A Study of Personality in Literary Autobiography: An ......as reflected in these views that Wolfe held of himself and others. Although the subject of this study is Wolfe, its basic

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology1989. Vol. 56. No. 3, 416-430

Copyright 1989 by the American Psychological Association, Inc.0022-3514/89/S00.75

A Study of Personality in Literary Autobiography:An Analysis of Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel

Seymour RosenbergRutgers—The State University

Analyzed physical and psychological traits used by Thomas Wolfe to describe self and others inLook Homeward, Angel as a method for studying personality. Set-theoretical comparisons (HICLASalgorithm) of the traits he attributed to self during 5 successive age periods revealed that Wolfeviewed his development as the accumulation over time of core family traits, particularly those offather. Multidimensional scaling revealed sharp differences between trait content Wolfe attributedto self and family and trait content he attributed to nonfamily. Interpretable differences were alsofound between family and nonfamily in the proportion of unique traits attributed to a person. Inaddition, differences were found in the proportion of unique traits attributed to self during the 5different age periods. Implications of the findings for personality are discussed.

Look Homeward, Angel (LHA) is a fictionalized autobiogra-phy of Thomas Wolfe's life from his infancy to his early 20s.Most of the people and places described in the book are readilyidentifiable despite their fictional aliases. The elements selectedfrom LHA for analysis are all the characteristics, physical andpsychological, that Wolfe attributed to himself and to others inthe novel. The focus of this study is on personality organizationas reflected in these views that Wolfe held of himself and others.Although the subject of this study is Wolfe, its basic purpose isto demonstrate the value of an in-depth analysis of an individu-al's view of self and others in autobiography (particularly oneas articulate and personal as Wolfe's) as a way of studying per-sonality organization in general.

The psychology of autobiography, the use of literary materi-als to study personality, and a social psychological conceptionof personality and personality development—all provide theorientation and certain general assumptions underlying thisstudy of Thomas Wolfe's fictionalized autobiography as a studyof personality. The introductory remarks that follow are in-tended to make explicit how this study is rooted in each of these

This work was supported by National Science Foundation GrantsBNS-83-01027 and BNS-86-15937. The study took considerable helpfrom a number of people and I am grateful to them. Phyllis Dennegarextracted the character descriptions in Look Homeward, Angel. Themanagement and much of the analysis of this large corpus of data aredue to the considerable efforts of two former graduate students, SamKingsley and Moonja Kim. Paul De Boeck's set-theoretical analysisopened a new window for understanding these data. I am grateful toCarol Becker, George Levine, and Richard Wasson for sharing their lit-erary perspectives with me, and to Richard Kennedy who also sharedwith me his considerable knowledge about Thomas Wolfe. I thankPhipps Arabic, Michael Gara, Harold McCurdy, Robert Wbolfolk, andmembers of the Society of Personology for their thoughtful commentson earlier drafts of this article and Stephanie Micale for patiently pre-paring successive revisions of it.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Sey-mour Rosenberg, Department of Psychology, Rutgers University, TillettHall, Kilmer Campus, New Brunswick, New Jersey 08903.

three domains and to provide a background for spelling out themethodological and substantive aims of the study in more de-tail.

Autobiography

An important and widely shared assumption is that the recallof past experiences is strongly influenced and even distorted byone's present views of self and others. Several kinds of evidenceexist for this assumption (Cohler, 1982; Eakin, 1985; Langness& Frank, 1981; Runyan, 1984; Spence, 1982). The strongestevidence is from experimental social psychology (Greenwald,198Q; Ross & Conway, 1986). A related and supporting assump-tion is that the present exerts its influence on memory becauseof a person's need to provide his or her self with a sense of histor-ical continuity. Moreover, when recall of age-related selves isembedded in a narrative of one's life—an autobiography—thenarrative form itself also exerts a strong influence toward conti-nuity, because a story is expected, among other things, to makemeaningful connections between past, present, and future(Cohler, 1982;Gergen &Gergen, 1983, 1988; Spence, 1982).

Is it necessary for the empirical study of autobiography thatfact be separated from fiction—self-discovery from self-inven-tion? A functional research stance is that meaningful researchquestions can be posed and answered about these phenomenaas phenomena, even if fact and fiction are inextricably boundin autobiography. This stance is akin to that underlying thestudy of implicit personality theory; that is, the perception ofpeople is lawful and worthy of study whether these perceptionsare accurate or not. Indeed, the study of person (self and other)perception in autobiographical memory suggests a new rubricand research domain for personality and social psychology: im-plicit developmental theory. Ross and Conway (1986) enunci-ated a similar notion, implicit theories of stability and change,in their review of a wide range of laboratory (and other) findingson remembering one's own past.

Wolfe's implicit beliefs about his psychological developmentwere uncovered in this study by partitioning his extensive de-

416

PERSONALITY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY: THOMAS WOLFE 417

scriptions of self into several chronological periods. A compari-son of these age-related selves revealed certain systematic re-lations of these successive selves to each other. Also, as part ofthis analysis of Wolfe's implicit beliefs about his development,his descriptions of other people were compared with those ofhis age-related selves.

Literary Materials as Data

Literary material has a number of advantages for the studyof personality. It is naturalistic: unstaged for and unfiltered bythe psychologist, psychoanalyst, or psychotherapist in its pro-duction. It is readily available to other investigators and as suchcan be subjected to reanalysis and reinterpretation. Biographi-cal information, as well as other literary works, letters, and per-sonal notes of the author, are usually in the public domain aswell. Writers who are productive through a major period oftheir lives provide unusual opportunities for longitudinal stud-ies of personality (e.g., McCurdy, 1940a, 1940b, 195 3). Literarymaterial is a more articulate expression of personal experiencethan the protocols typically produced by subjects in the labora-tory and by therapy patients (Runyan, 1984, p. 205), althoughthe boundaries for this assertion have yet to be specified.

Within the psychoanalytic tradition, literary material is oftenviewed as not unlike dream material, that is, as "manifest con-tent," containing abundant symbolism and with the author rep-resented by the central figure in the narrative. Because the au-thor and his or her free associations to this manifest content aregenerally not available, as they would be in a psychoanalysis,psychoanalytic investigators have substituted a variety of expe-dients to uncover the latent meaning of the literary work, in-cluding the use of standard symbol and theme interpretation,and biographical and other information that might be availableabout the author. These practices confound in unknown waysthe personality of the author with that of the investigator. Sim-ilar problems of confounding exist within most nonpsychoana-lytic studies of personality through literature.

Freud (1907'/1959) himself characterized the work of the cre-ative writer as being somewhat different from that of ordinarydreaming when he wrote:

The author. . . directs his attention to the unconscious in his ownmind, he listens to its possible developments and lends them artisticexpression instead of suppressing them by conscious criticism.Thus he experiences from himself what we learn from others—thelaws which the activities of this unconscious must obey. But heneed not state these laws, nor even be clearly aware of them; as aresult of the tolerance of his intelligence, they are incorporatedwithin his creations. We discover these laws by analysing his writ-ings. . . . (Freud, 1907/1959, p. 92)

For McCurdy (1939), an early pioneer in the developmentof a sharable methodology for the study of personality throughliterature, this formulation by Freud signaled the possibility"that literary productions (and dreams as well) often possessa character of coherence and wholeness which invites analysiswithout reference to anything external to themselves" (p. 307).By external, McCurdy meant biographical data, symbol inter-pretation, and "other gratuitous comments and interpolations"(p. 307). McCurdy urged as one of the working caveats for asharable scientific methodology that the investigator turn to ex-

ternal information only after an internal analysis of the literarywork is completed. This is, in fact, the way he proceeded inmuch of his own empirical studies of the literary works of D. H.Lawrence, the Bronte sisters, and Shakespeare (McCurdy,1940a, 1940b, 1947, 1953, 1961). Nonetheless, only a handfulof scattered efforts exist in the use of a sharable scientific meth-odology for studying personality through literature (e.g., Hall &Lind, 1970; Sears, Lapidus, & Cozzens, 1978; Swede & Tetlock,1986; White, 1947).

