Personal Identity, Narrative, and History: The Female Quixote and Redgauntlet

Personal Identity, Narrative, and History: The Female Quixote and Redgauntlet Everett Zimmerman Recent critical discourse tends to resist exclusive definitions of the novel but yetto imply some definable corpus. The novel is regarded as a kind ofprose that is neither self-identical nor able to be assimilated to the seemingly more precisely pedigreed genres that it simulates. Among such genres are history, biography, and autobiography, interrelated strands of narrative that were prominently appropriated by eighteenth-century fiction. Although we have little difficulty distinguishing the novel from these forms of writing, they continue to serve the novel's perennial claim to a truthtelling function. This appropriation of history and biography (including autobiography) connects the novel to two salient features of the eighteenth-century intellectual landscape: the primacy of history for the understanding of society, and the philosophical elaboration and critique of notions of personal identity . The institutions of civil and social life were thought to be explicable only through history, as they are products of a particularized development . And the new philological understanding, praised by William Wotton and exemplified by Richard Bentley, implied that sacred as well as secular texts were comprehensible only through interpretation consistent with their historical contexts. While personal identity appears to be a private concern far removed from the usual subject matter of history, eighteenthcentury conceptions of the private were also inflected by the category of EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 12, Number 2-3, January-April 2000 370 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION history, as the following well-known remark about Locke's Essay Concerning the Human Understanding in Tristram Shandy suggests: "It is a history-book ... of what passes in a man's own mind."1 When John Locke designates "memory" as the criterion for personal identity, he is in effect deriving identity from our consciousness of our history.2 Locke's view may be plausibly restated as follows: we are what we are able to narrate about ourselves. This kind of personal history is dependent on individual consciousness and is far removed from the public claims that the historical genres make, yet the relationship of identity to autobiographical writing is close, as Montaigne had demonstrated. And it was a commonplace of eighteenth-century (and earlier) historiography that private experiences and writings were the foundations of history, as evidenced in the narratives of Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon and Gilbert Bumet, Bishop of Salisbury. The assumption on which the following analysis rests is that the eighteenth-century novel takes as one of its significant tasks the exploration and reconciliation of the categories of public and private as represented by the connected but opposing poles of history and personal identity. In Time, Narrative, and History, David Carr posits narrative as the basis for personal identity as well as for most kinds of history.3 Narrative is the organizer of events and also of our selves. But our personal narratives are deeply entwined with the various narratives that constitute the groups in which our lives participate. The temporal dimensions of these groups may exceed by years or centuries the limits of an individual life. Historical writing, even if concerned with distant times and cultures, implicitly intersects this narrative "we" that forms part of our individual identity. Thus, the categories of public and private are fluid and reciprocal, not just oppositional. Eighteenth-century debates on personal identity can be interpreted as assaults on tightly woven theories of self as easily as affirmations of them. Locke's radically internalized view of personal identity as based on memory and his separation of "personal" identity from the "human" identity that is based on the perceptions of others made personal identity into a private matter, and thus raised questions of justice, or what 1 Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions ofTristram Shandy, Gentleman, ed. Melvyn New and Joan New, 3 vols (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1978), 2:ii,98. 2 John Locke, Essay Concerning the Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975),'pp. 328-48. 3 David Carr, Time, Narrative, and History: An Essay in the Philosophy of History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). PERSONAL IDENTITY, NARRATIVE, AND HISTORY 371 may be called "civil" identity. The Lockeian self may have to...