The Interior Difference: A Brief Genealogy of Dreams, 1650-1717

Abstract

HISTORIANS GENERALLY AGREE that the years between the publication of Miltor's Paradise Lost (1667) and Richardson's Clarissa (1747) saw the emergence of a new class of people. What is more, literary scholars observe something like the modern subject making its first appearance during the same period in a variety of written forms. These forms seemed to issue from a mind that was uniquely individuated and yet conspicuously ordinaryso ordinary, in fact, it could eventually be housed within a female body. The emergence of the modern mind, or consciousness, occurred swiftly, more swiftly than that of the class of people who eventually made it the source of value as well as writing. At least this conclusion may be drawn from the simple contrast of Milton's Eve to Richardson's Clarissa. In Paradise Lost, we might recall, Eve is put to sleep while the angel Michael makes Adam conscious of the impending history of humankind. Fully half of Richardson's novel, on the other hand, is composed of his heroine's consciousness as represented in her letters. And organizing that consciousness is a form of sexual warfare that shapes emotional life and not the grander movements of history. By giving Clarissa no power other than the power to give voice to her feelings and so to author her own consciousness, Richardson produces his most powerful testimony to the fact that consciousness is what we really are. Literary historians account for the popularity of fiction exalting such an individual by claiming that it served the interests of the new middle classes. But exactly how it did so and why it should find exemplary embodiment in a woman like Clarissa still remains something of a mystery. We will argue that this first made its appearance when a number of authors suddenly saw fit to designate an interior domain of self as separate and apart from everything else that was, by definition, not such a self. While this division of the semiotic universe did not, in itself, produce the gendered who presides full-blown over the Richardsonian text, we think the production of exclusive subject and object worlds was indeed the masterstroke of our culture. It made the difference on which all future distinctions between and other would be based-distinctions of class, gender, race, region, and ethnicity. In showing how this emerged