Replicas and Originality: Picturing Agency in Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Victorian Manchester

Abstract

The modern ideal of originality reflects a distinctively modern predicament of agency. Originality implies a consummate participation in tradition even as it also implies, more obviously, a radical break from precedent. This divided emphasis mimes a divided self-conception in modern agents, who play out established roles and routines but also see identity as a scene of rethinking or even out-thinking such constraining protocols. With this parallel of originality and agency in mind, I speculate that we identify with the peculiar complexity on display in those acts or things called original. By identification, I mean something more than the casual association of oneself with a thing or idea; instead, I mean actually seeing in a thing or idea an image of oneself as an agent. And identifying with complexity, in turn, indicates something more than feeling an affinity for intricacy; instead, it involves identifying with something that seems to exceed any specific explanatory principle because it partakes of multiple and contradictory mandates. This essay's premises bear specifically on Western cultural currents since the eighteenth century at least, where thinking about one's originality might almost seem tantamount to thinking about oneself as a producer and agent. I argue that this self-reflection--this thinking about oneself--constitutes the interest of originality in the modern context, insofar as our self-image hinges on an investment in productive agency.