her freedom of action, achieved greater freedom in her writ-
ten reflections on her experiences. Cibber, an actor, played many roles
but suffered from the resultant sense of falsity. More obsessively than
Pamela, therefore, he claims the truth of his self-presentation as its
justification. "There is something inwardly inciting" him to self-reve-
lation, he confesses.

A Man who has pass'd above Forty Years of his Life upon a The-
atre, where has never appear'd to be Himself, may have naturally
excited the Curiosity of his Spectators to know what he really was,
when in no body's Shape but his own . . . It was doubtless, from a
supposition that this sort of Curiosity wou'd compensate their La-
bours, that so many hasty Writers have been encourag'd to publish
the Lives of the late Mrs. Oldfield, Mr. Wilks, and Mr. Booth, in less
time after their Deaths than one could suppose it cost to transcribe
them. Now, Sir, when my time comes, lest they shou'd think it
worth while to handle my Memory with the same Freedom, I am
willing to prevent its being so oddly besmear'd . . . by taking upon
me to give the Publick This, as true a Picture of my self as natural
Vanity will permit me to draw.'
He wishes to render himself in order to keep control of the depiction,

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to forestall the efforts of others to tell his story, and to gratify the curi-
osity of his spectators. The story on the printed page represents one
more potential way of appealing to an audience. But it differs from
dramatic self-representation specifically in its truth and in its mani-
festly defensive function. Like Pamela, Cibber feels the need to guard
himself against the misapprehensions of others by his proclaimed
truth.
But the notion of truth in autobiography, as we have seen, is highly
problematic. Cibber did not, as far as anyone has ascertained, invent
the facts he reported of himself. On the other band, he contrived judi-
cious omissions. As his twentieth-century biographer puts it, he
"never referred to the things of which he—it is to be hoped—felt
ashamed":10 neither to his passion for gambling, for instance, nor to
the episode in which he was briefly dismissed from the management of
Drury Lane, but also, more perplexingly, he does not refer to his re-
ceiving the laureateship and hardly at all to his wife and children. Yet
he claims specifically the truth of total inclusiveness, boasting his
commitment to "shewing myself in all my Lights" (p. 20), insisting,
against the evidence, that he conceals "no Truth, that is against me"
(p. 172).
The truth he in fact achieves in his narrative is, as it must be, a truth
of story, dependent partly on his conscious interpretation of his own
experience and partly on deeper molding forces. Pamela perceives her
commitment to virtue as motivating all her actions; Cibber under-
stands himself as inevitably driven by vanity, his "ruling passion."
Like Pamela, he reveals that an apparently simple "Principle of ac-
tion" becomes remarkably impenetrable when examined in detail.

On human actions reason tho' you can,

It may be reason, but it is not man:
His Principle of action once explore,
That instant 'tis his Principle no more.
Like following life thro' creatures you dissect,
You lose it in the moment you detect.
(Pope, Epistle to Cobham, 11. 35-40)
At first vanity seems, from Cibber's point of view, to constitute his
chief point of vulnerability. He confesses that the impulse to write
autobiography derives from "the same Vanity which makes even
homely People employ Painters to preserve a flattering Record of their
Persons" (p. 4). The analogy suggests the book's central paradox: on

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the one hand, commitment to truth justifies the enterprise; on the

other, vanity, its motivating force, demands "a flattering Record."
This, too, is a paradox implicit in all autobiography, although Cibber
does not note the fact. He recognizes, though, that vanity permeates
all levels of his own psychic experience, accounting alike for preten-
sion and humility. He directly contradicts any claim of literal truthful-
ness by admitting that he sets down only what he wants others to
know of him (p. 25). What he wants them to know, though, includes
what he smiles at in himself. His self-enjoyment and comic self-aware-
ness, which rarely appear elsewhere in eighteenth-century autobiogra-
phy, involve a kind of self-acceptance that appears to generate emo-
tional freedom.
By the end of the narrative we have been led to entertain the possi-
bility that vanity represents strength rather than weakness. Gradually
the writer argues that his own ruling passion in fact constitutes "the
universal Passion of Mankind" (p. 192). He differs from other men,
then, primarily in his admirable willingness to admit it. That willing-
ness, itself an aspect of the governing passion, defines his virtue—at
least in his own mind. Viciously condemning those "monstrous Med-
lies" of singing and dancing and other forms of entertainment "that
have so long infected the Stage" (p. 423), he blandly admits that he
himself encouraged such medleys—against his conscience—from
necessity, because he "had not Virtue enough to starve, by opposing a
Multitude, that would have been too hard for me" (p. 424). But his
readers should not criticize such expediency. How does his motivation
differ from that of Henri IV of France in changing religion? T h e king
"has always been allow'd a great Man: And what I want of his Gran-
deur, you see by the Inference, Nature has amply supply'd to me, in
Vanity, a Pleasure which neither the Pertness of Wit, or the Gravity of
Wisdom, will ever persuade me to part with. And why is there not as
much Honesty in owning, as in concealing it? For though to hide it,
may be Wisdom, to be without it is impossible; and where is the Merit
of keeping a Secret, which every Body is let into? T o say we have no
Vanity then, is shewing a great deal of it; as to say we have a great
deal, cannot be shewing so much: And tho', there may be Art, in a
Man's accusing himself, even then it will be more pardonable than
Self-commendation" (p. 424). The argument has become oddly circu-
lar: Cibber, reiterating his confession of vanity, has manipulated his
terms to declare the vanity of acknowledging vanity less than that of

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denying it; he leaves the reader to ponder the further gigantic vanity
of that assertion. The autobiographer has also admitted the personal
pleasure of his "vice"—a pleasure so great that he cannot be persuaded
to relinquish it. From pleasure, it converts itself to virtue—precisely
the reverse of the common female equation that opposes pleasure to
virtue. Cibber's vanity of self-justification epitomizes his masculine
freedom to redefine virtue by the self's demands instead of hiding be-
hind societal sanctions. One acts virtuously, Cibber concludes (p.
425), in order to win the praise that gratifies vanity; vanity thus be-
comes the force behind all human goodness.
Unlike Boswell, the only other married man among the famous
eighteenth-century autobiographers, Cibber hardly refers to his wife.
He reports his marriage in these words: "One might think that the
Madness of breaking, from the Advice, and Care of Parents, to turn
Player, could not easily be exceeded: But what think you, Sir, of—
Matrimony? which, before I was Two-and-twenty, I actually com-
mitted, when I had but Twenty Pounds a Year, which my Father had
assur'd to me, and Twenty Shillings a Week from my Theatrical La-
bours, to maintain, as I then thought, the happiest young Couple, that
ever took a Leap in the Dark!" (p. 150). The account, denying the
emotions commonly associated with matrimony for the sake of a self-
mocking pose, reminds one anew of the possible gaps between story
and reality. Forming his narrative for an imagined audience ("what
think you, Sir?"), Cibber describes marriage with reference to eco-
nomic facts, hints (through the verb committed) his view of it as crime
or misdemeanor, suggests by the qualifier "as I then thought" the pos-
sibility that it was a mistake, but treats it entirely as one exploit (or
"Madness") among his many, never acknowledging that it involves a
relationship. He mentions his wife once again, in a sentence that Pope
quotes without comment as a footnote to The Dunciad: "my Muse,
and my Spouse were equally prolifick; . . . the one was seldom the
Mother of a Child, but in the same Year the other made me the Father
of a Play: I think we had a Dozen of each Sort between us; of both
which kinds, some died in their Infancy, and near an equal Number of
each were alive, when I quitted the Theatre" (p. 217). Indeed, the
statement comments upon itself. It also constitutes Cibber's only refer-
ence to his children, those undependable productions. 11 The Apology
contains no accounts of friendship: only of business alliances. Cibber's
ironies deny human fellowship.

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 Samuel Richardson, Colley Cibber

Extreme vanity of course implies extreme isolation. Only his self

seems real to Cibber; others comment on, applaud, or reflect it. Rela-
tionships embarrass him. His omission of marriage, fatherhood, or
friendship as subject matter may suggest the high cost of his ruling
passion and qualify his effort to claim it as a wellspring of virtue.
O r it may suggest the high cost of commitment to story, with its
simplifying principles of unity and coherence. Steven Marcus, writing
about Freud's case histories, stresses the analyst's concern with his
patients' inability "to tell a coherent story of their lives." 12 Freud in
fact implies, Marcus argues, "that a coherent story is in some manner
connected with mental health . . . and this in turn implies assumptions
of the broadest and deepest kind about both the nature of coherence
and the form and structure of human life. On this reading, human life
is, ideally, a connected and coherent story, with all the details in
proper place, and with everything (or as close to everything as is prac-
tically possible) accounted for, in its proper causal or other sequence.
And inversely illness amounts, at least in part, to suffering from an in-
coherent story or an inadequate narrative account of oneself" (p. 92).
Colley Cibber lived in many respects an incoherent life: that fact
emerges clearly from his narrative of himself. Trying to create from it
"a connected and coherent story, with all the details in proper place,"
he demonstrates that although his life may not be such a story, he can
yet tell this kind of story about it, denying the disorder of actuality.
For Cibber as for Freud, turning life into story provides a means to
"account for" everything. And the ordering principle he discovered
for his narrative is in effect—paradoxically—the principle of incoher-
ence. Everything about him can be explained, he insists, by his immer-
sion in his own "follies" or "giddiness" or "inconsistency." The persis-
tence of his eccentricities marks him as "all of a piece." "The Part I
have acted in real Life, shall be all of a piece . . . I will not go out of my
Character, by straining to be wiser than I can be, or by being more
affectedly pensive than I need be; . . . I can no more put off my Follies,
than my Skin" (p. 17). What, exactly, do these follies comprise? We
never find out. Cibber does not describe himself in any detail as a fool-
ish man or attempt to define his eccentricities; he simply concedes—
indeed, boasts—the ridiculous conduct of which he has been accused.
The world, recognizing his folly, recognizes him, and his craving for
notice, as he makes increasingly clear, allows few discriminations.
So he offers reflections on the Glorious Revolution, exposing his

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 Imagining a Self

"Political Notions," declaring that he does not care "how wise, or

weak they may have shewn me," since even if he has gone far beyond
his depth, "I still flatter my self, that I have kept a simple, honest Head
above Water" (p. 57). "Simple indeed!" we imagine Pope remarking;
Cibber will not object. Nor does he mind being a blockhead: "A Block-
head is not always an unhappy Fellow," and those who claim wisdom
are probably no wiser than he (p. 238). Accused of plagiarism, he in
effect grants the truth of the accusation, then justifies his procedure as
bringing together for the enjoyment of the public the best parts of for-
gotten works (pp. 274-5). He describes himself as a trimmer, success-
fully supporting both his partners in contradictory positions, then
applauds his own dexterity in thus treading a tightrope (p. 362). He
gives an account of his gratuitous intervention in his partner's affairs,
which he sums up as revealing his "insolent interposing honesty" (p.
374). An infinite impulse toward self-justification drives his narrative.
Cibber's trivializing tone about his own plagiarism, expediency,
and deceitfulness duplicates the emotional atmosphere of his refer-
ences to his marriage and to his wife's childbearing. Reducing all his
actions to evidence of the folly that he insistently glorifies, he achieves
his eccentric narrative unity at the cost of emotional variety and
depth. The logic and consistency of his story appear to testify to psy-
chic sickness rather than health, as the need to account for everything
takes precedence over the need to respond richly or to remember au-
thentic response.13 But the problem, from a literary point of view, is
not Cibber's putative psychic stability but how his characteristic de-
fense mechanism of trivialization generates the special, powerful effect
of his autobiography. Even Dr. Johnson, contemptuous of Cibber as
conversationalist and as poet but granting him competence as a play-
wright ("but that was his trade"), considered the Apology "very well
done, to be sure," an example of the validity of Pope's couplet,

Each might his several province well command,

Would all but stoop to what they understand.14

Yet the sense in which Cibber may be said to "understand" his life is
surely very limited. And it was also Johnson who commented, "The
value of every story depends on its being true. A story is a picture
either of an individual or of human nature in general. If it be false, it is
a picture of nothing."15 It is probably false of Cibber to imply that he

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values his plays and his children at the same level or that his marriage
was only a youthful exploit; to claim pride in his plagiarism must be
far from the whole truth; his narrative omissions are effectively falsifi-
cations. His story, full of poses, nonetheless creates an overwhelming
effect of authenticity.
Partly this effect derives from that unusual self-awareness as a
writer that provided the starting point of our discussion, the self-
consciousness Cibber shares with Pamela but elaborates even more
than she. Relating his experience as actor, playwright, and manager,
he also repeatedly calls attention to the wonder of his current role as
man writing. He understands his book as a process, revealing his na-
ture as well as some of his problems. At stake in her writing, for Pam-
ela, is her position in the world; her writing may make things happen
by affecting others' opinions. For Cibber, the question of position
depends solely on how he is perceived: position and reputation are, in
effect, identical, and he believes himself to control both through his
narrative, though the narrative also repeatedly eludes his control—or
so he claims. "I find," he reports ruefully, "that Persons, perhaps of
colder Imaginations, are allowed to write better than myself. When-
ever I speak of anything that highly delights me, I find it very difficult
to keep my Words within the Bounds of Common Sense: Even when I
write too, the same Failing will sometimes get the better of me" (p. 44).
Since nothing delights him more highly than himself, the dangers of
self-depiction are manifest, and the reader inevitably feels the precari-
ousness of all "Bounds" when Cibber allows himself full expressive-
ness. The author particularly regrets the boundaries of factuality.
Beginning to apologize for his "familiar Stile of talking"—he has been
comparing the affairs of the theater with those of the Court—he grad-
ually becomes indignant that anyone should object to it, since it em-
bodies his only means of transforming restrictive facts. He feels "tied
down . . . to the Veracity of an Historian, whose Facts cannot be sup-
posed, like those in a Romance, to be in the Choice of the Author, to
make them more marvellous, by Invention" (p. 462). In an unusually
eloquent sequence, he digresses from his narrative to insist on the im-
portance of unified action to the aspiring playwright (p. 284). But he
would resent imposition of any corresponding principle on his own
prose. A few pages later, he admits (as he has admitted several times
before) his own tendency toward digression. If the reader too has time

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on his hands, he concludes, he might as well read digressions as any-

thing else. On the other hand—"as I have no Objection to Method,
when it is not troublesome, I return to my Subject" (p. 287).
One thinks uneasily of the Hack-persona of Swift's Tale of a Tub,
for whom digression exemplifies the instability of all commitments
and the impossibility of linguistic control. But in fact digression em-
bodies Cibber's ultimate commitment: to the eccentricity of his "fol-
lies," the center of his self-image. The unity essential to the dramatist
cannot supply for this autobiographer a literary resource; "Bounds"
threaten the very selfhood that his Apology triumphantly asserts. The
book's organization, or apparent lack of organization, enables Cibber
to enlarge the limits of the personal. Much of his book concerns its
author only insofar as he is the narrator of events. Sometimes the
Apology provides a history of Colley Cibber; often it digresses into a
theatrical history of his time. Cibber reports the careers, stage man-
nerisms, and personalities of actors and actresses connected with him
by professional association or merely by the fact that he has seen them
act; he reports in excruciating detail the intricate history of Drury
Lane and the other theaters.
One may, of course, understand this technique as epitomizing the
random operation of Cibber's vanity. As he openly confesses, a writer
may receive narcissistic gratification simply from being allowed to
hold forth without interruption. Only the opportunity for self-expres-
sion, not the subject, matters. In fact, though, Cibber's accounts of
other people provide quite specific opportunities for the expression of
vanity. His autobiography provides possibilities of self-display analo-
gous to those he finds in stage acting, but it also supplies counterparts
to the resources of the theatrical manager—the profession at which,
his own account suggests, he feels most unambiguously successful.
But the management of the Drury Lane theater involves less power
than Cibber's management, in the Apology, of the theatrical history
of his time. Here he can display his magnanimity, his excellent mem-
ory, and his critical acumen. He can determine what other people will
think about his world, and about actors now dead. Knowing more
than the reader is likely to know from direct experience, he can choose
how to exercise his special power of showing the past. Awareness of
power and deep satisfaction in the awareness appear everywhere in
Cibber's history. If he reports the financial situation of actors in the
late seventeenth century, he immediately compares it with the im-

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proved present arrangement brought about by his own managerial

efforts (p. 81). He thus declares his mastery of events, his right to
judge the past, and his authority as historian and critic. Telling his
readers about Mrs. Oldfield's theatrical career, he stresses the impact
of his opinion on her (p. 248); he wants his readers to believe in the
almost magical force of his judgments, which have had their impact in
the theatrical world and whose power he now tries to extend. His van-
ity displays itself most emphatically in his attempt to incorporate the
history of the stage into the story of himself.
Vanity creates its own order, subordinating everything to the self,
valuing everything by the self, and automatically justifying all literary
inclusions, in any arrangement, in relation to the individual sensibil-
ity. The absorbing action of Dulness in the revised Dunciad, where
Pope has replaced Theobald with Cibber as hero, is precisely reflected
in the Apology:

None want a place, for all their Centre found,

Hung to the Goddess, and coher'd around . . .
The gath'ring number, as it moves along,
Involves a vast involuntary throng,
Who gently drawn, and struggling less and less,
Roll in her Vortex, and her pow'r confess.
( The Dunciad, IV, 77-78, 81-84)
Cibber's vortex of vanity, his Apology demonstrates, also drew to
itself conglomerate material. He shows by his narrative procedure
how vanity, converting itself to solipsism, generates literary energy.
He does not himself make any connection between his "ruling pas-
sion" and his way of writing, though he links his vanity with the fact of
his writing. But his digressions, his inclusions and omissions, all re-
flect the operations of the enormous vanity that exposes as well as cre-
ates Cibber's emotional shallowness, his reductiveness, and his dis-
honesties and that drives and controls his narrative by a single prin-
ciple: the insistence on absorbing all experience into the self. Gibbon
wishes to be a great historian; Boswell, to be a great man; Cibber
wishes only to incorporate as much as possible, thus substantiating his
self-esteem.
The Apology amounts to a great act of incorporation, of self-
aggrandizement, and finally of self-creation. Colley Cibber emerges as
a man not because of what he feels, or does, or is, but because of what
he tells. His self-awareness as writer calls attention to the importance

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 Imagining a Self

of his telling and of the mental operations that produce it: operations
of memory and of imagination. "Since, at my time of Day, our best
Possessions are but Ease, and Quiet, I must be content, if I will have
Sallies of Pleasure, to take up with those only, that are to be found in
Imagination . . . Let the Grave, and Great contemn, or yawn at these
low Conceits [comparisons of himself with Brutus], but let me be
happy, in the Enjoyment of them! To this Hour my Memory runs o'er
that pleasing Prospect of Life past, with little less Delight, than when I
was first, in the real Possession of it" (p. 366). The operations of the
self-enlarging imagination are here set consciously before the "good-
natur'd Reader" Cibber fantasizes; if that reader can accept grandiose
metaphors as authentic representations of emotion, he can participate
in the writer's imaginative pleasure. The limitations of history yield to
the fanciful expansions of story.
That story, asserting the teller's importance, in fact creates the im-
portance it declares—a statement that might be applied with equal
accuracy to Pamela. Pamela makes herself a heroine by presenting
herself as one; Cibber, his perception dependent on his assertion,
maintains the significance of his self-pleasing memory, his self-expand-
ing imagination, his self-indulgent digressiveness, and his self-impor-
tant versions of history, imposing his ego until the reader takes him
seriously, if only for the massiveness of his self-assertion. Vanity thus
supplies, after all, a force to integrate the apparent disparities of an
ostensibly artless narrative.

Pamela's vanity, less freely self-acknowledged, becomes a matter

for comment in the continuation of Richardson's original novel, where
in a long set piece Mr. B. offers his wife a point by point physical com-
parison between Pamela and the titled lady with whom Mr. B. has
been flirting. Pamela, on the whole, appears to come out ahead in her
husband's evaluation of female beauty. When he digresses from eye-
brows and foreheads to events, she feels displeased. "I will own to
you, Madam," she confesses to her correspondent, "that my Vanity,
in this Comparison, was too much soothed, not to wish to hear how it
was carried on." Her husband seizes on this evidence of moral weak-
ness, but Pamela converts her vanity into evidence of her virtue by a
rapid process of redefinition. "All is owing, Sir, to the Pride I take in
your Opinion. I care not how indifferent I appear in the Eyes of all the
World besides" (IV, 225). In fact, Pamela's obsession with how she

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 Samuel Richardson, Colley Cibber

appears in the eyes of the world has dominated the preceding

narrative. For her almost as literally as for Cibber, life consists largely
of a series of performances before an audience, although for her the
stakes are higher. In a long sequence of scenes Pamela enacts her vir-
tue. When, in an early communication to her parents, she foresees
that Mr. B. "may be ashamed of his Part; I not of mine" (I, 17), we
already understand that the two antagonists not only "take part" in a
single action but that they, in effect, "take parts" in a drama struc-
tured according to rules tacitly understood by both participants. In
the vivid confrontation between Pamela and Lady Davers, the aristo-
crat proclaims, "I'll Warrant, my little Dear has topp'd her Part, and
paraded it like any real Wife; and so mimicks still the Condition!" (II,
204). By this time Pamela has played her part so expertly that she has
justified her elevation in social status; the ability to play out an elabo-
rate drama of "honour" shows her to be a native aristocrat.
Pamela's awareness of audience has not escaped the notice of critics.
Morris Golden, who has investigated it most fully, links it with the
"frequent examples of the peculiar need for an audience by most char-
acters in most actions" in the novel. 16 He adds that "Pamela most con-
sciously acts her role before an audience which is at times conscious of
its own role" (p. 160), and cites several examples of the carefully
staged scenes characteristic of Pamela. Richardson himself obviously
knew what he was doing; theatrical allusions run through his novels.
George Sherburn has remarked that his "characters speak as much the
language of the stage as they do that of real life." 17 An "applauding
multitude" attends Harriet Byron's wedding in Sir Charles Grandi-
son.1' And in Pamela II, Mr. B., after stage-managing a display of
parental and grandparental fondness for his infant, turns to an admir-
ing witness to inquire, "Do you often, my dear Miss Damford, see
Scenes wrought up by the Poets to this moving Height?—Here we
behold and admire that noble Simplicity, in which Nature always tri-
umphs over her Hand-maid Art!" (IV, 132). But neither Richardson
nor any of his commentators has spelled out the serious implications
of such pervasive theatricality. Behind Pamela's consciousness of her
effect on others, which has made many critics see her as hypocritical
or self-serving, lies a well-developed and well-founded sense of the
power of external judgment. Beyond other judgments, of course,
looms that of God, whose "All-seeing Eye" allows nothing to be hid
from it (I, 161). Mortal eyes, almost equally alert, on the whole per-

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ceive different aspects of reality. Pamela testifies the power of public

opinion. The heroine knows that her chastity represents a viable re-
source only inasmuch as its value is externally affirmed (although, of
course, it remains a virtue even in private). She demands such affirma-
tion: not only must Mr. B. avoid violating her virtue; he must ac-
knowledge its importance. The demand epitomizes her self-respect—
not, as Fielding would have it, her hypocrisy.
The novel's central struggle focuses on manipulation of language,
involving the different import of words for various users and hearers
of them. If Pamela can win her pursuer over to her version of what
key terms mean, she will have won her battle for self-preservation and
self-advancement. She triumphs largely by quarreling. The various
members of the visible audience—Mrs. Jervis, Mrs. Jewkes, the neigh-
bors in Lincolnshire, Lady Davers—testify their alignment by their
vocabularies. Pamela perceives (and seems to perceive rightly) a
world devoid of neutrality. Everyone is watching, and everyone is
either on her side or against her. Playing the humble and virtuous
though aristocratically gifted maiden for all she is worth, Pamela re-
lies heavily on a language of value that she shares with her aristocratic
tormentors. Its key term is honor. The action of Pamela derives from
the characters' efforts to preserve or to enlarge individual honor, and
their disputes about what the word means are central to the drama.
Mr. B. and Pamela share an almost obsessive concern with honor, a
term embodying different realities for each. Lady Davers cares about
family honor; Pamela's parents, about personal honor. Even the hor-
rific Mrs. Jewkes, like the dreadful Swiss Colbrand, has a good-Nazi
notion of honorable, hence unquestioning, service to a master. The
happy ending demonstrates how everyone can retain his or her indi-
vidual sense of honor without loss, Mr. B.'s yielding to Pamela's sys-
tem of values counterbalanced by her movement in his direction. In
Pamela II, he ostentatiously relinquishes the idea of honor altogether,
converted by his wife to true Christianity (IV, 377). Of course by this
time Pamela too has given up talking so much about her honor.
The meanings of honor, according to the O.E.D., include: (1) "High
esteem, deferential admiration"; (2) "Glory, fame, credit, good
name"; (3) "Nobleness of mind"; (4) "Chastity, purity"; (5) "Dignity,
distinction." Meanings 3 and 4 refer to internal qualities; the other
three allude to external judgments of quality or worth. Pamela's high
regard for her honor ostensibly concerns her chastity and her essential

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nobleness, in contrast to Mr. B.'s preoccupation with his dignity and

his social role. His honor, it seems at the outset, almost demands the
violation of hers.
Terms of moral value, from a master's point of view, have little
meaning in relation to social inferiors. When Mrs. Jervis calls Pamela
"innocent," Mr. B. mocks her use of such words as innocent and virtu-
ous. "Well, Mrs. Jervis, you abound with your Epithets! but I take her
to be an artful young Baggage; and had I a young handsome Butler or
Steward, she'd soon make her Market of one of them, if she thought it
worth while to snap at him for a Husband" (I, 26). Mr. B. here articu-
lates precisely the view of Pamela held by Fielding and many later crit-
ics: that her apparent innocence serves as a tactic for the "artful young
Baggage" to "make her Market" of the most economically advanta-
geous candidate for husband to come her way. Of course, the reader
who continues to see Pamela's artfulness as more significant than her
virtue will perceive the irony of Mr. B.'s statement. Understanding so
clearly exactly what he has to deal with, he yet falls into the trap he
sees her preparing for some handsome butler or steward, crucially
mistaken in underestimating Pamela's ambition. But one may alterna-
tively believe his mistake more fundamental—as he himself comes to
think, learning to value Pamela's innocence—and admire Richard-
son's fictional daring in spelling out so explicitly the precise view he
then refutes. It can be argued that Pamela's artfulness is, in fact, an
integral part of her virtue.
Quarrelsome Pamela takes Mr. B.'s language more seriously than
he takes it himself. He soon finds her an "Equivocator" (I, 29), partly
because she insists on calling attention to what he has said rather than
dealing directly with what he means. When he forgets himself so far as
to utter the word damn, she complains to her parents, concluding
"that when a Person will do wicked Things, it is no Wonder he will
speak wicked Words" (I, 43). The asserted connection between words
and deeds works entirely to Pamela's advantage. Persisting in main-
taining it, she proclaims that her virtue in action makes her a better
user of language than her pursuer. "Alack-a-day! what a World we
live in! for it is grown more a Wonder, that the Men are resisted, than
that the Women comply. This, I suppose, makes me such a Sauce-box,
and Bold-face, and a Creature; and all because I won't be a Sauce-box
and Bold-face indeed" (I, 90). Her concept of honor, she is the first to
point out, differs significantly from her master's, and the difference

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derives partly from her awareness of the intimate connection between

vocabulary and action.
In a dialogue with Mrs. Jewkes, Pamela broaches the subject of
honor. "Why, said she, what can you doubt, when my Master himself
assures you of his Honour? . . . But, said I, what do you call Honour?
—Why, said she, what does he call Honour, think you?—Ruin!
Shame! Disgrace! said I, I fear.— Pho, pho! said she; if you have any
Doubt about it, he can best explain his own Meaning" (I, 163). Mrs.
Jewkes, who concerns herself with actions rather than words, believes
that Pamela's regard for language reflects her aversion to reality. But
Pamela continues to see language as her vital resource: if she can ex-
pose the discrepancy between B.'s words and his actions, she believes,
she can defeat him.
Mr. B. does not lack weapons in the battle of language. One of his
aggressive letters charges Pamela with having thrown herself upon
Mr. Williams. "As therefore you would place no Confidence in me,"
he concludes, "my Honour owes you nothing" (I, 223). He here claims
the significance of his own notion of honor as derived from the respect
and admiration of others. Pamela attempts repeatedly to trap him in
the paradox that he demands her wickedness to support his honor.
Now he invokes another paradox to defeat her; by failing to respect
him she denies his honor and thus obviates any obligation it might
place upon him. She tries to refute his argument by repeating her own:
"But, it seems, His Honour owes me nothing\ So he tells me in his Let-
ter. And Why? Because I am willing to keep mine" (I, 245). But she
recognizes the social sanctions that support his view. Her alertness to
the possibilities of language, however, enables her to use even his so-
cial advantage to her own ends. Acknowledging that his honor must
forbid any alliance with her, she resorts to an extravagant rhetoric of
humility to insist on the necessary distance between them—precisely
the distance that her master is attempting to breach. "Your Honour,
well I know, would not let you stoop to so mean and so unworthy a
Slave, as the poor Pamela: All I desire is, to be permitted to return to
my native Meanness, unviolated" (I, 261). If he wants respect he shall
have it with a vengeance. Pamela reiterates references to his honor to
the point of extreme tedium. She withdraws from her earlier claims of
her own: "My Honesty (I am poor and lowly, and am not intitled to
call it Honour) was in Danger" (I, 298). Her "lowliness," as she uses it,
becomes a defensive resource, no index of weakness. She demands,

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explicitly and implicitly, that Mr. B. contemplate what his honor

really means. When he discovers how to reconcile his notion of honor
as appearance with hers of honor as virtue, he can marry her. Pamela
explains to her parents that all her previous doubts derived from her
worry about his honor (II, 8). Mr. B., on the other hand, begins boast-
ing that his honor and "Purity" equal Pamela's (II, 128); he soon as-
sumes a comfortable position as her moral instructor. Once recon-
ciled, the two notions of honor readily reinforce one another.
To speak of the conflict between Pamela and Mr. B. as one about
language ignores the serious questions of value involved. It may use-
fully suggest, however, the possibility that those clashes of value are
less serious than they at first appear. The autobiographies of the eight-
eenth century, except for the special case of spiritual autobiographies,
conspicuously deny—as I have already argued—the importance of
fundamental change in human life. David Hume, Edward Gibbon,
Colley Cibber, all use their records of themselves to affirm the neces-
sity of their careers. They see in their childhoods, inasmuch as they
consider their childhoods at all, omens of what they are to become;
they seek everywhere in their pasts the signs that they have turned
into historian or actor or philosopher by destiny rather than accident.
The spiritual autobiographer must invoke God to account for change;
only by the operations of divine grace does a man radically shift direc-
tion. Even a man so eager to change as Boswell, determined to make
himself over after some model, demonstrates in the succession of his
journals a sad recognition that he is forever trapped in a single self.
Much may happen to him, much happens within him, but he was al-
ways intended, as his father had always maintained, to be a Scots law-
yer. He could not turn into Dr. Johnson or the actor West Digges,
however ardently he tried.
The patterns of early novels resemble those of autobiography in
nothing so much as in this. But the emphasis on inner stability often
implies awareness of the possibility and value of manipulating appear-
ances. Mr. B. and his bride share from the beginning their assumption
that the judgment of "the world" matters enormously. Like Cibber,
like all humanity, they yearn for applause, but they also have a lively
sense of the danger, and the probability, that the world will judge
them harshly. When Mr. B. has only begun his pursuit of her, Pamela,
writing to her parents, comments, "O how poor and mean must those
Actions be, and how little must they make the best of Gentlemen look,

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when they offer such things as are unworthy of themselves" (I, 20).
Her concern with how her actions and his will make them look persists
and ramifies throughout her adventures. In the crucial garden scene
where Mr. B., like the hero of the Wife of Bath's tale, puts mastery in
Pamela's hands, appealing to her to tell him what he ought to do, she
finally responds, "As to my poor Thoughts, of what you ought to do,
I must needs say, that, indeed, I think you ought to regard the World's
Opinion, and avoid doing anything disgraceful to your Birth and For-
tune" (I, 293). Predictably, her awareness of the importance of "the
World's Opinion" and of what is owing to his "Birth and Fortune"
intensifies Mr. B.'s conviction that she is the woman for him. But
Pamela must face another test before she can win him. As the result of
a misunderstanding, he sends her back to her parents, where she has
intensely wished to go. Then he changes his mind, appealing to her to
return voluntarily to him. For the first time she has a real choice of
action, not merely of resistance or passivity; she must literally decide
her direction, knowing the penalties of deciding wrong. She formu-
lates her dilemma as she has formulated his, in terms of the world's
opinion. Considering the alternatives, she thinks it might "look as if I
was pre-possess'd, as he calls it, if I don't oblige him; and as if it was a
silly Female Piece of Pride to make him follow me to my Father's; and
as if I would use him hardly in my Turn, for his having used me ill in
his." Always as if: the question is not what an action might mean, but
how it would look. If she does "oblige him" and he takes advantage of
her, she will be in serious straits. With an uncharacteristic bit of irony,
reflecting her genuine desperation, Pamela remarks, "to be sure, the
World, the wise World, that never is wrong itself, judges always by
Events. And if he should use me ill, then I shall be blamed for trusting
him" (II, 14). She must make her decision before the event, assessing
the likely denouement by her understanding of her character and her
wooer's and the ways that circumstance may affect both. And despite
her irony at the wise world's expense, she in fact shares its assumption
that the event justifies or condemns an action. If her return had meant
her seduction, she would have blamed herself, as earlier she blamed
herself for being scared from escape by imaginary bulls.
The way in which the world judges the situation before the denoue-
ment depends largely on the "light" people are put in, the "eyes"
through which others see them. "The World," Mr. B. explains, "sees
not your Excellencies and Perfections; if it did, I should intirely stand

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acquitted by the severest Censurers" (II, 27). He worries about how

Pamela will endure the social ostracism that would follow her mar-
riage. With a return to her extravagant self-deprecatory rhetoric,
Pamela responds, "As to me, considering my lowly Estate, and little
Merit, even the Slights and Reflections of the Ladies, will be an Hon-
our to me" (II, 28). Mr. B. has just observed that he can endure any
reproach from her except "Doubts of my Honour." Pamela's repeti-
tion of the crucial noun in this context has perhaps inadvertent ironic
force: any notice, she says, seems honor to her. She now participates
fully in her lover's view that honor depends upon external recogni-
tion. At any rate, Pamela claims (and not for the last time), she cares
only about Mr. B.'s acceptance, not about the world.
References to light, eyes, and sight abound in this novel: a set of
allusions hinting at the enormous importance of appearance to all the
characters. Robert Alan Donovan has perceptively noted of Pamela
that "she is perfectly willing to move either up or down in the social
scale, but she insists always on having her status known and recog-
nized."19 But recognition is not readily to be achieved—or, more spe-
cifically, recognition by one person does not necessarily imply recog-
nition by society at large. Pamela cannily concerns herself mainly
with Mr. B.'s perceptions of her. "I see with different Eyes from other
People," he remarks early in the novel, claiming that he finds Pamela
less pretty than others think her (I, 58). By the novel's end, after a
neighbor has suggested that Pamela "eclipses" them all, "You are very
kind, Madam, said he, that you, and all my worthy Neighbours, see
with my Eyes" (II, 350). He sees more than he once did. Now the ques-
tion of Pamela's prettiness has receded; he perceives her internal and
external qualities as justifying her in the sight of the world, and with
some relief he resumes his position at ease in a community of his peers.
Pamela, repeatedly put on display, manifests various emotional
responses to this trying situation. On one such occasion, not long be-
fore her marriage, Mr. B. tells her that he has invited various guests to
dinner, having "promised them a Sight of my beloved Girl" (II, 41).
One of the young ladies has begged "it as a Favour, that they may see
you just as you are"—meaning, it seems, wearing her country garb.
Pamela, agreeing to appear thus, demurs that "your Goodness be-
holds your poor Servant in a Light greatly beyond her Merit! But it
must not be expected, that others, ladies especially, will look upon me
with your favourable Eyes" (II, 42). Ladies, she means specifically, are

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unlikely to be charmed by the rustic costume she has devised for her-
self.
When the neighbors actually appear for the anticipated social occa-
sion, "They all so gaz'd at me, that I could not look up; for I think it is
one of the Distinctions of Persons of Condition, and well-bred People,
to put bashful Bodies out of Countenance" (II, 60). Such socially di-
rected anger rarely manifests itself in Pamela's responses. In an earlier
episode, when Mrs. Jewkes ordered her to dress up for a visit from
Lady Darnford's daughters, she refused to obey, telling the house-
keeper "I would not be made a Shew of" (I, 247). But one who asks as
frequently as Pamela "in what Light must I appear to the World?" (I,
283) must acknowledge the world's right to look at her. Although she
resents the necessity of concerning herself with society's judgment of
her, considering that the idle rich will ignore her condemnation of
them, she also accepts the situation as a corollary of class distinctions
too binding to be challenged. (Pamela, of course, does challenge the
notion of inevitable correlation between class and worth, but not the
necessity of maintaining distinctions. Indeed, she repeatedly, and
apparently sincerely, reproaches her master for violating them by his
sexual overtures.)
In observing that Mr. B. perceives her in a flattering light that his
neighbors are unlikely to share, Pamela is not merely thinking about
her clothes. She hints that Mr. B. recognizes her inner worth, whereas
the ladies will be more likely to judge by external measures. The rela-
tion between clothing and true value creates one of the novel's sub-
themes. Carey Mcintosh has made some penetrating observations
about the frequent allusions to clothing in Pamela, pointing out the
connections between apparel and sexual attractiveness (the descrip-
tions of people dressing and undressing are particularly relevant to
this point) and the use of clothing as an indicator of social class. 20 The
inordinate focus on what people wear and what they own also bears
significantly on the whole question of appearance. Costumes define
roles. When Mr. B. wants to impress Pamela, he demands that she
come look at him in his court apparel (I, 86). When she wants to im-
press him, she dons her carefully calculated country outfit, which he
refers to as a "Disguise" (I, 70), provoking her to the claim that she has
"been in Disguise indeed" ever since she has lived in his house (I, 71).
She looks out the window in Lincolnshire to see him "charmingly
dress'd." "To be sure," she reflects, "he is a handsome fine Gentleman"

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—adding hastily, "What Pity his Heart is not as good as his Appear-
ance!" (I, 268). Pamela's most significant claim for herself, which she
never makes aloud but allows others to make for her, is that her at-
tractive appearance reflects inner virtue.
When Mr. B. spells out his dishonorable proposals to Pamela, he
stresses fine clothes and jewels as a reward for compliance. She rejects
his overtures contemptuously: "Fine Cloaths, Sir, become not me; nor
have I any Ambition to wear them. I have greater Pride in my Poverty
and Meanness, than I should have in Dress and Finery" (I, 259). Her
best jewel, she continues predictably, is her virtue. His honor forbids
his stooping so low as Pamela (I, 261); as for her, "I am also above
making an Exchange of my Honesty for all the Riches of the Indies.
When I come to be proud and vain of gaudy Apparel, and outside Fin-
ery; then (which, I hope, will never be) may I rest my principal Good
in such vain Trinkets, and despise for them the more solid Ornaments
of a good Fame and a Chastity inviolate!" (I, 262). The unexception-
able rectitude of that position is echoed subsequently by the reformed
Mr. Β. (II, 98). In fact outward appearance means a great deal to Mr.
B. and to his bride and, apparently, to their creator. Pamela's recur-
rent dilemmas about what to wear involve more than the ambiguities
of her social position. In choosing a costume, as in telling a story, she
asserts herself. "I won't, I think, change my Garb," Pamela reflects
after her voluntary return to her master. "Should I do it, it would look
as if I would be nearer on a Level with him: And yet, should I not, it
may be thought a Disgrace to him?" (II, 24). Another version of the
problem, presented in her observations to Mr. B. on their approaching
marriage: "But, as I know, that every Slight to me, if I come to be so
happy, will be, in some measure, a Slight to you, I will beg of you,
Sir, not to let me go very fine in Dress; but appear only so, as that you
may not be asham'd of it, after the Honour I shall have of being call'd
by your worthy Name: For well I know, Sir, that nothing so much
excites the Envy of my own Sex, as seeing a Person set above them in
Appearance, and in Dress" (II, 31). One must not claim by appearance
more than one can justify in action. Yet to fail to demand sufficient
attention from the world also involves danger. After their marriage,
Mr. B. commands Pamela "not to mind, as you once proposed, what
other Ladies will say; but to appear as my Wife ought to do. Else it
will look as if what you thought of, as a Means to avoid the Envy of
others of your Sex, was a wilful Slight in me, which, I hope, I never

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shall be guilty of; and I will shew the World, that I value you as I
ought, and as if I had marry'd the first Fortune in the Kingdom" (II,
158). Pamela and Mr. B. share the same concern with slights and with
what and how they show the world. The characters' complex manipu-
lation of appearances produces the happy ending, with Pamela con-
tent to be her master's possession. She "shews the World" something
about him, finally, more than about herself; on the next to the last
page of the novel she appears "dressed out"—as if without her own
volition—"only to be admired" (II, 359). She no longer needs to make
her own subtle determinations about proper appearances but allows
her importance to be asserted for her by her dress.
Yet, of course, the novel values—as Pamela herself values—some
ideal of sincerity: "the strict correspondence of internal state and ex-
ternal action, stated intention and actual intention, appearance and
reality . . . an ideal of behavior, complex and coherent, which tran-
scends social status and lends integrity to every individual who prac-
tises it." 2 1 And indeed the heroine's constant public performance is
designed precisely to attest her "sincerity": this virtue she claims for
her writing and for the self that writing reflects. When most artful,
Pamela is often most "sincere," her artifice authoritatively demon-
strating her authenticity. "Reality" matters more than "appearance,"
but only through the successful manipulation of appearances can real-
ity be recognized.
By the novel's ending, everyone admires Pamela: her husband, her
husband's illegitimate daughter, his sister, his neighbors, the local par-
son, the servants: everyone. A fictional character, she has achieved
the apotheosis attainable only in fiction, the blissful reception of uni-
versal applause that Cibber can only fantasize. To be sure, she has
braved temporary disapproval from various quarters but with unwa-
vering proclamations of her own integrity as her motivating force.
Her goodness creates her triumph.

