The Unsociable Sociability of Women's Lifewriting

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Author: Anne Collett | Louise D'Arcens

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Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-05

The Unsociable Sociability of Women’s Lifewriting

10.1057/9780230294868 - The Unsociable Sociability of Women's Lifewriting, Edited by Anne Collett and Louise D'Arcens



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Edited by

Anne Collett and

Louise D’Arcens



The Unsociable Sociability of Women’s Lifewriting

Selection and editorial matter © Anne Collett and Louise D’Arcens 2010 Individual chapters © contributors 2010

No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–0–230–24647–8

hardback

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The unsociable sociability of women’s lifewriting / edited by Anne Collett, Louise D’Arcens. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978–0–230–24647–8 (hardback) 1. Literature—Women authors—History and criticism. 2. Autobiography— Women authors. 3. Women in literature. 4. Self in literature. 5. Self-presentation in literature. 6. Social interaction in literature. 7. Autobiography in literature. I. Collett, Anne. II. D’Arcens, Louise. PN471.U67 2010 809'.933522—dc22 2010027497 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne



All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

List of Illustrations

vii

Preface and Acknowledgements

viii

Notes on Contributors

x

1 ‘Femmes a part’: Unsociable Sociability, Women, Lifewriting Louise D’Arcens and Anne Collett 2 ‘Je, Christine’: Christine de Pizan’s Autobiographical Topoi Louise D’Arcens

1 18

3 Law, Gender and Print Culture in the Lifewriting of Eliza Frances Robertson Sarah Ailwood

37

4 ‘Some Stories Need to Be Told, Then Told Again’: Yvonne Johnson and Rudy Wiebe Michael Jacklin

54

5 The Scripted Life of Peig Sayers Irene Lucchitti

71

6 ‘Yet Thou Did Deliver Me’: The Exemplary Life of Alice Thornton Anne Lear

89

7 Size Matters: The Oppositional Self-Portraiture of Emily Carr Anne Collett

107

8 A Literary Fortune: Mary Fortune’s Life in the Colonial Periodical Press Megan Brown

128

9 ‘You for Whom I Wrote’: Renée Vivien, H.D. and the Roman à Clef Melissa Boyde

148

10 Writing Food Writing Fiction Writing Life: Marion Halligan’s Memoirs Dorothy Jones

168

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Contents

11 Writing as Cultural Negotiation: Suneeta Peres da Costa and Alice Pung Wenche Ommundsen

187

12 The Language of Recognition: Carolyn Slaughter and Alexandra Fuller Tony Simoes da Silva

204

Selected Bibliography

221

Index

224



vi Contents

1 Emily Carr, The Little Pine, 1931, oil on canvas, 112.0 x 68.8 cm, Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Emily Carr Trust, VAG 42.3.14 Photo: Trevor Mills, Vancouver Art Gallery

110

2 Emily Carr, Scorned as Timber, Beloved of the Sky, 1935, oil on canvas, 112.0 x 68.9 cm, Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Emily Carr Trust, VAG 42.3.15 Photo: Trevor Mills, Vancouver Art Gallery

123

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List of Illustrations

The painting featured on the cover, The Lacquer Room (1935) by the Australian modernist Grace Cossington Smith, captures in a single remarkable image the central theme of this book. Notwithstanding its reputation as one of Cossington Smith’s great celebrations of modern Sydney, the painting is striking for the ambivalence of its depiction of women in an urban communal space. For all the genteel, bustling amity in this café’s Art Deco interior, there is also an unmistakable urban anomie, as its diners sit either solitary or in silent couples, adjacent to one another but not quite together. The space is quasi-domestic yet emphatically public, welcoming yet detached: sociable yet unsociable. This sense of the painting’s ambivalence is underlined by what we know of the artist herself. Living for most of her adult life in the suburban seclusion of her parents’ home, Cossington Smith dwelt at the fringes of Sydney’s thriving modernist scene. Her work might have defined it, but she was never fully a part of it. She is, as her stark 1948 self-portrait also attests, a fellow-traveller of the sociably unsociable women discussed in the pages that follow. This volume began life as a workshop in 2006 organized by the Lifewriting Group within the Literature, Identity and Culture (LIC) research strength of the Arts Faculty, University of Wollongong, Australia. We were fortunate to have had Professor Gillian Whitlock of the University of Queensland as our guest speaker at this workshop. Her thought-provoking comments led us to define our project with greater assurance, and for this we thank her. We also wish to acknowledge the University of Wollongong Arts Faculty’s financial support for the workshop, as well as its support for costs associated with the volume’s indexing, proofreading and image acquisition. Heartfelt thanks also go to our contributors for their enthusiasm, responsiveness, patience and collegiality. From the time of the first workshop, through numerous subsequent meetings, to the last stages of editing, they have truly been a joy to work with. Our editors at Palgrave Macmillan, Paula Kennedy and Ben Doyle, have been models of professionalism. At all stages of the volume’s development and production they have been unfailingly efficient, courteous and supportive. We wish to express our sincere gratitude to them for making a potentially arduous process seem easy. viii



Preface and Acknowledgements

Our thanks go also to Chris Tiffin for his expert proofreading and indexing. We wish to acknowledge the Art Gallery of New South Wales and Ann Mills for granting us permission to reproduce The Lacquer Room. Finally, we wish to thank our families for their support throughout the process of working on this project. Anne Collett and Louise D’Arcens



Preface and Acknowledgements ix

Contributors to this book were all members of the Women’s Lifewriting Project associated with the Literature, Identity and Culture Research Group, based in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Wollongong, Australia. All continue to be associated with the University of Wollongong except Sarah Ailwood, who has subsequently taken up a lectureship at the University of Canberra. Sarah Ailwood is a Lecturer in the Faculty of Law at the University of Canberra. She completed her PhD in English literature at the University of Wollongong in 2008, and has worked in various legal professional roles. Her new project combines her research interests in literature and law to investigate women’s autobiographies as responses to their experiences with law and justice. Melissa Boyde is a Research Fellow working in the fields of modernist art and writing, and animal ethics and representation. Recent publications include articles on the modernist writers Hope Mirrlees and Djuna Barnes and the Australian modernist artist Mary Alice Evatt. She is currently writing Evatt’s biography and co-editing a book on cultural representations of animals. Currently completing a PhD that examines Mary Fortune’s writing in the Australian Journal from 1865 to 1885, Megan Brown has published on Mary Fortune in the special edition of Australian Literary Studies in honour of Elizabeth Webby in 2007. She has also written about Louisa Atkinson, a colonial journalist botanist and novelist. Anne Collett led the Women’s Lifewriting project and the Literature, Identity and Culture Research Group. She has published widely in the field of postcolonial women’s writing with a focus on Australia, Canada and the Caribbean, and has edited Kunapipi: Journal of Postcolonial Writing & Culture since 2000. Louise D’Arcens has published numerous chapters and articles on medieval women’s writing and is co-editor of Maistresse of My Wit: Medieval Women, Modern Scholarship (2004). Her other research interest is in Australian medievalism. She teaches medieval and modern literature in the English Literatures Program. x



Notes on Contributors

Michael Jacklin is a Research Fellow whose research interests include Indigenous literatures, collaboration in lifewriting, literatures of displacement and diaspora, and multicultural writing. His publications have appeared in journals including Life Writing, Antipodes, Kunapipi, ARIEL and JASAL, and his current research contributes to the AustLit database. Expatriate New Zealander and Honorary Fellow in the School of English Literatures, Philosophy and Languages, Dorothy Jones taught at the University of Wollongong from 1971 to 1996. She has published widely in the area of postcolonial literature, with special emphasis on women writers. Diaries and letters by nineteenth-century women settlers in Australia, New Zealand and Canada are major topics in several of her published papers. Anne Lear is a Senior Lecturer in the English Literatures Program. Her current research interests are focused on English women’s lifewriting in the early modern period. She has published on the autobiographical writing of Alice Thornton, Anne Clifford and the nineteenth-century Anglo-Australian Rachel Henning. A specialist in early twentieth-century Irish literature and culture, with expertise in lifewriting and translation studies, Irene Lucchitti has recently published a book on the autobiographical writings of Tomás O’Crohan (Ó Criomhthain) of the Blasket Islands (‘Reimagining Ireland’ series, 2009) and is currently writing another on Peig Sayers. Tony Simoes da Silva researches in the areas of Anglophone and Lusophone African studies and Australian writing. Recently published essays appear in refereed journals such as ARIEL (2009), Third World Quarterly (2005), Kunapipi (2008) and Life Writing (2004), as well as in collections published by Routledge (2008) and Lexington Books (2008). Formerly Professor of English Literatures, Wenche Ommundsen is currently Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Wollongong. She has published extensively in the area of multicultural and diasporic literary traditions, most recently on Asian-Australian literary interactions. Her latest book is Cultural Citizenship and the Challenges of Globalisation (2010).



Notes on Contributors xi



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‘Femmes a part’: Unsociable Sociability, Women, Lifewriting Louise D’Arcens and Anne Collett

When Christine de Pizan, in her 1410 Lamentation on the Evils of Civil War, described herself as ‘seulette a part’ (de Pizan, 1984: 84) she expressed a divided sense of identity that has echoed throughout women’s lifewriting right up to the present day. Calling desperately for an end to the warfare that was dividing France, she marshalled all the rhetorical pathos she could to attain her end, portraying herself simultaneously as a loyal member of, and an outsider to, French society. The striking ambiguity of the phrase ‘a part’ captures the uncertain standing she experienced as a widow and a female commentator, alluding to the social marginality her position brought with it, but also, vitally, to the valuable reflective distance it allowed her as a lone woman calling for peace in her fractured society. In this short, three-word self-description, which informs the title of this chapter, Christine captures succinctly the complex, uneasy relationship between the female autobiographical self that is ‘a part’ of communities and institutions, and the self that stands ‘apart’ from them. It is this complex and frequently agonized sense of self – seeking to belong yet yearning for solitude and privacy, or indeed for distinction from the group – that is at the heart of this volume’s exploration of women’s lifewriting. This mode of self-representation, in the many guises in which it is taken up in the chapters that follow, is at the heart of what we are calling the unsociable sociability of women’s lifewriting. As a term, ‘unsociable sociability’ has had a long and venerable history among philosophers and political theorists, but it is new to the scholarship of lifewriting. It is most famously associated today with Immanuel Kant’s brief but influential 1784 essay Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim, where it forms the centrepiece of the essay’s Fourth Proposition. With uncharacteristic accessibility of style, Kant outlines in this Proposition a dialectical model of historical progress, in which he 1



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Louise D’Arcens and Anne Collett

[a] propensity to enter into society, which, however, is combined with a thoroughgoing resistance that threatens to break up this society … [t]he human being has an inclination to become socialized, since in such a condition he feels himself as more a human being … [b]ut he also has a great propensity to individualize (isolate) himself, because he simultaneously encounters in himself the unsociable property of willing to direct everything so as to get in his own way … he knows of himself that he is inclined on his side toward resistance against others. (Kant, 2009: 13, italics in original) It is initially difficult from such statements to see how this antagonism could lead to human progress, for Kant’s formulation here would appear to set up a moral hierarchy in which sociability is presented as a benevolent disposition forced to contend against the unfortunate and perverse counter-tendency of unsociability. Yet this apparent hierarchy is unsurprising, given Kant is directly influenced in the Fourth Proposition by Michel de Montaigne’s statement in the Essais that ‘there is nothing so unsociable and so sociable as man: the one by his vice, the other by his nature’ (de Montaigne, 1965: I.39). Montaigne was, as J.B. Schneewind has recently shown, just one of a cluster of early modern thinkers for whom sociability expressed a uniquely human natural inclination for peacable cohabitation, while unsociability was the by-product of either vice or a primordial self-interest that humans evolve away from as they mature into sociability. While there was disagreement about which of the two tendencies was more natural to humanity – Thomas Hobbes, for instance, argued that fear and self-interest are more fundamental to human nature – there was general agreement that sociable existence was the more desirable state of the two, and that it is imperative to achieve it, whether to realize our higher natural inclinations or simply to deliver us from the hostility and discord perpetually threatened by our natural unsociability. Despite the influence of these thinkers on Kant, the initial appearance of a moral hierarchy in Proposition Four is in fact misleading. If we read on, we find him arguing vigorously for the benefits of unsociability for human development: Now it is this resistance that awakens all the powers of the human being, brings him to overcome his propensity to indolence, and,



argues that ‘lawful order’ and human progress are achieved by the operation of ‘antagonism’ in society. Chief among these progressive antagonisms, Kant argues, is the ‘unsociable sociability (ungesellige Geseligkeit) of human beings’, which he elaborates as

driven by ambition, tyranny, and greed, to obtain for himself a rank among his fellows, whom he cannot stand, but also cannot leave alone. Thus happen the first true steps from crudity toward culture; thus all talents come bit by bit to be developed, taste is formed, and even, through progress in enlightenment, a beginning is made … to form a society into a moral whole. (Kant, 2009: 13–14) While Kant does not deny the unsavoury impulses that accompany unsociability, he regards it as the necessary counterpart to the ‘excellent natural predispositions’ of sociability, which he argues would ‘eternally slumber undeveloped’ without it. Finally, this natural antagonism, far from being an aberration of nature, is in fact a kind of veiled blessing, an expression of divine will: the sources of unsociability and thoroughgoing resistance, from which so many ills arise [but] which impel human beings to new exertion of their powers and hence to further development of their natural predispositions, thus betray the working of a wise creator. (2009: 14) This remarkable construal of unsociability as a divinely ordained ‘natural incentive’ to cultural achievement and progress marks out Kant’s theory not only as distinct from the majority of those who came before him, but also, as we will go on to discuss, as uniquely serviceable to a discussion of the cultural achievement that is lifewriting. The link between Kant’s theory and the development of lifewriting is, historically speaking, far from incidental. A major influence on his formulation of unsociable sociability was the work of the great Enlightenment autobiographer Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau’s most conspicuous formulation of the unsociable–sociable dialectic can be found in his 1755 Discourse on Inequality, where he offers his famous account of how humanity’s natural urge towards sociability has paradoxically but inexorably given rise to contrary urges towards amour propre and social distinction – a tension which, he asserts, is the fundamental condition of civil society. But it is in his Confessions (completed 1769, published 1782) that we encounter Rousseau’s best known, and most complex, enactment of unsociable sociability, which is played out through his meditation upon the intrinsic unsociability that shadows the apparently sociable gesture of disclosing the self through writing. Although in the Confessions Rousseau does not use the same terminology as in his political philosophy, it is not difficult to detect the presence



Unsociable Sociability, Women, Lifewriting 3


of his abiding dialectic in the text’s approach to the autobiographical act. For Rousseau, the unsociable sociability of autobiography is twofold. First, in the very act of beginning his text with a declaration of his own absolute uniqueness (‘I am made unlike any one I have ever met; … I am like no-one in the whole world’ [Rousseau, 1953: 17]), he discloses the unsociable compulsion to distinguish the autobiographical self from all others. Yet this very declaration also expresses the sociable urge to communicate this unique self to others, and rests on the belief that this self can be understood by them (‘I shall … proclaim aloud, thus have I acted; these were my thoughts; such was I.’ [1953: 17]). Second – and this is the central theme of Jacques Derrida’s masterful deconstruction of the Confessions in Of Grammatology – the use of writing as a medium for life narration, while sociable in its attempt to disseminate the self to a wide audience across space and time, also introduces obstacles to this sociability. The most insurmountable of these is the impossibility of communicating or sustaining an unmediated self in written form. When Rousseau says ‘I will present myself … with this book in my hand, and loudly proclaim, thus have I acted’ (1953: 17), he captures perfectly (though possibly inadvertently) how the ‘man in the integrity of nature’ he strives to convey is inevitably displaced by his literary simulacrum. This literary Doppelgänger is, moreover, vulnerable to the unsociable vagaries of misinterpretation that come with relinquishing self-presence for the disseminative process of autobiography, in which the writer loses control over the reception of the autobiographical self. While Derrida calls this logic of displacement the ‘dangerous supplementarity’ of the autobiographical form (Derrida, 1976: 141–64), we suggest that it is equally a symptom of its unsociable sociability – an expression of lifewriting’s simultaneous offering and withdrawal of the writing self from the reader. Despite its solid grounding in the history of autobiography, our use of this Kantian formulation to describe the operations of women’s lifewriting is fundamentally heuristic. We do not, first of all, wish to subscribe to the strongly antagonistic tenor of unsociability within Kant’s paradigm of cultural development, which highlights hatred, tyranny, competitiveness and greed as motivators of progress; our interest lies, rather, in his account of the intricate tensions within sociability, and, crucially, the role of these tensions in cultural production, tracing in particular the manifestations of this tension in the lifewriting produced by women. As will become clear from the texts included in this volume, the unsociable tensions within the apparently sociable act of lifewriting should not be equated too readily with anti-social tendencies; indeed,



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autobiographical unsociability is as readily detectible in such subtle and even ‘literary’ behaviours as the pursuit of privacy and self-concealment through the use of fictionalizing techniques or the development of autobiographical personae that mark their provisional separateness from their social milieus. While such personae might take an openly adversarial stance towards society, more often they register more finely tuned unsocial desires, such as the wish to claim forms of moral, intellectual or social distinction, or the desire for recognition of their exceptionality. Even adversarial voices are, moreover, generally tempered by a desire for acknowledgement by the community from which the lifewriting subject separates herself. It is also not our aim, despite this volume’s broad historical, cultural and geographical scope, to perpetuate the notions of intrinsic human nature that Kant, when writing as an Enlightenment political philosopher, espoused; rather our primary interest is in examining the literary strategies of unsociable sociability that emerge out of women lifewriters’ interaction with the specific circumstances within which they live and write. It is our contention that across a wide spectrum of women’s lifewriting texts, there is a highly divergent but also remarkably persistent negotiation of the contrary forces of belonging and separation between the woman lifewriter and the social institutions surrounding her. These institutions range from more official bodies such as government and state to Church, the penal system and, in many cases, the literary and art establishment and marketplace, to the more intimate institutions of family and marriage. We have aimed to include not only those women whose approach to these institutions is critical and even contrarian – and who therefore quest to distinguish themselves not only within, but also in many cases from, their defining institutions and communities – but also those who are less resistant, thereby redressing the ongoing scholarly tendency to direct the critical emphasis towards women’s lifewriting that is construed to be transgressive of cultural norms and expectations. This volume follows a loosely chronological trajectory from the fifteenth century to the twenty-first, but is also arranged to emphasize a core of central thematic connections between the essays. The cross-cultural and geographical scope of the volume is broad, ranging from France, England, Canada, South Africa, Australia, to the Blasket Islands. The generic range spans memoir, autobiography, epistolic genres, roman à clef, autobiographical novels, religious autobiography, journalism, political verse and visual self-portrait, and, again, the essays are grouped, sometimes provocatively, to draw out suggestive resonances between genres and writers. Through its drawing together of the disparate contexts of these writers, the volume





offers an argument for a shared range of strategies deployed cross-culturally by female lifewriters to authorize themselves as writers, and to make interventions with an aim of transforming their social, political and personal conditions. Our emphasis on tracing a ‘strategic continuity’ between the women included here is worth underlining because while we do not assemble these writers in order to posit essential female qualities, or what Gillian Whitlock, after Denise Riley, regards as a specious assumption of ‘transhistorical female experience’ (Whitlock, 2000: 3), we do want to suggest that irrespective of historical or cultural context, the very act of lifewriting has involved women in a complex and often quite fraught balancing of their own self-interest against the demands of sociability. For many of the women featured here, particularly those writing in contexts where their self-representation strains against cultural expectations, the very decision to write, irrespective of content, violates sociability, placing them at odds with the social and institutional expectations placed on them; and this is rarely simply because they are women, though their gender plays a crucial role in the prohibitions surrounding their selfrepresentations. For others it is in the way that they choose to represent their lives, the prerogatives of silence they renounce or evoke, the secrets and injustices they expose or conceal, even the loyalties and intimacies they betray, that threaten to fracture the sociability on which, ironically, they also depend to find an audience for their self-narratives. In a volume dedicated to exploring the faultlines between the interests of the individual and those of the group, it is apt that we strive to preserve a kind of ‘unsociable’ singularity and distinctiveness within the essays gathered here under our collective theme. Rather than insisting on too great a similitude of critical idiom, theoretical position or discursive style, we have sought instead to highlight the range of approaches that might be taken when considering the question of unsociable sociability in women’s lifewriting. This breadth of range echoes that of the women writers themselves: just as some of them engaged reflexively with their agonized relationship to the social while others simply enacted this in their choice to write, so too some of the essays included here are more explicit in their engagement with the philosophical dimensions of unsociable sociability, while others use close reading as the most effective way of tracing this phenomenon within individual texts. The essays are united by yet another form of ‘strategic continuity’, inhering in their conviction both that the female lifewriting subject has long negotiated a tense (un)sociability, and that disclosing its many permutations will shed valuable light on the many wagers involved



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for women who choose to write their lives. Any danger of unanimity between the essays is tempered, however, by a salutary diversity of argument, emphasis and style – a divergence that, we believe, a theme such as unsociable sociability demands. Recognition of the attraction–repulsion dynamic between lifewriting and practices of sociability has been lurking in various forms within scholarship on women’s lifewriting for some time. But it has been pushed somewhat to the margins of the discussion as scholarship has reoriented itself towards an investigation of the ‘relationality’ of the female autobiographical subject. This critical emphasis on the way the female subject is defined by her intersections with other individuals and collectives, is widespread in contemporary accounts, and is aptly summarized in Cynthia Huff’s statement that investigation into women’s lifewriting has found, historically, that ‘women’s life-writing [followed] more relational community patterns, so that the auto dimension of autobiography was called into question’ (2005: 5). Leigh Gilmore has also, in recent years, stressed that ‘the task of autobiography … entails the larger organizational question of how selves and milieus ought to be understood in relation to one another’ (2001: 12). This widespread project of what Gilmore describes as the ‘recaptur[ing of] the effaced relations out of which the notion of the individual and persons themselves emerge’ (2001: 12) presents itself as a feminist riposte to the masculinist tradition of what Smith and Watson and others have called the ‘enlightenment ideology of the “self”’ (Smith and Watson, 1992: xvii) in which the autobiographical subject defines itself (or, implicitly, himself) as a sovereign individual whose selfhood emerges, and pursues a teleological arc, in splendid isolation from any familial, communal or more broadly cultural dictates. One of the dominant bêtes noires of accounts of women’s lifewriting is the Rousseauian ‘unique-yet-representative’ self, although Gilmore has also queried the feminist aperçu that male lifewriting is always geared towards the perpetuation of a subject characterized by unity and coherence (Gilmore, 1994: 11). This emphasis on relational subjectivity goes hand in hand with a conviction that the profound sociability of women’s lifewriting is also expressed in its quest for an audience – a quest which has been repeatedly characterized via the critical leitmotif of the writer who ‘reaches out’ to readers. Again, Huff’s formulation (citing Benedict Anderson) of an ‘imagined community of writer and reader’, is typical, extending women lifewriters’ ‘relationality’ into the realm of literary sociability. On a different but related tack, Whitlock, in The Intimate Empire, emphasizes the vital economic and material stakes involved for lifewriters in generating a





virtual sociability through the act of writing, arguing ‘autobiographers manoeuvre for their public; for the privilege of addressing the reader about [their] life’ (Whitlock, 2000: 3). In recent years this emphasis on sociability has gained a particular urgency with the emergence of important work on the potential for lifewriting to engage with, or even deliver, forms of social justice. Wendy Hesford and Wendy Kozol, for instance, have recently called for the production and reception of women’s lifewriting to be viewed as a valuable instrument in the maintenance, or indeed the restoration, of human rights, which is achieved ‘through the dialogic processes of looking and being seen’ (2005: 11). This dialogic process has the power to work as a kind of counter-discursive force against cultural exclusion and disinformation: it is, they argue, ‘a transnational and transcultural process whereby reading or seeing human rights violations locates the viewer, the reader, and the witness within local and global communities’ (2005: 11). This powerful invocation of reading as a practice of bearing witness rests on a belief that the sociability of women’s lifewriting is founded on an acknowledged high-stakes ethical pact whose aim is nothing less than social transformation. One development that has been especially significant in the past decade is the attention that has been given to trauma testimony as a form of lifewriting. Gilmore, Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith, Whitlock, and Paul John Eakin, have been instrumental in opening out the paradigms of lifewriting to accommodate the many and variable utterances that come under the enunciative rubric of trauma testimony. While feminist approaches to autobiographical writing have long been sensitized to the determining role of social hierarchy in refusing women access to selfrepresentation, work on trauma testimony has fine-tuned this concern to consider the manifold difficulties faced by victims of trauma in making their stories heard. Within such scholarship there is a conspicuous strain of advocacy for lifewriting as a form of personal and cultural healing, as well as an insistence, again, on the need for all parties to effect this very dialogic mode of healing. The capacity for lifewriting to restore ideal sociability, say Schaffer and Smith, ‘depends on the willingness of those addressed to hear the stories and to take responsibility for the recognition of others and their claims’ (2004: 5). Within such work there would appear to be little room for an examination of lifewriting’s intrinsic unsociability, although Margaretta Jolly’s recent work on the correspondence between women involved in British and American second-wave feminism points to the tension between an ‘ethics of care’ that was intrinsic to a ‘culture of relationship’ (2008: 3)



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and the value of (female) autonomy that might be understood to be essentially unsocial. In addition, a number of scholars have examined the ethical complexities that dog the urge to communicate one’s life. Beyond an acknowledgement of the fundamental tension resulting from lifewriting’s position at ‘the interface of singular and shareable’ (Gilmore, 2001: 12) is a widely held concern about the insufficiency of language to convey lived experience, especially experience of a traumatic complexion, which hovers at the edges of what is expressible, let alone reliveable, through the written medium. The anxiety expressed by Rousseau about the failure of language to represent the autobiographical self becomes, in the instance of trauma testimony and the self-representations of ‘those who struggle for cultural authority’ (Whitlock, 2007: 17), a far from academic concern, and the critics working in this area are deeply conscious of the very real risks this presents to those who choose to disseminate their stories in the name of restorative justice. In some cases, there is a palpable, and justifiable, anxiety about the risks involved in the very act of self-representation. It has been a convention of feminist literary scholarship to regard women’s breaking of silence as both desirable and laudable; but Michael Jacklin’s chapter alerts us to the care that is needed in calibrating the stakes of each act of lifewriting. In an analysis of the particular forms of unsociable sociability at work in the collaborative act of writing Yvonne Johnson’s Stolen Life: Journey of a Cree Woman (1998), Jacklin argues that ‘[i]ndigenous cultures commonly recognize that social discourse is accompanied by a responsibility for the consequences of one’s public utterance, and that quietness and care may at times outweigh the compulsion to speak’. Jacklin is sensitive to the very real and potentially harmful consequences that attend a decision to break silence for the autobiographical subject and all those whose lives are entangled in her story, and reminds us of our need as scholars and readers to understand the particular facets of sociability that each writer encounters, upholds, yet also threatens, by her decision to write her life. From a different perspective, the chapter by Tony Simoes da Silva addresses this central ethical dilemma of lifewriting in terms of ‘unsociable sociability’. Comparing two recent memoirs that look back to white childhoods in southern Africa – Africa ‘on the cusp of momentous historical and political upheaval’ – Simoes da Silva remarks on the force of survival instinct (the social) that binds both families together despite the trauma of family relations that would otherwise undo them (the unsociable). Like Jacklin, he reveals the complexities of an unsociable sociability that lies at the heart of each writer’s decision to break a silence. In these memoirs





the related acts of remembering and writing expose a fragile self to the demands of conflicted loyalty within the family unit and the broader social and political structure of settler community. The fundamental querying of lifewriting as an expressive act has been compounded by an increased scepticism towards the formal limitations of autobiography as a genre of literary self-disclosure. For two decades now, at least since Lawrence Buell’s 1991 distinction of ‘autobiographical mode’ from ‘autobiographical genre’, there has been a wide acknowledgement that the purely factual, linear autobiography – that is, the kind of autobiography that could unproblematically enter into the sociable ‘autobiographical pact’ famously anatomized by Philippe Lejeune – is but one of a multitude of forms utilized by lifewriters. While recognizing this generic flexibility might have become a critical truism, Gilmore’s work on trauma in ‘Autobiography’s Wounds’ again reminds us of the urgent stakes involved in the ‘struggle with form’ (Gilmore, 2005: 102) experienced by victims seeking to relate their stories. The legal frameworks surrounding their testimonies mean that ‘any self-representation is fully burdened by its public charge to disclose a private truth’ (Gilmore, 2001: 14) in a way that is legally and forensically intelligible – that is, without resort to any ‘suspect’ forms of creative or fictive truth-telling which are construed as potentially distorting and even mendacious. A negotiation of the ethics of self-exposure and concealment, communication and privacy, is, however, not just the preserve of those who speak in mode of trauma testimony. Sarah Ailwood documents the fascinating example of Eliza Robertson, a woman accused of ‘swindling’ and hence imprisoned for debt in the early nineteenth century. Taking issue with Paul John Eakin’s claim that, ‘[w]hen life writers fail to tell the truth ... they do more than violate a literary convention governing nonfiction as a genre; they disobey a moral imperative’, Ailwood asks whether ‘a woman in Robertson’s position – ... destitute, imprisoned and the victim of laws that have since been eradicated as unsuitable to the liberal democratic state – should be required to tell the truth, or to spare her persecutors’. Effectively silenced by the legal system, her reputation destroyed by a scandal-mongering press, Robertson exploited the tradition of the ‘scandalous memoir’ to gain recourse to the justice that had been denied her. Ailwood’s chapter reveals the skill with which Robertson, a feme sole who occupied ‘a marginalized social position outside of patriarchal family life’, exploited her singular unsociability to social advantage. Her memoir was designed to challenge the misrepresentation of herself in public discourse and legal process and to garner public support (and money) to further her legal



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case. In so doing, she made effective use of a form that claims to ‘set the record straight’ by presenting the public with ‘the facts’ while deploying the tools of fiction to elicit sympathy. Inspired not only by the moneymaking potential of writing, but also by the creative act of writing itself, Robertson moved on from the ‘scandalous memoir’ to the novel to make her case. Eliza Robertson is one of many woman featured in this volume who stray from the legalistic imperatives of ‘factual’ autobiography in favour of fictive disclosure, and in so doing invoke an unsociable resistance to the presumed sociability of lifewriting. Dorothy Jones provides a wonderful metaphor of this writerly unsocial sociability, drawn from Marion Halligan’s memoirs. ‘Although, in her memoirs, Halligan warmly invites us into her home,’ Jones explains, ‘we usually see just one room ... [and] we may not realize how much of the house is out of bounds.’ Jones compares the reader experience of Halligan’s home, as portrayed in her memoirs, to the tourist experience of a stately home where ‘the selected rooms on display are roped off, allowing us to look but never enter’. In some cases, there is a clear and sociably oriented belief in the greater capacity for fiction to convey the subjective truths of the soul. Jones asserts that in order to explore ‘more intimate spaces’ in Halligan’s writing, for example, the reader ‘must move into the house of fiction’. In other cases, however, the women’s self-narratives are as much concerned with self-protection as with self-exposure. Here, the audience is regarded by the writer in the light of Kant’s encroaching Other, whose intrusions and assumptions must be warded off or ‘managed’ in the interests of the writing subject’s chosen self-representation. Megan Brown writes about the difficulties encountered by Mary Fortune, who wrote about her unusual (and what might be deemed ‘unsociable’) life on the streets of Melbourne and the goldfields of Victoria, Australia in the latter half of the nineteenth century. In particular, Brown examines Fortune’s writing position as a flâneuse – one who is both a part of the crowd and yet apart from it – as a ‘striking position for a woman to assume in the nineteenth century’ given ‘the status of a woman on the streets was questionable’. Brown suggests that Fortune’s choice to write as flâneuse exposes the contrariness of her unsocial sociability; her texts create a persona who is at once defiant in her social-authorial independence yet wistful and desirous of belonging. In choosing to write pseudonymously about her life experience, and to use that experience to critique the limited freedoms of the middle-class woman in the colonies, Fortune risked an exposure that would result in the loss of her profession as a regular contributor to the periodical press.





