Creating Identity in the Victorian Fictional Autobiography

Heidi L. Pennington

• Publisher: University of Missouri
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780826221575
• eBook ISBN: 9780826274069
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This is the first book-length study of the fictional autobiography, a subgenre that is at once widely recognizable and rarely examined as a literary form with its own history and dynamics of interpretation. Heidi L. Pennington shows that the narrative form and genre expectations associated with the fictional autobiography in the Victorian period engages readers in a sustained meditation on the fictional processes that construct selfhood both in and beyond the text. Through close readings of Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, and other well-known examples of the subgenre, Pennington shows how the Victorian fictional autobiography subtly but persistently illustrates that all identities are fictions.

Despite the subgenre's radical implications regarding the nature of personal identity, fictional autobiographies were popular in their own time and continue to inspire devotion in readers. This study sheds new light on what makes this subgenre so compelling, up to and including in the present historical moment of precipitous social and technological change. As we continue to grapple with the existential question of what determines "who we really are," this book explores the risks and rewards of embracing conscious acts of fictional self-production in an unstable world.

CHAPTER ONE

The Victorian Fictional Autobiography in Context

Fiction, Reference, and Reader Expectations

FICTIONAL AUTOBIOGRAPHERS FREQUENTLY PROMPT THEIR narratees—and, by imaginative extension, their readers—to read their texts and their textual identities in particular ways. Such self-conscious narration treats the act of narrating as itself a significant part of characterization and is one of the most important distinguishing features of the fictional autobiography. Whether it is Barry Lyndon’s arrogantly “presum[ing] that there is no gentleman in Europe that has not heard of the house of Barry of Barryogue”¹ or Jane Eyre’s resisting the “many” who may “blame” her for her restlessness at the start of chapter 12, the more the narrating protagonist coaches her audience to have or to avoid certain responses, the more readers are encouraged actively to perceive and not just unconsciously to experience the reciprocal cross-ontological identity construction this subgenre enables. By implicit suggestion, explicit provocation, or one of the more familiar forms of direct address, among other possible methods, the central writing characters of fictional autobiography offer readers abundant counsel on how best to understand their identities and the stakes of their stories.

Given the amount of attention the form pays to its own internal processes of interpretation, it is curious to note how infrequently the fictional autobiography is studied as a form unto itself. This absence of sustained attention signals the critical uncertainty about whether the fictional autobiography represents an interpretively distinct subgenre or a mere imitation of other forms of literature. Indeed, without even opening a text of fictional autobiography, one can see that the subgenre’s very name indicates how a handful of theorists over the last few decades have expected readers to respond to these texts; namely, they treat them as hybrid works that fictionally reproduce the traits of referential life-writing. Dorrit Cohn, consolidating the opinions of several scholars of first-person writing, denominates fictional autobiography a “deliberate, artificial simulation” of autobiography.² But thinking of the fictional autobiography as a derivative hybrid form—presumably cobbled together from the already established conventions of the two broader genres suggested by its name—assumes a belatedness of the subgenre, obscuring how texts of this kind took shape alongside the nascent novel and autobiography genres throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Indeed, the historical “consanguinity” among the three forms (which Cohn and others deny)³ in part determines how nineteenth-century readers understood the distinctive interplay of overt fictionality and referential tropes in the fictional autobiography. To ignore the history of invented first-person life stories is to overlook some of the key factors that determine how this subgenre could be interpreted and understood in and beyond the Victorian period.

Victorian readers were avid consumers of fictional autobiographies, novels, and autobiographies, and they understood the ontological difference between the truth claims made by the two latter forms in the same way as contemporary readers do: that is, as metaphoric and referential claims, respectively. The now-familiar conceptual separation of the three sibling genres occurred at the same moment as—and in part because of—the growing tendency in the eighteenth century to conceive of fictional and referential discourses as two distinct modes of narrative truth-telling that claimed different connections to the actualities of the world. According to Nicholas Paige, realist fiction as a mode of communication makes a “soft” (or metaphoric) truth claim, as opposed to nonfiction’s “hard (i.e., literal)” assertions of accuracy.⁴ By the early nineteenth century, these distinctions were fully operational for the majority of readers, to the point of being nearly invisible. Broadly speaking, most readers would not have had to think consciously about the genre of a text to conceive in what relation it stood to the facts of the world. Early Victorians were one of the first generations implicitly to understand fiction and reference as distinct ontological modes of veracity in literature, and thus they were arguably the first historical audience for whom texts of fictional autobiography encouraged its characteristic doubled reading stance.

