Privacy: Concealing the Eighteenth-Century Self (review)

Writers traditionally contrasted society with solitude, which they regarded with suspicion because they thought people were social animals. When Francis Bacon quotes Aristotle's adage that love of solitude makes a man either a wild beast or a god (in his essay, "Of Friendship"), he speaks for most writers when he rejects the second possibility. Yet a little of this scary isolation was necessary to replenish the mind for renewed social engagement. In the notion of retreat, writers celebrated but socialized this beneficial solitude, associating it with Horace and his Sabine farm: ideally, it was shared with intimates. By the end of the eighteenth century, however, this socially anchored conception has substantially, but not completely, yielded to the modern concept of privacy. Privacy retains solitude's ambiguities. Necessary for health, it too can subvert society and, in excess, endanger the individual. What has changed is the perspective. Privacy observes social participation from the viewpoint of the individual's mysterious interiority instead of taking a social perspective on individual solitude. Many juggled familiar and emergent attitudes, of course; hence, perhaps, our fascination with the journals and novels of the later eighteenth century. Even in a poem as resolutely public as the "Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot," Alexander Pope may characteristically have a foot in both realities: a longing for privacy may inform his retreat, shared with a friend, from the demands of his public role as poet-satirist. Certainly James Boswell's diaries reveal a recognizably modern sensibility despite the longing to project particular social roles—"Be Macheath today"—that comes from an older structure of feeling.

Patricia Spacks takes the modern attitude as her subject in this brief, informative survey of an impressive array of eighteenth-century novels and diaries. She also offers insights into William Cowper's The Task (which gives us the phrase "interior self") and Charlotte Smith's Elegiac Sonnets. Noting that we now contrast the public sphere with the private, she shrewdly adds that the latter marks a domestic space within which someone, a woman especially, may in fact lack any privacy. She cites many definitions of this elusive concept, most suggestively Barrington Moore Jr's observation on Inuit culture: "The need for privacy amounts to a socially approved protection against painful social obligations" (89). This definition brings into play both social demands on the self and social sanction for the self's occasional recoil from those demands. It assumes, that is, a social consensus that what distinguishes individuals is their unique, and uniquely valuable, interiority. Spacks is consequently at her best when such a self confronts social demands that deny or refuse fully to acknowledge that valuable interiority. She is most at home, that is, with writers of sensibility and those who reacted to them, although she ranges farther afield than this. Among diarists, she considers Dudley Ryder, who became attorney-general in 1737 but kept his diary as a young man in 1715–16; Lady Vane, whose memoirs appeared in Tobias Smollett's Peregrine Pickle; Laetitia Pilkington; James Boswell; Elizabeth, first Duchess of Northumberland; Parson Woodforde; and Frances Burney. Spacks's conjunctions of writers are sometimes startling but always illuminating. Her chapter on "Private Conversations" surveys Oliver Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield, Henry Mackenzie's Man of Feeling, Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders (rather unexpectedly), and Sarah Robinson Scott's Millenium Hall, a masterpiece of indirect self-revelation. In "Exposures: Sex, Privacy, and Sensibility," Boswell and Pilkington (an intriguing pairing in themselves) rub shoulders with John Cleland's Fanny Hill as well as Lady Vane and the protagonist of Genuine Memoirs of the Celebrated Miss Maria Brown (1766), a scandalous tale attributed to Cleland on the title page. Among novels, she usefully brings into play not only Fanny Hill and Moll Flanders, but also Charlotte Lennox's Female Quixote and Sarah Fielding's David Simple.

She is most illuminating, though, on later fiction. She astutely argues that theatricality simultaneously displays and conceals the feeling...