Fortune’s lifewriting was balanced on a fine line that invited sympathy while also courting condemnation, hence she played a risky game of hide and seek, flirting with, yet fearful of, discovery. The genre of roman à clef is less singular in its unsociability in that it functions to speak to a minority of others ‘in the know’, while concealing identities and knowledge from the wider reading circle. Developed in the seventeenth century, the roman à clef enables ‘simultaneous disclosure and disguise of real-life identities’, and is thus, of itself, a generic example of unsocial sociability. Melissa Boyde explores the work of twentieth-century modernist coterie writers who used this genre to represent lesbian sexuality while avoiding personal disclosure or prosecution. When a key was made available, thereby unlocking secret knowledge ‘while at the same time pointing to what is culturally relegated to silence’, the genre provided a space, like the salon, in which the ‘unsociable’ might become ‘sociable’; but the danger of such disclosure is obvious. Less personally perilous, but written at a time of great turmoil and warfare, Christine de Pizan’s political writings, addressed in the early fifteenth century to royal and courtly coteries, are characterized by a paradoxical unsociable sociability in which her autobiographical self – a self characterized by deep and prolonged grief – is revealed through a series of sophisticated literary-religious personae. Although these writings appear to ‘transcend’ personal confession, the conditions of intimate sociability underpinning their production meant that Christine’s immediate audiences would recognize the autobiographical force behind the apparently depersonalized personae she developed. Her ingenious technique allowed her to revel in yet transcend the personal, thereby enabling her to address herself authoritatively and collectively to the pressing troubles of the French polity. The desire to establish distance from the reader is frequently echoed in these writers’ expressions of their sense of separateness, and need to stand apart, from the communities and institutions of which they are a part. Even Huff, with her heavy emphasis on relationality, admits that ‘communities that have functioned historically and spatially as sites for writing … may be fraught with conflict as well as conducive to growth’ (2005: 5) – an observation that is substantiated by Margaretta Jolly’s work on communities of sisterhood in the 1970s and 1980s. It is important to recognize the extent to which women’s claim to separateness in their lifewriting is not, as Gilmore suggests, a critical effect – a product of the Western hermeneutic habit of ‘pushing an individual forward out of a dense set of relations’ as a result of ‘the ubiquity of the individual as a trope of Western consciousness’ (Gilmore, 2001: 12); it is, rather, intrinsic



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to the self-fashioning engaged in by these women. Ironically, in a crystallization of the inseparability of the sociable and unsociable, in many cases the autobiographical subject’s marking of its distinction from its social institutions is achieved through the forging of an intimate bond with the reader via a confessional discourse, in which the lifewriter negotiates the perilous ethics of offering confidential revelations which, as Paul John Eakin and others have discussed, unsociably privilege the lifewriter’s compulsion to disclose over the interests of others close to them. Eakin says ‘an ethic of disclosure pursued to erase a legacy of stigma is not without its dilemmas’ (2004: 11); indeed, these dilemmas go to the heart of unsociable sociability because, in freeing themselves from personal or cultural stigma, some lifewriters engage in what some might see as a disregard for the privacy of others. The tension inherent in making the private public is also at the heart of Dorothy Jones’s chapter on the interchange of novel and memoir in the oeuvre of Australian author Marion Halligan. Jones remarks on the difficulty of writing those intimate others upon which a ‘truthful’ recreation of a ‘life’ and representation of the self is dependent. She cites as example Halligan’s comment on her husband’s uneasy response towards all her male characters: ‘the thing is,’ she writes, ‘ … Graham always thought my male characters were him,’ while the character that was intended to represent him in her memoir is, somewhat contrarily, ‘not him’ – ‘he was a character in a book, very like him but other, not somebody he liked particularly’. Halligan mixes the genres of fiction and memoir with a knowing playfulness, appearing to refuse the ‘truth’ claim of autobiography, and asserting rather the greater proximity to ‘truth’ that the cover of fiction allows. An associated but somewhat different dilemma comes to light in Anne Lear’s chapter on a hybrid form of ‘self-writing’ that merged personal and family histories with spiritually based lifewriting in the seventeenth century. In a discussion of the strategies of ‘Providence and prayer’ employed by Alice Thornton to construct ‘an ambitiously admirable [and thus unsociable] self’ from within a culture that valued a relational ideal of ‘woman’ as ‘someone else’s wife, daughter or mother’, Lear demonstrates the delicate balancing act such writing demanded. The risk of attracting accusations of pride in ‘a life’ that focuses on the singular attention given Alice by God in the form of ‘providential protection’ must be ameliorated by prayerful reflection ‘in the language of her spiritual community’. Lear notes how Thornton’s bold claim for singular personal worth, founded on ‘exceptional virtue’, would be rendered meaningless if it could not be measured by socially approved





standards. Exceptionality could not be deemed to fall outside the circle of ‘sociability’; hence Thornton’s careful deployment of a spiritual language that could be adapted to further her unsocial social purpose. Evidence of an ambivalent attitude taken by many of the women in this volume towards the literary and artistic lineages in which they are writing might best be understood as a consequence of the difficult balance required to promote a female self as singular, distinctive, exemplary yet be afforded the support and, indeed, the recognition of that distinction by the community (without which exemplariness is meaningless). This ambivalence is not just felt towards masculine tradition – although, unsurprisingly, this does feature in a number of the texts – but also, importantly, the female traditions on which they rely but from which they must ultimately distinguish themselves. A curious example of such ambivalence lies at the heart of Canadian artist Emily Carr’s development of a small persona. Accepted into and inspired by the Canadian ‘Group of Seven’, Carr chose rather to differentiate herself from what she came to see as an ‘Eastern’ geographical and male-gendered tradition in the making. She moved from a position of wanting to ‘have her share’, to taking on the more daunting but perhaps more rewarding (and distinctive) position of ‘holding up her end’ in splendid isolation. Carr painted large canvases in the modern style of the Group, rejecting the feminine tradition of miniature watercolours with which she had begun her career; but her forests were essentially (and radically) feminine. She asserted herself as an artist and a woman with courage and tenacity, and yet, acutely aware of the unsociable aspects of that personality, chose to represent herself in her lifewriting as small. ‘Small’ is the persona behind which Carr conceals her unfeminine Bigness, and is the strategy she employs to elicit the male patronage that would assist her in publishing her writing and endorse her artistic vision. The strategic position Emily Carr takes is peculiar to her, yet also follows a pattern of an unsociable sociability common to many female artists and writers. Writers need not resort to the trope of Rousseauian absolute uniqueness (as Carr tended to do) in order to disavow their relationships to literary forebears and contemporaries; indeed, the very gesture of marking their difference leads some of these women to locate themselves within creative lineages and communities, thereby revealing the impossibility of shedding the legacy of sociability that persists within even the most apparently unsociable rejection of shared creative practice. Alice Pung begins her autobiographical narrative, Unpolished Gem, by disavowing any inheritance from the genre of Asian women’s autobiographies in which the protagonists’ selfhood is forged via a traumatic relationship



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to political upheaval. In a comparison of two recent works by young women ‘growing up Asian in Australia’, Wenche Ommundsen argues that these authors negotiate a complex process of socialization through a parallel negotiation of the writing conventions that both place and displace them. Declaring their remove from a (female, migrant) literary tradition, both authors necessarily place their writing in relation to that tradition, affirming it and transforming it. As Ommundsen remarks, these writers ‘negotiate a contract with the reader on their own terms, but one in which the rejected generic “ghosts” are not so much banished as driven underground, where they continue to haunt the stories’. Gilmore calls trauma testimony a ‘limit case’ of autobiography, in that it tests the parameters of expressibility and ethical agency, as well as the generic breadth of the autobiographical form (2001: 7). We would suggest, conversely, that for these very reasons, traumatic enunciation is in fact a textbook case of lifewriting that lays bare its ineradicable unsociable sociability. What seems like a mapping of boundaries – of individual and group, public and private, disclosure and concealment, speech and silence, invitation and refusal – in fact traces a path back to the divided heart of literary practice. Irene Lucchitti’s chapter on the autobiography of Peig Sayers demonstrates this divided heart even in orature, a ‘literary practice’ that has often been distinguished from the purely ‘literary’ by its ‘tribal’ qualities. We might think of orature as essentially sociable, that is, created and perpetuated by a community, where the singular act of writing is essentially unsociable; but Lucchitti argues that the oral tradition of the Blasket Islands, a Gaeltacht community off the west coast of Ireland, provided Peig with ‘material, a forum for her voice and an audience … allow[ing] Peig to be exceptional while remaining at one with her community’. Lucchitti documents the specific, transformative contribution Peig Sayers made to this tradition. Her personal experiences became the basis of new stories told in traditional form, while her individual expression gave piquancy to familiar tales; furthermore, she transformed oral tale into literary form. Having been dictated to her son, Peig’s autobiography is at once individual and collective, personal and representative, recording singular and communal experience and preserving an oral tradition and a memory of communal life on the Blasket Islands that would stand when the island was deserted and its inhabitants scattered throughout the world. She was, then, like Christine de Pizan, and the other women included in this volume, ‘seulette a part’. At the divided heart of a literary practice we find the paradoxical dynamic which is responsible for lifewriting’s




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astonishing capacity for variety and, happily, for seemingly infinite self-renewal.

Buell, Lawrence (1991) ‘Autobiography in the American Renaissance’, in Paul John Eakin (ed.), American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect (Madison and London: University of Wisconsin Press). de Montaigne, Michel (1965) Complete Essays, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford University Press). de Pizan, Christine (1984) ‘Lament on the Evils of Civil War’, in Josette A. Wisman (ed. and trans.), The Epistle of the Prison of Human Life, with An Epistle to the Queen of France, and Lament on the Evils of Civil War (New York and London: Garland). Derrida, Jacques (1976) Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press). Eakin, Paul John (2004) The Ethics of Life Writing (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press). Gilmore, Leigh (1994) Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women’s SelfRepresentation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press). ——— (2001) The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press). ——— (2005) ‘Autobiography’s Wounds’, in Wendy Hesford and Wendy Kozol (eds), Just Advocacy? Women’s Human Rights, Transnational Feminism, and the Politics of Representation (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press). Hesford, Wendy, and Wendy Kozol (eds) (2005) Just Advocacy? Women’s Human Rights, Transnational Feminism, and the Politics of Representation (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press). Huff, Cynthia (2005) Women’s Life Writing and Imagined Communities (London: Routledge). Jolly, Margaretta (2008) In Love and Struggle: Letters in Contemporary Feminism (New York: Columbia University Press). Kant, Immanuel (2009) ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim’, trans. Allen W. Wood, in Amélie Oksenberg Rorty and James Schmidt (eds), Kant’s Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim: A Critical Guide (Cambridge University Press). Lejeune, Philippe (1989) On Autobiography, ed. Paul John Eakin, trans. Katherine Leary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1953) The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, trans. and intro. J.M. Cohen (Harmondsworth: Penguin). ——— (1997) Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality, in JeanJacques Rousseau, The Discourses and Other Political Writings, ed. and trans. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge University Press). Schaffer, Kay, and Sidonie Smith (eds) (2004) Human Rights and Narrated Lives: An Ethics of Recognition (New York: Palgrave Macmillan). Schneewind, J.B. (2009) ‘Good out of Evil: Kant and the Idea of Unsocial Sociability’, in Amélie Oksenberg Rorty and James Schmidt (eds), Kant’s Idea



Bibliography

for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim: A Critical Guide (Cambridge University Press). Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson (eds) (1992) Decolonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Whitlock, Gillian (2000) The Intimate Empire: Reading Women’s Autobiography (London: Cassell). ——— (2007) Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit (University of Chicago Press).




‘Je, Christine’: Christine de Pizan’s Autobiographical Topoi Louise D’Arcens

The literary output of Christine de Pizan (1365–c.1429) was prolific, spanning almost four decades and encompassing a range of genres, including courtly verse, epistolary polemic and consolatio, historical biography, verse and prose allegory, political speculum, moral advice and conduct manual. She is most famous in the contemporary era for her defences of women, but recent scholarship has also considered her legacy as an overlooked female political theorist and commentator. One of the most distinguishing features of Christine’s political oeuvre is her inclusion of details from her own experience as a woman in works dealing with such seemingly impersonal and ‘masculine’ themes as statescraft and warfare. In a period when a text’s auctoritas (authority) was regarded as deriving from its quotation of, and dialogue with, the established canon of masculine auctores (eminent authors), Christine’s assertion that her experiences gave her authority as a writer was striking to say the least, and by her own admission was largely responsible for her renown in France and abroad. What is more interesting still is the strategic use she makes of this autobiographical content to authorize herself. In some texts, part of her strategy is to assert her own experience as a challenge to misogynist auctores’ condemnation of women. More commonly throughout her oeuvre, however, her approach is more oblique, but arguably also more powerful, exposing the highly subtle and paradoxical unsocial sociability at the heart of her autobiographical practice. Her central strategy consists of taking features that her immediate audiences in the French royal courts would recognize as autobiographical, such as her widowhood and its associated struggles, and offering them with great candour to her readers, only to withdraw and ‘depersonalize’ her self-portraits by transforming them into sophisticated and distinctive – and most importantly self-authorizing – literary personae. Lest this seem 18



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to us modern readers like a resistance of intimacy between autobiographical self and audience, let us recall that this strategy was only possible because of the conditions of sociability underpinning it: Christine was able to turn herself into a trope precisely because the details of her life were known to her audience, who could acknowledge the autobiographical force behind the personae she developed. Christine’s work thus alerts us to the importance of being sensitive to the many permutations of autobiographical unsocial sociability, and its responsiveness to historical circumstance. Writing at a time of international and civil war – the quintessential political expression of unsocial sociability, according to Hugo Grotius, Thomas Hobbes and others (Schneewind, 2009: 95–100) – her calls for France’s welfare to prevail over princely selfinterest are an unmistakable act of sociability. Yet in doing this, she has recourse to autobiographical tropes that appear to place her on the outer margins of the community whose unity she craves – she is the widow, the migrant, the neglected voice in the wilderness, crying endlessly at the disintegration of sociability in her beloved France. Again, however, things are more complex than they seem, for these very tropes also provide her with a moral authority that enables her to speak not only to, but on behalf of, the community that appears to exclude her. Christine’s ingenious practice points to the care that is required when establishing what is meant by ‘female autobiography’ or ‘female lifewriting’ in the late Middle Ages. Finally (and more speculatively), her careful and disarming use of the personal as a means for offering strong social and political critique may perhaps point to an autobiographic unsocial sociability that can be identified as ‘feminine’, insofar as it self-consciously deploys feminine difference in order to gain access to certain valued speaking positions and subjects that might otherwise be unavailable to women.

Widow and mother: Christine as political Mater Dolorosa Over the past three decades Christine has been increasingly recognized for her abiding dedication to analysing, and proposing solutions to, the struggles of war-torn France. As I will go on to discuss, she produced a range of texts offering either urgent, overt political advice or more veiled commentary on contemporary events in France. Produced throughout a period marked by the immediate horrors of civil conflict and the ongoing turmoil of the Hundred Years’ War, these texts of political advice include verse and prose allegories (Le Livre de ladvision Cristine, Le Livre de chemin de long estude and Le Livre de la mutacion de fortune), mirrors for princes (Le Livre du corps de policie, Le Livre de la paix, Epistre Othea



Christine de Pizan’s Autobiographical Topoi 19

Louise D’Arcens

and the biographical Les Fais et bonnes moeurs du roi Charles V le sage) and epistles (L’Epistre a la royne, L’Epistre de la prison de vie humaine and Lamentacion sur les maux de la guerre civile). Her political writings clearly reveal the extent to which she regarded her own fate as intertwined with, and reflected in, that of the French kingdom. I wish to begin by exploring the intersection between the politics of Christine’s literary authority – that is, the strategies she deploys to promote the authoritative status of her texts – and her literature of political authority. Of particular interest is her articulation of active roles for women within the medieval polity, and feminized models of the state. Dwelling chiefly on Christine’s complex and autobiographically inflected evocation of a range of Marian traditions, and in particular that of the Mater Dolorosa, I will analyse how Christine’s claim to literary authority underwrites her bid for more concrete forms of feminine political agency. Through examining these Marian tropes I want to suggest that Christine relies heavily on the notion of influence as a legitimate, if unofficial, form of authority. Medieval political authority was not simply formulated in terms of intransigent official structures, but was more flexible, accommodating the strategic use of informally recognized influence or auctoritas. Political agency in the form of influence was therefore potentially open to those, such as women, who were located outside the legally recognized sphere of potestas. When analysing Christine’s more manifestly political works, we recognize that she was a pioneering voice in the history of women’s political writing. She of course drew heavily upon the genres, motifs, exempla and arguments found in masculine auctores; nevertheless, in a number of texts she actively encouraged women’s participation in affairs of state, formulating authoritative roles for them in national and civic domains. In particular, Christine promotes a crucial role for women in the sphere of diplomacy: a role which has its foundation in feudal notions of woman as intermediary between her lord and his vassals. The function of feminine intercession is fundamental to an understanding of Christine’s political thought, for it is out of this that she develops her sophisticated formulation of feminine political authority. One of the fullest articulations of the authority of woman as political intermediary is found in L’Epistre a la royne. This epistle has a threefold purpose: it functions simultaneously as Christine’s own attempt at immediate political amelioration; her attempt to encourage another woman, Queen Isabeau, to intervene in a political situation; and, in Richards’s words, as ‘a short treatise on women’s mediating role in politics’ (1993: 163). Writing on 5 October 1405, amidst the escalating tension of



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the Burgundy–Armagnac discord, Christine pleads with Queen Isabeau to intervene, and ‘obtain peace soon between these two princes of the same blood’ (de Pizan, 1984a: 73). Christine states that ‘it behooves a high princess and lady to be the mediator of a peace treaty’ (de Pizan, 1984a: 77). The intercessionary function bestowed upon the queen a symbolic form of princely seigneurial authority. In Christine’s work this feminized seigneurial authority is figured in her use of a familial metaphor for the state.1 This metaphor is crucial in its elaboration not only of a specifically feminine political function of protection and advocacy, but also in its recourse to the authority of Marian intervention. Of special interest in Christine’s use of this comparison in Epistre a la royne is the fact that in exhorting Isabeau to action she does not mention Mary’s virginity, but evokes those Marian designations that correspond most closely to the roles undertaken by Isabeau – that is, Mother of God and, importantly, Regina Coeli, ‘the Queen of Heaven’. Of course any form of authority Christine formulated for women relied for its plausibility on her establishing an authoritative speaking position for herself. Without this, any declaration of women’s authority in the public sphere would be undermined. To this end, Christine’s writing is remarkable for the consonance between her general assertions of female authority and her specific claims concerning the authority of her own voice. This is especially evident in her extensive deployment of Marian discourse to lend authority to her experiences and to her voice as a writer. Among the personal details found in Christine’s texts it is her widowhood that features most abidingly. Charity Cannon Willard asserts that ‘the most original of her poems are those expressing her own emotions as she continued to mourn the loss of her husband’ (Willard, 1984: 53). Among these grieving poems are the famous ‘All alone am I, and all alone I wish to be’ as well as her rondeau that begins and ends ‘I am a widow, all alone, and dressed in black’ (de Pizan, 1886–96a: 148–9, lines 1, 7, 12). In her prose allegories Mutacion de fortune and Ladvision she speaks with remarkable candour about the changes wrought in her life by her widowhood, glowingly remembering her young husband, and lamenting his untimely death and the responsibilities she was left to shoulder alone. While these texts contain material and sentiments recognizably drawn from Christine’s own life, we should, as Barbara Stevenson has reminded us, remember that these are public courtly performances of private grief (2000: 29–44), exemplifying what Daniel Poirion (1965: 252) described




Louise D’Arcens

as Christine’s professional ‘personnage triste’ (melancholy character).2 Without denying the biographical interest of Christine’s remarks on this subject, it is also important to examine the extent to which the emphasis she places on her own widowed status is crucial to the development of her literary persona. This is most pointedly so in her repeated use of the topos of tearfulness. Although this tearfulness superficially seems to function more as a dramatic, individuating detail enhancing her voice’s melancholy tone, its repeated appearance at the beginning of her texts suggests that it constitutes one of Christine’s more important selfauthorizing gambits. The meaning of Christine’s tears emerges most clearly in her epistle L’Epistre de la prison de vie humaine. This prose epistle, which also opens with a tearfulness motif, was completed in 1418 and addressed as a consolatio to Duchess Marie of Berry and other Frenchwomen who had lost their menfolk in the battle of Agincourt. In searching for a remedy for the women of France, and for France itself, Christine recalls what had been a consolation ‘to my humble widowed state’ (de Pizan, 1984b: 3), thereby directly linking the tears that begin her text with those of her widowhood. This suggests that the authorial tears which open a number of Christine’s allegorical and epistolary texts are in fact fundamentally the grieving tears of a widow. But the question remains: how does Christine’s widowhood become a Marian trope? I wish to argue, based on her devotion to the Virgin as mediatrix, that Christine’s tears are the tears of the Mater Dolorosa, the sorrowing widowed Virgin of the Passion. I want to suggest that despite her use of a range of complaint and lamentation genres in her epistles, her texts are linked by their politicized deployment of the sorrowing voice of the Mater Dolorosa. The theological tradition of the Mater Dolorosa had become a commonplace of Marian devotion by Christine’s time. Focusing on the Virgin’s tearful grief at the Crucifixion, this tradition interpreted her behaviour as the fulfilment of Simeon’s prophecy in Luke 2:35 that a sword of sorrow would pass through her maternal heart. A vast array of medieval representations of the Mater Dolorosa at the foot of the Cross portray her as weeping, wailing and rending her breast. The significance of this weeping for Christine was that it focused on a moment in the Virgin’s life that marked a departure from her much-lauded silence throughout the Gospels. As both widow and mother, the Mater Dolorosa offers Christine, a fellow widow and mother of three children, a form of Marian identification that authorizes her voice as a woman writer. By imitating the excessive grief of the Mater Dolorosa at the Crucifixion, Christine is able to legitimate her own venture into public affairs.3



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Acknowledging Christine’s identification with the sorrowing Virgin mother is vital to understanding the way she defined tears as a form of political action. This topos functions to authorize her texts as issuing from a chaste, faithful widow and a contemporary Mater Dolorosa, weeping her redemptive tears for women, and, in so doing, instituting a new textual covenant. Just as Mary’s conception of Jesus was believed to have redeemed humanity, so will Christine’s texts redeem women from their condemnation at the hands of textual tradition and offer them political agency. This authorization is vital to Christine’s aim of public intervention in her political epistles, and to her formulation of herself as interceding on behalf of the French people. But how can casting herself as the Mater Dolorosa achieve this? Surely this Marian figure is best known for her capacity for empathetic suffering rather than her intercessionary power? While the vocal Virgin at the Crucifixion might authorize speech, the planctus Mariae she offers her dead son, is, as Sandro Sticca (1988) has argued, ironically most powerful for its articulation of human impotence. Christine, however, offsets this potential limitation, and effectively politicizes the planctus Mariae, by establishing tears, especially tears of human compassion, as a form of intervention. In their discussion of the fourteenth-century French L’Advocacie de Nostre Dame, Spurgeon Baldwin and James W. Marchand state that the image of the Virgin as advocate gained popularity in the later Middle Ages because its use in the pseudo-Bernardine sermon ‘Advocata nostra’ linked it with the authoritative name of St Bernard (Baldwin and Marchand, 1992: 93, n.2). Looking at Christine’s 1402–3 text L’Oroyson Nostre Dame, which contains no fewer than six references to Bernard, and which refers to the Virgin as intermediary, it appears she may have known of this sermon. In this poem Christine appeals for intercession ‘by the fountains of your chaste eyes’ (de Pizan, 1886–96d, stanza XVII), a plea that explicitly links Mary’s tearfulness with her influence as heavenly mediatrix. This suggests that Christine was conscious of the potency of the Mater Dolorosa some time before she came to politicize her mediatory agency. Considering that Christine displays a full awareness of the salvatory significance of the Virgin’s tears, it becomes clear that her tears at the opening of her texts in fact bestow upon them a redemptive power issuing from the widowed, sorrowing state of its author. Second, in the context of late medieval political literature, dominated by the Mirror for Princes genre, which, according to Judith Ferster (1996), tended to embed critique within advice, the planctus form might be construed as a




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relatively ‘gloves off’ mode of intervention.4 Thus by evoking and emulating the Mater Dolorosa tradition Christine enacts a self-authorization whereby she may, as widow and writer, lay claim to a unique form of compassionate intercession expressed in the Mater’s vocal, sorrowful widowhood. This kind of intercessionary authority would have been appropriate for a woman of Christine’s social standing to claim. As Lois L. Huneycutt argues, the paradigm of Marian intercessionary authority was not reserved to queens; rather ‘some noble women actively encouraged intercessionary imagery as a new definition of their political authority’ (1995: 131).5 However, when writing to the queen and other members of the royal family, presenting her own intercession as that of the Regina Coeli would not have been prudent or appropriate for Christine. In articulating her intercessionary authority, Christine thus again deploys the trope of tearfulness, begging Isabeau not to despise ‘this tearful voice of mine’ (de Pizan, 1984a: 71), thereby representing herself as a supplicant calling upon the higher intermediary prerogative of the queen. In so doing, Christine creates the Epistre a la royne not merely as a political epistle, but as a political prayer to the queen, a secular Salve Regina. In the Lamentacion sur les maux de la guerre civile, Christine again resorts to the topos of supplication. Addressing the Duc de Berry, she implores him to restore peace between the warring Burgundians and Armagnacs. However, in this text, the tearful Christine presents herself as a political Mater Dolorosa, whose tearful planctus ratifies her intercessionary agency on behalf of the people of France. The motif of tearfulness is also threaded through L’Epistre de la prison de vie humaine and Lamentacion. Both of these texts were written in direct response to political events, the Lamentacion to its eponymous civil war, and Prison to the French defeat at Agincourt. Drawing upon the biblical lamentation tradition, Lamentacion falls within Poirion’s genre of the plainte politique (Poirion, 1965: 145), while Prison is written as a consolatio to the wives and widows of the vanquished. Despite their different genres these texts are alike in their representation of tears as political action. Furthermore in both texts the topos of tearfulness represents the embattled nation of France not simply as a feminized state, but as one which Christine, as widow, figures in her own image. It is significant that when discussing her tears in Lamentacion, Christine describes them as ‘wetting my breast and lap’ (de Pizan, 1984c: 89), thus emphasizing the lap as the generative and authorizing locus of her feminine body. However, their excess here threatens to interrupt Christine’s textual production. For, flowing ‘like streams on my paper’



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(de Pizan, 1984c: 89), washing away her words, Christine’s authorizing tears also cause her to lay aside her pen to wipe her eyes. Nevertheless, this tear-soaked lap marks her as national Mater Dolorosa. Drawing on the exemplum of the Sabine women, whose successful tearful intervention she had celebrated in the Cité des dames, Christine calls for collective action, inciting the women of France to join her in her role as political mediatrix: ‘cry, cry, beat your hands and cry’ (de Pizan, 1984c: 87). These tears are represented not only as an appropriate response to the grief of civil war, but also, as Leppig has noted, as an expression of political and moral protest.6 By way of this action the body politic is figured, like Christine in her authorial self-representation, as a weeping widow. The reference to the widowed Jerusalem of Lamentations is undeniable; nevertheless Christine’s audience, acquainted as they were with her circumstances, would have detected her presence in the image she creates of her beloved France. Her own well-documented widowhood brings a dramatic immediacy and authenticity to this depiction of the beleaguered state. Considering the collective nature of the political agency in the Lamentacion, it is interesting that in its opening words Christine describes herself as ‘seulette a part’, a solitude topos reaffirmed, according to McKinley, by Christine’s final words, which mark her ‘withdraw[al] from the community she evokes’ (McKinley, 1992: 167) and ultimately cast the Lamentacion as the hopeless cry of a solitary vox clamantis, ‘a poor voice crying in this kingdom’ (de Pizan, 1984c: 95). However, while Christine’s description of herself as ‘seulette’ might seem to segregate her, readers of Christine’s balades would, as Leppig points out (1992: 143), have recognized the sociability within its unsociability, seeing it both as a reprise of the ‘seulette’ persona of her early widowhood poems, and as an articulation of her widowed status – a status that guarantees her a place in the political milieu she describes. Thus she is finally, in McKinley’s words, ‘both apart and a part’, a quintessential summation of the unsociable sociability reflected in her literary persona. In Prison, Christine further develops an image of the state identified with her own image as a woman writer. In this text, the Lamentacion’s affirmative representation of tears as political action has vanished. In a stark contrast to the earlier text, Christine now seeks to restrain the debilitating ‘flood of tears’ (de Pizan, 1984b: 3) issuing from the grieving women of France. Offering advice drawn from classical and biblical sources, Prison offers a stoic Christian consolation in which all life is represented as tribulation and imprisonment. The depiction of the French state in this epistle constitutes an intensified version of that offered in




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the Lamentacion. To begin with, her apology to the duchess, in which she explains that sorrow has delayed the writing of the epistle, locates her within the community of women afflicted by the losses after Agincourt. Furthermore, it is on the basis of her ‘humble widowed state’ (de Pizan, 1984b: 3) that Christine inscribes herself within the national community of widows, now returning the advice she claims the duchess once offered her. Her identification of the misfortune of France with her own widowhood here again creates the French polity in the feminized image of a weeping widow. This is not a new analogy in Christine’s work, having appeared in the image of La Dame Couronnee in Ladvision (1405). Unlike the polity of Ladvision, though, this image of the widowed polity is not metaphorical, but reflects the reality of France stripped of its men. In addition, perhaps out of a recognition of the depth of this national calamity, Christine does not represent the widowed polity here as a healing mediatrix. Instead she represents France, like herself in Ladvision, as the widowed victim of ‘la vie humaine’, whose healing, like her own, lies in reading the comforting words of the auctores. Two years later, having retired to the Abbey of Poissy, Christine returns for the last time to the Mater Dolorosa, offering her fullest account of this figure in her prose meditation Heures de contemplacion sur la Passion de Nostre Seigneur. Despite its early appeal to the stoic exemplum offered by Christ’s suffering (lines 25–6), one can trace a gradual but unmistakable shift in focus from Christ’s Passion to the Virgin’s compassion, so that the text’s final stages are almost exclusively devoted to meditating on her role in the Passion and thus in salvation history.7 Christine is explicit in figuring the Virgin’s loss as a second widowhood, describing her departure from her son’s tomb wearing a long black mantle like a newly widowed woman (lines 1332–4). In so doing, Christine treats Mary’s widowhood as significant to her final commission in the covenant of redemption. Like the Prison, this text is offered as a form of consolatio. It differs from the earlier text, however, in the intended scope of this consolation; for while in the Prison Christine addresses a single woman, in the Heures she broadens her ambit, directing her lesson of Marian stoicism ‘to all women and maidens ... stricken by tribulations past and present’ (lines 1–3).8 In this text we again encounter a portrayal of post-Agincourt France as a community of grieving women buffeted by hardship and loss. Furthermore, by declaring her ‘pitié et compassion’ for these women, Christine again both sociably and unsociably positions herself as ‘seulette a part’, her pity marking her distance from them while her compassion indicates active involvement in their suffering.



