Romantic identities: Models of subjectivity in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries

This dissertation argues that a canonical Romantic model of the self--one that accents inwardness and psychological depth--was not the only one constructed during the Romantic period. The individual chapters are designed to reveal a range of Romantic-era models of identity and trace their relations to other social constructs. The first chapter focuses on the canonical model of identity, but defamiliarizes it by outlining its development in a nonliterary realm: that of embryology and obstetrics. The chapter traces the development of a model of birth that emphasizes the child\u27s role in its own development. Chapter 2 argues that in the late eighteenth century a model of identity emerged that polarized identity into an essential identity akin to use value and a social identity akin to exchange value. I show that while the canonical Romantic model of identity centers on grounded use value, early gothic novels present personal identity as violently polarized, and are driven by a fascination with the vagaries of exchange-value identity. In Chapter 3 I argue that French Revolutionary ideology encouraged the replacement of a hierarchical genealogical system of identity by a non-hierarchical system wherein identity is based on context. I first describe this shift in the realm in which it is most visible: biology. I then turn to British Romanticism and show that some of Byron\u27s early poems dramatize the shift from an essential to a contextual and finally to a self-made notion of the self. Chapter 4 argues that Shelley criticizes the Romantic tendency to ignore the corporeal in favor of the inner self. In The Cenci Shelley explores the relationship of outer and inner being in terms of their resemblance to drama and poetry. While corporeal life may be just a mask, when one divorces one\u27s sense of identity from one\u27s body the imagination is impaired and the self becomes dangerously unstable. The final chapter shows how Scott\u27s Heart of Midlothian explores the heart of persons and society, but associates both of these hearts with economic circulation, with the result that interiorized Romantic identity comes to seem dangerous