Autobiography as Fiction: The Example of Pater's Marius

AUTOBIOGRAPHY AS FICTION: THE EXAMPLE OF PATER'S MARIUS Who, if he saw through all, would fret against the chain of circumstance which endows one at the end with those great experiences? Pater, "Winckelmann" By Ira B. Nadel (University of British Columbia) Reviewing Marius the Epicurean in May 1885, Mrs. Humphrey Ward—not as yet the celebrated author of Robert Elsmere—remarked that "The Child in the House," Pater's earlier autobiographical essay, lacked effect because "it was not disguise enough." "Some form of presentation more impersonal, more remote from actual life was needed"; Marius, she happily concluded, met this requirement. Mrs. Ward's comments are a useful guide to Victorian autobiography in general and Marius in particular because they explain both the conditions which shaped autobiography in the 1880's as well as the distinct aesthetic that dominates the text of Pater's work. "As a nation," Mrs. Ward wrote in the same review, the English "are not fond of direct 'confessions.' All our autobiographical literature, compared to the French or German, has a touch of dryness and reserve." The "deepest, most intimate and most real ... in personal experience" is conveyed only indirectly. "Coupled with the natural tendency to expression [is] a natural tendency to disguise" (p. 131). Pater responded to this Victorian reticence and distrust of confession, to this fear of exposing too much of the self, by setting his story in the second century A. D. and choosing as his hero a young Roman who registers Pater's own doubts, anxieties and hopes. In the work history and art combine to "disguise" personal revelation, yet Pater was not alone in fictionalizing his autobiography as a brief review of nineteenth -century autobiography reveals. For the Victorians, autobiography became an act of self-denial. Beginning as either confession, where the writer attempted to tell all, or apology , where the writer defended all, the Victorian autoblographer soon found himself in difficulty. On one hand he distrusted and was embarrassed by the revelations of the self while at the same time he felt compelled to express them. Unburdening the self might lead to hypocritical self-justification and a morbid, paralyzing self-consciousness. The apology, with its semi-documentary , objective account of one's self, justifying actions and reporting events, soon became the necessary antidote to the self-indulgence of the confession . The autobiographies of Mill, Newman, Trollope, Darwin and Spencer clearly illustrate the form as their external accounts become narratives of record, not revelation. Carefully composed and organized, the apology rationally presented a well-ordered life. The autobiographer who wanted to confess had little choice but to fictionalize his experience so that his self-indulgence and self-consciousness could be hidden behind the fabricated events and personality of another. The private self became a blend of factual experience and fictional expression as seen in Sartor Resartus, David Copperfield, The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford , The Way of All Flesh, Confessions of a Young Man and The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft. The answer to the dilemma of the Victorian autobiographer was the development of a curious but influential form of autobiographical 34 35 writing that stressed the fictionalization of fact, the disguise of the self and the dramatization of events. Marius is a pre-eminent example of the combination of personal autobiographical needs and fictional literary expression with an additional twist : to insure the removal of the work from the immediate or personal, Pater, like Bulwer-Lytton in The Last Days of Pompeii and Charles Kingsley in Hypatia, chose a historical setting from the classical world. This distancing allowed Pater even greater freedom to trace his own youth and development in tandem with his hero, allowing him, in a paradoxical manner, to be more autobiographical without being more personal. This paradox does not have to do with form alone. Pater's aesthetic of the indefinite, what he called in an early essay the "evanescent shade," is also important. Shadows and shades pervade Marius and act as the elusive images of the indirect and implied form of self-revelation. Yet, for Pater, it was the indefinite that enhanced beauty and encouraged meaning. The Venus de MiIo, he once noted, became more attractive as...