Fictions of depersonalization: inauthentic feeling at the fin-de-siècle

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 For Stephen, feeling and emotion have their proper place (largely in the private, domestic realm); he is worried that they are beginning to exert too much influence outside of this, “in literature, in politics, in religion” (1864, 74). It’s hard to ignore the gendered aspect of Stephen’s argument here. He is clearly suggesting the “injurious” repercussions of female influence on “robust” male culture and this culture’s inevitable effeminization.2 See Mayer (Citation2008) on scientific experimentation and Kehler (Citation2008) on class. Elsewhere, Furneaux (Citation2016) has written on the role emotions played in the construction of Victorian masculinity. On sentiment and emotion in relation to empire, see recent studies by Lewis (Citation2018) and Lydon (Citation2020).3 It was Mary Augusta Ward who translated Amiel’s original French coinage, dépersonnalisé, into “depersonalized”, now the accepted English term.4 Philip Gerrans (Citation2019), for example, draws on Dugas’s work when formulating an affect-based model of selfhood. For Gerrans, “the self to which experience is attributed is a predictive model made by the mind to explain the modulation of affect as the organism progresses through the world” (401). The self, here, is constructed through an accumulation of “characteristic” affective responses to perceptions and thoughts; depersonalization, the feeling that one is “no longer present in experience”, emerges when familiar perceptions and thoughts fail to produce the characteristic affective responses that are expected (401).5 There has been some discussion of literary writing’s connection with depersonalization. Simeon and Abugel (Citation2006) devote a chapter of their book on depersonalization to literary representations of the phenomenon. And Francis (Citation2022) has recently considered depersonalization in relation to creative writing. These works, though, do not consider nineteenth-century literature.7 In their introduction to Moore (Citation2007), Heilman and Llewellyn note that the “aesthetic tastes, sexual oddities and nervous condition of Moore’s spectator protagonist [Norton] are transparently adapted from his reading of Joris-Karl Huysmans, Walter Pater and Arthur Schopenhauer” (I).6 Early in the story Norton’s mother and Kitty’s father agree that Norton is “quite different” from other men with regards to his disinterest in women (119). He also stumbles into his engagement with Kitty through a moment of uncontrolled passion and, just before the tramp’s attack hopes that an “accident might lead him out of the difficulty into which a chance moment had betrayed him” (151).8 In contemporary psychiatry, Depersonalization Disorder is commonly defined as a type of dissociation, related to but distinct from other dissociative disorders such as what we now call Dissociative Identity Disorder (previously multiple personality disorder) (Simeon and Abugel Citation2006, 73).9 I have focused here on “Mildred Lawson”, but, in the collection’s final story, John Norton’s sense of being “far away” is echoed by Agnes Lahren as she comes out of a convent and is initiated into the decadent society of her mother: She tells her downtrodden father, “I shall never get on in society. I cannot, father, dear, I cannot, I feel so far away; I do not know what to say to the people I meet. I do not feel that I understand them when they speak to me: I am far away, that is what I feel; I shall never get over that feeling” (2007, 192).10 The story has frequently been discussed in relation to the New Woman novel, see Saudo-Welby (Citation2014)11 See Jadwin (Citation1992) for a discussion of this figure in Vanity Fair.12 “She must succeed. Success meant so much. If she succeeded, she would be spoken of in the newspapers, and, best of all, she would hear people say when she came into a room, ‘That is Mildred Lawson … ’” (Moore Citation2007, 40).13 In an early review of Celibates, Harry Thurston Peck (1895) opined that the “character of Mildred Lawson suggests a curious blend of Becky Sharpe [sic] and [another of Thackeray’s women] Blanche Amory” (quoted in Moore 2014, 215).14 “It is as though Teiresias who alone kept his true life in unsubstantial Hades, should at last feel himself dream into a shade” (Myers Citation1886, 654).15 See Carel (Citation2016)16 See Tanner (Citation2003)Additional informationNotes on contributorsJosh PowellJosh Powell is a Lecturer in the English Literature department at Cardiff University. His doctoral thesis focused on Samuel Beckett’s relationship with experimental psychology, and a monograph based on this project was published in January 2020, as part of Bloomsbury’s Historicizing Modernism series. He has recently published articles on the work of Ann Quin, and Philip Roth.