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Discussing the Heures in the context of Christine’s political works might at first seem unwarranted, given this is for the most part a meditative text. It is true that her allusions to the misfortune of the kingdom are, as Dulac argues, brief and rather general; but they are far from perfunctory. Rather, they paint in broad, vivid strokes a scene of national catastrophe that contextualizes the meditation on the Passion that is to follow. This text also corresponds to the political epistles in its depiction of tears as a response to public calamity. However, Christine’s representation of tears in the Heures is distinguished by its ambivalence. At the outset, it appears to reinforce the Prison’s contention that tears pose an obstacle to writing. This is apparent in Christine’s atypical adoption of a dry-eyed persona, who suppresses all references to her own grief and emphasizes instead her long-standing role as a writer who supports and defends women. Thus in the Heures the tears that threatened to erase her words in the Prison are stemmed so that they will not jeopardize her offer of consolation. This association of tears with impotence or inaction is further reinforced throughout the text by its depiction of Mary’s tears and familiar planctus as expressions of her powerlessness. Christine’s vivid dramatization of the Passion repeatedly portrays the Virgin in a state of tearful impotence: she cries out in compassionate pain, laments her own ordained fate and weeps as she is driven back by the throngs along the via dolorosa (lines 753–4). These scenes culminate in the quintessential depictions of her as the suffering Mater Dolorosa, ‘at the foot of the cross where her son hangs, covered in tears’, and later bathing with her tears the blood and dirt from her dead son’s face (lines 1251–4). While it must be admitted that the Mater Dolorosa does not here offer women an exemplum of conspicuous political intervention, she nevertheless embodies a commitment to justice and a refusal of despair that is exemplary to those women whose lives have been devastated by the misfortunes of France. Change will, the text suggests, be brought about through tears of hopeful patience, tears that promise not only the salvation of the soul and the alleviation of personal suffering, but also, importantly, the deliverance of France. Although the image of the Mater Dolorosa had been widely mobilized by Christine as an authorizing widow figure, she was also undeniably an image of suffering motherhood. Indeed, Christine’s allusions to political turmoil in the Heures arguably seem general and colourless when compared to the heartrending portrayals of the widowed Virgin mourning her son, and the explicit references to the sorrows ‘suffered by mothers for the death and torment of their children’. Nowhere does the Heures come more to life than when it describes the Virgin bearing horrified witness to her son’s suffering at the hands of his captors. The text dwells




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intensely on her agony as she watches the spectacle of cruelty enacted on her child, unable to intervene on his behalf. At the most evident level, the Virgin’s sorrow makes her a national emblem for all the women of France suffering loss and separation from their beloved menfolk in the wake of Agincourt. But for an analysis of Christine’s use of autobiographical detail, this text’s preoccupation with maternal anxiety and, in particular with portraying a mother’s powerlessness to help a defenceless son, presents us with a more complex case for determining the authorizing function of the autobiographical in Christine’s writing. For while Christine speaks directly and at some length for many years about her migration to France, and the many trials of her widowhood feature over decades of her writings, after about 1405 she is less forthcoming about her children and the particular maternal fears she entertained for their future security. In particular, when tracing Christine’s views on her son Jean de Castel, whose career as a courtier and diplomat unfolded in a time of great turmoil and was studded by crises and reverses, we see her resorting to quite different, even contradictory, strategies. On the one hand, we recognize her familiar technique of creating a persona – here the Marian-inspired suffering mother – that allows her to authorize her right to offer advice. On the other hand, we find her using what seems to be a quite different strategy, in which she writes on a theme that is recognizably inspired by her own experiences with Jean, but does not actually mention herself, or him, at all. Indeed, what can be seen to be autobiographical information about her relationship with Jean seems to be alluded to via a series of ever more remote and oblique guises. The question this raises is whether, when examining a writer whose readers are patrons who know her life intimately, we need to reconceptualize what constitutes ‘the autobiographical’ to include material that evokes autobiography ‘by omission’ – that is, without needing to mention actual autobiographical detail because the readership is expected to recognize its trace within apparently impersonal material.9 First, however, Christine’s overt admissions of maternal fear need to be noted. From La Mutacion de fortune and Ladvision we learn of her early struggle to secure the future of her children Marie (born 1381), another, unnamed child, whom scholars believe died young, and Jean (born 1385). Ladvision gives us the fullest picture of her single motherhood, recounting her efforts to support her children, detailing catastrophes such as the loss of their inheritance at the hands of an unscrupulous merchant, and portraying the many fruitless years she spent in courts trying to reclaim monies owed to her after the death of her husband.



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But in this account her children are but shadowy figures. Their qualities are sketched – Marie is devoted and gentle, Jean is learned and sings well (de Pizan, 2005: 122) – but their individual responses to their changed fortunes are unknowable to the reader. We know that Marie was rescued from an uncertain future by being granted a special dowry in 1397 to enter the royal Dominican abbey at Poissy outside Paris. We hear little of her after this, with the exception of Christine’s description of a visit to her at the convent in the 1400 poem Le Dit de Poissy, which presents Marie’s life as one of cloistered gentility, mercifully shielded from the more immediate horrors of warfare and political strife (de Pizan, 1886–96c). In Ladvision Dame Philosophie also refers to the comforting letters exchanged between mother and daughter after the latter’s sequestration (de Pizan, 2005: 122). We hear more about the early fortunes of Christine’s surviving son Jean, for whom she wrote the advice text Les Enseignements moraux, when, at 12, he left her home to receive court training in England (de Pizan, 1886–96b). It is on this topic that we encounter, again in Ladvision, the longest passage devoted to Jean in Christine’s oeuvre (de Pizan, 2005: 111–12). Here Christine tells of how Sir John Montague, the earl of Salisbury, took the young Jean into his household in 1398 to provide companionship to his own son – a promising arrangement that was derailed dramatically when Salisbury, a staunch supporter of the English king Richard II, was executed in 1400 at the orders of Henry IV, who had recently deposed Richard. After this, Christine recounts, Henry not only extended unexpected clemency to Jean, taking him into his own court, but also attempted to entice Christine to the English court (de Pizan, 2005: 112–13). Finding Henry’s offers uninviting, Christine describes the protracted diplomacy involved in extricating her son from what she viewed as the court of a dangerous usurper, and mentions that Henry’s price for the return of Jean involved copies of several of her books.10 From the account in Ladvision we are encouraged to register the depth of Christine’s maternal anxiety for Jean’s safety. This inference is corroborated by the fact that, she stresses, she brought him back from his splendid life abroad into her relatively straitened household in Paris without having secured a new position for him.11 The fact that Christine’s most extensive discussion of her son in her entire oeuvre recounts this episode is significant, and indicates its formative role in her fashioning of a particular suffering maternal persona. This is especially so when one considers that she is believed by Willard and others to have had ongoing contact with Jean (and possibly also later with his wife and children) throughout much of his adolescent and adult life up




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to 1418 when, as a notary for the royal dauphin (later Charles VII), he was forced into exile with his master, and Christine retired to the same convent as her daughter at Poissy.12 While there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of Christine’s anxiety for Jean in Ladvision, I am more concerned with this as a literary strategy on Christine’s part, for we see this episode performing a key function in her development of a selfportrait as a fearful mother separated from her son, engaged in rescuing him by diplomacy from people who held him in what she believed was a state of political peril. By dramatizing this stage in her relationship with her son she emphasizes both her direct experience of separation from her loved one and the fine political intuition that allowed her to secure his release. This speech is framed by comments from Dame Philosophie about how fortunate Christine is to have her children alive and doing her so much credit (de Pizan, 2005: 122): speeches which allay Christine’s anxiety but do not dismiss it. And yet it would seem that this spectacle of maternal anxiety vanishes as quickly as it has appeared, for after Ladvision Christine says no more of his fortunes, despite the fact that he went on to live close to the centre of a political maelstrom. So what are we to make of this silence? Are we to conclude that France’s increasingly ailing state preoccupies Christine to the extent that her personal cares no longer merit expression? Her increasing output of overtly political texts from 1405 would appear on first analysis to confirm this, despite the fact that the last ones were produced away from the political centre stage, within the confines of the abbey at Poissy. But there is another way of interpreting this apparently unsociable retreat from the personal: that is, that Christine’s early establishment of an autobiographically informed persona makes it possible for her to move on to political writing with a very distinctive, autobiographically grounded form of authority. Having established the intersection of her own personal fate with France’s in Ladvision, she frees herself to explore political matter in later texts with the understanding that she has already established her authentic mandate to discuss these matters. These later texts reveal Christine yet again developing out of her own autobiographical narrative a voice that authorizes her to speak with personal authority on matters ordinarily beyond the reach of a woman – but without actually needing to reiterate her personal claim for doing so. First of all, we see in these later writings a continuation of the persona of tortured Mater Dolorosa that had already been rehearsed in Ladvision. In Ladvision, of course, she tells of how she successfully sued for her son’s return, so this persona is not yet fully realized in this text.



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But because of this early documented anxiety about her son, this persona’s reappearance in later work, especially in the grieving mother of Heures, has the weight of testimonial attached to it. Willard does not hesitate to interpret the maternal grief of the Heures as autobiographical, correcting those who have thought the text to be a response to national misfortunes and arguing that the poem is expressing Christine’s grief at the death of Jean in 1425 (Willard, 1984: 203). Willard’s argument not only strains against the widely accepted dating of this text at 1420, but arguably unnecessarily divides the personal from the political. Given the extent to which Christine identified her own life with France, national and personal loss are intertwined in her work. So arguably the Heures, despite its more meditative and religious nature, expresses autobiographical content obliquely through the use of the Mater Dolorosa figure. The sections of the Heures portraying the deposition of Christ’s body and the pietà are certainly moving in their portrayal of maternal loss, and to that end one can see why Willard speculated on the death of Jean as a possible impetus behind the older Christine’s production of a planctus Mariae text. And yet these images of the Virgin with the dead Christ have a kind of hieratic quality, in contrast to Christine’s more immediate and kinetic portrayal of Mary’s agonies while witnessing her son’s Passion. The vividness of the scenes on the via dolorosa suggests that the Heures is oriented more towards a preoccupation with the agony of separation through captivity rather than through death. If indeed this text is written in 1420, or even the years immediately after, Christine may well have expected her readers to recognize an autobiographical impetus behind this, for her son had been in exile with Charles VII in Bourges for about two years, a situation that would have rendered him vulnerable given that in the 1420s much of France (including Poissy) was under the control of English/Burgundian forces hostile to Charles and his followers. While Christine had once been able to rescue the child Jean from Henry IV’s menacing patronage, the image of the Mater Dolorosa in the Heures captures perfectly her current state of impotence, which was the result of both her sequestration and her grown son’s then-dangerous political affiliations. Recognizing this emphasis on loved ones in captivity links the Heures to the other texts written by Christine on political imprisonment, hostagetaking and its meaning in the contemporary state at war. The most famous of these is the Prison, written, as mentioned earlier, to Marie de Berry, who had suffered insupportable losses of her menfolk at Agincourt, and whose husband and son would be held hostage by the English until their deaths decades later. Christine deploys her own experience overtly in this




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text, discussing the sorrows that befell her in the wake of her husband’s death. Her own loss, as well as her experience of anxious separation from a living loved one, gives her the authority to offer stoic advice. Scholars such as Willard have compared Christine’s understanding of this topic favourably to the treatment offered in other post-Agincourt treatises, such as Alain Chartier’s The Four Ladies (1415–16), in which four women debate whether it is worse to lose a soldier lover through death, imprisonment, abandonment, or his shameful desertion of military post. Despite its largely conventional nature as a stoic consolatio text, Christine’s Prison stands out from Chartier’s text for its depth of understanding about the experience of loss and the pain of being gripped by uncertainty about the fate of loved ones. This preoccupation with separation arguably returns, though in a more attenuated form, in other texts where we again see Christine drawing on and obliquely alluding to her own personal experience in order to debate larger questions around the ethics of warfare. All of these texts are concerned with hostage-taking. In the second section of Le Dit de Poissy Christine includes a lament by a young woman about the exorbitant ransom being demanded for the return of her beloved, who is a hostage after the defeat of Christian forces at the battle of Nicopolis in 1396. It is interesting, though again not surprising, to find this issue cropping up as early as 1400, when, as many in her immediate audience would have known, Christine was in the throes of getting Jean home to France. In chapter 15 of Livre du corps de policie (1407) we find a brief discussion in which Christine argues that a good prince treats prisoners of war and political prisoners with clemency. This theme returns in a more highly developed fashion in section 3 of her 1410 treatise on warfare, Livre des armes et de la chevalerie. Here, Christine uses sections from Honoré Bouvet’s 1387 L’Arbre des batailles (Tree of Battles) to explore the ethics not only of holding combatants for ransom, but of capturing civilians who are only indirectly involved in the conflict – or, indeed, who are its victims (de Pizan, 1998: 171–9). Given these two texts were written by Christine in a context of internecine turmoil between Burgundians and Armagnacs, and of warfare with England, it would be absurd to reduce either of their comments to mere autobiographical commentary. Nevertheless, her personal stake in the matter – that is, the fact that her now grown son was a member of the Burgundian household – could not have been lost on her audience. Her exploration of the ethics of civilian hostage-taking in Armes et de la chevalerie is especially interesting in this respect, not only pointing to her immediate fears for her son, but revisiting the fear she recounted earlier, in Ladvision. It is difficult



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to read her chapters arguing for the unfairness of holding children and students captive without recalling her trepidation over her son’s potential captivity by Henry IV. Especially notable to those readers familiar with her circumstances are Christine’s remarks that the English have become poor at observing the rule of leaving defenceless and innocent civilians unmolested (de Pizan, 1998: 177). We do not see any clear introduction of the self into these texts in the form of self-portrait or personal recollection, but these texts, despite their more avowedly political concerns, can still be described as autobiographical in the sense we have already seen with Christine’s utilization of other aspects of her personal experience. Here we have the use of a mother’s experience of agonized separation to authorize her political advisory role, with further moral buttressing coming from this topos’s evocation of the iconic sorrowing Virgin mother. This potent combination of meditative, consolatory and advisory elements is a powerful strategy used by Christine as a woman to underwrite her entrance into an arena of public commentary that had conventionally been, and to this day still largely remains, the preserve of men. Christine’s writing offers, in sum, a historical masterclass in both the dilemmas and the opportunities offered to women by autobiographical unsociable sociability: as a writer whose literary self-fashioning placed her at the centre yet also the margins of French political and social life, she courted readerly intimacy even as she appeared to ward it off, evoking autobiographical detail, but in the form of heavily textualized topoi. Her self-portraits, with their strongly Catholic inflection, are unmistakably those of a woman of her time; yet in them we see an early example of the struggles between membership and distance, intimacy and estrangement, and publicity and privacy, that have continued to preoccupy women lifewriters for centuries since.

Notes 1. Again, this was not unique to Christine. See, for instance, Carla Freccero’s discussion of Marguerite de Navarre’s conception of ‘maternal authority’ of the queen (1992: 132–50). 2. See also Paupert (1993: 1062), who borrows M. Zink’s concept of a ‘mise en scène du moi’ (theatre of the self) to describe Christine’s public autobiographical persona. 3. Accounts of this figure include Graef (1963: 306–8), which points to the elaboration of the planctus Mariae tradition in fourteenth-century Marian devotion. 4. Leppig (1992: 143–9) also notes that Christine’s use of the genre of complainte allows her to exploit its ambiguity, as it is both a lyric and a legal genre. 5. See also Wright (1992: 36–59) and Parsons (1995: 153–9).




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6. Leppig says ‘this joint weeping and mourning can also be interpreted as an act of defiance and a display of unity against and in the midst of the warring factions’ (1992: 144). 7. Dulac (1998: 483) also comments on this shift, which she regards as remarkable. All line references are to Liliane Dulac’s forthcoming edition of Heures de contemplacion sur la Passion de Nostre Seigneur, to be published by Champion (de Pizan, in preparation). My sincere thanks to Jeff Richards and to Mme Dulac for securing me a copy of the working manuscript of this edition. 8. The translation is from McLeod (1976: 159), who translates an extract from an article by Suzanne Solente. 9. See Ethan Knapp’s authoritative study for an account of another writer, an exact English contemporary of Christine’s, whose autobiographical persona was also intimately bound up with his status as bureaucrat, and was developed, like Christine’s, out of the ‘impersonal textual traditions’ (Knapp, 2001: 13). 10. For a discussion of the books Christine might have sent to Henry, see Laidlaw (1982). 11. From a 1402 ballade addressed to Louis D’Orleans in which she appeals to the duke to receive Jean into his court – a ballade that appears to have missed its mark – it seems to have taken her some time to have found a new place for Jean, during which time she would have carried the burden of his upkeep. 12. Willard suggests that it is likely that Christine lived with Jean before entering Poissy in 1418, and further speculates that the absence of texts by Christine between 1413 and 1418 suggests that ‘some of her preoccupation with living in this difficult period may have been tempered by the pleasures of being a grandmother’ (Willard, 1984: 196).

Bibliography Baldwin, Spurgeon, and James W. Marchand (1992) ‘The Virgin Mary as Advocate before the Heavenly Court’, Medievalia et Humanistica, 18, 79–94. de Pizan, Christine (1886–96a) ‘Cent ballades’, in Maurice Roy (ed.), Oeuvres poétiques de Christine de Pisan, 3 vols (Paris: Didot). ——— (1886–96b) ‘Enseignements moraux’, in Maurice Roy (ed.), Oeuvres poétiques de Christine de Pisan, 3 vols (Paris: Didot). ——— (1886–96c) ‘Le Livre du dit de Poissy’, in Maurice Roy (ed.), Oeuvres poétiques de Christine de Pisan, 3 vols (Paris: Didot). ——— (1886–96d) L’Oroyson Nostre Dame, in Maurice Roy (ed.), Oeuvres poétiques de Christine de Pisan, 3 vols (Paris: Didot). ——— (1959–66) Le Livre de la mutacion de fortune, ed. Suzanne Solente, 4 vols (Paris: Picard). ——— (1984a) ‘Epistre a la royne’, in Josette A. Wisman (ed. and trans.), Lamentacion sur les maux de la guerre civile, Epistre de la prison de vie humaine, Epistre a la royne (New York: Garland). ——— (1984b) ‘Epistre de la prison de vie humaine’, in Josette A. Wisman (ed. and trans.), Lamentacion sur les maux de la guerre civile, Epistre de la prison de vie humaine, Epistre a la royne (New York: Garland). ——— (1984c) ‘Lamentacion sur les maux de la guerre civile’, in Josette A. Wisman (ed. and trans.), Lamentacion sur les maux de la guerre civile, Epistre de la prison de vie humaine, Epistre a la royne (New York: Garland).



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——— (1998) Le Livre du corps de policie, ed., intro., notes and glossary Angus J. Kennedy (Paris: Honoré Champion). ——— (2001) Le Livre de l’advision Cristine, ed. Christine Reno and Liliane Dulac (Paris: Honoré Champion). ——— (2005) The Vision of Christine de Pizan, trans. Glenda McLeod and Charity Cannon Willard (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer). ——— (in preparation) Heures de contemplacion sur la Passion de Nostre Seigneur, ed. Liliane Dulac. Dulac, Liliane (1998) ‘Littérature et dévotion: à propos des Heures de contemplacion sur la Passion de Nostre Seigneur de Christine de Pizan’, in J. Claude Faucon, Alain Labbé and Danielle Quéruel (eds), Miscellanea mediaevalia: mélanges offerts à Philippe Ménard (Paris: Honoré Champion). Ferster, Judith (1996) Fictions of Advice: The Literature and Politics of Counsel in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press). Freccero, Carla (1992) ‘Marguerite de Navarre and the Politics of Maternal Sovereignty’, in Louise O. Fradenburg (ed.), Women and Sovereignty (Edinburgh University Press). Graef, Hilda (1963) Mary: A History of Doctrine and Devotion (London: Sheed and Ward). Huneycutt, Lois L. (1995) ‘Intercession and the High Medieval Queen: The Esther Topos’, in Jennifer Carpenter and Sally-Beth Maclean (eds), Power of the Weak: Studies of Medieval Women (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press). Knapp, Ethan (2001) The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the Literature of Late Medieval England (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press). Laidlaw, James (1982) ‘Christine de Pizan, the Earl of Salisbury and Henry IV’, French Studies, 36.2, 129–43. Leppig, Linda (1992) ‘The Political Rhetoric of Christine de Pizan: Lamentacion sur les maux de la guerre civile’, in Margaret Brabant (ed.), Politics, Gender and Genre: The Political Thought of Christine de Pizan (Boulder, CO: Westview Press). McKinley, Mary (1992) ‘The Subversive “Seulette”’, in Margaret Brabant (ed.), Politics, Gender and Genre: The Political Thought of Christine de Pizan (Boulder, CO: Westview Press). McLeod, Enid (1976) The Order of the Rose: The Life and Ideas of Christine de Pizan (London: Chatto and Windus). Parsons, John Carmi (1995) ‘The Queen’s Intercession in Thirteenth-Century England’, in Jennifer Carpenter and Sally-Beth Maclean (eds), Power of the Weak: Studies of Medieval Women (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press). Paupert, Anne (1993) ‘Le “Je” lyrique féminin dans l’œuvre poétique de Christine de Pizan’, in Jean-Claude Aubailly, Emmanuèle Baumgartner, Francis Dubost, Liliane Dulac and Marcel Faure (eds), Et c’est la fin pour quoy sommes ensemble: hommage à Jean Dufournet (Paris: Editions Honoré Champion). Poirion, Daniel (1965) Le Poète et le prince: l’évolution du lyrisme courtois de Guillaume de Machaut à Charles d’Orléans (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France). Richards, Earl Jeffrey (1993) ‘“Seulette a part”: The “Little Woman on the Sidelines” Takes Up Her Pen: The Letters of Christine de Pizan’, in Karen Cherewatuk and Ulrike Weithaus (eds), Dear Sister: Medieval Women and the Epistolary Genre (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press).




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Schneewind, J.B. (2009) ‘Good out of Evil: Kant and the Idea of Unsocial Sociability’, in Amélie Oksenberg Rorty and James Schmidt (eds), Kant’s Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim: A Critical Guide (Cambridge University Press). Stevenson, Barbara (2000) ‘Revisioning the Widow Christine de Pizan’, in Barbara Stevenson and Cynthia Ho (eds), Crossing the Bridge: Comparative Essays on Medieval European and Heian Japanese Women Writers (New York: Palgrave). Sticca, Sandro (1988) The Planctus Mariae in the Dramatic Tradition of the Middle Ages, trans. Joseph R. Berrigan (Athens: University of Georgia Press). Willard, Charity Cannon (1984) Christine de Pizan: Her Life and Works (New York: Persea Press). Wright, Rosemary Muir (1992) ‘The Virgin in the Sun and in the Tree’, in Louise O. Fradenburg (ed.), Women and Sovereignty (Edinburgh University Press).



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Law, Gender and Print Culture in the Lifewriting of Eliza Frances Robertson Sarah Ailwood

Relationships between public discourse, autobiographical writing and gender merge in Eliza Robertson’s legal disputes and imprisonment for debt as a ‘swindler’ in early nineteenth-century England. The newspaper press took a strong interest not only in Robertson’s swindling, business dealings and litigation with her creditors but also in her gender and sexuality, destroying both her commercial and her personal reputation. Effectively silenced by the justice system, Robertson used autobiographical writing to challenge what she perceived to be misrepresentations of herself in public discourse and legal process. Her autobiographical writing reveals tensions between the competing claims of the sociable and the unsocial, as she simultaneously seeks to challenge public representations of her character and also to construct an autonomous and socially detached self. Robertson’s autobiographical acts – her writing and publication of her life in not one but three forms – demonstrate a strong desire to privilege the social dimensions of selfhood. It matters to Robertson what journalists, lawyers, judges and the public at large think of her, and her publications are designed to counter public constructions of her character and her damaged reputation.1 Yet the self that Robertson presents in her autobiographical writing is distinctly unsocial in being determinedly individualistic. Indeed, Robertson’s protestations of innocence are underpinned by her story of self-reliance, abandonment by family and friends (excepting her partner Charlotte Sharpe), and victimization by creditors, lawyers and judges. Robertson exploits the tradition of the ‘scandalous memoir’ to balance these competing interests in her autobiographical writing. In May 1800 Eliza Robertson and Charlotte Sharpe leased a house in the Paragon building at Blackheath, a masterpiece of Georgian architecture. Being professional teachers it was their intention to establish a 37



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school, and over the next few months Robertson contracted with several tradespeople and merchants to undertake work to complete, decorate and furnish the house. All of this business was conducted on the basis of credit, Robertson presenting herself to her landlord and other creditors as expecting to inherit a large fortune from an ancestral estate in Scotland.2 In December some of her creditors, particularly Mr Oakley (a furniture merchant) and Mr Creasy (a leather currier), became suspicious of her capacity to pay for the goods and services they had provided and sought security for her credit. In February 1801, under increasing pressure from her creditors and unable to pay them, Robertson and Sharpe left Blackheath for Cornwall. The exact amount of Robertson’s debts is unclear, but they seem to have amounted to between £15,000 and £20,000. In her absence, Oakley and Creasy seized and sold the entire contents of the Paragon house, including items that had been paid for and other property owned by Robertson and Sharpe, together with all her financial papers and accounts. Robertson was traced to Penzance and then to Huntingdon, where she was arrested and imprisoned for debt on 30 March 1801. She later moved to the Fleet Prison in London. Robertson’s ‘swindling’ quickly attracted the attention of the English press, and the wide publication of her story in metropolitan and regional newspapers contributed to her detection and arrest.3 She writes in the Life and Memoirs of her arrival at the county gaol: ‘the newspapers, led the inhabitants to suppose I was as represented. People of all descriptions lined the streets, and it was with great difficulty the chaise could draw up to Mr Drage’s mansion’ (Robertson, 1802: 80). Throughout her imprisonment the gaoler, Mr Drage, displayed Robertson as a public spectacle, charging admission to locals and passers-by: she writes that ‘it would have been an impeachment of any one’s love of natural curiosities, not to go to see this miraculous creature, if they came within a stage of Huntingdon’ (Robertson, 1802: 82–3). Servian attributes this public interest in Robertson to ‘a moral panic in England about “swindling”’ that had begun in the 1780s (1987: 79). He argues that the press played an important role in the public campaign against the practice of swindling by ‘describing the exploits of individual swindlers’ and notes that ‘the effect of this categorization by the press was devastating for the reputation of the alleged swindler’ (1987: 80). Robertson was certainly a victim of this practice, but the focus of press reports on her gender and public speculation on her sexuality, together with her decision to write and publish autobiographical tracts, indicate that in her case there was more at work than concern over swindling. As Barros and Smith have



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commented, ‘the female autobiographer must come into some kind of conflict with the culture and its values and laws, else there is no need to tell someone else “something happened to me”’ (2000: 24). Press reports published around the time of Robertson’s arrest indicate a widespread preoccupation with her gender. The Times, for example, reported on 16 March 1801: A female Swindler, of the name Robertson, resided lately at Blackheath, where she had the address to defraud various tradesmen of property to the amount of 20,000l. and upwards … No discovery has yet been made of this Swindler … In person she is plain; much marked by the small-pox, about five feet two inches in height, and insinuating in her manners. (3) The Sporting Magazine for March 1801 published its own report under the headline ‘Swindling Females’: Two fashionable Females, who, for upwards of twelve months, lived in the most dashing style of elegance, in the neighbourhood of Blackheath, have disappeared within the last three weeks, leaving their several trades-people unpaid. One of the artful Fair Ones bears the appropriate name of Sharp; her partner in dexterity is a Miss Robinson [sic]. Their debts are supposed to amount to little short of Fifteen Thousand Pounds. (290) The Monthly Visitor printed a similar report under the headline ‘Account of Miss Robertson, the Female Swindler’ (April: 328); The Times referred to them as the ‘Female Sharpers’ (20 March: 3); the Sun as the ‘Heroines of Blackheath’ and ‘the Swindling Beauties’ (27 May: 3); the Morning Post referred to Robertson as ‘the Female Proteus’ (4 April: 3) and the Morning Herald published a later article under the headline ‘The Fair Swindler of Blackheath’ (15 July: 3). Clearly, Robertson’s gender was of particular interest to journalists and their readers. The Morning Chronicle’s coverage of the story was more focused on her gender than her alleged ‘swindling’: The example of the Blackheath female Swindlers is a proof how far vanity and pride may sometimes lead the sex. It was not from sordid motives of avarice that they deluded their trades people, but merely to cut a dash, and to pass for ladies of fashion! (13 April 1801: 3)



Eliza Frances Robertson 39

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In addition to this preoccupation with Robertson’s gender her sexuality also became a matter of public speculation. She was variously described as a prostitute, a lesbian and a cross-dresser: ‘Mr. Pearce, of St. Paul’s Churchyard, met her last week in Bishopsgate-street, dressed in men’s cloaths and boots, with a Miss Sharp leaning on her arm.’4 Robertson’s Life and Memoirs suggests that these rumours originated at an auction of her property by Oakley and Creasy: ‘some said I was then going about London to deceive in men’s clothes; others said I was a man in woman’s clothes. All brought their different suspicions, and conferred about them till they supposed them quite consolidated into facts’ (Robertson, 1802: 72–3). Robertson later reflected on these and other public accusations: ‘some say Miss Robertson is a “swindler! A whore! A Proteus! Nay, some not only say, she can change her sex, but even dare to surmise she is of the masculine gender!” Others with great professions of concern and horror, say, such a report has been spread, they know not how true’ (Robertson, 1801a: 27). Robertson’s comment on Pearce’s report – ‘Will Mr. P say this in a court of justice?’ (Robertson, 1801b: 31) – suggests that such reports originated in gossip and were published to satisfy a public desire for scandal. The circulation and publication of such reports destroyed Eliza Robertson’s reputation well beyond her creditworthiness in an example of what Clare Brant has described as a ‘choric’ construction of an individual’s character. Brant defines the choric as ‘a number of processes and products, including collective discourses such as hearsay, gossip and scandal (and, in other contexts, news), and social constructions of identity such as character, which may be individuated or gendered or both, as in the case of reputation’ (1992: 244–5). She argues that the choric ‘exaggerates and distorts its material in order to expand its own regulatory significance’ (1992: 246) and in Robertson’s case this is played out as the press projected sexually transgressive behaviour onto the public image of a woman whose conduct amounted to breaches of civil law and was not itself morally or sexually scandalous. In this respect, Robertson can be considered a victim of an early nineteenth-century public with a vociferous appetite for scandal. Eliza Robertson’s autobiographical writing reflects a fundamentally sociable desire to engage with and challenge choric constructions of her character. In framing her publications as strategic interventions in the choric process, Robertson exploited a tradition of memoirs published



Some of the Papers, from feelings of gallantry, no doubt, give the famous Miss ROBERTSON the title of The fair Swindler, at the expence of a contradiction in terms! (17 July 1801: 3)

since the 1740s by women who sought to contest public misrepresentations of their conduct as morally transgressive. Collectively these texts have been labelled ‘scandalous memoirs’ by several scholars although, as Clare Brant and Caroline Breashears have argued, it is important to recognize the differences between them and to refrain from discussing them in generic terms.5 They were among the first autobiographical writings by women that were publicly available and widely read, usually during the writer’s lifetime, and Eliza Robertson’s most significant literary exemplars. Their significance in the history of women’s lifewriting is that they ‘mark the point at which women widely produce as well as consume discourses about themselves and their experience’ (Nussbaum, 1989: 180). For Robertson, the legacy of the ‘scandalous memoirists’ is the establishment of a public mode of lifewriting for women and the creation of an audience of interested and responsive readers. Robertson’s writing and publication of autobiographical texts exploit this space within early nineteenth-century print culture to provide her with a voice through which she could protest the conduct of her creditors and gaolers, challenge the choric construction of her reputation and raise money to fund her legal claims. Although she pioneered this strategy of sociable engagement in June 1801 with Dividends of Immense Value; and My Claim on Others Evidenced, by Indisputable Authorities, it became particularly important later that year when Robertson’s public reputation as a ‘female swindler’ was confirmed as ‘truth’ by the processes of justice. In July 1801 one of Robertson’s creditors, Mr Haycraft, who had sold her goods amounting to almost £500 on credit, successfully claimed damages against Mr Creasy ‘for giving a false character to a Miss Elizabeth Frances Robertson, by representing her as a woman of fortune’ (The Times, 15 July 1801: 2). The case of Haycraft v. Creasy (2 East 92) was widely publicized in the press at the time and later published in law reports and legal texts throughout the common law world and in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It remains a foundational decision in the law of fraudulent misrepresentation. Haycraft’s claim was based on the premise that Robertson was at best a poor credit prospect and at worst an artful swindler, an assumption that went unchallenged throughout the legal proceedings themselves, in the court’s ruling or in the legal and press reports of the case. Rather than defending the claim by contesting this characterization of Robertson, Creasy instead presented himself as similarly duped by her. Counsel for the plaintiff (Mr Erskine) argued that the case ‘arose out of the adventures of a Female Swindler, who had lately resided at Blackheath, and whose history had been made known to the Public through the medium of the




