Ghostly Selves in Augusta Webster’s Poetry

Ghostly Selves in Augusta Webster’s Poetry Andrea Selleri (bio) And now it seems a jest to talk of me / as if I could be one with her.”1 Thus Eulalie, the high-end prostitute featured in Augusta Webster’s most famous poem, “A Castaway,” thinking about herself as she was as a young girl. Eulalie has stumbled on a philosophical and existential problem that emerges time and again in the history of thought and literature alike: where does the thing I call me begin and end? Over the course of a life, is there a point beyond which the continuity of the particular arrangement of molecules and memories and relations I happen to inhabit is just not enough to feel that the same person is being thought about? And what happens when such a “me-but-no-longer-really-me” barges into my consciousness again? This sort of intractable existential conundrum is an ideal hunting ground for post-Romantic poetry. As we look at our pasts, most of us feel that there is some sort of difference between the “I” that sits in the office this after noon and the “I” that was ripped screaming from a womb, or the one who threw the peppers into the canal to see if they floated. This may be due to sheer temporal distance, or to one particular traumatic event— say, taking part in a war, or suddenly finding oneself parentless, or like Eulalie becoming a “castaway”— which acts as a watershed between two near-irreducibly distinct senses of self. In hindsight, such “I’s” are so unlike the present “I” from which we picture or reminisce about their doings that the grammatical identity may feel at best like a strained convention. And yet, old selves may turn out to be not exactly dead but ghostly, materializing after their proper lifespan to puzzle, shock, or bemuse their successors. Simple reminiscence may thus take on an uncanny quality, as it does for Eulalie.2 Such re-encounters with supposedly defunct versions of ourselves are liable to produce an intimation of incongruousness, a feeling that the quiddity of experience has become at odds with the inherited grammatical or existential categories through which we describe it. The idea of the self as an unstable entity is often associated with literary modernism, and with late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century intellectual attitudes and movements such as Nietzschean anti-foundationalism and Freudian psychoanalysis. The most frequently cited operational category for this [End Page 187] destabilization is “the unconscious,” an idea that first appeared in English in 1866 courtesy of E. S. Dallas, who foregrounded it in his The Gay Science, and which became the subject of a book, Eduard von Hartmann’s Philosophie des Unbewußten, three years later.3 The earliest such developments are indeed coeval with Webster’s formative years; nonetheless, in this essay I want to suggest that another category, temporality, is more relevant to her poetic thematization of the self. A time-based problematization of selfhood had been available to philosophers since the heyday of British empiricism: David Hume’s “bundle theory,” for instance, precedes by more than a century Walter Pater’s “concurrence renewed from moment to moment,” and by nearly two Virginia Woolf ’s “luminous halo” passages, more familiar to literary scholars.4 Hume puts it quite poetically: [ People] are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement. . . . The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, repass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations.5 If selfhood is so subject to change across time, it is perhaps more surprising that Eulalie can recognize herself from one end of her meditation to the other than that she can no longer recognize her childhood self. It was a consideration of such changeability that led a thinker from a very different philosophical tradition, F. H. Bradley, to deem the whole notion of selfhood incoherent: “[W]hen we . . . survey the man’s self from the cradle to the coffin,” he wrote, “the usual self in...