Fielding describes Cibber's Apology as a work that, dealing "in

Male-Virtue, was written by the great Person himself, who lived the
Life he hath recorded, and is by many thought to have lived such a
Life only in order to write it." 22 Affectation implies audience. The
meaning of writing about the self, both Cibber and Pamela suggest,
involves the presentation of the individual to an audience both imag-
ined and literal—the two by no means necessarily identical. What

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audience does the autobiographer imagine? Gibbon, in his series of

false starts, seems to be explaining himself to his father; Mrs. Thrale,
with one eye on posterity, yet wishes above all to justify herself to her
mother; Fanny Burney, defining "nobody" as her reader, asserts for
her own benefit the interest of her experience. David Hume, dying,
conjures up an imaginary readership of his peers. Tristram, imaginary
autobiographer, fancies an audience alternately hostile and sympa-
thetic, representing always a potential challenge to the writer. Colley
Cibber, too, speaks repeatedly of his readers, engages in fanciful dia-
logue with them, and makes of his Apology a drama of relationship
between self and audience. Not that his audience is clearly defined:
hence its treacherous potential. Heterogeneous, unpredictable, as
eager to damn as to praise, it resembles the miscellaneous crowd that
might attend a play. The writer, like an actor—he is, after all, an
actor—ambivalently recognizes his spectators as a source both of dan-
ger and reward.
Writing of his early career, Cibber justifies acting as a profession on
various tenuous grounds, concluding with a tribute to the wonder "of
Publick Applause, which, when truly merited, is, perhaps, one of the
most agreeable Gratifications that venial Vanity can feel" (p. 73).
When the young actor wins his first success, as the chaplain in Ot-
way's The Orphan, he summarizes, "Here was the first Applause I
ever receiv'd, which, you may be sure, made my Heart leap with a
higher Joy, than may be necessary to describe" (p. 149). He remem-
bers the exact sound and sequence of an audience's expressed approval
(p. 169), and that approval fully compensated, in his mind, for finan-
cial insufficiency.
Yet he cannot altogether trust it. "Applause," he points out, "does
not always stay for, nor always follow intrinsick Merit; Applause will
frequently open, like a young Hound, upon a wrong Scent; and the
Majority of Auditors, you know, are generally compos'd of Babblers,
that are profuse of their Voices, before there is any thing on foot, that
calls for them" (pp. 180-81). In retrospect, Cibber believes his attempt-
ing to perfect his powers as a tragedian was a hopeless task, for the
public bases its judgment on superficial criteria, valuing a strong voice
(which Cibber lacked) more than all the skills of the knowledgeable
and thoughtful actor (p. 180). The public, he comes to believe, is inter-
ested only in decadence and evil. It prefers to hear of a man's defects
rather than his virtues; those who find character assassination "de-

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 Imagining a Self

lightful" may "know how to please the World better" than Cibber (p.
407).
By such logic the writer's, and the actor's, failures become indices of
success. When he wins applause, approval suggests his true merit; his
failure to win it also demonstrates his quality. Self-applause, a re-
source always at his disposal, remains a powerful defense, declaring
his superiority of judgment to those so misguided as to damn and hoot
his productions. Self-righteousness often proves as sweet as applause.
An actor, playwright, and theater manager, Cibber depended
throughout his career on public esteem for economic security; indeed,
for survival. Even apart from the fact that his Apology itself repre-
sents a transparent bid for esteem (as the title suggests, with its impli-
cit reference to audience), it is clear that the actor cannot salve wounds
to his pride simply by announcing their irrelevance. His dependence
on others traps him. In the autobiography he attempts to fight his way
out of his dilemma without fully acknowledging its existence. His
clearest formulations of his fundamental problem emerge through his
accounts of the only two childhood episodes that he relates.
Like many other eighteenth-century autobiographers, Cibber ap-
parently considers much of his youthful experience irrelevant to his
mature accomplishment. In the light of his destiny as poet laureate,
however, he tells of two early poetic efforts, his emphasis focused not
on literary impulse but on its public effects. His introduction to the
two schoolboy episodes suggests that they will concern themselves
with "Passions." "However little worth notice the Life of a School-boy
may be supposed to contain, yet, as the Passions of Men and Children
have much the same Motives and differ very little in their Effects, un-
less where the elder Experience may be able to conceal them: As there-
fore what arises from the Boy, may possibly be a Lesson to the Man, I
shall venture to relate a Fact, or two, that happen'd while I was still at
School" (pp. 25-26). At the death of Charles II, he explains, his school-
master commanded the students to produce a funeral oration. All
refused except Cibber, who, "ever giddily forward, and thoughtless of
Consequence," produced an effusion about the dead king's "Affabil-
ity" (p. 27). When the other boys insisted upon their inability, the
master understood their reluctance as a mark of modesty rather than
idleness but rewarded Cibber's industry by setting him at the head of
the form. As a result, "I was so jeer'd, laugh'd at, and hated as a prag-
matical Bastard (Schoolboy Language) who had betray'd the whole

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 Samuel Richardson, Colley Cibber

Form, that scarce any of 'em wou'd keep me company . . . Notwith-

standing which, my Stupidity cou'd take no Warning from their Treat-
ment" (p. 28). Shortly afterwards, at the coronation of the new king,
the school petitioned for a holiday, which the master agreed to grant if
any of the boys would produce an English ode upon the occasion. Cib-
ber, in half an hour, wrote one, not very good, he confesses; "Yet bad
as it was, it serv'd to get the School a Play-day, and to make me not a
little vain upon it; which last Effect so disgusted my Play-fellows, that
they left me out of the Party 1 had most a mind to be of, in that Day's
Recreation. But their Ingratitude serv'd only to increase my Vanity;
for I consider'd them as so many beaten Tits, that had just had the
Mortification of seeing my Hack of a Pegasus come in before them"
(p. 29).
These two stories of social isolation and ostracism hint at a charac-
teristic set of "Passions" in the narrator. He explicitly blames himself
for giddiness, forwardness, thoughtlessness, stupidity, and bad writ-
ing. On the other hand, there can be no question about his pride in his
own skill at setting himself apart from his contemporaries by superior
daring and enterprise, if not genius. His Pegasus, hack though it may
be, wins the race. To be set apart constitutes, for Cibber as for others,
both glory and doom. Placed at the head of the form, he has achieved
distinction, but his schoolmates, suddenly become his "audience," jeer
and "hate" him, and many years later the autobiographer recollects
the exact language of their taunts. The emotional complexity of these
episodes and the mixture of tones in which Cibber relates them, imply
the entire problem of audience. The performer's passionate desire for
approval wars with his hatred of those who withhold it, and his sense
of superiority is at odds with a deeper conviction of inferiority. (His
schoolfellows mysteriously turn out to exemplify modesty in what he
perceives as their laziness, and his success makes him hated. Perhaps
he is inherently hateful?) His deep confusion of values stems from his
heavy reliance on the opinions of others. The same feelings persist
throughout his career, helping the autobiographer to express the hope-
less confusions of the performer's lot. One piece of "Stupidity" leads
the youth to the next. He has learned that he can write on command,
that he can win by writing (however bad) approval from his elders,
and that he can survive the disapproval of his peers. Surely he hopes
for the miracle that will convert their mockery to enthusiasm, and his
entire career seems foreshadowed in its beginnings. Aspiring desper-

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 Imagining a Self

ately to reduce the ambiguities of his situation by achieving some last-

ing applause that both he and the applauders will believe fully de-
served, he demonstrates how inevitably ambiguity persists.
The Apology itself, of course, constitutes one more performance,
more ambitious than schoolboy oration or ode but like them intended
to testify the writer's power and justify his "specialness." "You find by
the setting out of my History," he reminds his readers, "that I always
intended myself the Heroe of it" (p. 147). He is certainly a comic hero,
triumphing over adversity and achieving reconciliation in the end. But
Cibber's doubts about his readers interfere with his narrative. If he
irritates and confuses the reader by his blurred focus and shifting
intent, what more can he expect? His long experience of audiences has
generated his skepticism about the fidelity of readers.
Of course he knows of more than one kind of reader. He may hope
to appeal to special interests, as when he praises Henry Brett, remark-
ing, "If my taking this Liberty may find Pardon from several of his fair
Relations, still living, for whom I profess the utmost Respect, it will
give me but little Concern, tho' my critical Readers should think it all
Impertinence" (p. 302). But the thought of those generalized critical
readers rankles, whatever he tries to do with it. Sometimes, dreading
that he may have only a few readers, he comforts himself by recalling
his many spectators (p. 349). Sometimes, allowing himself a specific
fantasy about the response he may receive, he engages in debate with
an imagined reader—a device that Fielding and Sterne would adapt to
fictional purposes. "What's all this idle Prate, you may say, to the
matter in hand? Why, I say your Question is a little too critical; and if
you won't give an Author leave, now and then, to embellish his
Work, by a natural Reflexion, you are an ungentle Reader. But I have
done with my Digression, and return to our Theatre at Hampton-
Court, where I am not sure the Reader, be he ever so nice, will meet
with any thing more worth his notice: However, if he happens to read,
as I write, for want of something better to do, he will go on . . . " (p.
451). The characteristic mixture of self-doubt and belligerence marks
Cibber's constant attempt to ascertain what it is that the reader (the
audience, the other) wants. He may fancy that he shares assumptions
with his reader: "The very Word, Ode, I know, makes you smile
already; and so it does me" (p. 28). The word is a joke because of Cib-
ber's notoriously bad efforts as poet laureate. By participating in the
reader's smile, he declares his willingness to mock himself for the sake

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 Samuel Richardson, Colley Cibber

of approval, even though, with an immediate return to the aggressive

stance, he promptly denies complicity in the attacks on his own per-
formance. He begs the reader to tolerate him, and he hopes that the
reader will resemble him. His passion for applause and his uncertainty
about how best to win it emerge in almost all his many references and
addresses to his readers, which contrast sharply with, for example, the
equivalent authorial interpolations of Tom ]ones with their air of easy
mastery.
By Fielding's standards, as articulated in Joseph Andrews, Cibber
cares too much what others think of him, while failing to discriminate
clearly who those others are. "How artfully doth [Cibber], by insinu-
ating that he escaped being promoted to the highest Stations in
Church and State, teach us a Contempt of worldly Grandeur! how
strongly doth he inculcate an absolute Submission to our Superiors!
Lastly, how completely doth he arm us against so uneasy, so wretched
a Passion as the Fear of Shame; how clearly doth he expose the Empti-
ness and Vanity of that Fantom, Reputation!"23 The complaints focus
on Cibber's presentation of his relationships with others and on the
attitude toward public opinion implied by his narrative. Fielding
rightly perceives the self-justifying streak that makes Cibber interpret
all his deeds and experiences to his own advantage, unable to admit
failure, error, or serious weakness. Yet the Apology becomes absorb-
ing largely as a result of this psychic limitation and from the book's
specific delineation of the penalties and rewards of intense caring
about the opinion of others—penalties and rewards dramatized in the
autobiography's discursive form as well as its content.

Writing about the self—as opposed to merely thinking—establishes

at least a potential relationship to the outside world. Not even the ex-
treme possibility that the writer may comprise the sole audience for
his own production obviates the fact that writing is always display,
and even in reflexive display, the articulated differs from the unarticu-
lated self.
Display implies both danger and reward: such is a constant theme
of Pamela's writing and of Cibber's. Pamela, a performer in her writ-
ing, reveals the constant performance of her life. Colley Cibber per-
ceives his autobiography as the counterpart of the professional perfor-
mance by which he has earned his living. Both reveal the uneasiness
that attends the effort at self-justification. Both put their best face,

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 Imagining a Self

best foot, best self forward, with some cosmetic effort, some enlarging
effect of fantasy, and some smoothing out. The act of writing in itself
thus reminds one of the intimate connection between sincerity and
artifice in all forms of art.
But such writing as Pamela's and Cibber's, by persistently calling
attention to its own status as performance, implicitly invites the
reader to consider not only what the performance reveals—its sincer-
ity—but what it attempts to conceal. In Pamela II, for example,
Pamela's first quarrel with her husband concerns her proposal to nurse
her own child, an idea that he violently rejects on many grounds in-
cluding his "Fondness for her personal Graces" (IV, 13), which he fears
will be damaged by suckling. Yet Pamela, yielding to his will only
when admonished by her father to do so, invokes nature as her sanc-
tion for self-will.
One can readily understand Pamela's position as belonging to the
middle-class morality that Richardson through her so vigorously sup-
ports. She demonstrates her goodness both by her desire to be a loving
mother and by her eventual willingness to submit to her husband's
desires. Yet one can also discern a hidden drama here as elsewhere in
the novel. "The decision to employ a nurse," a historian writes about
eighteenth-century practice, "was as much as anything a sexual tri-
umph for the father." 24 Sexual intercourse was prohibited during nurs-
ing. The quarrel over Pamela's relation to her infant thus recalls her
earlier unwillingness to give herself sexually to Mr. B. Understanding
the dynamics of power in man-woman relationships, Pamela
endeavors to retain as much control as possible in her marriage by the
only means at her disposal: her reputation for and her performance of
undeviating virtue. Mr. B., in this instance as in earlier episodes, wins
his sexual triumph, but Pamela has once more dramatized her re-
sources for resistance. Lady Da vers anticipates that Pamela's letters to
her will compose "a kind of Narrative purposely designed to entertain
us here" (III, 40) and reports that "Lady Betty says, It is the best Story
she has heard" (III, 31). Displaying her virtue through entertaining
narrative, winning her audience by her story, Pamela gratifies her
vanity and consolidates her power. And the narrative calls attention
always to the hidden purposes it serves.
Pamela's narrative allows us to perceive the hidden aggressiveness
beneath her apparent passivity; Cibber's reveals the weakness beneath
apparent strength. His bluster of self-aggrandizement and his perfor-

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 Samuel Richardson, Colley Cibber

mance of success imperfectly conceal the insecurity of his utter depen-

dency and his consequent inability to participate in genuine human
interchange. He admits sexual feeling, for example, in relation to the
Duchess of Marlborough, whom, as a young man, he once served at
table. He confesses that her beauty "struck me into a Regard that had
something softer than the most profound Respect in it" (p. 59); then he
belligerently justifies himself because he has kept such "impertinent"
thoughts secret for fifty years. The rather hostile apology generates in
him fresh assertiveness. He begins to speculate on the meaning of the
Duchess's undeviating good fortune. The paragraph concludes, "I
now return to our Military Affairs" (p. 60).
The sequence exemplifies the special flavor of Cibber's self-revela-
tion. It relates a single personal fact: he served a beautiful woman
wine and became infatuated with her beauty. (That fact takes on spe-
cial importance since the autobiography reports so little intimate rela-
tionship with women.) Then it deviates into observations on the
Duchess's career, reflections on what that career might signify, and a
conclusion implicitly apologizing for digressiveness. But observations,
reflections, and apologies—all part of the demonstration of authorial
savoir faire, intellectual quality, and sense of entitlement—reveal the
person behind them. The insistence of the demonstration and the con-
stant pressure toward self-justification suggest the vulnerability of the
man never unaware that someone else will read and judge what he
writes.
Both works create partial illusions of formlessness. Pamela appears
shaped by simple chronology; the exigencies of letter-writing and
journal-keeping involve repetition of pious sentiments, retelling of the
same events, and, at one point, the awkward intervention of the "edi-
tor" to narrate in his own voice happenings not plausibly reportable
by Pamela. The leisurely pace and spontaneous air of a story told in
her own words by a naïve young girl conceal the novelist's skillful
shaping. It comes as something of a shock to realize how consistently
the pursuit of honor and the awareness of audience have shaped the
sequence. With the atmosphere of random narrative, Pamela yet con-
tains nothing extraneous: every detail of vocabulary, of personal
response, and of action helps to sustain its psychic argument. The
Apology, too, achieves unity through frequent digression, free asso-
ciation, and vacillation between the public and private sphere. It
asserts the almost inevitable unity of an individual's account of him-

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 Imagining a Self

self and of every real story if not every life, with the singleness of pas-
sion triumphing over disorder.
And both works, finally, exemplify the same crucial function of
writing about the self: to demonstrate to an audience, real or ima-
gined, the integrity and significance of individual identity, and thus to
make that identity real. The drama of both lives is one of self-asser-
tion. For male and female character alike, to assert the self in writing
helps the writer to resist the psychic inroads of his or her experienced
powerlessness in a society that is felt as hostile. Writing creates the
vital illusion of power (however qualified) over an audience.

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 δ
Young Men's Fancies:
James Boswell, Henry Fielding

he series of texts we have examined imply with increasing em-

T phasis the participation of the act of writing—writing fiction or

fact—in the larger actions of living. Tristram, trying to win his
battle against death by recording it; the women writers, creating
through their fictions defensive fantasies against the restrictions of
their experience; Fanny Burney, reinforcing her avoidance of wrong
by converting writing itself into an exemplification of virtue; Pamela,
affirming her self's significance in endless words; Cibber, displaying
himself through language for one more audience: all insist that writing
partakes of the drama of individual experience. James Boswell and
Henry Fielding, vivid literary figures, investigate as well as embody
this phenomenon. In extended journals and artfully contrived third-
person novels, they study the place of imagination in psychic life,
recognizing imagination's dual role as literary and personal resource.
To examine their work enables the critic to enlarge his perception of
how selfhood can be conveyed and what the conveying may mean.
The formal principle that unifies Boswell's journals differs sharply
from that discernible in Fanny Burney's diaries. The controlling forms
that governed Miss Burney's social conduct governed also her record-
ing of it, literature thus becoming an extension of life, freer in some
ways yet accepting the same necessities of moral discipline. For Bos-
well, life often threatened to turn into an extension of literature. Dis-
cussing the value of journal-keeping with Dr. Johnson and Lord Trim-

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 Imagining a Self

lestown, Boswell elaborates the analogy between a lady's looking at

herself in a glass and a man's seeing himself in his journal: "And as a
lady adjusts her dress before a mirror, a man adjusts his character by
looking at his journal." 1 By studying his journal he discovers and
partly controls who he is. The dynamism of Fanny Burney's account
of herself derives from the tension between her need for freedom and
her dedication to socially defined virtue; Boswell's record achieves its
intensity by its commitment to infinite personal possibility.
To appreciate the special phenomenon of Boswell as a diarist, one
must turn again to an approach through literary structure. What can
be the source of his journals' powerful, consistent inner form? John N.
Morris suggests that "the sense of the essential unity of a passage in
Boswell's life that we sometimes derive from large sections of the Jour-
nals is owing not so much to his loyalty to actual time as to his relent-
less preoccupation with an idea, a person, or a feeling." 2 Behind such
unity of preoccupation, of course, must lie the unity of personality.
To quote David Goldknopf on fiction: "I-narration forces us to ac-
knowledge what third-person narrative would merely encourage us to
surmise: the role of the interpretative consciousness in the drama
before us." 3 The statement applies as well to literal as to fictional first-
person narration. "Interpretative consciousness" creates the drama it
narrates and creates its form. My argument is more extreme than
Morris's—an argument for the unity not simply of "large sections" but
of volumes, and even of the whole sequence of volumes. And this kind
of unity, I would maintain, testifies the presence in Boswell's journals
of a coherent "plot," in the sense in which Ronald Crane uses the term.
Crane's famous essay on the plot of Tom Jones brilliantly suggests
the kind of claim that can be made for plot's importance.

I shall assume that any novel or drama is a composite of three ele-

ments, which unite to determine its character and effect—the things
that are imitated (or "rendered") in it, the linguistic medium in
which they are imitated, and the manner or technique of imitation;
and I shall assume further that the things imitated necessarily in-
volve human beings interacting with one another in ways deter-
mined by, and in turn affecting, their moral characters and their
states of mind (i.e., their reasonings, emotions, and attitudes). If
this is granted, we may say that the plot of any novel or drama is
the particular temporal synthesis effected by the writer among the
elements of action, character, and thought that constitute the mat-
ter of his invention . . . A plot, in the enlarged sense here given to

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 James Boswell, Henry Fielding

the term, is not merely a particular synthesis of particular materials

of character, thought, and action, but such a synthesis endowed
necessarily, because it imitates in words a sequence of human activi-
ties, with a certain power to affect our opinions and emotions . . .
The positive excellence of [a good plot] depends upon the capacity
of its peculiar synthesis of character, action, and thought to move
our feelings powerfully and pleasurably in a certain definite way
. . . It follows, consequently, that the plot, considered formally, of
any artistic work is, in relation to the work as a whole, not simply a
means—a "framework" or "mere mechanism"—but rather the final
end which everything in the work, if that is to be felt as a whole,
must be made, directly or indirectly, to serve. 4

Crane, writing about fiction, assumes that plot, in his enlarged sense
of the term, derives largely from the conscious invention of the au-
thor. But journals, as well as novels and plays, imitate or render life
in a linguistic medium; the journal-writer employs his special "manner
or technique of imitation"; his subject involves the interaction of
people and the revelation of moral character and of states of mind—
principally, of course, his own. Boswell's journals move us powerfully
by their rendition of character, action, and thought. And, despite the
fact that life supplies the events they report, they can be judged on the
basis of their plot.
This summary obviously implies the organic development of plot
from the very substance of life experience. It implies also that the
reader's interest in diary and autobiography is essentially identical
with his interest in fiction, both equally testifying the compelling
power of images of action and of passion. Action or passion claimed
as the experience of a real person may move us in particularly intense
ways, but once set down on paper it too comprises only an imitation
of reality, one not necessarily closer to reality's source than artful,
avowed fiction customarily is. Yet the presence of something one can
call plot in a diary raises perplexing problems. Unless, like the spiri-
tual autobiographers and their contemporary readers, one accepts the
notion of God as the Great Artificer of individual lives, one must con-
clude that either in the living or in the telling, human beings often
create artistic shapes—shapes of coherent psychic meaning—for their
life stories, perhaps even living those shapes.
Literature suggests, as life often does too, that one must imagine
himself before he can finally be himself. The world does not neces-
sarily allow a person to be all that he can imagine; usually he cannot

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 Imagining a Self

permit himself even to try to fulfill his own fantasies, nor does he
necessarily possess the capacity to realize them. Yet sequences of ima-
gining—repeated acts of imagination and repeated efforts to reconcile
imagination with actuality—remain a vital component of maturity.
Boswell's London Journal has in common with Fielding's novel Tom
Jones—written, of course, almost a quarter of a century earlier—its
concentration on youth rather than maturity as subject. Formal auto-
biographies rarely record convincingly the process of maturing. A
middle-aged or elderly man or woman, looking back over a lifetime,
seeing what he was in the light of what he has become, forgets choices
in order to accept necessities. Impossible to conceive, once identity is
established, that we might have been fundamentally otherwise. The
little boy hopes that he will drive a fire engine and be a hero; the
grown man knows that he had to become a pharmacist. The woman
who dreams of the life she might have had as concert pianist, the man
whose fantasies remind him of beautiful women unsought, unfound—
such imaginers also feel that the possibilities they remember never
really existed. What they wistfully remember is the sense of possibility
that belongs uniquely to youth.
The London Journal and Tom Jones also share, as I have already
suggested, their preoccupation with the relation between imagination
and living, specifically between the processes of writing and those of
experiencing. The Fielding who presents himself as a character in his
Qwn fiction calls attention to many implications of the writing down
of events and the recording of character. The twenty-two-year-old
Boswell who sets down his day by day experience testifies an intricate
process of self-cpeation, specifying the centrality of imagination in the
career of a young man not yet professionally committed to imagina-
tive endeavor. Both elucidate more problems than they can solve.
To record a life helps to create it: asserting the comprehensibility of
his past identity, the author discovers who he is, and determines who
he will be. Boswell wants to be—quite simply—a great man; any
attainable greatness will serve. Like the protagonists of Tom Jones and
Joseph Andrews, he needs to discover his place in the world; the pro-
cess of discovery creates the journal's inner action and its plot. Bos-
well finds, during the year he reports, a more viable identity than that
he possesses at the beginning, but his finding is also a making, of life as
well as literature. He has to invent himself. So does Fielding, for dif-
ferent reasons and in a different sense in each successive novel. Wayne

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 James Boswell, Henry Fielding

Booth has pointed out how greatly the "implied authors" of Fielding's
various works differ from one another.5 Each serves a special dramatic
purpose; each delineates a particular form of the perplexing drama of
self-invention.

Almost at the midpoint of the London Joumel, Boswell remarks the

discrepancy between the image of himself that he had hoped to record
and the one actually emerging. "I wished [my journal] to contain a
consistent picture of a young fellow eagerly pushing through life. But
it serves to humble me, and it presents a strange and curious view of
the unaccountable nature of the human mind. I am now well and gay.
Let me consider that the hero of a romance or novel must not go uni-
formly along in bliss, but the story must be chequered with bad for-
tune. Aeneas met with many disasters in his voyage to Italy, and must
not Boswell have his rubs?"6 If the comparisons convey characteristic
self-mockery and more covert self-glorification, they also suggest the
hidden underpinnings of this journal. Setting down his life as it takes
place, Boswell recreates himself as a fictional hero: Macheath, per-
haps, if not Aeneas (e.g., p. 264); or an archetypal "Man of Pleasure"
(p. 140); or a mythological version of Addison (p. 62). He needs to feel
his interludes of "bad fortune" as mere vicissitudes attesting his hero-
ism, good fortune and bad alike belonging to a pattern elaborately
constructing itself toward the necessary happy ending.
The journal, Boswell understands, is a work of the imagination (p.
202), a word having for him primarily its Addisonian sense of the fac-
ulty that reproduces images. But the Addisonian meaning readily ex-
pands, as it was expanding for other writers of the period.7 In the in-
troductory section, explaining his motivation for keeping a journal,
Boswell runs through a sequence of orthodox literary and moral pie-
ties, beginning with an assertion of the value of self-knowledge. To-
ward the end of these justifications, he observes, "Very often we have
more pleasure in reflecting on agreeable scenes that we have been in
than we had from the scenes themselves" (p. 40). The crucial noun car-
ries its theatrical meaning for Boswell as for Richardson.8 Soon after-
wards, Boswell refers to his pleasure in "the scene of being a son set-
ting out from home for the wide world" (15 Nov. 1762; p. 41)—a plea-
sure clearly derived from seeing his experience in literary terms. Long
before he supplied his dramatic renditions of Dr. Johnson's perform-
ances, Boswell was a sharp observer of his own, and the recapturing

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 Imagining a Self

of scenes in which he could understand himself as having played a

glamorous role or create after the fact the glamor that he had not di-
rectly experienced, exercised his imagination. Unlike Cibber and Pam-
ela, though, he felt himself to be his most significant audience.
The work of the imagination is not, from Boswell's point of view,
real work. He associates imaginative activity with pleasure, an under-
tone of guilt sometimes suffusing it. Trying obsessively to assess his
own character, Boswell congratulates himself on having worked hard
at his journal, letters, and essays. Then he reflects that these are "all
works chiefly of the imagination," and that he could never work
equally hard at the law, "hearing a heavy agent explain a heavy cause,
and then to be obliged to remember and repeat distinctly the dull
story, probably of some very trivial affair" (25 Feb. 1762; p. 202). Yet
his own trivial affairs, transformed by his imaginative reproduction of
them, seem to him (and to us, his readers) anything but dull, and his
capacity to "remember and repeat distinctly" comprises the genius of
the journal.' His preservation of his experience guards against depres-
sion. "An Hypochondriack," he would explain later, "is subject to for-
getfulness," due often to the "darkness in his mind." He must try to
stock his mind with as many "agreeable ideas" as possible, to protect
him from the "total vacancy" of "wintery days." 10 Boswell's journal
provides his stock; it is an artificial memory.
The sin of which Fielding accused Cibber—living his life in order to
record it—defines Boswell. "Sometimes it has occurred to me that a
man should not live more than he can record, as a farmer should not
have a larger crop than he can gather in." 1 1 Confined to his rooms for
several weeks of treatment for venereal disease, he worries that he
may lack sufficient material for his writing, then congratulates himself
because such fears prove unjustified. "How easily and cleverly do I
write just now! I am really pleased with myself; words come skipping
to me like lambs upon Moffat Hill; and I turn my periods smoothly
and imperceptibly like a skilful wheelwright turning tops in a turning-
loom. There's fancy! There's simile! In short, I am at present a genius"
(9 Feb. 1763; p. 187). Although his self-awareness again bears an edge
of self-ridicule, he also reveals an important truth. As experience con-
verts itself into "periods," the turning of a sentence temporarily re-
places the attempt to turn his life in new directions. Temple's warning
of the dangers of journal-keeping, in terms foretelling the injunctions
young Fanny Burney would receive ("he imagined that my journal did

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 James Boswell, Henry Fielding

me harm, as it made me hunt about for adventures to adorn it with";

25 May 1763, p. 269) acknowledges the temptation to subordinate life
to art; the record suggests how frequently Boswell succumbed to it.
Boswell's relation to his own imagination focuses his journal's
drama as he details the struggle to reconcile inner and outer reality,
and to discover the principle of reconciliation. For Tom Jones and his
fictional contemporaries, the battle to find a place in the world in-
volved coming to understand the demands of actuality and to con-
form to the standards of society without undue compromise of indi-
vidual integrity. Boswell faced equivalent demands, social pressures,
and fears of compromise. But he also faced, with full awareness, the
trap of subjectivity. Were his ideas about himself and about the world
valid guides to conduct or illusions created by an overheated imagina-
tion? The problem, which troubled Robinson Crusoe in fiction and
William Cowper in fact, exists for everyone. But Crusoe and Cowper
do not fully recognize it as a difficulty; Boswell's painful knowledge
repeatedly confounds him. Even his most "whimsical" ideas, testifying
the vitality of his inner life, feel to him both valuable and dangerous.
The most obvious paradox in Boswell's nature is his dual commit-
ment to his "warm heart and . . . vivacious fancy" (p. 54) and to an
ideal of "coolness and moderation" (p. 65). "I . . . went coolly to bed.
There's conduct for you" (p. 71). His emotional vacillations lead him
to rational conclusions and away from them. Although he claims a
true character as reserved, grave, proper, he also asserts the validity
of feeling as the ultimate test of character (p. 228) and the significance
of imagination as a means to transcendent experience (e.g., p. 294).
He struggles not merely to control his imagination by reason, but also
to use it as a guide to truth. The reconciliation achieved by the end of
the London Journal involves a profound commitment to that "blest
imagination" (p. 181) that can illuminate as well as transform reality.
Boswell's acceptance of his own nature amounts to a dramatic denoue-
ment for the interior development of the London months. His decision
about his career and his reconciliation with his father may be under-
stood as offshoots of that fundamental self-acceptance. If the journal
has not fully enabled him to know himself, it has helped him to come
to terms with himself even without full understanding.
From the journal's beginning, it is clear that certain kinds of fanciful
ideas seem to Boswell ends in themselves. To choose London as resi-
dence involves the choice of imaginative stimulation. It is as though

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 Imagining a Self

the filling of the mind with "London images" (p. 177) represents salva-
tion. If he can furnish his imagination with the correct raw material,
stocking up for his old age and protecting himself from disagreeable
external facts, he may avoid confronting his inadequacy to his ambi-
tions. The proper ideas and images, in fact, may miraculously make
him adequate, guarding against those terrible fantasies that issue from
within.
For although Boswell glorified his "blest imagination," he also
feared "the sickly suggestions of inconsistent fancy" (p. 205) and attri-
buted his intermittent misery to the frightful imaginations" that
sometimes populated his mind (p. 254). London would provide, he
anticipated, a talisman against them. He would rely on abundant
external stimuli to ward off the dangerous inner forces that he felt
often powerless to combat. At the beginning of his journal, leaving
Edinburgh, he stops his chaise to bow to the Palace, the crown of
Scotland, and "that lofty romantic mountain," Arthur Seat (p. 41). He
then explains at length how remarkable is the character such actions
reveal. At the journal's end, preparing to leave London, he stands in
the middle of St. Paul's Cathedral and bows to every quarter of it (p.
331). London has not saved him from himself; his "frightful imagina-
tions" overtake him there as in Scotland. 12 But London has educated
him. He is still capable of romantic reverence (although he takes pains
to point out that Dr. Johnson shares his high regard for St. Paul's) but
less self-conscious and self-congratulatory about his capacities. The
London images and English ideas he has absorbed have broadened his
perspective. John Morris has noted that "Boswell desires among other
things to enlarge himself, to incorporate within himself as many kinds
of experience as possible." 13 Fulfilling this passionate desire in Lon-
don, he learns as a result that no single experience deserves taking too
seriously. The bowing to St. Paul's occupies two sentences; then the
diarist moves on to Dr. Johnson's bon mot about woman preachers.
Hungering for internal as well as external experience, he would not
miss the opportunity to test and display his feelings by bowing to the
cathedral, a symbolic act of leave-taking as well as obeisance. But he
no longer protests that his feelings make him remarkable. He has
learned to value the external world of people and things at least partly
for its own sake as well as for the private images and ideas it gener-
ates.
Through most of the journal he wonders how to determine the real

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 James Boswell, Henry Fielding

nature of that external world. From the beginning he recognizes un-

easily that his ideas bear no necessary relation to things in themselves.
He faces a symbolic choice between studying law, as his father wishes,
and becoming a Guardsman, his own romantic dream. His positive
thoughts about the army all partake of his confused fantasy of inde-
pendence. Whenever he actually examines the soldier's life, however,
or even thinks concretely about the nature of soldiers' work, he real-
izes his lack of military vocation. Because the idea of the Guards is so
intimately connected with that of London, any dissatisfaction with the
actual city extends itself readily to disinclination for the military. "I
thought London a bad place for me. I imagined I had lost all relish of it
. . . I thought I would go immediately down to Edinburgh, and would
be an advocate in the Parliament House, and so lead a comfortable
life. I was vexed to find all my gay plans vanished" (22 Jan. 1763; p.
165). These melancholy reflections suggest vividly how completely
Boswell is controlled by what he here calls his "wayward, diseased
fancy." External reality hardly exists for him. He suffers from the loss
of his "gay plans" and is comforted when Erskine reminds him how
miserable he was at home (the reminder temporarily resolving his
ambivalence), but then he becomes increasingly depressed when a
visit from his brother brings "many low old Sunday ideas when we
were boys" into his memory, making the present feel like a version of
the past. More real than London or Guards, or, for that matter, Edin-
burgh and the advocate's life, is the realm of thought, imagination,
memory, and plans—that realm of charmed experience but precarious
control.
Deliberate imaginative exercises may provide some illusion of men-
tal control. Boswell constructs for himself an elaborate interior picture
of the advocate's joys ("I might keep a handsome machine. Have a
good agreeable wife and fine children and keep an excellent house"; 24
Feb. 1763; p. 200). They add up to a self-image as "a man of conse-
quence" (p. 201), a vision so exciting that he can hardly endure the
prospective delay of a year or two on the Continent. The next day he
has second thoughts: "The notion of being of consequence was not
much, for . . . just now I knew from experience that just by strength of
imagination I could strut about and think myself as great as any man"
(p. 201). He works up a counter-fantasy of the Guardsman's life of
"romantic adventures" (p. 202), then comments on his own ambiva-
lence and on his capacity to justify both sides of it: "Such were my rea-

