Dimensions of the Self in Autobiographical Life-Writing: James Boswell’s Journals and William Hickey’s Memoirs

Abstract

James Farr offers an overview of the historicity of the self from the Renaissance to the early nineteenth century and follows with a close analysis of two autobiographical examples from the late eighteenth century—the journals of James Boswell and the memoirs of William Hickey. He questions recent arguments about the supposed emergence in the late eighteenth century of the introspective self as the hallmark of the modern self. Instead, Farr, continuing in the vein of earlier essays in this volume, understands the self in terms of inter-relational dimensions, or modalities—specifically, the socially turned or performative (recalling Cellini’s consensus realities) and the reflective (recalling Montaigne)—and depending on historical context, one or the other assumed prominence. In the Boswell and Hickey texts, Farr finds that inwardness is but one dimension of the self, and in fact in autobiographical writing even in that later period it was the exception rather than the rule as authors were pre-occupied with their relation to external factors (prominently reputation), not in revealing a coherent narrative of an unfolding interior identity. Farr suggests that the complexity of early modern visions of self continued to influence life writing and egodocuments well into the nineteenth century.