In contrast to more recent accounts of this subgenre, Victorian reviewers of fictional autobiography did not rhetorically marginalize this literary form by associating it with imitations of autobiography. Further, their engagement with these texts often demonstrates the form’s doubled reading stance in action. Works such as Cometh Up as a Flower: An Autobiography, by Rhoda Broughton, seem most often to have drawn some version of the label “autobiographical novel” and to have been treated as a fictional novel that engaged its readers through the familiar structural and thematic tropes that it shared with the autobiography. The difference is slight but essential. To Victorians, these were not novels faking the form of the autobiography and asking readers to detect the potential duplicity of their character-narrators,⁵ nor were they primarily assumed to be lightly fictionalized versions of the flesh-and-blood writer’s own autobiography; instead, they were explicitly fictional texts that explored the identities of imaginary characters through narrative techniques also characteristic of a literary genre best known for personal referentiality. One Victorian reviewer of Washington Grange: An Autobiography, by William Pickersgill, comments in the Literary Gazette that “among the most pleasant” forms a “man of genius” can select for his canvas of invention is the “autobiographical form of novel-writing.”⁶ This casual if clunky phrase suggests that this nineteenth-century writer understood the thematic and formal traits affiliated with autobiography to be enhancements of the overtly imaginative experiences of novel-writing and novel-reading. The declared fictionality of the fictional autobiography was an essential aspect of the form’s pleasure-giving potential for this writer, rather than a sign that it was copying or attempting to simulate the referential genre with which it shares certain features.

Victorian critics also remark on this subgenre’s special charm for readers: namely, they find that the intimacy the form constructs between fictive teller and actual reader increases both the excitement of the reading experience and the reader’s sense of the narrative’s authenticity.⁷ In an 1867 review of Broughton’s novel Cometh Up as a Flower, an anonymous reviewer in the Times (London) describes it as the “autobiographical form of narrative, or, as children more simply style it, ‘An I story.’” The reviewer argues, “The disadvantages attending the autobiographical novel are pretty obvious. The I of the book ought to be especially interesting. He (or she) is almost necessarily the most prominent character, for he must be present at every incident, and take the lead in every conversation.” He notes that this necessity for the narrator to be simultaneously the protagonist places certain narrative rigors and constraints on the flesh-and-blood author of such productions. The reader, on the other hand, is drawn to the “autobiographical novel” precisely because of the excitement such autodiegetic “I” narration promises.⁸ This reviewer makes the case for the compelling nature of the fictional autobiography thus: “It is more startling to say, ‘I thrust my dagger into the caitin’s [sic]⁹ breast’ than to say that X, Y, or Z performed that thrilling feat. In the first case the reader is permitted to hold actual converse with the assassin; in the latter case the assassin is separated from us by a third person who professes such an intimate acquaintance with all his characters that we are inclined to doubt his veracity.”¹⁰ Coming from a position opposite that of later critics, this writer seems to find extradiegetic-heterodiegetic—more commonly called omniscient narrators—less credible than their first-person, autobiographical counterparts. After all, fictional autobiographers are frequently accounting for the sources of their knowledge and making clear gestures to maintain standards of real-world epistemology; not so with the more numerous all-knowing (if not all-telling) narrators of most Victorian fiction.

