The history of character, and how we shape it
“Portrait of an Elderly Lady” by Frans Hals, 1633, the Twitter profile photo of Duchess Goldblatt
Heraclitus proclaimed that character is destiny, but does “character” have a destiny of its own? In her wide-ranging cultural history of the term, Marjorie Garber wonders if it is merely “a quaint survival from a more naïve, more ethical, or at least less brazen past”.

Yet this noted Shakespeare scholar demonstrates that the term remains a prominent point of reference today. From the Classical period on, character was understood as the pith of human identity, a set of essential traits expressing not just abilities but moral compass. This idea has been widely questioned in the West since the late nineteenth century, but character talk continues to thrive, at times through related words such as “personality” and “temperament”. Garber finds that the concept of a “core” character is also invoked implicitly today. The popular apology “This is not who I am” suggests an enduring self from which the person has deviated.

Ironically, character as an idea lacks any determinate essence, which is why it has persisted over time in different guises. The word derives from the Greek χαράσσειν, to engrave, traits being seen as deeply etched into one’s being. Garber shows, however, that the term was always less stable than that etymology suggests. Classical writers allowed that character traits could be forged through habitual practice, and guidebooks illustrating character types and role models have been popular ever since. These include Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans and Emily Post’s Etiquette, as well as related “character education” programmes, such as the Boy Scouts. (The movement’s founder, Robert Baden-Powell, preferred this punchy name to “Society for the Propagation of Moral Attributes”.) Garber demonstrates that the concept of character has always been riven between being inborn on the one hand, and culturally acquired on the other. This duality led to various unresolved issues. If character consisted of essential traits, how were they to be identified and measured? If socially constructed, how were they to be sanctioned and challenged?

Garber approaches these questions thematically for much of her overview. Her topics include the idea of character in politics (she seizes on President Trump’s invocation in 2017 of “National Character Counts Week” as an example of how the term has become debased in recent years, although his flagrant hypocrisy also gave substance to Joe Biden’s election slogan in 2020, “Character is on the ballot”). She writes about character’s gendered dimensions (with masculinity, not surprisingly, being normative: a “bold” man is deemed brave, whereas a “bold” woman may be deemed shameless); and the question of “national character” (a perennial topic since antiquity, and one that Garber finds accentuated during periods of national crisis: “Sometimes it is a regressive move, and sometimes a call to remember our better selves”). She also writes about efforts to represent character scientifically, including not only the sober statistics of social scientists but also the extravagant fancies of phrenologists, who read character traits such as “Amativeness” and “Philoprogenitiveness” in the contours of a person’s cranium. She has perceptive things to say, too, about how character has been shaped by the example of literary characters – especially those of Shakespeare, who provided “the blueprint … that taught us how to be us”.

Garber has unearthed fascinating material and is a convivial, stimulating critic. At times, however, her thematic arguments can become diffused amid a fog of examples and lengthy quotations that cry out to be paraphrased. Her narrative becomes more cohesive when she discusses the rise and apparent fall of character since the nineteenth century. Garber focuses on Britain and North America, where the concept reached its apogee during the mid- nineteenth century. It provided a useful replacement for the “soul” in a secularizing age, although for many it continued to have religious and moral implications. Character formation also became the primary aim of the English public schools, supplanting scholarship, yet its centrality was not restricted to the elite: popular works such as Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help (1859) presented good character as an egalitarian passport to social advancement.

John Stuart Mill’s insistence in the mid-nineteenth century that individuals fashion their characters, rather than passively succumbing to external pressures and inward predispositions, indirectly encouraged more idiosyncratic expressions of character. Garber neglects the late nineteenth-century aesthetic turn – an important development – that contributed to “character” being eclipsed by “personality”. By the end of the century, philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and aesthetes such as Oscar Wilde (neither mentioned by Garber) went well beyond Mill by advocating perpetual self-creation, even at the expense of public morality. Because “character” still connoted a relatively fixed and moral centre, “personality” became the preferred way to capture this aesthetic understanding of the self. Stemming from the Latin “persona”, meaning “mask”, personality accorded with the new theatrical presentation of the self, often upstaging character during the fin de siècle.

