Flesh in the Age of Reason (43 page)

Within the novel a newish, and often purportedly autobiographical, mode developed: fiction masquerading as confession. Classic are the first-person narratives of Daniel Defoe – Moll Flanders telling her story in
The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders
(1722), for instance, is a woman of the world fighting for survival in wicked and mercenary times. Fictionalized from the real story of the castaway Alexander Selkirk,
Robinson Crusoe
presents a hero washed up on a desert island with virtually nothing except his wit and will, to spin a civilization out of himself. Crusoe is the ultimate self-made
man, half Christian pilgrim and half entrepreneur, who becomes a king – the ultimate childish fantasy of omnipotence. Scores of novels fictionalized, often in the first person, the saga of the individual confronted by the evil and the powerful, having to learn the ways of the world in order to survive. Sentimental novelists in particular often drew on personal experience. Left by her husband with several young children, Charlotte Smith projected herself as a shabby-genteel heroine in a hateful world. In novel after novel, such as
Emmeline
(1788) and
The Young Philosopher
(1798), her heroines suffer at the hands of legal chicanery and male power, be it that of fathers, ghastly husbands, lawyers, conniving parsons and all manner of other blackguards and bullies.

Apt for exploring the personality under pressure was the epistolary novel, notably Samuel Richardson’s
Pamela
(1740), the story of a servant girl made good, and
Clarissa, or The History of a Young Lady
(1747–8), the tragedy of a lady from a genteel family brought to ruin, rape and death at the hands of a rake. The secret of epistolary novels lies in the dissection of the mind not just of the heroine (or less frequently hero) but also of the other correspondents; the novel thereby becomes a vehicle for analysing the interacting psychologies of many protagonists.

Confession, autobiography and fiction merged above all in the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. His
Émile
showed the development of the self through the process of education;
Julie; ou la Nouvelle
Héloïse
probed the tangled twists of love and loyalty; above all his autobiographical
Confessions
– a work widely found deeply shocking – justified a self who was neither a model Christian pilgrim nor even a worldly success.
Confessions
was, self-confessedly, about a character neither good nor exemplary whose chief claim to fame was uniqueness. His ringing ‘if I am not better, at least I am different’ became the late-Enlightenment credo, before inspiring Romanticism. In Addison’s eyes, as we have seen, one’s duty had been to sparkle as a convivial conformist; in the gospel according to Jean-Jacques, it was in the unbiddable rough diamond that true value lay. The spirit of nonconformity became
de rigueur
and self-preoccupation was prized.
The new privileging of inner experience subverted hard-and-fast classical distinctions between the inner and the outer, fact and fantasy, and invited readers to remake themselves as originals, following inner promptings – with a little help from fictional stimulus material.

The self which loomed so large in autobiographical writings and pseudo-autobiography justified his (or occasionally her) existence primarily in terms of uniqueness rather than exemplary quality. The lives of the saints thus gave way to fictional protagonists as the role models upon whom people would fix and plot their experiences and responses. It is significant that Boswell would urge himself to be Macheath: he never aspired to be St Jerome. The non-commendable became exemplary, and in an age of print, fiction supplied the new role models.

Critics exposed the subversive power of fiction, offering as it did seductively dangerous models for life: the rakish hero, the bewitching lost soul, the woman or man of sensibility justifying all in terms of exquisitely uncontrollable feeling – or even something more brazen still, as in John Cleland’s
Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure
, the best-selling story of Fanny Hill. In the sensibility wave, many readers lost themselves in private fiction, an imaginative collusion with writers. By fantasizing about themselves or fictionalizing their own lives, novelists created texts of the imagination which fed their readers’ fancies. Fiction thus emerged as a fertile medium for ‘rethinking the self’.

The novelty of the culture the novel created should not be overlooked. For the first time ever, a mass public was identifying itself imaginatively with the fortunes of fictional folks like (or, at least, imaginably like) themselves. The old injunctions to obey the Commandments, to behave like the saints or the exemplary figures of Graeco-Roman antiquity (Horatius, Pericles, Xenophon – all the role models so crucial to Cornelius Scriblerus), were now challenged by the possibility of vicarious imaginative engagement with whatever was picked off the circulating library shelves. It became so easy to fantasize being someone else. That had always been condemned as envy or vain imagination: now it was the ordinary expectation and
experience of every novel reader, for it was through such fictions that the secular voyage into the interior was pursued and popularized.

