Presentation script, SCSECS 2019 conference, Dallas, 23 Feb: “Rise of the Female Self: Frances Burney’s Journal, Letter, and Novel Writing as Technologies of Self/care”
Download a copy of the slides here.
Slide 1:
This project is a reduced version of a seminar paper during a class on a transhistorical approach to Foucault’s technologies of the self, that I am planning to expand, refine and improve into a dissertation chapter in the next couple of years.
Slide 2:
This presentation is in two parts: first, we will orient ourselves in Foucault’s theory and how it has typically been applied. Then, we will move into the ways in which Burney navigates what Foucault calls the “plateau on which I find myself” (TOTS part II).
As you can see, I am citing Technologies of the Self with the fun abbreviation of TOTS throughout this presentation.
Slide 3:
Part 1: In which Foucault et al articulate technologies based on the (male) self.
Slide 4:
Here is the TOTS book cover, Foucault’s late-in-life theory which he never finished before his death. Sadly, we do not know where this theory would have taken him, but it has served as a valuable jumping-off point for scholars (interestingly and often, I have noticed, in sports rhetoric journals).
Slide 5:
This crazy picture, I would like us to bear in mind as it relates to the perpetuating nature of the “self” and the frames in which “we” find “it.” It always reminds me of Pink Floyd’s album cover for Echoes. I have not looked into how this image might be “mapped” on to Burney and her self-portraits and written portraiture to be examined in this project, but it would be an interesting activity, I dare say.
Slide 6:
“As a context, we must understand that there are four major types of these ‘technologies,’ each a matrix of practical reason,” Foucault writes:
- OF PRODUCTION, which permit us to produce, transform, or manipulate things
- OF SIGN SYSTEMS, which permit us to use signs, meanings, symbols, or signification
- OF POWER, which determine the conduct of individuals and submit them to certain ends or domination, an objectivizing of the subject
- OF THE SELF, which permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality (TOTS 18).
Slide 7:
“This contact between the technologies of domination of others and those of the self I call governmentality” (TOTS 19).
“I am more and more interested in the interaction between oneself and others and in the technologies of individual domination, the history of how an individual acts upon himself, in the technology of self” (TOTS 19).
Slide 8:
This gets us prepped for thinking about Burney’s diary-writing within the historical context/framework that Foucault is working with. He writes that “Diary writing comes later” during the “Christian Era and focuses on the notion of the struggle of the soul” (think: Augustine’s Confessions).
Slide 9:
Greek and Roman periods …
Slide 10:
Self-technologies for the Early Christian monk (eerily applicable to the much-later eighteenth-century women).
Slide 11:
From “the eighteenth century to the present” people stopped “renouncing” the self after it was constructed. This is a facet of the TOTS that I have omitted from this portion of my paper due to time constraints.
Slide 12:
This places further into context why in the eighteenth century this was necessary to stop renouncing the self but to instead, enlarge it. This applies to males, not females, I argue, as males expanded onto/into female’s interiority and the female sense of self essentially struggled against this colonization and implosion which might result if not properly and surreptitiously guarded against. I address this in another paper I wrote regarding Evelina and the eighteenth-century marriage market.
***
Our (western) modern sense of selfhood, and thus self-care, has been widely presented in the field of literary/cultural studies as having emerged in the eighteenth century. However, these and other arguments/perspectives, perpetually focusing on male self-expansion in male-authored and dominated novels have not adequately addressed the rise of the female self. The emergence of the modern sense of self in the eighteenth century has always been framed by patriarchal demands and male liberalism/independence.
Selfhood for women has been denied the individuality that men’s selfhood, in the expanding colonial/economic British Empire, began to afford. To that end, this paper, in advancing authorship of Frances Burney’s diaries as a form of self-care, will focus on a woman’s perspective, for whom selfhood, and thus self-care, worked differently than did men’s. Specifically in this project, I am looking at Michel Foucault’s (male-dominated and dominating) theory of self-governance presented in Technologies of the Self in order to reveal the little-recognized connections between female self-authorship and -care. Foucault defines technologies of the self as “techniques which permit individuals to effect, by their own means, a certain number of operations on their own bodies, on their own souls, on their own thoughts, on their own conduct, and this in a manner so as to transform themselves, modify themselves, and to attain a certain state of perfection, of happiness, of purity, of supernatural power, and so on” (Hermeneutics 203).
