This paper addresses Victorian labor by way of Augusta Webster’s “A Preacher,” the first poem in her 1866 collection Dramatic Studies. Webster’s critical ascendency mainly owes to dramatic monologues like “A Castaway” and “The Happiest Girl in the World,” which represent female subjectivities quietly constructing themselves amidst a dehumanizing sexual marketplace.@ As Patricia Rigg bluntly puts it, “it is time now to consider…the male speakers who make up the bulk of” Webster’s Dramatic Studies and Portraits (31). Perhaps it is a mistake to separate dramatic monologues featuring women and those featuring men, since texts like “Sister Annunciata” and “A Castaway” also reflect on vocation. However, the professional alienation we see in “A Preacher,” particularly as linked to the Victorian “crisis of faith,” seems to be gendered male. Such is consistent with texts like Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall” (1842), Arnold’s “Dover Beach” (1867), Arthur Hugh Clough’s Dipsychus (1869), and Mrs. Humphry Ward’s Robert Elsmere (1888). However, more consideration could be given to her vocational monologues — poems like “A Preacher,” “A Painter,” and “An Inventor” — which represent the words of Victorians at work. Arguably, the most sophisticated of these poems, “A Preacher” invites special attention. Webster’s poem catches a priest backstage following a day’s preaching. In his essay “Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties,” John Stuart Mill famously distinguished between eloquence, which is heard, and poetry, which is overheard. Webster takes advantage of the dramatic monologue as a form that strands us uneasily between these poles. On the one hand, her preacher speaks only to himself, combing through memory in a lyrical, nearly Wordsworthian nostalgia. On the other hand, his confidential tone often spikes into exhortation or excoriation. Although alone, the preacher delivers a kind of sermon, a sermon on sermons, in which he doubles as priest and parishioner, homily and homilectician. His theme is an alarming occupational hazard of ministry: namely, that the pulpit inoculates the preacher against a primary experience of his own message, contaminating his faith as well as his integrity before his parishioners.

Fittingly, the monologue takes on something of the structure of a Victorian sermon. It opens with a biblical text, I Corinthians 9.27:

“Lest that by any means

Should be a castaway.” (lines 1-3)

From there the speaker presents a sort of exordium (lines 4-39), summing up his message — the urgent need for something, or someone, to revitalize “the old dull skeletons/ Of points and morals, inferences, proofs,/ Hopes, doubts, persuasions.” The tools of the trade, he says, are so “Worn out of the flesh” that preachers themselves need a preacher. Sadly, however, “no one bears/ Apostleship for us” (21). From exordium the speaker turns to conformation, or sermon body (40-108). Here he examines his pulpit experience in a pattern that moves from general to specific, and professional to personal. This section climaxes in a confession that his latest sermon, which turned on a harrowing portrayal of a soul awakening in Hell, left him untouched. Next comes the refutation (109-182), where the speaker dismisses various ways he might jumpstart his zeal — but by this point, the sermon structure, such as it is, has begun to break down. The preacher cannot convincingly pivot from refutation to peroration; no remedy, no “application” presents itself, and when at the end he is summoned to dinner, his voice trails off in regret, considering “Dear Jane, who thinks me half a saint.”

The preacher’s dilemma, I propose, is best understood in light of the debate concerning priestly sincerity, which had erupted in Britain following the 1860 publication of Essays and Reviews. The “higher critical” Essays did more than reactivate fears of national apostasy. They also crystallized questions about vocational integrity in a world where secular professionals too were increasingly expected to express themselves as simultaneously individual and institutional subjects. As Trevor May writes, “As the nineteenth century progressed, the office of clergyman became less one of amateur (though often dedicated) service by gentlemen of private means than that of a modern professional. This was part of a general trend in society and was equally evident in medicine and the law” (21). Critics have emphasized the dramatic monologue as entailing doubleness (Nancy Armstrong), “self-division” (Robert P. Fletcher), and “swerves of voice” (W. David Shaw). Vocational monologues like Webster’s “A Preacher,” I suggest, exploited this formal potential in context of the rise of professional society and an emerging species of alienated labor.

