Defoe Masters the Serial Subject

I

When Mary Carleton was indicted on January 15, 1673 for the theft of a silver cup and spoon, a crime which ended her career as a thief at Tyburn, two indictments were drafted and filed in the Sessions Records. One indictment identifies her as “Maria Carlston wife of John Carlston alias Maria Carlston, Spinster” while the other more complex indictment identifies her with a longer catalogue of names: “Maria Carlston wife of John Carlston,” “als. Maria Carlston, Spinster,” “als. Maria Kirton,” “als. Maria Modders.” ¹ What is more, a jail delivery list dated January 15, 1673 in State Papers adds yet another appellation to Carleton’s serial identity when it identifies her as “Maria Carlston als. German Princess.” ² The catalogue of names frequently found in early modern indictments would seem to be an unwieldy means of identifying offenders, but before the late eighteenth century when, at Sir John Fielding’s request, “records” began to be kept providing “reliable information as to the criminal antecedents of every offender” it was the only means. ³ Before a criminal had a “record” which was, in essence, an authoritative biography, the indictment was the sole discursive site for provisionally establishing a subject’s legal identity and history. Because indictments were filed in different jurisdictions at different moments in time, the fragmentary nature of a criminal’s “record” prior to the eighteenth century made “agency” possible as a kind of loophole. Each appearance before an official (justice, recorder, or judge) offered the criminal opportunity to rewrite her personal history if she wanted to keep living. Indictments, particularly of female offenders, construct the criminal’s identity as a series of names (and by implication, a series of lives), making visible the process by which marginalized subjects could claim a degree of agency, however circumscribed, within seventeenth-century historical and juridical process.

Criminal indictments reveal an early modern discursive formation in which socially marginal individuals were able to construct themselves in a series of narrative responses to determinate (often life-threatening) situations. Lower-class men and women of great imaginative resourcefulness exploited an ineffectual criminal process as well as Restoration society’s infatuation with masking, costume, and fashion to produce subjectivities that were unfixed and in-process by deploying personae with particular histories to meet the demands of specific situations. While there is evidence to suggest that both men and women deployed personae to construct subjectivities, women were much more likely to do so since an early modern woman, if she wanted to act outside the domestic sphere, had to assume a persona that would allow her to enter other social networks and manipulate her position within them. I will be referring to this practice as a discursive formation since it was facilitated not only by individuals’ narrative productions but also by inefficiencies in legal practice of indicting and punishing female offenders; and I will be calling this discursive formation “serial subjectivity” since the majority of indicted female subjects continued to revise their life-stories in response to changing circumstance. ⁴ Furthermore, I want to insist that “serial subjectivity” is a viable mode of self-fashioning in which the conventional opposition between the private and public, the unconscious and the conscious, the personal/unknowable and the universal/comprehensible, is displaced and re-anchored in a new conception of situation or context as both psychic and historical. ⁵ Behind each name in the series of names used to indict female offenders, there is a persona with a history. These self-representations (more or less narrative in nature) represent the attempts of concrete individuals to construct subjectivities that are determined, in part, by social contexts but also by the individuals’ determination to intervene in these contexts. While liberal humanism locates agency and meaning in the unified human subject, the early modern serial subject knows herself and is known (hence, is meaningful) only through enactments that are responses to specific situations. The discursive formation of serial subjectivity that enabled actual early modern female criminals to become subjects was widespread and influential. On the one hand, the discourse was transformed into non-fictional periodicals such as The Ordinary...