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Newspapers’ (Edinburgh Magazine, July 1801: 67). Referring to a security Creasy had deceptively obtained from Robertson, Erskine reportedly accused him of knowing that Robertson was a swindler because ‘when the talisman was broke, and this magic castle dissolved into air, he shewed that he had known how to guard himself against the spells of the inchantress’ (Edinburgh Magazine, July 1801: 69). The Times reported that rather than contesting this image of Robertson, Creasy’s counsel (the Attorney-General): rose and observed, that as the age in which we lived was productive of great talents and of great virtues, so it was likewise fertile in the production of great crimes, which was sufficiently illustrated by the conduct of Miss Robertson, who had deceived his poor client as well as all the neighbourhood of Greenwich and Blackheath. He had been completely duped by this female swindler, and the representation he made to the Plaintiff was made fairly and bona fide. (15 July 1801: 2) Robertson was presented as an ‘artful and wicked woman, who had swindled every body who ever gave her credit’ (Edinburgh Magazine, July 1801: 69), and the Attorney-General, who brought a series of witnesses to testify the same, managed to convince the judge Lord Kenyon of her guilt. The characterization of Robertson as a swindler by both legal counsel was unchallenged by the judges and presented as impartial truth not only in the press reports of the litigation but in subsequent legal reporting of the case: Miss Robertson … gave herself out to the world as a person of considerable fortune, which had devolved upon her by her mother’s death, and with still greater expectations from her grandfather and other relatives. Upon the strength of those assurances she contrived to gain credit to a considerable amount from a large number of persons, and settled herself in a large house at Blackheath, fitted up in an expensive manner, kept a carriage, exhibited a great show of plate, and other marks of affluence, talked of her relationships to persons of note: by means all of which she imposed on great numbers of persons, who believed her to be the character she had assumed, and visited her as such. (Haycraft v. Creasy, 1801–2: 93–4) This characterization of Robertson’s behaviour was judicially confirmed in November 1801 when the Attorney-General unsuccessfully brought



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an appeal, during which he described her as ‘so artful, that she had duped the whole neighbourhood’ (The Times, 7 November 1801). Such reports of Haycraft v. Creasy illustrate the degree to which law itself can be influenced by, and in turn can influence, the choric. As Brant has argued: ‘Legal discourse is permeated by others; legal personnel are not immune to choric effects … Just as what goes on in court is absorbed by the choric, so court exchanges make use of choric constructs’ (1992: 259). Robertson was effectively silenced within the legal/choric process: as she was neither a party to the proceedings nor called as a witness she was unable to contest her characterization as a deceptive swindler. Who are the Swindlers?, published first in August 1801 and in a second edition the following month, provided her with this voice. Robertson disputes not her bankruptcy but rather the finding that she had intentionally deceived the merchants and tradespeople of Blackheath. Relying on newspaper reports of Haycraft v. Creasy and the account of Miss Sharpe, who attended the hearing, Robertson challenges the testimony of each witness brought by both the plaintiff and the defendant. She particularly targets Creasy, who she argues ‘might have proved the truth, that my character was irreproachable, my conduct circumspect, and my credit good’, and asserts ‘nor will the malignant combination of my enemies ever prove the contrary, though some have stepped on the verge of perjury with that intention’ (Robertson, 1801b: vi). Robertson suggests that some of her creditors, including Creasy and Oakley, had vested interests in having her proved a swindler to justify their own conduct in stripping her house and selling her property to recoup their losses (1801b: 26). Above all, Robertson protests against a judicial system that has silenced her: ‘The worst of criminals are allowed to plead for themselves, but we have been condemned without judge or jury; all that our enemies could, whether by true or false witness, they have laid to our charge’ (1801b: 36). The conclusion of Who are the Swindlers? reveals Robertson’s dire financial situation and her hope that the sale of her narrative will assist her: ‘It is hastily written in a day of pressing need, with a hope that it may furnish Miss Sharpe with the means of paying for her lodging and other necessaries’ (1801b: 45). The publication of Who are the Swindlers? brought Robertson a small amount of financial relief.6 It was widely reviewed and although publications such as the Monthly Visitor commented that ‘few will believe her’ (September 1801: 96), her notoriety would have ensured the pamphlet’s popularity. A second edition was published in September 1801 and Robertson recorded in the Life and Memoirs that sales brought her £120 (Robertson, 1802: 100). She wrote




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in the Preface to the second edition: ‘Notwithstanding this Query is “a sharp threshing instrument,” it has had a rapid sale. Grateful thanks are returned to those who are purchasers, from the benevolent motive of wishing to afford us relief’ (Robertson, 1801b: iii). There is also evidence to suggest that Who are the Swindlers? had a moderate degree of success in challenging the destruction of Robertson’s reputation and generating sympathy for her case, adding a financial dimension to her sociable engagement. In the Preface to the second edition Robertson requests correspondents to pay for their own postage – ‘Those who really make the Post the vehicle of Sympathy and Benevolence, will cheerfully add the expence of conveyance’ – indicating that she may have received sympathetic letters or perhaps charitable donations from the public. Furthermore, while Robertson appeared to protest her public notoriety, the conclusion of Who are the Swindlers? indicates a willingness to capitalize on it for her own financial gain: ‘Those who have not seen the swindlers, may here read them for One Shilling and Sixpence’ (1801b: 46). In November 1801 Robertson moved from Huntingdon to the Fleet Prison in London and in February or March 1802 published The Life and Memoirs of Miss Robertson, Late of Blackheath, a more comprehensive autobiography than her previous publications. The Life and Memoirs discusses Robertson’s childhood, her relationship with her parents (including taking responsibility for her father’s debts when she was a teenager) and her career as a teacher and schoolmistress, as well as providing a detailed explanation of her commercial and legal transactions. She makes the persuasive argument that if she had intentionally deceived or ‘swindled’ her creditors, she would ‘have sold the property and set off with the money’ (Robertson, 1802: 37). Robertson writes of her destitution and her difficulties in accessing the justice system: I have not only lost all I paid for while at the Heath, but all I removed from Crooms Hill, besides having my character and reputation hashed up without mercy, and my future prospects sadly obscured; though if England has any longer reason to boast of her laws, my cause will some time or other be redressed; or I am sure it will stain the annals of the present century. (1802: 36) She later reverts to the failure of the English legal system to dispense justice in her case: ‘I was conscious I had not intentionally injured any person, and I knew I was a great sufferer. I had heard and read a great deal about the boasted laws of our country; but, I thought, if this was law, there seemed no justice in it’ (1802: 68). She protests that her



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imprisonment is the result of a conspiracy among her creditors, many of whom, she claims, far exceeded her orders and failed to provide her with accounts: ‘If this is legal, I think our country need not boast the equity of its laws. No bill delivered! no charge made! though the bills had been long demanded. Men, who had gone on hand over head, thinking they might do just as they pleased with me and my property!’ (1802: 95). She claims that her destitution is the result of Oakley and Creasy unlawfully entering her house and selling her property, and that this has prevented her from accessing the justice system: ‘I was deprived of all means of seeking redress in a court of justice by their illegal conduct in stripping me of every thing; and neither law, justice, or equity is to be procured without money in England’ (1802: 96–7). The Life and Memoirs closely illustrates Clare Brant’s comments regarding writing and access to justice for eighteenth-century women: ‘Financial constraints did limit women’s use of the law. Writing, on the other hand, could not only make them money, but could also substitute for the courts a protected space in which they could stage a fair hearing’ (1992: 60). The Life and Memoirs indicates that shortly after her arrival in London, Robertson convened a meeting of her creditors at which she suggested that they sell her interest in the house to secure immediate compensation and recommended that they sue Oakley and Creasy for their share of the property (Robertson, 1802: 106–7):7 ‘I have, in every respect, done all I could for the creditors, and have been willing to act with them against Oakley or Creasy; both of whom they might have brought to a reckoning, and reaped the advantage’ (1802: 109). She concludes the Life and Memoirs with a determination to continue: ‘I still think, if money can be procured, some law, and perhaps some justice, may be obtained: and should I be spared to write the second part of a life so chequered, I hope a ray of sun-shine will enliven it’ (1802: 110). Robertson’s separation of law and justice – ‘some law, and perhaps some justice’ – reveals her loss of faith in the English legal system. Like her previous autobiographical writings, the Life and Memoirs was published with a view to financial gain. While she strongly protested her gaoler’s exploitation of her as a public spectacle she appears to have had no qualms about employing the same strategy to increase both sales and public sympathy on the publication of her final autobiography. Burned by her previous experience distributing her publication through London publishers and booksellers, Robertson made the Life and Memoirs available only from Badcock or from herself or Miss Sharpe directly in the Fleet Prison. This demonstrates direct sociable engagement with the reading public, and by encouraging readers to visit her to obtain a copy




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of her autobiography Robertson may also have sought to increase public sympathy for her predicament and perhaps attract charitable donations. Endeavouring to preclude the piracy of her work that had troubled her with Who are the Swindlers?, Robertson notes at the beginning of the Life and Memoirs that ‘every copy of this work that is sold for the benefit of her friend and self, is signed by them, in red ink, on the last page. Any bookseller selling them without the signature will be prosecuted for pirating the work.’ Nevertheless, it seems that she still had difficulties obtaining the profits. Edmund Burke writes in the Annual Register of World Events that in June 1802 ‘the well known Miss Robertson brought an action against Badcock, a bookseller’ in the court of common pleas, and successfully claimed profits from the sale of her Life and Memoirs of which he had attempted to defraud her (Burke, 1803: 415).8 It is difficult to gauge the degree to which Robertson’s autobiographical writings successfully exploited the sociable dimension of her subjectivity by altering the public perception of her character or attracting public sympathy for her case. However, two circumstances indicate that audiences did respond positively to her writing. The first relates to chapter XVI ‘The Irish Incognito’ of Richard and Maria Edgeworth’s 1802 Essay on Irish Bulls, in which they clearly use Robertson’s case as a foundation for their satire. The Edgeworths particularly target Creasy – here named ‘Queasy’ – for his behaviour towards a lady who ‘was rich – a spinster – of full age – at her own disposal – living with a single female companion at Blackheath – furnishing a house there in a superiour style – had two carriages – her Christian name Mary – her sirname Sharperson’ (Edgeworth and Edgeworth, 1802: 256–66). In contrast to media reports of Robertson’s appearance, Miss Sharperson is described as ‘elegantly dressed; her person was genteel, and her face rather pretty’ (280). Rather than focusing on Robertson, the Edgeworths instead satirize Creasy as unctuous and servile in his attentions to people of wealth and power. It is not difficult for the central character, Phelim O’Mooney, to convince Queasy that he is an Englishman named Sir John Bull as ‘things passed continually without his seeing them’ (270). O’Mooney offers Queasy a place in his carriage en route to London and on their arrival at Blackheath Queasy contrives an introduction of ‘Sir John’ to Miss Sharperson, ‘whom he thought the two people of the greatest consequence and affability’ (273). He recommends ‘Sir John’ to Miss Sharperson ‘by as many exaggerations as he could utter in five minutes, concerning his purdigious politeness and courage, his fine person and carriage, his ancient family, and vast connections and importance wherever he appeared on the road, at inns and over all England’ (273).



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He nodded to Sir John, as they passed across a long gallery and through an antichamber, threw open the doors of various apartments, as he went along, crying – ‘Peep in! peep in! peep in here! Peep in there! – Is not this spacious? Is not this elegant? Is not this grand? Did I say too much?’ continued he, rubbing his hands with delight. ‘Did you ever see so magnificent, and such highly polished steel grates out of Lon’don?’ (274–5) The tour of the house – including the interior, the furniture and ‘the map of the Rascally estate’ on display (279) – convince ‘Sir John’ to propose and he exercises ‘the precaution, before he left Blackheath, to go into several shops and to inquire something more concerning his fair ladies … All agreed that she was a rich scotch heiress’ (281). O’Mooney learns of the reality of the ‘Rascally estate’ and informs Queasy, whom he determines to be ‘too great a fool to be a knave’ (285). The Edgeworths’ satire on Creasy, Robertson’s other creditors and the community of Blackheath reflects public mockery at their expense. The second circumstance implying Robertson’s success in improving her reputation and attracting financial support is her publication of an autobiographical novel titled Destiny some time later in 1802 or in 1803. This novel was reprinted in 1804 and distributed to booksellers and circulating libraries in addition to being available from Robertson personally at the Fleet. A card included with the 1804 edition states that publication of the novel was funded (at least in part) by subscription, indicating a sufficient degree of public unease about Robertson’s situation to prompt concerned members of the public to assist her financially. Competing with Robertson’s desire for sociable engagement – and the rehabilitation of reputation, public sympathy and financial gain it offered – is the determinedly individualistic and socially detached self she constructs within her autobiographical writing. She clearly states in the Life and Memoirs, for example, ‘I have always been able to provide for myself, and in myself possess independence’ (Robertson, 1802: 94). In her individualism Robertson resembles the writers of scandalous memoirs, who similarly operated outside the realm of the family, particularly as it supported and was supported by patriarchal, capitalist structures. Barros and Smith, for example, have identified the ‘anomalous’ figure of the single woman ‘who achieved financial independence outside a family structure and thus undercut the economic foundations of that



Queasy later tries to convince ‘Sir John’ of Miss Sharperson’s wealth by leading him through the house:

Sarah Ailwood

structure’ (2000: 19–20) as a significant producer of autobiographical writing throughout the eighteenth century. Felicity Nussbaum has persuasively argued that one aspect of the ‘scandal’ surrounding such women was their refusal ‘to recognize themselves as permanently attached or subjected to men’ (1989: 179) and their independence of family life: ‘Excluded from it, they also pose a threat to it. These women threaten to disrupt the intricate power relations of capital and patriarchy’ (1989: 137). As an unmarried woman Robertson was at law a feme sole and accordingly entitled to possess property in her own right and required to take responsibility for her own debts. She had worked in various educational roles to support herself for many years and so was financially independent of male relatives; she was estranged from her father and thus had no significant connection to a male relative; and although she writes of her failed romances, the strength of her relationship with Sharpe indicates, at minimum, a preference for personal and professional relationships with women. Like many scandalous memoirists, then, Robertson occupied a marginalized social position outside patriarchal family life. Robertson’s alienation and disillusionment with social life is evident in her deploring of the English legal system and in her repeated presentation of herself unequivocally as the innocent female victim of a conspiracy hatched by her male creditors: ‘Martyr and Co. prevent my acting, and seeking redress, by keeping me in confinement; they say they have clubbed together to keep me for life’ (Robertson, 1802: 24). In this she also resembles the scandalous memoirists whose texts, Nussbaum argues, ‘may be read as a corpus of antimasculinist literature in their frequent attempts to blame men and circumstance’ (1989: 187). Robertson particularly targets male journalists who have destroyed her reputation: ‘that men of understanding and liberal education, conversant with the sacred writers, and teachers of others, should thus join the rabble against two persecuted females, is almost incredible’ (Robertson, 1801a: 5). She also, of course, targets her creditors, arguing that they have used both judicial processes and the press to sully her reputation and protect themselves: Most of those who have commented on, and given their opinion of this transaction, have been quite ignorant of the true state of the case; or, like Oakley, who gave the first account to a newsmonger to publish, they have used me like fuller’s earth, sealed and melted my reputation to whiten their own, which stood in need of cleansing. (Robertson, 1801b: 36)



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Miss Robertson did not publish the Query, (Who are the Swindlers?) as a defence, but merely as a statement of the cruel conduct of others towards her and her friend. Those booksellers who have advertised it as her defence, have taken up an erroneous opinion, and were not authorised by Miss R——— to give it that title. Yet despite Robertson’s construction of an unsociable, individualistic and innocent self, her grounding of this self in allegations of deception and fraud on the part of creditors, lawyers and to a lesser extent judges means that it is unavoidably relational, even if this relationship is characterized by opposition rather than connection. Robertson knew that in publishing her autobiographical writing she was publicly defaming others. She comments on the response to the publication of Who are the Swindlers? in the Life and Memoirs: ‘It sadly galled the publishers of the newspapers, &c. who had printed so many libels … and lies concerning me; and you may be sure it did not please the parties whose conduct was laid before the public by it’ (Robertson, 1802: 97). Her willingness to sacrifice the reputation of others in the pursuit of the sociable resuscitation of her own character and the creation of an unsocial, individualist self raises questions concerning the ethics of lifewriting and particularly of truth-telling. David Parker notes in The Self in Moral Space: ‘Telling the truth, respecting privacy, and representing others are among the first issues to come up in serious reflection on writing stories about self and others’ (2007: 2). Theorists of the ethics of lifewriting such as Paul John Eakin stress the imperative of truth-telling in autobiography, arguing that ‘the very idea that … personal narratives … can cloud our access to the historical record testifies to the potential power of lifewriting. When life writers fail to tell the truth, then, they do more than violate a literary convention governing nonfiction as a genre; they disobey a moral imperative’ (2004: 2–3). Indeed, Robertson herself seems keenly aware of the necessity of truth-telling to secure public support, providing a subtitle to the Life and Memoirs: ‘Faithfully recorded by her to the best of her knowledge and belief’. Yet it needs to be asked whether a woman in Robertson’s position – silenced by the legal system, destitute, imprisoned and the victim of laws that have since been eradicated as unsuitable to the liberal democratic state – should



She steadfastly refuses to admit guilt of any kind or to characterize her publications as ‘apologies’, ‘defences’ or vindications as those terms carry with them a suggestion of wrongdoing. She inserted a statement to this effect in the second edition of Who are the Swindlers?:

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be required to tell the truth, or to spare her persecutors. Parker writes that ‘an ethics in which the goods of self-care and self-realization scarcely weigh in the scale against other-regarding imperatives can be a vehicle of oppression’ (2007: 3). Women in Robertson’s position, it could be argued, should be spared this imperative. There is evidence to suggest that Robertson’s publication of the Life and Memoirs did bring her sufficient funds to pursue her legal claims against her creditors. In August 1802 she unsuccessfully brought a claim against Oakley and the other creditors who had seized and sold goods from the house in Blackheath, including items that had been paid for and all other property owned by Miss Sharpe and herself. Like the legal counsel in Haycraft v. Creasy, Robertson’s counsel Mr Garrow reportedly opened by highlighting her notoriety, describing her as: a Lady of whom it was much more than probable each of the Jury had heard or read, because it was one of the misfortunes of the age, that persons of any celebrity in the world could not come into a Court of Justice without having the circumstances of their case forestalled, and the public mind prejudiced, at least as far as depended on the writers of anonymous and libellous pamphlets. (The Times, 9 August 1802: 2) Mr Garrow implored the jury that if ‘they had heard or read of her as the famous Swindler, the Lady who went about the country in various disguises, sometimes in man’s cloaths, sometimes assuming one mode of concealment, sometimes another, he trusted they would dismiss such rubbish from their memory’ (The Times, 9 August 1802: 2). The Times report also reveals Robertson’s continuing desire to have her story heard in a court of law and given the due process which, in her view, she had been denied: Miss Robertson had stated to him that it was very much her desire the whole of her life should be publicly confessed and examined in this place, but she had modestly added to her wish, her fears that her Counsel would neither be able to devote sufficient time to acquaint himself with the whole of her history, or the Court consider it important enough to occupy its attention. (2) This claim was doubly unsuccessful for Robertson: not only did she fail to obtain redress against her creditors, she was also denied the opportunity to challenge the choric construction of her character, this not being



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considered relevant to the proceedings before the court. Robertson was left with no further legal recourse against the creditors she viewed as dispossessing her, and no legal forum to mend her destroyed reputation. Eliza Robertson died in the Fleet Prison on 7 June 1805 (Burke, 1806: 484). In 1808, the Consolatory Verses of the Late E.F. Robertson was published pseudonymously by ‘Mat Thunegnos’. This publication indicates that some time in 1803, Miss Sharpe abandoned Robertson and published a pamphlet containing her own narrative of events (Thunegnos, 1808: 31), which appears to be lost. It also suggests that Robertson wrote and published essays highlighting the deficiencies of the Act for the Relief of Insolvent Debtors in 1803. One of these may have been A Brief View of the Consequences of Imprisonment for Debt published pseudonymously and reviewed in the Monthly Review for September 1803, but which also seems to be lost. Tensions between the competing claims of sociability and the unsocial inform the publication of Eliza Robertson’s autobiographies and the model of individualistic selfhood she constructs. Her autobiographical writing provided her with a voice through which she could challenge choric representations of character and reputation and narrate her own version of the events that so dramatically impacted her life. They are also strategic interventions in the legal process, designed to refute her silencing by the legal system, to contest the narrative of events provided by her creditors and to resist the construction of her conduct and character authorized as ‘truth’ by the processes of justice. Robertson exploits the space in print culture established by the writers and readers of ‘scandalous memoirs’, allowing her to use her notoriety not only to correct public representations of herself but also to earn the money she needed to prosecute her legal claims. Eliza Robertson’s autobiographical writings exemplify a female use of autobiography to intervene in public and judicial discourse in early nineteenth-century England.

Notes 1. Robertson’s publications include Dividends of Immense Value (1801), Who are the Swindlers? (1801) and The Life and Memoirs of Eliza Frances Robertson (1802). She was not unique in using autobiographical writing to respond to her experience with the law and legal institutions in the long eighteenth century. Teresia Phillips, Laetitia Pilkington, Charlotte Charke, Elizabeth Gooch and Margaret Leeson, who are often considered ‘scandalous memoirists’, were all involved in legal disputes. Of these, Gooch and Leeson both published autobiographical writings to raise money while they were imprisoned for debt (Barros and Smith, 2000: 275–6; Peakman, 2004: 165) and Clare




2.

3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8.

Sarah Ailwood Brant has noted: ‘Pilkington and Charke also illustrate how imprisonment for debt intertwined legal, economic and gender issues’ (1992: 258). The exact nature of Robertson’s claims in relation to this estate is unclear. It is possible that she concocted the story to secure the trust of the tradesmen; that she herself was duped into believing that she would inherit this estate and was thus acting honestly, if foolishly; and that she genuinely was the beneficiary of this estate but could not act upon it due to her imprisonment. The Times, 6 April 1801: 3; Monthly Visitor, April 1801: 332–3; Gentleman’s Magazine, April 1801: 368; Sun, 4 April 1801: 3. Sun, 14 March 1801: 3; Morning Post, 14 March 1801: 3; The Times, 16 March: 3; Weekly Entertainer, March: 226; Monthly Visitor, April: 332. See Breashears (2003: 189–90) for a history of this scholarship. See also, for example, Nussbaum (1989), Peakman (2004: 163–84) and Zuk (2004). Brant (1992: 242–70) and Breashears highlight the limitations of such genre classification, Breashears preferring the phrase ‘memoirs by unconventional women’ (2003: 187). It seems, however, that Robertson’s publisher attempted to defraud her of these earnings. Rules governing the distribution of a bankrupt person’s property between their creditors do not appear to have been followed in this case. The case was reported in full in The Times, 21 June 1802: 3. It seems that Badcock’s defence – that Robertson was a swindler and therefore not to be trusted – failed and she was awarded over £62 in damages.

Bibliography Barros, Carolyn A. and Johanna M. Smith (2000) Life-writings by British Women, 1660–1815: An Anthology (Lebanon, NH: Northeastern University Press). Brant, Clare (1992) ‘Speaking of Women: Scandal and the Law in the MidEighteenth Century’, in Clare Brant and Diane Purkiss (eds), Women, Texts, Histories 1575–1760 (London and New York: Routledge). Breashears, Caroline (2003) ‘Scandalous Categories: Classifying the Memoirs of Unconventional Women’, Philological Quarterly, 82.2, 187–204. Burke, Edmund (1803) The Annual Register of World Events: A Review of the Year 1802 (London: Longmans). ——— (1806) The Annual Register of World Events: A Review of the Year 1805 (London: Longmans). Eakin, Paul John (2004) The Ethics of Life Writing (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press). Edgeworth, Richard Lovell and Maria Edgeworth (1802) Essay on Irish Bulls (London: Printed for J. Johnson, St Paul’s Churchyard). Haycraft v. Creasy (2 East 92) 1801–2, in Edward Hyde East, Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Court of King’s Bench (London). Nussbaum, Felicity (1989) The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press). Parker, David (2007) The Self in Moral Space: Life Narrative and the Good (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press).



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Peakman, Julie (2004) ‘Memoirs of Women of Pleasure: The Whore Biography’, Women’s Writing, 11.2, 163–84. Robertson, Eliza Frances (1801a) Dividends of Immense Value; and My Claim on Others Evidenced, by Indisputable Authorities by Miss Robertson of Blackheath (London: Printed by J. Cundee, Ivy Lane. Sold by J. Badcock). ——— (1801b) Who are the Swindlers? A Query. By Miss Robertson, of Blackheath (London: Printed by J.D. Dewick, Aldergate Street. Sold by J.S. Jordan, LudgateStreet, and Mr Row, Huntingdon). ——— (1802) Life and Memoirs of Miss Robertson, of Blackheath (London: Printed by W. Burton for C. Sharpe. Sold by Robertson at the Fleet). ——— (c. 1803) Destiny: or, Family Occurrences of the House of Derwentwater; and Interesting Narrative, including the Life of the Author (London). Servian, M.S. (1987) ‘The Fair Swindler of Blackheath: A Case Study on the Importance of Reputation in Late 18th Century Legal and Commercial Affairs’, Journal of Legal History, 8.1, 79–87. Thunegnos, Mat (1808) Consolatory Verses of the late E.F. Robertson. With Some Account of the Life and Character of the Author (London). Zuk, Rhoda (2004) ‘The Courtesan’s Progress in the Late 1790s: Elizabeth Gooch and Margaret Coghlan’, Women’s Writing, 11.3, 363–76.




‘Some Stories Need to Be Told, Then Told Again’: Yvonne Johnson and Rudy Wiebe Michael Jacklin

Stolen Life: The Journey of a Cree Woman (Wiebe and Johnson, 1998) is the story of Yvonne Johnson’s experiences of childhood sexual abuse and incest, her repeated experiences of rape through her teenage and adult years, and her participation, with three others, in the 1989 killing and sexual abuse of Leonard Skwarok, a man they barely knew but whom they believed to be an abuser of children, and whom Johnson believed to be a threat to her own young children. Her story is, profoundly, a woman’s story, a story of violation by men: by her father, by his father, by her brother, by their acquaintances, by police and by strangers. It is a story of trauma, recovered and retold, while Johnson served a life-25 sentence for first degree murder. In being written from prison, it is also the story of a woman’s experience of the Canadian criminal justice system, her arrest, trial and sentencing, and her incarceration – for the first part of her sentence in Kingston’s Prison for Women (P4W) and later in the then-recently opened Okimaw Ohci Healing Lodge. Stolen Life is the story of a Cree woman writing back to structures of power and patriarchy that have attempted to silence her. It is also a Cree woman’s story of her recovery of identity through women’s rituals and ceremony. And it is a story recovered and retold with the help of many, but primarily with the help of a Rudy Wiebe, a white, middle-aged man. It is this issue of collaboration and gender in Wiebe and Johnson’s book that I would like to address in this present essay, which is for this writer a returning to Johnson’s story. Twice previously I have offered critical commentary on Stolen Life. In the first, I discussed ethical concerns relating to critical analysis of collaborative lifewriting that focused upon the interventions of the editor without similar attention to the contributions and the agency of the autobiographical narrator. I suggested that engagement and dialogue 54



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with all those involved in a collaborative writing project could lead to encounters with metaphors, with interpretations, that might otherwise be overlooked ( Jacklin, 2004). In the second, I attempted to demonstrate such an encounter, as my understanding of Stolen Life and the power within its pages – for good and, in some cases, for harm – benefited from speaking to Yvonne Johnson and Rudy Wiebe, and especially from learning that Johnson wished her book to be thought of as a spirit bundle, a Cree power object needing to be approached, to be opened, with care (Jacklin, 2007c). In response to this second essay, one anonymous reviewer noted that I had inexplicably neglected to discuss how gender might have impacted upon Johnson and Wiebe’s collaboration. This essay, then, is a return to Johnson’s story, to Wiebe and Johnson’s book, and an effort to think through aspects of their collaboration as one that works across gender as well as cultural heritage. It is also an attempt to apply the concept of unsocial sociability to writing processes, particularly in regards to Johnson’s textual contributions to Stolen Life. Indigenous cultures commonly recognize that social discourse is accompanied by a responsibility for the consequences of one’s public utterance, and that quietness and care may at times outweigh the compulsion to speak. As Okanagan First Nations writer Jeannette Armstrong explains: One of the central instructions to my people is to practise quietness, to listen and speak only if you know the full meaning of what you say. It is said that you cannot call your words back once they are uttered and so you are responsible for all which results from your words. It is said that, for those reasons, it is best to prepare very seriously and carefully to make public contributions. (Cardinal and Armstrong, 1991: 90) By implication, some forms of speaking, or writing, risk violating such social codes. Rudy Wiebe’s statement that ‘To begin a story, someone in some way must break a particular silence’ is an acknowledgement of this very risk (Wiebe and Johnson, 1998: 3). This sentence opens the first chapter of Stolen Life and readers are soon aware that in Johnson’s life, violation has been normalized and social codes are very much broken. In this lifewriting text, unsocial sociability is bound inextricably to violation. Johnson and Wiebe’s collaboration begins with her sending him a letter, written from Kingston’s Prison for Women, in which Johnson introduces herself, explaining that she is a great-great-granddaughter of the Plains Cree chief Big Bear. This letter marks the opening of their



Yvonne Johnson and Rudy Wiebe 55

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collaboration because, as Wiebe admits, Johnson’s mention of Big Bear drew him into her story as nothing else could have. Johnson says that when he replied to her letter, Wiebe said, ‘I don’t think I can get you to understand how much Big Bear has meant to me in my life’ ( Jacklin, 2007a: 38). Big Bear had, in fact, fascinated Wiebe throughout his writing career. His first novel, Peace Shall Destroy Many (Wiebe, 1962), included a character who was a descendant of the Cree chief, and his 1973 book, The Temptations of Big Bear, won the Governor-General’s Award for fiction. Reading Wiebe’s book about her ancestor while she was in prison prompted Johnson to write to him. Her letter begins: Howdy Howdy Stranger My name is Yvonne Johnson. I am currently an inmate at the Prison for Women in Kingston, Ontario. I am thirty-one years old. I am a Cree from Saskatchewan, that is where my ancestors come from. We were accepted back into my grandmother’s rez after my mother was kicked out for marrying my father, who is a White from Great Falls, Montana. My grandmother Flora was a Baptiste, my grandfather was called John Bear, I lost him a few years back now; and my grandfather’s grandfather was the Cree chief Big Bear. (Wiebe and Johnson, 1998: 3) She goes on in her letter to relate her story to the context of her family’s experiences of disempowerment and dispossession, which followed the imprisonment of Big Bear in 1885 in the aftermath of the North-West Rebellion, and have continued to the present day. Johnson tells Wiebe that she was impressed by how much he knew of her family’s history, and by his sensitive writing of her ancestor’s story. She asks Wiebe for his help, not with her case or her sentence – she does not at this point say why she is imprisoned – but with her desire for information. She writes: Please help me share what it is you know, and how you got it. How is it you came to know as much as you do? Were you led? What was the force behind you? Who are you? Why did you choose Big Bear to write about? What sparked your interest in this powerful man of long ago? I wish to clear his name and to recover his medicine bundle as I try to find my lost family, and only under our Bear Spirit will it ever be true. (1998: 9) With this letter Yvonne Johnson initiates the collaborative process. She sends out this invitation to Wiebe to enter her story, to help her