Twentieth-century social scientists also preferred personality as a term, not for its exhibitionist connotations but for its value neutrality. As Garber shows, psychologists offered “personality traits” as objective replacements for the moralistic “character types” common in western literature. “Extraversion”, “Openness” and “Neuroticism” suited a scientific age better than “The Grumbler”, “The Gossip” and “The Coward”. She observes that the widespread acceptance of “personality disorder” in popular discourse further sidelined the term character, as did the rise of celebrity “personalities” as cultural heroes.

Garber focuses on the role literary creations have played as exemplars; while acknowledging the social dimensions of character construction, she preserves the distinction between human character and fictional characters. Yet today, many consciously view their own character to be fictional to greater or lesser extents, and construe their lives in narrative terms, reflecting the broad shift in Western culture from metaphysics to metafictions.

This practice first assumed momentum in the late nineteenth century. While Wilde is often cited as the poster boy for self-invention, there were numerous others who exceeded him in their zeal to become fictional. Alfred Jarry, for example, emulated his grotesque character Père Ubu, at times losing himself in the role entirely by speaking in a staccato voice and referring to himself in the third person. At the same time, Frederick Rolfe (aka “Baron Corvo”) aspired to become a priest and acclaimed artist. When neither dream came true, he weathered his disappointment by living audaciously as if they had. (He signed his letters “Fr. Rolfe”, which conveniently signalled “Father” as well as “Frederick”.) He also revised his real life to his liking by writing brilliant – and frequently libellous – romans-à-clef. In his masterpiece Hadrian the Seventh (1904), he made himself Pope, cheerfully excommunicating others who were thinly disguised enemies from his real life.

Rolfe’s example casts in relief some of the problems and possibilities that come with living as a fictional character. He is likely to have been a sociopath, engaging in fraud and self-deception. Yet his fictionalizing was not solely pathological: it permitted him to reframe his setbacks and remain open to new opportunities, not all of them criminal. His endless reinvention enabled him to write brilliant works under adverse conditions until his death.

Becoming fictional also empowered the novelist Helen Emily Woods. In 1938 she changed her name to “Anna Kavan”, the name of a fictional character from two of her previous novels. She changed the cut and colour of her hair too, but the most profound transformation was to be found in the style and content of her fiction. Anna Kavan’s works were boldly experimental, expressing a hidden store of creativity that the capable Helen Woods only suggested. Alice Sheldon (1915–87), a part-time writer, likewise experienced a surge of inspiration when she secretly adopted the pen name and persona of “James Tiptree, Jr.”, but when Tiptree was publicly exposed as Sheldon, her muse largely disappeared along with the enabling character she had created.

Many others have openly fictionalized their lives to some extent since the advent of the internet. Curating one’s character online is commonplace, and “story” has become a master metaphor for how people interpret their experience. This fictionalist moment has demonstrable dangers, including the spread of misinformation and scepticism towards science, expertise and well-established facts. Yet there are distinct benefits. To assess the potential gains and pitfalls, we can learn from those who have tried it – among them the author of Becoming Duchess Goldblatt.

“Duchess Goldblatt” is a popular figure on Twitter, one of the few to openly proclaim her fictional status and age (eighty-one). She is a famous author, having written a family chronicle, “An Axe to Grind”; an account of mother–daughter relations, “Not if I Kill You First”; and the unclassifiable “Feasting on the Carcasses of My Enemies: A love story”. The hint of anger in these titles may reflect the agonized state of mind her creator was in when she conceived of the Duchess. She relates in this book that she had recently undergone a painful divorce, resulting in her being abandoned by in-laws and many so-called friends; in short order she also lost her job and her home. Now a single parent living in uncongenial surroundings, she created the Duchess on social media to distract herself from desolation. It was sufficient that the Duchess amused her, and she was surprised to find that the Duchess appealed to strangers as well.

