SOURCE: Danahay, Martin A. “Class, Gender, and the Victorian Masculine Subject.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 5, no. 2 (fall 1990): 99-113.

The interrelated categories of class and gender have become increasingly subject to scrutiny in recent analyses of autobiography. Following the deconstruction of the concept of the unitary individual, criticism of autobiography has begun to tackle the role of such complex social codes as class and gender in the construction of the writing subject.¹ The increasing influence of the works of French social theorist Pierre Bourdieu on literary criticism reveals a desire to move beyond the deconstructed categories of the subjective and objective, or individual and social toward an account of the social construction of subjectivity.² Such developments suggest the need for a rethinking of the canonical figures of nineteenth-century autobiography within the new theoretical paradigms. In this article I propose a reconsideration of three Victorian male authors: Matthew Arnold, John Stuart Mill, and Edmund Gosse. Laying their construction of subjectivity alongside texts such as Margaret Oliphant's Autobiography and working-class autobiographies, I map out a definition of their construction of subjectivity in terms of their attempt to represent themselves as autonomous from social constraints. These authors repress the social context, investing instead in representations of themselves as autonomous and unitary subjects. In this they betray their class and gender affiliations, and construct a distinctively masculine writing subject.³

Such representations of autonomy have been characterized by Pierre Bourdieu in Distinction as the bourgeois “denial of the social” (11). Bourdieu uses this phrase in a general discussion of the fine arts, pointing out that it is a characteristic of what is viewed as “high” culture to stress the means of representation over the thing represented. In other words, what Bourdieu terms an “aristocracy of taste” can be exhibited by favoring art that stresses the autonomy of the producer of art from the social context. It is precisely the opposite of autonomy, the insistence on the social conditions that inform the production of a text, that characterize women's and working-class autobiographies. The aesthetic governing working-class autobiography is in many ways diametrically opposed to what Bourdieu calls the “pure gaze,” the detachment from the social that is the product of a life of relative leisure (4). Regenia Gagnier has pointed out how most working-class autobiographers write “for communicative ends,” and exhibit a more functionalist attitude to representation:

Such functionalist uses of literacy contrast markedly with the aesthetic of detached individualism represented by literature in general and the autobiographical canon in particular.

(42)

As Gagnier's comments here indicate, at stake in the contrast between mainstream autobiographies of the literary canon and women's and working-class autobiographies is a definition of what constitutes the literary itself. In the conclusion to this article I will argue that the “detached individualism” of nineteenth-century British masculine autobiography is replicated in most twentieth-century criticism of autobiography. In my concluding remarks I suggest a theoretical model for the study of autobiography that avoids assuming an individualist and class-based definition of the subject.

The most famous canonical Victorian figure to exhibit “detached individualism” in his construction of his subjectivity is Matthew Arnold. Despite his renunciation of poetry in favor of prose and social criticism, Arnold still ends up affirming the radical separation of his consciousness from the social. In his Preface to the 1853 edition of his Poems, Matthew Arnold criticized poetry that exhibited the debilitating effects of the modern “dialogue of the mind with itself” (152). He was criticizing his own poem “Empedocles on Etna,” but clearly also meant to condemn any poetry that showed the effects of a “diseased” and exclusively introspective state of mind that has lost contact with “things as they really are” (195). Arnold was criticizing a form of writing with which we are now very familiar, that of the autobiographical subject examining the mysterious origins of his or her sense of identity. Arnold both inherited and attempted to repress his Romantic autobiographical legacy in his poetry, particularly the influence of Wordsworth.⁴ In criticizing the autobiographical “dialogue of the mind with itself,” Arnold is apparently repressing what he views as dangerously solipsistic tendencies in both his Romantic forebears and his own writing.

I say “apparently” because Arnold's self-repression in his Preface actually helped construct the very subjectivity he is criticizing. Far from escaping “the dialogue of the mind with itself,” Matthew Arnold's poetry and prose are actually what George Levine has suggestively termed “autobiographical fictions” (473). As Levine's phrase indicates, Arnold's poetry and prose are centrally concerned with the construction of his own subjectivity, even as he overtly represses self-consciousness.

