Creating Identity in the Victorian Fictional Autobiography by Heidi L. Pennington (review)

First-person narration, employed magisterialliy by so many Victorian writers, can be all too easy to naturalize. It s one of the virtues of Heidi Pennington’s work that it shows us the rewards of paying detailed attention to the nature and implications of one type of first-person narrative – the fictional autobiography. Pennington identifies this as a distinctive form that has received relatively little concerted critical attention. Her own analysis, informed by narratological theory, makes a strong argument for the importance of this genre. In the examples she provides, the fictional autobiography enacts a delicate interplay among disparate narrative possibilities: between an essentialist, private self and a self constructed through external observation; between the first-person narrator as story-teller and as character, and between that narrator and the author. Pennington persuasively argues that fictional autobiography is a genre worthy of greater scrutiny, and that it has a privileged status in its ability to elicit from readers an understanding of the constructed nature of human character. For, she claims, “the ‘selves’ of people in the real world are fictional creations constructed using the same cognitive and affective processes with which readers animate fictional worlds, characters, and situations” (5). Only in the nineteenth century does fiction embrace a recognition of “fictionality and referentiality” as “two different modes of truth-telling” (48) that permits the deployment of fictional and autobiographical form with appropriate ontological complexity.

The focus of this book rests on two novels by Dickens (David Copperfield and Bleak House) and two by Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre and Villette). While I will devote my primary attention to the treatment of Dickens, it is worth noting that the readings of the Brontë novels make cogent contributions to Pennington’s thesis. Of the former, she concludes, “By portraying the reader as both her adversary and her other self, Jane’s narration performs a consciousness of identity’s required reciprocity” (100). Villette, with its highly self-conscious and sometimes disingenuous narrator, provides an even more dramatic example of the potency of fictional autobiography: “In confronting our collaborative and contended role in vivifying Lucy’s provocatively fictional identity, we come face to face with the possibilities of our own fictional selves” (155).

David Copperfield figures importantly in two phases of the study. Chapter 2, which productively brings it into conversation with Jane Eyre, is particularly attentive to the early part of the novel, which Pennington considers crucial in David’s construction of himself as a Carlylean Hero as Man of Letters. Here both innate abilities and externally imposed identity co-exist uneasily in David’s self-definition. Murdstone’s attempts at correction are fended off, yet Pennington provocatively posits that in his adult family life “David seems to replicate the Murdstonean model of the paterfamilias in his construction of himself as the ultimate authority” (80). And her careful examination of David’s anxiety over potential readers of the placard he wears at Salem House reveals a parallel anxiety about potential readers of his writing. “[T]his moment of public reading that he chooses to include in his written selfhood suggests that the trauma of being read into existence by the ‘many-headed’ lingers in the authorial identity of the David who writes” (84). Chapter 4 interestingly argues for Dora’s essential role in establishing David as a successful writer in the Carlylean mode. Her ineffectuality as a helpmeet provides proof that he has become an author on his own. Yet there is a paradox in this: David’s “narration of his failed domesticity and successful authorship enacts the communal dynamics of identity creation in the very attempt to resist the appearance of anything short of autonomous self-making” (134).

Chapter 3’s engagement with Esther Summerson as a “domestic autobiographer” (104) challenges the apparent naturalness of Esther’s embodiment of the cultural ideal of endlessly sweet femininity. “Esther’s pronounced need for sympathy within her world, her eagerness to experience sympathy with her fellows, and...