LAUSR

Theorists and historians of autobiography have been profoundly influenced by the postmodern assault upon the idea of the author. Although few have fully embraced the notion of the death of the author, just how the author is constituted in autobiographical texts has been closely examined from a variety of perspectives. No longer can we assume that an autobiographical text is the product of a self-conscious, unified and autonomous persona fully aware of who he or she is and how he or she came to be himor herself through an analysis of his or her life. Instead, we consider authors as subjects whose identities are fragmented, relational, contextual, and constructed, and whose texts’ meanings are deeply contested. I focus my analysis on the Memoirs of William Hickey (Spencer, 4 volumes, 1913– 1925), an autobiography written by a man who was the son of an Irish attorney in London and, after a riotous youth, who spent most of his adult life practicing as an attorney in India. He picked up the pen in retirement back in England and for four years beginning in 1809 produced a lengthy text of about 750,000 words that recounts his life from birth in 1749 until his departure from India for England in 1808. He claims at the outset that idleness and boredom led him to write these memoirs, giving no other indication of why he engaged in what was such a time-consuming task. Regardless of Hickey’s stated motivation in writing his life story, I probe more deeply and ask who the author thought he was, why he wrote about his own life the way he did, and how a prospective readership might have affected what he wrote. Here I consider how Hickey constructed and presented in his text one of his identities (there were several), a sense of self formed by a combination of an interiorized self-consciousness and a socially-turned self-fashioning. The identity that concerns me here, that of a British gentleman, was constructed in part by how the anticipated response from an anonymous readership of his memoirs likely affected what he wrote about himself. Hickey seems to have been aware that his authority over the meaning of his text (and, as we will see, his fragile claim to gentlemanly status) would be contested by the reader. He therefore selected and reconstructed certain episodes in his life, filtered through a tendentious memory and presented not as fiction but as a “true” account, in an attempt to disempower a skeptical reader whom he feared would see through and shatter his questionable claim to gentlemanly status. That Hickey never published his manuscript during his lifetime suggests that he refused to surrender it, and the meaning of his life, to a public tribunal.