Self-esteem

‘If you can’t love yourself, how the hell you gonna love somebody else?’ RuPaul asks his audience and fellow drag queens each episode of the Drag Race. The question proposes we first look to ourselves and weigh up our own self-worth and self-esteem before looking for somebody else to love.

When I was a first-year undergraduate, I was told that the poet John Milton coined the English word self-esteem, but it wasn’t until I started looking into his use of the term that I realised how closely Milton’s word resembled the self-esteem that we speak so highly of today.

In Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost, the angel Raphael tells Adam that he should not abandon his own self-esteem for his all-consuming love for Eve: ‘Weigh with her thyself, Then value’ Raphael suggests to Adam. The angel goes on to argue that ‘Oft times nothing profits more than self-esteem grounded on just and right well managed’. In other words, having good, ‘well-managed’ self-esteem will make you more attractive to your partner.

Milton: is your angel the early modern equivalent of a self-help columnist?

William Blake. Illustration 6 to Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’: Raphael Warns Adam and Eve. 1807. The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. Object Number 000.7.

Unfortunately, during my research, I also found that Milton was not the first to use the word self-esteem, although he was the first that we currently know of to use it in English literature. The first person whose writing of this compound noun remains extant was, in fact, a Mr Edward Coffin in 1619. Whilst Edward Coffin is not the author of one of the greatest epic poems written in English, he does use his word self-esteem to do something just as valuable: have a go at someone’s arrogance! Speaking about a Mr J Hall, Coffin proclaims that Hall’s ‘misfortune’ is down to ‘his wit being so shallow, and self esteem of his own worth and works so great’. Our first use of the word, then, is used to have a good old moan about Mr Hall’s arrogance, albeit as part of an eloquently written three-hundred- and seventy-six-page document.

Milton’s use of self-esteem in Paradise Lost, published in 1667, is the poet’s first appearance in the Oxford English Dictionary’s list of exemplary uses of the term. But Milton actually uses the word substantially earlier than this in his An Apology Against a Pamphlet (1642). He uses the term to defend both himself and his understanding of his own self-esteem against an anonymous critic who, Milton tells us, calls himself a ‘modest Confuter’ of Milton’s writing. In the pamphlet, Milton defends himself from the critic’s accusation of linguistic and sexual excesses by giving an extensive and ‘more true account’ of himself. He explains that he is conscious of what he writes, and that it is down to his own ‘self-esteem either of what I was, or what I might be’ that he would certainly not conduct himself in the manner that his anonymous critic accuses him of. Upon reading the remarks of his critic, our poet argues that, he is ‘met with a whole ging of words and phrases not mine, for he hath maim’d them, and like a slye depraver mangl’d them’. To put it simply, Milton reasons that that he could never write or act in the manner in which this critic accuses him of because of how he, the poet, views his own self-esteem.

The word self-esteem may have been first used in the seventeenth century, but it does not enter common speech until much later on. During the early modern period, self-esteem could often be substituted for the much older word ‘self-knowledge’, a term that goes back to the Christian teachings of Augustine and the early Church Fathers. ‘Self-knowledge’ is a phrase that comes with a package of religious connotations, bound up with knowing the Christian God. (Further back, it is associated with the Greek aphorism to ‘know thyself’ (γνῶθι σεαυτόν); used by the likes of Socrates and his pupil Plato). Self-esteem, however, departs from the Christian tradition of ‘self-knowledge’. It is a word that, instead, moves along with the growth of the cult of the individual that we know so much about today from cultures of identity politics and social media influencers.

The popularity of the word self-esteem really exploded in 1890 when the psychologist William James introduced it as a concept in his work Principles of Psychology. Here, instead of weighing your own self-esteem, as Raphael urges Adam to do, psychologists could also do this weighing by commenting on a person’s low or high self-esteem.

Milton’s first use of the word in 1642 focuses on different versions of the self: a past version and a future, ‘self-esteem either of what I was, or what I might be’. In this phrase, Milton asks himself to reflect on the future of his ‘self-esteem’ and of what he ‘might be’. Raphael, too, asks Adam to manage his self-esteem so that in the future, he may profit from it through Eve’s realisation of his power: the more you manage your self-esteem, the more ‘she will acknowledge thee her head’ Raphael explains.

Perhaps, then, the word, in its first Miltonic essence, argues for self-reflection and possibly an adjustment in how a person perceives themselves so that a future self will profit from ‘just and right’ self-esteem. Today, by typing ‘self-esteem’ into YouTube you will find words such as ‘fix’, ‘build’ and ‘strengthen’ attached to it. Equally, you might find titles that offer ways of identifying low self-esteem in order to control it. It seems to me as though Raphael’s request that Adam look inwardly and manage his self-esteem in a just and right way is still at the forefront of how people respond to the question of self-esteem today.

Although, I have to admit, RuPaul does turn a slightly catchier turn of phrase than Milton’s Raphael.

Caitlin Rankin-McCabe is a PhD Candidate in the Department of English at Durham University.

Selected Bibliography.

Coffin, Edward. A Refutation of M. Joseph Hall (Saint-Omer, 1619).

Milton, John. An Apology Against a Pamphlet (London, 1642).

• Paradise Lost (London, 1667).

12 March 2021.