In Pam Morris’s Imagining Inclusive Society, she traces a new “code of sincerity” to the 1830s Corn Law controversy, during which political authority reconstituted itself around a perceived congruence between the inwardness of the charismatic leader and that of his public (Morris 9-15). If so, however, it took the Essays and Reviews scandal to test that code on a professional, as opposed to strictly political, plane. Penned by seven liberal theologians, the volume ignited furious discussion about biblical authority. Essays with titles like “On the Interpretation of Scripture” and “Bunsen’s Biblical Researches” essentially repackaged German biblical scholarship for an English audience, for example parsing the Book of Genesis as a sediment of legendary fragments, or explaining away the Passover miracle in light of earthly probabilities.@ As Frederic Harrison put it in the Westminster Review, “[biblical] facts are idealized; dogmas are transformed; creeds are discredited as human and provisional; the authority of the Church and of the Bible to establish any doctrine is discarded; the moral teaching of the Gospel remains” (163). The pushback was thorough: painstaking theological refutations in the Christian Observer; the prosecution of two Essayists before the Court of Arches (1861); and a declaration signed by almost 12,000 Anglican clergymen upholding the “literal inspiration of the Bible and eternal damnation” (Shea and Whitla 6).

But most troubling for many observers was the fact that this assault came from within, masterminded by priests and Oxford theologians who’d pledged themselves to the Thirty-nine Articles.@ For what subscription involved, see Gibson’s The Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England Explained, esp. 60-64. Despite periodic adjustments in language and procedure, the most recent being the Clerical Subscription Act of 1865, requirements had remained fairly stable since the seventeenth century. As one exasperated commentator put it, “We have a chaplain to the queen, a head-master of Rugby school, a vice-president of St. David’s college, a vicar of Broad Chalke, a vicar of Great Staughton, and two Oxford professors, not believing the creeds of the Church, — those very creeds upon the profession of which they were admitted…into possession of all these honours and preferments!” (qtd. Alholtz 53).@ F.C. Cook likewise highlighted the Essayists’ false position, his annoyance unspooling in great ribbons of gentlemanly legalese: “[N]o man would be regarded with more entire sympathy and tenderness than one whose spirit might be overwrought in its struggles with storms which haunt the higher regions of intellectual life, but so long as he works, prays, teaches, administers the sacraments of the Church, or discharges the kindred and no less responsible duty of forming the character of youth under the sanction of the ministerial office, laymen presume, and would be scandalized to hear it doubted, that he holds substantially the convictions which he professed, when formally, publicly, deliberately, at a most critical moment of his life, he signed his name in token of unfeigned assent to the Articles of his Church” (180-81). For a more extensive analysis of the scandal, see Parsons’ “On Speaking Plainly: ‘Honest Doubt’ and the Ethics of Belief.” Parsons notes that the Essayists, particularly Williams and Wilson, were roundly abused for subscribing to Church doctrines in a seemingly hedging sense. Again, the affair irritated secularists perhaps more than co-religionists. Henry Sidgwick wrote that “the duty of making his position clear rests with the divergent; and if his position is not made clear, if the terms of membership are merely relaxed in the esoteric opinion of the enlightened few, if he gives other men fair reason for believing he holds opinions he does not hold, then his conduct can only be defended on the grounds on which all other religious hypocrisy can be defended” (qtd. Parsons 204). The Essayists had their supporters, particularly in the popular press. But even sympathizers often portrayed them as feeble conversos forced by circumstance to disguise the extent of their skepticism. In Frederic Harrison’s influential review, for example, the Essayists emerge as victims of a historical rupture pitting “the home, the school, and the Church” against forms of “Life, thought, and society” which “nullify and dispel their teaching” (177). Christianity’s intellectual insolvency, he argues, has poisoned honest relations between family members, as well as between clergymen and parishioners, so that even “the grey hairs of the preacher scarcely save him from contempt.” Anthony Trollope’s Clergymen of the Church of England, published in the same year as Webster’s “A Preacher,” casts the liberal priest in a similarly tragic role.@ The relevant chapter is titled “The Clergyman Who Subscribes for Colenso,” in reference to a companion scandal regarding the purported heresy of Bishop John Colenso and his The Pentateuch and Book of Joshua Critically Examined (1862). As the Colenso case suggests, the Essays composed only one moment in a longer struggle. Charles Kingsley’s now infamous libel on John Henry Newman, issuing in Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864), belongs to the same story insofar as it raised questions of clerical integrity. Such a priest glides among his parishioners with “subrisive smile,” handling the tales of Jonah or of Balaam’s Ass with “a touch of irony” (126). Indeed, he labors under a sort of mythic curse which forces him at intervals to violate his conscience: “He is one who, without believing, cannot bring himself to think that he believes, or to say that he believes that which he disbelieves without grievous suffering to himself. He has to say it, and does suffer. There are the formulas which must be repeated, or he must abandon his ministry altogether” (Trollope 129).

