Andrea K. Henderson. Romantic Identities: Varieties of Subjectivity, 1774-1830.(Book Review)

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-MAR-03

Bookmark this article Print this article Link to this article Email this article Digg It! Add to del.icio.us RSS

COPYRIGHT 2003 Boston University

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. xiii+ 198.

Andrea Henderson's Romantic Identities authoritatively unsettles the depth model of romantic interiority at the same time that it evokes this model's uncanny half-life. Henderson opens with a passage from that "deepest" of romantic texts, The Prelude, to then examine romanticism's privileging of interiority as part of an ideological powerplay now regularly critiqued in romantic studies. Part of this critique, to which Henderson contributes powerfully, is to recover how the romantics themselves begin this process of self-(de-)idealization. Thus her aim is "to historicize Romantic subjectivity ... not by linking [its] model of psychological depth to its historical context but by exploring and contextualizing other, competing models of the self that were produced during the period" (2), and so to "trace their complex relations to the depth model and to other social constructs" (4). That the depth model was one of several alternate forms of subjectivity anticipates romanticism's own immanent poststructuralism. But Henderson cannily "appl[ies] the hermeneutics of suspicion to the binary structure of the subjectivity debate itself" (3) by reading an ambivalence between "essentialism" and "construction" archaeologically back to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Accordingly, hers is an episodic rather than teleological account of romanticism's shifting relationship to its construction of its own interiority. In Henderson's study economics, drama, medicine, physiology, psychology, poetry, moral philosophy, embryology, the novel, political economy, and the gothic each contribute to performances of the interior in what amounts to a critical dramatization of the romantic subject as both a productive and an ambivalent multiple personality.

Henderson's approach is materialist and feminist (Lukacs, Irigiray, Bataille, Kristeva, Negri, and Marx are significant presences). Using romantic texts to historicize contemporary thought rather than the other way around, she reads the emerging social valencies of her romantic subject(s) at the intersection of gender and genre and in frequently startling interdisciplinary ways. The book's provocative first chapter examines eighteenth-century embryology, divided between earlier mechanistic or "preformationist" and later organicist or "epigenecist" accounts of fetal development. These provide the scientific and medical "labour" that produces a model of self-generating, autonomous selfhood in romantic literature, particularly its poetry. As Henderson states, "Early...

Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.