| Duplicity is at the very core of what it means to be an individual. If the hallmark of Renaissance individualism is self-consciousness, the ability to stand adjacent to oneself and observe one's own inner workings, then to be an individual is to play the role of individuality with oneself as audience. What happens when that performance is translated into text in an autobiography? My dissertation watches the performance of the inauthentic self in American autobiography from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. If all the world is a stage, what better place to learn about the formal properties of this literary imposture than the memoirs of professional deceivers? The dissertation begins and ends with serial autobiographers, showman P.T. Barnum and novelist Mary McCarthy, two masters of the genre who ceaselessly wrote and revised their lives, thus providing especially clear examples of the refinement of the autobiographical persona. In between Barnum and McCarthy, two distinct autobiographical subgenres rose and fell with the tenor of the times. Stage magicians and confidence artists each for a time cornered the market on deceptive autobiographies before their professions became eclipsed by other entertainments.; This project develops the notion of "autobiographical masquerade," which denotes the way an author impersonates him- or herself in written words, arguing that autobiographical truth arises from the dynamic between deception and expose. The autobiographer paradoxically secures personal truth by courting inauthenticity and then unmasking the true self hidden behind the illusory one. For the reader, this sense of getting a privileged glimpse behind the curtain at a spectacular deception forms a structure of feeling crucial to American modernity. The project seeks to identify the literary conventions undergirding these acts of revelation and to link them to other facets of cultural life. I hope to illuminate a century-wide arc which traces the ebb and flow of fraud as a useful literary device for describing the self. |
