Blockchain Papers

Melissa Alexander

Before they met in 1917, Virginia Woolf envisioned a peculiar setting for her first encounter with Katherine Mansfield, the promising young writer who had ‘dogged [her] steps for three years’. Intriguingly, Woolf imagined she might glimpse Mansfield, not in the drawing-room of a mutual friend or at a literary soirée, but ‘on a rock or in the sea’ – there, ‘I shall accost her’.1 Woolf pictures Mansfield in an attitude reminiscent of Frederic Leighton’s Solitude (1890), an allegorical painting of a ‘woman draped in white, sitting on a rock’ overlooking the sea, mentioned in Mansfield’s 1915 short story, ‘Autumns: II’.2 This allusion reveals acute attention to Mansfield’s early work, as well as a tendency to imagine the New Zealand outsider in a liminal position, tricked out in classical trappings but on a promontory of her own. It seems that, for Woolf, Mansfield’s allure was mixed up with her air of solitude. Indeed, solitude would draw these writers together as a magnet, a fertile ground for ‘accost’. Woolf’s image proved strangely prescient as if, already attuned to the sound of ‘waves breaking’, she had somehow anticipated Mansfield’s declaration in her diary, ‘All that I write – all that I am – is on the border of the sea’.3 If Woolf assumed she could identify Mansfield as a ‘sign’ of solitude (not merely the signature of her own work, but a citation of longstanding pictorial traditions), it is worth recognising that we, their readers, also approach these figures through the iconography of solitude developed by their contemporaries and cultural legatees. For instance, when Mansfield’s husband John Middleton Murry edited her journal for posthumous publication, he presented Mansfield as the female isolate par excellence, adding subheadings like ‘Femme Seule’, ‘Being Alone’, and ‘Living Alone’.4 Similarly, in 1930, Cecil Beaton described Woolf as a fragile ‘sea-anemone’ that ‘curls up at contact with the outer world’, a marine image that influenced her popular representation for decades (despite her indignation), perhaps because it anticipated her suicide by drowning in 1941.5 Such early depictions of the modernist isolate – embracing the deluge alone with tragic but heroic determination – seem like caricatures, especially in light of recent scholarship on modernists’ efforts to develop meaningful forms of intimacy and public engagement.6 Nevertheless, in addition to complicating these stock images, we might consider how their crude outlines invite questions about the legibility and evasiveness of that ubiquitous affect we call ‘solitude’. The assumptions that colour Woolf’s imagined Mansfield – simultaneously, a distinctive body that can be recognised by virtue of her solitary position, and a generic genius loci – should alert us to how solitude is implicated in ‘the tension between personal expression and general convention’. Solitude is at once a passionate feeling of (or claim to) singularity, an uncompromised only-ness, and a culturally encoded ‘repertoire of actions and statements […] postures and signs’ that can evoke the heat of genuine frisson or seem like tepid clichés.7 In singling out the one, solitude gestures towards the universal, connoting island and ‘continent’, one Mansfield standing out to sea and ‘mortal millions that live alone’ in ‘the shoreless watery wild’.8 Solitude seems like a landscape where we travel alone but it is characterised by discursive landmarks and pocked with others’ steps. Thus, this paper not only traces the connections between Mansfield and Woolf’s thoughts on solitude, but also tracks their course through a wider cultural and literary horizon. Solitude emerges as a fluid network of feeling, characterised by expressive norms and emotional protocols that are ‘repeatedly undone by the very wildness’ of its ebbs and flows.9 Solitude and literature have been deeply wedded in the Western cultural imaginary, as solitude is often considered an essential precondition for creativity, marking a writer’s commitment to their craft. We might, for instance, think of Henry James sententiously advising the aspiring writer to inscribe ‘one word’ ‘upon your banner … that word is Loneliness’.10 James’s self-advertising tone aside, Woolf often subscribes to this idea, remarking that ‘solitude will be good for a new book’ for ‘it is likely that the best [phrases] are made in solitude’.11 Moreover, her seminal essay, A Room of One’s Own, contends that, throughout history, too few women have had the privilege of uninterrupted solitude or an income of £500 with which to purchase an escape from the voice of that ‘eternal’ patriarchal ‘pedagogue’ ‘which cannot let women alone’.12 Although Mansfield did not explicitly frame the need for solitude in gendered terms (and, as a perpetual boarder, knew a room of one’s own could be rented for less), she also valued spatial privacy. ‘[T]o be alone’, she notes, was one of ‘2 essentials to my writing – endless time no fires to attend to, no-one to wait for … I’d better find a room in London quickly – and £5 with which to furnish it’.13 Woolf and Mansfield’s efforts to reclaim solitude as a space of independence, individuation, and