Feminism & Autobiography

Texts, Theories, Methods

Tess Coslett, Celia Lury, Penny Summerfield

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134573615
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Gerontologia

Featuring essays by leading feminist scholars from a variety of disciplines, this key text explores the latest developments in autobiographical studies.

The collection is structured around the inter-linked concepts of genre, inter-subjectivity and memory. Whilst exemplifying the very different levels of autobiographical activity going on in feminist studies, the contributions chart a movement from autobiography as genre to autobiography as cultural practice, and from the analysis of autobiographical texts to a preoccupation with autobiography as method.

Part I
Genre

1 Enforced narratives

Stories of another self

Carolyn Steedman

Histories of autobiography and histories of the self

If we are interested in autobiography – interested as literary and cultural theorists, as historians and sociologists – then we work with two tacit assumptions. The first is that somehow, in some way, the production of written forms has something to do with the production of subjectivities; and the second is that this process is a voluntary one, that there is an urge to tell the self, that it comes from within, and that the impulsion to do so, in spoken or written language, is part of the very process of self construction.

These assumptions, of a connection between self-writing and self-construction, come from two traditions of academic inquiry, the literary and the historical. Over the last twenty years, feminist literary theorists and critics have scrutinised the long-term European project of creating an autobiographical canon and have condemned it for being almost entirely made up of items of masculine self-writing. Naming the problem as the writing of normative masculinity actually reinforced the connection between a form of written language and the aetiology of the self. As Sidonie Smith put it in 1993, the difficulty of autobiography (as practised by Augustine, Rousseau and Goethe, or any other male member of the canon you choose to mention) is that it composes a master narrative, the ‘architecture of the universal subject’, a ‘hard nut of … normative (masculine) individuality’ (Smith 1993: 3). However, literary criticism has had its effects, and now, at the end of the century, the autobiographical canon has been greatly extended, and the autobiographical theory derived from it is more likely to be fashioned out of women’s writing than that of men.

The concomitant accusation, that the Western autobiographical canon was constructed from the writings of élite men, was more muted, but has brought about an equal shift of attention, from the chronicles of the privileged to the annals of the labouring poor. There are many more writings of women, and of plebeian men and women in print and in circulation than there were twenty years ago. In the same period, a vast and proliferating body of postcolonial criticism has directed attention away from the subject of Europe, towards the subaltern and marginalised subjects of the contact zones. But as Pamela Fox noted when she was working on twentieth-century working-class writing (on fiction rather than on autobiography, though the point still holds good), it is a common academic assumption that the written productions of working-class people belong to some realm of ‘fact’ or ‘reality’, rather than to ‘literature’, and are thus the province of the historian rather than the literary critic (Fox 1994: 45). It is certainly the case that whilst modern autobiographical theory has been made out of the published writing of formerly neglected women and some postcolonial subjects, working-class autobiography has not been used in the same way.

During the same period of academic activity, historians of literacy and culture reinforced the connection between the development of modern autobiography and modern selfhood. Any historian of the early modern and modern periods in Europe and the Americas works with the heavy freight of a historiography that charts the rise of individualism and individuality in the West. This insistent ‘background’ stresses the role of writing and reading in the making of modern social and political persons. From two ends of the twentieth century two examples make the point. In Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–5), spiritual journals, confessional tales, Bunyan’s first-person narratives and a whole range of literary texts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are used to inscribe Economic Man or (less figuratively and more prosaically) the relationship between Protestant selfhood and the structures of early capitalist development (Weber 1991). In a major publishing enterprise of the 1980s, The History of Private Life, the volume dealing with the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries elaborates, refines and illustrates, in charming and compelling detail all the categories of modernity, so that we might see the things and feelings that proliferate around reading and writing (novels, pens, writing manuals, chairs for reading in and peignoirs to wear whilst sitting in them, libraries, closets; romantic love and love for children, privacy, intimacy) as the modern subject makes him or herself. Such techniques of feeling, connected to the practices of reading and writing, have been even more recently celebrated in John Brewer’s Pleasures of the Imagination (Chartier 1989; Brewer 1997).

