and not to have them entangled in the briars and thorns of controversy. For once, I like to have it all my own way; and this is impossible unless you are alone […]” (182). Similar to Sanders’s metaphor of a dog chasing rabbits, Hazlitt is describing the meandering, seemingly haphazard movement of his mind (“my vague notions float like the down of the thistle before the breeze”), freed from social constraint/obligation (“not to have them entangled in the briars and thorns of controversy”), bound only by his own desires/impulses (“all my own way”).
Of course, Hazlitt, too, says above that he is freed in journeying of even his self (“leav[ing] ourselves behind”). The self that Hazlitt writes of leaving, though, is apparently the impeded and burdened self, for as he journeys, he discovers another self: “Then long forgotten things, like ‘sunken wrack and sumless treasures,’ burst upon my eager sight, and I begin to feel, think, and be myself again” (182, emphasis added). Again, the natural self seems to be capable of being discovered in the shedding of our social-ness, in a journey into what is natural.
The appeal of this simpler notion of the self and of the self’s relation to the world, perhaps, is obvious. It offers us the possibility of getting away from the world, getting away, even, from our worldly selves. Our students certainly see the appeal. I’m reminded of at least a few of my students’ essays in which they have written about a nostalgia for a more natural self, which equals, for them, a simpler mode of being—e.g., a self that has to worry about tilling the land or making bread for the family dinner, instead of a self that has to worry about paying bills and submitting papers and negotiating the competing versions of self that are maintained at the job, in the classroom, on Facebook, and at the dinner table. I’m reminded, though, too of many of the same student essays in which they experience some paralyzing moment in which they are confronted by a storm or a rattlesnake or a twisted ankle, while walking in the woods. In those moments, they realize that people built what we know to be “modern life” (of self-satisfaction and convenience) for many good reasons: to stave off threats and fears, to make surviving easier, but also so that we can concentrate on other stuff (like how best to treat a horse, how best to educate citizens, how best to negotiate the animosity between warring factions of people).
Sure, taking a walk can be relaxing; even commercials are now advising us to do so. But, my student essayists, even when waxing poetic about the benefits of getting away from it all, always, eventually realize that the effort doesn’t actually get us away from our (postmodern) selves. Perhaps this example will do more to reveal my own fears than to prove my point, but I offer this personal example of my own daily walks: there are moments when I find that the rhythm of my own feet and the playful present-ness of my dog’s experience of various spots of grass and of the other animals we meet along the way inspire a kind of dumb but also hyper-sensory state in me; however, I never get to stay in that state long. I am constantly jarred back into a much more “postmodern” reality with all of its splintering and spreading power dynamics: by men honking their horns as they pass us, by my comparison of my own body to the bodies of the women we pass at the pool, by the apparent economic differences between the lives lived in the neighborhoods we pass, by the tensions expressed in the “vote for” signs nailed to the yards we pass, and so on.
There is simply no simpler self, not without that simpler self being made in a grand pretend. Even the moments I mention above in which I describe myself as dumb and hypersensitive are not, to my mind, indicators of my having discovered a simpler self. Rather, I suspect that they are simply moments when I am given over to the present and have stopped worrying; they are not the momentary revelations of a distilled me. That said, none of this awareness, in my own or in my students’ meanderings in nature and/or on the page, of the essay’s failure to really capture a simpler self through the first two conventions of freedom and walking diminishes the essay’s valuing of or value granted by voice.
Voice
The two concepts—voice and walking—are pointing to intimately related processes: the first points to the power of the movement of a mind on the page (I’m invoking terms from Peter Elbow’s work here, which I’ll explore at greater lengths in the coming pages); the latter points to, describes, the movement itself, as I’ve discussed above. I find, however, in my readings about essays that the concept of voice has emerged as the convention that readers (and presumably, writers) care most about in the genre.8 For example, Scott Russell Sanders states, “The essay is a haven for the private, idiosyncratic voice […]” (190). This assumption about the genre being conducive to the writer’s voice is so ingrained in essays and essay scholarship that voice seems an inescapable or inevitable part of the genre. For example, in their Introduction to one of the most widely used essay textbooks The Fourth Genre, Robert Root and Michael Steinberg state, “[…W]e are aware of [essayists’] presence, because their voice is personal, individual […]” (xxiv). Again, this statement suggests that voice in an essay is a given (“we are aware”)—but also that it is proof of the essayist’s presence on the page.
In his extensive study of George Eliot’s writing voice over the course of her literary life,9 Robert Strange frames much of his study around the assumption that the narrator in her works is the “figure which George Eliot has animated with her own convictions and made to speak with the clarity and authority of her own celebrated authority” (326). It should come as no surprise that Strange can assert that “this figure” re-presents Eliot’s own convictions and speaks with her own authority, given that the text is an essay (specifically, a “moral essay”). Because of the common conception of the essayist-essay relation I’ve been describing, Strange can assert that even through the fictional character in a moral essay, the writer speaks and is manifest. It is through the writer’s “authorial voice,” in particular, that Strange hears the writer in her essays.
In the conventions of freedom, walking, and voice, the assumption is that there is a direct and transparent relationship between the essayist and the essay; in fact, I have often found that this relationship is the ultimate goal, if not the driving force, for writing or teaching the essay. According to voice scholars in Composition Studies, though, it is not through walking [in nature and/or on the page] or even in the freedom of the form that one finds voice; rather, it is through a series of operations—e.g., reflection and speaking/breathing—which can be enacted in a personal essay to create voice in writing.
Reflection
In his article addressing the distinction between tone and voice, Taylor Stoehr states, “Voice is the pervasive reflection, in written or spoken language, of an author’s character […]” (150, emphasis added). Like the image we see in the mirror, voice must be a copy of the real face, or in this case, the real writer’s character. 10 Stoehr continues: “There are as many possible voices as there are tones of voice, but a writer has only one voice, and while he may modulate it with many tonalities, it remains his idiosyncratic way of talking” (150). To extend the metaphor of the mirror, then, the image may reflect the apparent changes of the real face—the changes brought on by age, sleep, hairstyle, makeup, and so on—but the image remains, even in all these changes, the unique reflection of the person.
In his Introduction to Landmark Essays: On Voice and Writing, Peter Elbow is a bit more careful about asserting that voice is equal to the writer’s self; however, he admits that he “tend[s] to lean toward” (xxviii) the view that “people do have some kind of identity that exists apart from the language they use, and that it’s worth trying to talk about whether or not that identity shows in a textual voice” (xvii). Given his career-long investment in the conceptualizations and pedagogies of voice and given the field of Rhetoric and Composition’s general understanding of his role as one of the central figures of the Expressivist movement, perhaps it’s no surprise that I read Elbow’s work as consistently asserting that something of the writer can and should necessarily show up in the voice on the page. As to what the “something” is, though, that’s one of the major questions that drives much of his work, and there’s no easy way to pin down what that something is.
In investigating the writer-page