Furthermore, his phrase “dialogue of the mind with itself” provides a key for the analysis of the dynamics of Victorian subjectivity. Arnold seems to be arguing for what M. M. Bakhtin characterized as the “dialogic” imagination, an imagination that actively addresses its social milieu and reflects in its language the social conflicts of its day. Bakhtin contrasts the “polyglossia” and “semantic openendedness” of dialogic forms such as the novel with the impulse toward “monoglossia” in other genres, particularly highly conventional poetry (284). While not subscribing to Bakhtin's implicit denigration of poetry in favor of prose, I find that his comments do help elucidate the process that is at work in Victorian autobiography.

In writing autobiography, Victorian male autobiographers aligned themselves with monologism rather than dialogism. Monologism in Bakhtin's terms is a form of solipsism:

Ultimately monologism denies that there exists outside of it another consciousness, with the same rights and capable of responding on an equal footing, another equal I (thou). For the monologic outlook the other remains entirely and only an object of consciousness and cannot constitute another consciousness … The monologue is accomplished and deaf to the other's response … Monologue pretends to be the last word.

(318)

Monologism is a denial of alterity, as the writing subject represses the role of the social in the construction of his subjectivity. Monologic texts therefore involve a repression of other voices, as the writer seeks mastery over the unsettling forces of the contingent. Monologism is a gendered trait of Victorian male autobiography, as authors such as Matthew Arnold and John Stuart Mill both include women within their texts and silence them at the same time. Such a process can be seen at work in such Arnold poems as “The Buried Life,” but the most famous example is John Stuart Mill's use of Harriet Taylor. By conflating Taylor's words with his own, Mill effectively erases her as a separate consciousness. His strategy has spawned a long, and ultimately undecidable, debate over who “really” wrote his texts.⁵ The issue is a red herring. Mill's hyperbolic descriptions of Taylor reveal her as the overdetermined site of his own fantasies. His descriptions of her have more to do with his own desire to escape the “incubus” of determinism than any qualities she may have actually possessed. Jonathan Loesberg has noted how Mill “by praising her beyond human recognition … frees himself from human influence,” thus reading into her his own transcendence (46). In the context of monologism, Mill's Autobiography is entirely concerned with the unilateral construction of his own subjectivity, not Harriet Taylor's. He reduces her to an object of his consciousness.

Matthew Arnold's phrase “dialogue of the mind with itself” seems to involve the negation of a solipsistic and self-referential form of writing in favor of a more socially-oriented mode. Like Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill, Arnold ostensibly advocates a form of “anti-self-consciousness” in which the writer represses subjectivity in favor of disinterestedness. However, as John Kucich's recent analysis of Victorian fiction has made clear, repression in Victorian texts, far from negating Victorian self-consciousness, actually helped produce a distinctive form of subjectivity. Kucich, following Michel Foucault's redefinition of repression in The History of Sexuality, sees the Victorian middle-class novel as “imagining and articulating a vast internal territory that might be reverenced as the mysterious origin of selfhood.” Victorian novels therefore enact a “radical separation of a self-negating libido from a collective context” so that “positive images of community are replaced entirely by the insular and seemingly autonomous dynamics of repression” (27). Repression therefore produced the Victorian masculine subject, a liminal consciousness poised between the competing demands of individuality and social duty. The bourgeois Victorian subject is the product of a self-repressive and self-policing subjectivity that insulates the individual from the contingent forces of the social.

