Through a Glass Darkly: Reflections on Personal Identity in Early America

Through a Glass Darkly: Reflections on Personal Identity in Early America. Edited by Ronald Hoffman, Mechal Sobel, and Fredrika J. Teute. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Pp. xii, 464. Illustrations. Cloth, $49.95; paper, $19.95.) "So, say that final belief/Must be in a fiction," the poet Wallace Stevens wrote in his "Asides on the Oboe" ( 1942). "It is time to choose." Of all the fictions we have chosen to give cohesion to human lives in the modern era, the notion of unified selfhood is one of the most pervasive. We are, most of us believe, substantial and more or less independent agents: in part self determined, in part comprised of genetic inheritance, in part the product of cultural mores and usages. Since the Enlightenment, personhood and unique individuality have stood as hallmarks of humanity in the Western tradition. Through revolutions and reform movements, the inhabitants of an ever-widening variety of social positions and categories (I hesitate to say "persons") claimed the right to selfhood as their own. We act in everyday circumstances as though selves really do exist. We navigate the basic issues of life thinking them anything but a fiction. Today, we inhabit a scholarly universe that tells us to be skeptical of any such claims. Selves-persons as they exist in any meaningful sense-are, in the current postmodernist mode, discursive constructions. Alternatively, we are cultural creations, our very capabilities and sensibilities largely predetermined by the categories of meaning available to us. Be wary of any attempt to locate identity within the bounds of an individual himself (or herself), we are told. To do otherwise is to commit the sin of essentialism: we fail to know the contingency of our very selves. This collection of sixteen essays, published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, taken together makes a persuasive case that the processes through which selves constructed identities in early America were varied, though in large part determined by social positioning, race, and gender. Thomasine Hall, an individual in seventeenth-century Virginia who possessed unusual physical attributes, discovers that others do not accommodate well to her personal choice to make or unmake gender identity at will. Andrew Montour, part-Indian and part-French, tries to construct almost singlehandedly an identity category that bridges two cultures. In so doing, he becomes a threatening enigma to others and an enraged and frustrated isolato. Adriaen Janse van Ilpendam finds his life pulled out from under him by changes of fortune and government in seventeenth-century Albany. In perplexity and despair he chooses death by his own hand rather than life in a new identity environment. These essays make the stakes of identity-wrestling high and the outcomes generally somber. The single notable exception to this overriding tone of doom and gloom occurs in Laurel Thacher Ulrich's essay on "Hannah Barnard's Cupboard," a forceful assertion of the ability of persons to leave marks on the world despite restrictions on their social agency. Greg Dening, the historical anthropologist who provides keynote essays at the head of each section, directs us to see identity constructed as a mirror image of others used as points of reference. We locate ourselves in social contexts, tell stories about ourselves, compare ourselves to others. One might expect in a volume such as this one some self-reflective discussion on the entanglements inherent in constructing stories about stories about selves. How can we talk authoritatively about self construction in the past when anything we may say about it is at least as redolent of ourselves as of the "realities" of lived lives? Curiously, neither the authors of these essays nor Dening choose to ask the obvious. By and large, the historians writing here (and they are no different from the vast majority of us in this respect) adopt a rhetorical posture on selfhood and identity that suggests somehow first, that there is a ground from which an omniscient view is possible, and second, that what they are writing about has nothing in particular to do with themselves. …