"This new species of affliction": Self-Destruction and the Eighteenth-Century Ethic of Self-Improvement
This dissertation tests the eighteenth century's narrative of individual agency as the source of modern personal autonomy, and argues that there is a subtle but problematic conflation between agency and autonomy; rather than assume increased personal agency guarantees a corresponding surge in the experience of autonomy, I suggest that autonomy is ultimately eroded by the modern self's dependence on social identities that must be continuously maintained, objectified, and circulated as forms of social currency. My approach is founded upon an extensive examination of nonfiction (puritan autobiographies, science writing, essays, etc.) married to close readings of eighteenth-century fictional texts by Defoe, Lennox, Johnson, and others. This nonfictional foundation provides a historical record of the individuated enterprise of self-production, the true genesis of the self-help industry, and the fiction serves as the experimental testing ground that reveals the limits and hazards of this quintessentially modern enterprise. The primary insight of this dissertation is the counter-intuitive revelation that modern selfhood is needful of comic perception to transform exertions of agency squandered within social institutions into exercises of improvisation that buoy the individual rather than burden it. My first chapter focuses on recovering the neglected comic subtext of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, and by including analysis of Puritan autobiographies, I demonstrate that this form which is produced in the novel can be re-read through its comic elements to reveal the limiting nature of the process of self-production inaugurated by Puritan nonfiction. Lennox's The Female Quixote and Johnson's Rasselas anchor the next two chapters, and I chose two fictions not usually associated with discourse on the 'self' because of their unique capacity to complement the first chapter by showing first how any model of 'self' is inherently social and subsequently what destructive political consequences are catalyzed by western models of self-formation and self-improvement. Together these three fictions form a demonstration of how the eighteenth-century didactic impulse is transformed via the novel from a textual operation meant to produce discrete moral and social imperatives that would tend to produce uniform social self products into a more idiosyncratic cultural program that has persisted into the twenty-first century.