Kucich's analysis of the Victorian novel is persuasive, and if his and Foucault's insights are applied to nineteenth-century autobiography they suggest a complete revaluation of the usual description of autobiographical texts as reflecting the competition between the claims of the individual and the social on the writing subject. Instead, the dichotomy of the individual and the social actually produces the possibility of an alienated and isolated subjectivity that imagines itself to be detached from the community. Furthermore, by linking Kucich's analysis to recent insights in feminist criticism of autobiography, we can see that what is at stake in Victorian autobiographical texts is a subjectivity constructed within distinctive polarities that can be described in terms of Victorian social codes of class and gender.

The primary characteristics of Victorian male autobiography are an emphasis upon the ideal of autonomy, and a corresponding nostalgia for the lost intimacy represented by community. Nineteenth-century autobiography, the preeminent exemplar of an individualist ideology that privileged individual self-possession over the communal, records most graphically the Victorian male's libidinal investment in notions of autonomy. Victorian autobiography, in my reading of the form, represents the full flowering of bourgeois individualism in the nineteenth century.

I would therefore link the articulation of a fully-fledged individualism with the emergence of the word autobiography itself in the 1790s, using “individualism” in the sense proposed by Alan Macfarlane in The Origins of English Individualism:

It is the view that society is constituted of autonomous, equal units, namely separate individuals, and that such individuals are more important, ultimately, than any larger constituent group. It is reflected in the concept of individual private property, in the political and legal liberty of the individual, in the idea of the individual's direct communication with God.

(5)

This is an apt summary of the main tenets of individualism in the nineteenth century, and in the present I might add, since these presuppositions still inform many contemporary studies of autobiography. The great ideological weight placed upon the idea of autonomy, the premise that each individual is endowed with an autonomous self, distinguishes nineteenth-century autobiographies from earlier first-person narratives and betrays the influence of individualism. Individuality ultimately rests upon a vision of the self as property, as a territory that can be separated from the communal and declared to be under the exclusive control of a unitary individual. Nineteenth-century autobiographies construct a subjectivity based upon the ideology of the individual's freedom from the social.

The philosophical underpinnings of individualism have been described comprehensively by Steven Lukes in Individualism, a brief and useful study that provides a good overview of its basic ideas. Lukes defines the basic ideas of individualism as autonomy, privacy, and self-development. He describes autonomy as:

The notion … according to which an individual's thought and action is (sic) his own, and not determined by agencies or causes outside his control. In particular, an individual is autonomous (at the social level) to the degree to which he subjects the pressures and norms with which he is confronted to conscious and critical evaluation, and forms intentions and reaches practical decisions as the result of independent and rational thought.

(52)

This is a strikingly tautological definition that underscores to what an extent autonomy is an a priori for individualism. As Lukes' definition suggests, there is an implicit antagonism between the “social” and the “individual” in the ideal of autonomy. To be autonomous is to resist “pressures” or constraints originating in the social. While this definition is succinct, it does not advance analysis very far because it accepts a number of crucial assumptions that also underlie nineteenth-century autobiography. Lukes, like the nineteenth-century authors he quotes, assumes that it is possible to separate the “individual” and the “social” so that one can speak of a “social level.”

Neither Macfarlane nor Lukes acknowledge that autonomy is a gendered category. Men were encouraged to be autonomous, women dependent.⁶ Victorian male intellectuals both subscribed to the ideal of autonomy as part of their gender identity and feared its consequences. In particular, they expressed great misgivings at the loss of what came to be called community. As Suzanne Graver has pointed out, “Victorian social critics often described the loss of community and the need for its renewal to be one of the major problems of the age” (1). For instance, John Ruskin both wrote an autobiography and campaigned against what he saw as the debilitating effect of the “pathetic fallacy” of solipsism. Like Arnold, he saw solipsism as a Victorian social disease.

The anxiety to which I am referring is most forcefully expressed in Ferdinand Tönnies's seminal work, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, a work that systematized the distinction between “community” and “society.” While Tönnies bemoans the development of modern society as contingent upon the destruction of community, he also characterizes society as the realm of autonomy, power, and industry. Autonomy and community in Tönnies's terms are diametrically opposed terms; autonomy can only be gained at the expense of community:

The less human beings who remain or come into contact with each other are bound together in relation to the same community, the more they stand opposite each other as free agents of their wills and abilities.

