Scandalous Figures: Authorial Self in Eliza Haywood, Laurence Sterne, Charlotte Smith, and Lord Byron By Amy Thomas Campion A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Steven Goldsmith, Chair Professor Ian Duncan Professor David Bates Fall, 2010 Copyright © Amy Thomas Campion 2010. Abstract Scandalous Figures: Authorial Self in Eliza Haywood, Laurence Sterne, Charlotte Smith, and Lord Byron by Amy Thomas Campion Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Berkeley Professor Steven Goldsmith, Chair Characterized by originality and proprietorship, the modern paradigm of authorship developed in the British long eighteenth century alongside philosophical upheavals in concepts of identity and an increasingly free-for-all literary marketplace in which the author was commodified along with his or her works. Literary historians have associated the “author-function” with the logic of copyright law, introduced in 1710, but the ideology of original authorship also developed as a defense against the more chaotic practical reality of the circulation and ownership of texts. In Scandalous Figures I demonstrate how Eliza Haywood, Laurence Sterne, Charlotte Smith, and Lord Byron resisted this defensive formation by acknowledging the fluidity of modern identity, incorporating it into their self-representations, and paradoxically transforming it into a practice of the self. Each of these authors capitalized on the intersection between authorial identity and several areas of cultural fascination: sensibility, the philosophy of personal identity, fictionality, theatricality, and the evolution of a reading public. Especially important was their awareness that scandal blurs the boundaries between categories that were sites of intense cultural energy, in Byron’s time as in Haywood’s: fact and fiction, private and public, life-writing or history and literature. Rather than pin their authorial names to an essential self, these authors ironically accept the way a name circulates through imaginations, economies, and significations. The striking similarity in their self-performances, across periods and genres, indicates the persistence of an alternative genealogy alongside the development of the mythic status and “fictional identity” of the original, proprietary author. If the formation of the unitary Romantic subject was the result of one strategy to navigate the shifting terrain of identity categories, then the performance of a fictional, scandalized subject was another. For Haywood, who took advantage of both her celebrity as a well-known actress and the opportunities of anonymous publication, the authorial self was a chameleon whose identity depended upon the genre and market in which she appeared. Emphasizing the theatrical, fictional, associative, and Lockean performance of authorial identity, Sterne took on the selves of his characters and scandalously transformed “Laurence   1 Sterne” into just another role and written self. Smith’s authorial self took the form of a novelistic heroine of sensibility who claimed authenticity even as she exposed the conventional lineaments of this character and their limitations. By infusing the novel and lyric with autobiography, she demystified the “romance of real life” of an author. Byron’s written self, the Byronic hero, was eroded by his embrace of the fictionality of his authorial identity and by his “mobility,” whereby the self is contingent upon the cultural forms in which it appears. The sign of Byron’s recognition of the pervasiveness of fictionality in literature and life was laughter. For all of these authors, the groundlessness of self is not a deconstructive negation of the author but a practical strategy dependent on the author’s social construction, which occurs through the forms and discourses that guide the social imagination, and through the desires and anxieties that fire the market.   2 For Peter and Jack i Contents Acknowledgments iii 1. Introduction: “Masks and Faces on a Field of Representations” 1 2. Scandal: Eliza Haywood’s Chameleon Self 18 3. The Dangers in a Jest: Laurence Sterne’s Performance of Self 59 4. Charlotte Smith’s “Written Troubles” of the Written Self 97 5. “A Nameless Sort of Person”: Byron’s Authorial Self 147 Bibliography 196 ii Acknowledgments I am grateful to those professors who always had their doors open to me, and who supported and encouraged my ideas through their development into full chapters: Ian Duncan and Cathy Gallagher. David Bates has been an important reader on my committee, and I want to thank him for his thoughtful questions and good advice, and for making time for my work in spite of the long lapses between my communications. It is Steve Goldsmith to whom I am most grateful, for being so much above and beyond a great teacher, mentor, and advisor. From the first time I worked with him, in his seminar on Romantic literature, his responses to my work and to my conundrums have always been thoughtful, thorough, considerate, insightful, and generous. I want to thank them all, too, for teaching me so much through their own work, which has clearly been so important to my own. I