On the Words "Be Yourself"

Once upon a time I was teaching a survey course on American Literature from the Civil War to today. As part of a "unit" on naturalism I included Stephen Crane's classic Maggie, a Girl of the Streets.

One of my students, who had elected to complete a required short paper assignment by writing about that particular work, had for her thesis that Maggie needed to "be herself" and find a "lifestyle" consistent with that.

I was flabbergasted by this "analysis"--the more in as the paper actually indicated familiarity with the content of the novella (it would have been less appalling if they were completely ignorant of it when they made their claim); and I might add, as more than a few other students offered similar thoughts in their own papers.

(Lest the reader respond with a snide remark about community college students or some such they should know that I was teaching this course at a selective private research university which has ranked among the nation's top fifty in noted surveys of the matter, for what that is worth. My experience is that even the most prestigious institutions are no shorter on idiots--among students and faculty--than any others in the academic world, or the world generally, but the point is that this sort of cheap, common elitism explains nothing here. Now back to the story.)

Let us, for the moment, set aside the great many, many things wrong with what she (and the others) wrote, and focus simply on that particular choice of words she used, "Be yourself." Previously I had associated the words "be yourself" with the sort of lame, meaningless advice that unbelievably naive and oblivious parents give to children entering a far tougher world than the one they remember. (I find my mind often returning to Julie Hagerty singing "Be yourself!" to Ryan Reynolds as he gets in his car in Just Friends.)

But since that time the phrase has seemed increasingly pernicious. What does it really mean to "be yourself?" More precisely, how do we know if we are doing that? And how do others know it? A prerequisite to this would seem to be some basis for identifying a real "self" to which our "being" might or might not conform, but that raises yet another question, namely: Just who decides what your "self" is? Do you determine that, after which others defer to your conception of self? One might ask, too--is this self constant, or does it change? Should we want to do so, can we change ourselves?

We live in a society that speaks incessantly and self-importantly about "freedom," "liberty," "equality" and the rest. The reality it lives, of course, is very different. Ours is an extremely unequal, hierarchical order, in which very specific ideas about how people generally and people of particular types ought to behave are very strongly held by a very great many people, not least by those who have power and privilege--and because society is so far from the accepting, tolerant, inclusive thing it pretends to be, plenty of incentive to be something other than "yourself," however defined, and certainly as defined by those others. Others reserve the right to determine for themselves and for everyone else, you included, just what your self is; let you know it; and get very nasty about it--while not taking too kindly to people who change themselves from what they conceive them to be (even as they demand that people "fit in," with the square peg told that it had better learn to accommodate itself to the round hole).

The result is that "Be yourself," while sounding like the namby-pamby, nurturing-gone-mad that makes right-wingers snarl about "political correctness" often is no more than the age-old snarl of those on top to those beneath them to "KNOW YOUR PLACE!"--a place you don't decide for yourself, that others decide for you, that is likely to be a matter of what class you were born into, what ethnicity your ancestors were, and so forth--and, in spite of the fact that that place is likely an unpleasant one in which to be and which one might quite reasonably prefer to escape, keep that place forever, with doing anything else a matter of "putting on airs," and those who somehow manage to materially alter their circumstances, change their "place," if they cannot be wholly denied, sneered at as "upstarts," "parvenus" and the rest.

In that we have an all too common story--how what is presented to us as overgentle, "p.c." and the rest so often comes from a place even more right-wing than the avowed right-wingers, as we are easily reminded when we stop tossing around the word "postmodernism" and look at what it really means, a creed that is the heir not to Marx (indeed, it is hard to think of anything more antithetical to a genuine Marxist) but to Maistre.

Such cluelessness prevailing, I am not sure very many on the scene are capable of being "themselves" politically--precisely because they have no idea who, or what, they actually are.