Outside the fields of literary and historical studies, the question of autobiography has been moved away from exclusive concentration on the written word, and into the more general terrain of narrative. In Modernity and Self-Identity, Anthony Giddens describes a 300-year development in the West, by which personhood and self-identity have come to be understood as ‘the self … reflexively understood by the person in terms of his or her biography’. He understands ‘autobiography’ not so much as a form of writing, nor as a literary genre, but rather as a way of thinking and feeling – as a mode of cognition. According to Giddens, the process of actually writing an autobiography, getting it published and having it read is a very minor variant of a much more general ‘autobiographical thinking’. He says that in this ‘broad sense of an interpretive self-history produced by the individual concerned, [autobiography] whether written down or not … is actually the core of self-identity in modern life’ (Giddens 1991: 52–4).

Self-narration (meaning ‘interpretive self-history’ and the formal written auto- biography) has come to be emphasised again and again as formative, constitutive and descriptive of the subject of modernity. The understanding is refined by – for example – Charles Taylor, in his Sources of the Self. The Making of the Modern Identity. Here he surveys the whole of Western philosophy, and the great sweep of its cultural history (Renaissance humanism, urbanisation, Reformation, Protestantism, capitalism, individualism), in order to claim that the thing that has happened since the end of the fifteenth century is the move of the self from outside to inside. He describes the emergence of a ‘disengaged, particular self, whose identity is constituted in memory’. This identity is expressed in self-narration: ‘the life at any moment is the causal consequence of what has transpired earlier … [and] since the life to be lived has also to be told, its meaning is seen as something that unfolds through the events’ (Taylor 1989: 289).

For Taylor the importance of these developments is the questions they force about the form of the life-stories people tell. He asks whether the narrated story of the self is simply ‘the result of the happenings as they accumulate’, or whether the form of the life is there already, is somehow ‘already latent’, waiting to be expressed though an account of what came to pass in any individual life. In these deliberations, the self is conceived of as a remembered thing as well as a narrated thing.

Connections between memory and narrative have led to a recent interest in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thinking about childhood, and it has become clear that in some autobiographies of the last two centuries the idea of the child was used to both recall and express the past that each individual life embodied; what was turned inside in the course of individual human development was that which was already latent; the child (the child the autobiographer had been) was the story waiting to be told. In nineteenth- and twentieth-century autobiographical practice, people’s use of the child-figure (their remembering, and sometimes writing, about themselves as child) merged the two perspectives to which Taylor draws our attention (Wolff 1998: 377–401; Coe 1984; Steedman 1990: 62–80; 1995a: 59–76).

One of the many ways in which forms of selfhood have been transmitted and appropriated is through the reading of – or at least knowing about – literary selves.¹ There are even newer conclusions to be reached on this score about the relationship, mediated by writing, of selfhood to social structure and social change. If ways of being a person, and ideas of what a person is, are read, appropriated and learned differently in different historical epochs, then they are also taught. The subject of British modernity for example, was made a matter for instruction in the years after the Second World War, in the massive programme of teaching selfhood and self-expression that was in operation in state schools in Britain, from the early 1950s onwards. ‘Creative writing’ encapsulated beliefs about the psychological benefits of writing the self for children in classrooms and the pedagogical conviction that writing autobiographically allowed a recuperative selfhood to be developed in working-class children (Steedman 1999: 41–54). Creative writing flourished in conjunction with new practices of self-narration outside the school: adult education, the development of the worker-writers’ and community publishing movement (and thus an astonishing flowering of working-class autobiography in the 1970s), the rapid growth of community theatre, the folk movement and its deliberate forging of a sense of community between past and present narratives of the poor, the practice of oral histories of the working class, the development of the History Workshop movement, and, towards the end of the 1960s, the practice of consciousness-raising in the emergent women’s movement.² All these practices operated on the assumption that the subaltern could speak; that through self-articulation in spoken or written words, the dispossessed could come to an understanding of their own story.³ That story – that life – could, by various means, be returned to the people who had struggled to tell or to write it, and be used as basis for political action.⁴