personal growth have been a perennial touchstone for literary, sociological, and philosophical studies that highlight solitude’s positive functions as revitalising social critique and creative resource.14 I find the rapture at being alone hard to understand. Certainly when I am sitting out of sight under a tree I feel I would be content to never return … ‘oh Loneliness of my sad heart is Queen’. It isn’t in the least that. This entry vacillates between rapture and refusal as Katherine riffs on the French expression, ‘la solitude est la reine de mon cœur’, opting for the less exact translation, ‘loneliness’.16 In both authors’ writings about solitude, we find them slipping between cognates and casting about amongst clichés to express the turbulent valences of their own feelings. Indeed, some passages leave the reader with a profound sense of isolation without naming any feeling at all, relying instead on the simultaneously empty but pregnant cry – ‘oh, oh, oh’.17 This tendency to ‘move among’ and even relinquish ‘names’ in search of ‘some more appropriate predicate’ shows that expressions of feeling are, in Charles Altieri’s words, characterised by ‘a continual struggle between a sense of inchoateness and the forms of intelligibility provided by our social grammars’.18 We might venture to say that solitude reveals a unique dimension of this struggle. The difficulty of expressing solitude is not only to do with an inadequate or messy vernacular, but with the fact that a vernacular necessarily originates in a community and solitude seems like an intimation of distance or difference from others that craves its own idiolect. Isolates may find themselves in the same situation as theorists like Brian Massumi, who has sought to develop a language that directs attention to an experiential ‘excess or remainder’ that does not fit into ‘socially recognised lines of actions and reactions’ or confining emotional categories. Hence, Massumi famously distinguishes between ‘the socio-linguistic fixing of [a] quality of an experience’, a naming process whereby feelings become ‘owned and recognized’ as emotions, and ‘asignifying’ intensities he calls ‘affects’.19 Massumi’s distinction may be a little too tidy; as Sianne Ngai observes, ‘the difference between affect and emotion’ may well be ‘a modal difference of intensity or degree, rather than a formal difference of quality and kind’.20 However, it betokens a desire to distinguish between the unruliness of feeling and normative models of the emotions, which have emerged out of long historical struggles over diagnostic criteria that allow us to not only identify but invest ourselves in states of feeling that can be recognised and assessed by others. I wonder whether the speaking isolate is not uniquely situated to observe the gap between affect and emotion (in my opinion, more thought-provoking than secure) as well as how they bleed into each other. Isolates may feel that they are living in the ‘remainder’ that the concept of affect gestures towards, ‘the unexpected, the singular, or […] quirky’ aspects of experience rather than ‘the generally applicable’.21 Yet if they are to express and take ownership of solitude, they must engage with the emotional frameworks that qualify particular sorts of selves, solitary or otherwise. If they tend to squirm a little, no wonder, since discourses on solitude are often condensed into aphorisms and clichés that have lost much of their pith and energy in the course of public circulation. Faced with an overdetermined vernacular, the isolate is forced to navigate the ineffable only-ness of their feelings and the thorny places where these singular intensities brush up against the social. Thus, like affect, the isolate sits on the precarious boundary between the public and the private, the individual and the social (albeit with some vested interest in preserving it). If the isolate tends to test their feelings against social grammars and feel about for the parameters of the self, it is because solitude is deeply connected to ideas of authenticity. I do not mean to say that solitude is exempt from artifice, or to privilege it as more real and pure than other feelings, but it often feels like an exceptionally authentic part of the self, the self’s most sincere testament. Woolf broaches this issue in The Waves, where Bernard contrasts his shifting identity, dependent on ‘the illumination of other people’s eyes’, with ‘the authentics’ who ‘exist most completely in solitude’.22 Likewise, Mansfield relied on solitude ‘to puzzle out’ her ‘own particular self’ – ‘[w]hat I aim at is that state of mind when I feel my soul and my mind are one. … Only solitude will do it for me’.23 Solitude seems to bring the self to a peak of concentration so that we exist in emphatic totality, absorbed in ‘that sense of being which is so extreme in solitude’ and temporarily lost to all the distinctions whereby we gauge authenticity and parcel out the self into zones that are deemed more or less personal and inviolable (like the body, mind, or soul).24 Yet while solitude seems to consolidate the self, it is often experienced as self-displacement or surprise, seizing us