This unification of the self, and self-realization through techniques, I argue, can be seen in the corollary behaviors of repetition through writing in eighteenth-century female practices of self-care. Focusing on Evelina in relation to Burney’s diaries, which serve to prepare her for the intellectual labor (and, side note: marriage) markets, this paper will show that by recording “real-life” experiences, Burney participated in–yet despite excruciating efforts, was never fully in control of–her own self-definition. By reading and writing, women could work out who they defined themselves to be and practice operating on the various marketplaces interiorly, in order to avoid ruinous mistakes in public. Burney’s coming out simultaneously in her twenties as an object on the marriage and writing/intellectual labor markets, as Julie Park has shown in her article on Burney and the “pains and pleasures of coming out,” placed Burney in a double bind, creating her own economic worth, while setting herself up as an object of attraction to increase and maintain her cultural, and therefore economic, status for herself and for her famous family/name. I argue that “technologies of the self,” as deployed for and by women such as Burney, map onto the literal technology of the eighteenth century: specifically in writing. Burney composed and participated in multiple writing technologies, to include fiction and nonfiction, which can show interesting connections between these technologies and their implications for her and by extension other female authors.
Foucault writes that “as there are different forms of care, there are different forms of self” (“Technologies” I). He writes, “The soul cannot know itself except by looking at itself in a similar element, a mirror” (“Technologies” I). So, let’s look at what Burney’s journals are decidedly not doing, which male scholars have argued that male writers and their male characters have, and which constitute the development of our modern sense of self.
It is interesting to note that within Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, the collection of essays published after Foucault’s death, all of the essays are written (1) by men and (2) about male literary figures. Foucault’s “Technologies of the Self” focus on Marcus Aurelius, Seneca and other historical male figures, while the other essays focus on Hamlet, Rousseau, Freud, Marx, and so on. Stephen Greenblatt’s seminal work, Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare, as the title suggests, uses Foucault’s theory to focus on how the “self” perpetuated only for males, and from his male perspective. This glaring oversight of any semblance of a female perspective in these seminal works on the self–whether it be in the form of a female essayist featured/published in the work, or in an essay’s examining a female author or character–is quite striking. In Technologies of the Self, Rothwell mentions Ophelia only as she reflects Hamlet’s misogyny; Greenblatt mentions Queen Elizabeth only as she reflects the dramatic persona of her father Henry VIII; Huck Gutman mentions Rousseau’s infamous “mamma,” of course to reflect Jean-Jacques’ self-development in the form of his prior self that he wishes to exorcise/renounce by bringing to the light.
“If his story has relevance to the reader,” Huck Gutman writes in the Technologies of the Self compilation of essays from Foucault’s lecture series, “it is not because we are all reflections of Rousseau but rather because we are all unique, all selves with our individual histories and idiosyncratic impressions” (Technologies 100). “For Rousseau, the self is the subject of discourse. His aim is not to glorify God but to provide the truth about himself by revealing himself in all his completeness to the reader’s gaze” (Technologies 104).
Not so for Burney. It would appear, on first reading Burney’s journals, that she plans on engaging in this form, this technology, of confession. She opens up her Early Diaries as follows: “To have some account of my thoughts, manners, acquaintance and actions, when the Hour arrives at which time is more nimble than memory, is the reason which induces me to keep a Journal: a Journal in which I must confess my every thought, must open my whole Heart!” (1. Journal 27 March 1768). However, though Burney and Rousseau both using the technology of writing as a form of self-care, Rousseau’s is decidedly confessional (expanding on St. Augustine’s Confessions to glorify himself, while Augustine seeks to glorify God through renouncing the self), while Burney’s diaries are an exercise in storytelling, characterization and scene-setting–a precursor to and practice for her public writing.
Slide 13:
Part 2: In which Burney navigates the rocky dominant discourse that was the “plateau on which [she] shall find [her] identity” (TOTS part II).
One of the most famous critics who illustrates this attitude towards Burney is none other than John Thorpe of Northanger Abbey, Austen’s wonderful defense of Burney and other novelists. Thorpe tells Catherine:
I was thinking of that other stupid book, written by that woman they make such a fuss about, she who married the French emigrant.” / “I suppose you mean Camilla?” / “Yes, that’s the book; such unnatural stuff! An old man playing at see-saw, I took up the first volume once and looked it over, but I soon found it would not do; indeed I guessed what sort of stuff it must be before I saw it: as soon as I heard she had married an emigrant, I was sure I should never be able to get through it (Austen ch. 7).
