Beginning to write again...slowly

Well. Here it is folks. Introduction to my first paper in two years. Feel free to criticize or praise.


The Essential Self in Augustine and Weldon


Thomas Hobbes’ famous definition of life as “nasty, brutish and short” (reader 37) seems a mere platitude today perhaps, but interestingly we have dropped off the first condition of the definition in our modern excerpt; that life is “solitary.” In direct response G.W.F. Hegel asserts that the self “exists only in being acknowledged” (reader 40). But perhaps there is a middle ground, or a way to balance these two disparate views. Within the literary tradition we examine numerous works of both literary extroverts participating in society and those of recluses who shun social contact in an attempt to communicate with the essential self. Authors ranging from Chaucer to Thoreau or distinctly modern naturalists such as John Muir have all offered parodies of social dynamics or shunned them in a more solitary, purportedly profound method of self observation.

While theorists like Erving Goffman and Hegel have posited that we create a social self either inadvertently, through cultural conditioning, or willingly within a larger social dynamic, it seems that there is a part of us, an essential self in opposition to the Hegelian concept, which is immutable regardless of social pressures or temptations. This essential self will, as Hegel pointed out, be forever changed at its first encounter with the “other,” but even if it should assault the other in the master-slave dialectic or simply through “fronts” of performance it remains unchanged in a fundamental way.

In Saint Augustine’s Confessions the life of a worldly man turned hermit is portrayed to inspire readers toward God, but Augustine often betrays his own hubris in his homilies to the reader. In Fay Weldon’s The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, Ruth alters her social self in order to attain the goals of her fixed, vengeful inner self. The dynamics of these two texts will be my basis to argue that there is an essential, immutable self that is immune to whatever “performances” we display, which are only used in order to bolster self-worth and achieve the goals of our essential self.