Maxwell 1

Jeff Maxwell
English E-141
25 March 2015
Midterm Project
6. A critical interrogation of gender challenges the notion that the differences in men and women
are biological in nature. Literature can de-naturalize the allegedly natural and certainly
oppositional categories of masculine and feminine. At the same time, however, literature can
reinforce the social roles of gender as they are defined within the dominant ideology of a
particular, historically located cultural hegemony. Consequently, literature is doubly implicated
in the social construction and perpetual revision of gender identity.
James Boswells London Journal articulates the struggle of a subject, James Boswell, to
define himself autonomously while confronted with the conventionally constructed nature of
reality constantly threatening his identity. The identity which Boswell seeks to establish is an
identity independent of societal relations. In other words, he seeks an absolute identity
independent of extrinsic relations established performatively through interaction with others: I
was, in short, a character very different from what God intended me and I myself chose
(Boswell 62).
Addressing the contradiction created by the irreconcilability of absolute and relative
identities, Boswell affirms his sexual, and in accord with Boswells fixed identification of sex
and gender, his masculine, prowess: Five times was I fairly lost in supreme rapture. Louisa was
madly fond of me... I said twice as much might be, although in my own mind I was somewhat
proud of my performance (139). He continues to seek self-affirmation in the public space of

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Lady Northumberlands: I strutted up and down, considering myself as a valiant man who could
gratify a ladys loving desires five times in a night... (142).
Implicating class and gender, Boswell relates a scene in which a procured prostitute steals
from him and denies having done so. He, in turn, attempts to redeem himself sexually and
socially, stating: I was shocked to think that I had been intimately united with a low,
abandoned, perjured, pilfering creature... (280). By identifying himself as other than the
prostitute, Boswell seeks to re-affirm an idealized identity in which he is superior to women in
terms of both gender and class.
Boswell is finally made conscious of the intricacies of the relation of gender and class
while walking arm in arm with Samuel Johnson: ... a woman of the town came enticingly
near us... We then talked of the unhappy situation of these wretches... (327). It is this moment
with his friend, Samuel Johnson, that Boswell attains an awareness of alternative identities.
While Boswell descriptively subsumes women within his own understanding of what it means to
be a woman, or a prostitute for that matter, Johnson informs him of the performative nature of
prostitution and its institution in a society in which women are subjugated. Boswell the subject is
urged by his friend to recognize the difference of the other as relative. In the case of Boswells
London Journal, the otherness of the feminine comes to be seen by Boswell, through Johnson, as
determined by economic differences. In turn, Johnson opens a discursive space for Boswell
within which he can ethically consider the difference of the other as well as the obligations that
determine how he should act toward the other.
5. The dialogic construction of a narrative is the recognition that the narrator, or character within
a literary production, cannot exist prior to the linguistic and social conventions made obvious by

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the dialogue. Dialogue introduces the possibility, or what may in fact be the necessity of multiple
voices in the literary work. Intersubjective and anti-authoritarian, dialogue can introduce voices
alternative to that of the authors. The presence of the author and its regulation of other voices
within the text is destabilized, thus revealing the social nature of both text and language. It is in
the dialogue that voices other than the authorial are made subjects; they are not subject to being
spoken for, but they are instead speakers for themselves. What would be the others of the
literary production are no longer subjected to the dictatorial pursuits of the author. They are not
subordinate to an authorial voice that expresses itself as if it were independent of the social
context within which it speaks. The dialogic is the recognition that the voice of the subject
cannot be established except in relation to the voice of the other.
In Denis Diderots Jacques the Fatalist the narrator attempts to assert his power over the
text to the reader. However, the narrator, like Jacques and his master, is subject to the temporal
continuity of the text: What is there to prevent me from marrying off the master and leaving
him cuckolded? How easy it is to make up stories! But I will leave the two of them off with a
bad nights sleep and you with this delay (Diderot 22). The narrator, despite his or her
authoritarian proclamations, cannot direct the trajectory of the narration. The narration, instead,
is guided by a polyphony of voices.
Whereas the dialogic form allows for heteroglossia, the omniscient narrative assumes
authority as the one speaking for many. The narrator in such a work assumes a multiplicity of
voices that must be reduced to a singular narrative. The narrator is positioned in relation to the
reader such that he or she must make assumptions regarding the sensibility of the reader. The
narrator of an omniscient narrative must seek an empathetic relationship with the reader through