(162)

The condition of “free agent” is both desirable and fearful in Tönnies's terms. The solution to this dilemma here is to represent community as female and society as male. The “realm of life and work in the community is particularly befitting women” Tönnies claims, since “staying at home is natural for women” (162), while free agency is natural for men. Tönnies's analysis in Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft relies upon the familiar Victorian ideology of “separate spheres” and makes his sociological analysis close in spirit to the gendered assumptions of Victorian autobiography (40).

Tönnies is really describing the division of labor between men and women where men are given the public, alienated and atomistic sphere, while women are confined to the domestic hearth. While Tönnies and his British contemporaries express a nostalgia for community, they are actually invested in images of themselves as purposeful and self-directed in the way that Lukes has described. They view themselves as autonomous and women as dependent. Autonomy was the guarantor of their identity as males.

It is for this reason that Victorian autobiographers such as Mill or Edmund Gosse claimed the right of individuals to free themselves from the demands of the social. Mill in both his Autobiography and On Liberty championed the “sovereignty of the individual” (177-79), while Gosse ends Father and Son with an impassioned plea for the individual's “privilege to fashion his inner life for himself” (224).

Mill and Gosse enact in the narrative of their autobiographies the construction of an autonomous subjectivity at the expense of the social. The most revealing example of this repression of the social takes place in John Stuart Mill's Autobiography when he describes his famous “mental crisis.” Mill describes his “dull state of nerves” of the autumn of 1826, when in a depressed state of mind he started to question his own progress in life. He says:

In this frame of mind it occurred to me to put the question directly to myself: “suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and a happiness to you?” And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered “No!”

(94)

Mill here enacts what is essentially a monodrama. Mill is not usually given to theatrics, but in this one instance in the Autobiography he exhibits a flair for the dramatic by describing his mental state in terms of a dialogue. He places both the question he asks himself and the answer in quotation marks, as if quoting two separate voices. Consider the status of these voices, however. This is not an exchange between two separate individuals, but an example of what George Eliot termed “double consciousness,” the splitting of a single mind into two simultaneous consciousness. Mill here represents a form of subjectivity also described by Edmund Gosse in Father and Son in which the mind enacts a dialogue with itself:

I was always conscious of that innermost quality which I had learned to recognize in my earlier days in Islington, that existence of two in the depths who could speak to one another in inviolable secrecy.

(140)

In a striking phrase Gosse refers to this as his “individuality” so that while he acknowledges a split subjectivity he still refers to himself in terms of the unitary individual. This dual consciousness allows Gosse to create a secret space of individuality, immune from the pressures of the social. In Lukes's terms Gosse is here representing his autonomy as a product of his detachment from the social. Gosse's “dialogue of the mind with itself” makes him an autonomous individual.

Both Mill and Gosse enact dialogues which are in fact disguised monologues. Mill's “mental crisis,” for instance, takes place entirely within his own mind, with no reference to external social forces. The internal dynamics of his own self-questioning take the place of any imagined social context. Mill is completely alone according to his account.

Mill's isolation becomes even more apparent if we compare his autobiography to women's and working-class autobiographies of the Victorian period. In Margaret Oliphant's Autobiography, for example, one is continuously made aware of the presence of other people, especially her family. Her attitude toward the constraints laid upon her by the demands of her family is clearly ambivalent; she oscillates between appreciation of their presence and a nagging sense that her professional career has been hindered by their demands. Whatever her feelings, however, she could not escape the demands of family life. It was not possible for her to construct her identity as an autonomous individual in the same way as Mill:

I had no table even to myself, much less a room to work in, but sat at the corner of the family table with my writing-book, with everything going on as if I had been making a shirt instead of writing a book … and I took my share in the conversation, going on all the same with my story.

