Varieties of self-realization: art, work, and the self in late Victorian England

Abstract

A wide body of scholarship agrees that the “aesthetic” writers of the late nineteenth century offered a new conception of the self that challenged Victorian norms and proclaimed a new theory of freedom. Murray Pittock for instance claims that Walter Pater “stresses the autonomy of the human spirit: that we create ourselves, and are the measure of our own value.”1 Kate Hext expands this view, contending that Pater sees autonomy as a fragile achievement, a delicate structure constantly threatened by material conditions inside and outside oneself.2 Of course this connects to a rich philosophical literature on the unstable but perhaps therefore free identities of the flaneur and the “dandy”; as Len Gutkin puts it, the nineteenth-century dandy was first and foremost “a figure of supreme autonomy.”3 To mention one famous example of such scholarship, Michel Foucault departs from Charles Baudelaire’s account of the “dandy”—who “makes of his body … a work of art”—to develop an account of the “aesthetics of existence.”4 And more recent research on women writers of the period has supplemented rather than refuted the view that new ideas about freedom and the self were central to the period’s literature; Talia Schaffer has shown how women writers challenged masculine assumptions about the structure of the work of art and developed creative fusions of new and old forms of femininity.5 Admittedly, in regarding the aesthetes this way, such criticism reflects the writers’ understanding of themselves, a point distilled well enough in Oscar Wilde’s claim that “Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.”