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which they can share a common understanding of emotion: M. de Nemours feelings at this
point cannot be described. To see - in the depth of night, in the loveliest spot of the world - to see
the person whom he adored, to see her without her knowing she was seen (Lafayette 148). In
The Princesse de Clves the reader is allowed access to private scenes in a physical sense, but at
the same time he or she is relegated to an external position whenever a characters internal
composition is to be explained. It is in this sense that the reader remains distanced from the text
and reliant on the narrator to convey private emotions to a public audience.
In James Boswells London Journal Boswell creates a narrative that is written, on the one
hand, for himself in a deferred sense, and on the other hand, for an-other, John Johnston. Boswell
admits the intentions of his writing: I shall regularly record the business or rather the please of
every day... I hope it will be of use to my worthy friend Johnston... (40). It is in the diary form
that the writer is made reader. As Boswell demonstrates, his writing is intended to be an
exposition of events upon which he can reflect. The reader, too, approaches the London Journal
from a distance.
3. The notion of self-knowledge entails the epistemic question of, "How can I know the self?"
This question, in turn, entails the need for an explanation of both what it means to reliably know
something as well as of how a person attains what is judged to be knowledge.
John Locke argues against Ren Descartes's theory of innate ideas (Descartes 7) and
instead claims that ideas are particular pieces of sense data, the impressions of which are
inscribed on what is at first a tabula rasa (Locke 1-2). He expresses that he is challenging the
"Received doctrine that men have native ideas" (1). Furthermore, he states that ideas can also be
generated via reflection on sense perceptions (ibid). Locke then establishes a hierarchy of mental

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operations by exalting thought and rationality and devaluing memory and imagination as faint
copies of sense impressions. This hierarchy implies the identification of the self with rationality.
It is for this reason that Locke denies a relation of identity between the person dreaming and the
person awake (3).
Lockean conceptions of selfhood leave open the possibility for a single person to
demonstrate multiple selves. Locke equates the thinking self as the soul because "Thinking be
supposed never so much the proper action of the soul" (2). Nevertheless, Locke cannot admit the
soul as the only component of the self, so he connects body and soul as the nexus of the person.
For Locke, to be a person consists in not only thinking but being conscious of thinking (9).
Locke ultimately ties selfhood to personal identity, or persistence of the same self over time, by
arguing for a continuity of consciousness such that personal identity is posited based on a
psychological/mental continuum (9-10). That is to say, "Personal identity consists in the identity
of consciousness" (11).
David Hume counters Locke's arguments for the continuity of the self stating that a
relation of identity between the self at one point in time and the self at another point in time
cannot be established; the self is discontinuous. Having destabilized the concept of personal
identity as an integral component of the establishment of selfhood, Hume must account for how a
person comes to attain knowledge of the self. Hume's response is to assert the unknowabilty of
the self (Hume 1). The self, instead, is an ascriptive designation imputed upon perceptions "In a
perpetual flux and movement" (2). The self for Hume is an imaginary construction that links an
illusory continuity of experience. Questions about the self are empty in that they seek to account
for that which does not exist as other than an imaginary imputation. Instead of seeking some kind

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of coherent, unified entity persisting through time, Hume says one should turn outward and
examine his or her social relationships (7).
In Boswells London Journal James Boswell articulates Locke's claim that the mind is
like a dark room (Locke 7): "The mind of a young man (his gallery I mean) is often furnished
different ways. According to the scenes he is placed in, so are his pictures" (Boswell 203-4).
Boswell further reveals his allegiance to Locke's philosophy of psychological continuity (Locke
10) when he explains the function of writing his diary in the first place: to preserve memories
that would otherwise be lost entirely were they not to be retained in memory (40).
Boswell, however, challenges Locke's deprecation of the imagination when he notes his
poetic imagination from which he derives pleasure and happiness (42). Similarly, Denis Diderot
in Rameaus Nephew and DAlemberts Dream questions Locke's treatment of dreams by
suggesting that D'Alembert is perhaps more himself when he is asleep because of his flexibility
of imagination. Furthermore, Diderot's appreciation for the imagination is exemplified by
Mademoiselle de L'Espinasse's imaginative construction of a spider web as analogous to a neural
model of the nervous system (Diderot 182). Diderot suggests that the imagination plays a role
equal to if not greater than that of the rational mind in making advances even in the domain of
the sciences.
Diderot's emphasis on the self as a social being and its means of communication through
performance is seen in the body language used by Rameau's nephew in Rameau's Nephew and
D'Alembert's Dream (44). Diderot is making us aware of the social nature of language and of
how language functions in the linguistic construction of the self. Diderot wholly undermines both
Locke and Hume who claim that ideas are copies of sensory impressions that are mental

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particulars (Locke 6). This entails that the constituents of thought are private and cannot be
shared (Hume 1). Two people can neither share the same idea of an external object nor can they
share the particular mental content to which the name of the object refers. Diderot, in Jacques the
Fatalist, expounds on the conventional, social nature of signs. He shows the impediments to
communication posed by private ideas and that one person's referent, if it is a mental particular,
cannot be understood in the same way twice (64). Diderot is arguing for the conventional
establishment of the self; a self that Locke claims is constituted by intrinsic mental powers
(Locke 4) and a self Hume asserts is not an object of knowledge.