‘Plain, hamely, fife’: James Boswell’s shameful national masculinity

ABSTRACT

Much has been made in the scholarship of eighteenth-century autobiography of James Boswell’s journals, particularly the London Journal of 1762-3. While critical attention has tended to focus on his use of journal writing to construct and shift between various idealised masculine identities, few have recognised the central importance of shame to Boswell’s project. This essay argues that by examining shame in dialogue with Boswell’s conflicting ideas of national identity – his desire to embody English politeness whilst caught in a volatile relationship with his Scottishness – we are better placed to understand his idiosyncratic selfhood. My account of the London Journal, in concert with the letters he wrote his close friend John Johnston, situates shame in context as a catalyst of masculine identity formation in a period of political and societal transition.

KEYWORDS:

• Male shame
• enlightenment masculinity
• national identity
• Scottish masculinity
• shame and writing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Pittock, for example, quotes a Union-period song entitled ‘The New Dame of Honour’ which represents Scotland as a woman forced into promiscuity: ‘Since honour’s cast in a new mold/And chastity’s a staine’ [sic]. It goes on to mention ‘Wallace and the Bruce’ as guarantors of Scotland’s status as ‘a Dame of Honour’. Ultimately, then, it is men who should be most ashamed when ‘our Nation’s bought and sold/And Scotland has no name.’ See Pittock (1991: 37).

2. Politeness as a cultural phenomenon has been the focus of much discussion in eighteenth-century studies over the last few decades. Lawrence Klein (1994), for example has considered it in relation to its literary construction in the influential work of the Earl of Shaftesbury in Shaftesbury and the culture of politeness. Michele Cohen (1996) has considered its role in constructing English masculinity in Fashioning masculinity: national identity and language in eighteenth century studies, as has Philip Carter (2001) in Men and the Emergence of Polite Society, Britain 1660-1800.

3. Mackie considers how Boswell seems unable to decide in the London Journal which kind of masculinity he wishes to adopt, the polite masculinity of the retenu, or the rebellious highwayman, exemplified by Macheath from John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera. While it is true that Boswell enjoys playing different social roles, I don’t find much evidence in the journal that he sees anything other than the retenu as a viable form of masculinity to inhabit in the long term. See Mackie (2008).

4. There is an excellent exploration of the significance of Hume’s footnote by Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze in his essay ‘Hume, Race and Human Nature’, see Eze (2000).

5. Boswell relates, verbatim, a conversation between himself and the Duchess of Northumberland, in order to ‘enrich my Journal’ (86–89). The conversational ability of the English upper classes serves to make a contrast with the ‘familiar’ talk of his fellow Scots, but also helps Boswell practice being English.

6. I borrow this term from Heather Love’s Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Love, 2007), where Love discusses melancholy feelings and temporal displacement – a feeling of being ‘out of time’ in the context of queer texts and historical figures. Whilst I do not understand Boswell’s relationship to Johnston as queer in terms of its sexual or romantic inflections, I do situate their feeling temporally misplaced in a rapidly changing society imposing new political and domestic norms as being well-described by Love’s concept.

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Notes on contributors

Michael Rowland

Michael Rowland works at the University of Sussex, where he gained his PhD in English in 2017. His research interests are in eighteenth-century literature, masculinity, affect and national and imperial identity. He has published in the journal Eighteenth-Century Fiction, and is contributing a chapter to the forthcoming volume Gendered Emotions in Modern History, with Manchester University Press. He is currently working on a monograph investigating the role of shame in the development of idealised norms of masculinity in eighteenth-century British culture. He is a member of the Wellcome-funded research network ‘Pathologies of Solitude, 18th–21st Century’.