unawares. Although my solitude seems specific to me, I do not seem to be its origin. Similarly, though some critics suggest that solitude ‘produces individuals’, an ‘I’ is not necessarily its result.25 In Woolf’s experience of ‘solitude’, identity seems to ebb away ‘into deep waters’ and ‘it is not oneself but something in the universe that one’s left with’.26 Thus, solitude places pressure on the authentic self it evokes, prompting us to ask whether solitude stakes out some indigenous territory we can legitimately define as personal or whether, like affect, it reveals our susceptibility to migratory intensities stemming from ‘impersonal, or […] “pre-personal” forces’?27 Just as solitude is linked to the authentic individual, modernism has been defined by an interest in individual experience. As Woolf writes in ‘Modern Fiction’, many modernists tried to discard ‘the conventions which are commonly observed’ and ‘record […] the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness’.28 They sought to distinguish unique feelings from emotional norms through experimental works that reflect the vibrant flow of one’s inner life. Thus, modernism seems rather partial to the idea that ‘art […] is the rediscovery of solitude, and the road back into the individual self’.29 However, Woolf and Mansfield were sceptical of any art that ‘remains centred in a self which, in spite of its tremor of susceptibility, never embraces or creates what is outside itself and beyond’.30 This famous caveat from ‘Modern Fiction’, which immediately qualifies Woolf’s call to record personal impressions, may have been inspired by one of Mansfield’s reviews. A year earlier, Mansfield had contended that writers must not be content to ‘register’ the individual’s ‘faint inward shock[s]’, those ‘experiences which are, as it were, peculiarly theirs’. Such an art would leave us enclosed within a ‘tiny circle’, like that envisioned in ‘Modern Fiction’.31 Both authors sought a style that would capture ‘the effect of things upon one’s mind’ and yet portray these effects as affects (in our contemporary parlance), resonances between the self and the outside world. Else, Woolf observes, the writer ‘“lives alone, / Housed in a dream, at distance from the / Kind”’.32 … no sound Which the heart does not make, or else so fit[s] To its own temper that in external things No longer seems internal difference … things that are without Live in our minds as in their native home.37 Glossing over whether this exquisite ‘fit’ between self and things is altogether seamless or a matter of nipping and tucking, these isolates suggest that nature is not simply a surrogate for society and its difficult compacts and compromises. The isolate’s experience in the natural world models a better, organic community that operates by the principle of complete integration, not only resolving any splits in the self but also the more fundamental split between self and world. The permeability of hands and peaches and souls and boughs admits no barrier of difference, raising the question of whether the isolate’s pleasures are finally autoerotic, a matter of voluptuous self-gratification rather than a real engagement with otherness. Although Marvell exclaims, ‘Fair trees! wheres’e’er your barks I wound, / No name shall but your own be found’, is he actually grafting the name and legend of the human on the non-human world?38 Mansfield and Woolf were heirs to this tradition, demonstrating a deep familiarity with both Marvell and Wordsworth throughout their careers. For Mansfield, ‘W.W’ was one of those ‘people with whom I want to live’ and, in many ways, she did ‘live with’ Wordsworth, incorporating his ode to solitude into her letters and diaries.39 Mansfield’s repeated use of Wordsworthian motifs might explain the Woolfs’ conspicuous mistakes when typesetting Mansfield’s Prelude at the Hogarth Press; they were frequently in error over the title, using the definite article ‘the’, as in Wordsworth’s The Prelude.40 Wordsworth was also a significant figure in Woolf’s intellectual development and her frequent allusions to his work show that she was ‘involved in “one continuous unexhausted reading” of the Romantics, particularly of Wordsworth, from childhood to the end of her life’.41 Similarly, as Marvell was restyled in the twentieth century as the poet laureate of rural solitude, echoes of his poetry can be heard throughout both authors’ work.42 They invoke his images of blissful union with nature as well as his desolate ‘deserts of vast eternity’ to contemplate the double-edged nature of solitude.43 Indeed, Mansfield claimed Marvell’s ‘deserts’ as her personal ‘secret’, translating them into an existential threat hovering over the most quotidian experiences.44 In Mansfield and Woolf’s conversations with the past (shaped, perhaps, through conversations with each other), we see that to ‘live with’ these eminent poets of solitude was also to revise, rewrite, and disagree with them. Woolf and Mansfield tease out the complications and tensions in earlier paeans to solitude for, like other twentieth-century writers, they often felt immune to solitude’s If they could to Wordsworth’s pleasures in a they could