It’s a period type that we might label the Tragic Essayist, or, more broadly, the Tragic Subscriber — and Webster’s preacher fits the pattern. This is clearest in places he draws on an established language of “honest doubt.” At one point, for example, the speaker declines to “school myself/ To an unbased belief and love [God] more/ Only through a delusion” (164-66). “Better,” he concludes “to doubt and be perplexed in soul/ Because thy truth seems many and not one/ Than cease to seek thee” (172-74).@ Wrenched from context, these lines appear to express Millian relativism, or even an incipient Nietzschian perspectivalism. More likely, however, Webster is alluding to a Tennysonian situation in which, as Tennyson writes in In Memoriam, “God and Nature” are “then at strife.” Truth for Tennyson could appear multiple in that the soul speaks an immortal love at odds with the jungle law of Nature. Webster’s preacher reflects on a similar paradox, though in fact he reverses Tennyson’s logic. In “A Preacher,” it is the speaker’s inwardness that fails him, while his confidence in Christianity’s objective claims seems unshaken. Lines like these have led some critics to judge the preacher a full-blown skeptic, bearer of, in Angela Leighton’s words, “a quietly agnostic challenge to the monoliths of religious conviction and of heart-felt enthusiasm” (182).@ Rigg, who relies on Leighton’s inferences, likewise treats the preacher as a figure who is moving (or has moved) beyond Christian orthodoxy. In Rigg’s case, she erects a reading atop a rather wobbly thesis concerning Webster’s supposed Aestheticism. The preacher, in her view, is a performer who escapes his pained sense of duplicity by making “an aesthetic moment of his distress” (70). His rhetoric operates to circumvent his spiritual misgivings by recasting his priestly role in practical, earthly terms. For Rigg, such casuistry is simply pitiable since the preacher “lacks the social stature, intellectual agility, and sophisticated sophistry of [Robert Browning’s] Bishop Blougram” (70). Rigg ignores the fact that from the beginning the preacher candidly highlights performance as a significant problem — indeed, as the dilemma to be overcome. Perhaps it could be replied that in reflecting on performance he nevertheless falls back into it, but he hardly does so as some benighted näif. But this takes things too far. In a key line, the preacher directly asks himself “am I…a castaway?” and frankly answers “No, but a man who feels his heart asleep,/ As he might feel his hand or foot” (69-70). His doubts may link him to the Tragic Subscriber, but — and this is Webster’s brilliant twist — the poem proposes that it is faithful ministry, not theological reservations, which has eroded the preacher’s confidence. In fact, Webster shrewdly reorients our focus away from doctrinal assent and towards the labor of ministry.@ In the nineteenth century, the obsession with clerical integrity dates back at least as far as Tractarianism and Newman’s equivocal Tract XC. What’s new here is Webster’s focus on the professional — the preacher — at work. Her monologue asks, in effect: What if preaching itself interdicts belief? What if alienation is inevitable once religious witness becomes religious occupation?

In plumbing his dilemma, Webster’s speaker relies on three overlapping metaphors: of the machine, of sleeping and waking, and of theatrical performance. But it helps to begin at the beginning with that opening exordium, in effect a single toilsome sentence of nineteen lines:

If someone now

Would take that text [I Cor. 9.27] and preach to us that preach, —

Someone who could forget his truths were old

And what were in a thousand bawling mouths

While they filled his — someone who could so throw

His life into the old dull skeletons

Of points and morals, inferences, proofs,

Hopes, doubts, persuasions, for all time untold

Worn out of the flesh, that one could lose from mind

How well one knew his lesson, how oneself

Could with another, maybe choicer, style

Enforce it, treat it from another view

And with another logic — someone warm

With the rare heart that trusts itself and knows

Because it loves — yes, such a one perchance,

With such a theme, might waken me as I

Have wakened others, I who am no more

Than steward to an eloquence God gives

For others’ use not mine.