The upstart genre of the novel also marks a decisive embourgeoisement and feminization of culture. With the likes of Charlotte Smith, Maria Edgeworth, Amelia Opie and Mary Brunton penning the best-sellers around 1800, this was the first time that women had made a prime contribution, through the printed word, to the shaping of public manners and morals. As will be clear, it is primarily with the growing prominence of fiction, notably the novel, that the self-identity of women has become an issue in this book.

The novel attracted popular bewilderment and reactionary venom:

’Tis Novel most beguiles the Female Heart.
Miss reads – she melts – she sighs – Love steals upon her –
And then – Alas, poor Girl! – good night, poor Honour!

Countless warnings like this one by George Colman exposed the imputed giddy fantasy life of those high on reading, that solitary vice, in particular (according to the stereotypes) ‘the young, the ignorant, and the idle’ (Johnson’s phrase), sucked down into the maelstrom of print. ‘She ran over those most delightful substitutes for bodily dissipation, novels,’ reflected Mary Wollstonecraft on her heroine’s meretricious mother in
Mary
(1788) – ironically one of her own fictions. Charlotte Lennox’s popular
The Female Quixote
(1752), an obvious reworking of Cervantes, was a classic account of an impressionable young woman disoriented by reading fiction. Thinking ‘romances were real Pictures of Life’, its heroine Arabella drew from them ‘all her Notions and Expectations’.

Above all, the project of modelling one’s life on fictional characters was exposed time and again as inane and pernicious – often in novels. Witness the comic villain Sir Edward Denham in Jane Austen’s
Sanditon
, who

had read more sentimental Novels than agreed with him. His fancy had been early caught by all the impassioned, & most exceptionable parts of
Richardson;& such Authors as have since appeared to tread in Richardson’s steps, so far as Man’s determined pursuit of Woman in defiance of every opposition of feeling & convenience is concerned, had since occupied the greater part of his literary hours, & formed his Character.

Were not common readers being seduced by fiction, biting their nails and wetting their hankies over the fates of Richardson’s heroines? And this dubious identification of the reader with the fictional – this ‘novelization of life’ – brought a further enigma: the elision of the
authorial voice
with his or her characters, a disorientation, was heightened by the appearance from 1759 of a startling first-person novel of interiority, Laurence Sterne’s
Tristram Shandy
. Its vogue – as will be further explored in the next chapter – in large measure stemmed from the slippage of authorial persona between Tristram himself, first person (highly) singular, and his author, Sterne; as also between Sterne and Parson Yorick, subsequently cast as the hero of
A Sentimental Journey
(1768). Gaily and daringly, Sterne smudged the distinction between character and author, while readers were invited to condone the hero’s self-revelatory impulses: ‘Ask my pen, – it governs me, – I govern not it.’

Whereas
Tristram Shandy
was comically sentimental, later novels harped on the romantic, melodramatic and sexual, notably in the Gothic vogue launched by Horace Walpole’s
The Castle of Otranto
(1765). Fascination with the subterranean depths of the emotions attended the dawn of Romantic self-expression; Wordsworth, whose
The Prelude
was a meditation on ‘the growth of my own mind’, and Coleridge exhaustively analysed their own poetic processes, initially through the enlightened psychologies of Locke and Hartley. The mysteries of consciousness were psychologized and philosophized in fiction no less than in autobiographies and diaries – indeed fiction permitted more daring explorations.

A striking instance of fiction, philosophy and life folding into each other and becoming indistinguishable is offered by
Emma Courtney
(1796), an intensely autobiographical epistolary novel by the petty-bourgeois London Dissenting intellectual Mary Hays. Its eponymous
heroine falls for Augustus Harley, a man whose very name harks back to the hero of Henry Mackenzie’s
The Man of Feeling
. Her passion unrequited, Emma pursues Harley obsessively, pounding him with love and self-pity, and even proposing sexual surrender (‘my friend – I would give myself to you’) since her affection ‘transcended mere custom’. All to no avail. Tragedy then follows tragedy to a tear-jerking finale.