But any conclusions about this development in the period 1945–74 need the perspective of a longue durée of taught – perhaps enforced – self-narrative. It is the purpose of this chapter to consider the history of what we may come to call ‘the autobiographical injunction’: a history of expectations, orders and instructions rather than one of urges and desires.

The autobiographical injunction

The summary above offers an account of the connections that we are able to make now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, between the making of the modern self and the writing of it. But there is something else to notice, something else to see. The social historian, believing that something like this really has happened over the last three hundred years, starts to ask other questions: Who tells the story of the self ? Who does it most, at one time, in one place? Who uses these stories? How are they used, and to what ends?

Our autobiographical canon may still be made up of the writings of élite men and women, but in England from the seventeenth century onwards, the emerging administrative state demanded that it was in fact the poor who tell their story, in vast proportion to their vast numbers. The major source for Keith Snell’s monumental and elegiac account of working-class experience and its expression in rural England between 1660 and 1900 is extant settlement examinations, the many thousands of them that have ended up in county record offices (Snell 1985). Under legislation of 1661, magistrates were required to inquire into the origins of those who might become applicants for poor relief. Determining place of settlement, that is the parish responsible for relief of distress, involved applicants, or potential applicants, in telling a life-story, and having it recorded. Hundreds of thousands of men and women told where they were born, when they were put to work, where they had worked, and crucially, for how long they had worked in any one place, for working consistently in one parish and receiving wages for a calendar year, carried one of the most important entitlements to settlement. A century and a half of this kind of formulaic self-narration preceded Mary Manton’s examination in the parish of Astley, Warwickshire, in the autumn of 1815:

Mary Manton says that about September 1813 Mrs Beadman of Market Bosworth in the County of Leicester hired the said Mary Manton to serve her for £7.7.0 but no Time mentioned but when said Mary Manton Came to her Service she hasked her Mistress whether she was hired for 51 week or for 12 months but the Mistress Made answer and Said that was according to her behaviour but about 9 weeks after Christmas 1814 she had some fierce words with his [sic] Mistress whome paid her wages and Left and when to her Father’s house for 1 night only which next Morning Returned to fetch her Cloths. She agreed with her Mistress to Serve her Time out and Rcd. herwhole Wages, which she did a t this Mic haelmas 1814.⁵

The most common narrative extracted from women of the labouring poor, after the one framed by work, was the story of seduction and betrayal. Bastardy examinations, again conducted before justices of the peace, were demanded for the same administrative purposes, for an illegitimate child was a potential drain on parish resources. To extract the name of a putative father and charge him with maintenance, or to return an expectant mother to her true place of settlement offered a clear saving against local rates. Elizabeth Wells, examined by Nottinghamshire JP Sir Gervase Clifton in late 1809, was a parish apprentice, that is, a poor child apprenticed out by her home parish, and the legal question here was not who the father of her child might be, but rather, whether or not her home parish or her master had the right to discharge her from her indentures before her time was up:

The Examination of Eliz. Wells … Who says she was born in the parish of Ruddington in the County of Nottinghamshire of Parents legally settled there That when she was about nine Years old she was put out parish Apprentice to John Wilkinson of Ruddington Farmer until she was twenty one Years or marriage she was to have her Victuals drink & Cloaths she says she staid there about four years and she getting too big for an under servant her master told her she might go to the Statutes⁶ and get hired … accordingly [she] was hired to George Blount … Husbandman for one year she staid there two whole years and received her two years wages. … That in … June 1809 she went over to Ruddington to … inquire wether she was out of her time under her Parish Indentures to John Wilkinson he … said she did not belong there and that he had burnt the Indentures. She says she was then hired to John Butler of Clifton. … She was hired for this Year but proving to be with Child of a Bastard child he cannot keep her any longer She is now in her twentieth year and is at present with Mr Butler.⁷

