Identity, Genre, and Form in the Eighteenth Century by Andromeda

Serial Selves: Identity, Genre, and Form in the Eighteenth Century by Andromeda L. Hartwick A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English Language and Literature) in the University of Michigan 2015 Doctoral Committee: Professor David L. Porter, Chair Professor Lincoln B. Faller Professor Sidonie A. Smith Associate Professor Elizabeth R. Wingrove Acknowledgments I owe so much gratitude and appreciation to my committee: Sidonie Smith, Lincoln Faller, Elizabeth Wingrove, and most especially, David Porter, for their unfailing patience and support for the duration of this project. Their feedback and guidance both before and across the writing process has helped me to think critically about my own work in ways I doubt I could have achieved on my own. The camaraderie of my graduate cohort, and especially the generous intellectual encouragement and personal support of Karen McConnell, Geremy Carnes, Molly Hatcher, and Alison Carr, made my success with the dissertation, and indeed in the program, possible. I would never have made it to the PhD stage without the early direction and lasting assistance of my academic family at the University of Wyoming, especially Caroline McCracken-Flesher, Cedric Reverand, Susan Frye, Eric Nye, Quincy Newell, and Val Pexton. I am also so fortunate to have the support of my wonderful family: my fellow writers Victoria and Michelle, who helped me recover from road blocks by sharing their own writing projects, and Kathleen, Camilo, Glen and Elizabeth, who listened to countless updates and summaries of what I was doing without complaint. Finally, I could never have come this far without Chad, who knows me so well he can help me when I have trouble helping myself. Thank you. ii Table of Contents Acknowledgments……...............…...……………………………………………………………ii Abstract…………………………………...……………………………………………………...iv Introduction: Serial Narrative and Paradigms of Selfhood………………………………………………………1 Part One: Lives Produced and Published Serially………………………...............................31 Chapter I: Serial Identity in Laetitia Pilkington’s Memoirs………….……………………….....34 Chapter II: Charlotte Charke and the Problem with Serial Confession………………………….56 Part Two: Seriality as a Critical Framework…………………………………………………77 Chapter III: Serial Convention and the Novel: De-Mythologizing Robinson Crusoe…………...81 Chapter IV: Fits and Starts: Ben Franklin’s Serially Autobiographical Self………….………....99 Chapter V: Serially Domestic Identity in the Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph…………….....116 Part Three: Periodicals, Public Space, and Collaborative Identity………………………..142 Chapter VI: The Coffeehouse Club and the Spectator Diary: Making the ‘Self’ in Public Spaces…………………………………………………………………………………..145 Chapter VII: Gendered Embodiment and Collaborative Identity in the Female Spectator.........164 Afterward………………………………………………………………………………………178 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………………....181 iii Abstract This dissertation studies modes of fashioning textual selfhood in the eighteenth century. It begins with an exploration of how a critical paradigm of modern selfhood functions in current eighteenth-century criticism, and then attempts to build from theories of diaries and periodicals a second category, which I call “modes of seriality,” to determine how the features of serial production and publication might interact with or disrupt the expectations engendered by the paradigm of the modern self. The first part addresses two serial life writing texts. In my reading of Laetitia Pilkington’s Memoirs I demonstrate how she manipulates serial features in the telling of her own life, so that her identity becomes a patchwork, woven together through the words and experiences of others. The chapter on Charlotte Charke’s Narrative examines how the actress negotiates serial features and the conventions of confessional narrative to create an identity that both conforms to and resists the expectations of criminal auto/biography. Reading these serial lives helps me build a framework for understanding how writers of lives engage with serial features. The second part of the dissertation uses that framework to interrogate three texts from genres that are often referenced in eighteenth-century discussions of modern selfhood. First I look at how Daniel Defoe’s use of serial features in Robinson Crusoe call into question the myth of the modern individual’s dependence on the teleology of progress and interiority. The next chapter examines how Benjamin Franklin’s sense of community identification is both reproduced in and reflected by serial features in his Autobiography. The final chapter in this iv section engages with recent criticism on sentiment and identity to examine how the form of Frances Sheridan’s The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph routes selfhood through engagement and exchange with others. The third part of the discussion turns to two periodicals, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s Spectator and Eliza Haywood’s Female Spectator, to examine how periodical texts that model and participate in collaborative construction interact with features of modern individualism. This dissertation seeks to broaden our understanding of the processes available for constructing a “self” in the eighteenth-century. v Introduction: Serial Narrative and Paradigms of Selfhood Types of serial publication in the eighteenth century were widespread and varied: by the early 1700s: “the nationwide distribution network for periodical publications was already more highly developed than that for works in volume form” (Law). This ease of publication and access introduces the possibility that many of the texts we turn to in the study of eighteenth-century selfhood were not only published, but perhaps also constructed using serial features and conventions. Since life writing genres such as diary, journal, and letters are also serial in nature, and the novels of the period often borrowed these genres for their narrative framework, a question regarding the relationship between the construction of textual self and serialization seems appropriate, especially in light of recent interest in theorizing the serial.1 Theorizing the serial and its features as a formal framework for conveying textual self— or the particulars that make up one’s identity on the page—offers a way to approach these texts from outside the models preferred by modernity and contemporary criticism. The first two works I address, Laetitia Pilkington’s Memoirs and Charlotte Charke’s Life, are produced and published serially, as are the periodicals I take up in the final section. Though the texts I focus on in the middle section—two novels and an autobiography—are not published serially, all three employ narrative strategies that replicate the features of the serial. In order to situate this study in discourses of eighteenth-century selfhood, I attempt to engage with two critical frameworks common in approaches to texts of the period. The first is a 1 Studies of the serial and seriality have increased over the last decade or so. In fact, as I was finishing this dissertation I received two calls for papers in as many weeks by conferences interested in exploring the nature of the serial as a textual and cultural category. 1 paradigm constructed and perpetuated by readers and critics across the last two centuries as a central mode for understanding the necessary features of a modern “self.” In his introduction to Sources of the Self, Charles Taylor calls this construct “the ensemble of (largely unarticulated) understandings of what it means to be a human agent: the sense of inwardness, freedom, [and] individuality…that are at home in the modern West” (xi). Literary criticism often assigns the long eighteenth century as the significant period in the development of both that modern understanding of selfhood and the narratives that reflect it. This paradigm of the modern self, often routed through seventeenth-century Enlightenment thought, privileges an individual, autonomous, unified subject and is defined by a compulsion for interiority and reflexivity ascribed to the influence of the Protestant Reformation.2 These tenets of modern selfhood are almost ingrained in the way we approach eighteenth-century studies. Students of the period are introduced early to the concept, if not necessarily the term, as they learn about the self- accounting confessional style of Daniel Defoe’s protagonists and the interiority of Jane Austen’s heroines. Even criticism that is not interested in issues of identity often takes as a given some or all of its tenets; our expectations of a protagonist to be a “dynamic” rather than a “static” character, for example, are grounded in the kind of progressive development defined in the paradigm. Since this is a discussion of texts and textual conventions that represent self, I am primarily concerned with how the attributes of the modern self outlined above manifest in narrative. The genres that reflect this concept of selfhood generally have a narrative structure that 2 I define the concept in this discussion by drawing on Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity, which examines how our current understanding of “modern” selfhood is intertwined with concepts of morality. There are versions of the development of modern selfhood that posit alternative models, however; in Dror Wahrman’s The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth Century England he describes a much more sudden emergence of modern selfhood

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