Slide 14:
Switching to a non-fictional critic, let us examine the editors of the Christian published London paper, The Church Quarterly Review, circa 1891: “It is more than a century since the world was carried by storm through the appearance of Evelina,” the editors write in a review of Frances Burney’s Early Diaries, when they were made public for the first time. The review takes a negative turn, pondering what took so long for someone to finally publish these Early diaries. Their answer: “Possibly the memory of Dr. Burney’s Memoirs and Madame d’Arblay’s later diaries cast a shadow over the prospects of any further production from the pen of Frances Burney which was dark enough to deter the most enterprising publisher.”
It is clear that the editors value the release of Burney’s Early Diaries not out of an interest in her life specifically, but for what her perspective can offer, to shed light on “the knowledge of English life in the eighteenth century” in general. They write, “The domestic interior painted in such vivid colors by Frances Burney’s pen presents a variety of elements rarely seen in combination in the same class of life.”
Burney’s self is consistently divided by the public into young/good/fun “Fanny Burney” and old/French/a drag “Madame d’Arblay.” Placing some fragments of a person into a container of one’s own “likes,” another, older one into one’s bin of “dislikes” constitutes an act of power over that other. Burney’s public-divided self becomes then an object to curate into one’s self presentation. This habit was of course emerging during the eighteenth century, according to numerous scholars, and oscillating between subjecthood and objecthood was especially tricky to navigate for women, more so for those in the public sphere such as Burney.
Slide 15:
JOURNAL #8: In which Burney engages in self-care via the act of writing.
Slide 16:
O how I hate this vile custom which obliges us to make slaves of ourselves! To sell the most precious property we boast, our Time;—and to sacrifice it to every prattling impertinent who causes to demand it!—yet those who shall pretend to defy this irksome confinement of our happiness [emphasis mine], must stand accused of incivility,—breach of manners—love of originality,—and what not—…
In this excerpt, Burney starts her journal-writing in a resentful mood, articulating the disdain she feels for people who deprive her of agency to decide how she spends time. After repetitive writing and airing of grievances/feeling, this enables her to recognize she is “in no excellent mood” and can then take action–in the form of a walk, then in taking up her pen again–to alleviate it.
Slide 17:
For why should we not be permitted to be masters of our Time?…
Slide 18:
… I feel myself in no excellent mood—I will walk out and give my spirits another turn, and then resume my pen.
Slide 19:
JOURNAL #3: In which Burney celebrates the inexpressible “pleasure of writing down my thoughts.”
Slide 20:
I cannot express the pleasure I have in writing down my thoughts, at the very moment…
Burney’s diary-writing, for approximately four months between March and June 1768, have served as a technology for creating/instilling what Burney articulates as “happiness” or at least “happy hours” spent, as recorded in this excerpt.
Slide 21:
JOURNAL #4: In which the inexpressible “pleasure of writing down my thoughts” is threatened with violence/censorship, annihilation.
But this technology of self-care that generates “pleasure” and “delight” in regard to her past–the ability to recollect “all the happy Hours I spend with particular Friends and Favorites”–her present–”in writing down my thoughts, at the very moment”–and “a thousand other things in future” is not free. It entails a cost, and in others’ opinions, her internal reflections made external on paper have the potential to carry (socially) ruinous consequences, if exposed. In this way, Burney is not crafting a self for public receipt so much as participating in an action for her own good, her own self-care, at the risk of others’ judgement.
Slide 22:
This self-care was to be regulated and she was at-risk for her father’s refusing her the ability to write in her journal, let alone publish novels (which she famously hid from him until she knew Evelina was a critical success). One month after she writes of the pleasure generated by her journal-writing, the endeavor is nearly put to a halt when she mistakenly leaves her journal on a piano and her father discovers it. The following dialogue with their servant, Miss Young, articulates these risks that the elder fears and the youth defends/mitigates:
I have been having a long conversation with Miss Young on journals. She has very seriously and earnestly advised me to give mine up—heigho-ho! Do you think I can bring myself to oblige her? What she says has great weight with me; but, indeed, I should be very loath to quite give my poor friend up. She says that it is the most dangerous employment young persons can have—it makes them often record things which ought not to be recorded, but instantly forgot. I told her, that as my Journal was solely for my own perusal, nobody could in justice, or even in sense, be angry or displeased at my writing any thing.
