Toward Walden Pond: The American Voice in Autobiography

Abstract

The personal narrative casts a longer shadow in America than elsewhere. Its evolution reveals many of the contradictions and paradoxes that are pervasive in American society. On the one hand, American autobiographers have approached experience from an entirely private perspective and have celebrated the power of individualism. They have confronted the implications of a literary form which, as de Tocqueville says about democracy itself, throws man "back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to cofine him entirely within the private solitude of his own heart."1 On the other hand, they have used autobiography as a way to provide an ideal example for society. In so doing they have run the risk of losing the uniqueness of per- sonality in the search for a universal model, much as democratic society risks the "tyranny of the majority." The conflict between the two approaches to autobiography recapitulates and feeds upon the corresponding conflict in the national life. As a result, autobiography has been the most consistently popular American literary form from the seventeenth century to the present. Such diverse figures as Mary Rowlandson, Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglass, P. T. Barnum, Henry Adams, Gertrude Stein, and Norman Mailer became "best sellers" in their own times because they addressed the divided sensibility of the country even when they wrote most openly of themselves.