thank my parents for their endless generosity. Finally, I thank Peter for his encouragement, support, love, and friendship through it all.   iii Introduction: “Masks and Faces on a Field of Representations” The familiar paradigm of authorship, as it developed in eighteenth-century Britain with the invention of copyright, is characterized by originality and proprietorship. This paradigm depends upon a concept of the self as innate and essential and upon the assumption that the text is a property of that self. Early eighteenth-century articulations of this concept of authorship develop, in this paradigmatic narrative, into the proprietary author and the Romantic self, an interiorized, original, essential subjectivity that expresses itself organically in, and owns—in some sense—its literary productions. Significantly, the figure of the proprietary author arose with the commodification of literature. We may look to familiar, canonical authors to find descriptions of this idea of authorship as it developed. In his historical account, Authors and Owners, Mark Rose points to the importance of the Lockean conception of private property, which is created when “an individual removes materials from the state of nature and mixes his labor with them.”1 Rose argues that as early as 1730, James Thomson and his immensely popular poetic sequence, The Seasons, embodied this proprietary relationship between author and work: A work of literature belonged to an individual because it was, finally, an embodiment of that individual. And the product of this imprinting of the author’s personality on the common stock of the world was a ‘work of original authorship.’ The basis of literary property, in other words, was not just labor but ‘personality,’ and this revealed itself in ‘originality.’ (114) Byron would later mock the mystified representation of this process in Don Juan when he describes Juan-as-Wordsworth brooding in a bucolic scene beneath some trees, where “poets find materials for their books” (Don Juan I, 90). Before we look to the parodists, however, I would like to offer a few more articulations of the dominant conception of authorship. The idea of original genius gained importance over the next few decades. Samuel Richardson describes a version of authorship that is defined by originality and property: Suppose, sir, when you ask, What does the name of poet mean? you answer after some such manner as this— “It means a maker, and, consequently, his work is something original, quite his own.” It is not the laboured improvement of a modern cultivator bestowed on a soil already fertile, and refining on a plan already formed; but the touch of Armida’s wand, that calls forth blooming spring out of the shapeless waste, and presents in a moment objects new and various, which his genius only could have formed in that peculiar manner.2 And, of course, there is the famous essay by Richardson’s friend, Edward Young: Conjectures on Original Composition (1759). For Young, the works of the original genius: will stand distinguished; his the sole Property of them; which Property alone can confer the noble title of an Author; that is, of one who (to speak accurately) thinks, and composes; while other invaders of the Press, how voluminous, and learned soever, (with due respect be it spoken) only read, and write.3 1 True authorship—characterized by originality, integrity, and propriety—is defined against imitation and mechanical re-presentation. Young also defines original authorship as organic, a characterization that will become associated with the Romantic poets. Original composition, Young writes: “may be said to be of a vegetable nature; it rises spontaneously from the vital root of Genius; it grows, it is not made: Imitations are often a sort of Manufacture wrought up by those Mechanics, Art, and Labour, out of pre- existent materials not their own” (274). “By the 1770s the doctrine of originality was orthodox,” but like any orthodoxy, sometimes the integrity of this self must be defended against the incursions of others’ imitations, definitions, or skepticism.4 When Samuel Taylor Coleridge attempts to take control of the meanings of his name and to assert his originality against accusations of plagiarism, he writes his Biographia Literaria, a self-explication and justification, a text that would be the final word even as it opens out in a proliferation of fragments. (Nearly Shandyesque, not only in its subtitle “Biographical Sketches of my Literary Life and Opinions,” the work was called by Byron a “vagabond life.”5) Coleridge attempts to pin his name to a significance that derives from his own reading and writing—not from what others would wrongly read into or project upon it. He declares this motivation in the opening sentences: It has been my lot to have had my name introduced both in conversation and in print more frequently than I find it easy to explain, whether I consider the fewness, unimportance, and limited circulation of my writings, or the retirement and distance, in which I have lived, both from the literary and political world. Most often has it been connected with