also with when he of and the as by The of solitude are often (not by the natural as it seems to the by Marvell and Thus, Mansfield and Woolf’s writing much to who see as of our in […] the and its as much as its Solitude a sense of the and as we shall this is a precondition for a more of than that by of The cultural landscape of solitude is characterised by questions about and the nature of feeling, and our to others and to the non-human world. questions are also at in work on and and and A between solitude and affect can how solitude of and may even Indeed, solitude a in Woolf and Mansfield’s we find them the same ground in and their in and letters they were to have The and between their writings on solitude suggest the they claim to have or conversations that have been lost in the of I have letters in which she of the of a upon my writing with I have letters for adding of … the is it is The question also If it were not that I her of to these […] I should be more As it is Woolf frequently Mansfield’s and the quality of her own Indeed, authenticity something of a in their Mansfield knew she had a for and tried to Woolf that she ‘to be … without any at even to Woolf her Nevertheless, Mansfield ‘a to [her] and whether the most between women were could be and but also about her she with In Mansfield a of Woolf’s and she considered the ‘a in the to the effects of to to to the most … I am to by it might also for the of Mansfield’s repeated was in that and her situation with wonder she can is in her writing a of expression as though she were at – her over her – her own her – and her within Mansfield ‘I to feel like Virginia but she had I had This into her of and and Woolf spite in A she up to The was by Mansfield’s to to her – no no It that she is of the solitary we about solitude, I her expressing my feelings, as I never heard them we into as as as though were – … once more as as I feel a between us – a sense of being – not only about literature did they say when they about We can only because this it has no in Mansfield’s Yet it some about how these women solitude. Woolf solitude as the for an experience where we into feeling both and we think about solitude as a of This solitude, not as an but as a or that its – and meaningful – but is not by both authors tend to write of solitude in this tone seems to from the intensity of the feeling rather than from a that solitude is For instance, in To the and his an feeling that in the back of both of their minds … […] was for both of them the about The that is a profound between the but does not out In an To the echoes a from an in where Mansfield writes of ‘that which to her to be her only the only Woolf was to have this – is this what Mansfield when she my feelings, as I never heard them the of To the back to Woolf’s of in as solitude of Woolf that solitude is a even itself to a The idea that solitude is the of an may have its as when a young Woolf Wordsworth – like many is well to be in good I find solitude strangely Yet as the speaking isolate a in this does she some of her and authenticity – in a her Although Mansfield that solitude was the to a self, she also how even the most inward feelings and In solitude is up with an of […] and In her opinion, solitary we are ‘to a than would be in to to to even to ourselves or others only to find are no longer we think about Woolf and Mansfield’s it is to wonder whether Mansfield about how solitude the lines between the and its longer she the need to our feelings on show for others and have them recognised as sincere – a that might be as a in the air […] for of the with a of over of the sea […] – and more – of a where my were like and … and this other self in the the of her some of Mansfield’s find a of but one self is while and the of a towards the end of her Mansfield was with the idea of what she her and of feeling when we are most ourselves and least If Mansfield this experience their it is likely that Woolf would have her more for she that we are of many than but with the desire ‘to be but one ‘a self, a real Mansfield and Woolf might have that of alert us to the and of selves, our to flow towards things and back into is – what and – how one the other to have the other – … it is how and we each of us are – at the and from their find their into like a short in in which Mansfield ‘the quality of […] between an and to Woolf, consider how it is to find some one […] who to be with is in the desire to ‘the most of this ‘to be the Mansfield a of each up into that invite the other to complete each is with that the and of a that no For a minds to each Mansfield’s that she could ‘the quality of Yet For no their into and they themselves as little away into This is a as if the were to human they were – over their but from the a of and a The the with the the seems to a – is intimacy and a short from Woolf’s this between and on the and of a between and the of this is simply on the and the lines of and in the landscape the feelings this and that, like the of a sea felt that […] the who sits in while his does all the and and the show his the In the of social a of authentic encounter with ‘the upon which the was and they each other so were in so