Botany of the Mind: Character and Experience in Early Modern England

Abstract

This dissertation argues that early modern English authors forged a new sense of literary character to address the philosophical and political upheavals of the seventeenth century. In these years a pluralist mass public not unlike our own emerged, for whom private experience could be the only sure ground of knowledge and value. Conventional theories of moral “character” support this privatization, claiming it develops through “experience” over time, just as literary character does through plot. However, my research reveals how seventeenth century authors tried to recompose the public by making experience the product of character. In so doing they resisted a shift in the nature of “experience,” as the term shed its older meaning of prior communal knowledge and gradually acquired its modern sense: a mental event that produces rather than reflects knowledge – as in “experiments.” This newly private experience eroded the grounds of political obligation – writ large in the chaos of the War – and launched debate about what constituted scientific fact and who decides. I show how writers like William Shakespeare, John Milton, Margaret Cavendish, and the Earl of Rochester responded to these epistemological and political crises by using character to render private experience public and available. Exploiting character's medial position, between an individual person and a social type, these authors made it a technology capable of distributing experience across a set of sturdy literary figures. In their hands, literary formalism transformed the philosophical concept of experience into a workable media ecology. Thus “the character of experience” refers both to the process of marking experience with legible properties, and the literary person animating those properties. Tracing the career of this concept, my project insists on “the seventeenth century” as a unified field of study, often used only in retrospect to frame the birth of political liberalism, scientific empiricism, and the novel which merged them. While much recent scholarship challenges this teleology only by bypassing experience altogether, I recover its communal force by charting the early modern use of character to shape inner worlds. I contend that the seventeenth century remaking of character is a major, and still unnoticed, event in the history of media, making private experience public and communicable.