In context, “old dull skeletons” may allude to off-the-rack sermons available for purchase in volumes like Charles Simeon’s well-known Skeletons of Sermons (1801). Webster’s preacher, as we will learn, delivers his own material. But sermons nonetheless conventionalize Holy Writ into a banal clutter of “points and morals, inferences, proofs.” Towards the poem’s conclusion, the speaker returns to this problem, decrying a “knack of sermon-making,” which “seems to carry me/ Athwart the truth at times before I know” (184-85). Recently, he says, he declared from the pulpit that the Lord’s Day should be preserved for “Heaven’s thoughts,” “Sunday thoughts,” even though he privately holds such Sabbatarianism in contempt. Why? Because in the pulpit he found himself swept away by “lessons and rebukes long made/ So much a thing of course that, unobserving,/ One sets them down as one puts dots to i’s,/ Crosses to t’s” (238-41). Platitudes reproduce themselves mechanically, reducing clergymen themselves to mere machines: “drumming pedagogues” (23) and “clock-work sentinels” (32).@ This recalls George Orwell’s well-known argument that in its decadence, a language’s clichés, “tacked together like prefabricated parts of a henhouse,” assemble themselves without thought.

In Sartor Resartus (1833-34), Carlyle had described a historical shift rendering Christian forms “mere hollow Shapes, or Masks, under which no living Figure or Spirit any longer dwells” (164). Webster makes a more pragmatic point, describing a syndrome widely recognized within the profession. It’s what Charles Spurgeon termed “ministerialism” or “the tendency to read our Bibles as ministers, to pray as ministers, to get into doing the whole of our religion not as ourselves personally, but only relatively, concerned in it” (15). The more colorful phrase was “Gospel-hardened” (Evans 49). However, Webster goes further, proposing a more fundamental thesis about production and point of view. Midway through the poem, her preacher recalls how moved his parishioners were by the evening’s sermon:

Not a breath

But shivered when I pictured the dead soul

Awaking when the body dies to know

Itself has lived too late, and drew in long

With yearning when I showed how perfect love

Might make Earth’s self be but an earlier Heaven. (83-88)

What’s interesting is that although the preacher admits these convulsions of sensibility were artificially induced, he nevertheless honors them. Perhaps, he says, someone “has felt/ What it may mean to love Him, someone learned/ A new great horror against death and sin” (91-93). Why then can’t he trust his own emotional reflexes, which as he later admits are often equally intense? In George Herbert’s The Country Parson (1652), he had enjoined preachers to “dip[] and season[] all our words in our hearts before they come into our mouths” (204). In Webster’s own day, Spurgeon admonished young ministers with John Owens’ dictum: “No man preaches his sermon well to others if he doth not first preach it to his own heart” (15). Yet for Webster, this is just what can’t be done. There’s a cruel asymmetry built into homiletic performance. It’s the producer, not consumer, for whom sermonic discourse decomposes into skeletons. The preacher can no more preach to himself than a drowning man can hoist himself from the sea. Or, to adapt a mechanical metaphor in keeping with Webster’s conceits: the preacher can no more possess his discourse than the mill hand can possess the yards of fabric she looms.

To understand why, we must turn from the poem’s metaphor of mechanical to its metaphor of theatrical production. James Sheridan Knowles encouraged his actor friends to see Spurgeon preach, since he is “a master in the art of acting” (qtd. Ellison 71). But the idea that preaching entails performance troubles Webster’s minister. In the body of his monologue, he claims he is “no hypocrite/ Playing my soul against good men’s applause.” All the same, while in the pulpit he feels

A falseness somewhere clogging me. I seem

Divided from myself; I can speak words

Of burning faith and fire myself with them;

I can, while upturned faces gaze on me

As if I were their Gospel manifest,

Break into unplanned turns as natural

As the blind man’s cry for healing, pass beyond

My bounded manhood in the earnestness

Of a messenger from God.