that they had only to by this as as in feels ‘the of human … that of Both the same the of human the quality of and the of and intimacy and isolation seem to from outside the sense of so that they and in time to an that them and echoes between Mansfield’s and Woolf’s at a about solitude that the ebbs and of their an intimacy they but could not finally Mansfield and Woolf’s over solitude was only by Woolf was already a by Katherine to my on Nevertheless, their seems to have Woolf to her to a she considered and so and so that I had to to the for something to As observes, this may be to the of Woolf as of with her a little on one and as if were Mansfield’s of Woolf with your a little on one as though knew some we shall see In Mansfield Woolf’s about her on their – it is not but who is of the her as Woolf’s that she between and she qualifies her on Mansfield’s it to all this of her into a Yet has an personal even as it out into a on of solitude Woolf

Emily Doucet

Reviewed by: Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse 1790–1910 by Herbert F. Tucker Emily Doucet Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse 1790–1910 by Herbert F. Tucker; pp. 737. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. $94.50 cloth. In his prodigious Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse 1790–1910, Herbert F. Tucker excavates a history of the epic in the long nineteenth century in an attempt to correct the “categorical erasure of the epic genre from our working picture of the nineteenth century” (10). “Literary history must have its victim” (4), argues Tucker in his introduction, and the epic in the nineteenth century is one such victim, in part because the rise of the novel and of modernity are stories told at the expense of the epic, which is presented “either as a casualty of great old age or as a sacrifice exacted to consecrate the birth of that modern consciousness from whose vantage literary history is perennially put together” (4). In Tucker’s account, the histories of both the development of the novel and of modernism require the concurrent history of the epic’s “surviving tradition” (7) during the long century, a history which has hitherto been ignored. In Tucker’s reasoning, if literary critics can kill off the epic, then they can also resurrect it. After the first theoretical and introductory chapter, he presents, in eleven chronological chapters (most treating a single decade), the evidence of hundreds of epics—the bibliography of poems cited runs to over twenty pages—written and circulated between 1790 and 1910. He offers sustained readings of only a portion of this list, ranging from Erasmus Darwin’s 1791 Botanic Garden to Thomas Hardy’s 1910 Dynasts. These chapters each read their epics according to “the gust of the zeitgeist as a given decade’s epic output shows it blowing” (8), and if these gusts occasionally seem suspiciously tidy, and conveniently divisible by decade, they are also appropriate to the larger purpose of the work, which is to counter received literary histories with Tucker’s own. And so Tucker begins his work. “We need to tell a different story,” Tucker writes, “one that organizes phases into episodes and then connects the episodes in series to a history that matters” (10). Tucker explains that Epic is less interested in “theoretical arguments, explications de texte, or even the thick description of epic texts concurrently produced” (10); as he succeeds in his stated aims so well, it seems churlish to look for those absent elements. Tucker’s “alternative story” (8) is a sound one, which makes a highly readable case for a counter-historical narrative in which the epic is still very active indeed, busy at the work that the nineteenth century’s victorious genre, the novel, cannot do. Epics tell their readers stories about themselves as members of communities, however construed. “Bold-faced or latent, mutant or rote,” argues Tucker, “the epic conventions that litter the nineteenth-century landscape were not fossils but proofs attesting the bard’s membership in a guild and the reader’s stake in a heritage” (26). In ways unavailable to the novel, the epic was able to engage, on a large scale, with notions of belonging and inheritance, of communities and cultures, in order to place the nineteenth century reading-subject within the whole sweep of human history. It is the epic, argues Tucker, that offers “the [End Page 153] successful articulation of a collective identity that links origins to destinies by way of heroic value in imagined action” (13). In short, it is the epic that can make a community known to itself. Tucker’s twenty-odd-page list of poems cited is accompanied by an extensive and thorough review of secondary scholarship, and his frequent footnotes provide a lively and helpful overview of the history of many of the scholarly debates with which he engages in his text. Tucker wears his impressive research lightly, however, and Epic is a remarkably engaging work, even when it is busy discussing poems that, by Tucker’s own admission, are not good, or much read. For a book of this size, and with such an expansive genre as its subject, it also works remarkably well...

