Sublime

She is encouraged to pursue an ideal of self-invention and self-mastery that hails from a culture where someone else’s labors (that of wives and enslaved persons) would provide for the necessities of daily life.

Work on the self—the quest for a path, the invention of a life, or the search for authenticity—is offered as an antidote to the anxiety-provoking uncertainties of a new economic and social order. It is this newly emerging self—the self perennially at work on itself and the self labored over by the self—that I call the belabored self.