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 Imagining a Self

sonings upon both sides of this question, which are, in my own opin-
ion, very ingenious. It is strange to consider that the same man who
could waver so much could produce them. I was somewhat uneasy at
the consideration of my indetermined state of mind, which argues a
degree of imbecility" (p. 202). Imbecility, intellectual weakness, folly.
Boswell worries about his incapacity to decide the course of his life,
but considers his imaginative capacity—his ability to reason on both
sides of a question by evoking balanced images of different life condi-
tions—counter-testimony of uprightness and power.
Or do his fantasies, in fact, attest his weakness? His sexual activi-
ties, as reported in the London Journal, demonstrate not only the gap
between Boswell's self-imaginings and reality but the degree to which
his imaginings might interfere with his capacity to assess reality. Per-
haps he could not know or suspect that his Louisa suffered from vene-
real disease, but certainly his effort to convert reality to romantic fic-
tion in evaluating their relationship must have obscured any conceiv-
able clues. "I am hurt with the taunts of ridicule and am unsatisfied if I
do not feel myself something of a superior animal. This has always
been my favourite idea in my best moments," Boswell confides ( 1
Dec. 1762; p. 61). Two weeks later: "Indeed, in my mind there cannot
be higher felicity on earth enjoyed by man than the participation of
genuine reciprocal amorous affection with an amiable woman. There
he has a full indulgence of all the delicate feelings and pleasures both
of body and mind, while at the same time in this enchanting union he
exults with a consciousness that he is the superior person" (14 Dec.
1762; p. 84). The fantasy that sexual activity necessarily testifies male
superiority, socially supported though it is, seems peculiarly personal
for Boswell. His anxiety about consummating the relationship with
Louisa centers on his prowess (e.g., p. 117). After the liaison is estab-
lished but before venereal symptoms have developed, Boswell goes
to a gathering at Lady Northumberland's. "I strutted up and down,
considering myself as a valiant man who could gratify a lady's loving
desires five times in a night; and I satisfied my pride by considering
that if this and all my other great qualities were known, all the women
almost in the room would be making love to me" (14 Jan. 1763; p.
142). The five acts of intercourse in a single night perhaps represent
fact, but only Boswell's enlarging imagination makes him as a result "a
valiant man" of "great qualities." 14 That imagination is ever at work.
Taking two whores to a tavern, he thinks himself Captain Macheath

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 James Boswell, Henry Fielding

surrounded by his doxies and sings a song from The Beggar's Opera to
emphasize the resemblance (p. 224). 15 Engaging with a prostitute on a
bridge, he explains that "the whim of doing it there with the Thames
rolling below us amused me much" (p. 255). Yet he sustains his grandi-
ose imaginings only with effort. Toward the end of the Journal, Bos-
well reencounters Sally Forrester, his first London mistress, approach-
ing her, characteristically, "with something like the air of a tragedy
hero" (10 June 1763; p. 277). She willingly joins him for a cup of tea,
providing an opportunity for the hero to compare himself in past and
present. "Alas! my ideas have not now that giddy fervour which they
had when I was first in London. However, I now walk on surer
ground." Walking on surer ground, that alas suggests, hardly com-
pensates for what has been lost. In this encounter Boswell glows "with
pleasing imagination," but promptly atones for imaginative indul-
gence by feeling "a great degree of satisfaction at thinking that my
father would now be happy, and all things go well, and that I might
indulge whim with a higher relish."
Typically, Boswell thus converts his sensible choice of gratifying his
father's wishes into yet one more glamorous fantasy. Yet this episode
marks the increasing strain in his grandiosity. No longer does his imag-
ination effortlessly lead him from one adventure to another, mindless
of cost until costs must be paid. Looking back, he perceives his loss of
"giddy fervour." As actuality impinges more and more, his efforts to
convert trivial sexual exploits into manifestations of greatness flag.
After Louisa, he relinquishes his vision of a long-term mistress to pro-
vide cheap, secure, sustaining gratification. His relationship with Dr.
Johnson, supplying other kinds of security and satisfaction, occupies
much of his time; his recognition of the ridiculous becomes more acute
as he reports his imaginative efforts to glamorize chance encounters.
He begins to understand that the "great man" must do something.
In a perceptive moment Boswell describes himself as one who acts
passively. Such action, he explains, results from his persistent recogni-
tion that "Great People, those who manage the fates of kingdoms, are
just such beings as myself: have their hours of discontent and are not a
bit happier" (11 Dec. 1762; p. 77). He then hints at the connection
between that perception and his mode of passive action: "I may say, I
act passively. That is, not with my whole heart, and thinking this or
that of real consequence, but because so and so things are established
and I must submit." Reflections on this subject lead him quickly to an

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 Imagining a Self

account of his "severe illness" (probably, Pottle explains, a nervous

collapse) at the age of seventeen and his subsequent struggles with
melancholia.
In this bit of self-characterization Boswell describes an absence of
full commitment in action. His passivity consists in withholding him-
self. To act with his whole heart would imply assent to reality; he con-
sents only to submit. In his protest against the intolerable fact that
Great People are just like everyone else he pretends that nothing is "of
real consequence." His belief that he acts without full involvement
protects him from the necessity to judge himself seriously as a member
of the same world and the same species as the Great Men he admires
and envies.
The quality of self-withholding that Boswell here identifies is crucial
to the psychic shape of the London Journal. It derives from his charac-
terological commitment, much fuller than any commitment to action,
to the life of the imagination, which often denies but always modifies
the nature of reality. Even reporting his persistent melancholia, Bos-
well feels impelled to add, "My lively fancy always remained" (p. 77).
That fancy provides compensation for misery both externally and
internally caused, but awareness of its operations hinders meaningful
action. "I do think it is a happiness," Boswell remarks, "to have an
object in view which one keenly follows" (11 Dec. 1762; p. 79). His
object, at the moment, is to win a commission in the Guards. But "it is
very difficult to be keen about a thing which in reality you do not
regard, and consider as imaginary. But I fancy it may do, as a man is
afraid of ghosts in the dark, although he is sure there are none." Even
while he longs passionately for that commission, he knows it only
another ghost. Nothing has for him absolute authenticity apart from
what his fancy makes of it. His devotion to Johnson surely derived
partly from Johnson's apparent certainty about the real: kicking a
stone, the moralist refutes all philosophic questionings. Boswell's
questionings, more peculiar to himself, are less easily refuted.
In the many eighteenth-century novels shaped by their heroes' ef-
forts to find places in the world, potential obstacles to achievement do
not include doubts about whether a place in the world makes any con-
ceivable difference. Fielding's ironies about Tom Jones typically con-
cern the young man's insufficient awareness, not the value of his en-
deavor. Boswell's ironies challenge not only his persistent posing but
his very belief that it matters whether one becomes a Guardsman or
an advocate. Only in non-ironic moments, when he is melancholy or
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 ]ames Boswell, Henry Fielding

paralyzed by his terrors, does he abandon doubt about whether action

is meaningful. But when he acts he can rarely avoid his own convic-
tion that all he does derives from his own fantasy and therefore has
little meaning in the real world.
The poet James Macpherson, at lunch with Boswell, observed "that
to retain our high ideas of anything, we should not see it. He said too
that few, if any, people were happy" (27 April 1763; p. 249). Only by
avoiding actuality can one enjoy it. Boswell's ultimate fantasy about
himself is that he can be a man without fantasy, a "prudent" man con-
forming to his society's standards of conduct. A sense of the absolute
antithesis between prudence and pleasure dominates much of his
thinking. Proud though he is of his lively imagination, he centers his
dreams of moral possibility on developing the opposite side of his
nature. The operations of his fantasy encourage his dangerous desire
to please others: theoretically his father, whom he imagines as grati-
fied by a son's drudging, but more immediately the men and women
with whom he comes in daily social contact. He can satisfy women,
he imagines, by his sexual prowess. There is no conflict here between
what he wants for himself and what he thinks others want of him.
Often, though, it is difficult for him to determine what he wants for
himself, so actively does his imagination respond to the fancied de-
mands of others. Such response, he feels, makes him ridiculous; people
treat him as "a very inferior being."

I was, in short, a character very different from what God intended

me and I myself chose. I remember my friend Johnston told me one
day after my return from London that I had turned out different
from what he imagined, as he thought I would resemble Mr. Addi-
son . . . Indeed, I must do myself the justice to say that I always
resolved to be such a man whenever my affairs were made easy and
I got upon my own footing. For as I despaired of that, I endeav-
oured to lower my views and just to be a good-humoured comical
being, well-liked . . . Now . . . I felt strong dispositions to be a Mr.
Addison. Indeed, I had accustomed myself so much to laugh at
everything that it required time to render my imagination solid and
give me just notions of real life and of religion . . . Mr. Addison's
character in sentiment, mixed with a little of the gaiety of Sir Rich-
ard Steele and the manners of Mr. Digges, were the ideas which I
aimed to realize. (1 Dec. 1762; p. 62)

The paragraph elaborately demonstrates Boswell's conviction "that

we may be in some degree whatever character we choose" (21 Nov.
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 Imagining a Self

1762; p. 47); it also demonstrates the psychic cost of such a view. If

one can be anyone at all, one's character bounded only by his imagin-
ation, the possibilités of choice become infinite and its responsibilities
enormous. How tempting to see oneself as a Mr. Addison, although to
be "a good-humoured comical being, well-liked" offers more immedi-
ate rewards. But the problem of "solidifying" the imagination to pro-
vide an accurate account of "real life" remains insurmountable. Cer-
tainly the notion that James Boswell can will himself into a combina-
tion of Addison, Steele, and the actor West Digges results from no
reconciliation of imagination and reality. The young man seeks des-
perately outside himself for some image that he can internalize and
fulfill, but he can imagine giving up the comical version of himself
only for some artificial self that will be yet more compelling to the
world at large. He cannot commit himself totally to the dignity of
Addison. Wanting too much—to please too much, to be too much—
he vacillates among his grandiose alternatives, unable to make even a
definitive choice of models. The sense of possibility punishes its pos-
sessor, denying the reality of limitation and tormenting the youth with
his conviction that everything depends upon his conscious decision of
who to be.
Almost six months after writing about Digges, Addison, and Steele,
Boswell returns to the idea of God's intent as an aid to his own crucial
choice. The "natural character" that he wistfully perceives—that char-
acter God intended for him—still differs sharply from the character he
generally manifests.

I was rational and composed, yet lively and entertaining. I had a

good opinion of myself, and I could perceive my friend Temple
much satisfied with me. Could I but fix myself in such a character
and preserve it uniformly, I should be exceedingly happy. I hope to
do so and to attain a constancy and dignity without which I can
never be satisfied, as I have these ideas strong and pride myself in
thinking that my natural character is that of dignity. My friend
Temple is very good in consoling me by saying that I may be such a
man, and that people will say, "Mr. Boswell is quite altered from
the dissipated, inconstant fellow that he was. He is now a reserved,
grave sort of man. But indeed that was his real character; and he
only deviated into these eccentric paths for a while." Well, then, let
me see if I have resolution enough to bring that about. (13 May
1763; p. 258; my italics)

The concern with what people will say, the reliance on his friends'
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 James Boswell, Henry Fielding

opinions to support his own, the conviction of the drama of his own
nature—these remain unchanged from the earlier set of reflections.
Boswell's fantasy that happiness depends on uniformity of rational
character makes explicit what lay just beneath the surface before. But
his tone is less extravagant, his ambition less exalted, and his belief in
infinite possibility noticeably diminished. In December he could assert
what God intended as confidently as what he himself chose; by May,
he merely thinks his natural character dignified, and his pride derives
more from the thinking than from the character. Believing that he can
never be satisfied without constancy and dignity, he displays no assur-
ance that he can achieve those virtues. When Johnston tells Boswell he
should be an Addison, Boswell feels a "strong disposition" to be one.
When Temple makes a comforting speech, Boswell understands it as
exactly that and reacts with very tentative determination ("let me see
if I have resolution enough . . . "). Instead of a series of incompatible
models, the young man now focuses on specific virtues, his father's
virtues: constancy and dignity. He congratulates himself for being
"lively and entertaining" but stresses qualities opposed to liveliness.
He wants, or wants to want, moral solidity.
The Boswell of the winter was a youth entirely possessed by his fan-
tasies; by spring, he has encountered actuality. In conventional ways
he appears to be growing up: lowering his sights, moderating his tone,
leaping less precipitously into experience. The man who wonders
whether he has enough resolution to achieve the character he desires
will shortly accept the advocate's life as more viable than the guards-
man's—and will subsequently take to drink in order to make his
choice more tolerable.
But if Boswell relinquishes some illusions about himself, he also
learns to affirm the value of what he is as well as what he might be—to
affirm, specifically, the value of the capacity that allows him endlessly
to imagine what he might be. His tone is measured in the M a y self-
assessment, but its very moderation betrays an undercurrent of self-
satisfaction. Locating exceeding happiness in the future, he yet expres-
ses pleasure in the present: pleasure in his strong ideas and pride in his
ability to think about his own character.
Boswell's fit of bowing to the national monuments as he leaves
Edinburgh has ludicrous aspects. His return to the subject of Arthur
Seat as a basis for comparison between himself and Dr. Johnson does
not. Johnson has just announced that "the noblest prospect that a
Scotsman ever sees is the road which leads him to England!" Boswell
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 Imagining a Self

joins in applauding that epigram. "At the same time, I could not help
thinking that Mr. Johnson showed a want of taste in laughing at the
wild grandeur of nature, which to a mind undebauched by art conveys
the most pleasing awful, sublime ideas. Have not I experienced the full
force of this when gazing at thee, O Arthur Seat, thou venerable
mountain! . . . Beloved hill, the admiration of my youth! Thy noble
image shall ever fill my mind!" (6 July 1763; p. 294). However deriva-
tive the Scotsman's rhetoric, his bold accusation that his mentor lacks
taste and his assertion of imaginative superiority mark rising self-
confidence. Johnson, he concludes, is only witty; he himself is wise,
specifically because of his fidelity to his feelings and his psychic capa-
city to receive and absorb sublime ideas. Injured vanity doubtless con-
tributes to his response, but this testimony to the value of his imagina-
tion marks an important stage in his developing self-acceptance. He
does not lose, he hardly modifies, his tendency to dream of glorious
changes in himself and his situation.16 Toward the very end of the
Journal, we find him fantasizing that he will live in Johnson's garret
after the great man's death. Such a place, he says, would be favorable
for meditation (pp. 311-312). We understand that he imagines produc-
ing works to rival Johnson's. Although Boswell acknowledges that
this amounts to building castles in the air, he does not apologize. Find-
ing his place in the world has meant not only deciding on a career, dis-
covering friends, achieving reconciliation with his father, but also
finding how to value his own divided nature. He will continue to suf-
fer from its divisions, still imagining unlikely schemes of happiness,
but something has been resolved. As at the end of a novel, the hero
looks forward now to new challenges, having confronted the chal-
lenge that faced him at the outset. Now he knows how to be true to his
fanciful nature without being ridiculous. He may find himself ridicu-
lous again, but, understanding that dignity need not be incompatible
with imagination, he has, in fact, asserted imagination's dignity. The
complexity and subtlety of psychic patterning in the London Journal,
the power of its plot, depend on the book's rich investigation of the
relation between inner and outer experience in a man torn among con-
flicting views of himself and of the world outside him.

Tom Jones does not tell his own story, and Fielding calls attention
to the importance of this fact: "For let a man be never so honest, the

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 ]ames Boswell, Henry Fielding

account of his own conduct will, in spite of himself, be so very favor-

able that his vices will become purified through his lips, and, like foul
liquors well strained, will leave all their foulness behind. For though
the facts themselves may appear, yet so different will be the motives,
circumstances, and consequences, when a man tells his own story, and
when his enemy tells it, that we scarce can recognize the facts to be
one and the same."17 Fielding, no enemy, as teller of Tom's story
claims emphatically and repeatedly to tell objective truth. "It is our
business to relate facts as they are," he remarks, adding that "every
passage in our work is transcribed" from "the original book of nature"
(Bk. VII, ch. 12; IV, 37). The novel is, as Andrew Wright puts it, mor-
ally true—"true because it is a fiction . . . because to see life spectacu-
larly is to be generous about human motive." 18 Maynard Mack be-
lieves that "life apprehended in the form of a spectacle rather than in
the form of experience" belongs to the comic novel.19 The contrast
between spectacle and experience, however, suggests not only a dis-
tinction between comedy and tragedy but one between third-person
fiction and autobiography—and even between third-person fiction and
first-person fiction. Even so self-conscious and self-observing a diarist
as Boswell interests himself primarily in how each particular form of
his appearance feels to him; Pamela's meticulous attention to her own
emotion helps to create that aura of affectation that Fielding despised.
If Tom Jones like Boswell exemplifies the young man creating himself
through his imagination, we understand this fact more through his
actions than through his consciousness. He has been seen and placed
by another consciousness; the narrator's intervention prevents the
character's vanity or hypocrisy from controlling his story. Tom, like
Boswell, must imagine his place in the world before he can assume it,
but Fielding must imagine Tom first. And this point exists not only in
the background of our awareness, as with Pamela—part of our knowl-
edge of what it means to read fiction—but frequently in the fore-
ground: the narrator calls attention to the fact that he invents, as the
autobiographer cannot, thus declaring his mastery of all that happens.
The narrator's control, Fielding implicitly argues, authenticates the
fiction's truth. Yet this third-person novel, constantly reminding the
reader of its fictional status, differs less than one might suppose from
the straightforward autobiography. Tom Jones resembles Boswell's
London Journal in more than its concern with a young man's matur-

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 Imagining a Self

ing. For all its ostentatious artifice, it imitates autobiography in pur-

porting also to record in the first person a sequence of imaginative
experience. This experience, belonging to the novel's narrator, illumi-
nates and comments upon Tom's. It clarifies the essential plot of Tom
Jones partly by supplying an analogue for it. 20 And it helps to focus
the reader's attention on the crucial theme of imagination—an issue
alike, as Boswell too came to realize, in the writing of books and the
living of lives.
Imagination in a complex sense lies at the center of Tom's experi-
ence. What this young man must learn in order to grow up seems at
first far less problematic than what Boswell must learn. Fielding tells
us directly that his hero, despite his many virtues, lacks prudence, a
quality, involving awareness of likely consequences, that may derive
from imagination or from reason. Its more rational varieties, in the
novel, are unappealing. The prudence of Bridget Allworthy, of her
servant Mrs. Wilkins, of Captain Blifil and of his son, of Sophia's
servant Honour, stem from narrow calculation of self-interest and
involve considerable affectation. The prudence Tom finally achieves,
a larger virtue, amounts to the power to discriminate wisely and de-
pends upon imaginative grasp of the needs and responses of others as
well as of the self. Tom learns, in other words, to enlarge his imagina-
tion rather than, like Boswell, to control it.
The hero of epic, elevated above his contemporaries, both surpasses
them and exemplifies their deeply held values. Tom fulfills these func-
tions in the comic epic that contains him. But the untried youth must
learn his heroism. The human imagination, he sees, focuses most in-
tensely on money. Captain Blifil, a minor character, typifies Tom's
world in his preoccupations. Marrying for money, he then directs all
his mental energy toward fantasies of expenditure on Allworthy's
property after the squire's eagerly anticipated death. Such fantasies,
from Fielding's point of view, evidence fundamental perversity. Cap-
tain Blifil's contemplation of money not only substitutes for but mili-
tates against proper human concerns, encouraging him to yearn for
his benevolent brother-in-law's demise. The simple irony of the cap-
tain's own unforeseen death in the midst of his calculations empha-
sizes man's inability to control his destiny, however extensive his
planning, but also suggests divine punishment for fundamental impi-
ety.
Similar impieties, often well concealed, pervade all social levels.

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Not everyone denies normal human ties to Captain Blifil's extent, but
treachery readily associates itself with desire for gain. T h e innkeeper
whose lively imagination convinces him that Sophia is the Young Pre-
tender's mistress, Jenny Cameron, wonders whether more profit lies in
fawning or in betrayal. Sophia's servant, Honour, turns over in her
imagination the gain and loss involved in helping her mistress and in
betraying her; Mr. Nightingale, like Squire Western, assumes that to
arrange a mercenary marriage for his child involves no wrong, since
he assumes also the paramount importance in every imagination of
financial concerns. Squire Western himself, by no means an imagina-
tive man (as the narrator directly tells us), is immediately roused to
action by his daughter's horrifying hint that her aunt might not will
her money to the squire.
Nightingale exemplifies with particular clarity the reductive effects
of preoccupation with money. "As money . . . was always uppermost
in this gentleman's thoughts, so the moment he saw a stranger within
his doors it immediately occurred to his imagination that such stranger
was either come to bring him money or to fetch it from him. And ac-
cording as one or other of these thoughts prevailed, he conceived a
favorable or unfavorable idea of the person who approached him"
(Bk. XIV, ch. 8; V, 128). And again: "He had indeed conversed so
entirely with money, that it may be almost doubted whether he imag-
ined there was any other thing really existing in the world; this at least
may be certainly averred, that he firmly believed nothing else to have
any real value" (Bk. XIV, ch. 8; V, 128). The idea of money, in other
words, can utterly control the imagination, overriding other values
and inhibiting discrimination. The kind of prudence displayed by
those obsessed with money thus opposes itself to the more profound
prudence T o m needs to develop, while confusingly parodying that
crucial value.
The narrator of this novel inhabits the same moral world as his
characters, although his capacity to discriminate exceeds theirs. He
too faces the problem of focusing his imagination properly. He too
must acknowledge money's importance. The novel's opening sentence
establishes a financial relationship between author and reader: "An
author ought to consider himself, not as a gentleman who gives a pri-
vate or eleemosynary treat, but rather as one who keeps a public ordi-
nary, at which all persons are welcome for their money." This rela-
tionship, he points out, gives the reader some right to have what he

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 Imagining a Self

wants. The author presents himself as a man working for his living,
his work involving not only traditional artistic making but the corol-
lary of distribution. He knows how money can both corrupt and stim-
ulate imagination. In a long introductory passage to Book XIII, Field-
ing invokes love of fame and love of money as the author's indispens-
able impetus to write, although he also acknowledges specifically and
at length the likelihood that desire for wealth may lead the writer
toward the popular or fashionable rather than the substantial. Men
wish to gain from what they do; the artist in this regard cannot sepa-
rate himself from mankind.
The author's announced attitude reveals the possibility of healthy
respect for rather than obsession with money. Tom's ideal prudence
demands equivalent respect, although the point is not fully spelled
out. His adventures, however, frequently involve him with financial
issues. The romantic abandon with which he flings away the bank
note bestowed on him by his benefactor, the idealism that makes him
refuse to use Sophia's money—such attitudes represent luxuries of
youth. In actuality, he finds himself gigolo to Lady Bellaston partly
for lack of a shilling to take a coach. Without money one cannot sur-
vive, but each individual must determine the moral price he will pay
for financial security. Tom in his sentimentality condones acting as a
highwayman for the sake of starving wife and children; Fielding takes
no clear position on this point. Indeed, the issue of money rather trails
away at the end. Theoretically, it has been settled. Through its minor
and major actions the novel states clearly that obsession with money
generates moral and imaginative destruction, but so does refusal to
take thought of money. The practical problem of money, on the other
hand, is not entirely worked out. Each of Fielding's novels demon-
strates more insistent concern with the question of how a human being
can properly procure the money he requires; the only viable answer
seems to be a deus ex machina. Someone must give the hero money, or
give him the means of getting it. His unaided efforts never achieve
even minimal financial security. 21 Fielding's pessimistic view increas-
ingly assumes the lack of connection between intrinsic worth and so-
cial reward; only in fiction, only by authorial manipulation, do the
good receive their just deserts.
The discrepancy between money as reality and as fodder for the
imagination, never fully resolved, is only one instance of the conflicts
between the real and the imagined that appear everywhere in Tom

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 James Boswell, Henry Fielding

Jones. Boswell's problem, as he delineates it, centers on his way of

imagining himself. His imaginative awareness of other people,
throughout the early journals, proves extremely limited. Other peo-
ple for him represent various ideas, embodying, say, romantic beauty
or gloomy Scots notions or aristocratic grandeur. From the point of
view of a reader, though, the supporting cast of Boswell's journals
comprises a series of projections of his hopes, fears, and psychic
needs. The young man believes himself to relate to others; the reader
suspects that he relates only to his own fantasies. The divergence be-
tween people's real natures and Boswell's understanding of them occa-
sionally becomes an open issue, as when Louisa ceases to be a glamor-
ous actress and turns into a poxed whore, but the diarist never draws
any general conclusions from his repeated misunderstandings.
Fielding, on the other hand, presses his reader if not his central char-
acter relentlessly toward general conclusions. Seeing his hero from
without, he can call unstinting attention to his ridiculous aspects.
Tom's imagination often makes him ludicrous. The reader must con-
cur in the narrator's negative, though often indulgently amused judg-
ment of the fancy that treats others as creatures of the self's needs and
that reduces vast realities (war, death) to means of dramatizing pri-
vate emotional states. When reality and imagination fail to coincide,
the imaginer must be wrong. He may also be noble and generous, as
when Tom imagines Molly's ruin if he leaves her, or brave, as when he
dreams of a glorious death in the service of king and country, or de-
voted, as in his fantasies of Sophia. The author's voice accords the
hero full credit for such virtues. But Fielding laughs at Tom much
more than Tom laughs at himself and usually for the same reason:
some version of the eternal gap between the real and the imagined.
Tom rhapsodizes by moonlight, reflecting that "the solemn gloom
which the moon casts on all objects is beyond expression beautiful,
especially to an imagination which is desirous of cultivating melan-
choly ideas" (Bk. Vili, ch. 10; IV, 104). He proposes climbing to the
top of the hill, where he can better encourage his melancholy, only to
be undercut by literal-minded Partridge, who concludes that the hill's
bottom must encourage merriness if the top stimulates gloom. In this
instance, as in several others, we recognize the invincible naivete' of
the hero's fancy, and we are invited to be amused but also to wonder
at the propulsive force of imagination. By imagination Tom (like the
rest of mankind) progresses. His fancy places him in the world he per-

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 Imagining a Self

ceives, largely determines his course of action, and preserves him from
despair. Fielding allows us to admire Tom's invincible imagination
even while mocking it.
We now come to the question Tom Jones loudly raises: what, pre-
cisely, is the ultimate value of imagination? (The previous question,
what constitutes imagination, does not emerge as an issue. Imagina-
tion is assumed to mean what Dr. Johnson thought it to mean: "the
power of forming ideal pictures," "the power of representing things
absent.") Imagination helps to determine Boswell's experience.
Glorifying it as an emblem of his uniqueness, he learns how often it
leads him astray. Tom never thinks about imagination as a problem,
but the narrator thinks about it constantly. Through his hero and
through his tale he conveys more fully than Boswell a view of how
imagination functions fruitfully in art and in life.
The divergence between imagination and reality, the novel finally
suggests, need not be inevitable. Such imaginations as Honour's or Bli-
fil's, directed always toward personal gain, limit perception. But
ideally a human being can achieve clearer vision through imagination:
the message of Robinson Crusoe, now yet more elaborately stated.
Blifil, loving only himself, imagines only in terms of himself; Tom
from his early youth can imagine the feelings of others. Although on
occasion he reduces the world to an adjunct to his fantasies, his deal-
ings with the Seagrims demonstrate that he can also fantasize con-
structively about human needs quite different from his own. By the
last quarter of the novel, both Tom as character and Fielding as narra-
tor suggest how this kind of imaginative grasp can become a guide to
morality. Tom appeals to Nightingale to engage his imagination about
the girl he has seduced (Bk. XIV, ch. 7; V, 124). He invites, in other
words, systematic exercise of the imaginative faculty to engage aes-
thetic and emotional response in support of right action. Nightingale
should make an honest woman of Nancy not simply because it is right
to do so, but because not to do so can be imagined as causing pain and
the prospect of doing good generates fantasies of pleasure.
Tom's benevolence to the Seagrim family, however, dictated by the
same kind of vicarious participation in their situation, leads him
astray. And toward the novel's end, when Tom wishes to forgive
Black George the theft of £500 from him, Squire Allworthy rebukes
him sharply, arguing that "such mistaken mercy is not only weakness,
but borders on injustice, and is very pernicious to society, as it en-

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 James Boswell, Henry Fielding

courages vice" (Bk. XVIII, ch. 11; V, 358). Eager imaginative involve-
ment with the affairs of others, in short, readily produces the senti-
mentality that may prove pernicious. Clearly the imagination requires
control; clearly, too, by the end of the action T o m has not altogether
mastered the principles of control. Nor does any character in the novel
attain full imaginative penetration into reality. Either narrow realism
limits the imagination, as with Blifil and Nightingale, or misguided
confidence in others distorts perception, as with Allworthy (frequent-
ly blind to true motives), or enthusiastic empathy reduces moral
insight, as with T o m . Moreover, the reader himself is directly impli-
cated in the mistakes of imagination. In one of his moods of benevo-
lent mockery, the narrator wishes for his reader the same sanguine
temper that T o m richly demonstrates, since such a temperament en-
sures pleasures of illusion far more enjoyable than anything actuality
can provide. "I make no manner of doubt but that, in this light, we
may see the imaginary future chancellor just called to the bar, the
archbishop in crape, and the prime minister at the tail of an opposi-
tion, more truly happy than those who are invested with all the power
and profit of those respective offices" (Bk. XII, ch. 6; V, 56-57). Only
possibility truly gratifies. One thinks of Boswell, clinging to his
belief that he can be whoever he chooses. How surely we know that
no actual choice will satisfy him.
T o seek imaginative pleasure for its own sake is to run the danger of
acting passively—a danger for T o m as well as Boswell. And a danger
for the novel-reader, ideally engaged in a fruitful partnership with the
writer but needing, Fielding suggests, constantly to be prodded toward
activity and toward right perception. T h e reader needs the author to
penetrate the characters. He is wrong, Fielding announces, if he thinks
that Thwackum appeared to Allworthy as he appears to the instructed
reader; the source of instruction is the inspired author (Bk. Ill, ch. 5,
III, 125). Art, in other words, provides more insight than life. But art
can also generate in the reader the imaginative energy that provides a
vital resource in life, and Fielding's adjurations often focus on this
point, as when he rebukes the reader's laziness, explaining, "thou art
highly mistaken if thou dost imagine that we intended, when we began
this great work, to leave thy sagacity nothing to do; or that, without
sometimes exercising this talent, thou wilt be able to travel through
our pages with any pleasure or profit to thyself" (Bk. XI, ch. 9; IV,
295).

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 Imagining a Self

Tom, like many other fictional characters, takes a symbolic journey

toward maturity; so does the reader. 2 2 Traveling through the novel,
he too learns and grows. If he resembles Tom in his sensibilities, the
narrator remarks (Bk. XV, ch. 8; V, 178-9), he will learn more; if not,
he may like Blifil be unable to profit morally from his experience. But
Fielding's insistence that to read a novel constitutes a dynamic process
dictates much of his literary procedure.
The imaginative testing of the author precedes but parallels the
imaginative testing of reader and characters. Boswell begins his narra-
tive with the adjuration "Know thyself." The imperative that dictates
Tom Jones's growth (and the reader's, and the narrator's) is "know the
world": what lies without rather than within. T o m neither has nor
achieves any particular desire to know himself. Assuming himself as
known, he enacts the same self (unlike Boswell) in all his adventures,
and develops a desire to reform rather than to discover his nature. He
learns the possibilities both of adventure and of reform not only
through direct experience but through imaginative participation in the
experience of others: the Man on the Hill, Mrs. Fitzpatrick, young
Nightingale, Anderson (the would-be highwayman), and the rest. The
reader, of course, has only this means of knowing. The author, who
boasts his control of reader and characters alike, faces directly in his
role the problem of achieving and substantiating imaginative insight.
Early in the novel, Fielding's self-presentation as narrator empha-
sizes his omnipotence within the world of the book and his freedom to
play with reader and characters. Rhapsodizing about Squire All-
worthy's exalted virtue, he deflates his own rhetoric by observing that
he has got the reader up as high a hill as Allworthy's and he is not sure
how to get him down again. The linguistic play of his mock-epic ex-
cursions emphasizes his mastery of literary tradition as well as his
complex perspective. He calls attention to the beauty of his own simi-
les or imagery, announces that he has been "set over" his readers for
their own good, boasts that the Muse has entrusted him with secrets,
and mocks critics' pretensions to judge him: he creates, in short, an
impression of effortless and pleasurable mastery. The novel's second
half, on the other hand, reveals the degree to which mastery involves
struggle and suggests the author's serious concern with the moral im-
plications of his craft.
By an imperceptible progression, literary issues merge with moral
ones. 2 3 The imagination can help to achieve the knowledge of the

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 James Boswell, Henry Fielding

world everyone needs but only if it functions as an instrument of pene-

tration rather than a means of illusion. The novelist's announced con-
cern for probability, his doctrine of the "conservation of character,"
and his rejection of the supernatural: all reflect his commitment to the
real. But he is also profoundly committed to the products of his own
imagination. In a mock-pathetic passage with serious reverberations,
the narrator elaborately develops the conventional metaphor of
literary productivity as childbirth. Insisting upon the unbreakable tie
between the author and his creation, he calls attention to the sexual
overtones in the analogy: "The reader who hath suffered his muse to
continue hitherto in a virgin state can have but a very inadequate idea
of this kind of paternal fondness" (Bk. XI, ch. 1; IV, 244). The notion
of a sexual connection between author and muse, recalling Gibbon,
emphasizes the passionate energy of the writer's involvement, and the
suggestion that every reader is also a potential writer coexists with the
statement of crucial differentiation between practising author and rel-
atively passive reader. Love and work, in this metaphor, are not
merely the components of human happiness; they become in effect
identical, as Fielding draws a diagram of sublimation. The metaphor's
development stresses pain and effort: "the uneasiness with which the
big muse bears about her burden, the painful labor with which she
produces it, and lastly, the care, the fondness, with which the tender
father nourishes his favorite, till it be brought to maturity, and
produced into the world." Finally the speaker declares the essential
identity of author and book: "The slander of a book is, in truth, the
slander of the author" (IV, 245). Acknowledging the comic overtones
of his treatment, he reminds the reader that truth often emerges
through jest: this metaphoric fantasy demands to be taken seriously.
So taken, it focuses attention on the novel as evolved from the un-
ion of the author's brain with the mysterious forces of inspiration.
Earlier, the narrator has examined at some length the notion of genius,
finding it to comprise "that power, or rather those powers of the
mind, which are capable of penetrating into all things within our reach
and knowledge, and of distinguishing their essential differences" (Bk.
IX, ch. 1; IV, 157). He labels those powers invention and judgment.
Invention, he continues, is generally agreed to be "a creative faculty,"
but in fact it may be better understood as "a quick and sagacious pene-
tration into the true essence of all the objects of our contemplation."
In a third discussion of the same issue, he wonders about the proper

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 Imagining a Self

relation of learning to imagination, pointing out that learning has

often been considered "entirely useless to a writer, and, indeed, no
other than a kind of fetters on the natural sprightliness and activity of
the imagination" (Bk. XIV, ch. 1; V, 91). Poets, critics, and politi-
cians, he concludes, can get along without knowing anything in par-
ticular, but the novelist must be conversant with the life of his times,
in the mass and in detail.
Taken in conjunction, these three discussions suggest the nature of
the plot focused on the novelist, which in essential respects duplicates
that concerned with Tom's career. The action that Tom must fulfill,
the action underlying plot, is by natural process to understand the
world; the action of the narrator is identical. By long and laborious
birth the muse produces her child, the writer's child. Product of gen-
ius, it must therefore result from accurate penetration into the essence
of things. It both derives from and generates knowledge of the world.
The imaginative enterprise, in Fielding's stated view, must stand or
fall on the basis of its truth.
The pattern here sketched suggests a fairly clear relation of author,
reader, and hero. All three wish, need, and depend upon understand-
ing of the world. All three learn through imagination; the writer also
teaches through imagination (as does Tom, at least once, in his inter-
change with Nightingale). He depicts characters teaching and learning
and enforces a view of human existence as centrally involved with
those activities. His demand for the reader's active involvement
derives from his deep convictions about human life. Accepting for
himself the full responsibility of realism as a creator, he demands that
the reader take equivalent responsibility to use his imagination con-
structively.
For, after all, the author cannot control the reader's imagination,
however grandiose his claims of power, and one must remember again
that neither Tom nor Allworthy finds his imaginative perceptions a
perfectly dependable guide to moral truth. Fielding introduces into his
narrative two curious episodes to suggest the unpredictable and am-
biguous consequences of communication through the imagination. A
carefully expurgated puppet show, purified of all lewdness, is per-
formed; shortly afterwards, the puppeteer's assistant is discovered for-
nicating with a servant girl on the stage. The young woman explains
that she has deduced from the puppet show the bad conduct of the de-
picted characters. What was the fine lady doing when she lay away

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 James Boswell, Henry Fielding

from her husband all night? Slightly later comes Patridge's famous
encounter with Hamlet, which leaves him terrified of the ghost, im-
pressed by Claudius as a fine declaimer, and scornful of Garrick's
Hamlet because the part involved no acting at all: of course the little
man would feel scared of the ghost.
These two episodes of stage entertainment force attention to the re-
lation between life and art. In his introductory chapter to Book VII,
Fielding considers the analogy between the world and a stage under
several different aspects. Reminding his readers that art imitates life,
he finally insists upon his own novel as a theatrical performance; the
distinction between art and life, by the time he finishes his playful ex-
ploration, has become hopelessly confused. An artful author may in-
duce such confusion; on the other hand, no author can sufficiently
guard against it. It is not Shakespeare's fault or Garrick's that Part-
ridge cannot distinguish between an actor playing a frightened man
and a man truly frightened; the fellow who purified his puppet show,
however foolish, bears no responsibility for the maidservant's lapse.
The maidservant, in fact, is responsible for the use she makes of a dra-
matic spectacle, just as Partridge, determinedly uneducable, must be
held responsible for his foolishness. Both, as spectators of drama,
closely resemble—by Fielding's own richly developed analogy—the
reader of the novel. Both warn of the necessity to discriminate: be-
tween art and life, between good and bad. Invention and judgment,
the novelist tells us, are the stuff of genius. They are also the stuff of
humanity. Everyone has them; everyone must use them. Invention,
imagination, creativity, amount finally to penetration. Judgment, on
the other hand, discriminates and discovers differences. The reader,
the author, the hero: all are responsible to both faculties, and all must
learn to respond properly, to create properly, and to act properly in
the world: functions that are significantly analogous. Fielding em-
phasizes the development of sympathetic imagination but assumes the
parallel necessity of controlling judgment. Boswell's learning and
Tom's have much in common, and so do Boswell's learning and
"Fielding"'s. Unlike "Fielding," though, Boswell does not function
consciously as teacher.
By abandoning the form of autobiography Fielding enlarges the pos-
sible points of view on the course of a human life. It is worth noting
that he did not abandon that form altogether. In this novel too,
someone inside speaks directly to us who are outside.24 Paralleling the

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 Imagining a Self

fictional biography of the picaresque hero is a shadowy fictional

autobiography of the novelist as novelist: a form of self-presentation
that calls attention to the issue implicit in all autobiography: what
does it mean to convert a life into a work of art? The relationship of
life to art constitutes a central subject of Tom Jones. And the intricate
form through which that relationship is conveyed depends partly on
the novelist's exploitation, even in this work of high artifice, of some
of the special resources of autobiography.

