The power and the glory
What does it mean to be self-made?
Centuries after the idea of the self-made man was conceived, it retains considerable kilowatts of divisive power. For conservatives, it is an ideal to be strived for. “To be happy, to become authentic, you must become the author of your own self,” writes Missouri Senator
Josh Hawley in one of the less-commented-upon passages from his book “Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs.” For liberals, however, the idea is flypaper for falsehoods.
In “Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians,” Tara Isabella Burton makes the case that, for better or worse, our current cultural moment “is one in which we are increasingly called to be self-creators: people who yearn not just to make ourselves a gift to the world but to make ourselves, period.” Burton offers a wide-ranging cultural genealogy of the concept of the “selfmade man” in Western civilization, starting with the German painter Albrecht Dürer, who “transformed himself into a work of art,” and ending with Kim Kardashian, an avatar of both “Instagram face” and the idea that we are fundamentally the sum of our desires. The author of two previous novels, Burton writes with verve about a range of novelists, artists, politicians, and socialites who had a talent for self-expression or “leapfrog[ged] the social hierarchy” through force of charisma.
In Burton’s telling, self-creation forms the third leg of a triangle composed of artifice and authenticity. She tracks the mythos of the self-made man in Europe and the US, which epitomize the “aristocratic” and “democratic” strains of the idea, respectively. In Regency England, for instance, a self-made man was one who possessed “bon ton,” an ineffable quality alchemizing “elegance, grace, class, and charm.” Bon ton was not a function of one’s heritage or professional standing, but rather a matter of how one presented oneself to the world.
Frederick Douglass, who became an acclaimed public speaker after escaping slavery, exemplified the egalitarian version of the bootstrapper. He helped popularize the idea that “the self was an open field to be tilled; the self-maker had to learn to carefully cultivate it, through mental and physical toil alike, if he wanted to be able to shape his own destiny,” writes Burton. Along with figures like Benjamin Franklin, whose Poor Richard’s Almanack exhorted readers to optimize their lives through a series of proto life-hacks encapsulated in folksy sayings, Douglass imbued self-making with a moral valence.
During the 19th century, the idea of the self-made man acquired capitalist overtones — the “virtuous, frugal citizen” supplanted by the entrepreneur, “someone who had figured out how to harness money and bend it to his will.” Figures like the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie and billionaire oilman John D. Rockefeller were held up as examples of men who had transcended humble beginnings to become titans of industry.
In every age, as Burton makes clear, the figure of the self-made man required a foil against which to define himself. The Parisian dandies, who prized artistic creation as the “key to human superiority,” sought to separate
SELF-MADE: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians By Tara Isabella Burton PublicAffairs, 288 pages, $30
themselves from the foule, or the masses. The sine qua non of the dandy was his ability to “cut [himself ] off from other people — their rules, their customs — and show exactly how unlike other people one can be.” This ability to sever ties from others cuts both ways. Dressing in unorthodox clothing may have imparted a sense of freedom and agency to queer-coded men living in a time when homosexuality was criminalized, but the habit of hiving oneself off from one’s neighbors could militate against fellow-feeling: “The more he sees himself as special or distinct … the less credence he gives to the experiences of those around him, particularly those whose viewpoints do not reflect his own.”
The dark side of aristocratic self-creation found greater expression in the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s idea of the Ubermensch, or “overman,” who was “both naturally superior to all other men, by virtue of his intellectual and physical qualities, and also capable of exercising that superiority by consciously creating himself, exerting his will upon the world.” The concept of the “overman,” which Hitler infamously seized upon for his program of mass extermination, was of a piece with Nietzsche’s idea that hierarchies naturally obtained in human relations. The overman lived according to his own values; the more he was able to express his “interior selfhood,” the greater he became. What united both this extreme Nietzschean version of the self-maker and the more democratic instantiation is their belief that “reality itself was malleable … that life was simply raw material for the magician of personality to reshape into his desired image.”
Is the idea of the self-made man entirely bankrupt? Burton’s book reads largely as a cautionary tale about complacently accepting the myth of being self-made. Burton has nothing to say, for instance, about drag culture or gender-affirming surgery, two areas where the idea of self-creation would seem to have more positive implications. The closest she comes to discussing the “liberatory” potential of self-fashioning today is when mentioning the “relative diversity of Internet influencers,” whose flouting of conventional beauty standards “make self-creation an increasingly openended proposition.” At the same time, there is mounting evidence that social media drives feelings of insecurity, concerns about body image, and selfdoubt, especially among teenage girls. Whether we’re living in the best of times or worst of times for self-making, only time will tell.