More recently and from quite another tradition, that of per-son perception within the domain of social psychology, RussellJones and I developed a replicable methodology for represent-ing an author's view of people from his or her literary work andapplied this method to a collection of Theodore Dreiser's(1929) short stories (Rosenberg & Jones, 1972). We selectedfrom this literary corpus all the terms and phrases that referredto stable characteristics (traits) of a person, with each such ref-erence noted according to the character to whom it was attrib-uted. A multidimensional scaling and clustering of these traitsrevealed aspects of Dreiser's perception of people that were cen-tral to his life and personality, as corroborated by an in-depthbiography (Swanberg, 1965).

The present study of Thomas Wolfe's autobiography usesmethods for extracting character description from narrativethat are similar to those used for Dreiser's short stories. How-ever, methodological advances that have been made in the anal-ysis of such trait attributions since the Dreiser study (Gara &Rosenberg, 1979; Rosenberg, 1988; Rosenberg & Gara, 1985)are particularly appropriate to the analysis of an autobiographi-cal work such as LHA. In particular, in addition to a multidi-mensional scaling of the traits, there are now algorithms basedon set-theoretical notions that can be used to represent the re-lations among the characters (De Boeck, 1986; De Boeck & Ro-senberg, 1988). That is, the fact that the trait descriptions ofsome characters subsume those of other characters can be rep-resented by these analyses. Intermediate degrees of overlap be-tween characters, as well as equivalence (when two charactersshare the same traits) at one extreme and disjunction (whentwo characters have no traits in common) at the other, are alsorepresented, as are the classes of trait attributions on which therelations among characters are based. A recently publishedanalysis of Henry Kissinger's White House Years (1979) bySwede and Tetlock (1986) also aimed to uncover the perceivedrelations among prominent people described by Henry Kis-singer, albeit with different analytic tools.

Social Personality

A basic assumption in the interpretation of Wolfe's descrip-tions of the people in LHA is that an individual's personality isreflected in his or her perceptions of both self and others. Thisassumption has its roots in the very early formulations of mod-ern social psychology (Baldwin, 1897/1973; Cooley, 1902;Mead, 1934). Of these early American thinkers, it is the psychol-ogist, Baldwin, who first enunciated the concept of social self—or socius, as he called it—as a way of representing the personal-ity of an individual. For Baldwin, the socius, a dialectic consist-ing of one's views of ego and of alters, is the self and is person-ality.

418 SEYMOUR ROSENBERG

Although Baldwin's (1897/1973) assertion may seem ex-treme to contemporary personality psychologists, the notionthat a person's perceptions of others, as well as of self, revealimportant components of his or her personality is common toa variety of otherwise diverse modern personality theorists. Sul-livan's (1953, pp. 16-17) interpersonal conception of personal-ity, for example, is clearly traceable to Cooley and Mead (andtheir conceptions to Baldwin and James), whereas other person-ality theorists not obviously influenced by early American so-cial psychology and sociology also incorporate a person's viewsof others to characterize personality. The idea that personalityis reflected in one's view of self and others is basic to assessmentinstruments such as the Thematic Apperception Test and theRepertory Grid (Kelly, 1955).

What the present study offers in its structural representationsof self and others and Wolfe's descriptions of them is an explicitdisplay of Wolfe's social personality, his socius as he believed itdeveloped in the context of family and community. The struc-tural representations presented in this study identify the peoplein Wolfe's formative period with whom he identified and whosetraits provided the basic categories for construing self. With re-gard to the people with whom Wolfe did not identify, there aretwo types that can be discerned in this study: people whomWolfe knew intimately and those whom he did not. Thus, thereare two kinds of contrasts of his view of self, one elaborated andthe other not.

The theoretical concepts of contrast (or "duality") and elabo-ration, applied here to social personality structure, are found insuch diverse personality theories as those of Freud, Kelly, Jung,and Sullivan. The concept of elaboration is central to Kelly'sstructural theory of personality. I made minimal use in this em-pirical study of Wolfe's social personality of other theoreticalconcepts that are particular to certain psychodynamic and per-sonological theories. A psychoanalytic conception of Wolfe'spersonality can be found in Steele's (1976) psychobiography.Also available is an electic analysis of Wolfe's social personalitybased on Freudian psychoanalysis, learning theory, and Mur-ray's system of needs and presses (Snyder, 1971).

Aims of the Study

The preceding discussion makes it possible now to spell outthe methodological and substantive aims of this study.

On the methodological side, the study aims to demonstratethat a sharable methodology exists that is feasible for extractinginformation about social personality from naturalistic materi-als (here, a literary work), and that recently developed analyticmethods, based on a set-theoretical model, provide a parsimo-nious way of representing this information structurally. Thisstudy of Thomas Wolfe is the first application of these data-gathering and data-analytic methods to an autobiography.

On the substantive side, the study aims to show the validityof the concepts of contrast and elaboration in the organizationof social personality. The validity of these concepts is assessedin two ways. One is in the interpretation of the structural repre-sentations of social personality per se. The second is in the ex-amination of the relations between these structural representa-tions and biographical and other information about the person'slife course, information external to the autobiography itself.

These relations are expected to be complex, and hence theirexamination is necessarily qualitative and discursive. Neverthe-less, their examination focuses specifically on the question ofwhether the structural representations used in this study cap-ture features of social personality that are relevant to the lifecourse. Also, although specific substantive hypotheses con-ceived at the outset of this study regarding the relations betweensocial personality and life course seem premature at this stageof the research enterprise, their formulation for subsequentstudies of autobiography (perhaps laboratory-based) may be in-spired and rendered more realistic by the present study's re-sults.

Finally, there is an element of discovery that was present inthe conception of this study, fulfilled at least in part by the anal-ysis of traits attributed to one person only and only once in theentire autobiography. Their systematic analysis in an autobiog-raphy reveals for the first time that when these unique traits areself-attributions, they may be indexing developmental periodsof self-examination and change. When these unique traits areassociated with another, they appear to index interest in andinvolvement with the other.

A general comment on the place of studying the single indi-vidual in the scientific enterprise: Any general explanatoryprinciple, derived from whatever empirical source, must ulti-mately be shown to apply at the individual level. An idiographicanalysis can also facilitate the search for (as well as provide avalidation of) general explanatory principles of personality,provided it is these general principles that stay in focus as thegoals of the research. Even the typical empirical study involvinga sample of subjects from a seemingly well-specified populationis, in a strong sense, an idiograph, as there are inevitably partic-ulars associated with the sample as a whole—particulars thatmay shape the results in unknown ways. For these studies, asfor the study of single individuals, it is the ongoing enterprise ofdeveloping a cohesive body of theory and knowledge that yieldsan understanding of the phenomena. As McCurdy (1961) notedin reference to his own use of imaginative literature as data tostudy personality, it is "comparative studies of this sort [that]would yield some new insights into personality development ingeneral" (p. 427).

The Data Base and Its Context

Biographical Sketch of Thomas Wolfe

Thomas Wolfe was born in 1900 in Asheville, North Caro-lina, a city in the mountainous, western part of the state. Hewas the youngest of eight children, one of whom (Leslie) diedin infancy, and another (Grover) at the age of 12, when Thomaswas 4 years old. Both Grover and his twin brother Ben, whodied at the age of 26, are referred to in LHA by their real givennames. Other family members were given fictional names. Thefamily tree with the family's real given names, as well as thoseused in the novel, is shown in Figure 1. Members of the family,as well as other significant people in LHA, are referred to in thisarticle by their real names.