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reclaim her narrative and understand it in relation to Big Bear’s legacy. For Wiebe, at this point even without knowing her crime or the circumstances that led to it, Johnson’s story is irresistible. Her story, however, is not only one of colonial dispossession. It is also, horribly, a story of male violence and sexual abuse perpetrated by both family members and strangers, beginning when Johnson was two and continuing through her childhood and into adult life. Shortly after sending her first letter to Wiebe, Johnson also sent him a copy of the witness statement she had made to police not long before, regarding her first memories of sexual assault. The extract from the 30-page handwritten statement begins: My first attack happened when I was between two to three years old … The attack on me was by a grown man, by my brother Leon (eight and a half years old at that time), and later on by three other boys, one was tall with red hair. And one boy was our neighbour, and would be in later years as well. (334) Johnson was unable to tell others – her mother, particularly – of what was being done to her because she suffered from a cleft palate that impaired her ability to speak and others’ ability to understand her. ‘Mom could never understand me,’ Johnson writes. ‘I would try and talk, but she was always so busy – so many kids – and she never had time to figure me out. Sometimes she’d just sit and cry, “What do you want? I don’t know what you’re saying, I can’t do anything.” So I’d wind up shutting up, or crying’ (29). Johnson’s inability to communicate was also related to her age and the traumatic impact of the violence inflicted upon her. She could not, at the time, tell anyone what was being done to her because, as she explains: At that age I had nothing to compare, that act is all I had. You learn something because people tell you the story around it – well, this was not my case. I had no story. I registered what happened to me as pain, hate, bitterness, yelling, crying, mass confusion with no explanation. (337) The phrase, ‘I had no story,’ is crucial because, although it applies to the child’s incomprehension at the age of two or three to the sexual abuse she was experiencing and extends to her eventual suppression of memories of this abuse, it also applies to how Johnson perceived herself in prison, sentenced to a minimum of 25 years without parole for her




Michael Jacklin

involvement in the killing of a man, and serving her time in a federal prison in Kingston, Ontario, distant from her family and community in Saskatchewan and Alberta. Johnson is well aware that P4W is a prison in which numerous women had died, their stories untold. A counsellor, a woman of First Nations heritage who worked with Johnson in prison, encouraged her to write and encouraged Wiebe to help her, so she could regain her story – take possession of it, take control of its telling, as Johnson had been unable to do during her trial, and as the many women who had died in P4W had been unable to tell their stories. However, this counsellor tells Wiebe: She’s not capable of writing a publishable book, and never in P4W … In certain ways she doesn’t grasp the magnitude of her own story. People who are abused are ashamed of what happened to them. There’s never been such a story out of P4W; dozens of women have died going in there, and it’s closing soon. A kind of memorial, it needs a book. (40, 41) And although the counsellor feels that Johnson does not recognize the significance of her story, Johnson herself is clear in her commitment to its telling. The witness statement cited above, and the letter to Wiebe which followed, are both part of that commitment to tell her story: one that she knows is also the story of other abused women (338). Wiebe is well aware of the tensions that would inevitably result from his becoming involved in Johnson telling her story. In response to the counsellor’s comments about why Johnson needs his help, Wiebe reflects that although he knows about writing books, he knows ‘nothing about the one this will have to be’, and he replies, ‘I’m an aging, professional man, exactly the kind of “powerful White” who’s so often created problems for her. Isn’t there someone else who should work with her, a woman, a Native writer?’ The counsellor answers: ‘Vonnie trusts you. Honesty is the key for her, no bullshit, no avoiding. When you’re in her shoes, maybe a White male is safer to trust than a Native’ (41). This statement implies that the abuse inflicted upon Johnson came mostly from Native men. It is made in the months just prior to the 1993 trial of Johnson’s brother, Leon, for incest and sexual assault against their sister Karen. Seven months later Yvonne will bring similar charges against him, as will their cousin Darlene (Bear) Jacques. That Native men, including her brother Leon, contributed to the abuse Johnson experienced is evident throughout Stolen Life. But that the abuse came only from Native men, and that Yvonne should then be



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more trusting of Whites than Natives, is not a completely accurate assessment of Johnson’s experiences, which become clearer as the narrative progresses. In ensuing chapters Johnson recounts that her subjection to incest occurred not only from her brother, but from her Norwegian-heritage father, and from his father as well. She accuses her White grandfather, ‘Fightin’ Louie’ as he was known, of sexually abusing her when she was four years old and he was 90 (136). She recounts her father first abusing her when she came home crying and traumatized after being gang-raped by White police (123–4). In a later chapter, as Johnson prepares to recount a significant experience involving her Cree grandparents and ancestral land she writes: My White father and grandfather abused me, but my Cree grandfather, John Bear, never touched me … When I was alone with them on the reserve, he left me undisturbed with Grandma Flora; he never so much as looked directly at me that I can remember. He must have known how deeply troubled I was as a child. (198–9) Being White, then, is not necessarily a factor in Wiebe being granted Johnson’s trust, as the counsellor suggests it may be. Nor is being White necessarily the impediment Wiebe fears it could be. The trust between them, rather, develops and strengthens from the sense both share that their collaboration is based upon a mutual recognition that traverses race and gender. Like the counsellor who advocates for Johnson’s story to be written, Wiebe recognizes how important her narrative is and agrees to assist with its telling. And like Johnson’s Bear grandfather, Wiebe sees how deeply troubled she is, and knows that working with her to recover her story will test both of them to their limits. It should be clear from the comments above that Stolen Life does not offer a seamless first-person account of a woman’s life. Collaborative lifewriting often attempts to smooth over the potentially troubling fact that the narrating subject – the first-person narrator of the life experiences – in most cases has not, herself, written the narrative. She has, rather, told her story to another who assists with its writing. Most frequently, if details of the narrative exchange and the editing process are provided, they appear in threshold material, such as prefaces, introductions or afterwords. In fixing commentary and reflection upon the collaborative processes at the margins of the text, the main body of narrative retains an appearance of autobiographical cohesion, offering the reader an experience of first-person narration unimpeded by markers of its dialogic making. While this simplifies the tremendous variety




Michael Jacklin

of collaborative lifewriting – many texts do maintain dialogic markers throughout – it is a fair indication of a common type of collaborative text, one in which mediation is acknowledged in introductory material but downplayed or elided in the substance of the first-person autobiographical account which follows. Readers of Stolen Life, however, face an overabundance of pronominally marked contributors to the narrative. The two dominant voices are, of course, Johnson’s and Wiebe’s. Both are first-person contributors to the text. In the opening chapters, Wiebe dominates, as he constructs for the reader the outlines of Johnson’s story through the contexts of her introductory letter, their meetings in prison, their conversations and their agreement to work together to write her book. Johnson’s firstperson narrative, it is important to remember, is drawn as much from her writing – her 17 prison notebooks, her letters to Wiebe, her written comments on court records and legal documents – as it is from her conversations with Wiebe. And as the chapters progress, Wiebe as narrator recedes and Johnson’s first-person account takes over. As well as Johnson and Wiebe’s narratives, however, there are newspaper accounts, court records, ‘cell shots’ which are transcripts of conversations secretly taped in jail-cells, statements given to police by witnesses, interviews with investigators and lawyers involved, and substantial material from Johnson’s father, whom Wiebe interviewed. Although selected and incorporated by Wiebe, these other voices work dialogically to complicate the reader’s interaction with the events portrayed. The result of this overlay or juxtaposition of many voices is that the reader must negotiate the multiplicity of perspectives involved in each event recounted and reflect upon the partiality of each. The greatest challenge, however, to the reader’s negotiation with autobiographical voice in Stolen Life remains that of disentangling the contributions of the two co-writers, for if Stolen Life is women’s lifewriting, it is crucial to ask how Yvonne Johnson’s contributions to textual construction hold their own ground and maintain a distinct voice within the overarching narrative frame that Wiebe provides for their book. It is here that I believe the concept of unsocial sociability may be useful. Writing is a process of social engagement; lifewriting an effort to draw readers towards an understanding of the circumstances that have shaped the narrating/narrated subject and her interactions with the world. In its various forms, lifewriting shares this fundamental aim: to make the events of a life lived by one comprehensible to another who turns the pages, reading. This is certainly how Wiebe understood his collaboration with Johnson. His obligation in writing, he believed, was



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to make Johnson’s story accessible to readers who might otherwise turn away, unable or unwilling to face the violence that had overwhelmed Johnson’s life (see Jacklin, 2007a). It is not surprising, then, that critical commentary on the book has tended to focus on Wiebe’s interventions: his reliance on the generic features of ‘the journalistic or documentary novel’, his application of ‘the resources of fiction’ to an auto/biographical text, his relentless concern for chronology and his efforts to establish ‘coherency’ in a woman’s narrative that has been rendered chaotic and incoherent through her lifelong experiences of violence, sexual abuse and trauma.1 The third of these comments just cited is from a chapter by Julia Emberley, in which the critic makes the extraordinary claim that when Wiebe in his preface of the book refers to ‘the two authors’, the reader should not make the simple assumption that ‘Wiebe is one author and Johnson the other’, because this ‘Other Author’ is ambiguous, ‘a mythical, if not transcendent, one’, which she then identifies as ‘the spirit of the text and the law – and embodied in Johnson’. Emberley continues: It is this mystical author who guides Wiebe’s desire for a non-violent, rational, textual resolution to colonial violence. When I write that Yvonne Johnson does not figure as a conventional author, I am not saying that she is not recognizable as a co-writer, but it is Wiebe who put her narrative threads together and carefully crafted the book as a whole. (2007: 225) Throughout her analysis, Emberley emphasizes the process of ‘narrative containment’ by which Wiebe attempts to ‘account for’ or make coherent Johnson’s life story (2007: 213) and she argues that Wiebe’s efforts result in ‘Yvonne Johnson’s stolen life becom[ing] ... an allegory of colonial territorial dispossession’, at the expense of the reader’s full focus upon the crimes of ‘sexual violence toward indigenous women … a fact that in and of itself is general to the history of imperialism, colonization, and globalization, neither supplementary nor apparitional’ (2007: 232). It is understandable that Emberley, a deeply committed feminist scholar, chooses to interpret the woman’s narrative recounted in Stolen Life as a contained narrative. It is certainly the case that Wiebe goes to great lengths to provide a framing narrative that constructs a sense of coherence. To use Paul John Eakin’s term (1998), Wiebe is meticulous in his provision of ‘the story of the story’. From Wiebe’s chapters readers gain an understanding of the complex process of his collaboration with




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Johnson, spanning six years of visits in prison, letter writing and phone calls, as well as Johnson’s writing of her prison notebooks, Wiebe’s visits with Johnson’s father who provided material relating to her childhood and adolescence, Wiebe’s attendance at the trials of Johnson’s brother Leon for sexual assault against her sister Karen and later against Yvonne and their cousin Darlene, and, eventually, Johnson’s narration in the presence of a Native elder of the events of the night of the killing of Charles Skwarok. Each stage of their long process of narrative exchange is detailed. Although not necessarily arranged in the book in sequence, their meetings and conversations are identified by date and place and the intent reader could construct a timeline of Johnson’s writing, of her and Wiebe’s narrative exchanges, and of her coming to terms with the telling of her story. These markers of place and time and mode of narrative exchange are myriad in Wiebe’s sections of text. The introductory letter from Johnson, for example, is identified by the date Wiebe receives it, 18 November 1992. About 330 pages later we are told that Johnson gave her witness statement describing her first memories of abuse on 2 November 1992, which would have been before writing to Wiebe (Wiebe and Johnson, 1998: 334). In the second chapter, we read: In her first journal, begun in May 1991, a few weeks after she was taken to Kingston and a year and a half before she contacted me, she states, ‘I wish I could write my life-story book. Maybe then and only then will my life be revealed, and it might help the next abused and hurting person whom the world judges and condemns as already dead. But this dead person, me, is not beyond help. Maybe in death I’ll be of some use.’ (40) And when she finds herself able to recount what she did, and how she contributed to Skwarok’s death, Wiebe fixes the narrative moment in time: On 26 December 1996, in the Elder’s apartment at the Okimaw Ohci Healing Lodge, she speaks for hours into an audio recorder … On 29 December, Yvonne personally gives me a copy of the tapes when I visit her in the presence of Pauline Shirt [an Elder]. I began listening to them on 2 January 1997. (395, 396) Markers of mode – whether the particular portion of narrative is written or spoken – are equally frequent. In places in the text, narrative



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exchange is situated during a particular visit: Wiebe visiting Johnson at the Okimaw Ohci Healing Lodge, or earlier visits at Kingston’s Prison for Women. Some episodes are constructed from multiple narrative exchanges, and Wiebe marks these with phrases such as ‘Yvonne writes to me in a letter’ (91); then, ‘Yvonne laughs at a lighter memory’ (92), followed a page later by ‘... she writes me’ (93), indicating that the textual narrative is one that has accrued through retellings, in both speech and writing. My point in drawing attention to these markers is that their prolixity convinces the reader of two important points. One is, as stated, that each step of the narrative’s accrual is allotted to a particular place and time. They help to establish that the maker of the book, Wiebe, has been scrupulous in his documentation of the process of assembling the story. They also demonstrate that Johnson’s narrative is one that she has worked to construct, to retrieve and to retell, over a period of years, not just with Wiebe, but with multiple other interlocutors including Native elders who counselled her in prison and fellow prisoners belonging to the Native Sisterhood. They also move the reader towards the most confronting and brutal sections of the book, chapters in which the markers of narrative exchange disappear completely, chapters in which Wiebe’s textual presence recedes – his pronominal presence vanishes – and chapters in which Yvonne, as narrator, dominates. Emberley’s comments on authorial figuring, cited above, move her to suggest that it would be an interesting project not to try to situate Johnson as an author of Stolen Life, in order to respond to established notions of authority claimed through identity and representation, but to seek to understand how her textual contributions de-authorize and de-mystify the violence that is constitutive of the colonial law of narrative and the narrative force of colonial law. (2007: 225–6) To a certain extent Emberley attempts this. She comments upon Johnson’s contributions to the earlier chapters, those in which she and Wiebe share textual space, in order to demonstrate the disruptive force of Johnson’s memories and her recovered narratives of sexual abuse, rape and incest. She comments on the ‘unfocused’ quality of the narrative, ‘the lack of coherency, the fragments, the bits and pieces’ (2007: 221–3), to make the argument that Wiebe’s efforts towards narrative coherence are doomed to fail so long as ‘the originary violence of incest and sexual abuse’ is not fully and comprehensibly acknowledged (2007: 224).




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To take up Emberley’s suggestion that a critic should read with care Johnson’s textual contributions to gain an understanding of how they ‘de-authorize and de-mystify’ the violence through which her life has been lived and determined, I wish to focus upon the first of the chapters in which she is the sole narrator. Chapter six, ‘Growing Up in a Beer Bottle’, is delivered entirely through Johnson’s first-person narration and, although previous chapters have included lengthy accounts of her memories of sexual abuse and incest, in this chapter the narrative develops into a detailed analysis of abuse suffered not only by Yvonne, but by her sisters, her mother and by many Cree women in Canada’s prairie provinces. Here Johnson’s narrative supports Wiebe’s earlier established argument that contemporary Cree experiences need to be understood in the context of colonial dispossession. She sets her own experiences of sexual abuse and violence amidst the historical processes of dispossession resulting from the imprisonment of Big Bear and the scattering of his descendants. As she crosses the border from Montana into Alberta she reflects: A hundred years ago Big Bear’s son, Little Bear, escaped from the Canadian prairies to hide in the mountains of Montana; I was born and raised all over those mountains; now I was running back to hide north of the border. My mother, my sisters, me – running, looking over our shoulders, hiding – Big Bear’s descendants, we had become nomads again; we were hunters hunting whatever we could find to stay ahead of hunger and homelessness. Still running from Whites. (Wiebe and Johnson, 1998: 152) But the running she emphasizes here, the flight of her mother, sisters and her, is a running from violence, male violence, as much as it is an uprootedness resulting from colonial dispossession. She and her sister Minnie are leaving Butte, Montana, because of threats from the local police, by whom she has already been raped, and because she feared recurring violence from her father, who had recently raped her and threatens to beat her. Sexual abuse and violence and colonial dispossession are entangled, as Johnson’s narrative makes clear. As she recounts her, her sisters’ and her mother’s experiences, it becomes evident that abuse and shame have been normalized across generations of Cree women. Johnson writes: ‘I was never taught what it meant to be a woman – except what I understood to be the shame of it’ (165). Johnson’s sister Minnie epitomizes the acceptance of violation and shame experienced by



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many Indigenous women. Johnson writes: ‘By age nineteen, Minnie had already resigned herself to take whatever kind of violence she got battered with. However often it happened, she simply refused to think about it’ (163). Johnson describes one winter night when Minnie turned up at their mother’s house in Winnipeg near frozen and unable to speak. She had been hitchhiking drunk, ‘got raped and left naked’, but had managed to dress herself and walk over 30 miles in sub-zero weather. ‘Sometimes,’ Johnson writes, ‘I can’t believe what women have to survive’ (161). The violence to women in this chapter includes beatings by police – Johnson witnesses her mother being bashed by Winnipeg police (159–60) – and intimations of the sexual assault of a young Native girl, ‘no older than six’, by workers in a detention home in Lethbridge where Johnson, in her teens at the time, is held for a brief period (156). Throughout the chapter, Johnson maintains that the experiences she recounts are common ones: ‘I know I’m part of the hidden, sometimes forgotten-for-alittle-while-but-never-erased sorrow of the many people I knew who, like me then, lived on Winnipeg’s skid, one of the biggest aboriginal peoples’ hell-holes on earth’ (164). In this ‘hell-hole’ Johnson describes, the violence comes not only from Whites, but just as often from Native men who have had their conscience destroyed. They wait till women are passed out, either from booze or drugs, and then they brutalize and rob them, and sometimes it’s done by a crowd of men daring each other on. Native men do this a lot, especially to Native women – a dreadful shame on our people, but they prey on each other’s suffering. (165) Native women, too, participate, Johnson says, and she recounts being invited to a party by a young Native woman who then drugs her beer so that the young woman’s relatives could gang-rape her. Days later when they meet again, Johnson, enraged, beats her, as she describes, with all the pain and fear and misery for all those people who had violated me and whom I could never catch. Rage for ever bottled up and screwed up tight inside me, acts blacked out, or unremembered, by nevertheless still, for ever, there … Only men can rape and hurt you the way they do but, worse still, sometimes women help them. (168) The violence relentlessly described by Johnson in this chapter is both deeply personal in its devastation of individual lives and, her analysis




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insists, systemically entrenched. The passage above alludes to Johnson’s recovered memories of being abused as a child. She understands her eruptions of rage as being related to the trauma she suffered as a young child. Children who are brutalized can go on to brutalize others. ‘To be taught how to suck, fuck, drink and fight is a very hard, cruel way to live; to survive it you have to act adult before you know you’re doing it. Becoming an adult in a beer bottle is small and limiting’ (165). The chapter ends with another description of sexual violence: this time Johnson is raped by a man with whom her mother was living. Johnson’s sense of degradation is total. She writes: What’s so special about my ugly body, men forcing themselves into every opening in it – why don’t they just slash open my belly and wash their face in my guts as I die in one piece. At least I’d know it was final. But no, they ram themselves into me and defile my life forever. (174) My reason for reproducing so much of the detail of this chapter is to demonstrate two things. First, it is important to apprehend the enormity and the relentlessness of the violence and sexual abuse experienced by Johnson and by all of the women she knows. The chapter builds to an understanding that every woman in her life has experienced abuse by men, Native and White, abuse which is to be endured, ‘the way women have to’ (170). Second, it is crucial to acknowledge that the chapter is both an analysis of the pervasiveness of this violence and a denunciation of its normalization. Readers frequently comment that Johnson’s chapters are overwhelmingly brutal and many are unable to continue reading.2 It is in this sense that her textual contributions are unsocial. In breaking the silences surrounding incest and sexual abuse suffered by Native women Johnson narrates in ways that for many are nearly unreadable. Yet Johnson’s chosen manner of delivery is integral to her objective: to confront her abusers with the shame that is theirs. Earlier in the book, Wiebe quotes Johnson saying ‘I’ve learned to wear my own shame, but I refuse to wear anyone else’s – and I give back to my abusers the shame that is theirs and theirs alone’ (23). In this chapter and in other extended narrative passages throughout the book, Johnson does this. She shoves her reader’s face into the gore that has been her life. In Johnson’s case, this is what women’s lifewriting is when that life has been shaped from infancy by male violence. This writing is not a product of Wiebe ventriloquizing a Cree woman’s voice. Wiebe’s extended passages are often lyrical and figurative, as critics have pointed out, and his aim is that of accessibility and coherence. His portions of the text provide



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readers with a sociable reading space, whereas Johnson’s contributions are frequently as brutal and as horrible to read as those cited above. In narrating thus, Johnson insists that her readers face the violence of her world, the violence which has been forced upon her throughout her life. ‘I write as I speak,’ she says (Jacklin, 2007b: 49), and her writing conveys, viscerally, the brutality she has endured and denounces the actions of all those who have contributed to her brutalization. The risks in such a narrative strategy are significant, of course. Laura Tanner, in her reading of rape and torture in twentieth-century fiction, identifies a range of subject positions in which a reader of narratives of violence may find herself. These include the disembodied, detached observer to whom the victimized body becomes ‘simply another text on which the reader inscribes meaning’ (Tanner, 1994: 9); the empathetic witness for whom the distance between reader and victim has been collapsed; and, disturbingly, a subject position in which the reader finds herself, or himself, ‘located in discomforting proximity to the violator’ (1994: 10). The third of these, Tanner claims, while ‘repugnant and frightening’, may also provide ‘an opportunity for interrogating the mechanisms of representation and the conventions of reading through which the material dynamics of violence are depicted’ (1994: 10). This is precisely what Johnson’s narrative demands of its readers. It is this sense of repugnant proximity to the perpetrators of violence that prompts Anne Collett to write of her encounter with Stolen Life: ‘The more I read the more I engaged in what I felt to be a violence done to Yvonne, by me personally’ (2007: vii). However, to turn away from the text in response, Tanner argues, to choose not to see violence or its effects is not to erase its existence but simply to ignore it. Seeing into violence, on the other hand, becomes a form of resistance when what is exposed before the eyes of the reader/viewer is not his or her own helplessness but the dynamics of violation; the critical reader in the scene of violence uncovers not just the vulnerability of the victim or the observer but the very power dynamics upon which the violator’s force depends. (Tanner, 1994: 15, italics in original) To return to Emberley’s suggestion that Johnson’s textual contributions might be read for the ways in which they de-authorize the sexual violence to which Indigenous women have been subjected through colonial history, the argument can be made, as I have been attempting here, that Johnson’s narrative smears the reader with the guts of




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her story in such a way that the dynamics of violation are palpable, unavoidable and utterly shameful. Far from being unfocused, Johnson’s textual contributions here, and through the book, insist that the reader face ‘the originary violence of incest and sexual abuse’ (Emberley, 2007: 224). Wiebe’s contributions may well work otherwise, as Emberley and others maintain, but Johnson’s efforts in her book are directed towards this: that readers know beyond any possibility of denial the horrible, shameful circumstances of sexual violence and the dynamics of its perpetuation in prairie Canada. ‘Some stories need to be told, then told again,’ Wiebe and Johnson write (1998: 387) towards the end of Stolen Life. The sentence appears just after a section break, between accounts of events in P4W, narrated by Johnson. In critical honesty, one cannot be sure if this particular sentence has been written or spoken by Johnson, or whether it may have been provided by Wiebe, as a transition marker between two narrative units – a brutal fight with another woman inmate before, and the bestowal of Johnson’s spiritual name following. The phrase reminds readers of Wiebe’s recurrent emphasis on the circularity of Johnson’s storytelling, while it also resonates with her statement two pages on: ‘I must tell the story again’ (389). There are numerous utterances like this, where attribution remains uncertain. Also, there are sections of the text that are undeniably Wiebe’s, that are entirely Wiebe’s, as there are long sections such as those analysed above that are Johnson’s, although even those passages comprised entirely of Johnson’s first-person narrative have been assembled and edited by Wiebe. As I have tried to demonstrate, however, Johnson’s narrative contributions work in ways of her choosing and of her design. Her narrative is not trapped or constrained. Her narratives may circle, they may return to violence repeatedly, but they do so necessarily. To write of violence as Johnson does is to analyse it, to challenge it and to denounce it. The two voices – Wiebe’s and Johnson’s – interweave in the closing chapter of their book, as Johnson narrates her memories of Cree ceremonies of release and purification performed upon her as a child by her grandmother, Flora Baptiste Bear, while Wiebe recounts how Johnson has passed these narratives to him. Following Johnson’s account of a shaking tent ceremony, Wiebe writes: Yvonne tells me this particular story of ceremony the day in August 1996, when we complete the second four-round sweat on the high glade near Okimaw Ochi [sic] … She tells me the story again, in greater detail, in the pages she types for me afterwards, circling



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From beginning to end of Stolen Life, then, the reader is reminded that Johnson’s narratives have been assembled by Wiebe, often – as with the example above – from both oral and written accounts, each with repetitions, each version ‘circling’ through the story. Wiebe’s involvement, however, does not diminish, constrain or contain the power of Johnson’s narrative, or of her manner of narration. As I have argued, in the extended sections of first-person narration, Johnson’s strategies, her choices, her repetitions and her focus are hers. This is especially so with regard to her focus on male violence in the chapter analysed above, where her words are as violently brutal, and as painful to read, as the events she narrates. In this, her ‘unsociable’ writing demands that readers experience violation – as she has – at the same time that it risks turning those readers away. In the book’s final pages, Johnson writes, ‘I was told that my life was hard, and it would remain so. I was told to keep seeking, I was told you do not give your pain to the spirit world, you must give your pain away’ (438). In Stolen Life, Johnson has given her pain away by writing it out and detailing the sexual violence through which her life had been defined and which led, ultimately, to her participation in the taking of another’s life. In forcing her readers to confront her pain, her violence, and the violence and sexual abuse that she endured all her life, Johnson insists (where Tanner can only suggest) that readers see into the dynamics of violation and the structures by which it is perpetuated. It is this demand, and the unsocial sociability of the collaborative writing from which it arises, that makes Stolen Life such a powerful reading experience.

Notes 1. The quotations are taken, in sequence, from Egan (2000: 15), Omhovère (2003: 108) and Emberley (2007: 216). 2. This has been the reaction of some students who find the book unbearably confronting; see also Collett (2007).

Bibliography Cardinal, Douglas, and Jeannette Armstrong (1991) The Native Creative Process (Penticton: Theytus Books). Collett, Anne (2007) ‘Editorial’, Kunapipi, 29.1, vi–vii.



around and around the variant facts as if by sheer force of will she will ultimately unwind a meaning my intellectualized mind can, against all odds, fathom. (431, 432)

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Eakin, Paul John (1998) ‘Relational Selves, Relational Lives: The Story of the Story’, in G. Thomas Couser and Joseph Fichtelberg (eds), True Relations: Essays on Autobiography and the Postmodern (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press). Egan, Susanna (2000) ‘Telling Trauma: Generic Dissonance in the Production of Stolen Life’, Canadian Literature, 167, 10–29. Emberley, Julia V. (2007) Defamiliarizing the Aboriginal: Cultural Practices and Decolonization in Canada (University of Toronto Press). Jacklin, Michael (2004) ‘Critical Injuries: Collaborative Indigenous Life Writing and the Ethics of Criticism’, Life Writing, 1.2, 55–83. ——— (2007a) ‘Interview with Rudy Wiebe’, Kunapipi, 29.1, 54–69. ——— (2007b) ‘Interview with Yvonne Johnson’, Kunapipi, 29.1, 34–53. ——— (2007c) ‘“What I Have Done, What Was Done to Me”: Confession and Testimony in Stolen Life: Journey of a Cree Woman’, Kunapipi, 29.1, 19–33. Omhovère, Claire (2003) ‘Rudy Wiebe and Yvonne Johnson’s Stolen Life: Journey of a Cree Woman: A Peregrination Through Gender and Genre’, Commonwealth, 26.1, 99–111. Tanner, Laura E. (1994) Intimate Violence: Reading Rape and Torture in TwentiethCentury Fiction (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press). Wiebe, Rudy (1962) Peace Shall Destroy Many (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart). ——— (1973) The Temptations of Big Bear (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart). Wiebe, Rudy, and Yvonne Johnson (1998) Stolen Life: The Journey of a Cree Woman (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf).



