The Theatrics of Self-Sentiment in A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Charlotte Charke

The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance: pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations. There is properly no simplicity in it at one time, or identity in different; whatever natural propension we may have to imagine that simplicity and identity.

—David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature

By using the language of the theater to characterize identity—or more specifically, non-identity—Hume unwittingly underscores the tension that would come to mark some eighteenth-century narratives of the self. Contemporary critics identify this tension as existing between dramatic renderings of the self and a truthful articulation of identity. The theater, after all, is a site where the "intent to be false is undeniable—and necessary" (Barish 55). This important and fundamental feature of the theater informs the skepticism with which many have viewed Charlotte Charke's A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Charlotte Charke. As Charke records her personal history, she employs the voices of characters from plays to articulate her life experiences. Because she plays the part of actor, repeatedly casting herself in different roles, readers are left with no fixed view of Charke; this lack of fixity has prompted critics to accuse her of not being fully present in the text, of almost willfully writing her self in absentia. It isn't that Charke is physically absent from the text, but that the text does not offer a full representation of Charke's inner life, an absence underscored by her active role playing. Robert Rehder describes her personal narrative as largely one "of action." Readers, he insists, "learn next to nothing of [her] inner world" (ix). Her "mind is full of the parts she played. She has them at her fingertips" (xvii). Sidonie Smith's description of Charke as actor reads like Hume's description of the mind. Smith describes Charke as "an imposter who masquerades in a variety of roles, plots and characters, establishing throughout her autobiography resonances with fictional and dramatic heroines and heroes." Smith continues, "Charke assumes all rhetorical postures, takes on all characters, plays all scenes for the dramatic possibilities inherent in them" ("Transgressive," 95). Because she assumes such a variety of roles, observers assert, Charke is simply nowhere to be found in her Narrative. But despite the close attention that has been paid to Charke's role as actor, few have examined Charke's role as spectator in her effort to represent her own subjectivity. When examined from the latter perspective, Charke's autobiography is more inner-directed than critics have given her credit for.

Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments offers a useful avenue into examining Charke's role as spectator and its relationship to the theatricality that characterizes her autobiography. Contemporary discussions of Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments largely engage his use of the language of theater to contemplate sympathy. In his work, Smith theorizes about the role sympathy plays in social relationships, describing the "change of situation" upon which sympathy depends as one between sufferer and spectator. He writes: "In all such cases, that there may be some correspondence of sentiments between the spectator and the person principally concerned, the spectator must, first of all, endeavour, as much as he can, to put himself in the situation of the other, and to bring home to himself every little circumstance of distress which can possibly occur to the sufferer. He must adopt the whole case of his companion with all its minutest incidents; and strive to render as perfect as possible, that imaginary change of situation upon which his sympathy is founded" (21). By describing the figure who observes the sufferer as "spectator," Smith acknowledges the theatrical nature of sympathetic engagement with another. It isn't enough for the spectator to observe the sufferer, but he or she must also play the sufferer by placing "himself in the situation of the other." Although at first the "correspondence of sentiments between the spectator and the person principally concerned" appears uncomplicated, Smith goes...