Betraying Ourselves: Forms of Self-Representation in Early Modern English Texts. (Reviews).

Henk Dragstra, Sheila Ottway and Helen Wilcox, eds., Betraying Ourselves: Forms of Self-Representation in Early Modern English Texts

New York: Palgrave/St. Martin's, 2000. x + 266 pp. $49.95. ISBN: 0-312-23149-0.

The editors of this collection, one of the titles in the Early Modern Literature in History series from the University of Reading, have the goal of addressing some of the critical issues that have emerged in the study of early modern life-writing. These range from factual matters regarding what types of individuals attempted self-representations to formal inquiries into the various genres of self-representation in the period, to the fundamental problem of deciding what the term "self" might mean to early modern writers and readers. The essays proper are framed by a "prologue" -- an essay on Medieval literary self-consciousness as exemplified in Gower's Confessio amantis -- and an "epilogue" that discovers some common themes of self-hood and suffering in texts produced by seventeenth-century Quakers and a twentieth-century victim of a Shi'ite militia kidnapping. The idea, then, is to suggest both the historical situatedness of early modern self-representations and possible connections to those of earlier and l ater periods. The eleven essays between these bookends are arranged chronologically and explore texts created by men and women ranging from the famous to the anonymous and representing a broad spectrum of English society in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

In their introduction, the editors present the controlling thesis for the collection, which also provides its title. Early modern representations of the self, they argue, must not be limited to what is now recognized as a literary genre of autobiography. Rather, self-representation in this period is frequently an act of self-betrayal embedded in a text designed to perform other tasks. Renaissance scholars must be cognizant of a wide range of genres and traditions that empowered or, just as often, "betrayed" early modern writers into self-representation. The editors' discussion of the many traditional, formal, and institutional constraints upon the fashioning of early modern identity would seem to align their project with new historicist skepticism regarding the concept and experience of selfhood in the Renaissance. At the same time, the notion of "betraying our selves" appears to gesture in the direction of more recent critiques of new historicism. Thus, I was surprised by the limited engagement of contributo rs with the rich vein of contemporary scholarship on the early modern self. Readers interested in the question of how the collection's various approaches to self-representation support or modify current thinking on selfhood in the period will have to do that work themselves. Such contextualization might have helped to sharpen the project's focus as a book. The very plethora of forms of self-representation discussed, a feature that could be regarded as a strength, leaves the reader at something of a loss to determine just what in the end binds the individual readings together. I recognize that the editors had the goal of complicating matters; by the same token, I cannot say that I came away from reading these essays with a clearer or enhanced understanding of self-representation in the Renaissance. The trope of "betrayal" helps me see what early modern "autobiography" is not, but it does not go very far towards enlightening me as to what it is.

The many versions of self-representation covered in the volume include the poetic personae of writers as different as John Cower and Pietro Aretino; rhetorical self-dramatizations of John Bale and Francis Bacon; the "autobiographical effect" of poetic miscellanies; familial allusion and allegory in Mary Wroth's drama and prose romance; personal narratives, memoirs, diaries, and defenses by seventeenth-century men and women; even broadside "execution" ballads. Thus, readers from a wide range of research interests will likely find something of relevance in the volume. Three of the stronger essays treat the topic of authorial self-presentation. I appreciated Simon Meecham-Jones' nuanced study of self-reflection in the Confessio as a qualification of commonplace skepticism about selfhood and authorship in Medieval literature. Elizabeth Heale draws on recent scholarship of manuscript and print cultures to argue persuasively that authored miscellanies of the mid-sixteenth century "constructed a new kind of autobiog raphical voice, telling a new and significantly different narrative of social aspiration and threatening failure" (66). And,, in the liveliest essay of the collection, Cedric Brown introduces us to Leonard Wheat-croft, "The Laureate of Ashover," whose "blurring of kinds and ... mixture of personal record and social display feeds precisely into the divided attitudes of a late-twentieth century scholarly readership" (133). In quite a different rendering of private and public self-fashioning, Marion Wynne-Davies carefully leads the reader through Mary Wroth's multi-layered fictionalizations of the Sidney family in Love's Victory and Urania; the essay culminates in a fascinating reading of "the Sidneian ideology of place" in Urania I, focused on the famous Mount of the Penshurst estate. Conflicts between public and private selves are examined from the perspective of gender in Sheila Otway's study of the self-vindicating autobiographies of Lady Anne Halkett and Colonel Joseph Bampfield, romantically entwined suppo rters of the Royalist cause in the mid-seventeenth century. In an essay that perhaps expands the definition of autobiography to the breaking point, Heng Dragstra reads "autobiographical" execution ballads to argue that, for the semi-literate masses of seventeenth-century London, "composing your autobiography would have been like writing your own death warrant" (179). Beyond this witticism lies the important, underexplored territory of il- and semi-literate understandings of selfhood in early modern England.

Elspeth Graham's "Epilogue: The Suffering of the Self" is one of the few essays in the collection to bring a specific theoretical perspective to bear on a topic. Her work with Kristeva's idea of the abject helpfully informs and enlarges her discussion of the Quaker subject and, more particularly, the Quaker Katherine Evans' account of her fasting in prison. The essay provides a strong conclusion for the volume, offering a provocative new way of thinking about prison-writing, which is such an important category of seventeenth-century life writing, while also theorizing a relationship between suffering and selfhood with potentially broad significance for scholarship across historical periods.