The Times reviewer identifies the potential for readerly intimacy with the fictional autobiographer as part of the subgenre’s increased appeal over other novelistic productions. Because “the reader is permitted to hold actual converse” with the fictional being who both acts in the story and narrates those actions in the discourse, the emotional response is enhanced. (In his sensational example, readers are “startled,” though presumably the effect functions across diverse modes of feeling as well.) He even goes so far as to denominate the narrating protagonist of Cometh Up as “the authoress” of the work, remarking on her personal characteristics both at the level of the story and as they are reflected in her style of narration. He specifically quarrels with the predominance of “slang” in parts of the discourse, and instead prefers when “the authoress” is behaving in a more discreet and domestic manner (a significant preference in itself, and one of the reasons I refer to this reviewer as male): “For ourselves, we prefer the authoress in her calmer and more serious moods—when she is sitting by her poor old father, weighed down with debt and disappointment; or when she is striving to solve some of the many puzzles of our existence.”¹¹ Elsewhere in the review when he refers to the “authoress,” however, he clearly means the unnamed Broughton, the actual writer of the novel, talking of her potential for future literary productions. In the well-known review of Jane Eyre in the Quarterly Review of December 1848 by Elizabeth Rigby, the writer’s phrasing suggests a similar slippage between real-world author and fictional autobiographer. Rigby attributes to Brontë (as “Bell”) insufficient knowledge and incorrect portraiture of her main character in several passages. She asserts that Jane is “not as artless” as her writer would have readers believe, but that if the “high-souled” woman of chapter 27 who resists Rochester’s threats and temptations “be Jane Eyre,” then the author and not the skeptical critic has done Jane a disservice. Yet Rigby also credits Jane herself with the composition of certain scenes. Rigby criticizes Jane as both narrator and writer when she complains that “when Jane Eyre sets [Mr. Rochester’s guests] conversing, she falls into mistakes which display . . . a vulgarity of mind inherent in herself.”¹²

In both reviews, the identification of the overtly fictional character-narrator as the author of her text, all while explicitly treating her as distinct from the actual living writer of it, attests to the fact that these two historical readers experienced the fictional autobiography’s doubled reading stance. Both the Times reviewer and Rigby grant at least some agency to the narrating protagonists as their own tellers, and, as a result, these critics seem to feel they possess personal knowledge of the narrating protagonists’ identities based on how these main characters narrate their life stories. This persistent doubling of authority between real-world author and fictive narrator, and the potent impressions thus made on readers by the narrator’s identity—despite the readers’ consciousness of its fictionality—demonstrates this subgenre’s remarkable phenomenology of reading. These reviews illustrate that the fictional autobiography can and did operate for Victorian readers as more than a mere “facsimile” imitating autobiography and that its interpretive possibilities are distinct from non-autobiographical realist novels narrated in the third person.

The fictional autobiography occupies the intersection of two modes of truth-telling by sharing conventions with both novels and autobiographies; the above-cited reviews demonstrate just some of the potential interpretive effects of these shared features and commitments. Even as the interpretive effects of the fictional autobiography show it to function in more nuanced ways than as a simple copy of its sibling forms, the genre expectations of novels and autobiographies nonetheless play an essential role in understanding how the fictional autobiography as a related subgenre shapes reader interpretation. After all, as Justin Sider argues, “many readers, particularly of conspicuously ‘genred’ works, attach their sentiments less to the particular text in question than to the fulfillment of the generic contract.”¹³ The fact that individual texts of fictional autobiography openly invoke the genre expectations of both novels and autobiographies, in other words, can play a significant role in how readers interpret these texts and in how they invest their imaginative energies in the identities of the narrating protagonists. When reading the nonfictional autobiography, readers seek to find the writer’s authentic identity in and through the scrupulously accurate telling of his life. In the novel, readers seek intersubjective intimacy with fictional characters, achieved through a level of epistemological certainty (absolute assurances of created truth) that would be impossible to achieve in first-person accounts of the real world. In the fictional autobiography, readers seem to find it all.