Wolfe's father was a tombstone cutter who owned his ownbusiness in Asheville. Originally from Pennsylvania, he mi-grated to Asheville where he met and married Julia, a country


FATHERWilliam Oliver Wolf(e)

1851-1922(W. O. Ga(u)nt)

Leslie1885-1886

Frank1888-1956

(Steve)

MOTHERJulia Elizabeth Wolfe

1860-1945(Eliza Gant)

Grover Cleveland1892-1904(Grover)

Benjamin Harrison1892-1918

(Ben)

Thomas Clayton1900-1938(Eugene)

Effie1886-1950

(Daisy)

Mabel1890-1958

(Helen)

Fred1894-1983

(Luke)

Figure 1. Wolfe's family tree with the family's names in Look Homeward, Angel in parentheses.

school teacher and a member of a locally prominent family.When Thomas was still a child, Julia bought a boardinghouseand moved into it with Thomas and his brother Ben. Only hisfather and one sister, Mabel, remained in the family house,which Thomas visited frequently to be with his father and sister.

Thomas attended public school until the age of 12 and wasthen enrolled in a private school. He was a superior student andat the age of 16 went to the University of North Carolina tomajor in classics and English literature. LHA ends with hisgraduation from the university 4 years later and his departureto Harvard for graduate study.

He obtained a master's degree from Harvard and then taughtEnglish at New \brk University while attempting to launch acareer as a playwright. During this period he developed a closerelationship with Aline Bernstein, a married woman of somesocial standing who was 18 years his senior. Their relationship-lasted several years, and he dedicated LHA to her. He neithermarried nor developed a close relationship with anotherwoman. He wrote LHA while living in New York and during histravels in Europe. It was an instant success and was widely readfor over a decade, particularly by young people for whom hearticulated many of the strong feelings and desires associatedwith growing up.

Wolfe subsequently wrote three other novels, none of whichattained the success and recognition of LHA. He also wrote anumber of short stories and essays, some published after his pre-mature death in 1938 of a tuberculosis infection that had spreadto his brain.

Like a number of other prominent writers, there is a plethoraof readily available information about Wolfe's life. This infor-mation is used in interpreting and amplifying the findings fromthe present study. With the recent publication of Donald's(1987) biography of Wolfe, there are now three biographies ofhim, the other two by Nowell (1960) and by Turnbull (1967). Inaddition, there is Kennedy's (1962) literary biography. Several

extensive volumes of Wolfe's letters have been published (Hoi-man & Ross, 1968; Nowell, 1956; Stutman, 1983), as well asselected personal notes (Kennedy & Reeves, 1970). An ongoingnewsletter for Wolfeophiles, The Thomas Wolfe Review, pub-lishes anecdotes and new discoveries about details of his life andan updated bibliography of Wolfe-related work.

Look Homeward, Angel as Autobiography

After several abortive attempts in his early 20s to portray hislife and family history in plays and short stories, Wolfe turnedto the novel as the artistic form adequate to encompass all thathe had to say. At the age of 26, he started in earnest to planhis first and major novel. His determination to portray the fullimpact of his family on his early development and his strugglesto shape his own identity can be found among his first notesabout the book.1 The evidence that he indeed based the novelvery directly on events and people from his own life is extensiveand cogent (Holman, 1975, Ch. 2; Watkins, 1957, p. 9). Mostof the characters in LHA are readily identifiable in real life.

Wolfe spent several months scribbling a voluminous chronol-ogy of his early life, starting with his earliest childhood memo-ries, "allowing his mind to rove freely, dredging up memoriesas if he were on the psychoanalyst's couch" (Kennedy, 1962,p. 120). However, none of the writing in the novel is cast inpsychoanalytic language or interpretation. Wolfe completed hisintense self-exploration for the novel and the book itself within2 years. The novel, initially titled O Lost, was accepted for pub-lication by Scribner's within a year and published in 1929 asLook Homeward, Angel. Wolfe's strong determination to tell

' These notes are quoted by Kennedy (1962, p. 120) in his literarybiography of Thomas Wolfe. The original unpublished notes are depos-ited in the Houghton Library at Harvard.


the story of his early life as he experienced it, his dedication torecovering these experiences by dredging up early memories,and his stream-of-consciousness writing style all support thecharacterization of LHA as a highly personal document (All-port, 1942) and as a rich source of material for personality re-search.

Finally, there is the methodological issue of the role of theeditor in shaping the published version of the novel. The recentallegations (Halberstadt, 1980) of extensive editorial tamperingwith Wolfe's writing—"Wolfegate," as some of the media re-ferred to it—apply almost entirely to his posthumously pub-lished works, and even these allegations have not gone unchal-lenged by Wolfe scholars (e.g., Kennedy, 1981). Still, the ques-tion of editorial influence in the final version of LHA, whichHalberstadt does refer to briefly, has merit for a study such asthis one. As already noted, an important working assumptionin this analysis of LHA is that the work has a coherence andwholeness coordinate with the social personality of the author,that is, with his view of self and others.

When Wolfe submitted his manuscript to Scribner's, it wasabout 1,100 pages in length. Wolfe shortened the novel to about800 pages following the suggestions of his editor, Maxwell Per-kins. The specific question for the present study is whether thenovel as finally published is representative of the longer versionin terms of character description. Kennedy's (1962, pp. 173-179) detailed account of the nature of the cuts has suggestedlittle if any bias in the data base extracted for the present study.The general nature of the cuts are perhaps best summarizedby Wolfe himself. In a letter to his former schoolteacher, Mrs.Roberts, he wrote of Perkins and his suggestions:

He said the book was new and original, and because of its formcould have no formal and orthodox unity, but that what unity itdid have came from the strange wild people—the family—it wroteabout, as seen through the eyes of a strange wild boy. These people,with relatives, friends, townspeople, he said were "magnificent"—as real as any people he had ever read of. He wanted me to keepthese people and the boy at all times foremost—other business,such as courses at state university, etc., to be shortened and subordi-nated. (Nowell, 1956, p. 169)

Extraction of Self and Other Descriptions

Terms and phrases in LHA that refer to stable personal char-acteristics were recorded verbatim and listed according to thecharacter to whom they were attributed. The task of extractingand recording these terms and phrases was performed by a sec-retary/research assistant who was employed full time for thisand other research projects on person perception. The guide-lines she used for identifying and recording terms and phrasesare the same as those used in the study of Dreiser (Rosenberg& Jones, 1972). To ensure that she had a thorough understand-ing of the guidelines before coding the entire book, she and Iindependently coded several small samples of the test. Aftereach sample was coded, we compared the terms and phrases wehad each extracted. On the last two practice samples of 20 pageseach, we achieved an average agreement of 83% on the total listof terms that we had extracted.

A disagreement usually arose from certain ambiguities inher-ent in the narrative form as to whether a phrase in the text actu-ally referred to a stable characteristic of a person being de-

scribed; for example, air of travel, cruel openings of her life, andornate wooden palace (a possession of the character). The gen-eral rule for such phrases was to include them in the listing oftraits for that person. This rule helped ensure that Wolfe's wayof perceiving a character's personality would be as fully repre-sented in the data as possible.

A brief summary of the guidelines is as follows: Unmodifiedphysical or psychological trait terms that appeared in the narra-tive were recorded as single words (e.g., strange, tall, and lonely).When a trait word was qualified or modified in some way, theentire phrase was recorded (e.g., sensual swing of the body andloneliness of his soul). To facilitate the subsequent classificationof phrases into trait categories, each phrase was identified by akey trait word (sometimes a word combination) contained inthe phrase. When the key word was not the first word in thephrase, the phrase was identified by recording the key word first,followed by a comma and the rest of the unit (e.g., full of strangenoises was recorded as strange, full of(—) noises). If a phrasecontained two or more key words, the phrase was listed sepa-rately for each key word (e.g., strange and awkward lonelinesswas also listed as loneliness, strange and awkard, and as awk-ward, strange and(—) loneliness).

References to transient feelings and moods were not re-corded. However, when a feeling term clearly referred to a rela-tively stable affective disposition of a person (e.g., "he was acheerful person," "his life was filled with terror") it was listedas a trait term for the person.