Yet back in his study, the preacher discovers “The callous actor who, because long since/ He had some feelings in him like the talk/ The book puts in his mouth, still warms his pit” (47-62). Earlier he’d spoken as though he were spiritually frigid. Now he reveals that in the moment he’s all too suggestible, transported by the role he plays as mirrored back in the “upturned faces” of his congregants. Their eyes upon him, his linguistic innocence is momentarily restored, his utterance as unitary and unimpeachable as a New Testament penitent’s cry.

Yet these moments are not to be trusted, as the preacher knows, for they arrive hopelessly encumbered in self-consciousness.@ Auerbach’s essay “Victorian Players and Sages” documents a Victorian “rage for integrity,” suspicious of any threat to a coherent identity grounded in Nature. She argues that after 1860, this conservatism had even infected the stage, which abandoned the dangerously polymorphic identity associated with traditional theater. It’s not just that back in his study he confronts “the callous actor.” Even in the pulpit part of him stands aloof, coolly reciting the very lines that “fire” him — a fatal doubling. What people in the pew experience as mystical qualia, the preacher undergoes as technique, reducible to rhetorical rules, as well as to such galling externals as “talk/ The book puts in his mouth” and a “satin suit” (61-62, 65). In a sense, Webster’s monologue cheapens Feuerbach’s grand anthropomorphic theory of religion into a trade secret. It is the preacher, specifically, who must live with the knowledge that we manufacture our own sublimities, sublimities that speciously return to us as evidence of the Divine. This is not to say that real faith doesn’t exist. However, we are told that where “God’s seeds root” it is “Silently in the dark.”@ I’ve rephrased Webster’s original lines, which in the original were phrased negatively: “It [rhetorically manufactured faith] is not natural. It does not root/ Silently in the dark, as God’s seeds root,/ Then day by day move upward in the light” (139-41). And silence is, of course, cruelly at odds with the preacher’s duty.@ The most haunting thing, perhaps, is how close the preacher comes to real faith. “I know thee, Lord, what I should see/ If I could see thee as some can on earth,/ But I do not see thee,” and “I know thee, Lord,/ What loving thee is like, as if I loved,/ But I cannot love thee” (96-100). Theologically, the speaker “knows” God, which suggests more than the ability to recite his attributes, as detailed in the creeds. It implies an ability to figure God to himself in a more intimate way. But there is a great gulf between even the richest figuration and love. Adding to the cruelty is the hint of a poststructuralist commonplace: that theology’s sign system, rich though it is, actually serves to block access to the Referent. As he puts it later, “there I stand/ In face with it and know it. Not for me;/ Because I know it, cannot trust it;/ It is not natural” (137-40).

In the poem’s last lines, Jane — wife? daughter? servant girl? — calls the preacher to dinner:

Yes, Jane, yes,

I hear you — Prayers and supper waiting me —

I’ll come.

Dear Jane, who thinks me half a saint. (53-56)

It’s an economical way of hinting that the preacher’s interior dilemma has compromised his public role. It is innocents like Jane, these lines imply, who are defrauded by the Tragic Subscriber, the preacher of “subrisive smile.”@ In Lionel Trilling’s landmark study, he distinguished between sincerity as a publically-oriented virtue and the romantic cult of authenticity, historically deriving from Rousseau and Wordsworth (Sincerity and Authenticity.) But in this clergyman’s case, compromised authenticity — an obstructed “sentiment of being” — automatically short-circuits sincerity, that is, his relationship to his public. Perhaps this is because the preacher’s responsibility isn’t just to communicate truth, but to embody it. In F.D. Maurice’s phrase, the minister should become “a witness of Christ’s presence” (120).

At the same time, Webster’s conclusion subtly points beyond questions of ministerial integrity towards a broader professional context. Just before that final supper call, the preacher bitterly asked how it was that he’d become “an actor/ Able to be awhile the man he plays/ But in himself a heartless common hack?” (245-47). The word hack evokes a wider world of botched professionalism, a late-century Vanity Fair of patent medicines, tabloid newsmen, and demagogic novelists. The hack’s very existence impugns “professional society,” whose growing economic leverage depended upon a reputation for rigorous training, market disinterestedness, and sincerity (Perkin 117-127). We don’t tend to associate such marketplace realities with Victorian poetry, much less with the grand religious despair that elevates many period lyrics.@ I’m thinking of poems like Tennyson’s In Memoriam, Arnold’s “Dover Beach” and “The Scholar Gipsy,” and Clough’s Dipsychus. Webster uses the monologue to ground spiritual alienation in the daily grind of “white collar” role-play.

