Maladies of the Will: The American Novel and the Modernity Problem

An examination of the nineteenth-century American novel that argues for a new genealogy of the concept of the will.

What if the modern person were defined not by reason or sentiment, as Enlightenment thinkers hoped, but by will? Western modernity rests on the notion of the autonomous subject, able to chart a path toward self-determination. Yet novelists have often portrayed the will as prone to insufficiency or excess-from indecision to obsession, wild impulse to melancholic inertia. Jennifer Fleissner’s ambitious book shows how the novel’s attention to these maladies of the will enables an ongoing interrogation of modern premises from within.

Maladies of the Will reveals the nineteenth-century American novel’s relation to a wide-ranging philosophical tradition, one highly relevant to our own tumultuous present. In works from Moby-Dick and The Scarlet Letter to Elizabeth Stoddard’s The Morgesons and Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition, both the will’s grandeur and its perversity emerge as it alternately aligns itself with and pits itself against a bigger Will-whether that of God, the state, society, history, or life itself. At a time when invocations of autonomy appear alongside the medicalization of many behaviors, and when democracy’s tenet of popular will has come into doubt, Maladies of the Will provides a road map to how we got here, and how we might think these vital dilemmas anew.