The terms and phrases extracted from LHA were groupedinto trait categories by two graduate students, using the follow-ing general guidelines:

1. It was necessary but not sufficient that the trait termsplaced in any given category contain the same basic morphemeor morpheme compound. It was also necessary that the mean-ings of the trait terms in a category be judged as similar. Forexample, cynical was grouped with cynicism, kindly with kind,and so on. Thus, grammatical variation was permitted withina category, but no judgments were made about the possible syn-onymity of trait terms with different morphemes; for example,beautiful and pretty formed two different categories.

2. Descriptive units containing more than one word werecategorized according to their key word if and only if the mean-ing of the phrase was judged to be similar to that of the unquali-fied key word. For example, the following units were assignedto the same trait category: awkward, awkward bulk of puberty,awkward calves, and awkward muscles. On the other hand, darkeyes (a physical feature) was put in a different category fromdark perception (a psychological feature).

3. Physical traits, of which awkward is one example, werefrequently used by Wolfe and were placed into separate catego-ries according to both the attribute and, in many instances, thepart of body referred to. For example, there was one categoryfor small, referring to body frame, and another category forsmall eyes; one category for small eyes and another for greyeyes; and so on. In general, there were three types of physical-trait categories: body frame or build (e.g., small, plump, heavy),a particular body part (e.g., small eyes, black hair, thin face),and complexion (e.g., white, pale, brown). However, psychologi-cal traits seemingly manifested in physical features (e.g., pas-


sionateface, sad eyes, and wild form) were assigned to generaltrait categories (passionate, sad, and wild, respectively).

4. The negation of a trait with not or never was categorizedby prefixing the trait with un-, in-, or im-.

In general, the intent of the categorization was to preserveWolfe's linguistic categories without proliferating categoriesunnecessarily. Thus, no judgments were made about the possi-ble synonymity of trait terms with different morphemes. Onthe other hand, a range of qualification was permitted within acategory.

A total of 5,410 descriptive units—trait terms and phrases—were extracted from LHA, attributed variously to 270 charac-ters. The categorization rules resulted in 2,217 categories: 775categories were attributed to two or more characters, 73 othercategories were each attributed to only one of the characters butwere repeated two or more times in the text, and the remaining1,369 categories occurred only once in the text. These are thedata on which the present study's analyses of LHA are based.

Results and Discussion

Structural Analyses

A frequency criterion was used to select individuals to be in-cluded in the analyses, because individuals with very few traitattributions would not provide a stable index of their similarityeither to each other or to other individuals. Those describedwith more than 5 of the 775 shared traits were included; thisresulted in a sample of 117 people. This sample included all thefamily members as well as other people considered psychologi-cally important in Wolfe's early life (Snyder, 1971). As the struc-tural analyses reveal, this sample proved more than sufficientfor revealing Wolfe's views of self and others.

Five of the 117 people are Wolfe himself, each correspondingto a different age period. That is, Wolfe's extensive descriptionsof himself were partitioned into five chronological periods: ages0-2,3-5,6-11,12-15, and 16-early 20s. This partitioning cor-responds to some extent to Wolfe's own partitioning. He wrotethe book in a chronological order and divided it into three parts:the last two chronological periods correspond to Parts 2 and 3,respectively; Part 1 covers his life from birth through age 11,which was partitioned for the analyses into 0-2,3-5, and 6-11.The structural location of the five age-related selves provides asimple and effective way of tracing Wolfe's retrospective por-trayal of his personality development, and in the context of theother people in his life.

A sample of 91 trait categories, selected for their statisticalrepresentativeness,2 was used for analyses aimed at representingthe structure of Wolfe's social personality. Wolfe's attributionsof the 91 traits variously to the 117 people (chronological selvesand others) are summarized in a two-way matrix. A small re-gion of this matrix is shown in Table 1 to illustrate the natureof these data.

Two kinds of structural analysis were used to representWolfe's beliefs about self and others as reflected in his characterdescriptions. One analysis, a nonmetric multidimensional scal-ing (KYST; Kruskal, Young, & Seery, 1973), is a structural rep-resentation of the traits based on the degree to which theyco-occur in the same people. The second, a recently developed

categorical analysis (HICLAS; De Boeck, 1986), portrays the set-theoretical relationships (De Boeck & Rosenberg, 1988) amongthe age-related selves and others. The multidimensional scalingof traits provides a familiar and useful perspective for theHICLAS analysis.

Representative traits and their underlying dimensions. Thepsychological distance measure used in the multidimensionalscaling of the 91 traits is the same as that used for Dreiser'strait protocol (Rosenberg & Jones, 1972) and for subsequentlaboratory studies of implicit personality theory (Kim & Rosen-berg, 1980; Rosenberg, 1977). The measure is based on the de-gree of co-occurrence of the traits in the same people. Proudand alone, for example, both tend to be attributed to the samecharacters (certain family members; see Table 1); thus, the psy-chological distance between proud and alone is small. Gentleand soft also tend to co-occur in the same characters, and thushave a small distance between them as well. However, proud andalone tend to be attributed almost exclusively to certain familymembers, whereas gentle and soft describe other characters, al-most none of whom are members of the family (see Table 1).Thus, the distance between proud or alone and gentle or soft islarge. Intermediate degrees of distance are also represented interms of their relative co-occurrence.

The distance measure reflects Wolfe's beliefs about whichtraits tend to go together in a person and which do not, as wellas the similarity in meaning of certain traits. The assumptionthat trait co-occurrence reflects both a person's beliefs and asemantic component is supported in studies of person percep-tion and implicit personality theory (e.g., Gara & Rosenberg,1981; Shweder, 1977). The two pairs of traits, proud and aloneand gentle and soft, illustrate more or less clear cases of each ofthese two underlying components of co-occurrence, respec-tively. As in other studies designed to uncover the underlyingdimensions in personality perception, it is not necessary to sep-arate these two components.

2 The use of a sample is necessary for structural analyses because thetotal set of trait categories is too large a corpus to be accomodated byextant structural algorithms. Moreover, it is unlikely that all the traitswould need to be included in a structural analysis as there is probablyconsiderable redundancy in their meaning and usage. Nevertheless,there remains the problem of selecting a representative subset of traitsfor analysis. A common solution to this problem has been to select thetraits (or themes) most frequently found in the literary corpus on thereasonable assumption that these are the author's most important con-structs (e.g., McCurdy, 1961; Rosenberg & Jones, 1972; Swede & Tet-lock, 1986). The methodological question of whether a sample of traitsso selected is also a representative sample is addressed empirically inthis study. A statistical procedure was used that estimates the represen-tativeness of each trait by calculating the average covariance of eachtrait with every other trait. The 91 traits with the highest average covari-ance were selected as most representative of the total set of traits. It wasthen found that the correlation between the rank order of the traits interms of their statistical representativeness and their rank order in termsof their frequency is .95. Thus, the statistical selection procedure canbe adequately approximated by simply selecting the most frequentlyoccurring trait categories as representative of the total set of categories.Nevertheless, this methodological exercise yielded an important findingthat should be highlighted: the adequacy of a simple, frequency-basedcriterion for selecting representative trait categories.


Table 1A Small Illustrative Sample of the Persons X Traits.Matrix Extracted From Look Homeward, Angel

Person

Traits

Eager Vital Terror Alone Proud Kind Tall Heavy Gentle Soft Blond

Mother 1 1Father 1 1 1 1Ben 1Thomas Wolfe

16-20s 1 112-15 1 16-11 13-5 1

Mabel 1 1Fred 1Mrs. Roberts 1GroverGirlfriend 1Ben's mistressA child, male

11

111

1 11

1 1 11 1 1

1 11 1

A multidimensional scaling solution was obtained for one,two, three, four, and five dimensions (KYST; Kruskal et al.,1973). The badness-of-fit values (stress) for the five solutions are0.17,0.11,0.09,0.06, and 0.05. Although the two-dimensionalsolution provides a relatively good fit and was found to be ade-quate to show the two major dimensions in Wolfe's trait space,the five-dimensional solution shows these two major dimen-sions more clearly than the two-dimensional solution. The addi-tional dimensions in the five-dimensional solution representcertain contrasting trait categories that differentiate familymembers. The detailed portrayal of these family contrasts, aswell as the family members that exemplify them, are shown inthe HICLAS analysis described in the next section, Self andOthers.