Striking is the portrayal of the identity of the heroine in terms lifted from contemporary philosophy and psychology. Hays drew extensively upon the determinism taught in her friend William Godwin’s
An Enquiry concerning Political Justice
, as well as on Hartley’s associationist psychology. Emma is thus driven ‘irresistibly’ by her passion; what was to blame, she insists in self-vindication, was that flawed sentimental childrearing, especially for girls, which Mary Wollstonecraft had lately condemned: being ‘the offspring of sensibility’, her infatuation and its consequences were thus utterly beyond her control. ‘Enslaved by passion’, she had fallen ‘victim’ to her own ‘mistaken tenderness’. ‘Is it virtue then’, she asks, ‘to combat, or to yield to, my passions?’ The answer was obvious.

While Hays’s heroine was ostensibly presented as a Wollston-ecraftian ‘
warning
’ of the mischiefs of ‘indulged passion’, she was equally evidently glamorized. Aware of these mixed messages, and pre-empting charges of immorality, Hays pitched her appeal to the ‘feeling and thinking few’, those enlightened readers soaring above ‘common rules’. Her
Bildungsroman
was remarkable, but far from unique, in the portrait it offered of late-Enlightenment selfhood in all its deliciously dangerous ambiguities. Her heroine is simultaneously the upholder of earnest philosophical principles regarding sincerity, and a raging emotional inferno; she is fiercely independent, yet a child of circumstances; she is strong-willed, while the product of her environment, driven by forces beyond her control.

Above all, and most shockingly, the core was all autobiography. Emma’s fictional miseries precisely embodied Mary Hays’s own passion for her first love, John Eccles, and then for William Frend – a considerable Enlightenment figure who had been expelled from
Cambridge University for his Jacobinism. Emma’s correspondence in the novel is almost a carbon-copy of some of Mary Hays’s love-letters to Frend and also her exchanges with Godwin. Fact and fiction thus merged in the making of late-Enlightenment subjectivity.

The ultimate self-lacerating and, as it were, masochistic example of these rising tendencies to self-dramatization and self-exposure is William Hazlitt’s remarkable
Liber Amoris
, published in 1823, the story of his tormented erotic desires for his landlady’s daughter, Sarah Walker.
Liber Amoris
drips with self-disgust and self-hatred; the hero is revealed to be mean, jealous, obsessed and unmanly. The various strands of autobiography and autobiographical fiction had moved from the sinner’s salvation typical of the spiritual autobiography to the ultimate self-revelation and abasement of its secular successor.

When Hobbes noted that a person was a player, it was in the service of a desperate attempt to restore stability by setting up an artificial ruler and carving out artificial rules and roles. Traditional notions of the self allowed considerable scope for role-playing – all the world was indeed a stage, so long as distinctions were kept crystal-clear between the divine, the natural and the theatrical – or, to put it another way, just so long as the scripts used were those of God’s theatre.

In the eighteenth century this ceased to be the case. Pre-allotted parts were rejected. The distinctions between being oneself and playing a part broke down – or were deliberately smudged, and, fired in part by imaginative fiction, the desire arose to play a new part or a multiplicity of them. The scripts of life ceased to be God’s: they were of man’s own choosing.

Autobiographies and first-person novels, being such personal genres, are often preoccupied with the relations between the body and the consciousness belonging to it. Their protagonists are commonly desperately striving to surmount the frailty and vulnerability of the flesh, to affirm the self in face of danger or desire. The very production of such a piece of writing may represent the attempt to give the musings of the mind some embodied form – the incarnation of print – which possesses an enduring existence of its own, beyond the unreliable and impermanent flesh.
The Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Charlotte Charke
(1755), for instance, reflected at length upon embodiment, being the life story, somewhat larger than life, of an actress notorious for cross-dressing both off and on the stage.