The aesthetic distance from which Fielding observes "Fielding," the

narrator-character in his novel, cannot readily be achieved by the lit-
eral autobiographer. Boswell's eagerness to perceive himself as a hero
of drama or fiction contributes to the vibrancy of his narrative; he
constructs himself for his benefit and ours, the self-artificer in his life
as in its recording. But, of course, he is not only a self-artificer. The
substantial self that eludes his perception yet remains a fact. His
efforts to shape himself become increasingly difficult, desperately to
be abandoned and desperately resumed. Freud is said to have refused
to write a letter of recommendation for a patient on the grounds that
he could not do so, knowing the man as he did only from the inside. If
the psychoanalyst has such a problem, the diarist who wishes to con-
vey as well as to record himself has it yet more emphatically. Of ne-
cessity he knows himself only from within, forced to surmise what
others see. Boswell, almost as deeply concerned with how he is seen as
with how he feels, learns inevitably that he can control neither
manifestation. The sequence of records following the London Journal
do not duplicate the optimistic, essentially novelistic, shape of the first
volume. Yet they confirm the impression of a necessary order in Bos-
well's experience, an order created partly by the diarist's unremitting
effort to convert his life into a work of literature as he lived it. Fielding
argues through the form and content of Tom Jones that elaborate arti-
fice can illuminate reality. Boswell's early journals amount to a
counter-argument: reality is, or may be, identical with artifice.
"1 am uneasy to think that I am not yet master of myself, but I al-
ways hope to be better," twenty-five-year-old Boswell writes to John
Johnston, near the end of his Grand Tour. 25 His stated goal has
changed from self-knowledge to self-mastery, as his increasing grasp
of reality deflates his sense of possibility. The three volumes following
the London Journal report his time of study in Holland and his travel

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 James Boswell, Henry Fielding

through France, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy: the journeying of

the traditional hero. But they also record a process of diminishment.
The desire for self-mastery derives from near despair at the impossi-
bility of full self-knowledge.
The records of Boswell's continental experience owe more to their
twentieth-century editors and less to the writer's own sense of form
than does the London Journal. Boswell in Holland reconstructs a co-
herent account of the year from the young man's memoranda and let-
ters, his journal itself having been lost. The two volumes now called
Boswell on the Grand Tour include letters to and from Boswell and
some material he published himself. Yet the thematic unity of each ac-
count presumably derives from psychic experience as well as from edi-
torial skill. Reading the records in chronological sequence, one un-
derstands the young man's continuing process of learning. In Boswell
in Holland he sets out to follow a plan, to control the self that in
London he had come precariously to know. The first volume of The
Grand Tour (in which he tells of his encounters with Rousseau, Vol-
taire, and Frederick the Great) shows him struggling simply to be him-
self, whatever self that might be. The second volume (in which
Boswell, returning to London after a long series of amorous encoun-
ters, proves sadder if not wiser than his fictional counterparts) tells of
the wistful "hope to be better" referred to in the letter to Johnston.
Growing up, for Boswell, involves abandoning treasured fantasies.
Tom Jones at the end of the novel retreats to the country with his
Sophia to live out a dream of idyllic domesticity. Fielding as narrator,
calling attention to his elegant plot, commits himself to an ideal of
control and implies that control resolves conflict. On the other hand,
Boswell's immediate record of growth, seen not from the vantage
point of secure adulthood but from the short and precarious perspec-
tive of struggling youth, emphasizes conflict, which is expressed even
in his syntax with its frequent reliance on imperatives to the self and
its manifest effort to achieve certainty in short, assertive declarative
statements. Boswell cannot afford the luxury of Fielding's ruminative
sentences, nor can he achieve their serenity of outlook. Fielding's
control implies containment; Boswell never quite learns to contain his
own experience.
Yet he uses Fielding's moral terminology, particularly in Boswell in
Holland, with its emphasis on the effort at control. Affectation, the
great sin and folly of Joseph Andrews, is Boswell's bugbear too;

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 Imagining a Self

prudence, Squire Allworthy's ideal and the virtue Tom Jones most
needs to acquire, looms large for Boswell. Like Tom (and to some
extent Joseph, a simpler character), Boswell uses his imagination to
conceive virtue and shun vice. But he also discovers an opposite need
to curb imagination by substituting doing for dreaming. In Boswell in
Holland he no longer congratulates himself for imaginative vigor or
for success in acting a part; he substitutes a notion of acting, or doing,
in the world, specifically because action eliminates dangerous imagi-
nation.26
The "Inviolable Plan" that Boswell composed 15 October 1763
stresses "the misery of being unsettled" and advocates "propriety of
conduct, that you may be respected." Propriety, but not unnatural-
ness. "You are not to set yourself to work to become stiff and unnat-
ural," he tells himself. "You must avoid affectation." He reminds
himself "that idleness renders you quite unhappy" because "then your
imagination broods over dreary ideas of its own forming, and you
become contemptible and wretched." He urges himself to remember
"religion and morality" and "the dignity of human nature." Most im-
portant, it seems, is the idea of a plan in itself. "Without a real plan,
life is insipid and uneasy" (BH, p. 376). Moving on to details of proper
conduct, he employs a rhetoric of moral verbs: command, be firm,
persist, remember, be prepared, bear, resolve, check, encourage. The
idea of imagination recurs, to be firmly rejected. "Your great loss is
too much wildness of fancy and ludicrous imagination. These are fine
if regulated and given out in moderation" (BH, p. 377). He continues
with more wise saws about conduct, then concludes with rather
qualified hopefulness: "Upon the whole you will be an excellent
character . . . But yield not to whims, nor ever be rash" (BH, p. 378).
The rest of Boswell in Holland glosses this text, as the writer strug-
gles against depression—a moral failing, he concludes, product of
improperly disciplined imagination. "I really believe that these
grievous complaints should not be vented," he writes to Johnston (9
April 1764), thus venting them; "they should be considered as absurd
chimeras, whose reality should not be allowed in words. One thing I
am sure of, that if a man can believe himself well, he will be really so.
The dignity of human nature is a noble preservative of the soul. Let us
consider ourselves as immortal beings . . . My dear Johnston, let us re-
tain this splendid sentiment" (BH, p. 207).
The anxiety about giving fantasies the reality of words focuses the

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diarist's dilemma. Yet his yearning to "retain" a "splendid sentiment"

acknowledges that formulation preserves the salvational as well as the
dangerous. If Boswell rejects "chimeras" that are produced, he
believes, by a "distempered imagination" (p. 274), he also suggests in
his words to Johnston that imagination now seems virtually the only
reality. He will consider his miseries mere chimeras, and he will not
allow their reality in words. By controlling thought and language he
can control feeling. What a man believes himself to be, the writer here
says explicitly, determines what he really is. He must rely on "splendid
sentiment," learning modes of self-formulation that will preserve a
sense of power and dignity.
The special importance of Boswell's diaries for anyone interested in
the possibilities of autobiography depends partly on the insistence
with which they confront the meaning of putting lives into language.
Richardson, choosing to write epistolary novels, implicitly recognized
how people define and sustain themselves by setting down what hap-
pens to them. Pamela thrusts herself into a new social class by telling
her story. Her linguistic discriminations recurrently call attention to
usage as conveying value; her dramatization of writing as a process re-
flecting the processes of life emphasizes the importance of the form she
has chosen for asserting herself.27 Boswell heightens the awareness of
Pamela in ways rich in implication for the novel as well as for various
forms of autobiography. He knows that the self of which he writes has
little objective importance; as he puts it in the Hypochondriack essay
on diaries, the diarist exposes himself to ridicule "when self-impor-
tance is obtruded upon others to whom the private concerns of an in-
dividual are quite insignificant" (no. LXVI; II, 258): a weakness Field-
ing perceived in Pamela. But Boswell also knows the utility of keeping
records of the self—less for their potential public value in providing
insight into human nature than for their immediate private function in
resolving "uneasiness" (II, 262).
Unlike Pamela, Boswell well understands the claim of self-impor-
tance implicit in writing about the self. He understands the tempta-
tions as well as the advantages of performing rather than being a self,
and he understands his writing as part of his performance, although
also as a desperate attempt to escape the need to perform. Unlike
Cibber or Pamela, he finds himself to consist of an evolving set of
problems rather than a given arrangement of characteristics. The
process of writing in his view partakes of a process of change; his

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 Imagining a Self

insistence that he has changed creates a comic-pathetic counterpart for

his continuing revelation of how much he remains the same. In formu-
lating his moral and emotional dilemmas, he also formulates the com-
plex values of first-person narration, demonstrating and describing
how the writer's self-consciousness helps to shape his life by his record
of it.
His awareness of how his view of himself affects actuality can be-
come an agony, as we see in a desperate letter to Temple written just
over a week after he expressed his resolve to retain noble sentiments
(17 April 1764).

My ideas alter above all with respect to my own character. Some-

times I think myself good for nothing, and sometimes the finest fel-
low in the world. You know I went abroad determined to attain a
composed, learned, and virtuous character. I have supported this
character to admiration . . . Certain it is that I have for seven
months conducted myself in a manly and genteel manner. "All is
well, then," one would say. It is so in all appearance. But I, who am
conscious of changes and waverings and weaknesses and horrors,
can I look upon myself as a man of dignity? . . .
I ask you this. If I persist in study, and never mention my sple-
netic chimeras, am I not then a man? Can I not review my life with
pride? Counsel me. I will swear to observe the precepts of my friend.
(BH, p. 218)

The man who had earlier taken such pleasure in manipulating appear-
ances now finds the divergence between internal reality and external
appearance almost unbearably painful. Wishing to "attain" a fine
character, he can achieve only a simulacrum of one. His pathetic final
questions to Temple, begging for assurance about the nature of real-
ity, also reiterate his faith in language's magic: if he never mentions his
chimeras, perhaps they cannot destroy him. Still his consciousness of
the vulnerabilities generated by the imagination remains to torment
him.
The first volume of The Grand Tour, organized around its narra-
tor's encounters with the great, shows Boswell forced to judge himself
in conjunction with men he admires, therefore thinking more and
more complexly about who he is and can be. In a particularly brilliant
passage, he arrives at the determination which dominates this volume.

My mind was clear and firm and fertile. It contained in itself both
male and female powers: brilliant fancies were begotten, and bril-

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 James Boswell, Henry Fielding

liant fancies were brought forth. I saw my error in suffering so

much from the contemplation of others. I can never be them, there-
fore let me not vainly attempt it in imagination . . . I must be Mr.
Boswell of Auchinleck, and no other. Let me make him as perfect as
possible . . . What gloomy nonsense have I often imagined! I recol-
lected my moments of despair when I did not value myself at six-
pence, because, forsooth, I was but an individual, and an individual
is nothing in the multitude of beings. Whereas I am all to myself. I
have but one existence. If it is a mad one, I cannot help it. I must do
my best.
Amidst all this brilliance, I sent forth my imagination to the Inner
Temple, to the chambers of Mr. Samuel Johnson. I glowed with
reverence and affection, and a romantic idea filled my mind.28

His resolve to be himself includes renewed commitment to his imagi-

nation. His sexualized mind ("firm" like a man, "fertile" like a woman)
requires no muse. Containing within itself both the male power of
fertilizing fancy and the female one of expression, it possesses the ma-
terials for its own salvation. Imagination's creativity rescues Boswell
from imagination's destructiveness. His error involves directing his
fantasy toward the superior virtue or happiness of others or allowing
gloom to dominate him. Now he sees that imagination can help him
grow. He will dream of his own perfectibility, acknowledging fully in
fantasy his importance to himself and using that sense of importance
as the foundation for change. Returning to the "romantic idea" of his
friendship with Johnson, he thinks less of the great man's superiority
than of his own affection. Allowing himself to dream and to enjoy and
value the dreaming—without reference to what his father might
say—he thus values himself, not explicitly as a writer, but for the
qualities that make him a writer, that vivify the journals, and that he
discovers partly through what he has written.
But whatever possibility imagination promised, it offered no depen-
dable response to reality. Repeatedly and with increasing desperation,
although sometimes with an odd note of self-congratulation, Boswell
observes the split between internal and external perception.29 His jour-
nal cannot rescue him from misery; present misery has the power to
reshape even the recorded past. "I must observe that my journal serves
me not so much as a history as it serves me merely as a reservoir of
ideas. According to the humour which I am in when I read it, I judge
of my past adventures, and not from what is really recorded. If I am in
gay spirits, I read an account of so much existence, and I think, "Sure I

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 Imagining a Self

have been very happy." If I am gloomy, I think, "Sure I have passed

much uneasy time, or at best, much insipid time." Thus I think with-
out regard to the real fact as written" (GT1,140). Again, he defines an
aspect of all autobiography: like novels, but more disturbingly, rec-
ords of the self are at the mercy of their readers. The dynamic inter-
change among writer, character, and reader that Fielding described
exists no less powerfully when all three are literally the same person.
The rhythm of the journal follows Boswell's responses to his own
imagination; the self he boldly determined to be and to perfect re-
mained consequently confused. He seeks reassurance from Rousseau,
inviting the philosopher to show him how to improve. An early en-
counter had ended with Rousseau remarking, "You are irksome to me.
It's my nature. I cannot help it." BOSWELL. " D O not stand on ceremony
with me." ROUSSEAU. "Go away" (4 Dec. 1764; GT I, 224). Not react-
ing openly to the serious rejection in this interchange, Boswell
continues to demand help. He makes memoranda of what he might
say: "And you, O great philosopher, will you befriend me? Am I not
worthy? Tell me . . . If I am, take care of me" (13 Dec. 1764; GT I,
246).The next day, he says it: BOSWELL. "But can I yet hope to make
something of myself?" ROUSSEAU. "Yes. Your great difficulty is that
you think it so difficult a matter" (GTI, 247). Writing to Mme. Denis,
Voltaire's niece, to entreat permission to spend a night under the phi-
losopher's roof, Boswell adopts an opposite tactic. "I present myself in
my natural character, which I find suits me the best of any. I own that
I have in some periods of my life assumed the characters of others
whom I admired. But, as David found the armour of Saul, I found
them by much too heavy for me, and like David was embarrassed and
unable to move with freedom . . . I do not, however, think lightly of
my own character" (25 Dec. 1764; GTI, 276). Three days later, in Vol-
taire's home, he confides to his journal, "I ought to have a good opin-
ion of myself, but from my unlucky education I cannot get rid of mean
timidity as to my own worth" (GT I, 281). (In an earlier reference to
his education, Boswell had explicitly blamed it for his obsessive role-
playing: "As I was ill-educated, I am obliged to affect more genteel
manners and so have learnt the habit of playing a part" [18 Oct. 1764;
G T I , 139].)
This series of conflicting statements about Boswell's sense of self
epitomizes the journal's tensions. Bragging of his expert performance,
he tries to convince himself that it reflects his true value: a man

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 James Boswell, Henry Fielding

everyone loves must be lovable. Seeking Rousseau's help, he both

claims the inherent interest of his nature and history and argues the
difficulty of the problems his personality presents. To Voltaire he
maintains his utter integrity, only to reveal subsequently his lack of
faith in it. But all his self-presentation reflects imaginative vacillation
and linguistic manipulation. Alternately convinced of his utter worth-
lessness and his unique superiority, he plummets from hope to de-
spair, struggling with the knowledge that Boswell is that being whose
imaginings lead him to know the irreconcilabilities of human exper-
ience.
The drama he reports remains centered on verbalization. Boswell's
history, the journals suggest, is that of a man trying to tell his story,
not—like Pamela—to preserve integrity, but to seek it. His efforts to
describe himself, embodying all his conflicts, comprise his crucial
activity. The enterprise of the journals, in other words, is substan-
tially identical with that of the life they record. Self-mastery like self-
knowledge seems to depend on putting the self into words. As the
narrator of Tom ]ones claims power, control, and imaginative en-
largement through his literary endeavor, Boswell through his jour-
nalizing and letter-writing seeks the same benefits.
The saga of imagination narrated in these early journals reaches a
culmination in the second volume of The Grand Tour, where Boswell,
returned to London, achieves a precarious maturity of relative disillu-
sionment. He suggests now that the value of his experience lies in its
capacity to correct his imagination. Writing to Rousseau of his stay in
Italy he says: "It was my imagination that needed correction, and
nothing but travel could have produced this effect" (3 Oct. 1765; GT
II, 3). Later in the same long letter, he confesses that he experiences
moments in which not even Rousseau seems important and in which
the imagination, eluding rational control, still causes him pain. "My
judgment tries in vain to free me from the grasp of a troubled imagin-
ation. It is hard to suffer so much" (GT II, 8). On the whole, though,
his imagination seems less troublesome to him as his travels draw
toward their end. He still indulges in lavish fantasies about women, as
well as in actual liaisons; he still allows himself romantic dreams of the
supernatural, proclaiming defiantly: "My having seen the realities
shall not undeceive me" (To Wilkes, 31 July 1765; GT II, 115). But he
feels that his travels have liberated him. "I had got upon a rock in
Corsica, and jumped into the middle of life." 30 The capacity to

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 Imagining a Self

immerse himself in real life—even though fantasy still intervenes—im-

plies escape from his earlier doom of acting only "passively," feeling
constantly and excessively acted upon by others and, more impor-
tantly, by his imagining of others.
Summarizing the personal impact of his famous visit with General
Paoli on Corsica, Boswell says that he has achieved a more exalted
sense of human possibility; he now wishes more ardently to distin-
guish himself, "and I was, for the rest of my life, set free from a slavish
timidity in the presence of great men, for where shall I find a man
greater than Paoli?" (28 Oct. 1765; G U I , 201). Back in London, Bos-
well reencounters Rousseau. His memorandum comments, "He seemed
so oldish and weak you had no longer your enthusiasm for him" (13
Feb. 1766; GT II, 296). Later the same day he sees Dr. Johnson, ma-
neuvering himself into a splendid scene in which he actually kneels to
ask the great man's blessing. Then Johnson "hugged you to him like a
sack," speaking affectionately. "You for some minutes saw him not so
immense as before, but it came back" (GT II, 297).
Boswell, when he saw Rousseau, had just seduced the Frenchman's
mistress; his vision of his former idol as "oldish and weak" reflects a
guilty internal effort at self-justification. When he sees Johnson as less
"immense" than before he quickly manages to reverse his perception.
Many years of Johnson-worship yet lay before him. Still, his response
to great men has in fact changed. Asking to be helped and seeking
models, he had long focused his imagination outside himself and
encouraged his tendency to fantasize about the superiority of others.
His determination, his making of "inviolable plans," his grandiosity,
and his misery gradually lessen into the hope that he can master him-
self, and his externalized idealization also diminishes. His reliance on
and subjection to his imagination and his dependence on language to
confirm his reality have given way to intimations of power to be exer-
cised in the realm of actuality. Language, of course, is power, as
Fielding knew, and imagination has power. The fictional argument of
Tom Jones implies that language and imagination supply tools that
action in society must ultimately validate. When Boswell jumps "into
the middle of life," having acknowledged that he cannot, after all, be
those whom he admires, he accepts the necessities of reality. Great
men show weakness; neither fathers nor philosophers provide ulti-
mate stability; fantasies about them do not enable one to live. One
cannot replay forever the relationship with a parent, bound by "slav-

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 James Boswell, Henry Fielding

ish timidity" before one's elders and resenting the bondage; one must
leave Paradise Hall. Unlike Tom, Boswell does not return to Paradise.
To make something of himself remains a difficult matter. Yet, record-
ing in the sequence of four journals his commitment to imagination
and his partial retreat from that commitment, he comes out at approx-
imately the same point as Fielding, if not Tom. His diaries dramatize
for the reader (as Fielding had dramatized) human problems about
one's place in the world and how to fill it; his writing insists on the role
of imagination in confronting such difficulties, and his identity grad-
ually formulates itself as a result of his imaginative and linguistic
efforts as well as his efforts at relationship. The writings of a neuroti-
cally introspective young man thus have much in common with the
fictional presentation of an enormous canvas of life with an unintro-
spective young man at its center. Fielding and Boswell talk about very
different matters. But they also find ways to talk about the same
crucial issues: the relation of the internal to the external world and of
life to art; how the imagination guides one to reality; how and when
the imagination deceives.

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 9
Laws of Time:
Fielding and Boswell

he writing defining the self considered thus far—even of

T socially restricted women, of melancholic William Cowper—

has demonstrated or, at least, asserted fundamental optimism:
belief in a divine plan, belief in the secular salvation of social virtue or
in the power of writing itself, or—minimally—in the presence of an
audience interested in watching. Moreover, as I have already sug-
gested, the essential enterprise of autobiography and novel alike, in
the eighteenth century, involved affirmation of individual value, the
act of such writing an act of faith. But eighteenth-century thinkers
were well aware how precariously, how ludicrously even, a man
asserted his own importance; a slight shift of focus might raise a story-
teller's doubts about the value of his hero's selfhood. Boswell and
Fielding, aging, incorporated into their work implicit speculation
about the extent to which the separate personality can survive, or
hope to survive, inevitable pressures of time and of society. Amelia,
Fielding's last novel, published when he was forty-four, four years
before his death, and Boswell's journals now assembled as Boswell for
the Defence, recording the Scots lawyer's experience from 1769 to
1774, when he was thirty-four, alike dramatize the increasing tensions
of the effort to preserve selfhood in maturity. Life entangles men in
obligation. Do they lose or fulfill themselves through such involve-
ment? The works we have considered thus far rarely admit society as a
vast, vague, inescapable force impinging on the individual, although

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 Fielding and Boswell

they deal with society as arbiter of manners, as spectacle, or as moral

abstraction. In Amelia far more than in Tom Jones, Fielding concerns
himself with the serious dilemmas of personality in society, and
Boswell, in the journals of his early maturity, suggests that such con-
cern belongs inevitably to one's growing up.
Both Fielding and Boswell seriously consider the problem of change.
Early in the Life of Johnson, Boswell articulates his conviction that
"the boy is the man in miniature: and . . . the distinguishing character-
isticks of each individual are the same, through the whole course of
life." 1 Biography thus reports a series of episodes reiterating the same
themes. And autobiography? The Johnsonian variety of stability, it
turns out, is an index of moral and intellectual superiority rather than
a universal human characteristic. "Nothing is more disagreeable,"
Boswell writes in a Hypochondriack essay of 1783, "than for a man to
find himself unstable and changeful. An Hypochondriack is very
liable to this uneasy imperfection, in so much that sometimes there
remains only a mere consciousness of identity. His inclinations, his
tastes, his friendships, even his principles, he with regret feels, or
imagines he feels, are all shifted, he knows not how. This is owing to a
want of firmness of mind . . . In proportion . . . as the intellectual fac-
ulties are exalted, will the character be fixed." 2 He is writing, of
course, essentially about himself. In his journals, finding himself
changeful, he obsessively explores the meaning of his alterations, try-
ing to justify what he feels as profound weakness. Fielding, on the
other hand, with an optimistic view of change as potential moral
growth, has apparent difficulty convincing himself of its possibility in
the individual. Seeking to construct a fable of moral progress without
fully committing himself to theological determinism, he hints at a pes-
simism quite opposed to Boswell's, suggesting how disagreeable it
may prove for a man to find himself stable in weakness and corrup-
tion.

"All autobiographies hold what was up to view in light reflected

from what is," Wayne Shumaker writes.3 Boswell for the Defence, a
day by day record, has—like the London Journal—the shapeliness,
the sense of story, that we expect in formal autobiography. It has the
artistic form that, Fielding suggests early in Amelia, belongs to life
itself. In Boswell's case the past casts its light upon the present as well
as the reverse. To live in time, for human beings, means to live with

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 Imagining a Self

the awareness of approaching death, which casts its shadow in the

process of diminishment individuals endure.4 Boswell makes deter-
mined efforts in his narrative to declare his present preferable to his
past, as in many obvious respects it is. "Everything depends upon our
ideas," he observes on the first day of his trip to London, with specific
reference to his intense distress at separating from his wife—a two-
month separation being, he points out, "something considerable to a
domestic man who has any turn to anxiety of mind." 5 Three days
later, seeing a lovely girl, he "cannot help being instantaneously
affected by the sight of beauty." His legal practice has made him "cal-
lous to the most attentive looks of the ablest men. But a glance from a
fine eye can yet affect my assurance. I felt this today. I compared
myself to one of those animals who by their strong scales or tough
skins are invulnerable by a bullet but may be wounded by the sharp
point of a sword, which can pierce between the scales or hit some
weak point of the skin" (p. 31). The next day, since nothing much
happens, Boswell sets down a simile formulated three days earlier,
remarking, "This is a good idea; and upon some occasion when my
imagination is warmer and my expression more fluent I may expand
it" (p. 32). A day later (19 March), he declares an important theme of
this journal: "I looked back on former parts of my life, and my present
firmness and cheerfulness of mind had full value by comparison with
the weakness and gloominess which I recollected" (p. 33). He passes
through a street full of prostitutes, feeling "a good deal uneasy. My
ideas naturally run into their old channels, which were pretty deeply
worn, and I was indulging speculations about polygamy and the con-
cubines of the patriarchs and the harmlessness of temporary likings
unconnected with mental attachment. I was really in a disagreeable
state and yet would not free myself from it by taking a coach. I re-
solved never again to come to London without bringing my wife along
with me" (p. 35).
The reference to his wife brings the sequence full circle—a sequence
providing an elaborate gloss on the notion that "everything depends
upon our ideas." Boswell creates his experience by his ways of
thinking about it; the pattern of self-characterization, analogy, simile,
comparison, speculation is more important than the pattern of events.
By imagination he deals with past, present, and future. The past, he
feels, strengthens him, his experience as a lawyer generating self-
assurance. It provides standards of comparison that enable him to

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 Fielding and Boswell

declare his continued progress. But the episode involving the street of
whores suggests a more complex relation between present and past.
On the one hand, the diarist feels burdened by his ideas running "nat-
urally . . . into their old channels"; on the other hand, he has devel-
oped new modes of response. Retaining the old ideas, no longer does
he act directly on the basis of them by taking a woman to bed. He
attempts to substitute imagination for action (another form of indul-
gence, as his language acknowledges) by merely thinking about con-
cubines and polygamy (a favorite fantasy); the attempt results, pre-
dictably, in increased tension. He comes closest to resolving the clash
between past ideas and present restraint by fantasies about the future.
Next time he will bring his wife.
Next time, of course, he does nothing of the sort. Before long, in
fact, he has returned, at least occasionally, to the casual sexual alli-
ances of his youth. The future, becoming the present, inexorably fol-
lows the laws of the past. Only in fantasy does it contain rich possibil-
ity, as when Boswell anticipates expanding his simile some day when
his powers are greater. As his imagination operates in the present, tell-
ing him both that he is a domestic man and that he is fatally, and nec-
essarily, vulnerable to beauty; assuring him of "the harmlessness of
temporary likings unconnected with mental attachment," and
claiming that his wife will protect him from the consequences of such
fancies—as his imagination operates, we see how it helps to create the
future of sexual and alcoholic indulgence that will produce a man
quite different from his exalted and hopeful visions of himself.
"Time is the most difficult of all subjects on which our thinking fac-
ulty can be employed," Boswell wrote. 6 In the journals of the early
1770s, he shows himself constantly involved with the perplexing
reality of time. As the examples cited thus far suggest, time was
becoming a dramatic component of his story. The passage of years
and the unavoidable changes of aging are objective phenomena. The
subjective measure is Boswell's shifting sense of the meaning of his
past and the possibility of his future. Paul Alkon has written of the
ways in which Boswell made time an essential element of his Johnson
biography by constructing the book's great mass to effect some
metaphoric equivalence between the reading time and the time de-
scribed. 7 The temporal equivalences one experiences in reading the
journals are yet more intricate, for Boswell's means of describing his
consciousness of time past and future duplicate his methods of dealing

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 Imagining a Self

with time as a problem in his life, and his imagination in both cases is
his weapon. Like Tristram Shandy, most time-obsessed of fictional
characters, he finds in writing his frail stay against mortality. The
creative power of his fancy, earlier his means of self-invention,
becomes now his method of self-defense—subject and technique of the
journal.
Burton Pike has suggested that the necessary fictionality of all auto-
biography stems from the anomalies of the human relation to time.
Since the past has no existence, once experienced, it must be created
by the experiencer: an act of the imagination, an exercise in fiction.®
"What makes all autobiographies worthless," Freud wrote, "is, after
all, their mendacity."' In Boswell at work, we see autobiography's
"mendacity," its inevitable fictionizing, come into being. This journal
of his middle years, embodying efforts to confront the past, shows
how they rapidly convert themselves into processes of reassuring rein-
terpretation.
He wishes to believe not in unsteady change but in orderly improve-
ment. "Let me endeavor," he concludes a sequence of self-assessment,
"every session and every year to improve" (p. 269). The view that his-
tory records decay is not for him. Reflecting rarely on social or politi-
cal history, he insists that the sequence of his life testifies the possibil-
ity of constant progress. But elsewhere in the journal he hints at his
knowledge that such a view embodies more hope than perception.
Occasionally another kind of recognition breaks through the deter-
mination to believe the present better than the past and the future
superior to either.
Two moments of self-revelation are particularly striking, both be-
longing to the long series of comparisons Boswell offers, in this time-
conscious record, between his present and his past. 10 In one episode he
experiences an unusual fit of depression. A Scots friend calls upon
him. "He brought strong upon my mind the dreary ideas of wet
weather and weary nights which I have endured in Ayrshire, when all
things appeared dismal. I have not had such a cloud of hypochondria
this long time. I wish it may not press upon me in my old age" (17
Aug. 1774; pp. 272-273). Of course depression often generates mourn-
ful memories of the past and dismal anticipations of the future, but
Boswell rarely admits that his acknowledged dependence on ideas for
his sense of reality implies that psychic instability may mar the future
as it has shadowed the past. More than a year earlier in one of his

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habitual optimistic comparisons, he had revealed a consciousness of

loss as well as gain in his progress toward a more controlled mental
state. "I remember the time when my mind was in such a state of fer-
mentation that whenever the lid put upon it by the restraint of com-
pany was removed, it was like to boil over, or rather, to use a better
metaphor, when not stirred by company but left to stagnate in sol-
itude, it soon turned upon the fret. But now it has wrought itself into
such a sound state that it will keep for a long time. The satisfaction
which I feel from the comparison of my present with my former self is
immense; though I must own that during my fermentation there were
grand ebullitions and bright sparkles which I can no longer perceive"
(1 April 1773; p. 157).
This statement testifies Boswell's conflict over what kind of interior
state he should prefer. He tries to persuade himself by his metaphors
that all alternatives to the sound state are manifestly inferior; yet he
regrets that "grand ebullitions and bright sparkles" have vanished
from his life. Giving up depression implies relinquishing exhilaration.
Boswell believes himself a better man, a better citizen, and a more
admirable human being than he was ten years earlier. But the loss of
psychic youth feels like loss indeed—and not even this sacrifice neces-
sarily protects against further loss in age.
"Creative imagination," Hans Meyerhoff has written, "is creative
recall. Recollection as an activity, an operation—not the passive re-
production of habitual memory response. To construct a work of art
is to re-construct the world of experience and the self." 11 And one can
reverse the last proposition: the reconstruction of past experience and
the reconstitution of the self reflected in it generate art. Meyerhoff
here specifically alludes to Proust, whose reconstructions involved fic-
tional disguises and heightenings. Boswell's more immediate recon-
structions, constantly delineating the activity of his mind, achieve an
art at once of intimacy and of imaginative distance. His "creative
recall," as his journals continue, more and more involves the distant
past. As he looks back on experience that he had previously recorded,
closer to the time of happening, it assumes new forms. Meyerhoff,
again, remarks that "the literary reconstruction of one's life invariably
involves two dimensions: a subjective pattern of significant associa-
tions (poetry) and an objective structure of verifiable biographical and
historical events (truth)."12 "Truth" remains the same as the past
recedes, but "poetry" changes. Boswell's shifting sense of his past and

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of his future emerges through his journals, as autobiography in pro-

cess and autobiography discovering its form.
Although he no longer presents himself as Aeneas or Macheath,
Boswell continues to insist on his own inventiveness and on the degree
to which he creates the experience he sets down—even though it pur-
ports to be literal truth. Describing himself as though he were a fic-
tional comic hero, he inhabits a world too real to supply the benign
reorderings of literary comedy. 13 Yet he can partly reconstruct a more
reassuring world. Still conscious of the operations óf his own imagin-
ation, although he has it under firmer control than a decade earlier, he
shows its transformations in action. "I just sat and hugged myself in
my own mind. Here I am in London, at the house of General Ogle-
thorpe, who introduced himself to me just because I had distinguished
myself; and here is Mr. Johnson, whose character is so vast; here is
Dr. Goldsmith, so distinguished in literature. Words cannot describe
our feelings" (10 April 1774; p. 104). Boswell's determination to
heighten, glamorizing himself by exalting his companions (elsewhere,
of course, he freely expresses his contempt for Goldsmith), leads him
even to associate his feelings, through the formulation about the inad-
equacy of language, with the profound emotional conflicts of ladies in
the novel of sensibility. (Amelia abounds in such phrases.) Words
intensify his experience, fully realized only through the artifice of its
telling.
As a moral being Boswell, like Captain Booth in Amelia, has flaws;
this journal focuses attention on them. He compensates, from the
reader's point of view and from his own, by his continued (although,
in his view, waning) imaginative vitality. Johnson has told him that
"the great thing" in keeping a journal "was to register my state of
mind" (25 June 1774; p. 215). Nothing much happens to him, he
reflects: "The state of my mind must be gathered from the little cir-
cumstances inserted in my Journal." But after observing once more
the paucity of external event in his life, he concludes, "Of this week I
can observe that my mind has been more lively than usual, more fer-
tile in images, more agreeably sensible of enjoying existence" (9 July
1774; p. 222). Two weeks later, he engages in a drinking bout with
friends. "How I appeared this night to others, I know not. But I recol-
lect having felt much warmth of heart, fertility of fancy, and joyous
complacency mingled in a sort of delirium. Such a state is at least
equal to a pleasing dream. I drank near three bottles of hock, and then

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 Fielding and Boswell

staggered away" (22 July 1774; p. 231). "Fertility" of fancy or of

images (much the same thing, presumably) compensates for bad con-
duct, imagination thus becoming in effect a moral index.
Boswell's claim that imaginative capacity amounts to moral accom-
plishment emerges most clearly in his account of one of his meetings
with the other partners of The London Magazine (7 April 1772). The
only Scotsman present, he finds himself entirely one of the company
"from my perfect art of melting myself into the general mass. Most
individuals when they find themselves with people of a different
country cannot get free of their own particular national distinction.
The individual, instead of being melted down, as I have remarked of
myself, remains as hard as a piece of iron in a crucible filled with lead
or silver. I should not wish to be melted so as not to be again separated
from the mass. But when the heat is over, I gather myself up as firm as
ever, with perhaps only a small plate or thin leaf of the other metal
upon me sufficient to make me glitter, and even that I can rub off if I
choose it" (p. 100). A bit later later in the same account, Boswell
reports looking through the magazine's records. "I had more
enjoyment in thinking of my share of the profits of this than if I had
been to draw ten times the sum out of an estate." His capacity to
"melt" into harmony with others and to enjoy whatever happens
derives from the fertile fancy that permits him to grasp so fully the
natures and demands of his companions that he becomes temporarily
indistinct in his separate identity, only to regain it in enriched form.
This fantasy of perfect freedom from distinction combined with ag-
gressive assertion of distinction embodies Boswell's most positive self-
image. He sees himself as triumphantly passive (allowing himself to be
"melted down") only in order to act successfully (gathering himself
up). His imagination provides his key to morality in the simplest sense
of that difficult noun. It exemplifies what he considers good in him-
self. Yet the journal reveals that it cannot, finally, rescue him.
The London Journal had begun with Boswell trumpeting "Know
thyself." In Boswell for the Defence that adjuration recurs in a very
different context. "I had stripped and gone to bed again in my night-
gown after breakfast, which favoured my tranquility. A man who
knows himself should use means to do him good which to others may
seem trifling or ridiculous" (17 July 1774; p. 228). Dr. Johnson had
argued "that action can have no effect upon reasonable minds"; Bos-
well presumes to disagree, on the grounds that "Reasonable beings are

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not solely reasonable. They have fancies which must be amused,

tastes which must be pleased, passions which must be roused" (7 April
1773; p. 169). Both the particular action of going back to bed, with
Boswell's commentary, and his general observation about the nature
of man reflect the same abdication of grandiosity. To know himself,
he fancied in his youth, would be to discover his greatness. In fact he
discovers his pettiness and irrationality and his sharing of them with
mankind in general. Not only action, but trivial action affects men. In
1762 and 1763, Boswell could readily see himself as a hero of epic or
drama. By 1773, his fantasies of future glory had reduced themselves
to a hope of being admitted to the English bar (a hope ultimately to be
fulfilled, as his earlier fantasies could never conceivably be). He
dreamed still of self-improvement, but no longer of grandeur. How-
ever complacent his implicit assertion that his willingness to engage in
trifling action testifies his wisdom and however large his claimed supe-
riority to Dr. Johnson in his readiness to admit human irrationality,
he acknowledges repeatedly the straitening of his self-imagining.
Most of all, he must defend against a sense of his own insignifi-
cance: here is the center of the journal's drama. He may defend by
embracing, as when he proclaims that self-knowledge sends him back
to bed, or by denying, as when he declares his self-improvement. He
defends through his ceaseless activity of introspection, of looking
forward and backward, of interpreting and reinterpreting. And, like
most men, he defends himself by his profession, the profession chosen
for him by his father that gives him institutional authority and a pub-
lic role of significance to counteract any private feeling of worthless-
ness.
Law as a human institution embodies, among other things, an
attempt to preserve order and grandeur in spite of, even by means of,
time. It rests on a system of precedents: the past ensuring an undimin-
ished future. It insists on consequences; the relation of past, present,
and future thus becomes a logical and comprehensible system of cause
and effect. If it cannot ensure progress, it at least guards against
decay. The judges deliberating Boswell's plea for a client accused of
stealing nineteen sheep feel themselves supporters of stability, believ-
ing that law—not the theoretical notion but the actual existing struc-
ture—belongs to the essential order of things, providing a vital stay
against chaos. Boswell, allying himself with this great structure,
expresses his ambivalence even through the alliance. Not judge but

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 Fielding and Boswell

advocate, he supports lost causes. Much of the overt drama of Boswell

for the Defence comes from the trial and subsequent appeals of his
sheep-stealing client, John Reid, who had some years earlier supplied
Boswell's first case when accused—and subsequently acquitted—of
another bout of sheep-stealing. The second time he proved less fortu-
nate. Convicted and sentenced to death, he remained the object of
Boswell's concern, because the lawyer felt his own prestige involved in
the case but also clearly for more complex and subtle reasons. Having
won a two-week reprieve, Reid hoped it would be followed by a royal
pardon. Instead came a reaffirmation of the conviction. Boswell urged
his client to prepare for death, meanwhile making feverish plans to try
to revive his corpse after the hanging. He also arranged for a portrait
of the condemned man, anticipating an interesting complexity of
facial expression, and he did not neglect to make detailed psychologi-
cal observations of the criminal's state of mind as his foreknown hour
of death approached. Dissuaded finally from the attempt at resuscita-
tion (on the ground that whether or not successful it would have bad
effects on other criminals), he watched the execution. Then "gloom
came upon" him, he was so "affrighted" that he hardly dared leave his
chair. A friend shared his supper and a bottle of claret: "But still I was
quite dismal" (21 Sept. 1774; p. 336).
His own account of his gloom suggests superstition as its immediate
cause: he feared John Reid's ghost. But the larger narrative indicates
the intricate functions of the Reid case in Boswell's psychic life. The
defense of Reid partook of Boswell's defense of Boswell; his execution
marked a crucial failure. This fact becomes apparent as one reads the
subsequent volume of the journal (Boswell: The Ominous Years,
1774-1776), with its increasing emphasis on melancholia and sexual
and alcoholic indulgence, its recurrence of internal and unresolved
problems. Facing his death, Reid confided to his lawyer that he had
taken sheep in the past, including some for which he was never ac-
cused, but he persisted in denying his theft of the crucial nineteen. His
reputation doomed him. The conviction rested on circumstantial evi-
dence and on the fact that Reid was generally believed a thief. Bos-
well's personal gifts, his eloquence and determination could not
prevail against the complicated sequence of cause and effect by which
a man's misdeeds in youth determine his fate in middle age.
For Boswell, the defeated attempt to save John Reid violated his
optimistic sense of his "own consequence" (p. 295); his local prestige,

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he feared, would be lessened as a result of failure. It testified the fini-

tude of his powers. Given full will and full engagement, he yet could
not achieve what he wanted. More serious, it probably suggested to
him a diminishment of his public force. Once he had been able to save
this man, now he could not. And it confronted him directly with the
reality of death. His desire to resurrect the hanged man certainly re-
flects a wishful fantasy that death should not be final, that he too
might escape the final doom.
Almost two years later, Boswell had an interview with David
Hume, dying, as he had lived, a skeptic. Talking obsessively about
death and the possibility of an afterlife, he tried in vain to make Hume
reveal some vestige of Christian faith. As the skeptic remained imper-
vious, Boswell became increasingly frantic in his verbal manipula-
tions, joking and fantasizing. His inner state, however, was yet more
disturbed than his verbal manifestations indicated. "I . . . felt a degree
of horror, mixed with a sort of wild, strange, hurrying recollection of
my excellent mother's pious instructions, of Dr. Johnson's noble les-
sons, and of my religious sentiments and affections during the course
of my life. I was like a man in sudden danger eagerly seeking his defen-
sive arms." 14 In his repeated confrontations with John Reid, Boswell
poses as a wise, benevolent, convinced Christian, explaining to the
criminal his good fortune in having time to prepare himself for death.
He refutes Reid's tendency to believe in predestination as firmly as
though he himself had never endured hours of mental conflict over the
possibility that his choices were predetermined; he assures the con-
demned man that hanging is easier than most other deaths. Or he
insists on his distance as a spectator, hoping that Reid's anticipated
pardon will not arrive until after his portrait's completion, since the
portrait's interest depends on its rendition of a man under sentence of
death, or discussing with the victim the fine weather characteristic of
days of execution. Yet all these—like his later efforts to rely on his
mother's pieties and Dr. Johnson's—represent defensive tactics against
the terror of time running out. No matter how much claret he con-
sumes, he cannot protect himself against mortality; he feels himself
growing older and only dubiously wiser; he feels the loss of power.

