Michael Rogin
THE ROMANCE OF THE SELF
IN JACKSONIAN AMERICA
The image of a distinctive American identity is most pervasively
embodied in the self-made man, born free of traditional restraints, who
determines his own fate in the marketplace and the west. This American
exceptionalism,
to
use the Marxian term Leo Marx has recently revived, has
rather different histories in literature and political science. Political scien–
tists have celebrated a politics of pragmatic individuals and pluralist
groups. Literary critics, on the other hand, have distinguished the Euro–
pean novel, where character is formed amidst thick social relations, perva–
sive class distinctions, and inherited limitations, from the American ro–
mance, in which the individual alone in space encounters races not classes,
declining families not powerful ones, and in which, in Richard Chase's
words, "close involvement with real life" is abandoned for the melodrama–
tic "underside of consciousness." I want briefly to locate the self-made man
in history, and then, using primarily literary materials, characterize his
narcissistic romance.
The westward-aiming American individualist is not a timeless crea–
tion but a historical one, who emerges to define American identity in the
Jacksonian period. This self-made image takes shape, consciously and
unconsciously, against three alternative American images of the antebel–
lum period. These are, first, the eighteenth-century, household society of
the fathers, organized around families for production and limited exchange,
governed by the leading families, limited to the eastern seaboard, and
symbolized in the nineteenth century by the Adams '; second, the com–
munal societies of Indian tribes, collectively owning the land, living on the
frontier, imprisoned both by the traditions of their fathers and their
closeness to nature, and symbolized in Francis Parkman's words, as "the
child who will not be weaned from the breast of his rugged mother"; and
third, coming into focus at the end of the Jacksonian period, the slave
society of the south, where family loyalty, aristocratic hierarchy, and slave
