Abstract
The issue of identity or ‘who am I?’ has been endlessly posed, as Roy Porter has already observed, by philosophers, poets, psychiatrists and people at large, and ‘if the question has stayed the same, the answers have changed over time’.1 And if the answer to that question has changed over time so has the answer to ‘what is wrong with me?’ when asked in relation to a dejected state of mind. The rise of autobiography is one of the ways in which attempts have been made to answer these questions. It has been suggested that there is a close correlation between the development of self-portraiture and autobiography, which has been attributed, in part, to the development of good mirrors in Europe.2 Paul Delaney observes that Albrecht Dürer is the best example of an early Renaissance artist using the mirror as tool for self-analysis and introspection; his first recorded work, at the age of 13 in 1484, is a drawing of himself with the inscription ‘made out of a mirror’.3 Dürer’s self-portraits change radically through a variety of costumes, settings and expressions, from a handsome young man that holds a good-luck charm in 1493 to the nude and broken Man of Sorrows in 1522, which suggests either a trying-on of various guises or a search for a sense of self that proves to be elusive.
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Notes
Roy Porter (ed.), Rewriting the Self: Stories from the Renaissance to the Present ( London and New York: Routledge, 1997 ), p. 1.
Paul Delaney, British Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century ( London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969 ), p. 12.
Bethan Benwell and Elizabeth Stokoe, Discourse and Identity ( Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006 ), p. 2.
D. Bruce Hindmarsh, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual Autobi-ography in Early Modern England ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007 ), pp. 51–2.
Bernard Mandeville, Fable of the Bees; or Private Vices Publick Benefits ( London: J. Roberts, 1714 ), p. 63.
Michel Foucault, The History ofSexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1980 ), p. 58.
Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage, 1992), cited in Benwell and Stokoe, Discourse and Identity, p. 22.
Frank Tallis, Love Sick: Love as a Mental Illness ( London: Century, 2004 ), p. 54.
Lesel Dawson, Lovesickness and Gender in Early Modern English Literature ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008 ), pp. 17–18.
Allan Ingram, The Madhouse of Language: Writing and Reading Madness in the Eighteenth Century ( London: Routledge, 1991 ), p. 120.
Linda Anderson, Autobiography ( London: Routledge, 2001 ), p. 35.
Clark Lawlor, Consumption and Literature: The Making of the Romantic Disease ( London and New York, now Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006 ), p. 21.
Harriet Blodgett, Centuries of Female Days: Englishwomen’s Private Diaries ( New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1967 ), p. 211.
Edmund Harrold, The Diary of Edmund Harrold, Wigmaker of Manchester 1712–1715, ed. Craig Horner (Aldershot and Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate, 2008), p. x.
Stuart Sherman, ‘Diary and Autobiography’, in John Richetti (ed.), The Cambridge History of Literature 1660–1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 649–72, p. 651.
Roy Porter, Madmen: A Social History of Madhouses, Mad-Doctors & Lunatics ( Stroud: Tempus, 2004 ), p. 102.
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© 2011 Allan Ingram, Stuart Sim, Clark Lawlor, Richard Terry, John Baker, Leigh Wetherall-Dickson
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Wetherall-Dickson, L. (2011). Melancholy, Medicine, Mad Moon and Marriage: Autobiographical Expressions of Depression. In: Melancholy Experience in Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230306592_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230306592_6
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