(Oliphant 23-24)

Oliphant gives an image here of writing as a social activity. When Oliphant does retire from the communal table, she is racked by guilt at being so anti-social (24). Oliphant, unlike Mill or Gosse, clearly does not feel she has the right to claim the “human being's privilege to fashion his inner life for himself,” but must always define herself in relation to others.

The contrast here in terms of gender can also be shown in class terms. The autobiography of George Mockford, an ordinary working man, contains the narrative of a “crisis” similar to Mill's.⁷ Mockford's was an overtly religious crisis, and at first glance has little in common with Mill's experience. However, Mill's reference to the similarity of his crisis to the Methodist “conviction of sin” suggests that he in fact was undergoing an intellectual version of the common Victorian crisis of faith in God.⁸ Both men were in fact undergoing a Victorian “rite of passage” in their crises that cut across class lines. Mill is deeply depressed by the idea of determinism, feeling in periods of dejection that:

The doctrine of what is called Philosophical Necessity weighed on my existence like an incubus. I felt as if I was scientifically proved to be the helpless slave of antecedent circumstances; as if my character and that of all others had been formed for us by agencies beyond our control, and was wholly out of our power.

(118-19)

As a reaction against his fear of determinism, which bespeaks his fear of death, Mill seizes on the opposing “doctrine of free will.” Although he couches the debate here in terms of science and philosophy, his “doctrines” have an obvious counterpart in the theological controversy over predestination and free will. Mill's “debate” in his Autobiography is represented as occurring entirely within his own consciousness. Unlike Mill, however, Mockford makes explicit the role other people play in his crisis:

I begun to discover the doctrine of predestination and election as revealed in the scriptures, but O the enmity I felt against it, and God on account of it! Where was the justice of God in it? I asked, as the doom of all was fixed, and that nothing man could do or would or could turn the mind of God … For months this deep distress continued, and my teacher, the clergyman, and other church people who visited me, pointed out how wrongly I was acting in trying to look, as they said, into those secrets that belonged to God.

(76-77)

Mockford becomes gravely ill as a result of his spiritual crisis. However, unlike Mill's ‘mental crisis’ Mockford's takes place in a recognizable community, and he reports conversations with other people and the effects others have on him. He eventually comes to terms with his crisis thanks to the Dissenters, a group his parents had taught him to despise. Where Mill converts to the doctrine of free will, Mockford finds salvation in a religious community.

Mockford's narrative, therefore, stresses interdependence, where Mill's stresses autonomy. Mill represents his crisis as one of completely isolated consciousness, reinforcing the myth of the autobiographical self as autonomous from the social. Mill denies community, where Mockford and other working-class autobiographers place themselves within a community.

As men, both Mockford and Mill were able to draw upon the form of spiritual autobiography, with its model of progress and redemption, and present themselves as spiritual “success stories.” As Linda Peterson has pointed out, this model became increasingly unavailable to women as they became inscribed within the Victorian ideology of the feminine as “selfless and self-effacing” (213). Women did not “compose retrospective accounts of spiritual or psychological progress” (212). This is evident in Oliphant's autobiography, as she feels compelled to apologize that it “is not likely that such family details would be of interest to the public” (122). Oliphant represents herself in her domestic role as mother, rather than as the protagonist in a narrative of spiritual progress.

It is precisely the kind of “family details” for which Oliphant apologizes that are missing from Mill's autobiography. The masculine subject in Victorian autobiography emphasizes the autonomy of self at the expense of family and community. The apparent dialectic in Victorian masculine autobiography between the inwardness of the autonomous individual and the social is a false one, in that the apparent opposition between the autonomous self and wider social responsibilities it presents disguises a privileging of self over other. Victorian male autobiographers adopt the monologic rather than dialogic mode. The use of repression in these texts apparently turns the interest of the author outward rather than inward, toward the social and public rather than the private. However, what occurs in fact an intensification of the individual's sense of “inwardness” at the expense of the “outer” world.

