"I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will!"

On the Concept of Self – 3

We here continue from our previous pit-stop at Emile Durkheim, where he traces the growth of a human being from being an individual to becoming a person, when at the moment he starts playing out his social roles!

Indeed, the bildungsroman is an excellent prototype that bespeaks much to this concept of a sensitive soul seeking to venture out into the world in a quest that would help him/her to gain a better, fuller and an enriching understanding of his/her self! In this genre the main conflict happens usually between the protagonist or the main character and the society in which s/he dwells!

Also dubbed the ‘coming of age’ novel, this genre focuses on the maturity of the individual per se!

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte is a classic example of this sort!

Jane’s initial days at Lowood Institution were such a harrowing time for her, as she couldn’t quite fit in there! However, her love for books, and her vibrant companionship with two friends of hers, stood her in good stead all along, and she was able to discover for herself her real self worth!

Some of her striking lines are witness to this, her growth!

I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.

I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will!

Do you think I am an automaton? — a machine without feelings? and can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup? Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! — I have as much soul as you — and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you. I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh; - it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God's feet, equal,- as we are!"... therefore I am better than you - let me go!"

Therefore, this troubled search to find one’s own identity for oneself - living amongst the ignoble strife of the madding crowd - is achieved only through a strenuous process of trials, self-awakenings and revelations that the protagonist has to go through!

Sample yet another equally troubled search for finding one's own identity, in the much-renowned character of Nora! There are stark similarities in the rhetorical backlash and the powerful verbal strictures doled out by Jane to her lover Mr Rochester, and Nora's diatribe against her husband towards the climax in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House!

I quote from A Doll's House - 

Nora: I must try and get some sense, Torvald.

Helmer: To desert your home, your husband and your children! And you don't consider what people will say!

Nora: I cannot consider that at all. I only know that it is necessary for me.

Helmer: It's shocking. This is how you would neglect your most sacred duties.

Nora: What do you consider my most sacred duties?

Helmer: Do I need to tell you that? Are they not your duties to your husband and your children?

Nora: I have other duties just as sacred.

Helmer: That you have not. What duties could those be?

Nora: Duties to myself.

Helmer: Before all else, you are a wife and mother.

Nora: I don't believe that any longer. I believe that before all else I am a reasonable human being, just as you are — or, at all events, that I must try and become one. I know quite well, Torvald, that most people would think you right, and that views of that kind are to be found in books; but I can no longer content myself with what most people say, or with what is found in books. I must think over things for myself and get to understand them.

Helmer: Can you not understand your place in your own home? Have you not a reliable guide in such matters as that? — have you no religion?

Nora: I am afraid, Torvald, I do not exactly know what religion is.

Helmer: What are you saying?

Nora: I know nothing but what the clergyman said, when I went to be confirmed. He told us that religion was this, and that, and the other. When I am away from all this, and am alone, I will look into that matter too. I will see if what the clergyman said is true, or at all events if it is true for me.

I’m quite reminded of Emerson’s famous lines that passionately advocate a ‘sabbatical’ or a solitary time for oneself to learn, to grow and to become a ‘superior being’! He says, and I quote –

It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude!

Yet another endearing character, - and one of our childhood favvys too – has been Hucky – Huckleberry Finn! What a brilliant description there is, in this narrative by Twain, on Huck’s path towards ‘Self’hood! 

Well, throughout the book, Huck is presented as a boy who is keen on celebrating this free human being within him! Indeed, his USP lies in the fact that, he’s a guy who makes his own choices based on his own free will! And that’s because he doesn’t live according to the dictates of his society, but creates for himself his own rules of liberty and freedom and also strives to live by them!

[On an aside..., per chance, he might have had a wisened premonition that a society's reasonsings and dictates, are as fickle-minded as the Roman mob in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar!]

Interestingly, much akin to Miss Temple who impacts the life and behaviour of Jane towards helping her in finding the meaning of her own true Self, the widow Douglas in Huckleberry Finn tries to inculcate in Huck, ethics, values and morals, towards making him ‘civilised’!