The two major dimensions of the five-dimensional solutionare shown in Figure 2. These two dimensions correspond to twoproperties of the traits. One property, family-nonfamily, is aphi coefficient that measures the degree to which Wolfe attrib-uted any given trait to himself or a member of his immediatefamily relative to his attribution of that trait to nonfamily mem-bers.3 The second property, male-female, is also a phi coeffi-cient that measures the degree to which Wolfe attributed anygiven trait to a male character relative to his attribution of thattrait to a female character.

The multiple correlation4 between the family-nonfamilyproperty and the trait space is .97 (p < .0001). Between themale-female property and the trait space it is .53 (p < .007). Itshould be noted that there is nothing inherent in the scalingmethodology or in the measurement of the properties per se thatwould necessarily produce significant correlations between theconfiguration and these properties.

The correlation of .97 for family-nonfamily is unusually highfor naturalistic data.5 Wolfe obviously saw certain sharp differ-ences between family, including self, and nonfamily. Thesedifferences can be discerned in Figure 2 by comparing the traitcontent in the lower (nonfamily) part of the space with the up-per (family) part. One difference is that traits ascribed to non-family refer primarily to physical traits, whereas the family

traits include a large proportion of psychological traits. Anotherdifference is that the psychological traits attributed primarily tononfamily (for example, gentle, soft, elegant, and shy) contrastin evaluative tone and depth with such core family traits asalone, desperate, dark fantasies, and life of pain.

The predominance of physical traits in Wolfe's descriptionsof nonfamily members is characteristic of the way a child de-scribes people (e.g., Livesley & Bromley, 1973; Peevers & Se-cord, 1973), and as such may reflect Wolfe's ability to recreateand describe his childhood experiences. However, attention tophysical traits also predominates in one's initial impressions ofothers and in casual relationships and as such is a phenomenonnot limited to children. Thus, the emphasis on the physicaltraits of nonfamily may also reflect Wolfe's social isolation frompeople outside of his family. The difference between family andnonfamily in the content of the psychological traits is consistentwith this interpretation (Snyder, 1971, p. 72).

To my knowledge, the extensive scholarly literature onWolfe's LHA contains no discussion of these contrasting fea-tures in Wolfe's perception of family and nonfamily and theirpsychological implications. Much of this literature focuses on

3 The phi coefficient is Vx2/JV. The chi-square is a contingency chi-square calculated for each trait from a 2 X 2 table in which one variableis family-nonfamily and the second is the attribution-nonattributionof the given trait. The N was 117, the number of characters in the sampleanalyzed in the structural analyses.

4 The multiple correlation for each property was calculated by mak-ing the property value the dependent variable and the orthogonal coor-dinate values of the traits in the configuration the independent vari-ables.

5 A factor analysis (varimax rotation of seven factors obtained froma principle-components analysis) of the 91 traits yielded similar results.The first factor (17% of the variance) corresponds to the family-non-family dimension. A second factor (5% of the variance) corresponds tothe male-female dimension described later in the text. The remainingfive factors (3%-5% of the variance each), like the remaining three di-mensions of the five-dimensional scaling solution described in the text,do not appear to correspond to any general dimension.

PERSONALITY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY: THOMAS WOLFE

FAMILY (.97)

DESIRES i*WILD

FANTASIZED*

• BIG(BODY)

.HUNGER(VARIOUS)" • STRANGER0*

• LONELY"

»• FEAR • LIFE OF PAIN*

• BROODING• SAVAGE* . .

• ALONE*

"DESPERATE. . .LONG (BODY)*.LOST"

INTENSE • • CONFUSED L?FE •STRANGE**SUPERSTITIOUS • • SHAME* PROUD

• NERVOUS* »THIN*. SICK WITH.

FEAR/LOSS

NEEDS(VARIOUS)* .STRAIGHT (BODY)

• DRANK

VITALITY..SMALL EYES

• BIG (BODY PARTS)

• HARD*

FEMALE

• DARK FANTASIES• MAD(NESS)

GAUNT* • PASSION*

• BITTER*

.SAD°• QUIET

• GENEROUS

MALE (.53)

423

VULGAR • • SENSUAL

POWERFUL .• (STRENGTH)

• LOOSE LIPS

*WHITE (COMPLEXION). .SALLOW• SENSITIVE

OLD* • DARK (COMPLEXION)• GRAY EYES

'BRIGHT •

*THIN FACE •• TALL • YELLOW (COMPLEXION)

* • BEAUTIFUL• BROWN (COMPLEXION). STRONG

MUSTACHE •• LONG LEGS (PHYSICAL)• RED (COMPLEXION)

• HEAVY (BUILD)* SCOTCH

• SHAVEN FACE

•SMALL FRAME

•HANDSOME

• ODORS (VARIOUS)

• LITTLE (BUILD)

•SCARRED I

• HUMOR(OUS)• KIND

• TRIUMPHAN

SMOOTH SKIN*

BLACK•HAIR

SMELLS•(VARIOUS)

•YOUNG

• DRAWL

• THICK HAIR-COUNTRY

MANNER

• ELEGANT

• PLUMP• BLOND

SHY"

• LOW FOREHEAD

• MINISTER

• NARROW (FEATURES)• SOFT

• FRECKLED

NONFAMILY

(Figure 2 caption appears on next page.)


Wolfe's perceptions of self, one or another family member, andtheir relation to his interpersonal life. The discovery in the pres-ent study of the sharp family-nonfamily contrast is rooted inits methodology, that is, in the unbiasing selection for analysisof all the characteristics of all the people found in the literarycorpus.

The male-female property, although significantly related tothe configuration with its R of .53, is not as interpretative of thespace as is the family-nonfamily property. That is, there aretraits in the space not well located in terms of Wolfe's actualattribution of them to men and women. A glaring misplace-ment is mustache (lower left quadrant). On the other hand, thelocation of handsome, big, vulgar, and powerful on the femaleside does indeed correspond to his attribution of them primar-ily to women. Overall, however, the kinds of traits Wolfe tendedto ascribe to men and to women do not seem particularly un-usual. Also, there is no evidence in LHA of the "virgin-whoredichotomy" that Wolfe scholars and biographers attribute to hisadult views of women (e.g., Donald, 1987, p. 39; Stutman,1983, p. 9). The absence of this dichotomy in LHA, if accuratefor his adult life, is perhaps still another reflection of Wolfe'sability to recreate his views of people during childhood and ad-olescence—periods of life in which such a dichotomy is un-likely. Nor is there any reason to doubt that structural analysesare insensitive to gender types when they are present in literarymaterials. The structural analysis of Dreiser's short stories (Ro-senberg & Jones, 1972), for example, independently revealedthe male and female "types" noted by his biographer (Swan-berg, 1965).

The multidimensional configuration can also be used, albeitsomewhat awkwardly, to portray Wolfe's view of himself duringthe various periods of his youth. This is done by identifying inthe configuration the traits that he ascribed to himself duringany given age period. This approach is illustrated in Figure 2.The traits he attributed to himself during each of two age peri-ods are identified: the C superscript for a childhood period (3-5) and the A superscript for the young adult period (16-20s). Acomparison of these two periods reveals a number of thingsabout Wolfe's view of his personality development. From earlychildhood on, he identified himself almost exclusively withtraits that he saw in certain family members, particularly men,that is, with traits in the upper right quadrant. The two inter-vening age periods (6-11 and 12-15), which are not shown inthe figure, show progressively more of the traits in this quadrantbeing attributed to self. By the time Wolfe is a young adult, hesees himself as having acquired the bulk of these family traits.We also see that, as a young adult, he has added to his viewof himself for the first time a scattering of traits that are notexclusively family traits (the lower two quadrants in Figure 2).