In the natural body, I believe, you will allow there is the season of
youth, the season of manhood, and the season of old age; and that,
when the last of these arrives, it will be an impossible attempt by all

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 Fielding and Boswell

the means of art to restore the body again to its youth, or to the
vigor of its middle age. The same periods happen to every great
kingdom. In its youth it rises by art and arms to power and prosper-
ity. This it enjoys and flourishes with awhile; and then it may be
said to be in the vigor of its age, enriched at home with all the emol-
uments and blessings of peace, and formidable abroad with all the
terrors of war. At length this very prosperity introduces corruption,
and then comes on its old age. Virtue and learning, art and indus-
try, decay by degrees. The people sink into sloth and luxury and
prostitution. It is enervated at home—becomes contemptible
abroad; and such indeed is its misery and wretchedness, that it re-
sembles a man in the last decrepit stage of life, who looks with un-
concern at his approaching dissolution.15

The character in Amelia who offers this detailed analogy belongs to

the vast group of those unwilling to reward merit, but exemplary Dr.
Harrison, who hears it, makes no effort to refute it, only suggesting
that proper adherence to religion—with its extension of futurity be-
yond death—may rescue men and nations alike. In Amelia as in Tom
Jones, the good get better and the wicked, more wicked, but everyone
ages. Men and nations alike can flourish but briefly.
Boswell for the Defence reveals the writer's paradoxical dual con-
sciousness of time as the medium for growth, in which he can see him-
self as ever better and wiser, and for decay, in which he must recog-
nize his repeated failures and his downward progress toward death.
The same duality permeates Amelia, where a narrowly focused view
of individuals may reveal evidence of growth and fruitful develop-
ment, although the larger truth remains that of deterioration. In fact,
more emphatically even than Boswell, Fielding demands our aware-
ness of time's multiple complexities. "The complex of relationships
between the different time-values of the reader, the author, and the
hero [of a novel] produces a highly involved and delicately balanced
structure," A.A. Mendilow writes.16 In Amelia Fielding adds to this
basic structure the differing time-values of several other characters,
many of whom offer their reminiscences, sometimes interrupted with
reminders of a present reality quite opposed to that of the past they
narrate. The author, despite his general practice of refraining from
interference in the story, intervenes to offer a gratuitous reference to
his own youth. Speculations and fantasies about the future occupy
many characters. Reminding his reader frequently of the relation of
cause to effect, the author deliberately introduces conditional possibil-

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 Imagining a Self

ities for the reader's moral future. At one point, one character inter-
rupts another to supply a memory that she knows to be distorted. In
large ordering and in minute detail, Amelia emphasizes the degree to
which an experience's location in time determines its psychological
valence, the ways in which time controls possibility, and the impor-
tance of time as an element in understanding.
Fielding in his own voice suggests that he has kept himself as con-
triver out of the reader's view because of his convictions about the
nature of the experience that novels record.

Life may as properly be called an art as any other; and the great
incidents in it are no more to be considered as mere accidents than
the several members of a fine statue or a noble poem . . . By examin-
ing carefully the several gradations which conduce to bring every
model to perfection, we learn truly to know that science in which
the model is formed: as histories of this kind, therefore, may prop-
erly be called models of HUMAN LIFE, so, by observing minutely the
several incidents which tend to the catastrophe or completion of the
whole, and the minute causes whence those incidents are produced,
we shall best be instructed in this most useful of all arts, which I call
t h e ART OF LIFE. ( B k . I , c h . i; V I , 14)

Lives really are stories, then; artistic form belongs not to the literary
shaping of experience but to the experience itself. A perfect life, meet-
ing aesthetic as well as moral criteria, can be valued for the way its
individual episodes contribute to the shape of the whole.
Autobiography, this argument might seem to imply, automatically
achieves the status of art, since even more emphatically than the novel
it provides models of human life. Yet the skepticism that Tom Jones
suggests about the capacity of human beings to tell their own stories
becomes intensified in Amelia, which hints that comprehension of a
life's shape depends on distance and on moral as well as aesthetic
grasp of experience. People cannot adequately report themselves. In
the preface to Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, his last, autobiographi-
cal work, Fielding makes this point explicitly. Writers, he maintains,
often recount trivia about their own experience in the belief that what-
ever happens to them must interest others, or they lie, inventing mar-
vels to compel attention. 17 Either device lacks literary validity.
Yet Amelia, though it is a third-person narrative, relies heavily on
individuals' first-person accounts of themselves, and accounts loaded
with trivia. To some extent the epic model justifies the story's begin-

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 Fielding and Boswell

ning with Captain Booth in prison and then allowing him to narrate
his own past at length.18 Miss Matthews, his temporary inamorata,
does the same, and so, later, does Mrs. Bennet for Amelia's benefit.
Briefer episodes in which characters tell something of their pasts occur
fairly frequently.
Critics have perceived the longer first-person narratives as struc-
tural excrescences in a strained narrative. 19 Yet their form emphasizes
their significant narrative purposes as they provide systematic instruc-
tion in the undependability of human testimony about the self. Miss
Matthews's story begins with a ferocious declaration of her satisfac-
tion in having committed murder. The author interrupts to call atten-
tion to the apparent inconsistency by which "a lady in whom we had
remarked a most extraordinary power of displaying softness should,
the very next moment after the words were out of her mouth, express
sentiments becoming the lips of a Dalila, Jezebel, Medea, Semiramis"
(Bk. I, eh. vi; VI, 40). Such incongruity, he demonstrates, belongs to
human nature in its political and personal manifestations. Miss Mat-
thews's lurid tale shapes itself in accord with her immediate psychic
needs. Thus a minor episode, long past, in which Booth defended her
right to stand uppermost in a dance, assumes for her as much impor-
tance as the climactic murder. She views and presents herself as a vic-
tim. Only as the novel continues do we come fully to understand her
weakness and why it amounts to depravity.
Critics have also commented on the novel's disparities of characteri-
zation, largely generated by the juxtaposition of different points of
view about a single person. Fielding's technique implicates "the reader
directly in the experience of a world where any smiling face many turn
out to be a mask, where, indeed, the face behind the mask may some-
times prove to be but another mask." 20 Moral identity, as the refer-
ence to masking may suggest, remains problematic to most characters
in the novel. People must rely on their public identities for protection
partly because private identity feels often precarious. 21 Both kinds of
identity, Fielding's technique indicates, develop partly from the opera-
tions of time on personality and are reinforced by people's stories of
themselves.
Told in the timeless setting of the prison, and reconstructing the pat-
terns of time past, Miss Matthews's story demonstrates a systematic if
unconscious development of identity through self-interpretation.22
Like Boswell, although with more immediate purpose and audience,

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 Imagining a Self

Miss Matthews recreates herself in story. Her account calls attention

to the way emotion forms memory and to the contributions of time to
pyschic drama. At the narrative's end, she apologizes for her peculiar
emphases. "If I have tired your patience by dwelling too long on those
parts which affected me the most, I ask your pardon" (Bk. I, ch. ix;
VI, 58). Indeed, the art of Miss Matthews's story considered as Field-
ing's creation depends heavily on its odd elaborations. Her learning to
play the harpsichord, perhaps better than her talented sister, receives
more detailed rendition than her murder of her lover. She spends a
long time discussing how people look and dwells obsessively on the
episode at the dance. Her emphases, belonging to the present, reveal
how she identifies and justifies herself in her new and glamorous role
as murderess and how she feels toward Captain Booth.
Delay structures Miss Matthews's drama. Hebbers, her faithless
lover, relies on postponement. He complains about "the delay of his
joys," but makes no effort to set a date for his marriage, and, as Miss
Matthews points out, "a woman who hath given her consent to marry
can hardly be said to be safe till she is married." Such safety cannot
accrue to the narrator. Her lover pretends "that he should, in a very
few weeks, be preferred to the command of a troop," an event which
will increase the propriety of his marriage. The woman acquiesces in
the consequent new delay, only to learn that her lover has been or-
dered to another post. When she demands immediate marriage, he
replies that the time is wrong for mentioning the matter to her father.
She rages, "I will have no excuse, no delay—make me your wife this
instant" (Bk. I, ch. viii; VI, 49, 50-51). But control of time is not within
her power: she cannot effectively insist that anything be done "this
instant."
It turns out, or so she thinks (indeed, Hebbers "confesses"), that her
lover has married long before. Now postponement becomes her
chosen tactic as well as his; she agrees in delaying their marriage.
Given the passage of time, she herself changes, listening "to a pro-
posal, which, if any one in the days of my innocence, or even a few
days before, had assured me I could have submitted to have thought
of, I should have treated the supposition with the highest contempt
and indignation" (Bk. I, eh. ix; VI, 54). Months go by. She lives as
Hebbers' mistress, bears him a child, but feels discomfort and re-
morse. Then, seeing her lover with another woman at a play, she

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 Fielding and Boswell

learns that he has in fact married only "a few days since." The differ-
ence between the idea of his unalterable marriage contracted in the
distant past and that of a marriage entered in the near present pro-
vokes her to stab Hebbers to the heart with a penknife.
Her memories sometimes revive old emotion and sometimes enable
her to find new feelings. Both responses stress the importance of mem-
ory, which may generate special distortions. An episode that Miss
Matthews reports emphasizes precisely this point. Booth inquires
what has become of her father, banished from the narrative by her
obsessive narcissism. She responds that she thought of her father con-
stantly. "His dear image still obtruded itself into my mind, and I be-
lieve would have broken my heart had I not taken a very preposterous
way to ease myself." She relies on summoning up a past happening
"too trifling to have been remembered." Once her father had been per-
suaded to let her brother take her sister with him in the chariot, an act
that prevented Miss Matthews from attending a ball to which she
wished to go. "I had long since forgotten it," she insists, adding that "it
was the only thing in which I can remember that my father ever dis-
obliged me." Somehow she manages to revive in her mind this for-
gotten slight and to use it as comfort. "When any tender idea intruded
into my bosom, I immediately raised this phantom of an injury in my
imagination, and it considerably lessened the fury of that sorrow
which I should have otherwise felt for the loss of so good a father,
who died within a few months of my departure from him" (Bk. I, ch.
ix; VI, 55-56). His goodness pales in her mind when she recalls his
slight to her vanity and self-indulgence; she uses her aggressive im-
pulses to protect against the sense of loss.
This gratuitous and rather implausible little story demands the
reader's attention to the important issue of how memory functions in
the psychic economy. Linking each individual to his own past, it may
be to some extent—so Miss Matthews's story implies—controlled by
will. It reveals the nature of the rememberer's true concerns: Miss
Matthews's recollections proclaim her self-absorption, envy, and
malice. If emotion affects memory, as the woman's large narrative
indicates, so can memory affect emotion. She uses a selected memory
deliberately to defend against painful feelings. People's accounts of
themselves may be untrustworthy, then, because memory serves other
functions than merely recording the past: a potential weakness of

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 Imagining a Self

autobiography. Memory's selectivity provides interpretation and,

more particularly, self-justification. Captain Booth has, in effect, been
warned to be wary; so has the reader.
The author's single explicit reference to his personal memories em-
ploys recollection for moral purpose. He recalls in his youth seeing a
young girl at a play, the picture of innocence, and overhearing a
woman comment that the girl is likely to be ruined by allowing herself
to be alone with a young man; then the narrator further remembers
recalling, at the time, that he has earlier encountered the same girl "in
bed with a rake at a bagnio" (Bk. I, eh. vii; VI, 41). The story illus-
trates that one cannot trust appearances. The novel illustrates the
larger truth that memories themselves comprise a sort of appearance,
also capable of manipulation and deception.
How are people formed by their histories and by their memories?
Fielding, who raises the question loudly, answers it confusingly. The
moral flaccidity and self-indulgence of Miss Matthews's past mark her
with increasing clarity as the novel continues. Her refusal to make
hard choices and her eagerness to nourish her own self-regard, one
might argue, shape her as a moral being, her past thus implying her
future. The novel's other bad or weak characters, if sufficiently devel-
oped to have histories, demonstrate how their inability to make cru-
cial discriminations, for example, perpetuates itself. At any moment
in time, it seems, one might see them fully revealed, each of their his-
tories an inevitable continuum.
This is only to say that, like the characters of other eighteenth-cen-
tury novels, they do not change, but solidify. Fielding's good char-
acters in Amelia learn strikingly little from their experience. Amelia
discovers the danger of masquerades; she already knows the impor-
tance of virtue. A contemporary woman commenting on the character
expresses irritation with this female paragon: "As for poor Amelia,
she is so great a fool we pity her, but cannot be humble enough to
desire to imitate her." 23 Another writes, "The Love part foolishly fond
beneath the dignity of a man. Amelia vastly good, but a little silly." 24
Amelia seems at best "a little silly," at worst "so great a fool," because
of her inadequate psychological response to the mishaps that befall
her. As a character she suggests a very simple view of personal his-
tory: once good, always good; and if good, as a woman, then passive.
She pawns the family possessions for her husband's debt, she cooks

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meals, and she arranges a substitute self to go to the masquerade (this

plan, however, is not her idea). Mostly, she accepts, never angry at
her reprehensible husband, never making any serious concerted effort
to urge him toward change. She declares her willingness to go to work
for the sake of the family's survival, but she takes no steps toward
doing so. Her increased knowledge of the nature (i.e., the evil) of the
world intensifies her conviction that the only wise course is to remain
at home. Her history, in essence, records stasis, as does Booth's.
Not that nothing happens internally. Booth presumably undergoes
a most crucial change: from deism, perhaps even atheism, to assured
Christianity. The novel's account of that implausible shift, however,
does not increase its plausibility. "Since I have been in this wretched
place," Booth explains to Dr. Harrison, "I have employed my time
almost entirely in reading over a series of sermons which are con-
tained in that book (meaning Dr. Barrow's works, which then lay on
the table before him) in proof of the Christian religion; and so good an
effect have they had upon me, that I shall, I believe, be the better man
for them as long as I live. I have not a doubt (for I own I have had
such) which remains now unsatisfied" (Bk. XII, ch. ν; VII, 312-313).
Immediately afterwards, his wife's unexpected inheritance makes his
course smooth. He thereafter avoids London, never loses his temper,
and rears a happy family.
George Sherburn attributes the unconvincing aspects of this se-
quence to Fielding's lack of available technique for the portrayal of
characterological alteration.25 One may postulate, however, some dif-
ficulty of belief as well as technique in Fielding. The author's sense of
psychology, belonging to the comic novel, takes character as given
rather than evolving.26 Amelia investigates evolution as a possibility;
it implicitly inquires how change might take place. And the answer it
hints at is Boswell's inconclusive answer: "Everything depends upon
our ideas." Although Booth is said to shift from the beliefs of a social
nonconformist to the views that his society nominally upholds, only
his state of mind really seems to alter; he has never had truly operative
convictions. The art of life, as he embodies it, involves not only a way
of living but a way of perceiving. He explains his previous lack of faith
as being based on his conviction that, since men "act entirely from
their passions, their actions could have neither merit nor demerit" (Bk.
XII, ch. ν; VII, 313). Moral discrimination is therefore irrelevant.

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Reading a book has changed his mind, corroborating the novel's con-
stant implication that language—ways of speaking and telling—shapes
perception.
We are back to Fielding's curious emphasis on personal histories,
not only as sequences of reported events but as acts of telling. Even the
happy resolution of the novel derives directly from someone's telling
his story. Dr. Harrison goes from Booth's confession of faith to a
"death-bed confession" which exposes the villainy that has deprived
Amelia of her rightful heritage. One cannot rest much weight of mean-
ing on so hackneyed a literary device, but in this special novelistic
context, one final report and reinterpretation of past events, assuming
its place in a long series of stories about the self, seems more than a
cliche'. Booth, converted by a book rather than by direct life-experi-
ence, becomes prosperous as a result of another man's new perspective
on his own life, caused by his fear of death. Dr. Harrison agrees with
Booth that men act from passion; he adds, though, that Christianity
employs as its ethical sanctions the strongest passions, hope and fear.
The criminal who believes himself dying demonstrates the point;
motivated by fear of divine punishment he uncovers the truth. His is a
truth of fact; he brings the Booths literal wealth, thus resolving the
novel's action in factuality.
Yet the book has raised questions that cannot be so resolved. If
"everything depends upon our ideas," external fact diminishes in
importance. The stories people tell emphasize that point, which
emerges particularly in fantasies about the future. A single, compli-
cated instance demonstrates the discrepancy between idea and fact.
Captain Booth's retrospective account of his courtship and marriage
(offered to Miss Matthews) claims to report verbatim a speech that he
made to Amelia "after the highest professions of the most disinterested
love." In it, he concerns himself with a possible consequence of their
marriage: Amelia's suffering of "dreadful inconveniences" (Bk. II, ch.
iii; VI, 76). The evils that he foresees befalling Amelia depend on his
profession and on the fortunes of war, not on any specific action he
may take or fail to take. In the event, of course, he involves Amelia in
distress more dreadful than he has imagined. She suffers not only eco-
nomic and emotional but even moral danger. He repeatedly intensifies
his wife's suffering by his own folly, ignorance, or mistake, thus be-
coming directly responsible for her misery, although his economic
inadequacy derives from no fault of his own.

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The ironic relation between the future Booth imagines and the one
that becomes the principal present of the novel indicates one dimen-
sion of the reiterated discrepancy between people's ways of seeing
themselves and their actual being. It also suggests that events may
make more sense than the people enduring them can recognize. Booth
assumes the injustice of his suffering, and in a large sense Fielding con-
curs, remedying that injustice at last with the unexpected inheritance.
But Booth also creates the future he fears, gambling beyond his
means, allowing himself to be deceived by plausible appearances, and
naively offering bribes to the wrong person. The meaning of those
events is altogether different for Amelia. Her most dreadful apprehen-
sions, model of Freudian femininity that she is, involve separation.
Booth, about to go abroad as a soldier, finds Amelia on her knees,
"praying for resolution to support the cruellest moment she had ever
undergone, or could possibly undergo" (Bk. Ill, ch. ii; VI, 111). The
happiest day she can anticipate is that of reunion (VI, 116).
Amelia undergoes all the sufferings that comprise her husband's
vision of a terrible future for her, but since her sole desideratum is
closeness to her mate, her personal misery hardly disturbs her. Both
partners get, from one point of view, what they deserve: Captain
Booth, the realization of his fears; Amelia, the fulfillment of her dear-
est wish in the physical proximity of her husband. Of course, eventu-
ally both get more: economic and emotional security in safe isolation
from the corrupt city. If this benign arrangement violates our sense of
probability, it emphasizes the author's power to dispose at will of his
characters. But through most of the novel he has allowed them, in
effect, to dispose of themselves: to enact their natures and to demon-
strate the consequences of such enactment. Fielding does not speak of
imagination in this novel, nor of wit, fancy, or genius. He intervenes
as moralist, not as manipulator, implicitly claiming for his personages
some status as real people rather than as imaginative constructs. 27 His
telling analogues refer to his tale as history, not as stage representa-
tion, deliberately generating uncertainty about the reality of his
world. His moral commentary, pointedly referring to the reader's
experience, suggests its identity with the characters'. "The admiration
of a beautiful woman, though the wife of our dearest friend, may at
first perhaps be innocent, but let us not flatter ourselves it will always
remain so; desire is sure to succeed; and wishes, hopes, designs, with a
long train of mischiefs, tread close at our heels" (Bk. VI, ch. i; VI,

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279). Colonel James's passion for Amelia thus implicates us, the read-
ers, as well as the author. In Tom Jones Fielding involved his readers
in dilemmas of imaginative response; in Amelia, apparently demand-
ing rather than mocking the total suspension of disbelief, he involves
us in equivalent moral intricacies. In a sense he denies the fictionality
of his creation and his power in inventing it.
Finally, however, seeing and depicting his characters in long tem-
poral sequences, Fielding demonstrates how his function as moralist
does not supersede but becomes identical with his role as artist. As an
artist, as a historian, as a moralist, he wishes to show. He handles time
as though it were space, providing his readers with constant oppor-
tunities to "see around" the persons of the novel. Those persons see
themselves, distortedly, as existing in the moment. Although they
have, rely on, and report memories, their memories are not depend-
able. They think about their futures but never perceive the relation
between their thoughts and what happens to them. The artist-moral-
ist, perceiving more, demands that his readers recognize the necessary
discrepancy between short and long views of experience and invites
them to participate in both and to enjoy and reflect upon the tension
between them, which creates the most memorable drama of Amelia.
Fielding's art, Erich Auerbach remarks, expressing with economy a
widely held view, shows an "energetic contemporary realism of life in
all its aspects" but "sheers away from any problematic and existential
seriousness."28 I am arguing that the technical devices of Amelia
supply a version of exactly that sort of seriousness, by raising as a
moral problem the implications of emotionally dictated fluctuations
of perception. Dr. Harrison, Mrs. Atkinson, Miss Matthews, Booth,
and Amelia: each sees the same world in a different way. They even
perceive identical experience differently. The story Amelia would tell
about her husband must differ sharply from the tale he would offer of
himself, or the story Fielding gives us. One cannot say merely that one
version of events is right and another wrong; or one good, another
bad. But one can say—indeed, one is invited to say—that moral
choice and action derive from and depend upon perception. After
Booth reads his book of sermons, he perceives the world differently
and therefore acts differently. He has changed. But the "problematic
and existential seriousness" of the issues the novel has exposed make
one question the depth of such change. In one sense, the action argues,
people change all the time. Booth may read another book and feel dif-

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 Fielding and Boswell

ferently. In another sense, they never change. Booth remains, for

example, quite as patronizing as he has always been toward his admir-
able wife. Fielding does not appear to have worked out in his own
mind the relation between fluctuation and stability. He retreats fre-
quently into sentimentality or simple moralizing. One yearns in vain
for the secure comic perspective of Tom Jones when, for example,
Amelia reacts to the news of her unexpected wealth. "She then desired
her children to be brought to her, whom she immediately caught in
her arms, and having profusely cried over them for several minutes,
declared she was easy. After which she soon regained her usual temper
and complexion" (Bk. XII, eh. viii; VII, 337). Amelia, to put it bluntly,
is often boring. But its mode of "seeing around" characters suggests an
important effort to explore the intricacies of psychic process and the
relation between the operations of that process and those of story-
telling.
In such a novel as Amelia, combining the advantages of third-per-
son and first-person point of view, the novelist provides the complex
perspective on his characters that time alone supplies for the autobiog-
rapher. He manipulates point of view as the autobiographer cannot;
he incorporates time as a dramatic element in his fiction. The novel
can invite almost simultaneous and equivalent perception of past,
present, and future as components of experience for imagined charac-
ters. The autobiography, establishing its poise of time perspectives in
different ways, also demands and creates awareness of time's essential
contributions to understanding. The sequence of Boswell's journals
reveals, for example, the shifting shapes that a man's life assumes in
his perceptions of it. Each recorded span of time possesses a special
pseudo-fictional form, but we see how the present changes form as it
becomes the past. Boswell, like Captain Booth, is tempted to believe
that he is not really responsible for his actions, that all is determined,
or that causality derives from forces outside the self. And Boswell like
Booth dramatizes ways of dealing with his experience of time's dimin-
ishments.

The plots of Boswell for the Defence and Amelia alike describe
rather tentative shapes of failure, differing in this respect from their
authors' previous work and from most eighteenth-century non-satiric
masterpieces. Amelia has its happy ending, manifestly imposed, but
the logic of the novel's events points overwhelmingly to its protagon-

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 Imagining a Self

ists' defeat. Boswell remains intact at the end of the 1774 journal. In
the journal as in the novel, however, one feels the pressure of forces
too powerful to be resisted. Captain Booth hardly notices time's attri-
tions, although the novel that contains him demands that the reader
notice, but he cannot fail to observe how social institutions entangle
and oppress him and how powerless he is before them. His involve-
ment with marriage and with the legal system creates difficulties that
effectively unman him. 29 Boswell, although the law is his profession
and his marriage has been conceived as totally nonrestrictive, faces
similar difficulties. ("I . . . bargained with my bride," he explains,
"that I should not be bound to live with her longer than I really in-
clined; and that whenever I tired of her domestick society, I should be
at liberty to give it up." 30 )
For Boswell and for Booth marriage as an institution creates ob-
vious problems about sexual possibility. Both men continue to yearn
for sexual opportunities that exist only outside marriage, and both
learn with some perplexity that married women may condone such
yearning.

I don't remember how we introduced the subject of matrimonial

infidelity. She [Peggy Stuart, an old friend of Boswell's wife] can-
didly declared that from what she had seen of life in this great town
she would not be uneasy at an occasional infidelity in her husband,
as she did not think it at all connected with affection. That if he kept
a particular woman, it would be a sure sign that he had no affection
for his wife; or if his infidelities were very frequent, it would also be
a sign. But that a transient fancy for a girl, or being led by one's
companions after drinking to an improper place, was not to be con-
sidered as inconsistent with true affection. I wish this doctrine may
not have been only consolatory and adapted to fact. I told her I was
very happy; that I had never known I was married, having taken
for my wife my cousin and intimate friend and companion; so that
I had nothing at all like restraint. (29 March 1772; p. 76)

The point of view here articulated by Mrs. Stuart will recur frequently
in Boswell's imagination, as he tries to justify his continued impulse
toward random sexual indulgence. As Boswell struggles with his imag-
ination and with his physical needs, he reveals with increasing clarity
that marriage to a "cousin and intimate friend and companion" does
not after all keep a man from knowing his bondage. He decides that
"interviews with women of the town" (p. 66) are dangerous, since "I
might fall into an infidelity which would make me very miserable" (p.

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 Fielding and Boswell

67). By autumn he has fallen, suffering the physical consequences of

venereal disease, and again during the winter (see pp. 140, 146). Suc-
ceeding journals record more frequent "falls," and more obsessive
speculation about how (or whether) they might be justified.
Captain Booth, who, like Tom Jones, lacks any highly developed
inner life, is not described as consciously perplexed by sexual prob-
lems. Fielding nevertheless makes it clear that Booth, shortly after
describing to Miss Matthews what a paragon he has married, suc-
cumbs to his listener's blandishments and during his week's imprison-
ment conducts a liaison with her. Like Boswell, he makes no emotional
commitment to a temporary mistress; when he leaves her, he hopes to
free himself from all involvement with her. She, on the other hand,
wishing to preserve the attachment, threatens him with exposure if he
fails to visit her. In his shame he foolishly tries to conceal his infidelity
from Amelia, who, however, turns out to have known of it but to
have taken Mrs. Stuart's large view of male wandering.
To the more or less upright men delineated in these books, marital
faithfulness and all alternatives to it seem equally impossible. Booth
describes his life with Amelia as "a calm sea" (Bk. Ill, ch. xii; VI, 167),
a vision Miss Matthews rejects with disgust: " The dullest of all ideas,'
cries the lady." Boswell, writing of his sober Edinburgh life, general-
izes, "The life of every man, take it day by day, is pretty much a series
of uniformity; at least a series of repeated alternations. It is like a jour-
nal of the weather: rainy—fair—fair—rainy, etc. It is seldom that a
great storm or an abundant harvest occurs in the life of man or in the
progress of years" (9 July 1774; p. 222). Obviously deploring the
monotony of day-to-day existence, Boswell characteristically appends
a comment on the fertility of his own fancy. Booth, speaking to an
audience, declares his enthusiasm for the placid life he has described.
Yet shortly thereafter he accepts the variety and excitement that Miss
Matthews offers. Marriage, as an institution and as an experience,
embodies for good people the principles of order and stability, which
may come dangerously close to the principle of boredom. Amelia con-
tains several representations of bad marriages, in which commitment
to change and excitement, by one partner or both, creates travesty-
relationships, tawdry and destructive mockeries of human possibility.
Inadequate alternatives to dull stability confirm the dilemma.
Man's predilection for wandering, then (women in these books
rarely have predilections), epitomizes the individual's need for possi-

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bility and change, the traditional desiderata of growth. Although both

Booth and Boswell declare themselves devoted husbands, neither can
quite settle down. Booth, proclaiming to Miss Matthews his happiness
in his idyllic state, manages by his own actions to destroy it. As for
Boswell, in London, conversing with Johnson, Goldsmith, and Gen-
eral Oglethorpe, he comments expansively, "Nothing was wanting but
my dearest wife to go home to, and a better fortune in the mean time
to make her live as she deserves" (10 April 1772; p. 107). At home
with his dearest wife, drunk, he curses her and throws "a candlestick
with a lighted candle at her. It made me shudder to hear such an ac-
count of my behaviour to one whom I have so much reason to love
and regard" (18 Sept. 1774; p. 321). The conventional pieties that Bos-
well, like Booth, readily utters cannot control the fierce passions
raging beneath his conventionality. The desire for individual expres-
sion outside institutional restrictions, as Boswell and Booth epitomize
it, produces not growth but chaos. When Booth settles down to rural
isolation with Amelia, he enjoys "an uninterrupted course of health
and happiness" (Bk. XII, ch. ix; VII, 340-341). Exploring other possi-
bilities, he lives in anxiety and internal disorder. Boswell, tormenting
himself with his imaginings, understands that he grows more through
efforts at control than through impulse toward expression. Marriage
emblemizes the conservative forces of the culture, of which Boswell
and Fielding alike attest the value, however their feelings urge them in
another direction.
"Amelia's 'heroic' role as wife and mother," Leo Braudy observes,
"restates the conflict between private and public history as a conflict
between essentially female and essentially male values. Fielding, like
Richardson, situates ultimate value in a woman." 31 Well, yes and no.
Certainly female values win in Amelia, as domesticity, patience, and
endurance receive their reward. And certainly male and female values
clash vividly. Yet the melancholy tone dominating this book may
make one question the existence of any "ultimate value." The clash
embodies the reality; Amelia's way of life avoids problems without
resolving them. As manifestly as Boswell's record of his early middle
age, the novel insists that there are no answers. Both these books
report the human struggle with time—that struggle in which one nec-
essarily loses. The resignation that attends the recognition of inevit-
able loss carries over into other areas. Boswell accepts the impossibil-
ity of winning universal admiration; Booth learns experientially, more

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convincingly than he learns the truths of Christianity, that all depends

on money, which can rarely be obtained by unaided individual effort.
He accepts passivity, happily acceding to the role of recipient and
living thus by a conventional but hardly an ultimate female value.
Marriage as a full commitment associates itself with the relinquish-
ment or sharp diminishment of ambitions that, experience testifies, are
unlikely in any case to produce significant reward.
But the moral complexity of these works depends partly on their
recognition that experience's lessons are characteristically ambiguous.
If marriage, through its association with order, sameness, commit-
ment, and monotony, epitomizes to Boswell and Booth the painful
awareness of freedom lost and hostages given to fortune, it also repre-
sents for both a form of salvation. Without wife and children, Booth
would less acutely feel his economic misfortunes; he would retain
greater scope for action, but he would also lack emotional sustenance
and moral support. Boswell's "valuable Peggy" helps to bear the bur-
den of his melancholy. When Tom Jones encounters the corrupt soci-
ety of London, he experiences it as an alien force that may involve him
for a time but from which he essentially remains separate even when
functioning as gigolo to Lady Bellaston. Booth and Boswell through
their marriages are committed to the social order from which they
profit and at which they chafe. Their losses and gains in maturity
often derive from a single source.

Boswell and Booth experience the pressure of society not only in

their most intimate relationships but in more generalized dealings with
the legal system. Law as embodiment of social values, actual and pro-
fessed, assumes symbolic and structural importance in Amelia and in
Boswell for the Defence.
In Amelia law functions symbolically and literally as agent of dis-
aster for Booth, and finally as means of reward. Mistakenly arrested
at the end of the second chapter, the captain repeatedly faces the dan-
ger and the reality of imprisonment as his financial affairs become
increasingly murky. His economic misfortunes, partly the result of his
inability or unwillingness to play the games expected of him by the
social world, make him a natural victim. Those who wish to harm or
exploit him, adept at society's manipulations, can readily have him
jailed. The law as it operates in the novel has become the instrument
of injustice and self-aggrandizement.