What may be gained in satisfaction from reading the fictional autobiography, however, comes with the attendant cost that traditional notions of personal identity—modern selfhood being the central concern of all three genres—lose some of their apparent stability. The fictional autobiography invites readers consciously to cross the line between the actual and the imaginary. Far from breaking down the line between the fictional and the referential, however, the fictional autobiography relies on the boundary’s relative stability in literary matters: only if Victorians were convinced of the essential difference between fictional creation and referential representation could the fictional autobiography trouble the nature of self by landing that “self” squarely on the side of the fictional. This, however, means that the literary transgression of the actual/imaginary boundary is displaced outside of literary experience into the realm of lived experience. In its most extreme effect, reading a fictional autobiography fundamentally detaches the notion of personal identity from anything eternal or objective while simultaneously reinforcing the reader’s investment in “self” as the most significant category of human existence. “I” becomes not just a contingent grammatical category, pitching us into an abyss of nonexistent referents. What is so disruptive in the fictional autobiography’s challenge to everyday assumptions about identity is that this genre never allows the attentive reader to forget that the experience of being a self—even if that self is indeed a flexible fiction—remains an intimately personal lived reality for each human being.

Historical Consanguinity: The Autobiography, the Novel, the Fictional Autobiography

The novel and the autobiography—as discrete genres whose conventions are established and signaled to readers by their genre names—developed concurrently. If we can talk about “the rise of the novel,” then we can also talk about “the rise of the autobiography” over the course of the eighteenth century. Although the terminology for the fictional autobiography remains persistently unfixed even today, it nonetheless shares common literary ancestors and thematic concerns with the novel and the autobiography, making it demonstrably historically consanguineous with its sibling forms. From the work of Michael McKeon to the writing of Roy Pascal, the emergence of the novel and the autobiography, respectively, are often traced to texts that feature the life story of an invented first-person teller—that is, to protofictional autobiographies. For McKeon, the first English novel is Samuel Richardson’s epistolary novel Pamela.¹⁴ For Pascal, Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders is superior to many early texts of referential life-writing in its autobiographical presentation of a developing personality.¹⁵ These common progenitors for all three literary forms demonstrate their shared cultural roots and preoccupations: specifically, all three are distinctly modern forms concerned with validating the identity of the singular individual in a social world.

By the end of the eighteenth century, a newly capitalist social and economic order had emerged that fed upon the Enlightenment premise that the autonomous individual human is the center of knowable experience and thus the locus of ultimate value in the world. As Ian Watt puts it, “individual experience” of the world became “the ultimate arbiter of reality.”¹⁶ Watt and McKeon each locate the novel’s success and its cultural relevance in its focus on the individual life; they also show that its genesis throughout the eighteenth century freely traversed the as-yet-nonexistent line between fictional and referential modes of discourse. It was only in the late eighteenth century, when most readers began actively to conceive of fictional works as separate both from tales with reference to the real world and from deception and lying, that the genre of the novel could truly be said to exist as such, according to Catherine Gallagher.¹⁷ Watt and McKeon each frame the rise of the novel as both participating in and reflective of a change in consciousness, an emerging sense of modernity.¹⁸ The rise to prominence of this modern consciousness and the modern individual’s “unique” identity accounts not only for the novel’s cultural success but also for the popularity of life-writing genres.

Watt’s emphasis on personal originality as the key to relevance in the modern world¹⁹ is also particularly applicable to the modern genre of autobiography. In autobiography, acts of introspective self-interpretation, according to Linda Peterson, are not just the central objective but the primary points of interest in the narrative.²⁰ Michael Mascuch and Martin Danahay also align the rise of an individualist ideology with the consolidation of the autobiographical genre as it came to operate in the early nineteenth century, following its somewhat reluctant naming in 1797 by William Taylor in a review of Isaac D’Israeli’s Miscellanies, or Literary Recreations, which contained the essay “Some Observations on Diaries, Self-biography, and Self-character.”²¹ So by the turn of the nineteenth century, Taylor’s autobiography had emerged as the primary term to refer to texts of life-writing featuring retrospective first-person narra...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Fictional Self-Making in a Changing World
• Chapter One. The Victorian Fictional Autobiography in Context: Fiction, Reference, and Reader Expectations
• Chapter Two. The Author and the Reader: The Individual and/as Narrative Community
• Chapter Three. Domestic Interiors and the Fictionality of the Domestic: Esther Summerson Writes Home
• Chapter Four. “No True Home”: Difficult Domesticity and Controlling Collaboration in David Copperfield and Villette
• Coda: Fiction and Selfhood in the Twenty-First Century
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index