Book Review: Self-Made

Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians by Tara Isabella Burton (PublicAffairs, 2023).

Do you remember the names Leopold and Loeb, two of history’s most famous thrill-killers? I was reminded of them the other night when I was watching Rope, Alfred Hitchcock’s (extremely underrated) 1948 movie loosely based on their crime. On this viewing, this line from one of the killers struck me: “I’ve always wished for more artistic talent. Well, murder can be an art, too. The power to kill can be just as satisfying as the power to create.”

The line tied back very neatly—and disturbingly—to the book I’d been reading, Tara Isabella Burton’s Self-Made. Burton posits that “the idea that we are self-makers is encoded into almost every aspect of Western contemporary life. We not only can but should customize and create and curate every facet of our lives to reflect our inner truth. We are all in thrall to the seductive myth that we are supposed to become our best selves.”

But what does that have to do with the so-called art of murder? Hold on, we’ll get there.

Burton traces the myth that she’s identified back to the Renaissance, when the prevailing concept of a divinely ordained social order was shaken by the undeniable fact that some people—geniuses like Albrecht Dürer, for instance—didn’t fit within that order. So it began to give way to “the development of a sense of the self as an artistic project to be presented to the outside world, as well as shaped from within.”

From the time when this idea takes hold, when the paradigm of “God as creator” shifts to “humankind as creator,” Burton takes us on a whirlwind tour of European and American history, examining in each era certain individuals and groups that both shaped and were shaped by that paradigm. In case you ever wondered what Oscar Wilde, Frederick Douglass, Thomas Edison, Benito Mussolini, and Andy Warhol had in common, Burton is here to highlight the connections. In accessible and lively prose, she tracks the “self-made man” (the term is apt, she points out, since those with the most resources to indulge in self-creation have most often been men) through the centuries, as he morphs from one form to the next. Depending on the era, you might find him preaching the gospel of sexual libertinism, hard work, social Darwinism, commercialism, technology, militarism, sex appeal—whatever would let him control his image and thus his circumstances.

It’s fascinating and instructive to look at history through this lens, especially as it also throws light on the “shadow side” of the self-creator. From the beginning, Burton argues, the self-creator has had to define himself against the rest of the world, which often leads to contempt for society at best, preying on people at worst. There’s a pattern here of hatred for women, for minorities, for anyone whom the self-creator deems beneath him. And it’s our admiration of these ostensibly superior creatures and our buying into their myth that allows them to get away with it.

Burton notes, for example, that the Marquis de Sade, the man who gave his name to the word “sadism,” went to prison for crimes including poisoning and sexual abuse of prostitutes, but in a 2000 movie he was portrayed as a sort of transgressive rock star. She also makes a convincing case that the myth of self-making helped early American proponents of liberty to justify enslaving others.

Not all self-creators have been bad people; some have been genuine benefactors to society. In general, however, they show a marked tendency to portray self-creation not just as a right, but as a duty. If you haven’t optimized your potential to create your very best self, well, you should have tried harder. And if you don’t have the time or energy or money to do it, something’s wrong with you. Even Christian leaders like Henry Ward Beecher, abolitionist preacher and brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, preached that poverty was sin.

By the time we get to Kim Kardashian and the Instagram era, the idea of self-making has progressed to the point where “authenticity and … artificiality are one and the same.” That is, you are your truest, most authentic self when you’ve totally remade yourself. We’ve “become gods”—and forgotten how to be human. As the killer Brandon makes clear in Hitchcock’s Rope, when you’ve achieved such power, it doesn’t really matter if you use it to create or kill. The power itself is all that matters.

It’s a bleak prospect, and I can’t help wishing a little that Burton had spent some more time on how we can learn to subvert the paradigm that’s brought us here. But then it’s not exactly fair to expect one writer to provide solutions to a problem that’s been centuries in the making. As it is, she’s done us a service with her thoughtful and creative exploration of that problem; now it’s up to us to consider where we go from here.

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Self-Made on Amazon
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At Englewood Review of Books, I reviewed Unexpected Abundance: The Fruitful Lives of Childless Women by Elizabeth Felicetti.