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Idealistic Dr. Harrison argues the possibility of reconciling law with

Christian love, holding forth a vision of criminals prosecuted purely
from a laudable desire to uphold the laws of the country. "Good laws
should execute themselves in a well-regulated state," the author ob-
serves in his own voice early in the novel (Bk. I, ch. ii; VI, 15). Such
statements of what social organization should imply echo ironically
behind the novel's detailed demonstration of how badly executed laws
in fact testify the fallibility of human institutions. Writing out of his
knowledge as a magistrate, Fielding invents with fury the corrupt
representatives of English justice and furiously describes the workings
of the system, in court, bailiff's house, and prison. Everywhere,
wealth and social class dictate response; individual merit is irrelevant;
"private malice" governs (Bk. IX, ch. viii; VII, 165). Booth's experi-
ence provides a microcosm of social disorder.
The second chapter of Amelia, entirely occupied with a theoretical
discussion of law and a demonstration of its operations through a
justice of the peace, establishes symbolic terms for the rest of the novel
and emphasizes the connection between the problems of marriage and
those of life in society. The author describes a poorly organized fam-
ily, in which the talents of every servant are "misemployed," offering
this description as an "illustration" to "set my intention in . . . a clearer
light" (VI, 16). Offices involving administration of law, he concludes,
are also bestowed on the wrong people, as in Thrasher's court, where
Booth is condemned to imprisonment for mistaken reasons. Justice
Thrasher, an unwitting follower of Rochefoucauld, judges wrongly,
because of his unremitting self-love, far oftener than the law of aver-
ages would permit if he judged at random. The assortment of guiltless
men and women he sends to prison in Chapter II thereafter disappear
from view, except for Booth, but they represent the vast assemblage of
the world's victims, punished for acting rightly. Thrasher's court
emblemizes society's moral confusion, which contaminates even those
institutions designed to guard against it. This confusion obviates
direct moral perception—the justice cannot see the most manifest evi-
dence of uprightness and innocence—in the courtroom as in other
social spheres. Everywhere people seek in one another only sources of
advantage, unable to see beyond the issue of gain.
The proper course for the individual to follow, given this state of
affairs, is far from clear. Explicitly, Fielding often declares the irrele-
vance of legal corruption to individual responsibility. The operative

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 Fielding and Boswell

system of rewards and punishments in the world bears little relation to

merit, but one may posit the right assignment of rewards and punish-
ments in an afterlife; Dr. Harrison and Amelia do so, and the reader is
presumably expected to assent. Booth learns that Justice Thrasher's
principles are those of the world, in which a man may advance by
pimping for his wife sooner than by fighting bravely in his country's
service. They are also the principles of many families, where husband
and wife, individually dominated by self-love, go their separate ways,
and appear to flourish. But Fielding observes at intervals that the
flourishing of the wicked can be only apparent, since laws beyond the
human continue to operate. Innocence is preferable to guilt, he sug-
gests, partly because it feels better: "Her sorrow, however exquisite,
was all soft and tender" (Bk. Vili, eh. ili; VII, 77). The innocent have a
less difficult relation to time than the guilty, since they can expect
ultimate reward. The novel's plot superficially supports the implica-
tions of such a viewpoint: the Booths' distressed circumstances are
converted into opulence; the captain's acceptance of orthodox Chris-
tianity promises him a share in heaven with his wife; the family's
miseries of social oppression are resolved by their retreat to the coun-
try.
But the novel's true moral complexity, despite its irritating pieties,
derives from deeper implications of its action and its development of
character—implications more paradoxical than the doctrines directly
stated. Booth, learning that retreat is a valuable strategy, learns also
the necessity of strategy. His long experience of official injustice mas-
querading as its opposite teaches him that one cannot afford vulner-
ability. If the kingdom in its administration resembles a family,
through comprehending the law in practice one may realize more pro-
foundly the structures, acknowledged and unacknowledged, that con-
trol family life and the difficulty of ordering them by rational princi-
ples. Booth comes to understand the almost impossible demands of
virtuous living, but he understands more acutely the dangers of being
judged. His final choice involves a retreat from one arena of judgment
and a willingness to behave in such a way that he will not suffer from
the kinds of assessment still brought to bear on his conduct.
Booth experiences society as enemy because social judgments derive
largely from general categories rather than from specific perceptions.
Unemployed, he has no social role except that of pariah, no meaning-
ful social class, hence no power base. Fielding shows us, through the

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 Imagining a Self

case of Sergeant Atkinson, how crucial such a theoretical distinction

as military rank can be. Atkinson's wife, ashamed to admit her alli-
ance with a noncommissioned officer, would literally prostitute her-
self to gain a commission for her husband. Booth's captaincy, though
hardly an operative reality, anchors his precarious sense of worth.
Unable to find gainful employment because his employment serves no
immediate social interest, he acquires status and security simply by
receiving money. This arrangement is not altogether comforting.
Booth, conforming and living the prosperous rural life appropriate to
his condition, finds society finally no threat. But he has experienced
the ease with which a man can become an outsider, the difficulty with
which he regains security, and the arbitrariness with which rewards as
well as punishments are assigned.
Law exemplifies things as they are. At one point Booth brings bank-
ruptcy on himself by setting up a carriage. He can well afford it, at this
particular stage of his life, but other men at his social level do not own
carriages, therefore he should not. His neighbors, embodying society's
force, rise in disapproval against his presumption and effect his finan-
cial overthrow. The triviality of this particular instance of overreach-
ing—one thinks of what "presumption" means in Greek tragedy—
reflects the triviality of society's preoccupations, which, however, by
no means diminishes their power. A man must not presume beyond
his station; he must not want too much. These are the important les-
sons Booth learns: never to act rashly and finally, virtually not to act
at all.
When he has been totally paralyzed by his misfortunes—literally
imprisoned, but also reduced to a condition where meaningful en-
deavor has become impossible—the law becomes the instrument of his
rescue. The machinations about the will by which Amelia receives her
inheritance vividly exemplify the arbitrary nature of law and of the
social system it represents, which bestows reward and punishment
with equal insouciance. Booth shows great good sense in retiring with
his gains; nothing in his experience suggests the possibility that he can
use them responsibly in the world. The coterminous processes of aging
and of encountering society's forces in action alike appear to demand
the yielding of any hope for functioning effectively in the public
sphere, the sphere of corruption. One must retreat to the domestic, the
novel argues, the smallest social unit, the unit of virtue.
Boswell, on the other hand, continues to function in public and to

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function, indeed, as an agent of law. Yet his experience of law as sym-

bolic representative of society oddly parallels Booth's, even though he
remains law's spokesman rather than its victim. The structural func-
tion of law in Boswell's narrative of himself reiterates the ambiguities
of Booth's career.
Booth's central problems concern how to act; Boswell's continue to
involve how to feel. More fundamentally, he faces the difficulty
(which has confronted him in various ways since his early youth) of
determining what kind of value feeling has in comparison to rational
judgment.
Theoretically, the law's impersonality seems to Boswell one of its
merits. He comments that "the nation is more civilized and judges
have better notions of justice" than in the past, being now less influ-
enced by "private regard," since justice has come to be understood as a
an abstract consideration. Yet his language of approval betrays famil-
iar ambivalence: he profoundly values the personal and private, the
realm of feeling. Is justice purer now because most people have less
powerful emotions than once they had? As he continues to ponder the
matter, he realizes that he is reluctant to blame "our judges of the last
age" for their less abstract adherence to justice because he understands
their bias as deriving from the "warmth of their hearts." Legal cases
provide such abundant opportunity for rational disagreement that it
seems quite proper to him that emotion should in some instances cast
the balance (15 June 1774; p. 210).
His own practice of law involves a high degree of emotion; the
rewards he values are rewards of feeling. He declares himself "a kind
of enthusiast in my profession," confessing his "great pleasure in ob-
serving different specimens of it" (5 April 1773; p. 162). These com-
ments occur more than a year before his reflections on abstract justice,
but indications of his emotional involvement with his profession
abound throughout the Reid case. On the day John Reid is convicted,
the lawyer emphasizes his narcissistic satisfaction with his own perfor-
mance. "Being elated with the admirable appearance which I had
made in the court, I was in such a frame as to think myself an Edmund
Burke—and a man who united pleasantry in conversation with abili-
ties in business and powers as an orator. I enjoyed the applause which
several individuals of the jury now gave me and the general attention
with which I was treated" (1 Aug. 1774; p. 253). But the glamor of the
functioning lawyer's appearance, to himself and to others, can only

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 Imagining a Self

superficially affect the reality of how he feels. In 1770, in an essay in

The London Magazine, Boswell had discussed the actor's profession,
partly in terms of the kind of feeling involved in it, and had compared
it, in this respect, with the barrister's activity.

If I may be allowed to conjecture what is the nature of that mys-

terious power by which a player really is the character which he
represents, my notion is that he must have a kind of double feeling.
He must assume in a strong degree the character which he repre-
sents, while he at the same time retains the consciousness of his own
character. The feelings and passions of the character which he
represents must take full possession as it were of the antechamber of
his mind, while his own character remains in the innermost recess.
This is experienced in some measure by the barrister who enters
warmly into the cause of his client, while at the same time, when he
examines himself coolly, he knows that he is much in the wrong,
and does not even wish to prevail. (Quoted in Boswell for the De-
fence, p. 17)

Boswell thus defines the lawyer's role as epitomizing the ambivalence

that characterized his own emotional life in and out of his profession.
Paul Fussell has remarked of Boswell, "He constantly welcomed
incongruities in the world around him . . . as a way of persuading him-
self that his own painful internal divisions had really a counterpart in
the objective world outside and were not the deforming secret singu-
larities which he feared they were."32 His perception of the barrister's
function represents a different version of this habit of mind.
The duality of the lawyer's experience resides not simply in the rela-
tion between his clients' interests and his own sense of justice; it resides
in Boswell as well. He feels concern with the glamor of his role, desire
to preserve or enhance his prestige, warmth of heart (which intensifies
his deep psychic involvement with Reid's fate), yearning for power,
and rage at the sense of powerlessness afflicting those who confront
the majesty of law. He had lost cases before and endured clients' exe-
cutions. His special anxiety this time partly reflects the immediate
intensity of his effort to make a place in his father's world. Boswell, in
the Reid case, clearly felt an outsider. Fielding defines Captain Booth
as an outcast by making him a debtor. Boswell, no outcast, even
applauded by the jury that had just convicted his client, yet feels alone
as he pleads for Reid's life. Society insists that the sheep-stealer must
die; society tells Boswell that he must not try to revive the hanged
man. In both cases Boswell accedes—he has no choice. He feels de-

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 Fielding and Boswell

feated. His father, always on the side of the law-abiding majority and
always right, has judged—Boswell must have felt—thief and lawyer
alike and found both wanting. Lord Auchinleck embodies the law; the
law—for Boswell as for Fielding—speaks for society, and in a single
voice, which forbids the ambiguities that Boswell perceives every-
where. Nor does society's judgment any longer—though Boswell
fancies that once, in practice, it did—allow for "warmth of heart" as a
component of judgment. Law, like time, is experienced as a force that
diminishes. Booth escapes from the pressure of law as public institu-
tion into the lesser restriction of the family institution. Boswell,
uncomfortably committed to both, must learn to live with both.
The London Journal ended in an atmosphere of qualified triumph,
with the individual's assertion of himself and his destiny. Young Bos-
well, sadder than before at the conclusion of his London year, is at
least wise enough to know that he cannot do everything nor be every-
one he admires. Boswell for the Defence ends somberly. John Reid's
ghost metaphorically haunts Boswell, reproaching him for yielding to
organized society, reminding him that the world inexorably exacts its
punishments. He had done everything for his client—pled for him
powerfully, written letters everywhere that might help, bought him
drinks, comforted his wife, even abortively planned his resurrection—
and everything was not enough. Society makes reputation a principle
of judgment; society represents an irresistible force.
Boswell's divided heart leads him to identify passionately with the
outsider, while as passionately yearning to be an insider. To be a suc-
cessful lawyer supports his self-esteem, yet also threatens its very
foundation. In London, Scottish friends comment that Boswell is like
his father. "I indeed felt myself very steady and very composed," he
comments smugly (28 March 1772; p. 68). The next day, he has his
conversation with Mrs. Stuart about marital infidelity. To be steady
and composed, functioning as a respectable member of society, yet at
best a pale copy of his father—how much more tempting to have a
seraglio! Sometimes working as a lawyer represents merely an escape
from boredom. Johnson emphatically encourages this view, suggest-
ing that leisure implies tedium (18 April 1772; p. 128). But such an
argument for his profession hints Boswell's difficulty about participat-
ing fully in his culture's values. Every day he sees before him, in the
persons of accused criminals, the high penalties of social deviation. So
he expresses his impulse toward rebelling in the socially acceptable

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 Imagining a Self

(and socially conducted) activity of heavy drinking. The world values

and supports him in his professional success; he tries to suppress his
idiosyncrasies. To be an outsider, a nonviable luxury, represents con-
stant danger.
Booth and Boswell, then, each a central character of a narrative
action, engage in processes of growth that involve their coming to
accept certain community values. Amelia, pole star for Booth's psy-
chic wanderings, knows from the beginning the importance of Chris-
tian ethics and conventional morality. Her lack of sophistication in
the ways of polite society fleetingly endangers her, but she has no dif-
ficulty distinguishing between good and bad standards of conduct and
judgment. Her husband's asserted religious conversion in effect signals
his final willingness to govern himself by beliefs shared by those who
exemplify the official (as opposed to the actual) values of his society.
For this conversion he is effectively rewarded by Amelia's inheritance,
a development no more implausible than the change of heart that
merits it. Boswell's account in Boswell for the Defence relates the
process by which he assimilates himself into the life of an Edinburgh
attorney—an assimilation also well rewarded, although not so dra-
matically as Booth's conversion. He repeatedly reports evidence of his
improvement: new clients, praise from his peers and superiors, social
acceptance. His misgivings about conformity express themselves far
more eloquently in his journal than in the life it records, and he enjoys
the conformist's rewards.
He does not describe himself as a failure, nor does Booth, content
with the blessings the gods have bestowed. Boswell feels remorse and
guilt for individual failures, nostalgia for the lost past, diminishment
in accepting the requirements of his role, but usually also the con-
sciousness that he is doing the best that he can. Fielding, similarly,
does not finally condemn Booth. He makes Amelia a paragon, but she
faces the struggle in society less fully than her husband. She must pro-
tect her virtue and her family, but she need not earn a living. Booth,
responsible for making money, deviates from perfect rectitude and
even from good sense. He rationalizes and misinterprets his inadequa-
cies, but almost everyone in the novel rationalizes and misinterprets,
telling their own stories as formed by their feelings. Fielding's large
awareness of this universal human trait helps to excuse or forgive
Booth and to convince us that he deserves his money for his sufferings
if not for his virtue.

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 Fielding and Boswell

The superficial form of the narratives, in other words, emphasizes

success rather than failure, despite the somberness beneath. Boswell
succeeds in his conformity even though he is capable of perceiving
conformity as defeat. Booth succeeds in finding domestic happiness,
removed from the world's temptations, and thus can comfortably
decide that the world, though corrupt, is irrelevant. But the new ele-
ment in the shape of these narrative actions is the persistent substruc-
ture of defeat. The two men learn what cannot be conquered or con-
tained as well as what can and experience that knowledge not merely
as metaphysical reality (as it is, for example, in Tristram Shandy) but
as social fact.
Of course Boswell's state at the end of this segment of his life seems
far more conditional than Booth's at the end of Amelia. Booth has
been allowed to achieve an existence with which he can presumably
remain content; Boswell's contentment is highly problematical, as
contentment in life must always remain—thus the abiding difference
between the effect of happy endings in autobiographies and in novels.
As the Greeks knew, one can count no man happy until he is dead.
Modern novelists have devised artifices of uncertainty; Fielding's is an
artifice of certainty and of completion. We reach eagerly for the next
volume of Boswell's journals, and the next, and the next; Amelia gen-
erates no longing for a sequel. Yet its completed form embodies the
same uncertainties as Boswell's: uncertainties about how a man can
live, given the psychic difficulties of his mortal and his social condi-
tion. Booth with money bestowed upon him, making his peace with
family life, finds an easy mode of existence. Yet the problems do not
disappear as human or as novelistic realities because wealth seems to
have solved them in his case.
The substructures of defeat echo and parody the imposed forms of
happiness that are won by acceptance of official values: a paradox
built into the plots of both the novel and the journal. Boswell struggles
against time, against the restrictions of marriage, against the unbend-
ing rigors of the law: hence the drama of his narrative. Yet time, mar-
riage, and law represent precisely the principles he must accept in
order to progress. Defeat in his struggle thus bears a Janus-face of vic-
tory; he can win only by losing. But the loss remains part of every
advance. Boswell as story-teller understands no more of that paradox
than Boswell as victim; he helplessly records his vacillations between
self-congratulation and despair, the essential causes of the contradic-

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 Imagining a Self

tory emotions being closely related. His story-telling allows him to

express emotion often hidden elsewhere in his life, but it no longer
effects experimental transformations of his experience. Facts in them-
selves have more weight for him than they did ten years before. His
imagination operates fitfully to enlarge his self-image in the present,
but it works better for the past and the future. He knows that imagina-
tion brings no income and that other people's standards of success
impinge now on him. The jury applauds his performance for John
Reid, but his performance has no power to change the course of
events. In the world outside, people apparently manage not to live by
their feelings; he struggles to do the same.
Fielding is manifestly conscious of comparable paradoxes in his his-
tory of the Booths and obviously feels uncomfortable about them. He
distinguishes, as his central characters learn to distinguish, between
good and bad values as exemplified in society, but the novel's argu-
ment insists that one must accept some of the community's beliefs in
order to progress. Booth's individualism—his claim to make moral
judgments on the basis of his personal intuitions—must be disciplined;
his acceptance of Christianity marks his admission that he is not suf-
ficient unto himself. His sufferings as victim of a society exemplified
by its legal system lead him to self-restriction, retreat, moderation,
and lessened aspiration: to socialization.
Deliberately choosing to create a fiction about what happens after
marriage, Fielding commits himself to the difficult enterprise of deal-
ing with the diminishments of maturity, celebrating not the potential
but the achieved self. The ambiguities of his chosen technique—rely-
ing heavily on characters' often inaccurate stories about themselves to
insist on the complexities of self-awareness and external judgment—
appropriately reflect the ambiguities of his central fable with its
flawed male protagonist and its frequently helpless heroine. Boswell's
record of a few years of his maturity, partly aware of its own ambigui-
ties, tells a story in some ways similar. Helpless without the protection
of natural and social law, the self accepts diminishment and functional
maturity as a paradox of success-in-defeat and defeat-in-success. Bos-
well ages, accommodates, and lives a life among men, while his youth-
ful grandiosities survive unchanged behind convention's screen.
The plot structure of Amelia ultimately rewards the good and pun-
ishes the wicked. Authorial pieties assert the rationality of the cosmic,
if not the social, order and thus appear sometimes to deny the impor-

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 Fielding and Boswell

tance of society's painful pressures. Fielding carefully distinguishes

between good people and bad, between good and bad social values;
Booth must learn the same distinctions. But he, like Boswell, suffers
from the pressure of those forces with which he must cooperate in
order to grow; he too loses energy, self-confidence, and charm in
becoming socialized. Although he escapes social corruption by retreat-
ing to the country, he has in fact experienced a dilemma even more
impossible than Boswell's. The relative powerlessness of virtuous,
passive Amelia and her well-intentioned, desperate husband reveals
the horror of social reality—a horror that Fielding finally evades. Field-
ing's novel and Boswell's journal both demonstrate the painful human
need for self-assertion in the face of unopposable forces, the appar-
ently random distribution of success and failure, and the ways in
which the sense of self weakens and its literary renditions become
increasingly complex. Justice Thrasher's court, with its arbitrary injus-
tices, miniaturizes the world. The inadvertent form of autobiography
and the intricate plotting of novel, in this case, illustrate similar truths
through similar manipulations of painful paradox.

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 10
Selfhood,
Given and Formed

wentieth-century autobiographies deliberately adopt the tech-

T nique of novels. Twentieth-century novelists write thinly

veiled autobiography, call it a novel, then complain if readers
suspect some direct self-revelation. Or they write real novels and com-
plain; readers still believe them to be autobiography. The multiplying
confusions of genre are encouraged and publicized, becoming part of
the general confusion of our time.
Investigation of our literary forebears, however, suggests that sub-
stantial distinctions between fictional and factual renditions of person-
ality have always proved difficult to maintain, although they might in
the past be taken on faith. The productions of the upright, sober, fac-
tual-sounding memoirists of the eighteenth century were paralleled by
those of novelists sounding equally upright, sober, and factual; the
extravagances of Tristram Shandy match those of Colley Cibber. The
experience of reading Fanny Burney on Fanny Burney closely resem-
bles that of reading Fanny Burney on Evelina.
The experience of reading must serve as a final resource to define a
book's essential nature. In effect, this study has been seeking, through
close investigation of individual texts, to arrive at some preliminary
understanding of the modes of eighteenth-century autobiography and
novel, in the sense usefully defined by Paul Alpers: "Mode is the liter-
ary manifestation, in a given work, of the writer's and the putative
reader's assumptions about man's nature and situation."1 Such assump-

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 Selfhood, Given and Formed

tions manifest themselves, of course, at many different levels; Profes-

sor Alpers goes on to demonstrate that one may locate different modes
in various passages of a single work or, conversely, use the term to
suggest linkages between books in obvious respects different from one
another: The Faerie Queene and Don Juan, for example (p. 50). If we
conclude, then—as I think we must—that autobiography and the
novel in eighteenth-century England shared common modes, we are
not declaring an identity of genres: only an important bond of shared
assumptions, shared techniques, and shared demands on the reader.
Autobiography, from its writer's point of view, implies curious
expectations. The autobiographer offers himself, his life, his story, for
illumination, entertainment, and judgment. He assumes, and assumes
the reader will assume, that a person can be known through his story.
The rhetoric of eighteenth-century autobiographies, of course, refers
to history rather than story, emphasizing the record's literal truth and
implying its relative lack of artificial shaping. But the role of the writer
in setting down his life involves more than memory and chronology,
as Gibbon's false starts indicate; the historian like the fictionist forms
his record to reveal the meaning he wishes to impart. "Knowing what
was to happen after the events which they are chronicling, historians
nearly always make it seem too inevitable . . . They lead us to forget
how heavily the path ahead is obscured by fog, how infinite are the
number of directions which the course of events may take." 2 The auto-
biographer, inviting judgment, may attempt to control the reader's
response partly by demonstrating the inevitability of the happenings
that have made him: inviting judgment, he thus simultaneously dis-
claims responsibility. He makes every effort to preclude the possibility
of final negative judgment. Even Cowper, insisting on his inadequacy
and sinfulness, reminds us that his is a chronicle of salvation and that
his painful struggle—partly self-justifying through its very pain—has
eventuated in acceptance by God. How can mere mortals presume to
oppose divine judgment? Colley Cibber, revealing himself a fool (in a
fashion that foretells much twentieth-century autobiography in which
the narrator insistently proclaims his sins and follies), demands ap-
proval for his self-revelation. The reader who shares Pope's contemp-
tuous assessment, or Fielding's, does so only by forcibly rejecting the
assumptions Cibber invites him to accept: assumptions about our
common humanity, common folly, and about the arrogance of any
claim to moral superiority.

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 Imagining a Self

The judgment the autobiographer invites, in other words, is one

that confirms his self-evaluation, and he shapes his story to ensure it.
Ralph Rader, trying to define what he calls the "general action model"
of the novel, suggests that "the action model describes a work which
the reader at some level of consciousness must know from the outset is
being shaped beneath its realistic surface to meet the created require-
ments of desire. It has therefore the character of an objective fantasy,
not such a fantasy as makes a reader the passive victim of a process
hidden from his consciousness, but a deliberate, determinate, con-
scious, controlled fantasy identical with the cognitive structure of the
book." 3 This element of fantasy, one might think, would distinguish
works of fiction from factual records. But investigation of even a few
eighteenth-century autobiographies discloses similar elements beneath
the surface. One might question the applicability of such terms as
deliberate and conscious, but they are questionable in relation to
novels as well. Granted, autobiographers deal with intractable hap-
penings. One need only recall Boswell, however, to realize the multi-
ple possibilities of interpreting any given happening. The stories in
Amelia and the interpolated tales in Tom ]ones remind us how
rememberers use and form and distort the raw material of their mem-
ories.
They form the material to answer their wishes and ours—to meet,
in Rader's phrase, "the created requirements of desire." Every literary
work establishes its own ground of expectation, but the kind of wish
gratified by eighteenth-century autobiography remains fairly con-
stant. For writer and for reader, this sort of autobiography meets the
desire that life should make sense, a yearning far more fundamental
than any wish that one particular thing or another should happen to
the protagonist of a literary work. The narrative mode that novel and
autobiography share is in this sense a mode of fantasy rather than of
belief. Declaring that meaning lies in sequence, in events following
from preceding events, it speaks to uncertainties vivid to everyone, in
whatever century. The spiritual autobiography of the period explicitly
declares that lives have plots arranged by God. But every memoir reit-
erates the first part of that statement: autobiographies affirm the art of
life, in the sense in which Fielding used the term, as stoutly as they
affirm human identity. They affirm, in short, the fulfillment of deep
human desires—precisely the desires answered by the artistry of the
traditional novel.

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 Selfhood, Given and Formed

Robinson Crusoe tells us that life makes sense, and so does Evelina.
Even Tristram Shandy in all its incoherence, full of statements that life
—and death—constantly frustrate expectation, speaks of reiterated
pattern in human experience. We may smile at the crudity of wish
fulfillment in Evelina, where good girl wins rich man, only to respond
to the same sort of gratification at a deeper level in Pamela, where the
good girl's winning involves more complex structures of cause and
effect. At a deeper level still in Tristram, structure derives from the
way that everyone fulfills his nature. The drama of that same demon-
stration—how inexorably a man enacts himself—absorbs us in Bos-
well's extended journals and in Hume's brief self-summary. The novels
characteristically recount more absorbing individual events than the
autobiographies, although Mrs. Charke, Mrs. Pilkington, and Bos-
well provide happenings at least as dramatic as anything that takes
place in Evelina. On the other hand, virtually nothing of external
interest happens to Gibbon or to Hume, by their reports. Cowper's
account of himself contains only a single dramatic episode; we do not
read Mrs. Thrale in search of sensational event. Yet all these books,
like novels, meet our opposed desires for order and for excitement and
for some reconciliation of the two. The excitement of Tom Jones
derives from its happenings; that of Gibbon's memoirs, from the ten-
sion of his effort to trace his destiny. Both gratify the profound wish
that everything should come out right. The difference in the material
and the methodology by which they effect this gratification must be
noted, but so must the underlying identity of achievement.
The two most fully achieved novels in the group we have investi-
gated, Tom Jones and Tristram Shandy, resemble one another con-
spicuously in their elaborate attention to the role of the reader, the
nature of the reader's participation constituting the central problem in
the determination of mode. They assume the reader's active engage-
ment in an imaginative process and his possession of intellectual capa-
cities (wit, judgment), social attitudes (e.g., high regard for money
and fame), and moral convictions (kindness is preferable to cruelty,
openness to hypocrisy) that are felt to be more or less universal. Novel-
ists who do not spell out their positions appear to make similar
assumptions. Fanny Burney does not take account of the possibility
that anyone might feel that Evelina should not marry Lord Orville.
Defoe knows that his readers will congratulate Crusoe on amassing
wealth. Autobiographers likewise rest their faith in their capacity to

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 Imagining a Self

lead readers through imaginative participation to desired conclusions.

Gibbon acknowledges that his inability to ride horseback and his
absence of profession separate him from his class, but his weighty sen-
tences imply his certainty that the immediate audience will understand
the necessities of his position. Indeed, his poignant references to the
generations yet unborn who will be his friends suggest his conviction
that readers will share his values if most of his acquaintances do not.
The modes shared by early autobiography and novel are styles of
narrative and appeals to common fantasy. They are fundamentally
optimistic modes in the faith they imply in their readers' good will,
capacity, and shared nature, and in the faith they iterate in human
stability and growth. But it is a mistake to assume that such facts
declare the profound security of the eighteenth-century world or of its
literature. The direct comments Fielding and Tristram make about
their readers express not only optimism but anxiety. Granted common
values, attitudes, and assumptions, readers yet remain unpredictable,
individual beings; no faith in human nature can assure a writer of pre-
cisely the response he wishes or ensure him against conceivable nega-
tive judgment. Nor is the issue merely authorial vanity. The incalcula-
ble differences between people suggest the possibility of fundamentally
different experiences of life. To say, as Fielding and Tristram do, that
their readers' imaginations are not firmly under their control or that
their readers may not work hard enough at the task of participation to
receive what the writer has to give is to imply that the order of se-
quence, of cause and effect, cannot be counted on in life, although it
can be created in literature.
The awareness of what cannot be counted on, in fact, looms large in
these books, despite the air of assurance most of them convey. Given
the common concern with human development shared by autobiog-
raphies and the novels that imitate or comment upon autobiographical
form, one might expect to find these books raising common questions.
Such questions indeed emerge, but without consistent answers. The
questions rather than the answers define an important aspect of the
eighteenth-century mode, inasmuch as it is investigative rather than
simply affirmative. Even the autobiographies and novels that de-
fiantly insist upon their particular answers often betray underlying
uncertainties.
Most of the important questions posed by the literature that is cen-
tered on the dramatic study of human character are implicit in the

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 Selfhood, Given and Formed

deceptively simple mode of spiritual autobiography. There is the

problem of determinism, for example—or fate, destiny, God. Robin-
son Crusoe's retrospective assurance that God's plan for him operated
through the very grains of corn clinging to the inside of a sack does
not preclude, from his point of view, his free will. He sees his story as
involving repeated, important choices. Similarly, Cowper, for all his
passivity and his accounts of how he "was hurried" here and there or
resuscitated by a vision of a joyous boy, implicitly assumes in his self-
castigation responsibility for his own moral choices. But the paradox
of the fortunate fall operates in Crusoe's narrative, although he never
acknowledges the fact. His story reports growth and salvation
through the pain of self-will. God, of course, has made such salvation
possible; yet Crusoe's wrong choices seem quite specifically respon-
sible for his ultimate wealth and contentment. As for Cowper, the
drive toward despair that he declares he has overcome informs his
entire narrative; one feels the power of the willful self throughout the
story of the self's powerlessness.
In secular contexts, the unanswerable question about the degree of
human freedom emerges with equal insistence and with equal implicit
anxiety. Gibbon's effort to understand his own history focuses fre-
quently on the problem of necessity. He feels, as all people feel, the
necessity of his identity, but how he came to be remains perplexing.
Destiny? Choice? Looking back, he can perceive the crucial choices,
only to reformulate the difficulty. What has impelled him toward
those choices? To suggest, as he finally does, that his pain has formed
him is merely to beg the question—as everyone ultimately must—
about the sources or necessities of that pain. Tristram Shandy, Gib-
bon's fictional opposite and counterpart, worries endlessly the prob-
lem of why he and others are the curious people they are, whether
their conspicuous and agonizing lack of control over the outcome of
even trivial events epitomizes the human condition, and whether there
is any escape. Although the novel's consideration of these matters is
more extensive and explicit than the equivalent in Defoe or Cowper or
Gibbon, its conclusions are equally (and insistently) ambiguous. One
can write books (but why?); one must die; Uncle Toby cannot get
married; Walter Shandy cannot escape marriage. For what reason?
Amelia, which brings up the problem of social determinism, simply
evades it at last. Suggesting that the accidents of social fate have more
bearing on individual possibility than do the most meticulous choices,

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the novel cannot confront the implications of such a suggestion, re-

treating into affirmations of God's ultimate justice but leaving the
reader exercised by his encounter with ominous social realities.
Boswell probably makes the problem of responsibility more vivid
than any other writer of his century, conveying both his confidence
that a man can be, by effort, whoever he chooses and his repeated dis-
covery that he cannot simply select a role and inhabit it for more than
a few hours or days at a time. The pathos of his repeated good resolu-
tions calls attention to an essentially metaphysical problem. Fanny
Burney, with all her good resolutions, reveals the problem's social
counterpart in the special form inflicted upon women. Mary Woll-
stonecraft and Jane Barker in their fictions convey that a woman's
efforts to take responsibility for herself will meet only frustration. All
these books create images of human endeavor; most implicitly or
explicitly glorify the life of striving. But they do not merely accept
with bland optimism the assumption that striving brings the reward
anticipated or desired.
Beneath all problems of heroism and responsibility lies the issue that
most profoundly concerns the writers of the time: the relative power
and validity of inner versus outer reality. The novelists without excep-
tion, although they describe protagonists at various stages between
obsessive introspection and apparent unawareness of inner experi-
ence, testify to the shaping power of the psychic life. Pamela and Tom
Jones, deriving from very different sorts of novelistic imagination,
resemble one another in this respect. Tom's lack of forethought and
speculation and concern for consequences repeatedly get him in
trouble; his fantasies about the women who attract him determine
many of his actions; more important, his consistent imagining of obli-
gation to others leads to his blossoming into manhood. The narrator
employs his jovial, mocking tone for discussion of Tom's tendency to
mislead himself by his fancy, but Partridge's response to Hamlet and
the maidservant's to the puppet show insist on the possibilities of
imagination as directed by art to affect understanding and action. The
novelistic enterprise involves the attempt to form readers' imagina-
tions; it reports the redirection and increased control of Tom's fantasy
life. He himself as a character comes dimly to understand the impor-
tance of his imaginings to his actions, as when he explains his enact-
ments of lust as dependent on his lack of hope for Sophia and insists
that once he imagined the possibility of winning her, he no longer
could desire another woman.

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 Selfhood, Given and Formed

The case is more obvious with Pamela, whose elaborately devel-

oped fantasies about the high significance of every minor event ulti-
mately come to control her employer's vision of life, quite replacing
his earlier assumption that a stolen kiss in the garden house means
nothing at all. Pamela's highly charged perceptions of moral drama
everywhere create that drama for others. She makes her wishes come
true by the sheer determination with which she clings to them. Her
imagining of Squire B. as a monster makes him monstrous to himself,
her perception of him as paragon turns him into a sententious counter-
part for her.
With varying degrees of energy and success, the protagonists of
these novels change the world by their dreams of it. Robinson Crusoe,
imagining his isolation on a desert island, finds himself the island;
imagining his kingship, he creates the situation in which he can be a
leader; imagining his self-mastery, he achieves it. Tristram Shandy's
bizarre world reflects his grotesque imagination; he, more fully than
any other fictional character of his century, understands the relation
between fantasy and reality. Evelina, a much cruder novelistic crea-
tion, like Pamela makes her wishes come true, just as, more blatantly,
Captain Mirvan in the same novel fulfills his sadistic fantasies of tor-
menting Mme. Duval. Amelia in relation to that issue emerges clearly
as the protagonist of Fielding's novel. Her husband acts while she only
suffers, but her vision of reality, in which virtue must finally triumph,
is confirmed by the novel's ending; his imagining of how the world
works is declared—rather artifically—to be mistaken.
To note this persistent theme in eighteenth-century novels is to real-
ize that in a simple sense the plots of all the fictions we have con-
sidered involve a pattern of wish fulfillment for the central character.
Each achieves exactly what he wants most. Even Tristram, the appar-
ent deviant among a collection of more or less conventionally ima-
gined figures, gets as much as, in the world of his imagining, he pos-
sibly can. He gets to write his story, to win precarious control of his
readers, and to demonstrate his own reality. Here is the most funda-
mental optimism of this novelistic mode. It declares not only the
stable identity of the individual, but his ultimate power—largely
denied or made ambiguous by real life—to shape the world he experi-
ences.
Real lives do not declare this power so clearly, but stories of real
lives, in their eighteenth-century mode, often do. One may suspect at
the same time that reality affects imagination as forcefully as fancy

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 Imagining a Self

shapes the personal world. Does Mrs. Thrale's conviction of injustice

reflect the ways that other people arbitrarily treat her or the way she
causes them to treat her? The detailed record of her journal forces the
reader to recognize the degree to which her vision of her predicament
constantly reinforces it as well as the préexistent limitations of possi-
bility she faced.
Only Boswell, among the century's autobiographers, discusses at
length and explicitly the relation between internal and external experi-
ence. He knows beyond all doubt, to his own distress, that the way he
sees things determines what they are, and that his ways of seeing may
—probably will—change from one day to another. But it is the nature
of autobiography to demonstrate this fact whether or not the writer is
aware of it. Gibbon shows us that he became a historian because of his
penchant for uncovering sequential pattern, and his efforts at auto-
biography demonstrate precisely how that penchant controls what he
can and cannot see. Cibber imagines himself a triumphant fool and
tells his story of triumphant folly. Fanny Burney fancies the social
world a moral arena; in her narrative it becomes precisely that. Cow-
per, more totally than any of the others, reveals that his real life has
been almost entirely one of the imagination, nothing in his experience
having meaning apart from that.
To tell one's story, as these men and women tell it, thus becomes an
affirmation of power, even when the story contains emphatic defeats
(like Cowper's) or evidence of limitation or revelations of folly. To set
down a personal interpretation of personal experience declares auton-
omy and demonstrates the dominance of the mental life, although the
autobiographers announced concern may be with external happen-
ing. Through subject or through technique the autobiographies of the
eighteenth century establish a mode equivalent to that of much of the
period's fiction: one based on assumption of the compelling energy of
inner experience.
Yet this assumption does not obviate the question about precisely
how powerful, how formative, that energy actually can be. The auto-
biographical and the novelistic modes root themselves less in securities
than in wonderings. In this literature, as in life, the claims of society
counter those of the psyche. Amelia embodies the most powerful
statement of society's power to control and to destroy individual hap-
piness, but every writer we have encountered recognizes at some level,
even if he acknowledges it only by denial, the problem involved in the

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 Selfhood, Given and Formed

individual's efforts to establish a viable relation to his social context.

