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Scandalous Figures: Authorial Self in Eliza Haywood, Laurence Sterne, Charlotte Smith, and Lord Byron

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Scandalous Figures: Authorial Self in Eliza Haywood, Laurence Sterne, Charlotte Smith, and Lord Byron Scandalous Figures: Authorial Self in Eliza Haywood, Laurence Sterne, Charlotte Smith, and Lord Byron By Amy Thomas Campion A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Steven Goldsmith, Chair Professor Ian Duncan Professor David Bates Fall, 2010 Copyright © Amy Thomas Campion 2010. Abstract Scandalous Figures: Authorial Self in Eliza Haywood, Laurence Sterne, Charlotte Smith, and Lord Byron by Amy Thomas Campion Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Berkeley Professor Steven Goldsmith, Chair Characterized by originality and proprietorship, the modern paradigm of authorship developed in the British long eighteenth century alongside philosophical upheavals in concepts of identity and an increasingly free-for-all literary marketplace in which the author was commodified along with his or her works. Literary historians have associated the “author-function” with the logic of copyright law, introduced in 1710, but the ideology of original authorship also developed as a defense against the more chaotic practical reality of the circulation and ownership of texts. In Scandalous Figures I demonstrate how Eliza Haywood, Laurence Sterne, Charlotte Smith, and Lord Byron resisted this defensive formation by acknowledging the fluidity of modern identity, incorporating it into their self-representations, and paradoxically transforming it into a practice of the self. Each of these authors capitalized on the intersection between authorial identity and several areas of cultural fascination: sensibility, the philosophy of personal identity, fictionality, theatricality, and the evolution of a reading public. Especially important was their awareness that scandal blurs the boundaries between categories that were sites of intense cultural energy, in Byron’s time as in Haywood’s: fact and fiction, private and public, life-writing or history and literature. Rather than pin their authorial names to an essential self, these authors ironically accept the way a name circulates through imaginations, economies, and significations. The striking similarity in their self-performances, across periods and genres, indicates the persistence of an alternative genealogy alongside the development of the mythic status and “fictional identity” of the original, proprietary author. If the formation of the unitary Romantic subject was the result of one strategy to navigate the shifting terrain of identity categories, then the performance of a fictional, scandalized subject was another. For Haywood, who took advantage of both her celebrity as a well-known actress and the opportunities of anonymous publication, the authorial self was a chameleon whose identity depended upon the genre and market in which she appeared. Emphasizing the theatrical, fictional, associative, and Lockean performance of authorial identity, Sterne took on the selves of his characters and scandalously transformed “Laurence 1 Sterne” into just another role and written self. Smith’s authorial self took the form of a novelistic heroine of sensibility who claimed authenticity even as she exposed the conventional lineaments of this character and their limitations. By infusing the novel and lyric with autobiography, she demystified the “romance of real life” of an author. Byron’s written self, the Byronic hero, was eroded by his embrace of the fictionality of his authorial identity and by his “mobility,” whereby the self is contingent upon the cultural forms in which it appears. The sign of Byron’s recognition of the pervasiveness of fictionality in literature and life was laughter. For all of these authors, the groundlessness of self is not a deconstructive negation of the author but a practical strategy dependent on the author’s social construction, which occurs through the forms and discourses that guide the social imagination, and through the desires and anxieties that fire the market. 