The legally required questions that structure these autobiographies can certainly be heard. Like the haunting self-narratives that Henry Mayhew presented to a variety of reading publics in the mid-nineteenth century, they are written accounts produced by questioning, but from which, in transcription, the interlocutor has been removed. By these means, multitudes of labouring men and women surveyed a life from a fixed standpoint, told it in chronological sequence, gave an account of what it was that brought them to this place, this circumstance now, telling the familiar tale for the justice’s clerk (who was so very used to the formula that Mary Manton becomes a ‘he’ by boredom of the pen) to transcribe. Apart from not being written down by the person who lived the life, these brief narratives fulfil the criteria for autobiographical narration (Vincent 1981). And some were written down by the liver of the life presented for scrutiny. The eighteenth-century philanthropic organisation often demanded a story in exchange for its dole. The mid-century London Society for the Encouragement of Honest and Industrious Servants determined that none should join or have entitlement to a handout unless they gave their account in writing: ‘Every person applying must deliver in a Petition, a Narrative of Information, containing an Account of his or her Service’ – ‘with whom, when, where, how long, in what quality …’ (Anon. 1752: 10).

There were literary forms, Grub-Street products, that exploited these everyday, enforced narratives of the self. There was the criminal tale, best known through The Newgate Calendar but more widely distributed in chapbook form (Rayner 1826; Neuberg 1972). One example plucked from the myriad is An Account of the Execution of Mary of Shrewsbury for the Murder of Her Bastard Child of 1775.⁸ Mary Saxby’s Memoirs of a Female Vagrant, Written by Herself (1806) is notable for two reasons. One is that in the massive microfilm publishing venture ‘The People’s History. Working Class Autobiographies, 1729–1889’ of 1986, a series of facsimiles of all such volumes deposited in the British Library, hers is the first woman’s story reproduced. It is part of the ongoing project to uncover and circulate the life-stories of the plebeian, the subaltern, the female. In this recovered working-class narrative, Saxby’s pain at losing eight of her ten children, and the guilty anguish of coming slowly and creepingly to God, certainly structure a conventional Methodist conversion tale. But a surer and tighter structure for the narrative on the page is the writer’s detailing of her contact with the law, and the central and local state. Her bids for settlement, appearances before the justices, encounters with the overseers of the poor (as well as with numerous philanthropic doctors and clergymen, likely to make a cash exchange for her story), dates and places of baptism and burial, as well as births and deaths, but on only one occasion marriage (her cohabitations and fornications provide the book’s insistent throb of shame), are listed and recorded, with a detail and precision of recall that the genre simply does not demand (Saxby 1806). Mary Saxby’s written autobiography was structured by all the other involuntary accounts she had delivered up over the course of fifty years.

The narrative of a life, which when told, explains something of the person, here, now, telling a tale (much more rarely, writing it down) was articulated again and again, by men and women like these, from the seventeenth century onwards. The basic structures of the modern literary character were – perhaps – laid down in these numerous enforced autobiographies. This is a large claim; and as yet, we know very little about the way in which an understanding of what a character was (what an informal theory of ‘character’ looked like) moved into the emergent novel, and out again, into the wider society, to be taken and used in innumerable acts of self-fashioning and self-perception. There is suggestive work on stage melodrama of the nineteenth century, and the understanding it may have brought into being, that a working-class character was a he or she buffeted by fortune and extraneous events (Booth 1965, 1989: 96–103). And in discussing fictional realism’s fixation on ‘character’ Bruce Robbins has observed that as ‘character was the mask that people were expected to don in the face o...