Maladies of the Will

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 ideal of the autonomous subject, charting a path toward self-determination. Yet novelists have portrayed the will as prone to insufficiency or excessfrom indecision to obsession, wild impulse to melancholic inertia. Jennifer Fleissners ambitious book shows how the novels attention to the wills maladies enables an ongoing interrogation of modern premises from within. Maladies of the Will reveals the nineteenth-century American novels relation to a wide-ranging philosophical tradition, highly relevant to our own tumultuous present. In works from Moby-Dick and The Scarlet Letter to Elizabeth Stoddards The Morgesons and Charles W. Chesnutts The Marrow of Tradition, the wills grandeur and its perversity emerge as it alternately aligns itself with and pits itself against a bigger Willwhether of God, the state, society, history, or life itself. Today, when invocations of autonomy appear beside the medicalization of many behaviors, and democracys tenet of popular will has come into doubt, Maladies of the Will provides a map to how we got here, and how we might think these vital dilemmas anew.