Representing Private Lives of the Enlightenment (review)

It is difficult to address the topic of private life in the Enlightenment without citing Roger Chartier and Philippe Ariès's magisterial study of the period, in volume three of the Histoire de la vie privée (1986). Yet fifteen years later, this new collection, while unavoidably in dialogue with its illustrious predecessor, brings a freshness to the subject that moves away from the traditional view of "private" as domestic and so in opposition to the public sphere, towards a whole series of alternative definitions of privacy and individuality. This is self-avowedly a collection of case studies, and does not claim to present any totalizing "history." Literature, the visual arts, society, children and history across Britain, France, Russia and Italy are taken up in turn by specialists in each field. Yet while each article stands in its own right, when they are brought together their range and interdisciplinarity offer a panorama that begins to display certain patterns and consistent traits. Definition is an important topic, with Caroline Warman's detailed exploration of the multiple contemporary meanings offered by the Encyclopédie—"intimate, deprived, uncivilized" (35)—serving as a useful point of reference when reading later articles. The theme that becomes increasingly clear, however, is the one signaled by the editor in his introduction: the individual and his identity, as explored through constructions and images of the private, and indeed public, self. Whether it is an insightful account of criminals and their pseudonyms (Lise Andries), a persuasive analysis of genre paintings and their metaphorical constructions of their artists (Mark Ledbury), an entertaining description of an Italian libertine arguing for the right to remain above prosecution for his private behavior (Larry Wolff) or a detailed presentation of the Russian gentry struggling to reconcile their military and literary selves in the strict class system of post-Petrine Russia (Irina Reyfman), the common thread is the relationship between the private individual and external conceptions of this figure, a relationship that also involves reciprocal movements between the two. Indeed, whilst Ariès described a move from the anonymous sociability of the court to the closed sociability of the family, this collection instead tends to draw the two worlds together, looking at privacy even within those public or courtly spaces—gardens and portrait galleries (Andreas Schönle and Shearer West)—as well as, for example, the effect of public images of sentiment on the intensely private action of diary-writing (Andrei Zohn).

Furthermore, in this porous relationship between public and private there is an element of voyeurism that paradoxically helps to create and define the very privacy it invades. Warman notes this need for a witness to the private, and Olivier Ferret's analysis of the scandalous Vie privée genre, produced in an early celebrity culture, provides evidence to support Warman's claim, as does Andries's account of the contemporary taste for fictionalized criminal biographies. The domestic sphere does not remain totally untouched: Wolmar's use of the family as a social utopia in La Nouvelle Héloïse (Alison Oliver), the glorification of the home in children's literature (M. O. Grenby) and an analysis of attitudes to male friendship (Adam Sutcliffe) serve as a reminder that this definition of the private is still valid, although all three cases strike a note of caution, seeming to suggest that the private sphere deprived of all contact with the public can be a suffocating place. Confession is perhaps the most ostensibly private act addressed, yet here too there is evidence of porosity, with imposed religious practices in eighteenth-century Russia contributing to state control (Viktor Zhivov).

The result of this wide-ranging collection is not, and never promises to be, a new and complete definition of the private. Instead, this is a miscellany of definitions, united by a common thread of openness and possibility. The private and public spheres may have been evolving in this period; the individual as a concept may have been finding his place in philosophical thought. But what this collection demonstrates is...