It’s tempting here to expand my thesis and suggest that the dilemma of vocational performance fundamentally shaped the dramatic monologue more broadly. So many Browning titles come to mind: “A Grammarian’s Funeral” (1854), “Mr Sludge, the Medium” (1864), “Bishop Blougram’s Apology” (1855).@ Of course, it’s long been understood that, as Glennis Byron puts it, “by placing the speaking self in context,” the dramatic monologues of Tennyson and Browning, “expose the illusory nature of the autonomous and unified Romantic subject” (3). Critics agree that to an unusual degree the dramatic monologue as a form reflects on its own discursive materials. See for example Byron (5) and Cronin (28).Works CitedAltholz, Josef L. “Early Periodical Responses to Essays and Reviews.” Victorian Periodicals Review 19 (1986): 50-56.Armstrong, Isobel. Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics. London: Routledge, 1993.Auerbach, Nina. “Victorian Players and Sages.” The Performance of Power: Theatrical Discourse and Politics. Ed. Sue-Ellen Case and Janelle Reinhelt. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991. 183-98.Byron, Glennis. Dramatic Monologue. London: Routledge, 2003.Cronin, Richard. Reading Victorian Poetry. Oxford: Blackwell, 2012.Davis, Philip. Why Victorian Literature Still Matters. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008.Carlyle, Thomas. Sartor Resartus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.Ellison, Robert H. The Victorian Pulpit: Spoken and Written Sermons in Nineteenth-Century Britain. London: Associated University Presses, 1998.Evans, A.B. “Preachers and Preaching: The Pulpit and the Press.” The Church and the World: Essays on Questions of the Day in 1867. Ed. Orby Shipley. London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1867.Fletcher, Robert P. “‘Convent Thoughts’: Augusta Webster and the Body Politics of the Victorian Cloister.” Victorian Literature and Culture 31 (2003): 295-313.Carlyle, Thomas. Sartor Resartus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday, 1959.Harrison, Frederic. “Neo-Christianity.” The Westminster Review (American Edition) 146 (Oct. 1860): 157-77.Herbert, George. The Complete English Works. The Country Parson, His Character, and Rule of Holy Life. New York: Everyman’s Library, 1995.Leighton, Angela. Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992.Maurice, F.D. The Kingdom of Christ; or Hints on the Principles, Ordinances and Constitution of the Catholic Church in letters to a Member of the Society of Friends, Vol. 2. London: James Clarke & Co., 1959, 1842.May, Trevor. The Victorian Clergyman. Princes Risborough, Buckinghamshire: Shire Publications, 2006.Mill, John Stuart. “Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties.” Part 1. The Crayon 7 (April 1860): 93-97.Morris, Pam. Imagining Inclusive Society. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2004.Orwell, George. “Politics and the English Language.” All Art if Propaganda: Critical Essays. Boston: Mariner, 2009.Perkin, Harold. The Rise of Professional Society: England since 1880. London: Routledge, 1989.Rigg, Patricia. Julia Augusta Webster: Victorian Aestheticism and the Woman Writer. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009.Shea, Victor and William Whitla, eds. Essays and Reviews: The 1860 Text and Its Readings. Charlottesville: U P of Virginia, 2000.Spurgeon, Charles. Lectures to My Students. Grand Rapids, Zondervan, 1954.Trilling, Lionel. Sincerity and Authenticity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971.Trollope, Anthony. Clergymen of the Church of England. [1866] London: The Trollope Society, 1998.Webster, Augusta. “A Preacher.” Portraits and Other Poems. Ed. Christine Sutphin. Petersborough: Broadview Press, 2000. 257-64. Suffice to say that both Browning and Webster could confirm a point made by Erving Goffman in his classic twentieth-century study of self-presentation: “No one is in quite as good an observational position to see through the act as the person who puts it on” (17).