That the solution is often escape—for Crusoe, for Tristram, for Tom
and Amelia, for Cowper and in a psychic sense for Hume, for Lady
Mary, for the characters in romance—only emphasizes the insolubil-
ity of the problem. Fanny Bumey's heroines, like Miss Burney herself,
come to terms with the demands implied and stated by their social
world but not without authorial recognition of the cost in freedom
and self-assertiveness. Pamela assumes that she gets more than she
relinquishes in becoming an impeccable model of upper-class decorum.
Although the reader can hardly fail to notice the decrease in drama of
her post-marital experience, Richardson, alone among these writers,
implies not the slightest question about the value of living as a mem-
ber of society. On the other hand, the structure of his novel depends
on his profound questioning (profound answers are another matter) of
the ways in which the assumptions of a class system may operate in
practice.
Among the autobiographers, Cibber describes himself as living
most fully in the public world—indeed, by his account, he has virtu-
ally no private life. The possibility of alternative orientations never
seems to cross his mind. Although he imagines that he might have
been a bishop or a military leader, he never conceives of living with-
out the eyes of the world upon him. The world determines reality
from his point of view; yet this extreme commitment to the impor-
tance of society as the center of experience conceals a radical sense of
alienation, which is betrayed in the childhood reminiscences about
rejection by his peers and emphasized by his defiant insistence on
being himself, although he knows the world will judge him a fool.
Gibbon, another figure who lived much of his life in society, describes
himself as a solitary man concerned only with his vocation, and he
resolves his personal problems by choosing exile, rejecting the life of
his class, and associating with only a few. Even Boswell, who vividly
enjoyed contact with others in large groups or small and took pleasure
in feeling himself part of a community of his kind—Edinburgh law-
yers, magazine owners, patriots—evokes an intermittent but compell-
ing sense of separation, isolation, and even opposition to the values
his various communities held.
The possibility and the usefulness of autonomy, of separateness,
thus preoccupy at some level of consciousness all the writers we have
encountered. Setting down on the page their self-definitions, or defin-

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 Imagining a Self

ing through action the being of a fictional character, they strike some
balance between the opposed principles of selfhood and society, but
they also express the precariousness of any such balance.
To convey questionings and convictions, autobiographers and
novelists alike require artifices of sincerity and truthfulness. The more
than two centuries of debate about exactly how artful and how con-
scious Pamela is in the process of getting what she wants might be ex-
tended in one way or another to include many books. In some cases
the central character brings up the problem of artifice; in some cases,
the author does. How does one come to terms, for example, with
Fielding's ostentatious contrivances? He insists that he is relating a his-
tory and that his raw material is the truth of human nature; he re-
minds the reader constantly of the author's role as manipulator of
events and controller of character. He simultaneously demands and
rejects the reader's belief. Defoe proclaims, untruly, the factuality of
his narrative. Fanny Burney asserts that the moral effect of fiction
depends upon its probabilities, but she writes contemporary fairy
tales. As for the autobiographers: Gibbon, offering prose remarkably
formal and highly worked even for his time, tells us that style is the
image of character. He declares truth the sole purpose of a narrative
that omits entirely—to mention only one example—any reference to
his not infrequent sexual liaisons. Cibber claims to tell everything and
leaves out his private life. Boswell, writing about posing and acting
parts as a problem in his experience, demonstrates in the writing the
process he is describing. Hume, boasting the truthfulness of the dying
man, makes every effort to convey a radically simplified view of him-
self.
I am not trying to suggest that these autobiographers do not tell the
truth, or that the novelists really contradict themselves in announcing
their truthfulness and telling the fictionists' lies. Novelists and auto-
biographers necessarily depend upon artifice—shaping, inventing,
selecting, omitting—to achieve their effects. To say that Pamela
would like to marry above her class and that she finds a canny way of
achieving her goal is not to say that she does not believe in the value of
chastity and in the moral integrity of her station. Artifice need not
deny reality. It may provide the best—or even the only—way to ex-
press the real. Fielding does deal in truths of human nature; he con-
veys those truths by his invention and arrangement of fictions. Cibber
evokes what we might call an image of himself—not a complete view

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 Selfhood, Given and Formed

but one whose power and truth depend on its simplifications. Auto-
biographers rely mainly on artifices of selection; novelists, on those of
invention. But both communicate vital truths through falsifications.
In many large ways, then, autobiographies and the novels related to
them in the eighteenth century display their close connections. They
speak to and derive from common fantasies; they involve themselves
with common themes, problems, and metaphysical and social issues;
they share a concern with character and with narrative and a faith that
character emerges through narrative; they rely alike on artifice for the
conveyance of truth, neither form telling the truth in any simple sense.
Yet, after all, they are in most instances easy to tell apart. The true
confusion of genres in the twentieth century, when practitioners of
both forms often deliberately obscure the line between them, does not
belong to the eighteenth. The similarities of assumption, response,
concern, and technique that have been asserted do exist, and they are
profound. The differences are harder to define and by no means invari-
able. The most vexed cases, here too, are those in which an author has
deliberately created confusion. We may suspect that Mrs. Pilkington
really is partly inventing her experience in order to make her history
of herself conform to fictional models; we know that Defoe is making
every effort to imitate a form consecrated to the telling of truth. But
putting the most fictional kind of eighteenth-century autobiography
and the most autobiographical kind of fiction side by side, we still can
tell the difference, since factuality affects narrative stance.
Both autobiographer and novelist tell stories shaped by imagina-
tion, but they obviously bear a different relation to the stories they
tell. To tell a story of the self is—as this study has argued in various
ways—to create a fiction. We know this even from day-to-day experi-
ence. Even as we form an anecdote to relate in company, we are delib-
erately or reluctantly sacrificing some part of the actual experience for
the sake of its telling, as we shape what has happened into a story.
When we speak of ourselves, trying to tell someone—an intimate,
even—what we are like, we often feel with desperation the impossibil-
ity of accuracy and know that we yield complexity for the sake of
comprehensibility. In the more public kind of communication involved
in writing down an account of the self, such processes become exag-
gerated. The capacity of the autobiographer to achieve an image and a
fable that can even partially express himself depends finally on his lit-
erary artistry and his mastery of the techniques of evocation. He need

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 Imagining a Self

not consciously invent—or become aware that he does not entirely

know what he remembers from what he has made up—but he must
use his selectivity in much the same way that the novelist uses his.
Yet the raw material of his narrative remains himself, what has liter-
ally happened to him, and the truth he wishes to tell, however wide its
ramifications, is that of his own being. Despite all decorum, he risks
exposure in a way the novelist does not. He is bound by his sense of
factuality. It may not correspond to the factuality of camera or tape
recorder, but it nonetheless establishes limits of possibility. And he
must acutely feel the bounds of his selfhood. Those bounds operate, of
course, for everyone, always, and most writers have experienced in
some fashion the desperation of being unable to reach beyond their
own talents, experience, and psyches. When one's talent, experience,
and psyche become the subject as well as the means of the literary
enterprise, the pressure markedly increases.
The result of this special set of tensions, risks, and pressures is the
special quality of autobiography as a reading experience, and the
nature of that quality, almost impossible to formulate adequately, is
nonetheless easy to feel. The urgency of Gibbon's narrative and of
Cibber's—at opposite extremes of dignity—comes from the drive to
preserve and convey a given essence of selfhood, and from the tension
(even in Cibber) between the desire to express and to conceal. That
particular urgency (which expresses itself often, paradoxically, in lei-
surely meditative discourse) does not mark Robinson Crusoe's narra-
tive, where the narrator's fascination with his own history appears to
imply no awareness of the psychic difficulty of setting it down. The
only novel that approximates autobiographical urgency is that excep-
tion to so many rules, Tristram Shandy, in which the urgency itself
becomes a central subject of discussion, as it does not in any true auto-
biography of the century.
Fiction, of course, has its own urgencies. The novelist too obviously
must endure the limits of his being; he too must find means to express
his values, feelings, and perplexities: means more indirect than the
autobiographer's. But his equivalent for the memoirist's pressure to
express consists of the pressure to invent. His terrible freedom to
create demands that he spin out of his own head, imagination, guts, a
plausible world, characters, actions, all persuasively imitating life but
not duplicating it. More completely responsible for what he chooses to
imitate than the autobiographer, who can always plead that facts con-

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 Selfhood, Given and Formed

trol him, and usurping—as Tristram realized—the function of fate, he

writes with more awareness than the autobiographer needs of the nec-
essities of plot. Autobiographies too have plots but "discover'd, not
devis'd." Their authors seldom feel creatively responsible for them.
One need not speculate, however, about the psyche of the novelist
in order to recognize that the eighteenth-century novel, even such a
novel of character as Pamela, calls attention to the importance of hap-
penings in ways that the autobiography does not. Pamela's letters and
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's premarital correspondence have
something in common: intense feminine self-consciousness and care-
fully preserved postures of virtue or of cynicism. The collection of
Pamela's letters, on the other hand, shares little with the collection of
Lady Mary's and not simply because Lady Mary's correspondence
extends into her old age. Although both epistolary assemblages create
a powerful impression of characterological unity, only Pamela's
moves the reader toward an understanding of a retrospectively inevit-
able sequence of events in which every minor piece of action helps to
elucidate the total pattern. The pattern that holds together the series of
genuine letters depends more heavily on the writer's consistency of
attitude than on what literally takes place. First-person narratives
always concern "what happened (happens, will or may happen) to
me," but fictional versions give the verb at least as much emphasis as
the personal pronoun, although factual fictions tend to stress the pro-
noun. We have discovered the unity of action in the autobiographical
records here considered; it derives from the central character's single-
ness of expectation, desire, or will: to discover, defend, assert, manu-
facture the self.
Eighteenth-century autobiographies sound different from their
novelistic counterparts sentence by sentence because they employ, by
and large, a different rhetoric and a different narrative atmosphere.
Autobiographies—even the informal kind created by journals—rely
on a rhetoric of explanation, shading often toward self-justification.
Even Mrs. Pilkington uses it. For all her extravagances of sensational
happening, she intervenes frequently to explain that her husband was
mistaken, that her father really loved her best, that her mishaps were
caused not by her own misdoing but by that of others. Hume begins
explaining from the first sentence of his autobiography: putting forth
his lack of vanity, his exemplary purpose in writing, his evenness of
temper and imperviousness of disposition. Gibbon explains, in vari-

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 Imagining a Self

ous versions, the importance of his ancestors, the nature of his child-
hood indispositions, the complexities of his relations with his father,
the intricacies of his vocation—everything. Boswell seeks desperately
to explain himself, as much for his own benefit as for that of others.
At some level, this kind of language and logic suggests, the purpose of
all these autobiographies is the same: projection and justification of
personality.
Novels, in contrast, rely on a more dramatic rhetoric. The emphatic
theatrical metaphors in Richardson, Fielding, and Sterne, conven-
tional though they are, call attention to the novelistic endeavor to
express character through adventurous imagery. Of course Pamela
talks about, even explains, what has happened to her at least as much
as Mrs. Pilkington, but she also describes, in vivid detail, actions as
trivial as pretending to plant beans in the garden and as momentous as
ordering the carriage to turn around in ways that illuminate not only
her own character but the natures of others and that establish clues for
future happenings. Tom Jones at the masquerade or eating at the inn
with Mrs. Waters, Evelina lost in the maze, Toby at work on his forti-
fications—all enable the reader to envision not only a personality but
a world and to perceive, not because something has been verbally
elucidated, but because it has been enacted and described in a lan-
guage of action.
Novels sound the way they do partly because they express a
broader ambition than autobiographies. This book has concentrated,
for obvious reasons, on first-person novels (also offering detailed
accounts of two third-person fictions that both use and comment upon
autobiographical techniques). But even fiction written in the first per-
son aspires, in the eighteenth century, to bring to life more than a
single character and to suggest a world. Fanny Burney and Boswell
vivify other personages than themselves through convincing records
of their speech, though not even Dr. Johnson seems as important to
Boswell's story of himself as Uncle Toby seems to Tristram's. The
formal autobiographers give no one but themselves scope and reality.
Their ambition concentrates on the demanding effort to evoke a single
subjectivity; they hope to do no more.
To compare eighteenth-century fiction and autobiography is not to
suggest that they cannot, in some way, be distinguished from one an-
other but to invite contemplation of the multifarious and often sur-
prising affinities that exist within the context of manifest difference.

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 Selfhood, Given and Formed

This, finally, is the center of the perception achieved by such a com-

parative study. Selfhood and consistent identity, whether by sheer
illusion-making or through collaboration with experienced actuality,
is the underlying obsession and final achievement of the literary imag-
ination in both of these related genres. It provides the ground on
which the complex relationship of subjective vision and verifiable
truth enacts itself.

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 Notes

Chapter 1 / Identity in Fiction and in Fact

1. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), ed. Alexander

Campbell Fraser, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1894), Bk. IV, ch. ix, sect. 3; II, 305.
2. Dialogue III, "Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous"
(1713), The Works of George Berkeley, ed. Alexander Campbell Fraser, 3
vols. (Oxford, 1871), I, 326.
3. A Treatise of Human Nature (1738), ed. A. D. Lindsay, 2 vols. (Lon-
don: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1959), I, 239.
4. "Essay on the Intellectual Powers of Man" (1785), The Works of
Thomas Reid, ed. Sir William Hamilton, 7th ed., 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1872), I,
344.
5. Joseph Butler, "On Personal Identity," Works (New York, 1842),
p. 301.
6. See, for example, Reid, Works, I, 340.
7. Hume, Treatise, I, 87. Locke and Berkeley present similar formula-
tions.
8. Reid, Works, I, 340.
9. Ian Ross touches on this point in his extremely interesting essay,
"Philosophy and Fiction. The Challenge of David Hume," Hume and the En-
lightenment, ed. William B. Todd (Edinburgh: The University Press, 1974),
pp. 60-71.
10. Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations,
facsimile reproduction with introduction by Theodore L. Huguelet, 2 vols, in
1 (Gainsville, Fla.: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1966), I, 331.
11. The Rambler, ed. W. J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss, The Yale Edi-
tion of the Works of Samuel Johnson, vols. III-V (New Haven: Yale Univer-

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 Notes to pages 5-20

sity Press, 1969), #4, 31 March 1750; III, 23.

12. The Rambler, #60, 13 Oct. 1750; III, 318-319.
13. The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling, The Complete Works of
Henry Fielding, Esq., ed. William Ernest Henley, vols. III-V (New York,
1902), Bk. X, ch. 1; IV, 195-96.
14. The Wanderer; or, Female Difficulties, 5 vols. (London, 1814), Dedi-
cation, I, xvi.
15. Time and the Novel (New York: Humanities Press, 1972), p. 35.
16. Hume, Treatise, I, 239-40.
17. Northrop Frye, noting the emphasis on moment-by-moment occur-
rence in the literature of the late eighteenth century, attributes it to the desire
"to give the impression of literature as process, as created on the spot out of
the events it describes." "Towards Defining An Age of Sensibility," Fables of
Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World,
1963), p. 131.
18. Roy Schäfer, "Self and Identity in Adolescence," The Psychoanalytic
Quarterly, 42 (1973), 52.
19. Memoir of Sir John Pringle, quoted in Boswell for the Defence, 1769-
1774, ed. William K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Frederick A. Pottle (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1959), p. 137.
20. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding . . . with Hume's
Autobiography and A Letter from Adam Smith (Chicago, 1907), p. v.
21. Design and Truth in Autobiography (Cambridge: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1960), p. 148.
22. Boswell's London Journal, 1762-1763, ed. Frederick A. Pottle (New
York: McGraw-Hill, 1950), 21 Nov. 1762, p. 47.
23. "And thus we may perceive, that all the Pleasures and Pains of Sen-
sation, Imagination, Ambition, Self-interest, Sympathy, and Theopathy, as
far as they are consistent with one another, with the Frame of our Natures,
and with the Course of the World, beget in us a Moral Sense, and lead us to
the Love and Approbation of Virtue, and to the Fear, Hatred, and Abhorrence
of Vice" (Hartley, I, 497).
24. Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1973), p. 135. The sentence by Richard Gilman is quoted by
Trilling on the same page.
25. Schliemann's autobiography, William Calder writes, "is a Wunsch-
bild, a picture that he had created of himself and that he wished posterity to
accept." William M. Calder III, "Schliemann on Schliemann: A Study in the
Use of Sources," Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies, 13 (1972), 343.
26. "Myth, Fiction, and Displacement," Fables of Identity, p. 36.
27. Confrontations with Myself: an Epilogue (New York: Norton, 1973),
p. 15.
28. "The ordering of his experiences into a shape that answers better than
mere continuous sequence to his notion of what his life really means is often
one of the chief purposes of the autobiographer." John N. Morris, Versions of
the Self: Studies in English Autobiography from John Bunyan to John Stuart

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 Notes to pages 20-29

Mill (New York: Basic Books, 1966), p. 11. Wayne Shumaker points out that
"in autobiography structural needs cannot, as in poetry and fiction, freely
generate appropriate material. There is a donnée which preexists the form, a
body of subject matter that can be hewed down like a block of marble but not
filled in at will like a blank piece of canvas." Wayne Shumaker, English Auto-
biography: Its Emergence, Materials, and Form (Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1954), p. 33.
29. Locke, Essay, Bk. II, ch. xxvii, sect. 15; I, 457.
30. Berkeley, "Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge"
(1710), Works, I, 152.
31. Hartley, Observations, I, 283.
32. See Fredric V. Bogel, "Structure and Substantiality in Later Eigh-
teenth-Century Literature," Studies in Burke and His Time, 15 (1973-4), 145.
33. The Great Tradition: A Study of the English Novel (Garden City:
Doubleday, 1954), pp. 12-13. (First published 1948.)
34. The Art of Biography in Eighteenth Century England (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1941), p. 131.

Chapter 2 / The Soul's Imaginings

1. For detailed accounts of the seventeenth-century tradition of spiritual

autobiography, see G. A. Starr, Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography (Prince-
ton: Princeton University Press, 1965) and Paul Delany, British Autobiog-
raphy in the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969).
2. Samuel Richardson, Pamela, or, Virtue Rewarded, 4 vols. Shake-
speare Head Edition (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1929), I, 213.
3. The Spectator, ed. G. Gregory Smith, 4 vols. (London: J. M. Dent &
Sons, Ltd., n.d.), #413, III, 63.
4. The two most widely accepted readings of Robinson Crusoe concen-
trate on its status as spiritual autobiography and on Crusoe's role as exemplar
of economic man. G. A. Starr (see note 1, above) and J. Paul Hunter, The
Reluctant Pilgrim (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966) have
studied the novel as a religious document, a study supplemented by such
essays as William H. Halewood, "Religion and Invention in Robinson Cru-
soe, " Essays in Criticism, 14 (1964), 339-51; Martin J. Greif, "The Conversion
of Robinson Crusoe," Studies in English Literature, 6 (1966), 551-74; Robert
W. Ayers, "Robinson Crusoe: 'Allusive Allegorick History,' " PMLA, 82
(1967), 339-407; Edwin B. Benjamin, "Symbolic Elements in Robinson Cru-
soe," Philological Quarterly, 30 (1951), 206-11. The economic interpretation
has been richly expounded in Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in
Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (London: Chatto and Windus, 1957) and
Maximillian E. Novak, Economics and the Fiction of Daniel Defoe (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1962). Both interpretations direct attention to
important aspects of the novel; I wish to refute neither. My own focus on Cru-
soe's emotional and imaginative experience derives, however, from the as-

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sumption that, whatever else the novel may be, it can be fundamentally
understood as deriving from the tradition of spiritual autobiography.
5. Daniel Defoe, The Life & Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robin-
son Crusoe, Defoe's Writings, Shakespeare Head Edition (Oxford: Basil Black-
well, n.d.), VII, 39. Subsequent references to the novel, taken from this edi-
tion, will be incorporated in the text.
6. The Imagination as a Means of Grace: Locke and the Aesthetics of
Romanticism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), p. 21.
7. Benjamin Boyce long ago observed that "this book, in its central,
famous part, is loaded with fear." "The Question of Emotion in Defoe," Stud-
ies in Philology, 50 (1953), 51. He did not speculate about the significance of
this emotion. Frank Ellis, who sees the "idea of man's isolation" as the organ-
izing theme of the novel, has examined some of Crusoe's terrors in relation to
this theme. Twentieth Century Interpretations of Robinson Crusoe (Engle-
wood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1969), Introduction. An even fuller investigation
of the ramifications of fear in Robinson Crusoe is contained in Homer O.
Brown's brilliant essay, "The Displaced Self in the Novels of Daniel Defoe,"
ELH, 38 (1971), 562-591. Seeing the relation between Crusoe's fear and his
alienation, Brown points to his "fear of solipsism and anonymity; alternately,
fear of being captured, 'eaten' by the other" (p. 569).
8. "The Displaced Self," p. 573.
9. Watt comments on how "egocentric" are Crusoe's relations with Fri-
day, seeing the interchange between the two as entirely based on patronage
(Rise of the Novel, pp. 71-72).
10. Not only does Friday clearly enlarge Crusoe's emotional life, but the
savage's later encounter with his father unmistakably demonstrates his great
capacity for love. Friday's inarticulate but active filial devotion contrasts
sharply with Crusoe's relatively sterile acknowledgements of his father's Tight-
ness, unaccompanied by clear evidence of love.
11. See James Sutherland, Daniel Defoe: A Critical Study (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 139.
12. I am essentially in agreement with those who see Crusoe as a roman-
tic forced to come to terms with reality. George Levine comments, "Admiring
the middle station and the energies that earn it, Defoe largely invents a form
that will become central to the realistic novel: the story of the romantic youth
who must learn to deal with reality." "Realism Reconsidered," The Theory of
the Novel: New Essays, ed. John Halperin (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1974), p. 245. Maximillian Novak describes Crusoe as "a prototype of
Shaw's Bluntschli—the hero raised as a tradesman but with a romantic tem-
perament." "Robinson Crusoe's 'Original Sin,' " Studies in English Literature,
1 (no. 3, 1961), 20. It seems important, though, to add that Crusoe conquers
his romantic tendencies only by exploring their full possibilities.
13. "The Displaced Self," p. 581.
14. "The Autobiographer's Art," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criti-
cism, 27 (1968), 224-5. Stephen Shapiro, on the other hand, believes that
"there is a sense in which all autobiographers are unreliable narrators." "The

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 Notes to pages 40-60

Dark Continent of Literature: Autobiography," Comparative Literature Stud-

ies, 5 (1969), 434.
15. The Dynamics of Literary Response (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1968), pp. 68-70.
16. See Jerome L. Singer, Daydreaming: An Introduction to the Experi-
mental Study of Inner Experience (New York: Random House, 1966), p. 27.
17. "Autobiography As Narrative," Michigan Quarterly Review, 3
(1964), 211, 212.
18. The Memoir was composed in 1766 or 1767 and sent to Martin
Madan in September 1767. See Charles Ryskamp, William Cowper of the
Inner Temple, Esq. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959), p. 174.
Cowper's words are from Memoir of the Early Life of William Cowper, Esq.,
2nd American edition (Newburgh, 1817), p. 67. (First published 1816.) Sub-
sequent references, from this edition, will be incorporated in the text.
19. Design and Truth in Autobiography (Cambridge: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, I960), p. 52. Pascal refers this insight specifically to the implica-
tions of autobiographies written between 1782 and 1831, but it surely applies
also to earlier works.
20. Versions of the Self: Studies in English Autobiography from John
Bunyan to John Stuart Mill (New York: Basic Books, 1966), pp. 165, 139.
21. See Michael V. DePorte, Nightmares and Hobbyhorses: Swift,
Sterne, and Augustan Ideas of Madness (San Marino: The Huntington Li-
brary, 1974), p. 21.
22. Maurice J. Quinlan, William Cowper: A Critical Life (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1953), p. 91.
23. "Notes for an Anatomy of Modern Autobiography," New Literary
History, 1 (1970), 490.
24. Barrett John Mandel, "Autobiography—Reflection Trained on Mys-
tery," Prairie Schooner, 46 (1972), 326.

Chapter 3 / Female Identities

1. See Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson,
and Fielding (London: Chatto and Windus, 1957), p. 310.
2. Charlotte Lennox, Euphemia, 4 vols. (London, 1790), II, 165.
3. Susannah Rowson, Charlotte and Lucy Temple (Philadelphia: 1881),
Preface, p. vi. (First published 1790.)
4. The Happy-Unfortunate or the Female Page (1732) (New York: Gar-
land, 1972), Preface.
5. The Happy-Unfortunate, p. 125.
6. Sarah Fielding, The Adventures of David Simple (London, 1904),
p. 110. (First published 1744.)
7. A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies (1723) (New York: Garland,
1973), p. 79.
8. Boyd, The Happy-Unfortunate, p. 87. From a familiar male point of

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view, of course, exemplified by the literary metaphors of procreation in such

writers as Gibbon and Sterne, pregnancy is power.
9. See, for example, Penelope Aubin, The Life and Adventures of the
Lady Lucy (1726) (New York: Garland, 1973), p. 108.
10. Eliza Haywood, The Rash Resolve (1724) (New York: Garland,
1973), p. 124.
11. Charlotte Temple, p. 27.
12. Entertaining Novels of Mrs. Jane Barker, 3rd ed., 2 vols. (London,
1736), I, 140.
13. "The Story of Louisa," Novellettes, Selected for the Use of Young
Ladies and Gentlemen (London, 1780), p. 116.
14. I have discussed the implications of this idea more fully in " 'Ev'ry
Woman Is at Heart a Rake,' " Eighteenth-Century Studies, 8 (1974), 27-46.
15. "Conjugal Fidelity: Or, Female Fortitude," Novellettes, p. 186.
16. Clara Thompson, "Cultural Pressures in the Psychology of Women,"
in Psychoanalysis and Women, ed. Jean Baker Miller (Baltimore: Penguin
Books, 1973), p. 76.
17. Mary Davys, Familiar Letters Betwixt a Gentleman and a Lady
(1725), Augustan Reprint Society Pub. no. 54 (Los Angeles: Clark Library,
1955), p. 297.
18. As in Rowson, Charlotte Temple. In The Hermit of Snowden, the
existence of unconsummated passion in a woman is punished by death; her
lover only becomes a hermit. [Elizabeth Ryves], The Hermit of Snowden: Or
Memoirs of Albert and Lavinia (London, 1793).
19. Entertaining Novels, II, 70.
20. Ernest Baker, calling the novel an example of "earnest domestic fic-
tion," comments that "all is righted at the end, except that Euphemia has to
resign herself never to enjoy married bliss." The History of the English Novel:
The Novel of Sentiment and the Gothic Romance (London: Witherby, 1942),
p. 43. Charlotte Lennox may consciously have intended such a point, but her
tone suggests quite another interpretation.
21. Little is known of Jane Barker. John Richetti paraphrases G. S. Gib-
bons as saying "that she was a Catholic spinster who spent some time at the
Court of St. Germain." Popular Fiction Before Richardson: Narrative Patterns
1700-1739 (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1969), n. 1, p. 230. Richetti see A
Patch-Work Screen as a conventional pious tale (pp. 237 ff.), thus echoing
Baker's judgment that Jane Barker produced nothing but "improving tales."
The History of the English Novel: The Later Romances and the Establishment
of Realism (London: Witherby, 1942), p. 124. About Miss Barker's life, Baker
comments that she "is said to have been a young associate of the Orinda cir-
cle, and to have belonged to a similar coterie of literary aspirants at Cam-
bridge" (p. 124).
22. Barker, A Patch-Work Screen, p. 90. Subsequent references to this
edition will be incorporated in the text.
23. Mary, A Fiction (London, 1788), pp. 7-8. Subsequent references to
this edition will be incorporated in the text.

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 Notes to pages 69-84

24. Strangely, Mary Wollstonecraft's most recent biographer says that

Mary "differs only in brevity and pretension" from the conventional senti-
mental romances of its period. Emily W. Sunstein, A Different Face: The Life
of Mary Wollstonecraft (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), p. 153.
25. Maria or The Wrongs of Woman (New York: Norton, 1975), p. 27.
26. Sigmund Freud, "Femininity," Women and Analysis, ed. Jean
Strouse (New York: Grossman, 1974), p. 76.
27. See Donald A. Stauffer, The Art of Biography in Eighteenth Century
England: Bibliographical Supplement (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1941), a 278-page listing of eighteenth-century biographies and autobiog-
raphies with an impressive number of titles by women.
28. Thraliana: The Diary of Mrs. Hester Lynch Thrale, 1776-1809, ed.
Katherine Balderston, 2 vols. (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1942), p. 309.
Subsequent references to this edition will be incorporated in the text.
29. Thraliana, p. 448. A few pages later (p. 520), Mrs. Thrale repeats the
comment. Katherine Balderston speculates (in a note on p. 448) that the rumor
circulated by Baretti—that Mrs. Thrale believed Piozzi to be her own half
brother, her father's illegitimate son—originated in such remarks as this.
30. I have treated Mrs. Thrale's ambiguous relationship with her mother
at greater length in The Female Imagination (New York: Knopf, 1975), pp.
197-207.
31. A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Charlotte Charke, ed. Leonard R. N.
Ashley (Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1969), p. 50. Subse-
quent references to this edition will be incorporated in the text.
32. Memoirs of Mrs. Laetitia Pilkington, 2 vols. (Dublin, 1748, 1749), I,
13. Subsequent references to this edition will be incorporated in the text.
33. To Wortley, 17 July (1748], The Complete Letters of Lady Mary
Wortley Montagu, ed. Robert Halsband, 3 vols. (Oxford: The Clarendon
Press, 1965), II, 406.
34. To Wortley [25 April 1710], Complete Letters, I, 30.
35. For a fuller discussion of her attitudes toward her own writing and
thinking, see my essay, "Scrapbook of a Self: Mrs. Piozzi's Late Journals,"
Harvard Library Bulletin, 18 (1970), 221-247.
36. To Lady Bute, 28 Jan. [1753], Complete Letters, III, 22.
37. To Lady Bute [Jan. 1750], Complete Letters, II, 450.
38. Donald A. Stauffer, The Art of Biography in Eighteenth Century
England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941), p. 109.
39. She was, in fact, generally perceived as at least faintly ridiculous.
Fanny Burney reports the Queen's comment on reading Mrs. Piozzi's account
of her tour of Italy: "How like herself, how characteristic is every line!—Wild,
entertaining, flighty, inconsistent, and clever!" Diary and Letters of Madame
D'Arblay, ed. Austin Dobson, 6 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1904), IV, 300.
The patronizing tone of the Queen's remark is characteristic of contemporary
commentators.
40. To Wortley [20 Aug. 1710], Complete Letters, I, 53-4.
41. To Philippa Munday, 12 Dec. [1711], Complete Letters, I, 112.

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 Notes to pages 85-94

42. See The Life of Lady Mary Worthy Montagu (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1960), p. 153.
43. To Algarotti (translated) [Aug. 1736], Complete Letters, II, 500-501.
44. To Algarotti (translated) [10 Sept. 1736], Complete Letters, II, 502.
45. To Algarotti (translated) [Sept. 1736], Complete Letters, II, 501.
46. Life of Lady Mary, p. 160.
47. Quoted by Stauffer, The Art of Biography, p. 103.

Chapter 4 / The Defenses of Form

1. The Art of Biography in Eighteenth Century England (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1941), p. 377.
2. Design and Truth in Autobiography (Cambridge: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1960), p. 188.
3. The Autobiographies of Edward Gibbon, ed. John Murray (New
York, 1907), p. 296. Subsequent references will be incorporated in the text.
4. Letter #867, 11/11/93, The Letters of Edward Gibbon, ed. J. E.
Norton, 3 vols. (London: Cassell, 1956), III, 359.
5. Cotter Morison reports that "twenty hours before his death Mr. Gib-
bon happened to fall into a conversation not uncommon with him, on the
probable duration of his life. He said that he thought himself a good life for
ten, twelve, or perhaps twenty years." Gibbon (London, 1878), p. 173. His
denial, in other words, was by no means a matter only of literary self-presen-
tation. His hydrocele, however, achieved for him an unexpected form of
immortality: a particular variety of hydrocele accompanied by a hernia, I
learn from a medical dictionary, is now known as "Gibbon's hydrocele."
6. Gibbon's style, Walter Bagehot flatly asserted, is not one "in which
you can tell the truth." Quoted in J. M. Robertson, Gibbon (London: Watts,
1925), p. 48.1 would argue, on the contrary, that it is the only style for telling
Gibbon's kind of truth.
7. His first unambiguous reference, in the letters, to the project of writ-
ing his own life does not occur until 1791, when he had already attempted five
drafts. To Lord Sheffield he confesses, "I have much revolved the plan of the
Memoirs I once mentioned, and as you do not think it ridiculous I believe I
shall make the attempt: if I can please myself I am confident of not displeas-
ing: but let this be a profound secret between us: people must not be prepared
to laugh: they must be taken by suprize." (Letter #791, 28/12/91, Letters, III,
240.)
8. Lord Sheffield's version appeared in 1796. Precisely one hundred
years later, John Murray's edition of The Autobiographies first made avail-
able the six separate texts. Twentieth-century versions of the text have been,
like Lord Sheffield's, composites. The most recent and scholarly is Edward
Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life, ed. Georges A. Bonnard (London: Nelson,
1966).
9. Thus Wayne Shumaker, for example, remarks that "the really signifi-

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 Notes to pages 94-100

cant fact about the Memoirs is that for the first time the extended autobiog-
raphy of a celebrated Englishman, intimate but not bearing upon religious
experience, was printed and widely disseminated within a few years of his
death," but he ignores the also significant fact that the autobiography was
"extended" by Sheffield's labors rather than the author's. English Autobiog-
raphy: Its Emergence, Materials, and Form (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1954), p. 27. Even Roger Porter, in a brilliant essay that acknowledges
the importance of the six separate versions, speaks of the Autobiography as
though it were a unified whole, referring to its "outset" with reference to a
passage that Gibbon himself never included in any of the six versions and to
its "concluding words," which belong to a sequence from the next-to-last ver-
sion. "Gibbon's Autobiography: Filling Up the Silent Vacancy," Eighteenth-
Century Studies, 8 (1974), 1-26. The only consistent attempt to differentiate
the individual texts is Barrett John Mandel, "The Problem of Narrative in
Edward Gibbon's Autobiography, " Studies in Philology, 67 (1970), 550-64.
10. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire, ed. J. B. Bury, 7 vols (London, 1896), I, 77. Cf. Dr. Samuel Johnson,
who points out the analogy between public and private memory: "What is
recollection but a revival of vexations, or history but a record of wars, trea-
sons, and calamities?" Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, ed. R. W.
Chapman (London: Oxford University Press, 1930), p. 98.
11. Gibbon's Journal to January 28th, 1763, ed. D. M. Low (London:
Chatto & Windus, 1929), entry for 17 Nov. 1762, p. 183.
12. John Morris, speaking of Gibbon's autobiography, perceptively re-
marks on "the historian's professional assumption that the true nature of
events can only be understood in retrospect." Versions of the Self: Studies in
English Autobiography from John Bunyan to John Stuart Mill (New York:
Basic Books, 1966), p. 85.
13. "Child and Adult: Historical Perspective in Gibbon's Memoirs,"
Studies in Burke and His Time, 15 (1973), 39, n. 26. It must be added that Gib-
bon apparently had equal trouble deciding how to describe other elements in
his experience—notably those involving his relationship with his father.
14. D. M. Low, on the other hand, points out that apparently Mile.
Curchod herself never "doubted the sincerity and even fervour of Gibbon's
attachment." Edward Gibbon, 1737-1794 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1937),
p. 90.
15. "My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding gen-
eral laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the
atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I
cannot conceive . . . The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may
possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral char-
acter, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature." The Autobiography of
Charles Darwin and Selected Letters, ed. Francis Darwin (New York: Dover,
1958), p. 54.
16. "The Dark Continent of Literature: Autobiography," Comparative
Literature Studies, 5 (1969), 426.

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 Notes to pages 100-124

17. "Confessions and Autobiography," The Making of a Poem (London:

Hamish Hamilton, 1955), p. 64.
18. Leo Braudy, in a brief note on Gibbon's Autobiography, emphasizes
the importance of the idea of role to Gibbon's concept of history. He sees the
autobiographer—accurately enough—as presenting himself in various roles. I
would argue, though, that the role defined by his vocation has overriding
importance. See Braudy, Narrative Form in History and Fiction: Hume, Field-
ing & Gibbon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), pp. 269-71.
19. "Swift's 'I,' " The Yale Review, 62 (1973), 384.
20. Commentators have described in many different ways the literary
effect of the famous epigrammatic formulation, "I sighed as a lover, I obeyed
as a son." See, for example, Folkenflik, "Child and Adult," p. 31 (summa-
rizing other views), pp. 39-40; Porter, "Gibbon's Autobiography," p. 10;
Braudy, Narrative Form, p. 271.
21. D. M. Low advances the theory of infantile rheumatism (Edward
Gibbon, p. 26), although he offers no substantiation for it.
22. "Compare the Anabasis with the Cyropaedia; and feel the difference
between truth and fiction; between the lively and copious variety of the one,
and the elegant poverty of the other." Letter #196, to Richard Hurd [c. Aug.
1772], Letters, I, 336-7. Again, "The Cyropaedia is vague and languid; the
Anabasis circumstantial and animated. Such is the eternal difference between
fiction and truth." Decline and Fall, ch. xxiv, n. 115, quoted Letters, I, 337,
n. 8.
23. "Autobiography As Narrative," Michigan Quarterly Review, 3
(1964), 212.
24. Mandel argues that Gibbon's successive attempts at autobiography
issue from his uncertainty about what identity he will declare, (e.g., "The
Problem of Narrative," p. 552.) Acknowledging the importance of identity, I
would yet insist that the nature of these autobiographical efforts suggests a
greater preoccupation with story than with self.
25. Peter Quennell, The Profane Virtues: Four Studies of the Eighteenth
Century (New York: Viking, 1945), pp. 73-4.
26. R. B. Mowat, Gibbon (London: Arthur Barker Ltd., 1936), p. 277.
27. See, for example, his letter to Lord Thurlow in mid-July, 1782: Letter
#546, Letters, II, 303.
28. John Murray's description: Autobiographies, p. 1.
29. Mandel unaccountably describes Memoir F as resembling A "in con-
tent, structure, and tone." He adds that "Gibbon was not satisfied with the
approach of F, as he had not been satisfied with A." "The Problem of Narra-
tive," p. 553. Although the historian expressed to Lord Sheffield a general lack
of satisfaction with his accomplishment as a memoirist, the best evidence sug-
gests that he was still working on F at the time of his death. See Bonnard, ed.,
Memoirs, Introduction, p. xxx.
30. A page of manuscript notes for the autobiography describes his sub-
sequent stay in Lausanne as his "mental puberty," thus emphasizing the sense

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 Notes to pages 124-136

of freedom and new growth associated with the aftermath of his conversion.
Reproduced in Low, Edward Gibbon, after p. 340.
31. Letter #826, 6 / 1 / 9 3 , Letters, III, 312.
32. "The Dark Continent of Literature," p. 449.

Chapter 5 / The Beautiful Oblique

1. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentle-

man, ed. James A. Work (New York: The Odyssey Press, 1940), p. 525. Sub-
sequent references to this edition will be incorporated in the text.
2. The relation between Tristram Shandy and the conventional novel
has been suggestively treated by Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in
Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (London: Chatto and Windus, 1957), pp.
302-308, and touched upon by B. J. Lehman, "Of Time, Personality, and the
Author," Essays on the Eighteenth-Century Novel, ed. Robert Donald Spector
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965), pp. 165-166.
3. J. M. Stedmond believes the creation of an identity to be the central
function of this novel. See "Genre and Tristram Shandy, " Philological Quar-
terly, 38 (1959), 48-49.
4. Stedmond explores those affinities and reviews previous investiga-
tions of the subject: "Genre and Tristram Shandy, " pp. 37-38.
5. "Tristram Shandy and the Tradition of Learned Wit," Scholia Satyr-
ica, 1 (1975), 17. This essay is reprinted from Essays in Criticism, 1 (1951),
225-248.
6. Character and the Novel (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968),
p. 120.
7. Michael V. DePorte, Nightmares and Hobbyhorses: Swift, Sterne,
and Augustan Ideas of Madness (San Marino: The Huntington Library, 1974),
p. 115. DePorte goes on to argue that "the real point about Walter and Toby is
not so much that Sterne thinks them mad, or even that most contemporary
readers would have thought them mad; the point is rather that given the psy-
chiatric criteria of the day they are mad" (p. 116). Tristram himself is less dis-
tinctly so, if only because he struggles more against his own imagination.
8. Letter #47, Letters of Laurence Sterne, ed. Lewis Perry Curtis (Ox-
ford: The Clarendon Press, 1935), p. 88.
9. "He Said, She Said," Commentary, 56 (March 1972), 58.
10. "Typography, Tristram Shandy, The Aposiopesis, Etc.," The
Winged Skull: Papers from the Laurence Sterne Bicentenary Conference, ed.
Arthur H. Cash and John M. Stedmond (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University
Press, 1971), p. 252.
11. The Created Self: The Reader's Role in Eighteenth-Century Fiction
(London: Heinemann, 1970), p. 167. My italics.
12. "Psychoanalysis and Historical Biography," Journal of the American
Psychoanalytic Association, 19 (1971), 154.
13. Laurence Sterne: From Tristram to Yorick, translated and abridged

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 Notes to pages 136-154

by Barbara Bray (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 136.

