Representations of the Self from the Renaissance to Romanticism (review)

Reviews Patrick Coleman,Jayne Lewis, andJill Kowalik, eds. Representations of the Selffrom the Renaissance to Romanticism. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. xii + 284pp. US$59.95. ISBN 0521 -66146-3. Is there such a thing as a self? Or do we all have multiple, conflicting, shifting selves? We still tend to speak as if there were one self; as Verlyn Klinkenborg recently said, describing his stepmother's dying, "all ofus who gathered around knew that the self within her had withdrawn for good." Our everyday language still reflects our apparent certainty that each of us has some inner core of being that makes us what we are. Poststructuralism , of course, has questioned that foundational belief. Writers like Judith Butler have contended that the self is not internal and essential but performative , a series of theatrical (though certainly not always conscious) displays that may or may not be consistent with one another. We are not what goes on inside us somewhere, but what we do. This collection of twelve essays, ranging from Descartes's Meditations to the afterlife of Sir Joshua Reynolds in the early nineteenth century, grew out of a series of conferences at University of California, Los Angles, and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library called "Life Studies: Autobiography , Biography, and Portrait in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries"—and the shift in title from "Life Studies" to Representations of the Self suggests an incompletely resolved shift in focus. Some of the writers are concerned to show that the early modern, pre-romantic "self was just as multiple and uncertain as the postmodern one, that a "teleology of the self developing from period to period is really a scholarly illusion. Others, however, are more interested in developing distinctions between various genres of "life studies" (biography and memoir, for example , or autobiography and letters), or in tracing the various ways a EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 14, Number 1, October 2001 112EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION14:1 writer's life, rather than self, can be represented. (Examples are Peter N. Miller's "The 'Man of Learning' Defended," an exploration of scholars' lives as creating a new model of excellence in the first part of the seventeenth century; Benoît Melançon's "Letters, Diary, and Autobiography in Eighteenth-Century France," focusing on the temporal differences between those genres; or Anne K. Mellor's "Mary Robinson and the Scripts of Female Sexuality," an interesting and often amusing study of four different "scripts" or existing narrative templates that were placed over Mary Robinson 's life—in cartoons, newspaper articles, verse-epistles, her daughter's continuation of her Memoir, and her own writing.) Other essays, otherwise quite diverse, explore the differing ways "public " and "private" were constructed, even in apparently laconic narratives. In "Representations of Intimacy in the Life-writing of Anne Clifford and Anne Dormer," Mary O'Connor suggests that we must often read apparently private or "intimate" moments in these women's narratives as public. Anne Clifford's diary entries detail her construction of small, domestic, repeated actions as part of her own and her family's history; Anne Dormer's private letters to her sister reveal her critical and political construction of her troubled relationship with her abusive husband. A similar interplay between public Wirkung and private, pietistic Innerlichhat structures Anthony La Volpa's interpretation of "Fichte's Road to Kant." Three of the most rewarding essays suggest that "life narratives" written by another actually reveal more about the biographer than the subject of the biography. In her study of Rousseau's representations of Mme de Warens in the Confessions, Felicity Baker shows how Rousseau reveals his changing self in his shifting portraits of his Muse—and, she argues, revises his view of the role of women so notoriously laid out in Emile and the Nouvelle Héloïse. In his meditations on the ways Reynolds was represented in "After Sir Joshua," Richard Wendorf shows various acts of "appropriation and reinscription" (p. 276)—from the lineage inscribed on Reynolds's palette as it was handed down through a succession of painters to Blake's ironic verses on his death ("When Sr Joshua Reynolds died/All Nature was degraded...") to the various...