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5 Irene Lucchitti

Peig, the autobiography of Peig Sayers of the Great Blasket Island, was first published in 1936 and was followed three years later by a second volume of lifewriting, Machtnamh Seana-Mhná. Both works were later translated into English, An Old Woman’s Reflections reaching the English readership in 1962 and Peig in 1974. Peig was born in 1872 in Dun Chaoin, Co. Kerry, Ireland. She left home at 13 to go into service which ended with her marriage to Pádraig Ó Gaoithín of the Blasket Islands. The Islanders welcomed her into their community and she spent most of her adult life among them, only returning to the mainland in her declining years. She died in Dingle in 1958. Peig was the third person from the Great Blasket Island to commit her life to the page, her work following into print two very popular masculine renditions of Island life: the elderly Tomás Ó Criomhthain’s two volumes, Allagar na hInise (1928) and An tOileánach (1929), and Muiris Ó Súilleabháin’s more youthful view of Island life in Fiche Blian ag Fás (1933). Her autobiography was the first to offer a feminine perspective of Island life. Kant’s notion of ‘unsociable sociability’ provides us with a useful tool with which to explore Peig’s lifewriting in which we find a portrait of a highly individuated self who is nonetheless a woman of community, faith and tradition. Although the term ‘sociable unsociability’ would not have been familiar to the Islanders, the tension it speaks of between community and the individuals within it was built into the very fabric of Island life. Physically, as hostages to sea and storm, they needed to be both self-reliant and able to rely on others for survival. No journey in or out of the Island was possible without neighbourly cooperation. Socially, a certain circumspection was required to live in such a tightly bound community, a need for reserve in some things while being 71



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together in everything. Socially, the oral tradition of the Island was the repository of its culture, holding its history, its lore, its genealogies safe for the community. Each of the Blasket autobiographies met with great acclaim upon publication. As the first written records to emerge from a Gaeltacht community, they were prized for their ‘authenticity’ and their elegant use of the Irish language. When they appeared in their various translations, they met with further acclaim, feeding a growing international taste for literature about ‘the exotic’ and contributing to a growing international canon written by or about ‘the folk’, the imagined ordinary people on which many European nationalisms were being constructed. They have all remained in print, in Irish and in translation, since they were first published, leading commentators such as Daniel Corkery (Caball, 1987: 7–8) and Fintan O’Toole (2003: 81) to suggest that the Blaskets will always haunt the Irish imagination. The Blasket autobiographies emerged from a period of local and national crisis. While Island life was becoming steadily less tenable, Ireland was also in crisis. Wracked by centuries of colonization and ravaged by famine, it lacked both leadership and clear vision for the future. The native language was dying out and its threatened loss was read as symptomatic of the nation’s endangered cultural and political state. Social leaders urged the building of a modern Irishness based on an amalgam of ‘Gaelic romanticism, Catholicism and nationalism’ (Collins and Hanafin, 2001: 57) with roots in the old traditional language and culture. The Western Islands held the relics of old Ireland that would contest the image of the country as a crumbling ruin – a Gaelic-speaking peasantry, a primitive way of life that had a nostalgic appeal to its recently urbanized population, a religious fidelity that would quell the anxieties of modernity and a well of folklore that would demonstrate both ancient tradition and native wisdom (Foster, 1987: xv–xvi). As the Blasket Islands came to sudden prominence as site and symbol of Ireland’s cultural rebirth, Peig Sayers, a pious, Gaelic-speaking peasant woman of the Island, became an Irish icon. Her skill with the endangered language, her deep involvement in the oral tradition and her place in the Blasket tradition, combined with the spirituality she expressed and the idealized femininity attributed to her, invested her texts with great cultural significance. The publication of Peig’s life story was an important event in Irish cultural politics (Bourke, 2002a: IV.1198). As the third autobiography to emerge from the Blasket Islands, the template for reading it as an



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expression of an authentic Irishness was well established. It was also an important event in Irish gender politics: as Patricia Coughlan points out, the publication of Peig’s two volumes occurred either side of the 1937 Constitution of Ireland, a document that restricted both the representation and the parameters of Irish women’s lives for generations (Coughlan, 2007: 62). For years prior to the publication of Peig’s texts, the role and identity of women in the new, resolutely Gaelic and Catholic Ireland – where ‘Christ and Caesar were hand in glove’ (Coogan, 1993: 1) – had been the subject of ecclesiastical and political discourse which sought to return women to the domestic realm (Valiulis, 1995: 168). The rights of women to work in industry, already curtailed by the Conditions of Employment Act (Coogan, 1993: 495), were further straitened by the new Constitution, Article 41 of which institutionalized the state’s desire to confine women to the domestic sphere. While the Constitution continued to deploy the familiar trope of woman as embodiment of the nation, its representation of women took on a new narrowness in its emphasis on her maternal identity and its redemptive potential (Collins and Hanafin, 2001: 56), signalled by its interchangeable use of the words ‘woman’ and ‘mother’ throughout (64). As Maryann Valiulis points out, the attributes of the ideal Irish woman – purity, modesty, a deferential manner and a placid contentment – were all invoked to deny a more complex female identity (1995: 176). Certain events in Peig’s life allowed the tying of her image to the ideals of Irish womanhood. Her account of her acceptance of an arranged marriage was read simply as an act of submission to paternal authority. In her account of this swift journey from life as a servant-girl to married life on the Island, we see not just the starkness of her situation but also that there were only two identities available to her – the ‘comely’ but vulnerable maiden De Valera would soon speak of (Coogan, 1993: 72) and the domesticated woman of the Constitution. Peig’s accounts of her many bereavements also aligned her with the ideal woman of Irish discourse. In her account of laying out her son’s body we might see that most idealized of all Irish mothers, the grieving mother who aligns herself with Mary Mother of Sorrows (Mac Curtain, 2008: 172). It is in relation to this Mary-like suffering and resignation that Peig becomes the ‘quintessential Irish mother’ and is drawn into the feminized figure of the nation, Mother Ireland (Coughlan, 2007: 62). This apparent conformity to the ideals of Irish womanhood impacted upon the reading of Peig’s autobiographical persona, and a natural piety



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and a feminized subservience were attributed to her, leading to a long and tiresome promotion of Peig as a role model for generations of Irish schoolgirls. The conservative ideological load that the text has carried for decades has been to Peig’s increasing detriment. As Angela Bourke points out, the Irish language and the oral traditions with which Peig was so closely associated were ‘most consistently invoked by the most conservative elements of a conservative society’ and therefore ‘identified in the minds of many with the prescriptions of authoritarian, patriarchal nationalism’ (2002a: 1193). The reception of Peig’s autobiography has been marked by an increasing hostility to which Tomás Ó Criomhthain’s works have not, although their respective works treat similar material from the same perspective of old age and failing health. The explanation for this seems to lie in the cultural work these texts were made to perform. While Ó Criomhthain could be read simply as a heroic relic of noble times gone by, the representation of Peig in terms of largely passive ‘virtues’ has been imposed upon generations of Irish girls as the very model of womanhood. Always burdensome, this template has grown increasingly anachronistic as the past four or five decades have gone by. Peig was a permanent fixture on the Irish secondary school curriculum from shortly after its publication until 1995, ‘institutionalized ... as a representation of national identity’ (Ferriter, 2004: 380). For more than half a century, it suffered not just poor teaching and arrangements of the syllabus but also from ‘scholarly neglect’ and ‘ideological distortion’ (Coughlan, 2007: 59). Presented to its hapless readership as ‘a document of indigenous, uncorrupted values’ it was, as Bourke says, ‘cordially disliked for the same reason’ (2002a: 1193). Donnachada Daly agrees: Peig was a book that was beaten into us when we were school kids. It was part of the school program from which there was no escape. Harsh rural Ireland from the old days. Poverty, piety, grim tales of life on the west of the country. An elderly woman, Peig Sayers, bent over with age, covered with a black shawl, recounting stories in her life. (Daly, 2007) Through her long years in the schools at the service of an ageing ideology, Peig became ‘something of a joke’ (Bourke, 1997: 305), a joke now told in a variety of media. Advertisers have used her ‘shawled, sharpeyed and benign’ image to sell both Kerry tourism (Bourke, 2002a: 1193) and McDonald’s hamburgers (Lysaght, 2000: 82). Peig the Musical



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[Islands] are where real, true Irishness is felt to reside. Peig Sayers with her pipe, her leather boots and kelp for toilet paper, keening about the misery of island life. The children all dead; the able-bodied emigrated; only the old, the halt and the lame remaining, gibbering their ancient tales at one another through the howling gales. (Myers, 2002) Horace Cantwell mocked Peig as ‘the woman in black herself’ as ‘a threat to sanity’ and ‘a source of nightmares’ for the millions of Irish schoolchildren forced to read her book. Cantwell’s ferocious ill-will is most apparent in his extravagant jest that those who were left scarred by her book regularly desecrate her grave with urine. ‘May she Rest in Piss,’ he concludes (Cantwell, n.d.). The ‘Peig Sayers Problem Page’ offers an equally savage mockery of Peig (Anon, n.d.). Beneath its veneer of gleeful malice, however, this piece mounts a multifaceted cultural critique of various aspects of the deployment of Peig’s image in Irish culture. It mocks the ideal Irish woman that Peig was made to represent in nationalist discourse and classroom teaching for nearly 60 years and impugns a retarding effect to the gender politics that characterized Irish nationalism during that time. At the same time, the coarse and earthy advice that ‘Peig’ gives out, couched in colloquialism and vulgarity, skewers her reputation as a gifted speaker of Irish while challenging her reputation for piety, wisdom and morality. An Irish-language comedy series, Paddywhackery, challenges those who ‘think the Irish language is all about Aran jumpers and Peig Sayers’. It plays with the familiar notion of Peig haunting the Irish imagination, bringing ‘the long-dead, grumpy old Kerry woman’ back from the grave to rekindle interest in the Irish language. It takes full comedic advantage of the increasing anachronism of Peig’s image in the popular imagination, with her ‘wisdom’, speech, aphorisms all seeming to come ‘like Yoda’ from another world (Gasaltogether, n.d.). Standing ready to contest such commentaries, Margaret Mac Curtain and Patricia Coughlan have each, for some years now, been arguing for a rereading of Peig Sayers, calling, in broad terms, for a fresh examination of Peig’s authority over her own life, as it was lived and as it was written. Mac Curtain’s call for a fresh approach to Peig’s autobiography and persona centres on the spiritual culture she expresses. Observing that Peig never aspired to the sanctity attributed to her (Mac Curtain, 2008: 206),



offered a theatrical response to ‘surely the dullest book ever written’ (Gough, 2005). The Irish Times ran a piece complaining that:

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she points instead to her creideamh, ‘that elusive Irish word meaning faith or belief [that] was the rock of her soul’ (183). Mac Curtain’s discussion of Peig’s creideamh invites a consideration of her spirituality in terms of unsociable sociability in that, although it is the faith of the Church Peig expresses, it is her own hard-won, deliberately chosen faith that she enacts. Mac Curtain finds in Peig’s autobiographical persona the expression of an unwavering awareness of God’s presence, contemplative qualities and many Christian virtues (206). In Peig’s communion with Mary, Mac Curtain sees a spirituality not unlike that of mystic Teresa of Avila (171). She sees in Peig a last link with a past ascetic tradition of Christian living who might reward the contemporary feminist search for a spirituality derived from Celtic models with ‘clues that lead into the heart of Celtic spirituality and supply an agenda for becoming a free spirit’ (169). Pointing out that Peig and her Island neighbours were often physically cut off from the Church and thus thrown upon their own spiritual resources, Mac Curtain reads Peig’s spirituality as a personal strategy for survival (208) and directs the reader to Peig’s accounts of the moments of crisis in her life, such as the early leaving of her mother, for an understanding of her spiritual resources and strategies (170). Such moments also allow us to see that although she conforms to the terms of communal identity, here as one of the faithful, a member of the state-sanctioned Catholic Church, her beliefs, decisions and behaviours are decidedly her own. We will bear Mac Curtain’s advice in mind when we come to a necessarily brief consideration of several such moments in Peig’s narrative. Patricia Coughlan has also been calling for a rereading of Peig’s work for some years. She interprets the jokes at Peig’s expense as ‘gestures of repudiation’ of her image and the accompanying ‘ruralist ideology’ that has been imposed upon generations of urbanized Irish youth. Her call for a recognition of Peig’s works as ‘feminine literature’ (Hogan, 1998: 2), or for ‘a feminist reading’ of Peig’s works (Coughlan, 1998: 13), proved controversial. Fr Pat Moore (1998) accused Coughlan of dishonouring the text and chided her for trying to ‘be more wiser or knowing’ than Peig and of trying to put a ‘feminist gloss’ on the book (Coughlan, 1998: 13). The correspondence between them sparked a nationwide debate as to ‘who owned Peig, who might think and write about her, and in what ways’ (Coughlan, 2007: 63). Reiterating her call for a fresh approach to Peig, Coughlan identifies the questions of Peig’s authorship, long doubted on account of her illiteracy, and of her autobiographical subjectivity as key areas of inquiry (2007: 60). Neither issue can be addressed without an appreciation of the importance of the oral tradition in Peig’s life.



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Peig was immersed in the spiritual practices and oral traditions of her community from infancy, learning and inheriting the lore of her father, Thomas Sayers, a famous storyteller. An incident recounted in the early pages of the autobiography indicates that, even in childhood, Peig’s response to life’s experience was artistic and spiritual. On her first day at school, she responds to the appearance of the schoolteacher with a verse composed by Dunlea, the Island poet. ‘Young as I was at that time,’ she explains, ‘I had verses like that on the tip of my tongue, this because I was always listening to adults reciting.’ Later in the narrative, as a young servant-girl away from home at Christmas for the first time, the lonesome Peig allows herself to be consoled by the storytelling of the family she was living with (Sayers, 1974: 73–83). Later still, Peig learns the therapeutic effect of composition from her friend Nan: ‘people had a habit at that time of composing poetry whenever loneliness came over them – this so as to banish the sorrow from their hearts’ (Sayers, 1974: 95). We see the consoling power of Peig’s spirituality and love of stories and poems combined in her accounts of several personal crises. Within weeks of the tragic death of her son, Tomás, Peig draws consolation from her work with Fr Clune: as she shares her language and stories with him, he responds with ‘sound advice and prime teaching’ that never failed to offer some measure of relief from her sorrow (Sayers, 1974: 184). Shortly afterwards, at the most desolate point in her life, after a series of losses sees her facing life bereaved and alone, Peig draws comfort from a poem she finds on a scrap of paper, written by Micheál who has just left for America. His farewell at the slip has been ‘like a funeral’ and, feeling his departure as keenly as a death, she is consoled by the religious verses he left which promise their eventual reunion (Sayers, 1974: 187). Of the issues raised in the calls for a rereading of Peig, the question of authorship, still a matter of conjecture more than 50 years after publication, is most fundamental. The question arises from the fact that although she was an accomplished storyteller, Peig was illiterate, while her son and amanuensis, Micheál, had been a prolific writer since the days of his youth. Known on the Island as Maidhc an File, Mike the Poet, he worked in a variety of literary forms, producing poems, novels, biographies and translations. While it is beyond any doubt that the work of mother and son was ‘deeply entwined’ (Almqvist, 1990: 101), questions concerning the nature and extent of Micheál’s influence continue to hang over Peig’s authorship of her texts. Several critics concerned with Peig’s authorship have looked into various texts for clues to the riddle and found that there are readily




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discernible differences between Peig’s texts and Micheál’s. Bo Almqvist, for instance, identifies stylistic differences between the two in their respective work (1990: 122). Joan Radner’s comparison of Micheál’s version of the tale, ‘The Woman Who Went to Hell’ with Peig’s version of the same tale reveals clear distinctions in the attitude towards women reflecting the life circumstances of each writer: an angry misogyny and resentment of the mother in Micheál’s version and an idealization of woman and of fidelity to the mother in Peig’s (Radner, 1989: 113). Coughlan also identifies very different attitudes towards women in the works of the two writers as well as great stylistic differences between Micheál’s Beatha Peig Sayers, published some years after her death, and the texts identified as Peig’s own (Coughlan, 2007: 61). Scholarship in the fields of orality and lifewriting allows broader theoretical approaches to the question of Peig’s authorship that might usefully supplement such textual analyses. Such theoretical approaches make it clear that assigning artistic primacy to Micheál not only conflates composition with the act of writing, it also overlooks the fact that Peig was well prepared for the telling of her life story by her years as a respected practitioner in the oral tradition of the Island, illiteracy notwithstanding. Kant’s notion of ‘unsociable sociability’ is a useful lens through which to view Peig’s life in the oral tradition. The tradition provided her with material, a forum for her voice and an audience. She took these and made them her own, remaking herself in the process. In allowing her to develop and perform her own abilities and inheritance, the oral tradition allowed Peig to be exceptional while remaining at one with her community. Her contributions to the tradition were many and diverse. First, she developed and exercised her own skills as a storyteller, absorbing, transforming and transmitting the lore she had inherited from her father and community. She was well ‘able to polish a tale in her own personal way without deviating from its traditional content’ (Ó Súilleabháin, 1970: 90). As so much of what she heard was told by men and reflected a masculine world-view and ethos, her expression of a feminine experience and mentality represents a significant artistic transformation of her cultural inheritance. Second, she welcomed neighbours, scholars and other visitors into her home for nights of storytelling and song. Third, Peig responded to the threatened extinction of the tradition by allowing several of her learned visitors to collect and preserve traditional material from her dictation, confirming Ní Dhuibhne’s observation that the collection of Irish folklore always occurs at times of social distress and transition (2002: 1216). Over a period



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of nine years, Peig allowed Irish Folklore Commission collector Seosamh Ó Dálaigh to collect the largest body of oral narrative ever collected from a single storyteller in Ireland (Ní Dhuibhne, 2002: 1217) – more than a million and a half words of lore filling 6000 pages of manuscript (Ó Súilleabháin, 1970: 90). Peig was ‘an accomplished artist’ and ‘a natural and graceful storyteller’, gifted with prodigious memory, instant recall and fluent speech (Ó Súilleabháin, 1970: 90). Her vast repertoire included international tales, romantic tales, adventure stories, anecdotes, moral tales, miracle tales, tales of the saints and traditional songs. She also told many of the long hero tales traditionally told by male storytellers (Coughlan, 2007: 59). Peig’s headstone is said to be the only monument to a storyteller in Ireland (Ó Súilleabháin, 1970). Such recognition confirms Bourke’s observation that the women performers of the oral tradition were rewarded with a prestige and respect that increased with age (2002a: 1195). Bourke also points out that the tradition reserved particular respect for those women who were acknowledged as experts in matters of religion and death (2002b: 1399). As a leading participant in the oral tradition, as a spiritual woman deeply immersed in the religion of her community and as a wife and mother touched all too often by the deaths of those near to her, Peig was without doubt a woman of considerable and ever-increasing cultural authority and power in the Blasket Island community. The autobiographical persona she creates in her text offers an assertion of her cultural status. Positioning herself firmly within the tradition as she begins, and indicating its centrality to the self she is writing, she locates herself both geographically and in terms of legend, telling of her origins in a town near Mount Eagle, ‘in the townland where the legendary House of Mór stands’ (Sayers, 1974: 1). She writes from the perspective of an aged woman who draws her authority from her twin experiences of the ways of the world and the tradition to which she belongs. Her declaration in the first line of her book: ‘I’m an old woman now, with one foot in the grave, and the other on its edge,’ is a proclamation of her identity and status as an elder of the tradition. Her frequent reminders of her advanced years sprinkled through the text represent reassertions of this authority. She further emphasizes her identity and authority as elder by drawing occasional attention to her memory of events and material significant to the community. Patricia Lysaght writes that Peig was ‘capable of exceptional verbal artistry’ and ‘able to weave threads from several tales into one fabric to create a new logical and coherent whole from disparate fragments’




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(quoted in Bourke, 2002a: 1253). Her ability to manage an extended narrative is evident in the fact that she is known to have told a tale of 36,000 words. Such interweaving of disparate threads of narrative was common practice in the oral tradition of the Island, according to George Thomson, who described the Island storytelling practice of blending personal contemporary experience with traditional lore. It was this practice, in Thomson’s opinion, that facilitated the Islanders’ ability to make the sudden shift from oral storytelling to the writing of autobiography (1998: 28). By means of this practice, the tradition evolved and remained fresh while individual tellers such as Peig situated themselves personally within the communal and in the continuum of tradition, an example of ‘unsocial sociability’ in practice. As Peig told parts of her story over the decades, weaving it in and around Island lore, she revisited the experiences therapeutically while revising and refining the tale as she gauged her audience reaction. Her artistic rendition of her life was thus ongoing, performative and dialogic and ‘unsociably sociable’. As Walter Ong demonstrated, it is by such a ‘multiplicity of performances’ that oral performers such as Peig refine and transmit both their material and an aesthetic (Bourke, 2002a: 1195; Ong, 1982: 78). Bourke has pointed to the significance of the audience in the Irish oral tradition (2002a: 1194). Far from being passive witnesses to performance, oral-tradition audiences were both discerning and involved in a dialogic relationship with performers, offering cues to performance and critical judgements. As Peig told her life, she performed her life and, for much of that time, Micheál had been both an intimate witness to the life and a member of her audience, thus familiar with both the life itself and the strategies used in its telling. So, as he worked in collaboration with his mother to produce the texts that bear her name, we see that he was more than ‘scribe’ and ‘son’: he is also her audience and her critic. Those who would question Peig’s authorship must consider that, as a seanchaí, Peig was used to composing in performance and therefore in dialogue with an audience. Similarly, as an informant who had, on hundreds of occasions, allowed the recording or transcription of her material, she was accustomed to composing for a scribe. While the debate about Peig’s authority over her text has largely turned on her illiteracy and Micheál’s literary activity, Gillian Whitlock’s recent theorizing of the relationship between autobiographical authors and their amanuenses invites a reconsideration of the literary relationship between the two that moves beyond appraising their respective claims to the text (2000). It also lends support to Coughlan’s view that ‘we should credit Peig with her authorship, however collaboratively



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exercised with her son’ (2007: 61). Considering all autobiographical texts to be the fruit of complex relationships and the autobiographical persona as a self invented in relation to others, Whitlock emphasizes the intersubjectivity, rather than the subjectivity, of all autobiographical production (2000: 7). In Whitlock’s terms, Peig and Micheál, author and amanuensis, are two very different subjects meeting ‘in the borderlands of identity’ (9). Their co-presence at the ‘writing scene’ facilitates the creation of a written self and the production of a written text that would otherwise be impossible. Engaged in a mutually interdependent process in which ‘ears, lips and hand on the page are not embodied in a single authorial presence’ (16), author and amanuensis produce a text shaped by their collaboration and impossible without it (16). The differing abilities of the two participants in the dialogue, no longer factors compromising the integrity of the text or the authority of the author, are recognized as the very things that enable the production of the text. What Peig offers in her autobiographical text is a performance of self composed in dialogue with Micheál. This version of self is but the latest in a lifelong series of performances in which the autobiographical persona it expresses has been created, rehearsed and revised, in the light of changing experience and perspective, in community and under the gaze of her son and amanuensis. Peig’s relationships with these intimate audiences simultaneously propel and constrain her production and performance of self. She, like all artists emerging from an oral tradition, must balance her own production and performance of self with the sensitivities and concerns of her community which is inevitably implicated in her story. While such a delicate balancing act calls to mind the tension inherent in Kant’s notion of ‘unsociable sociability’, Peig was distinguished from others in her community by her abilities but never separated from them. Her active role in the tradition empowered her to express not only her own experience and understanding of the lives of women in Irish rural society but also to voice the concerns and attitudes of the community of women among whom she lived (Bourke, 2002a: 1195). As she proceeds with the telling of her own life, Peig also ‘gives luminous witness to the lives of the poor and in particular of women – many births, multiple infant deaths, widowhood, loss of family to emigration and death’ (Coughlan, 1998: 13), reflecting the many ages and circumstances of women in rural Ireland. Peig’s life story begins with an account of the difficulties faced by women in the Sayers household. She describes her mother in terms of what she had lost before Peig’s story, and indeed her life, had begun – she




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once had broad shoulders; nine children lost in infancy, her vigour, her ability to run her household, her will to live, all gone. The unmanageability of life is conveyed in Peig’s manipulation of time – while young Peig has no idea of the hardships that lie ahead, her mother is unable to recover from the hardships she has known. The inevitability of suffering is conveyed in Peig’s account of her mother’s unsuccessful attempts to outrun trouble and find peace in new surroundings. Life’s fragility is everywhere evident, in the memory of so many dead babies, in the fearful coddling of the infant Peig and in the image of the broken woman sitting by the fire. Hardship passes down the generations: her mother’s poor health obliges her sister Máire to manage the household and care for her little sister. Peig allows us to see the special vulnerability of women in relation to marriage: while some like Máire are held back from marriage in order to manage the homes of ailing parents, we read later in the text that others such as Peig herself are forced to leave the parental home prematurely upon the arrival of a brother’s wife, a situation that Coughlan has termed the problem of ‘the surplus woman’ (2007: 63). Although she demonstrates the negative qualities of some women, such as her miserly employer and her brother’s wife who forced her removal from the family home, Peig represents most women in a positive light. She offers a range of portraits of women such as her mother, her sister, Cáit-Jim and the women of the Island that demonstrates their diverse circumstances as well as the great value of the emotional support they provide each other (Coughlan, 2007: 61). As we respond to the calls of Mac Curtain and Coughlan for a rereading of Peig Sayers, we find that from within a communal tradition and in the face of a restrictive discursive representation of Irish womanhood, Peig negotiated an independent identity. She fashioned a coherent literary version of a personal and idiosyncratic self whose responses to the circumstances and challenges of her life are both autonomous and spiritual. We see this clearly in her narration of being forced to leave her mother to go into service at the age of 13 (Sayers, 1974: 61). She is heavy-hearted knowing that she is the subject of argument in her parents’ home, anxious about her own future and concerned that her mother will suffer without her. She interrupts the story with a seemingly unrelated conversation about ‘The Bad Times’ of Famine, illustrating in a few compressed sentences the total social disruption it brings: deaths in the family, the loss of home, separation from townland, interruption of tradition – all experiences that await the young Peig. The parallel between the experience of Famine and her own impending experience of loss and separation



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offers a powerful expression of the desolation of the moment. Resuming her own story, she tells of a long night feeling ‘heart-scalded’, ‘weighing up the pros and cons of things’ and meeting her fears with prayer (Sayers, 1974: 64). The new morning brings solace in the sights and sounds of nature which lead her to the comforts of her faith. The crowing of a cock reminds her of her mother’s story about the Resurrection of Christ while a spider spinning a ‘thread of slender silk’ reminds her that God provides a living for every creature including herself. The moment of epiphany mobilizes her, enabling her to jump out of bed and dress, but it does not relieve her of her natural emotions. Realizing her schooldays were over and her life of service was to begin, she finds herself unable to speak, because she is ‘too lonely’ (Sayers, 1974: 65). This beautiful passage offers a profound expression of unsociable sociability in its explicit links between Peig’s personal suffering and the communal memory of famine and in the comfort she derives from calling up the very personal religious faith she holds at her core. Peig’s desire for autonomy is made clear in her story of Cáit-Jim’s departure for America and her unfulfilled promise that she will send Peig the passage-money so that she too can make the trip. What the promise meant to Peig is made clear in her reaction to the letter that says she will have the money by St Patrick’s Day: ‘My dear man, my heart was filled with joy. I’d now be free from the power of slavery and I’d be independent of everyone’ (Sayers, 1974: 149). For Peig, as for many young Irishwomen of the day, the trip to America was a trip to autonomous management of their own circumstances. As Maureen Murphy has found, it freed them from the system of arranged marriages in Ireland while also making them eligible for marriage in America (1997: 86). While some returned to Ireland humbled or in broken health, many returned on their own terms, with a self-made fortune, thus able to negotiate the terms on which they wished to live. Peig is naturally ‘sorely disappointed’ when Cáit-Jim’s next letter brings the news that she cannot fulfil her promise (Sayers, 1974: 150). She did not see or hear from her friend again, she did not go to America and she was forced to temper her desire for independence. Peig’s representation of her match and marriage, which commences in the very next paragraph, shows that she manages her disappointment and tailors her desire for autonomy to fit her circumstances. While Peig’s favourable response to her father’s offer of an arranged marriage to an Island man has often been characterized simply as a respectful accession to her father’s will, the text does not bear this out. Although she does indeed conform to custom and agree to her father’s




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I was sick of that same service and I thought it would be better for me to have a man to my back and someone to protect me, and to own a house too, where I could sit down at my ease whenever I’d be weary. (Sayers, 1974: 150) Soon after her wedding, turning over the implications of her decision in her mind, Peig realizes that she has traded one form of exposure for another. The shelter of marriage is also a confinement that has exposed her to a new raft of fears and worries. She expresses a fear of being islanded and the loneliness that goes with it and of being hostage to the sea. Cáit-Jim, still not far from her mind, functions as a cipher for an unfulfilled version of Peig’s self. Reacting to her first journey over the sea, a frightened Peig cries out in her mind to her friend: The blessing of God be with you, Cait-Jim … you were the lucky one! Whatever happens, your feet will be planted on mainland clay. Not so with me! How lonely I am on this island in the ocean. (Sayers, 1974: 153) She consoles herself with thoughts of her new husband, a ‘fine handsome man’. Her statement that she thought she would never be in danger of drowning if she were in the same currach as him (Sayers, 1974: 153), in spite of her mortal dread of the ocean, is a clear statement of the bond that was contracted between them. Finally she expresses satisfaction with the decision she made and with her marriage to Peats: Peats Flint was now bound to me by the Church; we belonged to each other and everything we owned we held in common. That was the way we promised it would be. Many a person promises and is sorry afterwards, but I wasn’t sorry when I saw these fine people-in-law around me. (153) Peig’s account of the death of her son and her preparation of his body for burial bears out Mac Curtain’s view that Peig deploys her spirituality as a personal strategy for survival. This sad narrative also allows us to see evidence of unsociable sociability in Peig’s life, as it was lived and as it was written. We see Peig isolated in the psychological space of her grief though there are other people present in the room. Her husband



wishes, it is only after her own appraisal of her options has taken place and yielded her decision:

is on his deathbed; her children, demented with shock, have been taken away from the house and all but two neighbours are too afraid to approach her. Thrown upon her own resources she is unequal to the terrible task confronting her. Unable either to escape or perform her duty, she prays to ‘the Sacred Heart and the Holy Mother’ for assistance and soon finds her psychological state entirely altered. She finds herself able to contemplate her son’s body with a certain detachment and a feeling of lightness and courage comes over her. As she falters again, she places a statue of the Virgin beside her and, as she does so, finds she was ‘but an instrument in the hands of the Virgin and her only Son’ and able to perform the dreaded task. While Cathal Ó Háinlé considers her account of the event ‘too facile to be convincing’ (1993: 145) and the religious faith she expresses ‘something of a bromide’, the story bears out Mac Curtain’s views that Peig’s faith in God was unwavering and that her identification with Mary was total (Mac Curtain, 2008: 171). Again, although it is the faith of her community and her Church that she shares in, we see the very personal in Peig’s anguished plea for the Virgin’s help which comes from a lifetime’s faith and trust in Her. As she offers a summation of her life in her final pages, Peig reiterates the various facets of her autobiographical persona and, in doing so, demonstrates that most of the comfort she has known, apart from that of God Himself, has been feminine in origin. First and foremost, she is still a woman tormented by the troubles of the world. She has just had word that her son Pádraig has died in America. Passing from this with the aphorism, ‘there is no cure for sorrow but to kill it with patience’, she moves into an assertion of her identity as a woman of letters who has given every help to those wanting to learn Irish. She identifies herself as a writer and thanks Léan Conellan and Máire Ní Chinnéide for their great help in the work. From this individual life she moves into a discussion of her life as a member of the Island community that was accepting of hardship and trusting in the goodness of God. That community, apart from Peig herself, is all dead and she is aware that she will soon join them. She writes of the true friendship she has found in Mary and her Son and of their suffering which offers a context that makes her own more bearable. Her mind takes her back to the days of her childhood when she played on the riverbank with Cáit-Jim, a reverie abruptly cut short with: ‘look at me today, an old grey woman with hardly a tooth in my head!’ (Sayers, 1974: 212). She explains the writing with a wish that she and her community might be remembered when they have ‘moved on into eternity: People will yet walk above our heads; it could even happen that they’d walk




Irene Lucchitti

into the graveyard where I’ll be lying but people like us will never again be there. We’ll be stretched out quietly – and the old world will have vanished’ (Sayers, 1974: 212). Peig Sayers was not, and did not intend to be, Ireland’s ideal woman. Instead, in the writing of her life, she shows herself to be a woman living consciously, deliberately and artistically within the embrace of her community and the narrow confines of her circumstances. The brief discussion here indicates the inaccuracy and injustice that has attended her image for so many years and bears out the calls for a rereading of Peig’s texts.

Bibliography Almqvist, Bo (1990) ‘The Mysterious Micheál Ó Gaoithín, Boccaccio and the Blasket Tradition’, Béaloideas, 58, 75–140. Anon. (n.d.) ‘Peig Sayers Problem Page’. http://www.lifeisajoke.com/irish11html. htm. Bourke, Angela (1997) ‘Language, Stories, Healing’, in Bradley and Valiulis. ——— (2002a) ‘Oral Traditions’, in A. Bourke, S. Kilfeather, M. Luddy, M. Mac Curtain, G. Meaney, M. Ní Dhonnchadha, M. O’Dowd and C. Wills (eds), The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Cork University Press), vol. IV. ——— (2002b) ‘Spirituality and Religion in Oral Tradition’, in A. Bourke, S. Kilfeather, M. Luddy, M. Mac Curtain, G. Meaney, M. Ní Dhonnchadha, M. O’Dowd and C. Wills (eds), The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Cork University Press), vol. IV. Bourke, Angela and Patricia Lysaght (2002) ‘Life Stories’, in A. Bourke, S. Kilfeather, M. Luddy, M. Mac Curtain, G. Meaney, M. Ní Dhonnchadha, M. O’Dowd and C. Wills (eds), The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Cork University Press), vol. IV. Bradley, Anthony, and Maryann Gialanella Valiulis (1997) Gender and Sexuality in Modern Ireland (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press). Bunreacht na hÉireann – Constitution of Ireland (1937) (Dublin: Government Publications Office). Caball, John (1987 [1953]) The Singing Swordsman (Dublin: The Children’s Press). Cantwell, Horace (n.d.) ‘Total Cult’. http://www.ivenus.com/therightstuff/ features/RS-TC-FocalPoint-PegSayers-wk55.asp. Collins, Barry, and Patrick Hanafin (2001) ‘Mothers, Maidens and the Myth of Origins in the Irish Constitution’, Law and Critique, 12.1, 53–73. Coogan, Tim Pat (1993) De Valera: Long Fellow, Long Shadow (London: Arrow Books). Coughlan, Patricia (1998) ‘Peig Sayers and Feminism’, Letters, The Irish Times, 14 April. ——— (2007) ‘Re-Reading Peig Sayers: Women’s Autobiography, Social History and Narrative Art’, in Patricia Boyle Haberstroh and Christine St Peter (eds), Opening the Field: Irish Women Texts and Contexts (Cork University Press).