The set-theoretical analysis described in the next section pro-vides a less cumbersome and more explicit structural represen-tation of the relations among the successive age periods thanthat portrayed in Figure 2. This analysis also shows that the

nonfamily traits are scattered over a large number of people,whereas the family traits are concentrated on a few people andare intricately related. In psychological terms, the family sideof this contrast is highly elaborated, whereas the nonfamily sideis relatively unelaborated. This important difference betweenfamily and nonfamily cannot be discerned in the multidimen-sional configuration.

Self and others.

I am, he thought, a part of all that I have touched and that hastouched me, which, having for me no existence save that which Igave to it, became other than itself by being mixed with what I thenwas, and is now still otherwise, having fused with what I now am,which is itself a cumulation of what I have been becoming. (Eugenein LHA, p. 192)

The set-theoretical structure of Wolfe's views of self and oth-ers, as obtained with the HICLAS (acronym for HierarchicalCLASses) algorithm, is a structure that shows explicitly how alater self emerged from an earlier self and also identifies the peo-ple that were likely models for these age-related selves. Thestructure shows these relations among selves and others interms of superset-subset relations. A superset-subset relationexists between any two people when the set of traits perceivedin one person (subset) is a part of the total set of traits perceivedin the other person (superset). The structure also represents thecase in which the set of traits perceived in one person (subset)is a part of the set of traits perceived in two or more other people(supersets), who themselves may or may not share (overlap in)certain traits.

The HICLAS algorithm also groups traits into classes accord-ing to their co-occurrence patterns. Thus, the structure identi-fies the specific trait classes that Wolfe attributed to self andothers, as well as the trait classes that he did not see in himselfbut did see in others.

The input data for the HICLAS algorithm is the two-way datamatrix of 117 people (chronological selves and others) X 91traits. Unlike multidimensional scaling, which requires as inputa distance (or similarity) measure among the elements to bescaled, HICLAS operates directly on the two-way data matrix.The algorithm alternates between the rows and columns of thematrix to find the best-fitting row classes and column classesand their hierarchical relations. This iterative procedure con-tinues until an iteration does not improve the goodness of fit ofthe solution to the data matrix.

For the HICLAS analysis, the cell entries in the Persons X Traitmatrix were (necessarily) reduced to one when any given char-acter was described at least once by any given trait category, andwere zero otherwise. A series of HICLAS analyses was performedto determine the optimal rank (number of dimensions) for thedata. Solutions from Rank 1 through Rank 8 successively incor-porated additional people into row classes, or differentiatedpeople in terms of their relations to each other, or both. How-ever, solutions of Ranks 9 and 10 did not change the structural

Figure 2. Two dimensions from the five-dimensional configuration of traits from Wolfe's Look Homeward,Angel. (Self-attributions during 3-5 age period denoted with C superscript; self-attributions during 16-20sage period denoted with A superscript.)

PERSONALITY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY: THOMAS WOLFE

FATHER (.85)

425

TW:16-20's(.74)

TW:6-11(.26)

D EI I

MRS. (-33) MINORROBERTS CHARACTER

Residual

MOTHER (.76)

TRAITS IN EACH CATEGORY

A: bitter; dark (complexion); thin faceB: alone; desperate; dark fantasies; long (body frame); lonely; life of pain; proud; sensual;

shame; strangerC: big (body frame); brooding; desires (various); fantasized; fear(ful); (filled with) terror

D: nervous; passion(ate); thin; wild

E: kindF: big (body parts); drank; eager; needs (various); sensitive; straight (body frame); vulgarG: grey eyes; old; red (complexion); sallow; shaven; small eyes; yellow (complexion)H: black hair; bright; heavy (build); loose lips; scarred; scotch; triumphant

FATHER: confused life; sad; savage. FATHER AND MOTHER: intense; hunger (various).MABEL: humor(ous); vitality. BEN: lost; powerful (strength); sick; white(complexion).FAMILY TRAITS WITH NO SPECIFIC FAMILY EXEMPLAR: gaunt; liked money; superstitious;quiet; generous; mad(ness); strange; hard.RESIDUAL: gentle; soft; elegant; shy; beautiful; young; wise; country manner; (plus 19 physicaltrait categories)

Figure 3. HICLAS structure of persons and age-related selves in Look Homeward, Angel. (Each number inparentheses is the goodness of fit of the person in the structure. Heavy lines are used to connect Wolfe'sage-related selves.)

location of any of the 117 persons in the sample from that in theRank 8 solution. Thus, the HICLAS solution of Rank 8, shownin Figure 3, was selected as the most interpretable and mostparsimonious solution.6

Some people, including age-related selves, are above the hori-zontal center of the diagram and some people are below, so asnot to clutter up the diagram. Also, this partitioning of peopleis not arbitrary, as is seen later. The trait classes are identifiedwith the letters A-H, and their content is listed at the bottom ofFigure 3. Each of the people shown in the figure is associatedwith one or more of these trait classes. For example, Mrs. Rob-erts, Wolfe's favorite schoolteacher, is associated with Class D,consisting of nervous, passionate, thin, and wild. ThomasWolfe: 6-11 is also associated with Class D. Moreover, Class D

is associated with all selves and others that are supersets of Mrs.Roberts or Thomas Wolfe: 6-11; these are Brother Fred andSister Mabel (below the horizontal center) and Thomas Wolfe:12-15, Thomas Wolfe: 16-20s, Brother Ben, and Father (abovethe horizontal center).

A family member is usually a superset. Fred, for example,spans Mrs. Roberts and a minor character and thus has bothTrait Class D associated with Mrs. Roberts and Trait Class E

6 HICLAS is an iterative procedure and like other such methods re-quires either a random or some rational starting point. It was found thatin order to obtain an interpretable output with minimal rank, it wasbest to use a rational starting point based on a hierarchical clustering(Johnson, 1967) of the traits.


associated with the minor character. Mabel spans these two peo-ple as well as Fred. To show when the descriptions of one personsubsume those of another (and also not to clutter the figure withlines connecting each person directly to their trait classes), thatperson is connected to some of his or her trait classes throughother person(s). Thus, for example, Mabel's possession of TraitClasses D and E is shown by a single line to Fred, who alsopossesses D and E, rather than by lines from Mabel directly toDandE.

It should be noted that three of the siblings are not in thefamily part of the structure but are instead among the residualcharacters. This is probably understandable from the fact thattwo of these siblings, Erne and Frank, left home and moved awayfrom Asheville when Thomas was quite young, and that Grover,Ben's twin, died when Thomas was 4 years old.

There are also a few trait classes that are superset trait classes.They are listed in the figure as associated with one of the follow-ing: Father, Mother, both Father and Mother, Mabel, Ben, andthe family generally. This means that any character that is asubset of the given character has the associated traits as well.Thus, for example, the two traits listed for Mabel, humor(ous)and vital, are also associated with Fred, Mrs. Roberts, and theminor character. Also listed are the residual (R) traits. They areprimarily nonfamily traits and, according to the HICLAS analy-sis, are so scattered among the characters that no specific classeswere found among them.

The HICLAS algorithm also calculates a goodness-of-fit valuefor each person. These values are shown in the parentheses nextto each person in Figure 3. The goodness of fit decreases fromone (perfect fit) to the degree that a person possesses traits notpresent in the classes subsumed by that person plus the degreeto which the person fails to possess traits present in the classes.

With HICLAS we can trace Wolfe's implicit view of his devel-opment in terms of the traits subsumed by each successive age-related self. Figure 3 shows explicitly how a later self emergedfrom an earlier self and also identifies the people that were likelymodels for these age-related selves.

Wolfe's infancy period (0-2) is among the residuals becausehe described himself primarily with unique traits (e.g., shiny,tiny acorn, and imp) and not in terms of any of the trait classesin the figure—understandable for someone describing his in-fancy. The figure shows that in characterizing his preadolescentdevelopment, Wolfe tended to emphasize one class of traits at3-5 and another at 6-11. The fits, however, are rather low. Thereason is that the traits Wolfe attributed to himself during thesechildhood periods are also thinly scattered among family traitsclasses other than C and D. The fit improves and the pictureclarifies in the adolescent period, in that it is at adolescencewhen he attributes the bulk of the traits in three main familyclasses, B, C, and D, to himself. Also interesting to note is theincreasing superordinacy of self with age: a younger self is gen-erally subsumed by an older self. This result is a consequenceof the way he actually described himself at each age period andis not an artifact of the analysis.

