Introduction

Abstract

Abstract Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation is a comparative analysis of subjectivity and value across social class and gender in nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Britain. I have attempted a cultural and material analysis of Victorian subjectivity-of what it was like to be a Victorian gentleman, lady, midwife, carpenter, mudlark, barrister, or nurse. In doing this I have simultaneously asked questions of value: What are the varieties of human desire? What is the nature of the society that can pro vide for such desires? And what kind of subjectivities have we today valued? Developing from my own disciplinary situation, the study has also evolved as a critique (an examination of the scope and limits) of the kind of subjectivity we have valued in imaginative literature. I view the completed project as a historical study of possible subjects, of human possibilities in antagonism and participation. My texts, or primary sources, are hundreds of autobiographical works by women and men from early nine teenth-through early twentieth-century Britain with a predominant focus upon the Victorian period. The “self-representation” of the title, then, refers literally to autobiography and more broadly to an axiology of the self: the systems of values, expectations, and constraints that come into play when one represents oneself to others in the concrete circumstances of daily life.