UCLA

The individual who first emerges in eighteenth-century England is new, but the subjectivity he or she bears is not. My dissertation returns to the work of John Dryden, Eliza Haywood, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Maria Edgeworth in order to recover the royal prehistory of a model of individuality that has progressed from its origins in eighteenth-century England to become a central element of global commercial life in the twenty-first century. I celebrate the progression of this consumer society as the means through which the divine sovereignty of kings has become a popular right of humanity. I criticize consumer society and its subjects only for failing to affirm the sovereign potential that lies at their foundation. As I demonstrate in my readings of poetry and novels from the long eighteenth century, British literature simultaneously helped to democratize this royal form of being and to construct the ideologies of domesticity that continue to encourage modern individuals to pretend that that they were never made sovereign, that is severed from the stable selves and communities of mere things.

My first chapter reads Dryden's "To My Honour'd Kinsman" (1700) alongside "Astraea Redux" (1660) and "To His Sacred Majesty" (1661) in order to argue that Dryden models his late figure of the "patriot" after his earlier image of the king as an at once mortal and immortal entity. While Dryden develops the patriot in the hopes of achieving social unity, my second chapter argues that the heroines of Defoe's Moll Flanders (1722) and Haywood's Fantomina (1725) demonstrate the subversive potential of bodies endowed with the wholly unnecessary and abstract aura of a sovereign individual. In my central third chapter on Clarissa (1747-8), I hail the struggle of Richardson's heroine to masochistically dissolve her modern self and withdraw from society as a Protestant-inspired campaign to achieve the truly sovereign feat of self-dissolution. Though my project ultimately affirms modernity, my final chapter celebrates the pre-modern multitude's interruption of the culminating moment of Edgeworth's The Absentee (1812) as an expression of the inevitable opposition that modernization will meet as it continues to subsume the globe.