SELF-MADE

A wide-ranging study of self-creation.

Burton, a novelist, scholar of theology, and essayist, examines the idea that we have the power “to remake ourselves and our realities” to reflect our desires. Organized chronologically, from the Renaissance to internet influencers, the author’s investigation charts “an increasingly disenchanted world” in which humans lost faith that God created each individual’s unalterable personality. Rather, they came to believe in their own power of self-transformation. Burton cites German painter Albrecht Dürer, for example, as an artist who “forged a personality that sustained and advertised his work, even as his work— constantly emblazoned with his trademark—advertised the man. “Dürer-the-artist, Dürer-the-portrait, and Dürer-the-advertiser all mutually reinforced one another.” In Regency England, the “middle-class upstart” Beau Brummell saw fashion as a means to social and political influence. “The perception of the right people at the right time,” he understood, “was at the heart of this new avenue toward power. Perception was something that the clever and intrepid could learn how to shape.” Rather than reflect social station, fashion came to express individual personality as well as political identity. In 1859, acclaimed orator Frederick Douglass lectured on the “Self-Made Man,” asserting that work was the key to remaking the self. Burton’s well-populated history features figures such as Thomas Edison, “one of the canniest self-promoters”; the outrageous Oscar Wilde; and writer Elinor Glyn, inventor of the term it, defined as “a blend of raw sex appeal, Wildean dandyism,” and “quasi-magical personal magnetism.” The quality of “it” lay at the heart of a burgeoning celebrity culture. Perhaps the oddest group of self-creators are extropians, “interested in optimizing every aspect of human existence, transforming the body into the best possible machine” through technology. The author concludes that our search for self-definition is ultimately a search for what it means to be human: vulnerable and inextricably interconnected.

A thoughtful, well-grounded cultural history.