Reviews of Books

Anyone who has read even a few of the personal narratives of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries can testify to their appeal. The stories are so odd and so intimate that they seem familiar, strangely modern. Sometimes it is hard to resist the temptation to disturb a poor researcher down the table with the extraordinary information they contain. A well digger, blown up one too many times on the job, pens in his retirement a tale of his amorous adventures and his exploits in the British and American armies. A reformed gambler marries a seventeen-year-old, fathers twin boys, Esau and Jacob, and returns to the taverns where he once played cards, peddling his published confession to his erstwhile victims. A murderer pauses in his confession to tell readers how to use cobwebs to stanch the flow of blood from a gaping axe wound. A woman listens to a voice heard in her dreams and takes to the road to preach the gospel. A female traveler fends off the advances of women who are convinced she is a man dressed in women's clothes. A New Haven lottery dealer, escaped from slavery, expresses an anger at the white race so visceral it seems to leap from the page.	1
These stories made their way into print and circulated among readers who apparently relished tales of individual lives. But what are we to make of this collection of stories? Are the stories true? Do they tell a single tale? In recent years this archive of personal narratives has served the needs of several scholars who have extracted from it evidence to support a case for the sweeping changes in ideas and attitudes that characterize the dawning of modernity. A list of exemplary titles might begin with Karen Halttunen's Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination (Cambridge, Mass., 1998) and Joyce Appleby's Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans (Cambridge, Mass., 2000). Halttunen read the personal confessions of murderers as episodes in the history of Enlightenment liberalism. Murder was incomprehensible to those who understood human nature as essentially good and rational. In the early years of the nineteenth century, a popular literature of crime presented murderers as monstrous moral aliens. Appleby turned to more successful individuals and read their personal accounts as a chapter in the triumph of liberalism. Many of the men and women who struggled in the nation's early years produced in old age autobiographies that charted long and ultimately successful careers. Their personal narratives formed a kind of cultural capital for a new generation of Americans.	2
In Teach Me Dreams: The Search for Self in the Revolutionary Era, Mechal Sobel has a more elusive subject in mind: the history of the Self. She uses details gleaned from some 200 personal narratives to chart what she sees as the appearance of the modern individual. Sobel is interested in "self-fashioners," in ordinary men and women, black and white, who began to see themselves as controlling their fates. They wrote of their lives as dramatic narratives, describing an interior landscape of dreams and emotions that came to constitute the "true self." Sobel finds personal narratives rich in information about the inner lives of true selves. In their pages she finds diverse scenes of self-fashioning, but such evidence is ambiguous, since narratives are themselves instruments in self-fashioning. What is a Self but a collection of stories?	3
The tale Sobel tells is complicated. In five chapters and a long coda, she lays out an argument about how discrete individuals emerged from premodern, communal "we-selves." She isolates four elements as keys to the process of self-fashioning. She begins with dreams, which were crucial to self-fashioners, offering a kind of psychic permission to try out new ways of living—to join new churches, to free slaves, to run from cruel masters. Gaining the courage to act on their dreams, self-fashioners defined themselves against "alien" others—men against women, women against men, African-American men and women against white men and women, and so on. Some also turned to the churches and sects that authorized new forms of individualism. And finally, encouraged by pastors and printers, self-fashioners set down their lives as dramatic narratives.	. . .