some charge which I could not acknowledge, or some principle which I had never entertained. …It will be found that the least of what I have written [here] concerns myself personally. I have used the narration chiefly for the purpose of giving a continuity to the work.6 Coleridge’s stated motive adheres perfectly to the eighteenth-century expectation that “an authentic personal character will observe the same formal logic as the authorial corpus.”7 He hopes to define his authorship, the “poetical character,” and more generally, the metaphysical self: the sum of all that is SUBJECTIVE, we may comprehend in the name of the SELF or INTELLIGENCE. …Intelligence is conceived of as exclusively representative, nature [the objective] as exclusively represented; the one as conscious, the other as without consciousness. …There is here no first, and no second; both are coinstantaneous and one. …This principle, and so characterized, manifests itself in the SUM or I AM; which I shall hereafter indiscriminately express by the words spirit, self, and self- consciousness. In this, and in this alone, object and subject, being and knowing, are identical.8 Rather than appealing to a social ground rule like a Humean collective fiction, Coleridge’s baseline is logic and God: “We begin with the I KNOW MYSELF, in order to end with the absolute I AM. We proceed from the SELF, in order to lose and find all self in GOD” (300).9 The figure of the author defined by these characteristics becomes a cultural paradigm of mythic proportions. (One of the interesting aspects of Coleridge’s 2 Biographia Literaria, of course, is the implicit undermining of the myth of the philosophically derived authorial self by the many digressions into matters of everyday contingency such as friendships and poetic “schools,” reviews and the literary market.) This paradigm has by now been thoroughly familiarized, contextualized, deconstructed, and historicized; perhaps the most familiar analysis of these modes of exploring the nature of authorship is Michel Foucault’s 1969 essay “What is an Author?” which both demystifies and secures the primacy of this figure—or function. According to Foucault, the author-function is: the result of a complex operation which constructs a certain rational being that we call ‘author.’ Critics doubtless try to give this intelligible being a realistic status, by discerning, in the individual, a ‘deep’ motive, a ‘creative’ power, or a ‘design,’ the milieu in which writing originates. Nevertheless, these aspects of an individual which we designate as making him an author are only a projection, in more or less psychologizing terms, of the operations that we force texts to undergo, the connections that we make, the traits that we establish as pertinent, the continuities that we recognize, or the exclusions that we practice.10 This author-function exists in history and came into being, Foucault argues, with copyright, which established “a system of ownership for texts” (108). Prior to the 1710 Copyright Act, writes Martha Woodmansee, texts “circulated more freely” because “more corporate and collaborative norms of writing prevailed.” The practices were “promiscuous” rather than “proprietary.”11 My dissertation argues, in part, that notions of corporate and collaborative, and even promiscuous, authorship did not simply end with the establishment of “a system of ownership for texts.” Rather than a rupture in the history of authorship, we find a chaotic and gradual transition that is not without contradictions. In the cases on which I focus—in the works of Eliza Haywood, Laurence Sterne, Charlotte Smith, and Lord Byron—the individual authorial self incorporated these former norms of textual production and circulation. My emphasis on alternative versions of authorial self contrasts with and builds upon other recent re-writings of the history of authorship that argue “that the author is not a singular individual with sole power to determine meaning through autonomous acts of literary creation” and that emphasize the collaborative nature of textual production, and the “overlap between authorship, publishing, and printing.”12 Jody Greene, for example, whose important study The Trouble With Ownership looks into the Copyright Act’s creation not only of new rights but also of new liabilities for authors, points to a site of ambiguity in the Copyright Act: Although the nature of the proprietary relationship is never spelled out in the act, the phrase ‘Proprietor or Proprietors’ stands in, after the opening lines, for the author, as well as for the printers, booksellers, and others whose interests might be covered under its provisions. (2, my emphasis) Other recent scholars, such as Paula McDowell, have focused on the role of these “others” in textual production.13 My study adds to and differs from the criticism in this field by focusing on authorial identity as it is represented by authors, and which includes those others called readers. Martha Woodmansee writes that authorship is “the result of quite radical reconceptualization of the creative process that culminated less than 200 years ago in the 3