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Daly, Donnachada (2007) ‘Peig’, The Daly Blog. http://www.irishblogs.ie/ peig%20sayers or http://thedalyblog.com/2007/05/peig html. Deane, Seamus (1997) Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1790 (Oxford University Press). Ferriter, Diarmaid (2004) The Transformation of Ireland 1900–2000 (London: Profile Books). Foster, John Wilson (1987) Fictions of the Irish Literary Revival (Syracuse University Press). Gasaltogether.com (n.d.) http://www.gasaltogether.com/2007/10/29/paddywhackerytg4-24-oct. Gough, Julian (2005) Peig the Musical. http://www.melbatoast.org/2005/01/janusjuliet.htm. Harvey, Clodagh Brennan (1989) ‘Some Irish Women Storytellers and Reflections on the Role of Women in the Storytelling Tradition’, Western Folklore, 48.2, 109–28. Hogan, Dick (1998) ‘A Feminist Peig Sayers Chaffed at Being a Chattel’, The Irish Times, 3 January: 2. Lysaght, Patricia (1999) ‘Traditional Storytelling in Ireland in the Twentieth Century’, in Margaret Read MacDonald (ed.), Traditional Storytelling Today (Chicago and London: Fitzroy Dearbon). ——— (2000) ‘Change and Transition in the Folk Narrative Environment in Ireland in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’, in G. Hirschfelder, D. Schell and A. Schrutka-Rechtenstamm (eds), Kulturen – Sprachen – Übergänge. Festschrift für H.L. Cox zum 65. Geburtstag (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: Böhlau). Mac Curtain, Margaret (2008) Ariadne’s Thread (Galway: Arlen House). Moore, Pat (Fr) (1998) Letter, The Irish Times, 6 April. Mullin, Angela (2007) ‘Daniel O’Hara Goes Paddywhackery’, Irish Film and Television Network, 18 October. http://www.iftn.ie/news/?act1=record&aid= 73&rid=4280742&tpl=archnews&only=1. Murphy, Maureen (1997) ‘The Fiannula Factor: Irish Sibling Emigration at the Turn of the Century’, in Bradley and Valiulis. Mutran, Munira H., and Laura P.Z Izzara (2003) Kaleidoscopic Views of Ireland (São Paulo: Humanitas/FFLCH/USP). Myers, Kevin (2002) ‘An Irishman’s Diary’, The Irish Times, 4 April. Ní Dhuibhne, Eilis (2002) ‘International Folktales’, in A. Bourke, S. Kilfeather, M. Luddy, M. Mac Curtain, G. Meaney, M. Ní Dhonnchadha, M. O’Dowd and C. Wills (eds), The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Cork University Press), vol. IV. Noonan, James (1993) Biography and Autobiography: Essays on Irish and Canadian History and Literature (Ottawa: Carleton University Press). Ó Conaire, Breandán (1986) Language, Lore and Lyrics (Blackrock, County Dublin: Irish Academic Press). Ó Criomhthain, Tomás (1928) Allagar na hInise (Baile Átha Cliath: C S Ó Fallúin i gcomharle hOifig an tSoláthair). ——— (1929) An tOileánach.eag (Baile Átha Cliath: C S Ó Fallúin i gcomhar le hOifig an tSoláthair). O’Dowd, Mary, and Sabine Wichert (1995) Chattel, Servant or Citizen: Women’s Status in Church, State and Society (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies).




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Ó Háinlé, Cathal (1993) ‘Deformation of History in Blasket Autobiographies’, in James Noonan (ed.), Biography and Autobiography: Essays on Irish and Canadian History and Literature (Ottawa: Carleton University Press). Ong, Walter (1982) Orality and Literacy: The Technologising of the Word (London and New York: Routledge). Ó Súilleabháin, Muiris (1933) Fiche Blian ag Fás (Baile Átha Cliath: Clólucht an Talbóidigh). Ó Súilleabháin, Seán (1970) ‘Peig Sayers’, Eire-Ireland, 5.1, 86–91. O’Toole, Fintan (2003) ‘Irish Culture in a Globalised World’, in Munira H. Mutran and Laura P.Z. Izzara (eds), Kaleidoscopic Views of Ireland (São Paulo: Humanitas/FFLCH/USP). Prins, Yopie, and Maeera Schreiber (1997) Dwelling in Possibility: Women Poets and Critics on Poetry (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press). Radner, Joan N. (1989) ‘“The Woman Who Went to Hell”: Coded Values and Irish Folk Narrative’, Midwestern Folklore, 15.2, 109–17. ——— (ed.) (1993) Feminist Messages: Coding in Women’s Folk Culture (Chicago: University of Illinois Press). Sayers, Peig (1936) Peig – A Scéal Féin (Baile Atha Cliath: Clólucht an Talbóidigh). ——— (1938) Machtnamh Seana-Mhná (Baile Atha Cliath: Oifig An tSolathair). ——— (1962) An Old Woman’s Reflections (Oxford University Press). ——— (1974) Peig: The Autobiography of Peig Sayers of the Great Blasket Island (Dublin: Talbot Press). Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson (2001) Reading Autobiography (Minneapolis: University of Michigan Press). Thomson, George (1998) Island Home: The Blasket Heritage (Dingle: Brandon). Tyers, Pádraig (1998) Blasket Memories (Cork and Dublin: Mercier Press). Valiulis, Maryann (1995) ‘Neither Feminist nor Flapper: The Ecclesiastical Construction of the Ideal Irish Woman’, in Mary O’Dowd and Sabine Wichert (eds), Chattel, Servant or Citizen: Women’s Status in Church, State and Society (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies). Whitlock, Gillian (2000) The Intimate Empire: Reading Women’s Autobiography (London: Cassell).



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‘Yet Thou Did Deliver Me’: The Exemplary Life of Alice Thornton Anne Lear

At the beginning of the seventeenth century autobiographical writing in English had only just taken its first tentative steps; yet by mid-century it had grown to encompass an enormous number of works of what we would call self-writing, an increase largely resulting from the reformed religions’ focus on the development and maintenance of a personal relationship between God and the believer (Delany, 1969; Ebner, 1971).1 Such spiritually based lifewriting – in the form of diaries, journals, memoirs and full-length autobiographies – was often merged with personal and family histories to produce a flexible hybrid genre which could be both sacred and secular in its content, motivation and methodology.2 Moreover, situated as it was within the doctrines, beliefs and prayer practices of a community of believers, the genre gave the autobiographer ‘permission’ to construct what could otherwise be seen as a dangerously ‘unsocial’ individual self. Even though this increasingly popular and influential genre gave space to both men and women, it was women who had most to gain from a socially validated form of self-focus. Through the genre of spiritual autobiography women were permitted a means of escape from the restricting imperative of silence; but more importantly by using the as yet unfixed possibilities available to them in this new genre they were able to construct identities outside the simply relational ideal of being someone else’s wife, daughter or mother.3 Alice Thornton’s lifewriting forms a significant example of the possibilities of this new genre for the construction of a singular female identity which transcended the conventional cultural expectations of her time. At the most basic level, seventeenth-century ‘woman’ was expected to be a social creature. For a woman, the imperative to selfhood, whatever the cause, would be no easy task, and Thornton’s methodology had to 89



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be both carefully chosen and consistently deployed. The strategies she used – Providence and prayer – issued directly from her own society’s firmly held belief systems. When used in conjunction with the new genre of spiritual autobiography, these strategies enabled Thornton to construct an ambitiously admirable self which was both ‘unsocial’ in its singularity and ‘sociable’ in its potential role as an example to all. In her autobiographical writings Alice Thornton stated that she had been in the habit of writing about her life ‘ever since I could remember from my first youth and childhood’ (1875: 271–2).4 What may have motivated any childhood literary excursions remains unknown as none of these early writings have survived, but judging by her earliest surviving work, ‘the booke of remembrances …’, such writing was most likely impelled by a desire to record important instances of her family history and to engage in the common spiritual practice of recording God’s mercies to the author.5 However, it was the later elaborations of this early book – a series of three extended narratives, the first of which Thornton called ‘my first Booke of my Life’ – which formed the basis of the nineteenth-century edition entitled The Autobiography of Mrs Alice Thornton, of East Newton, Co. York. What we find in this Autobiography is the construction of an identity in which ‘God’s mercies’ take on an entirely more emphatic focus on the singularity of Thornton’s spiritual condition.6 This can be explained by a more immediate motivation for writing which impelled the author to make more extensive and sometimes dramatic use of the role of Providence in her life. In early 1668 Alice Thornton and her husband entered into marriage negotiations with the Reverend Thomas Comber, the local clergyman, on behalf of her eldest daughter; negotiations which seem to have precipitated a degree of resentment that arose from another claimant’s frustrated desire for Comber’s hand. This resentment merged with negative feelings arising from other internal family disputes to create a situation where Alice Thornton believed her own reputation and that of her family was under threat. After her husband’s death in late 1668 the situation rapidly escalated to include suggestions about Mr Thornton’s financial mismanagement and, more damaging still, gossip about Alice Thornton’s own romantic involvement with the Reverend Comber.7 Thornton’s renewed interest in constructing her life seems to have been an attempt at justification in response to this local gossip and the result was a series of self-presentations which position the Thornton persona as an exceptional individual. In the series of books which made up The Autobiography of Mrs Alice Thornton Thornton’s task appears to have been to create a life so full of providential deliverances of an



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extraordinary kind that no one could question her character or motives. This is partly borne out by her eagerness to set this record before her friends and family in late 1668. To begin the process of vindication she sent her trusted family servant Dafeny to her Aunt Norton with a copy of the first book of the series of three, ‘my first Booke of my Life’: The collections of God’s dealings and mercys to me and all mine till my widowed condition. That she might be able to satisfy all my friends of my life and conversation – that it was not such as my deadly enymyes suggested. (Thornton, 1875: 259) Very soon after, she received her first ‘review’ when her Aunt Norton returned it with word that it Did abundantly please and sattisfy her, and said that ‘it was not writt as if a weake woman might have don it, but might have become a devine’. (1875: 260) In the meantime Thornton was apparently attending to more recent events by writing these up in the second and third books of the series. Her methodology in this rewriting of her life probably differed little from the original model of the ‘God’s mercies’ genre; that is, to present each episode of God’s providential deliverance and to follow the episode with a section of prayer and praise. What did differ was the extent of the providential deliverance, the dramatic way in which she described it and the resulting exemplary Thornton persona. The ‘God’s mercies’ genre gave her the two tools she needed for an incontestable vindication: the use of a valid means of suggesting that she was an exceptional self by focusing on God’s providential deliverance of her young self over and over again; and, to counter any hint of pride arising from this ‘unsocial’ focus, the use of the common language of her Christian society to position herself as an unworthy and sinful member of fallen humanity. In its most basic formulation the action of Providence could explain and validate all human experience from the grandest to the most minute, from the happiest to the most woeful, something the Puritan Lucy Hutchinson was keen to point out at the beginning of her autobiographical fragment: such is the stupidity of blind mortals that instead of employing their studies in these admirable bookes of providence wherein God dayly



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exhibits to us glorious characters of his love, kindnesse, wisdome, and justice, they ungratefully regard them not, and call the most wonderfull operations of the greate God the common accidents of humane life, specially if they be such as are usuall, and exercised towards them in ages wherein they are not very capable of observation, and whereon they seldome employ any reflexion; for in things greate and extraordinary some perhaps will take notice of God’s working, who either forget or believe not that he takes as well a care and account of their smallest concernments, even the haires of their heads. (Hutchinson, 1973: 278) Hutchinson was concerned that ‘blind mortals’ did not appreciate that God’s power and Providence extended to all human activity, even the smallest and seemingly most mundane – nothing was accidental – particularly in those times such as childhood when observation and reflection are lacking. At the very beginning of the Thornton text we have an account of the young Alice Wandesford as an especially healthy child: I heard it observed that I was both a strong and healthfull childe all a long, never having had either the rickets or any other disease, for which I most humbly and heartily give thankes to the God of my salvation, which still had His gracious eye of Providence over me both at my birth, when my deare mother brought me forth in great perrill of her life, she being weake uppon the birth of all her children, having had seaven in all, four sons and three daughters. Yett the Lord gave me a sound healthfull body, straight limbes, and of a reasonable understanding, praised be His glorious name for ever! (Thornton, 1875: 3) Already there is a hint that this child is out of the ordinary; not only in the generally accepted sense that any child of the period had the special protection of Providence, but also in this particular case as the eighth child born of a mother who almost lost her own life in the process. Where we might expect a weak child in such circumstances, little Alice was notably strong. Perhaps there is some retrospective irony here in that this healthy baby was to be subject to so many serious illnesses throughout her life. It is possible that Thornton herself was suggesting this irony, one which prefigures Alice’s increasingly well-defined role as the suffering servant of an all-powerful God. Within the space of the next 15 years, young Alice was to experience seven ‘life-threatening’ physical illnesses and accidents, including two doses of smallpox, two gastric illnesses caused apparently by undercooked 10.1057/9780230294868 - The Unsociable Sociability of Women's Lifewriting, Edited by Anne Collett and Louise D'Arcens


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the skin of the braine was seene, and [I was] in great danger of death, beeing like to have bleed to death, it beeing soe desperate a wound. (Thornton, 1875: 4) Yet Thornton the autobiographer notes that by the Providence of God, and my deare mother’s skill and caire of me, she did make a perfect cure. (4) She presents an equally dramatic account of the other fall, six years later. The scene is set in some detail: Alice is playing on a swing with several young female friends some of whom were weary with pushing and, on Alice’s turn, asked one of the pages, ‘a French boy’, to do it instead. Alice, seemingly unaccountably, fears that something might happen and tries to stop the game but with no success. The pageboy pushes with too much enthusiasm and she falls: I fell downe upon my face, fell to the grownd, and light with such a violent force with all my weight on my chin-bone upward, that both the chin and chap-bones was almost brok in sunder, and putt the bone out of its place, and did raise a great lumpe as bigg as an egge under my chin and throte, which sudainly astonished me, and tooke away my breath in soe much as I was nigh death. (11) The earlier incident had resulted in a short meditation of thanksgiving, clearly written in later life, which sets the fall, happening as it did ‘in the beginning of my daies’ (5), within the general context of her future life. The second fall, however, occurred when she was ten and here Thornton the autobiographer was more careful to indicate that the young Alice was not personally at fault in any way. First of all Thornton indicates the providential aspect of her deliverance: But, oh! what great cause have I to cast my selfe downe att the feete of the great and dreadful Lord God, who am but dust and ashes, made by His power, and preserved by His Providence ever since I was borne, and has delivered me this time soe wonderfully from a sudaine and violent death, eaven when I was in a childish sport or play. (11) 10.1057/9780230294868 - The Unsociable Sociability of Women's Lifewriting, Edited by Anne Collett and Louise D'Arcens


beef and too much lobster, a bout of the ‘Irish disease’ and two head injuries from falls. None of these is portrayed as minor. The first head injury, occasioned by a fall when she was three years old, was a wound of only an inch long yet,

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Although I was not willing to swing at this time, yet did Thou deliver me. (11) Her account of this event is an instance of the multiple nature of the audience for a work such as this: Thornton herself, God, and her relatives and friends. Who is Thornton addressing here? The use of ‘thou’ implies that God is the audience and that she is communicating the fact of her faith in his Providence. However, Thornton makes sure here that there is not even the suspicion of a fault, telling the reader that the young Alice wanted nothing to do with the game. Thornton is highlighting two related points: her acknowledgement that the power of Providence extends to the overview of simple childhood play; and that the deliverance was from an event in which the young Alice was absolutely guiltless. The attempt to deflect blame even when none could reasonably be attached may well indicate excessive humility in the face of God. It may also of course be meant for her potential secular audience, the small community of friends and family to whom she sent her autobiography and to whom she directed her ‘justification’ (259–60). What is certain is that what she is doing here is to indicate her singularity. Her statement of abundant thanks is useful as a narrative signifier that God has delivered her even from the effects of silly childish play and that she deserved such deliverance because of her fundamental innocence and, perhaps, because of her potential future Christian piety. Thornton also depicts her childhood gastric illnesses as life-threatening. The first, when she was just four years old, had been caused by eating beef ‘which was not well boiled’ (5). From this reasonably innocuous beginning came the predictable ‘extreame vomiting’ and the less predictable ‘meassells’ (6). It is not clear what she means by this; perhaps a fever or redness of complexion, but spots, those dreaded signs of smallpox, are nowhere mentioned. Whatever the actual illness was, her carers ‘almost despaired of my life’, a phrase that invariably accompanies Alice Thornton’s illnesses and misadventures. Soon, however, she recovered: I was spaired from death at that time, and by His blessing uppon the use of good meanes was recovered of my health perfectly againe. (6) God’s providential overview of the medicine for a five-year-old child was not too minute a task, and soon Thornton the autobiographer



At this point it becomes necessary to ensure that no blame attaches to Alice, even ‘in childish play’:

takes time to indicate that young Alice was, at the age of six, spiritually mature enough to recognize this. First of all Thornton gives the young Alice an insight into ‘the incomprehencable power and infinite majestie of Allmightie God, Who by His wisdome made all things in heaven and earth’ (7) – that great, general action of Providence as outlined by Hutchinson. At the conclusion of her meditation, however, the thanksgiving is for her special spiritual insight. It is the six-year-old Alice persona who gives Him my hearty thankes for His great and perticuler love and favour to me, a little childe, in giving understanding and reason to know there is a God that ruleth in heaven and earth, and doeth whatever He will, and to reward them that serves Him truly with joy in heaven that should never end. (7) The implication of this is that already the young Alice is on the way to this heavenly reward, something signalled by God’s favour to her in her various recoveries from her childhood illnesses. Twelve years later eating ‘a little piece of lobster’ similarly brought her again ‘nigh unto’ death, but here, too, ‘itt pleased God to preserve me’ (39). In the course of this incident there is an interesting variation in the way God’s protective Providence worked. Early in the illness Alice had ‘taken phisick’ which exacerbated her condition, in fact causing the life-threatening and ‘exceeding terrible vomiting and purging’. It could, of course, be said that this too was a direct result of God’s providential action but Thornton gives no indication of this potentially negative impact. It is only later in her description of the episode that God’s providential overview is directly attached to the treatment given when, by the gracious blessing of God upon some respitt and things given by Mr. Matrum, with my deare mother’s caire, [that] I escaped that desperate fitt. (39) It appears that, as far as Thornton’s particular experience is concerned, God’s Providence can only have positive outcomes. Visitations of the smallpox were a much-feared occurrence especially when the child was very young. Alice’s first experience, when she was five, was a mild attack and the autobiographer acknowledges the good fortune of her preservation by a God ‘that did not suffer that dissease to rage or indanger my life’ (6). The later attack, when she was 15, was much more virulent. Thornton engages in her own diagnosis of the




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being stroke with feare seeing him so sadly used and all over very read, I immediately fell very ill, and from that time grew worse till I grew so dangerously ill and inwardly sicke, that I was in much peril of my life. (33) Despite being again ‘well nigh death’ God saw to it that ‘the malignity of that disease abated when there was many in that place died of it’ (34). There is a suggestion here again that Alice herself has God’s special protection and is being saved for a purpose. That purpose becomes a little more obvious when the narrative goes on to describe the case of a household member who did not survive an attack of smallpox. Frank Kelly was a young Irish boy whom Thornton’s father had ‘adopted’ when he was Lord Deputy of Ireland. Frank was converted by the family from Roman Catholicism and travelled with Alice’s mother and her children back to England, after Lord Deputy Wandesford’s death during the Irish Rebellion. Frank is presented by Thornton as ‘a patterne of much goodnesse and virtue’ even at nine years of age. After he caught the smallpox, This poore boy, all along his sickenesse still praied for me; when he heard I was in danger of death, desired with teares that God would be pleased to spaire my life, and to blesse me, that I might live to do much good to others, as to him, and that he might rather be taken away and I spaired. (35, italics added) This rather self-congratulatory claim by the autobiographer is contained within a set-piece ‘holy dying’ scene, one of many throughout the narrative.8 However, it is the only one to draw attention directly to Alice herself, perhaps because it would not necessarily be expected by a reader that a young household servant would single her out unless she was an exceptional person. Another of Alice Thornton’s childhood and adolescent illnesses was perhaps the most inconvenient. Just as her mother and siblings were escaping from the disorder caused by the Irish Rebellion, young Alice came down with an attack of ‘a desperate flux, called the Irish disseas’ (31). Again she was ‘nigh unto death’ and her illness caused the family an unwanted delay of ten weeks in the English coastal town of Neston.



spread of this disease from her brother to herself, attributing it to a dual cause: her small pet dog which ‘carried’ the disease to her and her first horrified sight of her brother’s scarred complexion,


O this is a night worthy to be observed in all our generations after us, October 23, 1641, when the Lord did bring us (as He had don to the children to Israell) out of the land of Egypt. (31 note) Illnesses and injuries were a part of any child’s life in the period and I am not suggesting that Thornton had more or less than the norm nor that she and her family had no cause to worry. It was simply the case that any illness could be fatal. Yet it is rare to find such a dramatic focus on this potential outcome. Sarah Mendelson has noted that the genre of ‘God’s mercies’, by recording the high and low points of a person’s life, tended ‘to convey an atmosphere of crisis’ (1985: 188). While this is true of Thornton’s work, there is also a clear impression that her accounts are being deliberately ‘massaged’ to suggest an extraordinary series of life-threatening illnesses and an equally extraordinary series of interventions by God to ensure her recovery. None of the ‘lows’ are her fault and all of them are turned into spiritual and, therefore, personal highpoints by providential deliverance. Moreover, this is a pattern which is not confined to illness but is extended to other kinds of misadventure and accident as well. A good example occurs when Thornton is describing a coach accident which happened when she was around ten years of age. The ‘facts’ of the accident are that the coach was on a narrow road by a river and the coachman apparently became overcautious, and ran the coach off the road on the side away from the river. In her description, however, Thornton dramatizes another, more dangerous, imagined outcome: seeing the apparent danger of falling, by Providence he rather chose to throw the coach on the right hand towards the dry land, upon a banke side, which did hurt some of us, than to fall on the left hand, there being a great river close by the coach, which, if we had gon down on that side, it had bin impossible we could have bin saved, any of us, but all in the coach and horses had been utterly lost and perished in that deepe river. (Thornton, 1875: 9–10) Not content with a real accident Thornton chooses to deliver the more dramatic imagined alternative as well; indeed, she writes as if that one had actually happened, and gives it the kind of catastrophic outcome – ‘all … had been utterly lost and perished’ – that her imagination required.



Not one to underestimate potential danger, Thornton later gives her family’s escape a biblical gloss:

Anne Lear

It is the accumulation of these several deliverances, and the dramatic nature of their descriptions, which suggests an especially focused providential protection of the young Alice Thornton. The risk attached to this, of course, is the sin of pride.9 However, Thornton had the means to counter this. Even though the general effect is to suggest that Alice is a singular individual, saved from death and disaster, she is saved, so that she can live out her life as an example to all. The early sections of the autobiography, then, serve to set up the persona of the young Alice Thornton as someone worth saving; someone worth the attention of God’s special Providence. Later, when an older Alice continues to feel this benefit, and the potentially ‘unsocial’ nature of her singularity becomes more apparent, Thornton the autobiographer takes increasing care to make more use of her second ‘sociable’ strategy, prayerful reflection in the language of her spiritual community, to show her profound sense of her part in the general sinfulness of humanity. Her meditations on events in her life now begin to include descriptions of her as an unworthy sinner even though, in keeping with her primary aim, Thornton is careful to avoid emphasizing any serious shortcomings. The occasions when this method is most apparent are her childbirth experiences after she married William Thornton. Alice Thornton had nine live births and her written construction of these in her autobiographical works has occasioned some degree of critical interest. Mary Beth Rose sees these as important instances of Thornton’s attempt to give herself an identity of ‘heroic endurance’ (2002: 72–3). This is certainly the case but, as I have indicated, her earlier life had also been constructed with this heroic persona already in mind. Nevertheless, the childbirth experiences did give Thornton an unparalleled opportunity to extemporize at length on her personal suffering, both physical and spiritual, and, just as importantly, on her release from this suffering. Throughout the accounts Thornton is concerned with the nature of her pregnancies, any attendant accidents or ominous occurrences, the births themselves, and the physical and spiritual effects. She is interested in the treatments prescribed; she sometimes offers her own advice to the physicians; and she includes what might be seen as an almost pathological amount of detailed discussion of her symptoms. Her first childbirth experience, when she was 26 years old, can be seen as a paradigm of the method she continues to follow. Her period of pregnancy is characterized in this instance by three worrying circumstances: an excess of bodily heat, an eclipse of the sun ‘which affrighted’ her, and a journey to visit Mr Thornton’s family when she was seven



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months into her pregnancy (Thornton, 1875: 84–6). On the way home Thornton had to endure a difficult walk down a steep hillside which she directly blames for killing ‘my sweete infant in my wombe’ (86). She is so ill after this walk that she longs for death but she and her two attending physicians decide on a bloodletting which cures her but does not save her baby girl who dies just half an hour after birth. The section where Thornton deals with the physical after-effects of this birth contains perhaps the most well-known extract from her lifewriting: The effects of this feaver remained by severall distempers successively, first, after the miscarriage I fell into a most terrible shakeing ague, lasting one quarter of a yeare, by fitts each day twice, in much violency, so that the sweate was great with faintings, being thereby weakened till I could not stand or goe. The haire on my head came off, my nailes of my fingers and toze came of, my teeth did shake, and ready to come out and grew blacke. (87–8) Immediately after this description of detailed physical suffering Thornton includes a lengthy ‘praier and thanksgiveing’ for her recovery. It is a good example of a spiritual response which places her experience of exceptional suffering and exceptional delivery within the framework of the generalizing and communal language of her religion. First of all comes the gratitude to a God who has saved her, if not her child, whose own death, predictable and perhaps predestined by the ominous pregnancy, is barely mentioned. Thornton constructs and justifies her suffering as a necessary part of a Christian’s religious experience: O Lord, this dispensation of afflictions and great sicknesses is the way and meanes to bring me unto Thee, and the fittest for me to injoy, letting me see thereby Thy mighty power to cast downe and raise me up again, even in my desperate condition. (88) Throughout her retelling of the episode there has been a hint that the suffering mother was not entirely uncomplaining and Thornton makes heavy use of biblically inflected language to excuse this perceived ‘fault’, particularly the language of the psalmist: in mine anguish of spirit and heavinesse I did complaine. (88)




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These suggestions of a more explicit personal fault are mixed in with general exclamations of unworthiness which mitigate any sense of specific personal failure: my desires was to cleave unto Him that I had offended … but Thou art He that can wash and cleance my defiled polluted soule, for whoe is there that liveth and sinnest not? ... sanctifie this Thy dealing unto Thy handmaide; lett it incourage me to put my whole trust and confidence in Thee alone, and that I accept of the punishment of my iniquities, and learne by this not to offend. (88–9) Make this fire of affliction instrumentall to purge the drosse of all my sins of negligencys, ignorances, and willfull transgressions, that I may come out like gold out of the furnish. (90) This final flourish from Proverbs 17:3 (‘The firing pot is for silver, and the furnace for gold: but the Lord trieth the hearts’) stamps a seal of biblical authority on her suffering and her life. Thornton has subsumed any personal fault of complaint during her suffering within the overall fault caused by original sin, the ‘iniquities’ of simply being human. This language allows her both to portray herself as part of the community of Christian sufferers and, at the same time, to single herself out as a special member of that community. In a way she re-enacts the theological paradox of salvation for each and all, which was so much a part of the reformed Protestant position. But in Thornton’s case the contextual detail of her physical suffering and the extraordinary nature of her recovery contribute more to the singular experience her autobiography suggests and the exemplary identity it constructs. In a similar manner, in her thanksgiving after the birth and death of her child, William, Thornton elaborates upon her ‘lowly’ but fully human condition: I humbly crave to pardon all things in me which He ses amisse, and cleance away my sins by the blood of my dearest Saviour and Redeemer. And that my soule may be bettered by all these chastisements He pleaseth to lay upon me, His vilde worme and unprofitable servant, under all His dispensations that hath laid heavy upon me



Lord, lett me be kept by Thy grace from any displeasing thought of Thee, for Thou art good and doest good allwaies. (89)


The notion that suffering and affliction were punishments for personal sinfulness is common in the spiritual writing of the period. Even when there is no obvious specific sin which comes to mind, the autobiographer sometimes casts around for a likely cause. Thornton, too, searches in a poignant fashion for a possible failure and fixes on the not uncommon one of excessive human attachment.10 After the deaths of two of her babies, William and Christopher, Thornton notes that she has perhaps placed too much store on this kind of earthly happiness: My pretty babe was in good health, suckeing his poore mother, to whom my good God had given the blessing of the breast as well as the wombe … But it so pleased God to shorten this joy, least I should be too much transported. (124) least I should too much sett my heart in the satisfaction of any blessing under heaven, it seemed good to the most infinitt wise God to take him from me. (166) This is a sad indictment of the extremities of the Calvinist position on sinful humankind, but it is not a personal sin in the same way as the blasphemy and despair which the sectarian Hannah Allen cites as parts of her sinful past.11 Thornton does on occasion admit to personal feelings of what we can interpret as resentment, as seen in the above extract on the death of her ‘pretty babe’ William. When Joyce dies Alice Thornton is even more affected: I dare not, I will not repine at this chasetisement of the Lord, though it may seeme never soe troublesome to part with my suckeing childe of my wombe. (151) There is no hint, however, that this specific instance is to be considered a sinful attitude and she soon deflects attention to the more positive instances of God’s goodness to her: Good is the will of the Lord, inasmuch as He hath spaired my deare husband’s life, which I soe earnestly begged of him, spairing my own also, who is the vildest of His creatures. (151)



for these many yeares, whereby He has corrected me, but not given me over to death and destruction, for which I humbly magnifie His glorious name for ever. (125)

Anne Lear

Nevertheless, Thornton has to be careful throughout in case a literal interpretation may imply more blame than she ‘truly’ deserves. An interesting example of the fine line Thornton the autobiographer sometimes walks in constructing a persona of general guilt and individual innocence can be seen in her account of the birth and death of her fifth child, and first son. This tragic incident was responsible for a litany of miseries. First of all she was ‘upon the racke in bearing my childe with such exquisitt torment, as if each lime weare divided from other, for the space of two houers’ (95). When he was finally born he died after only half an hour. Thereafter, however, Thornton suffered for months with ‘the beginning of a consumption’, with lameness of her knee for three months, and for six months with haemorrhoids (96). She makes an attempt to place this suffering within the general parameters she uses throughout: But alas! All these miseries was nothing to what I have deserved from the just hand of God, considering the great failings of my duties is required both as to God and man. (96) So far so good; she remains within the formula of general punishment. But this is followed by a curious qualification: And though I am not given over to any sinful inormous crimes which thousands are subject to, yet I am not pure in the sight of God. (96) The necessity for a direct declaration of her own personal innocence even within the general lament for her fallen human condition shows the basic antagonism between two of her key aims – to suggest singular providential deliverance and general Christian humility. However, for Thornton, it was a productive antagonism: the ‘humility’ demanded by her God and her society was as necessary as the ‘unsocial’ excellence of character she gave herself in her account of her life. Indeed, the writer’s enthusiasm for the sheer narrative possibilities of that character sometimes led her to grasp any opportunity for self-praise when it could be presented as part of a dramatic scene. For example, during the description of her illness after her son Robert’s birth she includes a section of dialogue which points directly to her own prescience in extremis: My lady York out of her fright came to my bedside and wept over me, and said: ‘My deare cozen, you that helpes every one to save them, cannot you tell me what would do you good in this extreamity to save your owne?’ On which it pleased my good God to enable me, she laing her



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Thornton’s sense of the dramatic, indeed her scene-building skills, are apparent here as they are throughout the text. The quasi-naturalism of the presentation of the protagonist’s desperate instructions is, however, confounded a little by the inclusion of Lady York’s seemingly rather gratuitous, and in the circumstances time-wasting, compliment. Much of the narrative here and elsewhere does read like fiction and such dramatic exaggeration is intrinsic to Thornton’s method of constructing herself as exemplary (Lear, 2005). Indeed, there is some internal evidence that this dramatic tendency was a ‘real-life’ one as well and one not wholly welcomed by her relatives. After her ninth childbirth experience one of her female attendants, who may well have been with her for the four months it took her to recover from the birth, scornfully present[ed] my reall weaknesse and sad condition to some in secret, saing that I ailed nothing, and was as well as she, and made myselfe a talke to my neighbours. (Thornton, 1875: 167) The narrative delight the author frequently displays suggests that, as well as answering the immediate motivation of local gossip, Thornton may have been indulging a deeper and more personal desire to construct her self as exceptional. If so, the need for the ‘sociable’ strategies she chose would have been even more vital for her project. The narrative, dramatic and spiritual exuberance of Alice Thornton’s lifewriting has given us a seventeenth-century female self whose surprising individuality continues to reach out to us nearly four centuries later. Her large-scale autobiographical project is the result of ‘unsocial sociability’ in action. At a time when women were expected to be selfeffacing or at the least to present a ‘relational’ identity Alice Thornton deliberately constructed her ‘self’ to stand out from the crowd of other women. Her ‘unsocial’ emphasis on her own personal worth was a bold claim of exceptional virtue motivated initially by vicious local rumour but quite possibly enhanced by her own independent desire for admiration and respect. Thornton needed social approval for the exceptional self she was to create. The tools she used to fashion that self – the new genre of spiritual autobiography, the widespread belief in the action of Providence, and the prayer language of Bible and Church – were key strategies authorized by her society. But the self created was spectacularly singular.



eare to my mouth, to say only: ‘Goe into closet, right hand shelf, box, pouder, syrup of cloves, give me’. (141 note, italics added)

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1. Delany’s study ranges from the purely secular autobiography through the Catholic, Anglican and Presbyterian mixture of secular and spiritual material to the largely spiritual focus of sectarian works. His valuable study contains only a postscript chapter on female autobiographers. Ebner’s work relies on a more clearly developed theological basis for categorizing spiritual autobiography into those having a Baptist, Anglican or Quaker/Presbyterian perspective. 2. See Sara Heller Mendelson’s important chapter ‘Stuart Women’s Diaries and Occasional Memoirs’ (Mendelson, 1985: 181–210). In her influential critical study, Hilary Hinds focuses specifically on spiritual lifewriting by sectarian women. She, too, takes careful note of the hybridity of the genre even within the subgrouping of sectarian spiritual writing. See chapter 1, ‘Sectarian Writing, the Literary Canon, and Feminist Criticism’ (Hinds, 1996: 1–17). Sharon Cadman Seelig’s ‘Introduction: Mapping the Territory’ (Seelig, 2006: 1–14) raises several important questions about reader expectations of these early texts and focuses on the flexibility of the genre. 3. Linda Peterson makes much of this relational identity in the works of ‘seventeenth-century women who wrote family memoirs’ and whose work was ‘domestic in its focus, relational in its mode of self-construction’ (Peterson, 1993: 90). She mentions Thornton’s work as an example of this overarching schema. Certainly Thornton the autobiographer uses her relational position – as mother, wife, daughter and sister – as a ‘mode of selfconstruction’. However, I would rather emphasize Thornton’s achievement in constructing the singularity of her autobiographical subject than focus, as Peterson has, on her nineteenth-century editor Jackson’s supposed attempt to construct Thornton for his own time. 4. All quotations from Thornton refer to the edition by Christopher Jackson (Thornton, 1875). For a discussion of the manuscript sources of Alice Thornton see Anselment (2005). Anselment discusses the rather frustrating and complex situation as it currently stands. There were three main manuscripts which the nineteenth-century editor Christopher Jackson worked from: volume 1 of 303 pages, volume 2 of 291 pages (which is now lost) and volume 3 of 216 pages. As well as these, Jackson also referred to a smaller book of 196 pages (which is now lost but is available on microfilm). Jackson relied mainly on the three larger volumes but had access to the fourth. Approximately two-thirds of his material came from volume 1, most of the rest from volume 2 and the remaining parts from volume 3. Jackson always indicates the volume of origin in his text and sometimes relegates selected material to notes. Despite these textual difficulties, or perhaps because of them, Anselment regards Jackson’s work as a ‘responsibly edited, albeit limited version of Thornton’s original autobiography’ (2005: 137). Jackson’s version is the only one which is fairly readily available and which I will be using throughout. It is, of course, difficult to ascertain just how much of the extended versions of Thornton’s life was newly written and how much reedited in expanded and enhanced versions of past writing. 5. Mendelson notes that ‘the narrative of God’s mercies to the author’ was a ‘highly influential genre which helped to shape both form and content of



Notes

6.

