Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader (review) (original) (raw)
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The Ignored Self: Women's Life-Stories
Autobiographies delight their readers by taking them behind the scenes of the public personality and tell us about the author's private affairs and thoughts, their home and hobbies, etc. this charms the reader as it gives the reader information of a different kind. Indian women's autobiographies are different from that of men's. Their concerns and dilemmas are different; their expression is bound to mirror their differences. Women are underprivileged than men. Under the patriarchal social order, women are expected to place their traditional roles as daughters, wives and mothers above an individual identity. (Kumar 5
Motives in Women's Autobiographies
Psihologie, 2018
The article explores women autobiographies as a special category of life-writing. The first part is about traditions of women autobiographies. This section aims to understand how women authors construct an authentic identity in life writings. The second part is about explanation of motives in literature and sociology and about the motives in women autobiographies as combination of ontological (sociology, life) and epistemological (literature, presentation of life) aspects. In this paper, women autobiographies are classified in accordance with Jungian hero motives. The paper concentrates on the second type of autobiographies which are common among women authors and coincide with Jungian archetypes of hero in initiation.
In Cavarero's (2000) philosophical conceptualization of the narratable self, narration, both biographical and autobiographical, is a political act in its capacity to expose the fragile uniqueness of the self in its constitutive relation with others. Drawing on the notions of the narratable self and the relational character of stories, in this paper I am sketching out a genealogy of relating narratives by focusing on an early twentieth century document of life: Rosa Bonheur's auto/biography written by her companion Anna Klumpke. This rare blend of biography and autobiography brings forward in a unique way what Cavarero has defined as the desire of the narratable self to listen to her story being told by others. It further highlights the political and ethical responsibility of the listener to retell and rewrite the story disclosed to her. What I suggest is that there is an urgent need for narrative driven researchers not only to bend over the timely necessity of listening to stories being told by others, but also to problematize their listening and dig deeper into the political and ethical effects of the stories they write and tell.
Writing a Woman's Life, A Personal Journey
SHAPE Blog, 2022
To honor the late Progressive Era historian Dr. Elisabeth Israels Perry (1939-2018), I wrote this article for the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era's academic blog. It explores the similarities in Perry's experience writing her grandmother's biography, BELLE MOSKOWITZ: FEMININE POLITICS IN THE AGE OF ALFRED E. SMITH, to my own writing experience of my grandmother's biography, entitled "Memories: Writing the Life of Mayme Williams Carney." See online at: https://www.shgape.org/writing-a-womans-life-a-personal-journey/
Making Themselves at Home: Strategies of Self-Representation in Pioneer Women’s Autobiographies
2009
This dissertation explores narrative strategies of self-identity in autobiographies by six pioneering women writers, each of whom lost what has traditionally been woman’s place: her home. The accounts of emigration, expatriation, and exile by Anna Brownwell Jameson, Catharine Parr Traill, Susanna Moodie, Ada Cambridge, Isak Dinesen, and Alyse Simpson illustrate the implications of this loss, as each woman struggled to recover a sense both of home and of grounded identity. The writings span more than a hundred years, from the 1830s to the 1950s, and tell of lives lived in locations as different as Canada, Australia, and British East Africa (now Kenya), places that variously proved to be confining and/or liberating. By narrating the ways in which identity adapts to and is transformed by a new environment, these texts provide access to the construction and alteration of the self in relation to place. This study probes this process by using the concept of place, rather than the more conventional one of time, as the dominant category of analysis. My readings are both intertextual and interdisciplinary: they rely on theorizing by sociologists and psychologists concerned with the relationship between place and identity, studies on the same subject by literary scholars, and formulations by women’s autobiography theorists. My investigation reveals, among other discoveries, that the gender-specific aspects of the process of adaptation persistently centre on the notion of homecoming and that they are articulated with reference to the figure of the mother.