But he’s visibly suffocated and filled with unease at that! His suffocation at being force-clothed is evident in these lines -

She put me in them new clothes again, and I couldn’t do nothing but sweat and sweat, and feel all cramped up.

She worked me middling hard for about an hour, and then the widow made her ease up. I couldn’t stood it much longer. Then for an hour it was deadly dull, and I was fidgety. Miss Watson would say, “Don’t put your feet up there, Huckleberry;” and “Don’t scrunch up like that, Huckleberry—set up straight;” and pretty soon she would say, “Don’t gap and stretch like that, Huckleberry—why don’t you try to behave?”

Most of us would real love to empathise with the character of Huck, as we used to empathise with a Tintin or an Asterix! Even a comparative study could possibly be done on this aspect! 

Huck is a spirited being, a free bird, who obeys his conscience, and travels with such tremendous jollity, breathing his own air of freedom, sailing with the river, dwelling in the lap of mother nature, dealing with all the trials and difficulties that come his way, catching fish on his own, cooking food on his own - for himself and for Jim as well, all this would ideally make him a real prototype of a person who’s on quest to finding his own self, and thereby seeking to be master of his own life and his destiny as well!

Towards the climax of the novel, Huck is real caught in a double bind situation! He has to take a call now! Either he has to inform Miss Watson, (who was Jim’s ‘rightful’ ‘owner’), or make an attempt to liberate Jim from his fetters of slavery!

He has to act! Like Lord Krishna exhorts Arjuna at the battlefield of Kurukshetra to act! Says Lord Krishna,

It’s better to perform one’s own duty imperfectly than another’s duty perfectly!

Perform your obligatory duty, for action is better than inaction. Since action is rooted in the Imperishable, therefore, if you only do just that, you will surely conquer the enemies in the war.

Likewise, by this significant act that he’s got to perform, he has also to judiciously and sagaciously balance between his social duty and the duty of being true to the dictates of his own conscience: Between his social obligation of returning “the property called Jim” to its lawful claimant, and his obliging his own conscience as well!

And it is here that Huck takes a very balanced, a very sane and a very prudent decision! That’s because he doesn’t look at Jim as a ‘property’ or as a ‘commodity’ that belongs to another, but as a fellow human being who feels and thinks as much as he does!

He therefore takes the boldest stand and the boldest resolve of his life ever! Meaning, he decides to abide by the dictates of his conscience, as against the dictates of his society!

A bold move it was! A very calculated move at that!

This bold move of Huck, helps free Jim from off his fetters, his bonds, his captivity and from off his slavish existence as another’s ‘rightful property!’

And he said, what he had planned in his head from the start, if we got Jim out all safe, was for us to run him down the river on the raft, and have adventures plumb to the mouth of the river, and then tell him about his being free, and take him back up home on a steamboat, in style, and pay him for his lost time, and write word ahead and get out all the niggers around, and have them waltz him into town with a torchlight procession and a brass-band, and then he would be a hero, and so would we.  But I reckoned it was about as well the way it was.

So much for the impact and sway of the Self over the dictates of his sickened society!

Yet another novel that deals with the African American experience, would be Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man! A book which has garnered much praise and fame to being celebrated as one of America’s best-loved novels of all time!

The invisibility of the ‘invisible man’ in the The Invisible Man, is chiefly about the invisibility of one’s own visibility or identity, and in this context, the identity of being a black! The story as such, brings out the narrative of one man’s self-identity vis-à-vis the societal identity!

When the narrator, who is an African-American student is thrown out of college, he is again, caught in a similar crisis like unto Huck’s! – A kinda double bind! Between passively accepting the dictates of society and its societal roles stereotyped for a man of African-American ancestry, and developing his own self-identity all by himself! This introspective thought impulsively makes him set out to seek out on his own self-identity!

To be continued…

images are from amazondotcom & deccanchronicledotcom