In Quest of the Self (Masquerade and Travel in the Eighteenth-Century Novel: Fielding, Smollett, Sterne) by Jacob Lipski

Abstract

Reviewed by: In Quest of the Self (Masquerade and Travel in the Eighteenth-Century Novel: Fielding, Smollett, Sterne) by Jacob Lipski Melanie Holm Jacob Lipski. In Quest of the Self (Masquerade and Travel in the Eighteenth-Century Novel: Fielding, Smollett, Sterne). Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014. Pp. 223. € 48; $67. For Heraclitus, it was "not possible to step twice into the same river . . . or to come into contact twice with a mortal being in the same state." Such considerations of the individual as a being always in flux reemerge in the eighteenth century as one of many strategies for articulating new concerns about the nature of the self and individual identity. Hume, for instance, reprises the fluvial metaphor to argue that personal identity is a fiction that we impose on our ever-flowing impressions: much as "a river consists in the motion and change of parts," though shifting content "hinders not the river from continuing the same during several ages," neither is our belief that it is the selfsame river hindered nor that we are consistent selves capable of such persisting beliefs. The "masquerade" also arises as a complementary metaphor within our period, as writers like Terry Castle have shown, adding complexity to questions of fiction and the self by focusing less on internal fluidity than on external mutability. With differing emphases on the external and internal, a number of recent scholars have offered models that inquire into the relationship between the eighteenth-century self and its fictions, among whom Michael McKeon, Deidre Lynch, Charles Taylor, Dror Wahrman, and Nancy Armstrong are the most often invoked. But models, however robust, are not necessarily truths, particular or universal, and especially not when it comes to the delicate matter of how persons identify and define their "selves." It is in this slippage between the metaphoric modeling and the materials they claim to represent that my reservations about Mr. Lipski's work begin to emerge. He discusses eighteenth-century selves and fiction by placing complete trust in Wahrman's historical model of the masquerade in his formulation of the ancien régime of identity, and then applying this metaphor alongside yet another metaphor of self-discovery, the "journey," to literary characters. For Wahrman, we recall, the eighteenth-century English experienced a shift in how they linked self and identity: around 1780, a "new" modern regime conceived of identity as personal, interiorized, and linked with an authentic self, while the previous ancien régime regarded identity as entirely mutable, external, and dispensable. Mr. Lipski positions Fielding and Sterne as bookends of this ancien régime as he develops a historical depiction of the quest for the self in novels: Fielding plays the part of reactionary or precursor to the regime; Smollett is its picaresque representative; and Sterne dramatizes the unraveling of the ancien régime as it gives way to the modern. As this list of authors suggests, the selves that Mr. Lipski regards are decidedly male, with female authors pushed to the margins and female characters entering into his discussion as tools for articulating the development of the male [End Page 69] protagonist. This is in part the result of the authors he chooses, but also of his choice to focus on Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones, for example, but not Amelia, as well as the literary criteria for the "quest of the self" he lays out early in his argument. Mr. Lipski focuses on the tension between a character's participation in "the masquerade of the world" and a "struggle to determine who they really are." While this may sound like a broad outline of any number of works by women novelists in the century (Burney's Evelina particularly comes to mind), Mr. Lipski argues that the "quest for identity, inherent in the masquerade metaphor, finds its most accurate realization, as it always has, in the narrative of the road. Hence the journey, understood literally and metaphorically, does not serve as an arbitrary category narrowing the scope of the book but principally as a paradigm akin to the masquerade in its concern with identity." His approach to studying identity in novels, therefore, "is based on the conviction that both of these two...