THE USE OF MYTH AS METAPHOR FOR PRIVATE EXPERIENCE IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY AUTOBIOGRAPHY by SUSANNA EGAN B.A., Cantab., 1965 M.A.j The University of British Columbia, 1973 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY i n THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES (Department of English) We accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA June 1980 (c) Susanna Egan, 1980. In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and study. I further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the Head of my Department or by his representatives. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. Department of The University of British Columbia 2075 Wesbrook Place Vancouver, Canada V6T 1W5 11 ABSTRACT This thesis explores two apparently contradictory problems. It assumes that the autobiographer would like to "tell the truth" about himself as no one else could tell it. If this assumption is just, howeve why does the nineteenth-century autobiographer so commonly use formal literary conventions in order to describe large stretches of experience? In particular, why does the myth of paradise and paradise lost so fre• quently describe childhood and the end of childhood? Why does a journey represent the maturing youth? What sense do standard descriptions of conversion and confession make of private experience? Attempting to reconcile this contradiction between the expression of personal experience and the use of stereotypical forms, this thesis looks first at the inevitability of fiction in any written account. Fiction is inevitable because words act as translation for experience and because the individual translates every experience into the altered form of his perception. Altering himself and his life by the primary acts of perception and writing, the autobiographer translates himself into a character in a book and the events of his life into a story. Autobiographical works by William Hale White and George Moore exemplify the translation of the living man into the fictive narrator. Newman's •sickness in Sicily and De Quincey's departure from school exemplify the translation of variegated experience into the particular and familiar narrative forms of conversion and confession. If the fictive character and story are inevitable results of any attempt to write autobiography, then it makes sense to examine these literary conventions that recur so frequently in autobiography as myths iii described by Frye as the typical forms for typical actions or by Jung as forms without content. They are explored here, each in turn, as metaphors for private experience in a few core texts. Autobiographical works by Rousseau, Wordsworth, George Moore, and Thomas Carlyle provide basic exemplary material which is extended in particular instances by examination of autobiographical works by William Hale White, De Quincey, and John Stuart Mill. For exploration of childhood, I have turned to some Russian autobiographers who pay significant attention to childhood. For confession, some early confessional works provide an historical context. In order to understand why and how the myths of paradise, the journey, conversion, and confession can serve as metaphors for private experience, each form is examined in turn in its relation to myth, religion, and human psychology. Paradise and paradise lost, for example, examined in the light of other creation myths and of certain generally accepted truths about child psychology, can be seen to describe with considerable efficiency some essential truths about the life of every child and the problems inherent in recreating one's own childhood. Similarly, the heroic journey, which derives from myth, epic, and religion, and which takes the hero quite literally through hell, describes signifi• cant aspects both of maturation, the development of a coherent identity, and of the process of writing an autobiography. Confession, or the narration of the heroic tale, describes the return of the hero and represents the autobiography itself. This narration takes the form of metaphor at every stage precisely because its subject, the individual identity, is unique and inaccessible and because events and endings are less significant than meanings and identity; the character and his story i v depend on such complex representation for their hidden truths to be made manifest. Deriving from myths, which provide the forms for recurrent experience, and from those common psychological conditions from which the myths themselves derive, these metaphors are the servants of individual need and are efficient purveyors of intersubjective meaning. V TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Introduction 1 Chapter One: The Inevitability of Fiction 10 From Autobiographer to Fictive Narrator 20 The Evolution of Narrative Pattern 40 Chapter Two: Childhood: From Innocence to Experience 73 Chapter Three: Youth: The Heroic Journey and the Process of Art 115 Chapter Four: Maturity: Conversion or Descent into the Underworld 152 Chapter Five: Confession: The Hero Tells his Story 189 St. Augustine, Petrarch, Bunyan 198 Rousseau and the Nineteenth-Century Confessional Novel ... 207 Conclusion 219 Footnotes 226 Bibliography 244 vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS A number of people have been particularly helpful in the preparation of this thesis. I would like to thank the members of my Guidance Committee: John F. Hulcoop, both for his kindness and support and for his extensive and constructive criticism at every stage of my work; Michael Goldberg, especially for initiating my exploration of conventional forms in auto• biography and for his enthusiastic support of my earliest efforts; Ira Nadel for his careful criticism and for his generous sharing of specialised knowledge. I would also like to thank Irene Hull, who has turned an indecipher• able text into an excellent typescript, catching many of my errors with an editorial eye. Without the constant lovingkindness of Kieran Egan this thesis could not have been written. 1 INTRODUCTION People commonly perceive their lives as containing certain distinct stages. Whether persuaded by the rigorous attempts of scholars like Piaget and Erikson to classify the developing forms of mental life, or by the more general comments of a popular book like Passages, by the simplifying effect of personal memory, or by the constraints that language imposes on any attempt to relate experience, we learn to summarise crucial and multiform activities and happenings under headings like "childhood," "teenager," and "mid-life crisis." Such verbal reductionism also affects the autobiographer who approaches the more formidable task of writing his life as a narrative. He, too, describes his life in terms of certain distinct stages, like childhood, youth, maturity, and old age. The autobiographer, furthermore, describes these stages according to more elaborate, literary conventions than the conversationalist, not only in terms of summary titles but also in terms of certain narrative patterns. This thesis explores the nature of some dominant narrative patterns that are common in autobiography. It does not attempt to catalogue them nor to identify them through an exhaustive list of autobiographies. Nor does it seek to refine distinctions between fiction and fact or between the work of imaginative literature and the imaginative product which is also empirically verifiable. Working, rather, with a varied sampling of written lives, this thesis explores the epistemologically grey area where autobiographical novel and poem overlap with the formal autobiography in order to characterise certain autobiographical patterns in some detail and to suggest both how and why they work. 2 Why, for example, does Rousseau describe his childhood in terms of a paradise whose golden gates have closed behind him? The particular answer might lie in the many happy months that Rousseau spent with the Lamberciers in the country. But even if Paradise can provide a plausible metaphor to describe a period of Rousseau's childhood, why should Gorky, whose story is so different, adhere to the same narrative pattern? Gorky's autobiography opens with his father's dead body and continues in the squalor and brutality of his grandparents' house. Yet he describes a paradisal sanctuary that he creates for himself; he isolates a period of peace, safety, and rich sensations of beauty before he is forced out into the world. Similarly, why should "journey" provide a recurring metaphor for autobiographers who write about their youth? In autobiographical narra• tives as different as The Prelude, Hail and Farewell, Sartor Resartus, and Great Expectations journey or quest describes a significant aspect of youth. It becomes the metaphor that extracts and demonstrates some common meaning from very different events in different individual lives. Then, again, both the religiously devout like Cardinal Newman and the atheist like John Stuart Mill describe central crises in their lives in terms of "conversion." The narrative patterns for conversion can be found in spiritual autobiography, as in The Confessions of Saint Augustine, in an autobiographical poem like The Prelude, and in an autobiographical novel such as The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, or in so unliterary