During the period from ages 3-15, Wolfe described himselfas very much like his father and only somewhat like his mother.Note also that the mother has a sizable class of traits (H) notshared by Wolfe or any other family member. It is only in thepostadolescent period that his identity shifts away from the fa-

ther to some degree, both in the traits he sees in his father andnot in himself and in the traits he sees in himself and not in hisfather.

Although scholars of Wolfe sometimes comment on hisstrong attachment to his mother, and this may be so, the analysisshows that his primary models were his father and his brotherBen. The identification of "models" is, of course, an interpreta-tion of the fact that Wolfe attributed to himself certain classesof traits he also saw in his father and Ben.7 The inclusion of Mrs.Roberts in the structure, albeit marginally, probably reflects aprojection rather than identification, as she was his teacher afterthe period in which he attributed the traits to himself.

The results are consonant with Wolfe's expressed belief thathis development was strongly shaped by his "distrait, nervouspowerful family" (Kennedy, 1962, p. 120). That is, although theanalysis was not limited to family members, there are in factalmost no nonfamily characters who emerged as models. Norare there nonfamily members, except for Mrs. Roberts and aminor character, who are described with even one of the basicfamily trait classes. The book portrays a gradual convergenceto a set of core family traits, with very little sloughing of familytraits. According to the multidimensional scaling (Figure 2),there are a few scattered traits Wolfe attributed to himself as ayoung adult that are not exclusively family traits.

The analysis also identifies ego-alien traits: "not me" (not inthe Sullivanian sense). There are two distinct aspects of the ego-alien component of Wolfe's socius, one elaborated and the otherunelaborated. To identify these two aspects, I first identify hismost comprehensive description of himself as his characteriza-tion of ego. This is, in effect, his postadolescent self (16-20s),as it subsumes all his younger selves. Thus, Wolfe spans the left-most four of the eight trait classes. This leaves four other familytrait classes that fall into the elaborated ego-alien social self.

This aspect of the ego-ego-alien contrast also corresponds,but only in part, to a contrast he saw within the family. Mostnotable is the fact that Mabel and Fred are not characterizedby a core family Trait Class B (alone, desperate, dark fantasies,etc.) and are otherwise described somewhat more positivelythan other family members, that is, as kind, humor(ous), andhaving vitality. Fred obviously agreed about the existence of aclear contrast between Thomas and himself when he wrotemany years later, "I think with our family the two who weremost opposite in temperament all the way through were Tomand myself (F. Wolfe, 1971, p. 113). Less different from eachother are Thomas and Mabel as they both share Class C. One ofthe special advantages of HICLAS is that it can represent variousdegrees and kinds of psychological contrast and not just dis-junction.

The second, unelaborated aspect of the ego-alien componentare the traits he saw in nonfamily. The basis for saying that thiscomponent is unelaborated is clear from the set-theoreticalanalysis. That is, Wolfe not only saw self (and family, except forMother, Class H) as very different from other members of thecommunity, a contrast that has already been seen in the multi-

7 The spurious effects sometimes associated with the use of question-naires to study modeling and identity do not seem likely here. See Bron-fenbrenner (1958) for a full discussion of the theoretical and method-ological issues of studying modeling.


dimensional scaling, but he also created no clear trait patternsin his descriptions of most of the nonfamily characters in LHA.Almost all of the nonfamily characters and their associated setsof traits were represented as residuals in HICLAS.

Asymmetric elaboration of contrasts is probably not an un-usual feature in person perception and in personality organiza-tion. What is noteworthy here is that the degree of elaborationcorresponds so closely to a family-nonfamily distinction. Thatis, although the analysis includes more than 100 people, thereare almost no nonfamily members who emerged as models forself or as elaborated contrasts of self. Also, the tendency to viewself as rather negative is unusual.

The picture of Wolfe's social personality that emerges fromthis study of LHA fits with the fact that he rarely developed closerelationships with people in his adult life, despite the numerousand diverse social contacts that were available to him whenLHA catapulted him into great fame. In his psychobiographyof Wolfe, Snyder wrote

Thomas Wolfe's loneliness was his most pervasive personality char-acteristic. He began to suffer from this as a very young boy, andhe never overcame his sense of social isolation. Probably when hismother took him to live with her at the Old Kentucky Home [theboardinghouse], he felt his first severe sense of loneliness. Once hewrote to Mrs. Roberts that he had two roofs and no home from thetime he was a little boy. (Snyder, 1971, p. 70)

Snyder also cited Wolfe's own acknowledged discomfort withpeople, as expressed in his numerous letters, and his own expla-nation of it. He told Mabel in 1933

. . . the habit of loneliness, once formed, grows on a man fromyear to year and he wanders across the face of the earth and has nohome and is an exile, and he is never able to break out of the prisonof his own loneliness again, no matter how much he wants to. (Sny-der, 1971, p. 72).

Snyder's analysis and Wolfe's own explanation of his lonelinessare in accord with the literature on the relation between child-hood experiences and adult loneliness (Shaver & Rubinstein,1980).

Analysis of Unique Trait Categories

We now turn to the traits Wolfe attributed to one person onlyand only once in the whole book. Some of these singleton cate-gories refer to unusual physical traits (bulbous eyes, beanpoleof a girl, and Wagnerian breasts), others to relatively unusualidentities or highly specialized roles (son of the bishop, artist,butcher, and milliner). Of the unique traits with a more psycho-logical content, there are trait terms that seem similar in mean-ing to some of Wolfe's high frequency terms but that add a spe-cial nuance: patronizing, amiable, cheerful, and daring. Theyvary in their frequency of occurrence in common parlance, thelatter 2 terms having more common usage than the first 2. Anumber of the unique traits are simply modifiers of high fre-quency terms, another way of adding a special nuance in theperception of a particular individual: electric (energy), heavy(sensuousness), hot (pride), and jet (black hair). Finally, thereare Wolfe's unique poetic phrasings: air of travel, cruel openingsof her life.

In everyday life, these unique characteristics are likely to re-

fer to attributes that help the perceiver identify and give specialmeaning to a particular individual. As such, they are an impor-tant part of social personality, a reflection perhaps of the "ac-commodating" rather than "habitual" self (Rosenberg, 1988).This aspect of person perception has not been extensively inves-tigated, and certainly not at the individual level. This is not sur-prising as these unique characteristics are likely to be even moreidiosyncratic than the categories frequently used by an individ-ual perceiver. They are also likely to refer to perceptual catego-ries that are difficult to articulate. Nor are they amenable toany structural analysis. The distinction between recurrent andsingleton categories is akin to Baron's (1980, 1988) distinctionin person perception between conceptual and perceptual cogni-tion, respectively.

A large naturalistic corpus of traits from the work of an artic-ulate writer such as Thomas Wolfe offers an opportunity to ex-amine the nature of the singleton categories and their distribu-tion in the descriptions of self and others. The analysis of thesecategories was guided by two questions: (a) Is there a systematicshift in the proportion of unique traits that Wolfe attributed tohimself as he was growing up, and (b) is the uniqueness (or itsconverse, the stereotypy) with which a person is perceived sys-tematically related to the relationship of that person to Wolfe?In particular, is there a difference between family and nonfamilyin the proportion of unique traits relative to shared traits?