Barbara Taylor

In June 1795, the pioneer feminist Mary Wollstonecraft traveled to Scandinavia to sort out some business matters for her lover, Gilbert Imlay. She was accompanied by her one-year-old daughter, Fanny, and her maid Marguerite, but as she moved northward, they were left behind to be gathered up on the return journey. It was a wretched period in Wollstonecraft's life. Imlay, who prior to Fanny's birth had been a devoted paramour, had been seeing other women since. She clung to him desperately, as if life itself were at stake—as it had been two months earlier when, wild with misery at his betrayals, she had attempted suicide. Now, journeying through strange lands with neither lover nor child, she was wracked by the grief of abandonment. Yet, as always, the literary professional was on the qui vive, alert to possibilities. Shortly after returning to London, Wollstonecraft brought out a volume of letters addressed to an errant lover, but in fact written for publication and never sent to Imlay. Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden was one of her best-received works, a favorite especially with the young Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey, who enjoyed her self-portrayal as a melancholy solitaire, a companionless voyager in a loveless world. The image of the lone woman, shorn of all intimate ties, was touching but also pleasurably outré, a startling contrast to the familial, male-oriented feminine ideal of the late eighteenth century.1 The “generality” of women, Wollstonecraft wrote in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, “fly” from solitude as from a “fearful void.”2 Trained to submission, leached of inner resources, most women find aloneness intolerable. Against this, she set her own profound responses to solitude, offering up a repertoire of intense—and divided—reactions to her Scandinavian sojourn. The agonies of a forsaken heart were set against the exaltations of a mind freed from constraint. “Here I am writing quite alone,” she reported from Portor in Norway, after a hair-raising sea journey, “something more than gay, for which I want a name.”3 Yet returning to her lodgings in Tonsberg, she quailed at entering the room, “without lighting-up pleasure in any eye—I dreaded the solitariness … and wished for night to … close my eyes on a world where I was destined to wander alone.”4 A farewell meal with some fellow travelers on the final leg of the trip left her stricken with sorrow, and something more: “I then supped with my companions, with whom I was soon after to part for ever—always a most melancholy, death-like idea—a sort of separation of soul; for all the regret which follows those from whom fate separates us, seems to be something torn from ourselves.”5 What are we left with, who do we become, when we are alone? Solitude has been a key feature of human experience in all times and places. Yet little of its story has been told. Can such a powerfully personal experience have a history? If it can, then biography must surely be a chief route into it, just as a historical understanding of the solitary self is likely to yield valuable insights into the biographical subject. Biography—it will be no news to readers of this roundtable—is a controversial enterprise for historians. Some of the features that have made it controversial—its belletristic character; its emphasis on individual agency at the expense of larger historical forces; its flattening of complex causal connections to fit a linear life narrative—are less pronounced today than in the past, or at any rate seem to generate less anxiety. We now possess many historical biographies that do a superb job of integrating their subjects into their historical contexts; life histories are no longer a genre apart. At the same time, the wall that once divided history from literature has been well and truly breached, with many historians incorporating life-writing and even fictional narratives into their historical monographs. A new literary boldness has entered the discipline, from which biography has been a chief beneficiary. But there is one respect in which biography remains highly problematic for historians, and that is its psychological dimension. The role of personal psychology in history is possibly the most poorly developed field of modern historical discussion, plagued by “commonsense” prejudices, on the one hand, and hard-line theoretical diktats, on the other. All historians use psychology—it is impossible to write human history without it—but the psychology that most historians deploy is of the pick-and-mix variety, blending commonplace assumptions about human motivation with bits of pop psychology, often Freudian in flavor. The exceptions to this are those historians who embrace postmodernist anti-humanism, and thus assign no causal role whatsoever to individual psychology. For these historians, the “death of the subject” decreed by Foucault and his epigones has swept subjectivity off the historical stage. The “individual coherent self”—that is, the biographical subject as traditionally conceived—has been deconstructed and dismissed as a “bourgeois fiction.” This is a development that calls for closer scrutiny. The Western self has been receiving a lot of attention recently. Studies with titles like “Making the Self,” “Constructing the Self,” and “Inventing the Self” proliferate. As the active verbs make plain, virtually all these studies present selfhood as a cultural artifact or, in a variation on this, a discursive construct. A shared narrative unfolds that begins with a pre-modern, “extensive” self (a self rooted in communal life, lacking any sense of unique individuality) and then charts a shift (via the Renaissance, or the Enlightenment, or the Romantic Age: the putative transition points are multiple) to the modern Western self, a “bounded, unique” individual possessing innate character and psychological interiority: the “unitary” or “deep” self, as this modern subject type is often called.6 The story is basically a retelling of the familiar tale of the rise of bourgeois individualism, with the additional twist that it is not just the individualist character type that is deemed to originate with modern commercialism, but human subjectivity in toto. Inner experience—the private universe of psychic life—is also a historical invention, we are told: there is no subjectivity, only social phenomena that produce the effects of it. As one