This was partly due to the Duchess’s surreal sense of humour. She had a knack for creating incongruous juxtapositions that stood out from ordinary Twitter fare: “I spilled a bag of ellipses all over the floor. Now I don’t know where anything begins or ends”. And she provided unique perspectives on being fictional: “People often ask me what fictional people see in their dreams. We dream of you”.

The Duchess also became a secular saint. Empathizing with correspondents who were lonely or in pain, Anonymous had the Duchess extend solace. Anonymous assumed that she was simply channelling her father, a seminarian who preached unconditional love. She found this difficult to practise, but the Duchess exuded compassion. “Fictional or not,” wrote one acolyte, “you are a beacon of kindness.” Another described the Duchess in religious terms, praising “her faith, her words, her friendship, her insistence I not surrender – she had made a miracle”. Fans created Duchess reliquaries, or at least tchotchkes, and met each other in person, united by their devotion. The Duchess didn’t take herself too seriously, although she was happy to advise, “Don’t let anyone shame you for your love of an imaginary friend. Religions have been founded on less”.

The Duchess’s public profile expanded when writers and celebrities, themselves adherents of artifice, accepted the rare opportunity to chat with someone fictional. When the singer Lyle Lovett joined the conversation, the Duchess revealed her real identity to him, confessing that he was one of her idols, and they soon became friends. She credits him for helping her to regain her self-confidence, which also came from the virtual community she established via the Duchess. Included here are some of her exchanges with Lovett, which should reassure those wondering if this entire account might be fictional. As a work of non-fiction, Becoming Duchess Goldblatt belongs under Autobiography if not Duobiography, but it also aspires to be a self-help book. The tone can shift from sharp cynicism to treacly sentimentalism; like all of us, Anonymous is complicated.

Anonymous not only regained companions and self-esteem: her own character merged with that of her creation. The Duchess would console and bolster her at stressful moments. At her lowest ebb, Anonymous had trouble concentrating and remembering, yet she focused with ease on composing the Duchess’s tweets and recalled minute details about the Duchess’s many correspondents. She attributes her gradual recovery to the existence of her fictional persona. Anonymous landed a good job that involved distilling information and encouraging clients – skills she had honed as amanuensis to the Duchess. She also became more assertive. She recalled being timorous during a job presentation, when suddenly “Duchess came flouncing through the door … and pushed me aside. She grabbed the mic”.

Anonymous appears possessed by the Duchess. By the end of her memoir, though, she realizes that it was actually self-possession. Her epiphany arrived via a relative who had read an early draft of her book, and insisted that she was wrong to attribute the Duchess’s admirable character traits to the saintly father. “It’s your voice. It’s your ideas and your humor. … You give him all the credit for Duchess … but honey, she’s you.”By merging with her fictional character, Anonymous discovers the character that she always had, and finds the life she was meant to live. She attained integrity – a trait associated with undeviating character – by becoming a fiction.

Michael Saler is Professor of History at the University of California, Davis. He is writing a history of the interplay between reason and imagination in modernity

When I reviewed the wide range of topics covered by the respective chapters of this book, I wondered if the text would flow or seem disjointed. The text does flow together nicely; the chapters are arranged so that similar topics are covered back-to-back. What really connects this book is Professor Garber's lively prose and consistent -- but not heavy-handed -- references to the questions at the heart of the book. The book's introduction works very well to ground the reader in some of the main ideas about the very word "character" and the various concepts implicated by its use (both in modern times and historically..

It also does an exemplary job of showing off the author's conversational style of writing. I was worried this book might make for dry reading, but the narration is not only fluid but rather light. I experienced the following effect as I read: it seemed the narrator was trying to engage my interest personally. The subject matter was more accessible and less obscure/abstract than I thought it might be. I expect many readers to enjoy this book if they find the description interesting. There are frequent references to Shakespeare characters as well as some historical figures that may not be contextualized much, so the reader might want to look those references up on a few occasions.

I enjoyed this book heartily, and I would like to thank the publisher for granting me access to an eGalley on NetGalley. Please be advised this review will be posted on Goodreads and LibraryThing at a later time.