The Happy Man and the Cultural Fable of the Good Life

The Good Life, a cultural fable prominent in the imaginative artifacts of the post-war period, is fundamentally linked to material culture as an imaginative reflection upon or negotiation with contemporary historical forces. The material phenomenon condensed this fantasy of happiness is the economic expansion of the immediately postwar period. The Good Life registers and shapes the experience of prosperity, comfort, and individual material gratification. The formulation of this paradigm of bourgeois social success could be said to originate in the English eighteenth century, through the projection of certain assertions, models, images, and claims on the imagination from the past into the future. We can support an understanding and critique of The Good Life as it appears today, through an attention to the early phases of its development in the eighteenth-century poetic trope of the Happy Man. The fantasy of the Happy Man provides a first-stage version of the cultural fable of The Good Life, and this early mode of modern happiness-invention can help us understand the nature of its imaginative power, and can support our critique of the ideology behind this cultural fable going forward to our own present and future. This essay suggests that this very local but influential eighteenth-century figure structures an ongoing imaginative experience that tends to coalesce around ideologies of bourgeois prosperity, then and now.