The “autobiographical fictions” of Arnold, Mill, and Gosse corroborate the model of masculine autobiography proposed by Shari Benstock in The Private Self:

What is reinforced … is the moi, the ego; what is pushed aside is the split in the subject … that language effects and cannot deny. Man enforces a “unity and identity across time” by “reconstituting” the ego as a bulwark against disintegration; that is, man denies the very effects of having internalized the alienating world order.

(15)

Benstock here is criticizing Georges Gusdorf's definition of autobiography in “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography,” but her critique applies equally well to Victorian masculine texts. Benstock is describing in Lacanian terms what I have referred to above as monologism, the repression of the social construction of subjectivity. Victorian male autobiographers construct a unitary and autonomous subjectivity as a way of denying both the “split” in their subjectivity, and the determining role of the social on their formation.

As Benstock's remarks make clear, much criticism of autobiography is still informed by gendered categories. Most criticism of autobiography as it is carried out today replicates the subjectivity I have described here within the context of Victorian autobiography. The fundamental problem with most studies of autobiography was diagnosed most acutely by Candace Lang in her essay “Autobiography in the Aftermath of Romanticism.” Lang pointed out that many studies of autobiography, among them James Olney's Metaphors of Self and William Spengemann's The Forms of Autobiography, relied upon Romantic conceptions of the unitary self. Like the Victorian autobiographies I have analyzed, these critical studies present the self as autonomous, unitary, and rational. They therefore replicate the Victorian denial of community, and betray a class and gender based model of the self.

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese in her introduction to the Autobiography of Pierre Samuel DuPont has criticized such an approach to autobiography in terms similar to my own. Fox-Genovese characterizes the dominant critical approach to autobiography in the following terms:

This view of autobiography emphasizes its character as the individual's interpretation of his or her self as an individual and without reference to determining external values or communities. Autobiography, in this sense, requires the disembedding of the individual from the surrounding social, cultural, and ideological terrain.

(39)

As Fox-Genovese's comments here underscore, much criticism of autobiography follows the same premises as its subject. Where nineteenth-century autobiographers attempted to define the self as autonomous and free from the constraining powers of the social and historical, literary critics operate under a similar assumption of the autonomy of the author. They thus denigrate community in the same manner as their subjects, and show a remarkable similarity in outlook to their subjects. As Regenia Gagnier has pointed out:

This is autobiography as the term is usually employed by literary critics, and it is also bourgeois subjectivity, the dominant ideology of the nineteenth century and at least the first half of the twentieth century.

(“Working Class Lifewriting” 42)

The contemporary masculine view of autobiography relies upon the notion that “essential human characteristics are properties of individuals independent of their material conditions and social environment” (Gagnier, “Working Class Lifewriting” 42). As Oliphant's and Mockford's autobiographies show, only authors of a certain social class and gender could or would represent themselves as “independent of their … social environment.”

Feminist criticism of autobiography avoids falling into the trap of the bourgeois denial of community. Benstock, for instance, presents a model of autobiography in which the writing subject occupies a “seam” or “space” that is neither inner nor outer, private nor public, but is the space of language. She avoids the dichotomies that I have shown in Victorian autobiography between “inwardness” and “community,” between the “private” and “public,” by insisting upon the divided subject's uneasy tenancy of language. Her theoretical approach opens up the possibility of seeing the writing subject as composed of wider social codes of class and gender.

However, even Benstock falls into the trap of dichotomizing the construction of subjectivity by turning the ideas of masculine versus feminine into another set of opposed binary terms. There is no reason to assume that the categories of class and gender are mutually exclusive. As Paul Smith has argued, subjectivity may be composed of multiple and conflicting ideologies. A similar criticism of the misuse of gender categories has been made by Domna Stanton in The Female Autograph. She speculates that a “binary opposition” of male/female replicated “the private/public, inner/outer dichotomies that mark our genderic system” (11).