14. Howard Anderson elaborates this point in his fine essay, "Tristram
Shandy and the Reader's Imagination," PMLA, 86 (1971), 966-973. "It is
quickly established," he observes, "that Tristram has set out to educate and
train our imaginations, rather than allow us the simpler pleasures of giving
free rein to our own conceptions or passively relying on his" (p. 967).
15. B. L. Reid has sketched one view of the relation between tragic
potentiality and comic treatment in the novel. "Sterne and the Absurd Ho-
munculus," The Long Boy and Others (Athens: University of Georgia Press,
1969), p. 102.
16. Wild Excursions: The Life and Fiction of Laurence Steme (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1972), p. 66. J. Paul Hunter adds that the protagonist of Tris-
tram Shandy can be argued to be the reader, "helping design the work for
himself," although Sterne's control over this process is more comprehensive
than he claims. "Response As Reformation: Tristram Shandy and the Art of
Interruption," Novel, 4 (1970), 137.
17. Letter #96, To Lady D 9 July 1763, Letters, p. 179.
18. To the Palace of Wisdom: Studies in Order and Energy from Dryden
to Blake (Garden City: Doubleday, 1964), p. 320.
19. Andrew Wright, "The Artifice of Failure in Tristram Shandy,"
Novel, 2 (1969), 217.
20. "The Comic Mask," Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies
(New York: Scribner's, 1923), p. 138.
21. "Laurence Sterne," Laurence Steme: A Collection of Critical Essays,
ed. John Traugott (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1968), p. 118.
22. Printed in John Hall-Stevenson, Crazy Tales (London, 1762), pp. 17-
18. Quoted by Thomson, Wild Excursions, p. 22.
23. It is usually taken to emphasize—as it certainly does—the degree to
which listeners (and, by implication, readers) interpret every utterance in rela-
tion to their own predilections. Trim and Walter, for example, "both make the
sermon answer the needs of their hobbyhorses while the sermon's subject and
aims remain unregarded." Hunter, "Response As Reformation," p. 135.
24. Wilbur L. Cross, The Life and Times of Laurence Sterne, 3rd ed.
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1929), pp. 291-292. With a later use of
material from the novel as biographical evidence, Cross does offer some
qualification. "By abating [Sterne's] extravagance here and there, perhaps we
may tell the story somewhat as it was, though the narrative will be scant and
never quite trustworthy" (p. 320). Critics have often suggested a simple iden-
tity between Yorick and Sterne as well as between Tristram and Sterne. David
Thomson, for example, maintains that one important source of pleasure for
Sterne in writing Tristram Shandy was that "it allowed him the opportunity of
reinventing himself in Yorick" ( Wild Excursions, p. 157). John Preston offers a
particularly penetrating comment on the implications of this invention. "Tris-
tram, the fictional author, turns real life, real books, real people (John Hall-
Stevenson, for instance, or Dr. Burton) into fictions. He invents them, in just

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 Notes to pages 154-162

the way that he invents his own family, to populate his fictional world. What
is more, Tristram, invented to be the author of Sterne's novel, turns Sterne
himself into the fictional Yorick. Sterne invents the conditions in which he can
invent himself" (The Created Self, p. 188).
25. Letter #64, To Mary Macartney [June 1760], Letters, p. 117. The
same phrasing recurs in Letter #66, To Mrs. Jane Fenton [?], 3 Aug. 1760,
p. 120.
26. Letter #79, To Lady 21 Sept. 1761, Letters, p. 143.
27. See James Olney, Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972). "One creates from moment to
moment and continuously the reality to which one gives a metaphoric name
and shape, and that shape is one's own shape" (p. 34).
28. For a strong statement of this view, see Alfred Kazin, "Autobiog-
raphy As Narrative," Michigan Quarterly Review, 3 (1964), 210-216.
29. Letter #63, To the Bishop of Gloucester [William Warburton], 19
June 1760, Letters, p. 116.
30. Granted, what Sterne chooses to say to Warburton is not necessarily
identical with what he believes. He is, among other things, currying favor in
offering the view of himself as Sancho Panza. Yet the very possibility of this
kind of self-justification, not readily available to Tristram, underlines the dif-
ference between character and author.

Chapter 6 / Dynamics of Fear

1. The History of the English Novel: The Novel of Sentiment and the
Gothic Romance (London: Witherby, 1942), p. 156.
2. "Fanny Burney's Evelina," The Age of Johnson: Essays Presented to
Chauncey Brewster Tinker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949), p. 172.
3. The Early Diary of Frances Burney, 1768-1778, ed. Annie Raine Ellis,
2 vols. (London, 1889); Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay, ed. Austin
Dobson (from the edition of Charlotte Barrett), 6 vols. (London: Macmillan,
1904). The new edition of The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney thus far
includes Vol. I (1791-1792), ed. Joyce Hemlow with Curtis D. Cecil and
Althea Douglas (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1972); Vol. II (1793), ed.
Joyce Hemlow and Althea Douglas (1972); Vol. Ill (1793-1797), ed. Joyce
Hemlow with Patricia Boutilier and Althea Douglas (1973); Vol. IV (1797-
1801), ed. Joyce Hemlow (1973).
4. Diary and Letters, VI, 363. Subsequent references to this edition will
be incorporated into the text.
5. The Wanderer: or, Female Difficulties, 5 vols. (London, 1814), dedi-
cation, I, xx-xxi.
6. Early Diary, I, 18.
7. Early Diary, I, 7. Years later, Richard Owen Cambridge, telling
Fanny of his daughter's approaching death, urges her, as he has urged her
friend Sally Baker, "to be cheerful." " 'You two,' added he, 'and my two girls,

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 Notes to pages 162-181

have, among you all four but one fault,—and that is too much feeling. You
must repress that, therefore, as much as you can' " (Diary and Letters, II, 245;
1783).
8. Francis R. Hart, "Notes for an Anatomy of Modern Autobiography,"
New Literary History, 1 (1970), 497.
9. Barrett John Mandel, "The Autobiographer's Art," Journal of Aes-
thetics and Art Criticism, TJ (1968), 222.
10. As in the case of Sophie Streatfield: see Diary and Letters, II, 39.
11. To Mrs. Phillips, #17, 29 Aug. 1797; Journals, III, 352. Sarah subse-
quently eloped with her married half brother, twenty-two years her senior,
thus confirming Miss Burney's dark suspicions of her.
12. She describes her first social encounter with the King in a vivid pas-
sage beginning "It seemed to me we were acting a play" (Diary and Letters, II,
319). Although her later references are more discreet, her entire account of
court life emphasizes the extreme artificiality of its customs and the prescribed
nature of all activity.
13. #8, To Mrs. Phillips and Mrs. Locke, Oct. 1791; Journals, I, 73.
14. #23, Journal-letter to Mrs. Phillips and Mrs. Locke, May 1792; Jour-
nals, I, 160.
15. #61, To Mrs. Phillips, [2-3] April [1793]; Journals, II, 42.
16. #82, To Mrs. Phillips, 8 May 1793; Journals, II, 116-17.
17. Maria Rishton to Susan Phillips, quoted by Joyce Hemlow, The His-
tory of Fanny Burney (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1958), p. 239.
18. #120, To Mrs. Waddington, 2 Aug. [1793]; Journals, II, 179.
19. #124, To Mrs. Waddington [19 Sept.] 1793; Journals, III, 9.
20. #154, 16 Oct. 1794; Journals, III, 84.
21. #169, To Dr. Burney, 13 June 1795; Journals, III, 113.
22. A Writer's Diary, ed. Leonard Woolf (London: The Hogarth Press,
1954), entry for 20 April 1919, pp. 13-14.
23. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding
(London: Chatto and Windus, 1957), p. 310.
24. Kemp Malone, "Evelina Revisited," Papers on Language and Litera-
ture, 1 (1965), 3-19.
25. The History of Fanny Burney, pp. 91-95.
26. See Evelina, or the History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the
World, ed. Edward A. Bloom (London: Oxford University Press, 1970),
preface, pp. 7-8. Subsequent references to this edition will be incorporated in
the text.
27. The introduction to Bloom's edition of Evelina argues the importance
of prudence as a lesson the heroine must learn, pp. xix-xxiii.
28. Michael Adelstein enunciates a commonly accepted view in suggest-
ing that Evelina learns nothing of importance, having "merely exchanged
snobbery for sweetness, and sympathy for indifference," and demonstrating
"that social education is all." Fanny Burney (New York: Twayne, 1968) p. 38.
It will be clear that I disagree.
29. Cecilia: Or, Memoirs of an Heiress, 2 vols. (London, 1914), I, 244.

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 Notes to pages 182-202

30. Camilla: Or, A Picture of Youth, 5 vols. (London, 1796), I, 322.

Subsequent references to this edition will be incorporated in the text.
31. The Rights of Women (London: ]. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1955), p. 68.
Subsequent references to this edition will be incorporated in the text. The
book was first printed as A Vindication of the Rights of Women, 1792.
32. The Wanderer, I, 403. Subsequent references to the edition cited in
note 5, above, will be incorporated in the text.
33. See The Wanderer, III, 175, where Miss Burney writes directly from
her own emotional experience. Compare: "There is something, after all, in
money, by itself money, that 1 can never take possession of it without a secret
feeling of something like a degradation: money in its effects, and its produce,
creates far different and more pleasant sensations" (Diary and Letters, III,
142).
34. Fanny Burney, p. 129.
35. The History of Fanny Burney, p. 342.
36. #198, To Dr. Burney [for 6 July 1796]; Journals, III, 186.
37. #410, To Mrs. Waddington, 4 April 1801; Journals, IV, 483.

Chapter 7 / The Sense of Audience

1. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and
Fielding (London: Chatto and Windus, 1957), p. 199.
2. "Justice to Pamela, " The Long Boy and Others (Athens: University of
Georgia Press, 1969), p. 33.
3. Richardson (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1928), p. 95.
4. "Richardson's Pamela: The Aesthetic Case," Samuel Richardson: A
Collection of Critical Essays, ed. John Carroll (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-
Hall, 1969), p. 37.
5. "A Room of Pamela's Own," ELH, 39 (1972), 585.
6. Joseph Andrews, ed. Martin C. Battestin (Middletown, Conn.: Wes-
leyan University Press, 1967), p. 8.
7. Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, 4 vols., Shakespeare Head Edition (Ox-
ford: Basil Blackwell, 1929), I, xxi-xxii. Subsequent reference to this edition
will be incorporated in the text.
8. Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature (New York: Random
House, 1974), p. 198.
9. An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber, 2d ed. (London,
1740), pp. 3-4. Subsequent references to this edition will be incorporated in
the text.
10. F. Dorothy Senior, The Life and Times of Colley Cibber (London:
Constable, 1928), p. 46.
11. "Cibber regarded his growing family as a somewhat sinister joke,
and was fond of saying, after he had lost every shilling of his week's salary at
hazard or cards: 'Now I must go home and eat a Child!' " Senior, p. 25; she
cites Davies' Dramatic Miscellanies as her source. The Apology affords no
evidence of Cibber's capacity for such black humor as this perhaps apocryphal

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 Notes to pages 202-229

quotation reflects.
12. "Freud and Dora: Story, History, Case History," Partisan Review,
41 (1974), 91.
13. I do not mean to imply, of course, that Cibber's story would neces-
sarily meet Freud's criteria for mental health. Marcus's summary makes clear
how demanding Freud was about the nature of acceptable narrative. Dora's
story, which accounted for everything to her satisfaction, by no means satis-
fied him.
14. James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. G. Β. Hill, rev. by L. F. Powell, 6
vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), entry for 15 May 1776, III, 72.
15. James Boswell, The Ominous Years, 1774-1776, ed. Charles Rys-
kamp and Frederick A. Pottle (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963), entry for 16
March 1776, p. 259. Also in Boswell's life, II, 433.
16. Richardson's Characters (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1963), p. 159.
17. "Samuel Richardson's Novels and the Theatre: A Theory Sketched,"
Philological Quarterly, 41 (1962), 329.
18. Sherburn notes this point too. " 'Writing to the Moment': One As-
pect," Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature, ed. Carroll Camden
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), p. 201.
19. The Shaping Vision: Imagination in the English Novel from Defoe to
Dickens (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966), p. 58.
20. "Pamela's Clothes," Twentieth-Century Interpretations of Pamela,
ed. Rosemary Cowler (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1969), pp. 89-96.
21. Leon M. Guilhamet, "From Pamela to Grandison: Richardson's
Moral Revolution in the Novel," Studies in Change and Revolution, ed. Paul
Korshin (Scolar Press, 1972), p. 197.
22. Joseph Andrews, p. 18.
23. Joseph Andrews, p. 19.
24. David Hunt, Parents and Children in History (New York: Basic
Books, 1970), p. 108, quoted by Bogna W. Lorence, "Parents and Children in
Eighteenth-Century Europe," History of Childhood Quarterly, 2 (1974), note
64, p. 28. Lorence points out, on the other hand, that by the mid-eighteenth
century "moralists and churchmen had long inveighed against the evils of
wet-nursing." P. 3.

Chapter 8 / Young Men's Fancies

1. Life of Johnson, ed. G. Β. Hill, rev. L. F. Powell, 6 vols. (Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1934), entry for 31 March 1778, III, 228.
2. Versions of the Self: Studies in English Autobiography from John
Bunyan to John Stuart Mill (New York: Basic Books, 1966), pp. 182-183.
3. "The Confessional Increment: A New Look at the I-Narrator," Jour-
nal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 28 (1969), 16.
4. "The Plot of Tom Jones," Essays on the Eighteenth-Century Novel,
ed. Robert Donald Spector (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965),

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 Notes to pages 229-242

pp. 96, 97, 99.

5. The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1961), pp. 72-3.
6. Boswell's London Journal, 1762-1763, ed. Frederick A. Pottle (New
York: McGraw-Hill, 1950), entry for 27 Feb. 1763, p. 206. Subsequent refer-
ences to this edition will be incorporated in the text.
7. Ronald Primeau has explored some implications of Boswell's attitude
toward imagination in the London Journal, pointing out that "Boswell is fas-
cinated by the powers of the human mind to alter or create new realities for
itself through the dynamics of imagination." "Boswell's 'Romantic Imagina-
tion' in the London Journal," Papers on Language and Literature, 9 (1973), 19.
8. Richard J. Jaarsma, "Boswell the Novelist: Structural Rhythm in the
London Journal," North Dakota Quarterly (Spring, 1966), pp. 51-60, has
commented on "Boswell's tendency to see his life in terms of an actor of the
stage" (p. 52) and to view himself as a literary hero. Frederick Pottle also
emphasizes the dramatic quality of the journal as summing up its "distinguish-
ing structural features." James Boswell: The Earlier Years, 1740-1769 (New
York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), p. 90.
9. Martin Price, who sees Boswell as "a good example of the deliberate
artist working upon the materials of his own feelings," points out that he
"illustrates the distinctive excitement of his age in the 'pleasures of imagina-
tion.' " To the Palace of Wisdom: Studies in Order and Energy from Dryden
to Blake (Garden City: Doubleday, 1964), p. 343. Pottle also stresses his
imaginative gifts, e.g. James Boswell: The Earlier Years, pp. 87-8.
10. The Hypochondriack, ed. Margery Bailey, 2 vols. (Stanford: Stan-
ford University Press, 1928), no. LXVII, April 1783, "On Memory," II, 273.
11. The Hypochondriack, no. LXVI, March 1783, "On Diaries," II, 259.
12. Frederick S. Kiely points out that London represented for Boswell a
new sort of bondage. "To assert his independence from a tyrannical father, he
leaves home and ironically submits to the new bondage of London society.
Here, hostile social forces shatter his illusions of freedom and independence,
and he endures mental and physical anguish." "Boswell's Literary Art in the
London Journal," College English, 23 (1962), 629.
13. Versions of the Self, p. 209.
14. W. K. Wimsatt comments on the striking analogy between Boswell
and the fictional "rake with the heart of gold," adding that Boswell, unlike the
novelist, does not take pains to glorify his hero. "James Boswell: The Man and
the Journal," Yale Review, 49 (1959), pp. 91, 92. I would argue, rather, that
Boswell alternates between elaborate self-glorification and its opposite.
15. His "identification with fictional figures arose from his recognition,
and sometimes his creation, of fictive qualities in his own life." Anthony Til-
linghast, "Boswell Playing a Part," Renaissance and Modern Studies, 9 (1965),
90.
16. Primeau maintains that in later parts of the London Journal, "Bos-
well's interest in the creative workings of an imaginative mind began to de-
cline," "Boswell's 'Romantic Imagination,' " p. 24. Although it is true that

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 Ν otes-to pages 242-254

Boswell dwells less obsessively on the subject, it seems to me that he loses little
or none of his faith in the value of imagination.
17. The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling, The Complete Works of
Henry Fielding, Esq., ed. William Ernest Henley, vols. III-V (New York,
1902), Bk. VIII, ch. 5; IV, 81. Subsequent references to this edition, with book
and chapter citations preceding volume and page, will be incorporated in the
text. In the passage quoted the narrator is not speaking explicitly of his novel
as a construct but of the falsifications in Tom's account of his experiences to
Partridge.
18. Henry Fielding: Mask and Feast (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1965), p. 34.
19. Introduction to Fielding, The History of the Adventures of Joseph
Andrews (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1961), p. xv.
20. F. Kaplan has argued that the novel contains a second plot outlined
by the series of introductory chapters. "Fielding's Novel about Novels: The
'Prefaces' and the 'Plot' of Tom Jones, " Studies in English Literature, 13
(1973), 536. He does not demonstrate the sense in which this series can pro-
perly be called a plot.
21. In Amelia Booth comes close, functioning successfully for a time—
though only for a time—as a farmer. The farm, however, is in effect given him
by a benevolent friend.
22. Critics have begun to comment on the special importance of the
reader's involvement in this novel. Thus, John Preston believes that Tom
Jones "presents life as a fortuitous sequence of events . . . and traces the ways
in which we come to see these events as a pattern." He sees the novel's struc-
ture as dependent upon "the structure of successive responses to the novel."
The Created Self: The Reader's Role in Eighteenth-Century Fiction (London:
Heinemann, 1970), p. 114. Leo Braudy, whose view is closer to my own, re-
marks that "the process of reading Tom Jones is a learning process for the
reader, he is led and sometimes pushed by the narrator into the narrator's
created world, for the purposes of entertainment and the growth of his percep-
tions." Narrative Form in History and Fiction: Hume, Fielding & Gibbon
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), p. 146. He says even more
emphatically, "Its artificial form, involuted plot, and freight of meditation
have been constructed to make us perceptive readers of novels and therefore
perceptive experiencers of life" (p. 178).
23. Kaplan points out that Fielding explicitly values genius, humanity,
learning, and experience as virtues. Tom and Sophia need humanity and ex-
perience, Allworthy adds a modicum of learning, Fielding as author must rely
on all four qualities. "Fielding's Novel about Novels," p. 545.
24. I am paraphrasing Goldknopf, "The Confessional Increment," who
finds it "almost hair-raising" that someone inside a novel should talk to some-
one outside (p. 17).
25. Boswell on the Grand Tour: Italy, Corsica and France, 1765-1766,
ed. Frank Brady and Frederick A. Pottle (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955),
entry for 19 July 1765, p. 110. Subsequent references to this edition, incorpor-

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 Notes to pages 254-267

ated in the text, will be identified as G Γ II.

26. "Such is the constitution of the world that if we speculate too much
about it we shall see all human pursuits in insipid or ridiculous views. But let
us once heartily engage in some course of action and all these imaginations
vanish." Letter to Temple, 25 Sept. 1763, Boswell in Holland, 1763-1764, ed.
Frederick A. Pottle (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1952), p. 32. Subsequent refer-
ences to this edition, incorporated in the text, will be identified as BH.
27. Northrop Frye links Pamela and Boswell as "process-writers," keep-
ing "the emotion at a continuous present." He considers the "view of literature
as process" to be a vital aspect of the late eighteenth century—a point that
supports my argument that the diary has special links with the fiction of this
period. See "Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility," Fables of Identity:
Studies in Poetic Mythology (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963),
pp. 131-132.
28. Boswell on the Grand Tour: Germany and Switzerland, 1764, ed.
Frederick A. Pottle (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1953), entry for 9 Aug. 1764,
p. 52. Italicized sentence, my italics. On the 20th of July, Boswell had con-
gratulated himself on being "an original character" and had resolved, "let me
then be Boswell and render him as fine a fellow as possible" (p. 28). Subse-
quent references to this edition, incorporated in the text, will be identified as
GT I.
29. See, for example, GT I, 15 ("My thoughts were horrid, yet my man-
ners were cheerful . . . How strange is the mind of mani How are our ideas
lodged? How are they formed? How little do they depend upon realities!") and
GT I, 18 ("I was in despair. Yet without any change in the external world I
suddenly became perfectly happy. My imagination was gay . . . I was pleased
with the romantic idea of making love to a Turk").
30. Boswelliana, ed. Charles Rogers (1874), p. 328. Quoted GT II, 219.

Chapter 9 / Laws of Time

1. James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. G. Β. Hill, rev. L. F. Powell, 6

vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), I, 47.
2. The Hypochondriack, ed. Margery Bailey, 2 vols. (Stanford: Stan-
ford University Press, 1928), # LXIV, Jan. 1783, "On Change," II, 245.
3. English Autobiography: Its Emergence, Materials, and Form (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 1954), p. 114.
4. For a particularly interesting treatment of this point, see Marie Bona-
parte, "Time and the Unconscious," International Journal of Psychoanalysis,
21 (1940), 427-468.
5. Boswell for the Defence, 1769-1774, ed. William K. Wimsatt, Jr. and
Frederick A. Pottle (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959), entry for 14 March
1772, p. 29. Subsequent references will be incorporated in the text.
6. Hypochondriack § LXV, Feb. 1783, "On Time," II, 248.
7. "Boswellian Time," Studies in Burke and His Time, 14 (1793), 239-
256.

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 Notes to pages 268-277

8. "Time in Autobiography," unpublished paper.

9. Letters of Sigmund Freud, ed. Ernest L. Freud, tr. Tania and James
Stern (New York: Basic Books, 1960), #244, To Edward Bernays, 10 Aug.
1929, p. 391.
10. For other examples of such comparison, mostly stressing his great
moral improvement, see particularly Boswell for the Defence, pp. 33, 44, 76,
80, 160, 176.
11. Time in Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1955),
p. 48.
12. Time in Literature, p. 27. The abstract nouns in parentheses allude
specifically to the title of Goethe's autobiographical Dichtung und Wahrheit.
13. See the description of the type in Andrew Wright, Henry Fielding:
Mask and Feast (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965), p. 157.
14. Boswell in Extremes: 1776-1778, ed. Charles McC. Weis and Fred-
erick A. Pottle (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970), entry for 7 July 1776, p. 12.
15. Amelia, The Complete Works of Henry Fielding, Esq., ed. William
Ernest Henley, vols. VI-VII (New York, 1902), Bk. XI, ch. ii; VII, 249. Subse-
quent references to this edition, citing book and chapter as well as volume and
page, will be incorporated in the text.
16. Time and the Novel (New York: Humanities Press, 1972), p. 63.
17. Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, in Miscellaneous Writings, The Com-
plete Works of Henry Fielding, Esq., ed. William Ernest Henley (New York,
1902), XVI, 183-184.
18. For the relation of Amelia to the Aeneid, see, for example, George
Sherburn, "Fielding's Amelia: An Interpretation," Fielding: A Collection of
Critical Essays, ed. Ronald Paulson (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1962),
pp. 146-157, and Maurice Johnson, Fielding's Art of Fiction (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1961), pp. 139-156. Johnson comments, "By
borrowing its structure from the Aeneid, Fielding in Amelia interprets life in
terms of literature as well as interpreting literature in terms of life" (p. 171).
19. See, for example, Michael Irwin, Henry Fielding, The Tentative Real-
ist (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), p. 122.
20. Robert Alter, Fielding and the Nature of the Novel, (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1968), p. 156. Compare Leo Braudy, Narrative
Form in History and Fiction: Hume, Fielding & Gibbon (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1970), p. 202.
21. J. Paul Hunter comments on Amelia's shrewdness in avoiding "the
masquerade where loss of public identity might easily offer additional incen-
tive to fall." "The Lesson of Amelia," Quick Springs of Sense: Studies in the
Eighteenth Century, ed. Larry S. Champion (Athens: University of Georgia
Press, 1974), p. 162. Robert Alter, more generally, remarks that "it is almost
inevitable that the central rite of such a society should be a masquerade."
Fielding and the Nature of the Novel, p. 155.
22. J. Paul Hunter refers to this timelessness and also alludes in passing
to "the insistent time of the later books." "The Lesson of Amelia," p. 158.

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 Notes to pages 280-302

23. Letter from Anne Donnellen to Samuel Richardson, 11 Feb. 1752,

Henry Fielding: The Critical Heritage, ed. Ronald Paulson and Thomas Lock-
wood (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), p. 319.
24. Letter from Lady Orrery to Lord Orrery, 6 Jan. 1752, Henry Fielding:
The Critical Heritage, p. 311.
25. "Fielding's Amelia," p. 151.
26. "The comic writer leans upon the conviction that character is static."
Wright, Henry Fielding: Mask and Feast, p. 158.
27. Andrew Wright sees Fielding's retreat from the aesthetic as an index
of his relative novelistic failure in Amelia, which Wright describes as "the
work of a Christian fatalist who was losing his faith in art." Henry Fielding:
Mask and Feast, p. 50. Later (pp. 108-109) he remarks that by giving up the
introductory chapters of commentary characteristic of Tom Jones, Fielding
"has made the status of this novel as a work of art uneasy, uncertain, and even
ambiguous." The matter seems to me a good deal more complicated than these
statements suggest.
28. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (New
York: Doubleday, 1957), p. 434.
29. Robert Alter points out that "marriage is conceived as the basic insti-
tution of both private life and Christian society . . . so that the prevalent
neglect, violation, and loveless manipulation of marriage become measures of
the failure of Christian values in society at large." Fielding and the Nature of
the Novel, p. 150. C. J. Rawson notes the pervasive feeling in Amelia "of a
cruel divorce between social institutions and the human purposes which they
theoretically serve." "Nature's Dance of Death," Eighteenth-Century Studies,
3 (1970), 497. Other commentators, noting the new, serious importance of
society in this novel, have remarked also the confusion of responsibility be-
tween society and the individual. See, for example, Hunter, "The Lesson of
Amelia," p. 173, and Irwin, Henry Fielding, The Tentative Realist, p. 119.
30. The Hypochondriack, no. XLIII, April 1781, "On Marriage"; II, 69.
31. Braudy, Narrative Form, p. 201.
32. "The Memorable Scenes of Mr. Boswell," Encounter, 28 (May,
1967), 77.

Chapter 10 / Selfhood, Given and Formed

1. "Mode in Narrative Poetry," To Tell a Story: Narrative Theory and

Practice (Los Angeles: Clark Library, 1973), p. 29.
2. Frederick Lewis Allen, "One Day in History," quoted by Wayne Shu-
maker, English Autobiography: Its Emergence, Materials, and Form (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 1954), p. 45.
3. "Defoe, Richardson, Joyce, and the Concept of Form in the Novel,"
in William Matthews and Ralph Rader, Autobiography, Biography, and the
Novel (Los Angeles: Clark Library, 1973), p. 34.

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 Index

Titles of literary works are indexed under the names of their authors. Major treat-
ments of authors or texts are indicated by italic page references.

Addison, Joseph, 231, 239, 240, 241; Boswell on the Grand Tour, I, 258-
quoted, 29 260; imagination in Boswell on the
Adelstein, Michael, 187 Grand Tour, II, 261-262; imagina-
Algarotti, Francesco, 85, 86 tion in Boswell's London Journal,
Alkon, Paul, 267 231-232; law in Boswell for the De-
Alpers, Paul, quoted, 300 fence, 292-296; marriage in Boswell
Auerbach, Erich, quoted, 284 for the Defence, 286-289; "plot" in
Austen, Jane, 7, 61, 89,175,176; the journals, 228-230; sense of self in
Emma, 7 Boswell on the Grand Tour, I, 260-
261; success and failure in Boswell
Baker, Ernest, quoted, 159 for the Defence, 296-299; time in
Barker, Jane, 66, 90,176, 177; quoted, Boswell for the Defence, 265-270
59, 63; A Patch-Work Screen for the Life of Johnson, 265
Ladies, 66-69, 70, 71 Boyd, Elizabeth, quoted, 58, 59
Barlow, Thomas, 164 Braudy, Leo, quoted, 288
Barrett, Charlotte, 159 Brown, Homer, quoted, 38
Berkeley, George, 3; quoted, 2, 21 Buffon, Georges, 117, 118
Boswell, James, 247, 303, 309, 310, Burney, Charles, 164,166, 170, 173-
314; quoted, 13,16; concern with 174
inner life, 24, 308; self-invention, 20- Burney, Fanny, 16, 23, 158-192, 219;
21, 213, 243, 306 conflict with society as theme, 89;
Hypochondriack, The, 257, 265 interest in external, 24, 314; on fic-
Journals, 227-242, 254-263, 264- tion, 7, 310; relation of fiction and
274, 285-289, 293-299; control as autobiography, 189-192; reveals
theme in Boswell in Holland, 255- feminine strategies, 25,168-169
257; imagination in Boswell for the Camilla, 181-182,184,191
Defence, 270-272; imagination in Cecilia, 176,181, 184,190

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Diary and Letters, 160-175; depen- D'Arblay, Alexandre-Jean-Baptiste,

dency as subject, 173-174; form in, 160,171-172,189
174-175; identity in, 169-170,173; Darwin, Charles, 24, 98 ·
importance of fear in, 158-160,162- Defoe, Daniel, 26, 57, 310, 311
166,167-168; marriage as subject, Moll Flanders, 1, 9 , 1 0 , 1 1 , 20
170-173; virtue as theme, 161-162, Robinson Crusoe, 11, 28-39,127,
166-167, 227, 228 193, 303, 312; as spiritual autobiog-
Evelina, 1,165,176-181, 188, 303, raphy, 28-29, 38-39, 44, 53, 92, 305;
307; as autobiography, 180-181; fear as subject, 33-35, 88; imagina-
choices of fear in, 179-180; identity tion in, 29-33, 37-38, 41-43, 49, 55,
in, 11; prudence as theme, 178; real- 233; love as subject, 35-36; relation
ism of, 7; social position as issue, 9 to reality, 36-37, 46-47, 61, 248, 307;
The Wanderer, 176,183-188, 189; self and others in, 45, 50, 51, 309
obstacles to independence in, 185- Deutsch, Helene, quoted, 19
186; relation of individual to society Digges, West, 213, 239, 240
in, 183-184 Donovan, Robert Alan, quoted, 215
Burney, Sarah, 165-166 Downs, Brian W., quoted, 194

Charke, Charlotte, 87, 88,174, 303: as Eliot, George, 24, 25; Middlemarch,
daughter, 15, 75-76; lack of accom- 8-9
plishment, 73, 81-83; marriage, 84 Elliott, Robert C., quoted, 100
Charlotte, Queen, 166,167,168,171
Cibber, Colley, 20, 232, 300, 309, 312; Färber, Leslie, quoted, 131
glorification of follies, 15, 25, 301, Fielding, Henry, 12, 23, 57, 89, 302,
308; resemblance to Boswell, 257; 314; asserts stability, 16; attitude
sense of necessity, 213 toward external, 24; attitude toward
Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley readers, 304, 310; on artifice, 6,11,
Cibber, 194,199-208, 218-223, 224- 195; on Cibber, 232, 301
226; autobiography as defense, 17; Amelia, 270, 274-293, 296-299,
hidden weakness in, 224-225; inco- 305, 307, 309; law in, 289-293; mar-
herence as ordering principle of, 203- riage in, 286-289; novelist's role in,
204; lack of reference to feeling, 24, 283-285; success and failure in, 296-
310; sense of audience in, 140, 218- 299; time and memory in, 264-265,
223; "truth" of, 199-201; vanity as 275-282
theme, 201-203, 206-207 Joseph Andrews, 1; quoted, 195,
Cowper, William, 20, 88,109,193, 218, 223
233, 308 Tom Jones, 10, 90,154, 242-254,
Memoir, 40-55; conventions of 309, 314; author's thematic involve-
spiritual autobiography, 29, 40-41, ment, 250-252, 261; comic perspec-
91, 92; depression and isolation as tive of, 285; concentration on youth,
themes, 44-46, 264; first suicide at- 230; identity in, 1, 8, 20, 289; imag-
tempt described, 48-51; passivity as ination as source of value in, 248-
theme, 52-54, 72, 99, 305; problem of 250, 262-263; imagination making
control in, 41-43; relation to God as characters ridiculous, 247-248, 306;
theme, 17, 47, 78, 301; structure of imagination of money, 244-246; im-
narrative, 24, 54-55 portance of events in, 303; involve-
Crane, Ronald, quoted, 228-229 ment of reader, 250; life and art in,
Crisp, Samuel, 161, 164 253-254; realism of, 6, 7; unchange-
Curchod, Suzanne, 115,119, 121; Gib- ability in, 7, 9
bon's accounts of, 103, 105, 111, 113; Fluchère, Henri, quoted, 136
Gibbon's love for, 98 Folkenflik, Robert, quoted, 98,194

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Fontenelle, Bernard, 117, 118 24,193; claim of necessity in, 213;

Freud, Sigmund, 22, 72, 203, 254; explanations in, 313; imagined read-
quoted, 71, 268 ership, 219
Frye, Northrop, 21; quoted, 18
Fussell, Paul, quoted, 294 Jefferson, D. W., quoted, 128
Johnson, Samuel, quoted, 5, 204; Bos-
Gibbon, Edward, 24, 91,128,129, 303, well's ideal, 213, 242; Boswell's ren-
304; belief in logic, 148; desire for dition of, 231, 234, 314; denies origi-
admiration, 155; need for directness, nal genius, 99; on fancy, 12; on fic-
149 tion, 11; on objective world, 11; rela-
Autobiographies, 92-126; as ex- tion with Boswell, 237, 241, 262,
pression of selfhood, 312, 313-314; 271, 272; to Mrs. Thrale, 73
attitude toward father in, 25, 96-97,
98-99,105, 219; fact and fiction in, 1, Kazin, Alfred, quoted, 43,110
2, 93-94, 109-110,150,154, 301; free- Kearney, A. M., quoted, 194
dom as issue in, 105-109,114-117;
identity through vocation in, 17-18, Leavis, F. R., 24, 25; quoted, 23
21,101-104,134, 309; Memoir A, 95- Lennox, Charlotte, 90; quoted, 58, 64;
96; Memoir B, 96-104; Memoir C, Euphemia, 64-65, 72, 88
104-109; Memoir D, 111-113; Mem- Locke, John, 3, 42; quoted, 2, 21
oir E, 113-119; Memoir F, 119-125;
metaphor of procreation in, 145; Mack, John E., quoted, 135
struggle for form in, 26, 92-93, 94-95, Mack, Maynard, quoted, 243
125-126, 127, 310 Macpherson, James, 239
Decline and Fall of the Roman Mandel, Barrett John, quoted, 40
Empire, 103,106,108,111-112, 113, Marcus, Steven, quoted, 203
116 Mayoux, Jean-Jacques, quoted, 146-
Gilman, Richard, quoted, 18 147
Goffman, Erving, quoted, 100 McCarthy, Mary, 19
Golden, Morris, quoted, 209 Mendilow, Α. Α., quoted, 10, 275
Goldknopf, David, quoted, 228 Meyerhoff, Hans, quoted, 269
Gosse, Edmund, 24 Mill, John Stuart, 24
Graves, Robert, 24 Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, 83, 88,
Gray, Thomas, 123 89, 90, 313; attitude toward learning,
Guiffardière, Charles de, 160,168-169 79-80, 82; attitude toward passion,
84-86; identity through relationship,
Halsband, Robert, 85; quoted, 86 73-74, 77-78
Hardwick, Elizabeth, quoted, 197 Montague, Edwine, and Louis Martz,
Hart, Francis, quoted, 54 quoted, 159
Hartley, David, 11, 12, 21; quoted, 4, 5 Morris, John, quoted, 47
Harvey, W. J., quoted, 129
Hellman, Lillian, 24 Nabokov, Vladimir, 19
Hemlow, Joyce, 159,176,188
Holland, Norman, quoted, 42 Pascal, Roy, quoted, 13,15, 44, 93
Holz, William, quoted, 133 Phillips, Susanna, 167, 190
Hume, David, 11,17, 303; deathbed Pike, Burton, 268
interview, 274; Gibbon's resem- Pilkington, Laetitia, 17, 73, 78, 83, 90,
blance to, 118; on identity, 3-4; on 314
memory and imagination, 3-4; Memoir, attitude toward learning
quoted, 2, 10 in, 80-81, 82; fictional aspect of, 2,
Autobiography, 13-15, 19, 20-21, 303, 311; prose creating significance.

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16, 86-87; relation to husband, 15, Stauffer, Donald, quoted, 26, 93

88; relation to parents, 75, 77, 84; Steele, Sir Richard, 239, 240
unmastered conflict in, 174 Sterne, Laurence, 23, 57, 89, 314
Pope, Alexander, 96, 301; quoted, 207 Tristram Shandy, 127-157, 158,
Preston, John, quoted, 134 268, 300, 309, 312; history as subject,
Price, Martin, quoted, 142-143 146-151; imagination as subject, 129-
131,134-135, 307; language as sub-
Rader, Ralph, quoted, 302 ject, 143-146; problem of control in,
Reid, B. L., quoted, 194 126,127-129; 133-134, 227, 305;
Reid, John, 273-274, 293, 294, 295 reader of, 139-143, 304; selfhood in,
Reid, Thomas, quoted, 3 10-11, 82,151-153,193; sexuality as
Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 99 theme, 103,131-133; struggle for
Richardson, Samuel, 12,16, 23, 57, 89, form in, 26, 92,135-139,153-157,
314 303; unchangeability of character in,
Clarissa, 1, 8,11, 16, 73 7,8
Pamela, 24, 154, 193-199, 208-218,
223-226, 314; clothing in, 216-218; Thomson, David, quoted, 139
concerned with moments, 16; form Thrale, Hester, 16, 73, 83,174, 303;
of, 225-226, 313; hidden aggression quoted, 74, 75; and Fanny Burney,
in, 224-225; identity in, 11,18, 20, 165,191; desire to assert importance,
28, 227; imagination in, 306-307; 21; on life of mind, 78-79; on wom-
novelist's imagination in, 243; rela- en's power, 87; relation with parents,
tion of individual to society in, 9, 73-75, 84, 219; resentment, 82, 88,
213-216, 310; sense of audience, 208- 308
210, 218; sense of story, 13,197-199, Trilling, Lionel, quoted, 18
257, 261; use of language in, 196-197, Tuveson, Ernest, quoted, 31
210-213; wish-fulfillment in, 303
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 260-261, 262 Voltaire, 261
Rowson, Susannah, quoted, 60; Char-
lotte Temple, 90 Watt, Ian, 35; quoted, 175
Wollstonecraft, Mary, 88,183; as femi-
Santayana, George, quoted, 146 nist, 66; attitude toward marriage,
Schafer, Roy, quoted, 12 69, 71, 90; passivity of heroines, 76
Schliemann, Heinrich, 18 Maria, or The Wrongs of Women,
Shapiro, Steven, quoted, 99-100, 125 71
Sheffield, John Holroyd, Lord, 94,124 Mary: A Fiction, 66, 69-71
Sherburn, George, 281; quoted, 209 Vindication of the Rights of
Shumaker, Wayne, quoted, 265 Women, 66; quoted, 183
Smollett, Tobias, 9,12; Humphry Woolf, Virginia, quoted, 174-175
Clinker, 11; Peregrine Pickle, 1 Wright, Andrew, quoted, 243
Spender, Stephen, quoted, 100

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