Shakespeare Versus the Girlboss

Back in 1979, historian Christopher Lasch warned that a crisis of narcissism was about to consume our culture because self-referential thinking and feeling were being championed as ethical, effective, and equitable. His book The Culture of Narcissism provides an archaeology of how we got to where we are now, 45 years later. Behind the narcissistic impulse, he wrote, lies a desire to soothe emotional frustration and erase cognitive tension. These elisions are accomplished, not by grappling with reality, but by making reality conform to our wishes:

Narcissus drowns in his own reflection, never understanding that it is a reflection. The point of the story is not that Narcissus falls in love with himself but, since he fails to recognize his own reflection, he lacks any conception of the difference between himself and his surroundings.

Narcissus’s gaze is fatal, not because he loves the self he sees, but because he cannot see past himself to reality. Lasch’s prescience about our self-gazing culture has now been confirmed. Like Narcissus, we do not understand that our perception of reality is merely a failure to understand that we are only seeing ourselves.

Lasch’s predictions are now evident in even the most innocuous parts of culture. Consider the newest chick-lit offering by bestselling author Jodi Picoult. While Hamlet asserts that theatre holds a “mirror up to nature,” Picoult’s new novel, By Any Other Name, holds a mirror up to its author, though she imagines that the reflection she sees is that of Shakespeare. Her inability (or refusal) to reference anything outside of her own fantasy promises freedom from emotional tension—a freedom only made possible by a failure to grapple with the reality we cannot see. In Picoult’s case, this is particularly tragic because her entire project is to subsume the most clear-sighted of thinkers, Shakespeare, into a vision of herself.