Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Introduction: A Genealogy of Suicide
- 1 Suicide and Spectrality in Eliza Haywood's Amatory Fiction
- 2 Mors Voluntaria: Clarissa and the Agency of Martyrdom
- 3 English Maladies and Material Culture at Mid-Century
- 4 The Pathology of Sentiment: Politics, Sacrifice and Wertherism in the English Novel of Sensibility
- 5 ‘The Death of Reason’: Vitalism, Transnational Identity and Frances Burney
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - Suicide and Spectrality in Eliza Haywood's Amatory Fiction
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Introduction: A Genealogy of Suicide
- 1 Suicide and Spectrality in Eliza Haywood's Amatory Fiction
- 2 Mors Voluntaria: Clarissa and the Agency of Martyrdom
- 3 English Maladies and Material Culture at Mid-Century
- 4 The Pathology of Sentiment: Politics, Sacrifice and Wertherism in the English Novel of Sensibility
- 5 ‘The Death of Reason’: Vitalism, Transnational Identity and Frances Burney
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
To live an entirely private life means above all to be deprived of things essential to a truly human life: to be deprived of the reality that comes from being seen and heard by others, to be deprived of an ‘objective’ relationship with them that comes from being related to and separated from them through the intermediary of a common world of things, to be deprived of the possibility of achieving something more permanent than life itself.
In Hannah Arendt's view, an entirely private identity is inherently phantasmatic, lacking empirically verifiable and tangible reality, without permanence and without a future. By the same token, a ‘life spent entirely in public, in the presence of others, becomes, as we should say, shallow. While it retains visibility, it loses the quality of rising into sight from some darker ground which must remain hidden if it is not to lose its depth in a very real, non-subjective sense’. For Arendt, both the public and the private are indispensable aspects of the human condition; while the public is artificial and constructed, it is nonetheless the arena in which one emerges fully realized as a citizen, with all the rights and responsibilities integral to this identity. The eighteenth century, described by Adam Ferguson in his History of Civil Society (1767) as ‘the age of separations’, saw a sharpening of the division with the formation of a public sphere, although as Michael McKeon writes, this distinction clearly ‘antedate[s] Ferguson's age by many centuries’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Dying to be EnglishSuicide Narratives and National Identity, 1721–1814, pp. 23 - 52Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014