Slide 23:
… additional, humorous dialogue with Miss Young …
Slide 24:
‘Why then, they must take it for their pains. It was not wrote for them, but me, and I cannot see any harm in writing to myself.’
‘…—depend upon it, Fanny, ‘tis the most dangerous employment you can have. Suppose now, for example, your favorite wish were granted, and you were to fall in love, and then the object of your passion were to get sight of some part which related to himself?’
Slide 25:
‘Dear Miss Young!—But I’m sure, by your earnestness, that you think worse of my poor Journal than it deserves.’
In this dialogue, Burney again refers to her journal as her “friend” and personifies it by calling it her “poor journal”:
(She later, in a letter to her father when he banned her from publishing/staging her finished play, The Witlings, refers to “my poor witlings”). The debate concludes in that Burney would show her “some part of what I had wrote she should be a better judge, and would then give me her best advice whether to proceed or not.”
Slide 26:
JOURNAL #1: In which Burney intuits the Aforementioned danger involved in “writing down my thoughts.”
Slide 27:
But a thing of this kind ought to be addressed to somebody—I must imagine myself to be talking—talking to the most intimate of friends—to one in whom I should take delight in confiding, and feel remorse in concealment: but who must this friend be?—to make choice of one to whom I can but half rely, would be to frustrate entirely the intention of my plan. The only one I could wholly, totally confide in, lives in the same House with me, and not only never has, but never will, leave me one secret to tell her. To whom, then must I dedicate my wonderful, surprising and interesting adventures?—to whom dare I reveal my private opinion of my nearest Relations? The secret thoughts of my dearest friends? My hopes, fears, reflections and dislikes—Nobody! (1. Journal 27 March 1768).
Slide 28:
To Nobody, then, will I write my Journal! Since to Nobody can I be wholly unreserved—to Nobody can I reveal every thought, every wish of my Heart, with the most unlimited confidence, the most unremitting sincerity to the end of my Life! For what chance, what accident can end my connections with Nobody No secret can I conceal from No-body, and to No-body can I be ever unreserved. Disagreement cannot stop our affection, Time itself has no power to end our friendship. The love, the esteem I entertain for Nobody, No-body’s self [emphasis mine] has not power to destroy. …
As this smart self-dialogue shows, while Rousseau has the freedom to publish his Confessions for public reception/revelation and thus to participate in the Christian technology of public confession that Foucault describes, Burney addresses her “hopes, fears, reflections and dislikes” to “Nobody.” Burney, who kept family secrets and did not even write about them in her diaries (such as one brother’s expulsion from Oxford, another’s elopement) is decidedly not participating in the shame-relief type of confessional technology that Rousseau exemplifies. She shifts the journal from a heart-opening activity to a container for: her “wonderful, surprising and interesting adventures,” her “private opinion of [her] nearest Relations,” and the “secret thoughts of [her] dearest friends.”
Slide 29:
I will suppose you, then, to be my best friend; … My dearest companion—and a romantic Girl, for mere oddity may perhaps be more sincere—more tender—than if you were a friend in propria personae—in as much as imagination often exceeds reality. In your Breast my errors may create pity without exciting contempt; may raise your compassion, without eradicating your love.
While the emergent, liberal male self contemporaneous to Burney’s, such as Rousseau, sought to examine internal selves as though they were distinct and separate objects (and worthy subjects), Burney imagines a female persona already negated; “nobody” is her best friend (which sounds somewhat sad).
Slide 30:
From this moment, then, my dear Girl—but why, permit me to ask, must a female be made Nobody? Ah! My dear, what were this world good for, were Nobody a female? (1. Journal 27 March 1768).
In this passage, Burney intends that her Diaries serve also as a space to describe her “errors.” She articulates what self-care might start to look like: In a safe place, where “nobody’s self can destroy,” the caring self–aka nobody–operates as a friend who would feel “pity” and “compassion” and not “contempt” or eradication of “love” due to judgment of her and her “errors.” This imagined “dearest companion” would be “more sincere–more tender” than a “friend in properia personae.” Further, and perhaps most important, this imagined, caring friend that assists in Burney’s self-care, is female.
