Autobiography

Abstract

The Victorian period was a golden age of English autobiography, inseparable from the great flowering of nonfictional prose and developments in the novel, particularly the bildungsroman. Many definitions of autobiography have been forged and debated: a working definition is that autobiography is a retrospective prose narrative by a real person about his or her individual life and personality. Autobiography is a distinct subgenre of life writing, distinguished from autobiographical writing (self-representation in letters, journals, travel writings, etc.). In Roy Pascal’s view, “In the autobiography proper, attention is focused on the self, in the memoir or reminiscence on others” (Pascal 1960, p. 5; cited under General Overviews). Romantic emphases on individualism and processes of self-discovery shifted in the Victorian period to a focus on personal development. There was a growing market for memoirs and autobiographical writings. Autobiography’s increasingly public status responded to calls for heroes in a time of spiritual crisis, yet its drive toward introspection and self-examination was also a symptom of that crisis. The typical narrative describes a process of personal transformation founded on belief in personal progress; the narrative goal is spiritual, aesthetic, intellectual, or vocational development. Yet the overdetermined progressive narrative, by which the life story works toward the achieved “I” writing the autobiography, threatens to fix the subject in a deathly stasis. There were different approaches in autobiographies written from socially marginal positions (working class, female, homosexual, colonial), with more overt awareness of social division and its effects on the self. Although Victorian autobiographers often adopted a confident persona, modern critics find much ambivalence, conflict, and self-doubt in self-representation. The interior self is at once sacred and dangerous; introspection creates self-division and alienation; the unified self is itself revealed as fiction. Since the birth of modern Victorian studies in the 1950s, literary scholars have found autobiography a rich resource for understanding relations between private and public, self and society, religion and science, women and men, children and parents, domestic and professional life, and between classes. Autobiography is also a litmus test for changing methodologies and interpretive approaches in Victorian studies.