British follower of Foucault puts it, “we are ‘assembled’ selves, in whom all the ‘private’ effects of psychological interiority are constituted by our linkage into ‘public’ languages, practices, techniques and artefacts.”7 This socio-historicist account of subjectivity, regularly paraded as a first-order heresy, is now such an article of faith in many academic circles that alternative views tend to be rejected out of hand, as in Dror Wahrman's Making of the Modern Self, where the “self within” is exposed as a cultural fabrication, a post–French Revolution “identity regime.” But subjectivity, as Stephen Greenblatt once noticed with some embarrassment, tends to “cling” on, even in its most convinced critics, long after pronouncements of its demise.8 Biography, with its focus on the complexities of an individual life, highlights the deficiencies of this culturalist approach; biographies of the solitary self point up its psychological sterility. “Detached from the whole world, what am I?” Rousseau asked at the beginning of his Reveries of the Solitary Walker. “This must now be the object of my inquiry.”9 The investigation plunged him deep into meditations on the inner life, which is where any inquirer into human solitude must follow him. Solitude is one of the great debating points in Western thought, spooling out a string of oppositions—self versus society, private versus public, country versus city, contemplation versus action—that stretch back to antiquity. Classical thinkers tended to favor sociality as more conducive to virtue, with Aristotle's denunciation of solitude as fit only for beasts or gods setting the dominant tone. Philosophical solitude of course was exempted, with the figure of Socrates standing on a lonely hillside in frozen meditation for a full day and night symbolizing the mental autarky of the great sage. For ordinary citizens, however, society was essential to fulfill their potentia. This division between a socially embedded existence and a higher, solitary life reappeared in Christian thought as the dichotomy between the city of man and the city of God, where a spiritual elite dedicated to holy living were permitted to withdraw into monasteries or other forms of religious seclusion. With the Reformation, and its democratic leveling of access to the holy, this elite physical withdrawal gave way to a universal movement into the soul: an individuated form of spiritual retreat which, unlike monasticism and eremiticism, could be accommodated by ordinary life. A righteous man, Daniel Defoe wrote, could be “as perfectly retired from the world” in the London Exchange as in a hermitage. Heavenly meditation was the “essence of solitude,” not “monkish cells and forcible retreats.” “The business is to get a retired soul … and then we may be alone whenever we please.”10 From the mid-seventeenth century, a new scientific note was heard as enlightened anatomists of human nature entered the debate. Hobbes's bleak account of man as a lone pleasure-seeking machine was countered by defenders of natural sociability who declared Hobbesian man “monstrous,” a “wolf” in human dress.11 Latter-day Stoics quoted Cicero on civic duty: “we are not born for ourselves alone, but … mutually to help one another.”12 “We are made for the Cements of Society …,” a Ciceronian correspondent wrote to the Spectator, “and Solitude is an unnatural Being to us.”13 Positions proliferated, as retirement poets hymned pastoral solitude as an escape from worldly corruption while moral sentimentalists warned that without social intercourse, men descended into egoist bestiality. Celebrations of solitude as the “school of genius” were countered by medical warnings about the debilitating effects of solitary cerebration.14 In 1757, Rousseau—Enlightenment Europe's premier solitaire—took offense at words spoken by a character in one of his friend Diderot's plays, “Only the man alone,” which no as at him. were with from who him that as Rousseau was his but the a is a strange sort of a as a for his but also solitude was a to him. “Detached from the whole world, what am I?” What is The now as in tends to in their The of of other one of course be about that is, be in the of when one one a great story about but also with is for many the most solitary of social of these are solitude, some may be for it. This is solitude is not a experience but a an of self that is to be by any between and In a solitude as an inner at the back of the in his which the soul not to itself but to with and of a unique “We have a soul to in on … … to to to and to not that in such a solitude we be in lonely be a The lone self is no but a of solitude is an The Western thought, from less alone than when to of the solitary as an of The account is a by the “The to solitude, in this is a that in as the aloneness by from his other while in her and as as a to a for his when is Solitude without such is intolerable. of alone is something which that is We are of other selves, who favorite one of this even a the history of Western solitude it to be with of course has been the key but and and an all in the were to be in a of that is, in the of the Christian by without for to one of most of my Solitary were more than by the of to my In solitude, poets with their with their with readers with fictional Rousseau with a self, an with whom a solitary The to in this was a of the the man like was less alone than when alone,” the without a and without For most of Western have with and and the as an physical the by as the religious The of is not as a in the psychology of solitude, but the by as a a of solitary for … the and of individual men in their solitude as they to in to they may the these and as reported by what were of by of a of what we may which in its and any of the of for the of this it in the into mental life of and in what the a of from the self but in a to it. is and more life in our we are at any all of this life was most of the of inner by profound of and were and solitude,” the in a of individual is to find … that which is his but by of But the individual in a of inner the of holy in fact be in gave way to of the of an its through the The was highly controversial in the eighteenth as the human of all a mental between man and was for its its wild Solitary was as conducive to an of the a of are Samuel in an which in its a with the religious to a in which and were for the living Solitude and was not “The of who their in solitary a … the from their own and which have no in of alone, mind be with and of which are truly and to be no where but in Mary Wollstonecraft as something of an A she and her it as and as a to In she a A a young of who her solitary with is to her literary Mary is a to in lonely places. Wollstonecraft the as a and it is in the of and two poets of the and meditations on solitude the Mary in a she the of But it also Wollstonecraft's own highly sense of religious Wollstonecraft was born into the but by the she wrote her her views were and she her a natural this shift of however, a sense of a to God, as her it, that during some in her life, but never left The an intimate with the most powerfully in A from alone on a an in is the she wrote in an on solitude the all and the which the and of … and the world seems to only the mind that and the mind that all of the solitary however, Wollstonecraft was of its especially for were more than more to corruption by in women was to be than and other regularly women of with In solitude, all women were to in the form of or history of the the of lone readers by who to in the of the of some of her modern into this with as and their for A with an account of an who her alone in her most for She on the … as she accompanied the to the lonely and … with by the of the she thought while she her mind have been daughter, whom she and is of course made of with a mind and heart to But her and she to She in with an with whom she life as a and her truly to her which there was a that even … could not but by now in Mary the of her life and that an could the human and … when other were as a of the to Wollstonecraft was a when she wrote the but little to her she have her or had they her Wollstonecraft wrote at one point of not have out a new The was The of a and an Wollstonecraft was by the of the but regularly a heart to all the … I have never with she wrote to the of her Scandinavian “I once thought I but it was all a She to be off from ordinary “I with who are by … and I am to … of am I thus was to of and into which she to those with is a great in my heart its own she wrote to her in after the of her with the I am a to to after A was the were in a about a solitaire, The of or, in which Wollstonecraft wrote in the final months of her life and which was at her is a tale of is an the of who little for her that she up the who that is a man of A of and by her in a which is where the in her to her she her to up of with which she then a fellow a Gilbert by a she and sorrow, and solitude all to her and Wollstonecraft that she had a of But is and all of the that Wollstonecraft for the of her it for women to who have no active or but what is a of and to to men and her own lone the Mary is a solitary of The was but lacking any or moral Rousseau wrote to his friend had of that which and to the their be but they had fictional were a to this, as the Rights of was a of the of character in Yet it was in one of those for which was who Wollstonecraft with a for her in the figure of the of his is an solitaire, a torn between and virtue, who to with and to for with her at the of and works, Wollstonecraft's a of the and it is that their is as and as for a time, at she is no longer … the in and sense was to and social Wollstonecraft Rousseau in the late when she and his for the soon she was one of his most if It was his which she to she wrote in the Rights of Woman, in the of the with him that of the “I was in with she his personal she a fellow as she in a to his Reveries of the Solitary a mind that into that world in which I have often and the that all is and of image as a especially in its his in she his account of the of in Rousseau had alone, his heart no object for his to … the him of some of the and of the of which had never been to and with which by these she wrote, all the of his heart to one and his the of his with Rousseau then to these a woman, the with whom in with In her Wollstonecraft the story as an of a in the Rights of and she the of to their in his and her readers that the of of the of the as Rousseau wrote in in the that through the what is but a of truly to be but in is but it for itself … … It its object as it into its it in like and Wollstonecraft's Mary and the profound of the solitary as it an ideal world to But the of such be in the object of her to him which, in the to be wrote of Wollstonecraft's with Imlay, Mary to her life the of her to Wollstonecraft's Scandinavian have the Scandinavian to his lover had she not attempted is impossible to but it must have been a to him to get her out of his She left and full of bleak and for the she wrote to him as her set from is … I may some or in sense of the … I will or this The trip with its many and a of and a for the final solitude of melancholy my she wrote, as one lonely after a a her with of only of which I a and misery am I thus to she to Imlay. “I have never in my life … from Yet as the solitude her writing alone in from the she into the and in the “I am more than have for a long she wrote to after a day to the she her a of that her especially the young poets of her often do my produce that of the of many she wrote after a through a solitude the its and to the of its own The sense of her to God, of my and as in this solitude a new in the history of my own she what she on The a inner as she to a life from Imlay. She had his object once of his and now of his and she “I am I will not an object of to “I am to be but I will not be The she she was a an born of her and she to from the But she was and could not “I my from to the Being in the of the sense of “I without … a I the want of it more in society, than in As the its the “I am to up by the the to which has been the of my she wrote to from life will have an of to and she to in London, she living with a new and to this “I seem to have no she had written to him from she wrote in her “I to find Solitude is the where self and other for of what Wollstonecraft have her on in the journey, on her for her other in her on the that her to life. “I have … as a off from the of … alone, some like the of made that I was part of a from which I could not … by the of … The solitary self to in an that is Wollstonecraft's solitude of some two was by her in more than been to But to it, we more than a account of subjectivity as a cultural construct. We a biographical that as well as to focus on the of human subjectivity as well as its we to of the the sense of well as of and