This is an acute observation. My reading of Victorian working-class autobiographies has convinced me that the drive to autonomy, and the inscription of such binary oppositions as private/public and inner/outer within autobiography is a result of both gender and class. The case of George Mockford shows that “interdependence” can mark male working-class narratives as much as female narratives. The emphasis upon autonomy in Victorian autobiography, and the emphasis upon autonomy from the social in criticism of autobiography, is I believe as much a marker of class as gender.

Autobiography studies currently need a theoretical model that allows for the analysis of subjectivity as embedded in the social, rather than as “detached individualism.” One model that answers this need is the concept of habitus proposed by French social theorist Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu's theoretical model of habitus and his analysis of the discourses of class in such work as Distinction provide a useful theoretical model for the study of autobiography. Bourdieu's habitus is a concept that bridges the gap between what he describes as “the external determinisms of a mechanistic sociology” and the “pure interiority … of a spontaneous subjectivism” (Le Sens Pratique 92, my translation). Bourdieu's term is one, in other words, that rejects the extremes of a Marxist approach that would posit subjectivity as determined by a society's distribution of power, and an individualist ideology that would posit a free and autonomous self. Bourdieu's term self-consciously addresses the problem of how to study the interaction between subjectivity and wider social codes without subscribing to an excessively determinist or purely voluntarist model.

Habitus posits a “homogeneity” among subjects, a homogeneity that gives rise to the apparently external social facts of class and gender (Bourdieu, Le Sens Pratique 98). Habitus is therefore a “subjective but not individual system of internalized structures” (Le Sens Pratique 101) of which the subject position in the text is a variant. This is a non-individualist model of subjectivity that avoids subject/object dichotomies. It allows one to account both for individual subjectivity and for the patterns of class or gender that unite writing subjects, patterns that ultimately give rise to the appearance of a unified culture. This approach therefore unites subjectivity and culture.

Bourdieu's habitus acknowledges the subject's implication in language. Bourdieu in such works as Distinction analyzes the discourses of individual subjects to reconstruct the cultural terrain. Through the analytical model of habitus the critic can unite an anthropological and a literary approach to texts. Through habitus, literary critics can emphasize the way in which language constructs both the writing subject and the social world. As Gareth Stedman-Jones has pointed out, most social historians regard the “social” as “something outside and logically … prior to its articulation through language” (23). Literary critics using Bourdieu's habitus can approach the social as something constructed in language. This is a particularly fruitful approach when analyzing a text in terms of its class positions. By drawing upon Bourdieu's concept of habitus, those of us interested in autobiography can use autobiographical texts as ways of mapping out the social codes of class and gender as they are employed by the writing subject constructed in the text.

Notes

1. See for instance Derrida, Henriques, and Paul Smith for examples of the deconstruction of a unified self. For feminist approaches see Benstock, Sidonie Smith, and Stanton. For analyses of class in autobiography see Swindells (Victorian Writing and Working Women and “Liberating the Subject?”), Maynes, and Gagnier (“Working-class Lifewriting and Gender”). The most useful book-length study of gender and autobiography in the Victorian period is Peterson's Victorian Autobiography. See also her article, “Gender and Autobiographical Form.”

2. Paul Smith's Discerning the Subject is the most theoretically advanced book-length attempt to apply such concepts to autobiography. See also Gagnier (“Social Atoms”).

3. I am indirectly indebted to Harry Brod's seminal collection of essays in my remarks on the masculine.

4. For further discussion of Arnold's repression of his Romantic heritage see Riede and Gottfried.

5. The debate is undecidable ultimately because it rests upon an individualist ideology of individual creative genius that has nothing to do with how texts are actually produced. For a useful discussion of this debate see Loesberg (45-49).

6. For historical accounts of the effects of such socialization in the nineteenth-century, see Davidoff and Hall and Gagnier (“Working Class Lifewriting and Gender”).

7. In Burnett.

8. I have argued this point at greater length in “John Stuart Mill's ‘Mental Crisis’ as a ‘Rite of Passage.’”

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