With regard to the first question, Figure 4 shows a plot of theproportion of singleton traits relative to all the traits that Wolfeattributed to himself during each of the five successive age peri-ods. The results are clear. The proportion of singletons is higherin early childhood (0-2, 3-5) and in adolescence (12-15) thanin the other age periods. Although these findings are based onWolfe's retrospective self-descriptions, they are in line withideas about actual developmental patterns. That is, the elabo-rate conceptual system of traits that comes to dominate one'sperception of self (and others) begins to emerge during veryearly childhood. The jump in proportion of unique traits dur-ing adolescence (12-15) is readily interpretable as a period inwhich one's conception of self, although rather well developed,typically undergoes reexamination and possible change. A rea-sonable conjecture is that the jump in proportion of uniquetraits occurs during any protracted period of intense self-exam-ination. Adolescence is simply one such period (Cohler, 1982;Elkind, 1967; Enright, Shukla, & Lapsley, 1980). The propor-tion of singletons drops again after adolescence, at least for thetime of Wolfe's life at which LHA ends.

What is also noteworthy about these findings is that they arefound in a retrospective account. The results lend additionalcredence to the oft-repeated assertion among Wolfe scholarsthat he was deeply dedicated to incorporating his experiencesinto his literary creations. It also seems unlikely that Wolfe wasguided by an explicit rule as to at which age to emphasize themore unique aspects of self-perception.

With regard to the second question, Figure 4 shows the pro-portion of unique characteristics that Wolfe attributed to mem-bers of the immediate family and to nonfamily members. Thedifference is large and significant. Family members are less ste-reotyped than nonfamily members. That is, Wolfe noticed (de-scribed) proportionately more unique characteristics in peopleabout whom he also had a more elaborated conceptual picture.


COUJ13gz13Zq

o0.occ.CL

•8r-

.7

.6

.5

.4

I I

X

I0-2 3-5 6-11 12-15 16-20's Mo, Fa, Sibs Nonfamily

TW Age Periods

Figure 4. Proportion of unique traits Thomas Wolfe attributed to himself during successive age periods.(Also shown is the average proportion of unique traits attributed to family [N = 7] and to nonfamily [A' =258].)

This result is perhaps surprising and paradoxical at firstblush. Suppose, however, that the unique characteristics onenotices about another are an index of one's interest in them.Viewed in this way, the results show that intimates are morelikely than others both to attract one's interest (unique traits)and to engage one's elaborated conceptual system (sharedtraits). I would also conjecture that when this interest decreasesfor intimates, that is, when one's view of an intimate is too dom-inated by the elaborated conceptual system, or when the uniquenoticings increase for casuals, these shifts may signal an impor-tant change in the relationship—the first in the direction of dis-tancing and the second toward closeness.

Further Observations and Conclusions

Life After Look Homeward, Angel

Thomas Wolfe lived less than a decade after LHA was pub-lished. These were tumultous and traumatic years for him. Hesevered his relationship with Aline Bernstein—his one intimaterelationship with a woman—with considerable pain. He alsoterminated a close professional relationship with his editor,Maxwell Perkins, ostensibly because Perkins had become toointrusive in cutting his manuscripts. There are indications inhis writings, his letters, and his talks that he was experiencing amajor shift or crisis of some sort in personality.

The bold outlines of this shift can be discerned. For one thing,his preoccupation with his family and with their impact on himas a child diminished. This may have been the result of his hav-ing written the autobiography, characterized by one of his biog-raphers "as a kind of self-administered psychoanalysis" (Don-ald, 1987, p. 148). More generally, the conjecture that the auto-biographical act may itself have a transformational effect as the

person reconstructs the past is a prevalent one (see, e.g., Cohler,1982). Indeed, psychoanalysis and other kinds of historicallyoriented psychotherapies may be viewed as kinds of autobio-graphical methods designed to assist individuals in revisingtheir life history.

A major theme of his second novel Of Time and the River (T.Wolfe, 1935) was the search for an ideal father with whom hecould identify. This search for father, as he termed it, then di-minished also, and he seemed to enter a "second cycle" (Slack,1968, p. 106). The first cycle, a strong identification with hisactual father, as revealed in the present study, and the search foran ideal father "of a strength and wisdom . . . to which thebelief and power of his own life could be united" (T. Wolfe,1936/1983b, pp. 37-38) was being replaced with concerns for"economics, politics, government, the organized structure ofsociety" (T. Wolfe, 1983a, p. 124) and how they shaped people'slives. In the context of the present study, these concerns may beinterpreted as-an attempt to elaborate the nonfamily contrast,albeit not necessarily in his interpersonal life. In any event, heattempted to bring his sociocultural concerns into his last (post-humous) novel, You Can't Go Home Again (T. Wolfe, 1940).

The nature of this psychological struggle to transform thepersonality he portrayed in LHA is a most interesting questionfor adult personality development. His premature death pre-vents one from plotting the full course of this transformation.Snyder (1971), in his psychobiography, speculated that Wolfe's"personality problems would have been likely to become more,not less, acute" (p. 228), which is to say that the elaborated sideof self would continue to dominate. This was seen in Wolfe'saccount of his adolescence, where in spite of his increased atten-tion to self (as indexed by the rise in unique characteristics), heconverged on the core family traits in young adulthood. Sny-


der's prognosis apparently rests on the notion that a midlifecrisis, in which Wolfe may have again undergone an intensiveself-examination, would have had a similar, perhaps less felici-tous outcome.

It would require a very powerful theory of personality tomake a reliable prediction about the course Wolfe's life wouldhave taken had he not died prematurely. At best, such a theorywould also need to incorporate the cultural and interpersonalexigencies of his life. This is not to say that the social personalitystructure established in childhood can be discarded. On thecontrary, it is within this structure, this socius, that possibilitiesexist for incorporating and elaborating aspects of "not me" sothat the conception of "me" is altered and enlarged.

Methodological and Theoretical Notes

The study of Wolfe demonstrates that literary materials, andparticularly the character descriptions within them, contain in-formation about important, global aspects of the personality ofthe author, and that this information can be systematically ex-tracted and displayed using a sharable methodology. The meth-odology for extracting and analyzing character descriptions cantake other, less laborious forms. An a priori set of categoriesmay be used as, for example, McCurdy (1947) did when he usedCattelFs (1946) trait vocabulary to describe the key charactersin the novels of Charlotte and Emily Bronte. Alternatively, atrait vocabulary somewhat more faithful to that of the authorcan be gleaned from a sampling of the work, say 5%-10% ofthe pages, from which the author's high-frequency terms areestimated.

Laboratory-based free-response methods are also availablefor the study of self-perception and the perception of others(e.g., Rosenberg, 1977; Rosenberg & Gara, 1985). Relative tonaturalistic materials as a data source, laboratory-based meth-ods are efficient, and the fidelity with which such data portraya person's personality and identity structure depends on thecommitment the investigator is able to establish in the personfor going beyond superficial descriptions of self and others. Thesame consideration applies in the selection of naturalistic mate-rials. The analytic tools used in the present study are as applica-ble to laboratory data as they are to literary material (Rosen-berg, 1988). The applicability of these analytic tools to bothnaturalistic and laboratory data creates an important bridgeand conceptual interplay between these two complementarydata sources.

Theoretical concepts about personality organization havebeen clearly anchored in this empirical work—concepts closelyrelated to those of several personality theorists. Attention to thetheoretical concepts of personality organization, to their repre-sentation in data, to their usefulness in interpreting data, andto their validation ensures a nomothetic outlook. Still, the goalof psychology is an understanding of the individual human be-ing, and within personality, nomothetic principles must be sys-tematically integrated into the analysis of an individual person-ality to be of service in this goal. A sharable methodology capa-ble of yielding an idiographic picture of personality would seemto be an important component in such an integration. For ex-ample, the analysis ofLHA provides a way to construct a theoryof Thomas Wolfe's personality, a theory by which certain par-

ticulars of his life can be interpreted and understood. Theseanalyses do not by themselves represent the fullness of his expe-rience of himself. However, they do provide a framework forunderstanding what Wolfe says to us in his literary work. Theanalyses themselves are quite general in applicability and assuch are nomothetes, law givers.

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Received May 11, 1987Revision received May 10, 1988

Accepted July 12, 1988 •

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A Study of Personality in Literary Autobiography: An ......as reflected in these views that Wolfe held of himself and others. Although the subject of this study is Wolfe, its basic