2 For Peter and Jack i Contents Acknowledgments iii 1. Introduction: “Masks and Faces on a Field of Representations” 1 2. Scandal: Eliza Haywood’s Chameleon Self 18 3. The Dangers in a Jest: Laurence Sterne’s Performance of Self 59 4. Charlotte Smith’s “Written Troubles” of the Written Self 97 5. “A Nameless Sort of Person”: Byron’s Authorial Self 147 Bibliography 196 ii Acknowledgments I am grateful to those professors who always had their doors open to me, and who supported and encouraged my ideas through their development into full chapters: Ian Duncan and Cathy Gallagher. David Bates has been an important reader on my committee, and I want to thank him for his thoughtful questions and good advice, and for making time for my work in spite of the long lapses between my communications. It is Steve Goldsmith to whom I am most grateful, for being so much above and beyond a great teacher, mentor, and advisor. From the first time I worked with him, in his seminar on Romantic literature, his responses to my work and to my conundrums have always been thoughtful, thorough, considerate, insightful, and generous. I want to thank them all, too, for teaching me so much through their own work, which has clearly been so important to my own. I thank my parents for their endless generosity. Finally, I thank Peter for his encouragement, support, love, and friendship through it all. iii Introduction: “Masks and Faces on a Field of Representations” The familiar paradigm of authorship, as it developed in eighteenth-century Britain with the invention of copyright, is characterized by originality and proprietorship. This paradigm depends upon a concept of the self as innate and essential and upon the assumption that the text is a property of that self. Early eighteenth-century articulations of this concept of authorship develop, in this paradigmatic narrative, into the proprietary author and the Romantic self, an interiorized, original, essential subjectivity that expresses itself organically in, and owns—in some sense—its literary productions. Significantly, the figure of the proprietary author arose with the commodification of literature. We may look to familiar, canonical authors to find descriptions of this idea of authorship as it developed. In his historical account, Authors and Owners, Mark Rose points to the importance of the Lockean conception of private property, which is created when “an individual removes materials from the state of nature and mixes his labor with them.”1 Rose argues that as early as 1730, James Thomson and his immensely popular poetic sequence, The Seasons, embodied this proprietary relationship between author and work: A work of literature belonged to an individual because it was, finally, an embodiment of that individual. And the product of this imprinting of the author’s personality on the common stock of the world was a ‘work of original authorship.’ The basis of literary property, in other words, was not just labor but ‘personality,’ and this revealed itself in ‘originality.’ (114) Byron would later mock the mystified representation of this process in Don Juan when he describes Juan-as-Wordsworth brooding in a bucolic scene beneath some trees, where “poets find materials for their books” (Don Juan I, 90). Before we look to the parodists, however, I would like to offer a few more articulations of the dominant conception of authorship. The idea of original genius gained importance over the next few decades. Samuel Richardson describes a version of authorship that is defined by originality and property: Suppose, sir, when you ask, What does the name of poet mean? you answer after some such manner as this— “It means a maker, and, consequently, his work is something original, quite his own.” It is not the laboured improvement of a modern cultivator bestowed on a soil already fertile, and refining on a plan already formed; but the touch of Armida’s wand, that calls forth blooming spring out of the shapeless waste, and presents in a moment objects new and various, which his genius only could have formed in that peculiar manner.2 And, of course, there is the famous essay by Richardson’s friend, Edward Young: Conjectures on Original Composition (1759). For Young, the works of the original genius: will stand distinguished; his the sole Property of them; which Property alone can confer the noble title of an Author; that is, of one who (to speak accurately) thinks, and composes; while other invaders of the Press, how voluminous, and learned soever, (with due respect be it spoken) only read, and write.3 1 True authorship—characterized by originality, integrity, and propriety—is defined against imitation and mechanical re-presentation. Young also defines original authorship as organic, a characterization that will become associated with the Romantic poets. Original composition, Young writes: “may be said to be of a vegetable nature; it rises spontaneously from the vital root of Genius; it grows, it is not made: Imitations are often a sort of Manufacture wrought up by those Mechanics, Art, and Labour, out of pre- existent materials not their own” (274). “By the 1770s the doctrine of originality was orthodox,” but like any orthodoxy, sometimes the integrity of this self must be defended against the incursions of others’ imitations, definitions, or skepticism.4 When Samuel Taylor Coleridge attempts to take control of the meanings of his name and to assert his originality against accusations of plagiarism, he writes his Biographia
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