Reading the Surfaces of Colley Cibber's The Careless Husband

I do here think fit to inform the Reader, that in such Conclusions as these, Reason is certainly in the Right; and that in most Corporeal Beings, which have fallen under my Cognizance, the Outside hath been infinitely preferable to the In: Whereof I have been farther convinced from some late Experiments. Last Week I saw a Woman flay'd, and you will hardly believe, how much it altered her Person for the worse.

Jonathan Swift's satiric masterpiece A Tale of a Tub (1704) takes as its subject the relative value of what we might call an "aesthetics of surface," as opposed to an "aesthetics of depth." ¹ Throughout his work, Swift's various narrators prod his reader to consider the two alternatives, as the text encourages us to fathom what it means first to embrace the surface, then to explore the meaning of depth. The experience, as readers of the text know too well, is vertiginous. In the end, we are hard pressed to say which side comes out on top. Is the narrator serious, for example, when he writes that wisdom is really a cheese, "which by how much the richer, has the thicker, the homelier, and the courser Coat; and whereof to a judicious Palate, the Maggots are the best"? ² The brilliance of Swift's text lies in its ability to keep both alternatives in play simultaneously. Thus we live in a world where surface is all, where digging only discovers stinky cheese and in a world where the truth is always deep and necessarily difficult to come by.

In the end, A Tale of a Tub is much more than an aesthetic game, as Swift's project positions him in the middle of a wider social and cultural struggle. At stake is not just the value of two interpretative strategies, but alternative understandings of human subjectivity: are we creatures of depth or creatures of surface? Is the human character best understood as another kind of "surface," to be read in terms of externalized signals or signs that denote status, social identity, religious conviction, or even gender? Or is human character in fact a "deep" effect, something buried to the casual observer and only obliquely accessible to those who know how to read beneath surface?

For many of Swift's contemporaries, this query takes a different, though related, form: where do we locate the truth of our "deep" and "authentic" being? ³ In the works of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, an ascendant sensibility will link aristocratic display, ostentation, sartorial splendor, and performance to the inauthentic self, while decorum, modesty, restraint, and--above all--the absence of performative behaviors will come to mark an authentic, normative, and valued bourgeois subject. ⁴ As Erin Mackie has recently argued, fashion plays an especially important role in this redefinition of subjectivity. She explains that, in the pages of the Tatler and the Spectator, "Fashion and style are often negatively evaluated as at best empty, and at worst deceptive, signs, with no necessary, and often an illusive, relation to ethical referents. Capitulation to fashion threatens one's character and, since character is being conceptualized as an internal and personal subjectivity, it threatens one's very self." ⁵

In a related way, Deidre Shauna Lynch explores the meaning of consumerism for emerging eighteenth-century definitions of identity. ⁶ While Mackie describes how fashion was thought of as a force antithetical to deep character, Lynch's work queries whether consumerism was ever merely a superficial and mindless practice, and she demonstrates how the affirmation of Frances Burney's heroines is embedded in commercialism. While discussing the meaning of consumerism in Camilla, she gives the example of the consumer who stands in front of a dressing-room mirror or who studies a fashion magazine and who announces "It's not me." In Lynch's example, the very recognition...