7. 8.

9.

10.

11.

female reminiscences’ (1985: 187). Anselment also notes the ubiquity of the genre ‘as essentially a spiritual exercise common among contemporary testaments to divine deliverances from affliction’ (2001: 1). Anselment comments at length on the relationship between the ‘booke of remembrances …’ and the ‘first Booke of my Life’. He notes that ‘the second is a less conventional, more deliberate response to the exigencies of [Thornton’s] life’ (2001: 1). See Thornton (1875: 222–32, 275–6). The scandalous rumours are also discussed by Anselment (1996: 31–3) and more briefly by Rose (2002: 229). Ebner (1971: 84–5) says of this practice: ‘edifying death scenes are nearly as numerous in The Autobiography of Mrs. Alice Thornton as formal prayers acknowledging providential deliverances’ which earlier he gives as ‘nearly inexhaustible’ (1971: 83). Alexandra Walsham notes that it was a recognized danger that an individual’s too introspective and exhaustive accounting of providential action could become ‘both suspiciously self-confirming and potentially egotistical in the extreme’ (1999: 17). Mary Rich, writing at the same time as Thornton, has a similar reaction to the death of her infant daughter. In this case, however, Rich suggests that it was her husband’s extraordinary fondness for the child that may have been the reason for her death (1848: 17–18). Allen details her cursing and blasphemies, her disobedience to her elders and her several suicide attempts in her 1683 Satan his Methods and Malice Baffled (in Graham et al. [1989: 200–6]).

Bibliography Anselment, R.A. (1996) ‘The Deliverances of Alice Thornton: The Re-creation of a Seventeenth-Century Life’, Prose Studies, 19.1, 19–36. ——— (2001) ‘“My First Booke of my Life”: The Apology of a SeventeenthCentury Gentry Woman’, Prose Studies, 24.2, 1–14. ——— (2005) ‘Seventeenth-Century Manuscript Sources of Alice Thornton’s Life’, Studies in English Literature, 45.1, 135–56. Delany, P. (1969) British Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul). Ebner, D. (1971) Autobiography in Seventeenth-Century England (The Hague: Mouton). Graham, E., H. Hinds, E. Hobby and H. Wilcox (eds) (1989) Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen (London and New York: Routledge). Hinds, H. (1996) God’s Englishwomen: Seventeenth-Century Radical Sectarian Writing and Feminist Criticism (Manchester University Press). Hutchinson, L. (1973) Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson with the Fragment of an Autobiography of Mrs. Hutchinson, ed. J. Sutherland (Oxford University Press). Lear, A. (2005) ‘Thank God for Haemorrhoids! Illness and Identity in a Seventeenth-Century Woman’s Autobiography’, Women’s Writing, 12.3, 337–46.




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Mendelson, S.H. (1985) ‘Stuart Women’s Diaries and Occasional Memoirs’, in M. Prior (ed.), Women in English Society 1500–1800 (London: Routledge). Peterson, L. (1993) ‘Institutionalizing Women’s Autobiography: Nineteenth-Century Editors and the Shaping of an Autobiographical Tradition’, in R. Folkenflik (ed.), The Culture of Autobiography: Constructions of SelfRepresentation (Stanford University Press). Rich, M., Countess of Warwick (1848) Autobiography, ed. T.C. Croker (London: Percy Society). Rose, M.B. (2002) Gender and Heroism in Early Modern English Literature (University of Chicago Press). Seelig, S.C. (2006) Autobiography and Gender in Early Modern Literature: Reading Women’s Lives, 1600–1680 (Cambridge University Press). Thornton, A. (1875) The Autobiography of Mrs Alice Thornton of East Newton, Co. York, ed. C. Jackson for The Surtees Society (Durham, Edinburgh and London: Andrews, Whittaker and Blackwood). Walsham, A. (1999) Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press).



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Size Matters: The Oppositional Self-Portraiture of Emily Carr Anne Collett

Everything about Canadian artist Emily Carr was big. She painted huge canvases with great sweeps of movement and colour. Her subjects were the giant cedar and dense pine forests of west-coast Canada, wide expanses of sky and sea, and the exaggerated face and figure of First Nations ‘totem poles’.1 Carr’s work was energized by an emotional personality, a forceful creative drive and an intense spiritual yearning. Even the darkest forest depths radiated light and energy. Her prose exalted in the drama of life – its joys and anguish; her language tended towards excess. Carr’s writing did not have the smooth polish of a sophisticated stylist; rather it was crafted to emulate and to evoke the ‘truth’ of life as she knew it in the rawness of being and feeling. Carr herself was roundfaced, short but broad – a woman with bodily presence and an idiosyncratic style of dress that prioritized comfort (pragmatic and loose) over fashion (decorative and restrictive). She lived her life in the company of a monkey, a rat, various dogs and birds. She travelled alone into the wilderness and indigenous settlements of British Columbia and Alaska in the last decade of the nineteenth and first decades of the twentieth centuries, undaunted by her own fears or the expectations and reactions of others. For brief periods she had an old grey caravan, dubbed ‘the elephant’, towed into the depths of the forest that she might better capture the mystery of its green life-force on canvas. On return to domestic normality after one such trip, Carr reflects: The Elephant is bedded down opposite the Four Mile House in a quiet pasture. It is hard to settle down. The house feels stuffy and oppressive but the garden is joyful … I have uncovered ‘The Mountain’. It makes me sick. I am heavy in spirit over my painting. It is so 107



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But she didn’t quit. The ‘struggle for bigness’3 was a life struggle. To quit was to accept death – not only the death of the artist, but the death of the spirit and the death of the woman she believed herself to be. Emily Carr was an extraordinary woman, painter and writer whose impact and influence have gathered momentum over the course of this and the previous century such that she has engendered a Canadian industry (books, prints, exhibitions, museums, lectures, and all manner of marginalia and curiosity) devoted to the creation and maintenance of a myth, the celebration of a life, and one fuelled by the ongoing debate over the value of her artistic achievement and legacy. As biographer Susan Crean remarks, ‘Carr has long since superseded the category of “important woman artist” and has become a historical figure in her own right, a well-known Canadian and perennial source of controversy’ (2001: 13). Carr came to wide public attention and acclamation late in life, with the publication of Klee Wyck4 in 1941 – a volume of stories that, from the perspective of middle-age, primarily recounts the early years of her encounter and relationship with indigenous communities5 and individuals. The volume won the Canadian Governor General’s Literary award for that year. Appreciation of her painting, however, was slow to come in the West (British Columbia), but in the East (Ontario) she exhibited with the radical and influential Canadian ‘Group of Seven’ (a woman accepted into an exclusive masculine domain),6 and even in the very early stages of her career (1911), two of her paintings were selected for exhibition in the progressive Salon d’Automne (Paris) in the year that introduced the Cubists to the public. At the height of Carr’s career, a solo exhibition of her work was held at the Vancouver Art Gallery in October 1938. Eleven of the 28 pictures exhibited were sold, a greater number than those sold at any solo-exhibition previously held at the gallery, and reviews were ‘generous and enthusiastic’ (Tippett, 1982: 242). Vancouver artist Jock Macdonald described her as ‘undoubtedly the first artist in the country and a genius without question’ (quoted in Tippett, 1982: 242). The word ‘genius’ was applied some few months later when a review of ‘A Century of Canadian Art’, organized by the National Gallery of Canada and exhibited at the Tate Gallery, London, singled out Carr’s work for particular commendation from among 200 pieces. Art critic



lacking. What’s the use? Sometimes I could quit paint and take to charring. It must be fine to clean perfectly, to shine and polish and know that it could not be done better. In painting that never occurs. (Carr, 2006: 91–2 [16 September 1933])2

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If the word ‘genius’ can be applied to any Canadian artist it can be applied to her. She belongs to no school. Her inspiration is derived from within herself ... Her art is not easy to describe, and indeed her power can hardly be felt in the four works shown in London. It happens that I saw over a hundred of her paintings when I was in Victoria. To see them was rather like reading an epic. Four short quotations cannot adequately represent the cumulative effect of the whole. (1939; quoted in Tippett, 1982: 240) The words used to describe the artist and her art are big: magnificent, genius, epic; yet Emily Carr represented herself on page and canvas as small. She names herself ‘Small’ in the collection of stories based on her childhood, published as The Book of Small towards the end of her life. Titles of the autobiographical work that charts her life as a mature woman (The House of All Sorts) and the collection of her journals (Hundreds and Thousands) reduce the size of her accomplishment as an independent woman and artist by taking the childish form of sweets; and the book that documents ‘the growth of the poet’s mind’ – a portrait of the artist from baptism to the looming prospect of death and the promise of eternal life – is titled Growing Pains, as though she spoke merely of childhood dramas rendered small from the perspective of a ‘grown-up’. In letters to her literary editor and friend, Ira Dilworth, Emily is the ‘mouse’ that slips in and out of his waistcoat pocket. This literary representation of herself as diminutive corresponds to her portrait of ‘the little pine’ that pirouettes alone on the stage of the forest clearing, surrounded by ‘an audience’ of mature forest trees (see Figure 1). Given the bigness of Carr’s personal and artistic presence, this representation of herself as small is a curious anomaly upon which this chapter reflects and for which it offers explication based on a gendered inflection of Kant’s notion of ‘unsocial sociability’.

Kant and the problem of a gendered antagonism In a diary entry dated 20 March 1934, Emily Carr records her reactions to a particular experience of a typical Sunday. She is 63: I sailed up the church aisle Sunday late, so as to avoid the obnoxious soloist, and got there just in time for her solo. Then we had a hymn



Eric Newton observed that Carr was ‘at her best when she is working on a big scale. And her best is magnificent’:

Anne Collett

Figure 1 Emily Carr, The Little Pine, 1931, oil on canvas, 112.0 x 68.8 cm

and as I looked down at my book I discovered great splotches of whitewash on the sleeves of my coat. Then I further discovered I had gone to church in my very worst yard coat – whitewash and paint all over and two holes in the back as big as oranges and the lining hanging out. I laughed right out – I couldn’t help it – and caught Mr W.’s eye. He was holding forth and I suppose he thought I was laughing at him. Nothing for it but to sit it out. I got out during the last hymn, fuming.



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It’s too bad to wear even to the beach. A big worsted loop keeps it shut at the neck. I’m fed up with that church ... Mr. W. so tickled and smug ... Most of the parsons just chew words. If there is any juice in their performance they swallow it. It’s me that’s wrong, I guess. I want Christ’s teaching and living, not church dogma and doctrine. (Carr, 2006: 149–50) In this passage, typical of many others to be found throughout Carr’s various lifewritings, the artist exhibits the traits of an unsocial sociability that manifests in the struggle to maintain a place in her chosen community while insisting on the prerogative of singleness and, indeed, distinction. Carr is both oblivious and sensitively aware of her difference, critical – or more, scathing – of the soloist, the congregation, the minister and parsons generally, and yet also self-critical – acknowledging the possibility that she herself might be wrong. Pride and humility, anxiety and self-assurance, despair and equanimity, frustration with herself and with others, alternate with a rapidity that is wearing on the reader, and often wearing on Carr herself. The tension of the oppositional forces of the social and the unsocial as reflected in Carr’s lifewriting sometimes leads to stasis and depression, but might also be seen to be productive of a creative energy that would generate an art (the writing as well as the painting) of enormous vitality and surprising ‘freshness of seeing’.7 The human tendency to ‘antagonism’, or ‘the unsocial sociability of men’ (Kant, 1963: 15), as described in Kant’s ‘Fourth Thesis’ is identified as the creative force by which all a man’s powers are awakened, bringing him ‘to conquer his inclination to laziness and, propelled by vainglory, lust for power, and avarice, to achieve a rank among his fellows whom he cannot tolerate but from whom he cannot withdraw’ and thus, Kant reasons, ‘are taken the first true steps from barbarism to culture’. From these first steps proceed the gradual development of all talents and the refinement of taste (1963: 15). Thus the oppositional tendency towards both conformity and difference, towards community and singleness, sameness and difference – in other words, to the social and the unsocial – is that which, according to Kant, generates art. Although Kant does not specifically exclude woman from the antagonistic force of unsocial sociability that brings about civilization and the refinement of taste, not only his ‘universal’ use of the words ‘man’ and ‘men’ but his example of ‘an Arcadian shepherd’s life’ (Fourth Thesis) suggest that ‘woman’ is unrepresented and unrepresentative. She is excluded both from the ‘concord and contentment’ of the shepherd’s life, a life in which men ‘hardly reach a higher worth than their beasts’,




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and from the competitive arena of the civic society, described in the ‘Fifth Thesis’ as that in which and by which men achieve ‘all culture’ and all the art ‘which adorns mankind’ (1963: 17). Yet the example of artistic achievement represented by Emily Carr, and the tension evident in her lifewriting that might be deemed the product of Kant’s ‘unsocial sociability’, suggest not only that women also exhibit the tendency to antagonism, a tendency that is particularly strong in the artistic personality (and in terms of Kant’s thesis, the essential catalyst of artistic production), but that the woman artist also struggles against the gender bias of social conditioning (that being the social expectations of womanly behaviour) and is thereby antagonistic in ways that may be unproductive and ultimately act to exclude the artist from the society that sustains her and from which she requires support. This is to suggest then that the antagonism essential to the artist might itself be antagonistic to prevailing concepts of ‘woman’. Emily Carr’s self-representation is exemplar of this sometimes debilitating condition of the woman artist for whom the unsocial aspect of artistic antagonism is unfruitfully weighted with an additional gender-related antagonism. However, Carr’s paradoxical (some have said dishonest, and others just plain odd) self-representation demonstrates a generally effective strategy developed by Carr to counteract antagonism without annulling its productive potential. The diary entry that follows Carr’s record of her frustration with the small-mindedness of the religion delivered by the smug local parson in the parochial local church gives voice to a different kind of frustration, expressed as a weight against which she struggles as an artist. It is here also that Carr identifies the potential of an artistic talent that might result in the creation of something big – ‘a liveness’ – if only she works hard enough: small might become big. March 26 th [1934] Heavy today. Such a weight upon me ... Am working intensively this week. I make a sketch one quarter size, loose-knit and superficial but observed, bring it home and make a full-sheet one (oil on paper). I try to take it further than the small one and express all I know of that particular theme and the purpose of the sketch to wake and enter the place of it. What I am struggling most for is movement and expanse – liveness. (Carr, 2006: 150–1) The weight Carr feels, and that against which she remonstrates throughout her lifewritings, is not only the weight of desire and sense of responsibility that she feels as an artist, but also the weight of small-town



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colonial values, particularly as they impact upon a woman. Carr’s struggle to express the ‘movement and expanse’ of her internal and external world in her writing and painting was a monumental undertaking, in part because it put her at odds with received ‘ways of seeing’ God, Nature, Art and Woman.8

The contrary instincts of a vulgar woman9 Born in 1871 into the religious house of a colonial Victorian patriarch, the youngest of three sisters close in age and two elder by some years, Emily Carr was heir and subject to entrenched nineteenth-century attitudes and expectations (related to class and gender), in addition to the parochial attitudes of a small colonial outpost (Victoria, Vancouver Island, British Columbia). The story of the woman artist struggling to assert herself in a patriarchal culture is now a familiar one, but it is worth recounting Carr’s particular story here not only in order to demonstrate the contrary instincts at work in her life and writing, but also to give the reader a feel for the idiosyncracy and vitality of her prose style. ‘All our Sundays were exactly alike,’ she writes in The Book of Small; on Sundays, ‘every Bible and prayer-book in the house was puffing itself out, looking more important every minute ... Family prayers were uppish with big words on Sunday – reverend awe-ful words that only God and Father understood’ (Carr, 1942: 90–1). Although there is some kindness and understanding shown towards her father in The Book of Small, the relationship between father and daughter is represented with sometimes shocking harshness in Carr’s autobiography and journals. On the night of her 66th birthday, Emily wonders what Father felt on her arrival into the world: I can’t imagine him being half as interested as Mother. More to Father’s taste was a nice juicy steak served piping on the great pewter hotwater dish. That made his eyes twinkle. I wonder if he ever cosseted Mother up with a tender word or two after she’d been through a birth or whether he was as rigid as ever, waiting for her to buck up and wait on him. He ignored new babies until they were old enough to admire him, old enough to have wills to break. (Carr, 2006: 394–5 [13 December 1937]) Carr represents the rule of the Father as a repressive force against which she struggles throughout her life. Although Carr had a younger brother, he is described as ‘very delicate’ and thus coddled by Mother, so Emily, being something of a tomboy




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by personality and inclination, was allotted the role of surrogate son to her father: ‘Father kept sturdy me as his pet for a long time,’ Carr recalls in Growing Pains, ‘“Ah,” he would say, “this one should have been the boy”’ (Carr, 1946: 6). It becomes clear as the passage continues that the word ‘pet’ is pejorative: ‘Father insisted that I be at his heels every moment that he was at home’ (6). Carr describes the relationship as deteriorating as she begins to think for herself: ‘then I saw that I was being used as a soother for Father’s tantrums; like a bone to a dog ... I resented this and began to question why Father should act as if he was God’ (7). When the young Emily gives voice to her resentment she recalls that ‘Mother was supremely shocked; she had brought her family up under the English tradition that the men of a woman’s family were created to be worshipped. My insurrection pained her. She was as troubled as a hen that has hatched a duck’ (7). Here Carr identifies herself, as on many other occasions throughout her writing, as the odd one out – something of an ugly duckling: she is ‘[c]ontrary from the start’ (5) – an artist in the Romantic mould of alienated iconoclast, and a Kantian antagonist, but one for whom the mark of woman is a significant contributing factor that is not accounted for in either thesis. Carr represents herself in her autobiographical writing as a rebel and thus an outcast in terms of her person, her religious and artistic vision, and, importantly, her gender. In the story of ‘The Cow Yard’, for example, when the sisters are imagining their future lives, Carr’s two older sisters (Bigger and Middle) choose the acceptable roles of motherhood and missionary, while Small chooses to ‘join the circus and ride a white horse through hoops of fire’ (Carr, 1942: 17). Throughout Carr’s life the reaction of family and community members to instances of her idiosyncratic, flamboyant or contrary behaviour is shock, dismay and puzzlement (at least as interpreted and recorded by Carr herself). In the story ‘Singing’, Carr recalls the up-bubbling of joy she felt in the Cow Yard that found an outlet in singing: ‘As fire cannot help giving heat so Small’s happiness could not help giving song, in spite of family complaint ... They called her singing a “horrible row”, and said it shamed them before the neighbours, but Small sang on’ (29). The childhood tendency and family reaction so described are selected for inclusion in The Book of Small because they represent in miniature the large battle of Carr’s life as a woman and an artist: White fluttered through the cow-yard gate, Bigger’s apron heralding an agitated Bigger, both hands wrestling with the buttons of



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her apron behind and her tongue ready sharpened to attack Small’s singing. ‘It’s disgusting! Stop that vulgar row, Small! What must the neighbours think? Stop it I say!’ Small sang harder. (30) Carr is pitted against the domesticity of woman’s allotted role in life (the apron) and social convention (‘What must the neighbours think?’) that demands the suppression of her natural self – significantly, it demands she make herself small and muted when she is, in fact, expansive and loud. The social response to Small’s vulgar singing is symbolic of what she feels to be her equally unappreciated creative efforts in later life, and here it is clear that vulgarity is a label applied as much to her art because it is unwomanly as it is shockingly modern; and although Carr as ‘Small’ responds with bravado, singing harder and louder, this stance is difficult to maintain over any length of time. She does it tough, tougher than a comparable male artist, because she must also do battle with Woolf’s proverbial ‘angel in the house’.10 Indignation, disgrace, disgust and, correspondingly, discouragement and shame, are words that recur throughout the writing of Small and the record of a life from childhood to old age: the words represent Carr’s battle not only with others but with herself: ‘I so often feel I am not much use to my fellow men either by working or being alive. Perhaps it comes of the quiet ignoring of my work by my own folk, that I have been reared up to feel my profession rather a useless, selfish one’ (Carr, 2006: 262 [6 August 1935]). It is these selfish passions of men that, following Kant’s theory of unsocial sociability, are essential to the production of culture and the creation of art, yet this selfishness in a woman is understood both by Carr herself and her community to be unwomanly; and although the bohemian artist might be scorned by the bourgeois class, the pursuit of such a ‘profession’ attracts greater moral condemnation in a woman for whom ‘useless’ is a comment as much on her denial of wife and motherhood, as on the dubiousness of the profession itself. Something of the complexity of Carr’s position as singular woman artist can be seen in her conflicted attitude towards exhibiting her art. She both desires publicity and shies away from it. Carr complains that the public rarely appreciates her work in the manner she would like and thus she feels disconsolate and disappointed in the work she has displayed, despite initial belief in the value of that work. In April 1935 Carr




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Now the third exhibition is hung, my modern landscapes and modern Indian things, which look somehow lacking and dark. Maybe I am tired and that’s the reason. How completely alone I’ve had to face the world, no boosters, no artist’s backing, no relatives interested, no bother taken by papers to advertise, just me and an empty flat and the pictures. (Carr, 2006: 243 [5 April 1935]) And yet despite bouts of self-defeat and depression, she is ultimately agreeably surprised at the success of the exhibition: on 7 April, the sixth and last day of the exhibition, she writes: ‘It has been far beyond my expectations in success’ (245). The rewards however were hard-won, and, once won, were regarded by Carr with moral suspicion and some trepidation. When in 1937 the Vancouver Art Gallery expressed an interest in acquiring some of her paintings – an indicator of value finally accorded her work by the art world, the Canadian West and the nation, Emily confesses to feeling afraid: Suppose this sudden desire to obtain ‘Emily Carrs’ were to knock me into conceit. Suppose I got smug and saw the dollar sign as I worked. That would be worse than dying a ‘nobody’, a thousand times worse. When they sat picking possibilities to be sent forward a great revolt filled me. (386 [3 May 1937]) Is it preferable then to be small than big? Having achieved ‘success’, does Carr decide it is perhaps better to be locked out than locked in?11 It is easy to feel somewhat baffled and indeed frustrated by Carr’s apparent lack of satisfaction no matter what the result either with herself or with her public. Is she just plain irascible, a malcontent who refuses to be happy? Perhaps she subscribes to the theory that to feel content or any measure of satisfaction is the death of the artist; or perhaps Carr can never feel an assuredness or a confidence in herself and her art that would seem to come so much more easily to a man.

To be or not to be a-part: the Big question Anticipating her meeting with the Group of Seven, Carr acknowledges the group of male artists as ‘very interesting and big and inspiring, so



held a number of private exhibitions of her work over a week, recording her feelings and the reaction of the public in her journal. On the fourth day of the show she writes:

different from the foolish little artists filled with conceit that one usually meets’, and declares her desire for ‘a share’ – ‘I want to have my share, to put in a little spoke for the West, one woman holding up my end,’ but is also unsure how the men will react to her work, feeling that they will perhaps be ‘dissatisfied’ (Carr, 2006: 24 [Tuesday, 15 November 1927]). A day later she again records the difference gender makes, writing: ‘I wonder if these men feel, as I do, that there is a common chord struck between us. No, I don’t believe they feel so toward a woman’ (25 [Wednesday, 16 November 1927]). When Lawren Harris acknowledges her as ‘one of us’ she responds with delight but also with selfdoubt and finally with some degree of jealousy: Oh, how wonderful to think they feel that! Their works call to my very soul. Will they know what’s in me by those old Indian pictures, or will they feel disappointment and find me small and weak and fretful? Have the carps and frets and worries that have eaten into my soul, since I returned from Paris full of ambitions and then had to struggle out there alone, made me small and mean, poor and petty – bitter? They too have had to struggle and buffet and battle, but they’ve stood together and the fire in them has burned steadily. They’re rising above it with sincerity, bigness and courage. (27–8 [Friday, 18 November 1927]) The men have stood together. They are big. In contrast, Carr is small and alone. Carr recognizes that she has stood alone not only because she is unconventional as an artist but because she is a woman: a woman who painted in unwomanly fashion. It was only a decade before her birth that art critic Leon Légrange prescribed the form and scope of art best suited to the male and female sex respectively: Male genius has nothing to fear from female taste. Let men conceive of great architectural projects, monumental sculpture, and the most elevated forms of painting … In a word, let men busy themselves with all that has to do with great art. Let women occupy themselves with those types of art which they have always preferred, such as pastels, portraits, and miniatures. Or the painting of flowers, those prodigies of grace and freshness which alone can compete with the grace and freshness of women themselves. (1860; quoted in Chadwick, 1990: 40–1) Even the Union des femmes peintres et sculpteurs, established in Paris in 1881, an organization of professionally ambitious women artists, did




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not move much beyond the feminine art prescribed by Légrange. The first president of the Union, Madame Leon Bertaux, called on women artists to create l’art féminin – an art intended to ‘console the heart, charm the mind and appeal to the eye’.12 Although Carr would break out of this mould, setting herself apart from other women artists of her time and place, like Sophie Pemberton and Grace Judge (described by Moray as ‘two prominent contemporaries in British Columbia’ [2002: 79]), the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia holds a number of miniature watercolours attributed to a young Carr that would certainly qualify as l’art féminin. The watercolours depict the subjects writ-small that would feature throughout Carr’s career – forest, water, sky and the native canoe. But one tiny card in particular is a perfect specimen of the art Légrange recommends for women: a miniature palette of a picturesque scene, decorated with the ‘grace and freshness’ of flowers and swallows. The palette conforms to prescribed Victorian femininity in shape, shade, medium and size – it is small, delicate, pale, still and sentimental – providing a dramatic contrast to the big work of Carr’s middle and later years. Carr herself describes the painting of this early period as ‘nibbl[ing] at silhouetted edges’ (Carr, 1946: 79). This was painting that ‘followed the ordinary Art School curriculum – drawing from antique, still-life painting, portraiture, design and landscape’. ‘I drew boats and houses, things made out of tangible stuff,’ she recalls, but goes on to remark that, ‘Unknowingly I was storing, storing, all unconscious, my working ideas against the time when I should be ready to use this material’ (79). The size of the shift that Carr underwent is evident in an admonishment and reminder she delivers to herself some 30 years after the miniatures were painted: Do not forget life, artist. A picture is not a collection of portrayed objects nor is it a certain effect of light and shade nor is it a souvenir of a place nor a sentimental reminder, nor is it a show of colour nor a magnificence of form, not yet is it anything seeable or sayable. It is a glimpse of God interpreted by the soul. (Carr, 2006: 90 [9 September 1933]) What Carr referred to as ‘fresh seeing’ in her first public lecture on art (given in 1930 to the Victoria branch of the Women’s Canadian Club), was primarily brought about by the impact of west-coast Indian totem poles, exposure to the European modernist painters – especially Cézanne – and her journey to the east coast where she discovered the work of the Canadian ‘Group of Seven’. The description of this moment of seeing is found only a week into her ‘journals of an artist’ (Hundreds



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Thursday, November 17th [1927] Oh, God, what have I seen? Where have I been? Something has spoken to the very soul of me, wonderful, mighty, not of this world … It is surging through my whole being, the wonder of it all, like a great river rushing on, dark and turbulent, and rushing and irresistible, carrying me away on its wild swirl like a helpless little bundle of wreckage. Where, where? Oh, these men, this Group of Seven, what have they created? – a world stripped of earthiness, shorn of fretting details, purged, purified: a naked soul, pure and unashamed; lovely spaces filled with wonderful serenity … I think perhaps I shall find God here, the God I’ve longed and hunted for and failed to find … Perhaps in this newer, wider, space-filled vision I shall find him. (2006: 25–6) Carr would find this ‘God’ she so hungered for, but she would not find, or rather she rejected, a place in the artistic community represented by the ‘Group of Seven’, as much as they welcomed, admired and supported her. The reason for this was twofold: because her belonging and her vision of Canada was ‘West Coast’ and because she was a woman – a solitary woman among a group of men. The struggle to come to terms with both is recorded in Growing Pains: Of course I got into great snarls of despondency. Bitterly in my letters I would cry out, ‘When I hear of you Eastern Artists going off in bunches, working, sharing each others’ enthusiasms and perplexities, I am jealous, furiously jealous!’ ‘Solitude is swell!’ replied Mr. Harris. ‘Altogether too much chatter goes on.’ I knew he was right – stupid me – hadn’t I always chosen solitude … At long last I learned, too, to surmount the housekeeping humdrum which I had allowed to drift between me and the painting which I now saw was the real worth of my existence … Suddenly I realised brag and stubbornness had goaded me into proving to my family that an artist could cook, could housekeep. Silly, rebellious me! (Carr, 1946: 239–40) Carr makes light, indeed, makes child-play, of her struggle to believe in herself, to work on alone and lonely, and to combine the expected duty



and Thousands) that she began simultaneously with the first voyage east. The entry describes the new art she would create, as much as the moment of revelation that would lead to its development:

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to the domestic with the all-consuming duty to art;13 but her journal also reveals the stress inherent in the choice taken to strive for artistic greatness that was perceived to be ‘masculine’ and the prerogative of men: it was a stress that contributed to periods of severe depression, and ultimately undermined her health. She records how Max Maynard visited only to pick on footling unessentials, harping on the misplacement of one small hut. He ignored the forty-five other sketches while he rasped and ranted over that one little hut. He says that women can’t paint;14 that faculty is the property of men only. (Carr, 2006: 98 [October 1933]) She is in anguish some days later, ‘dead beat tonight with struggling’. ‘I repainted almost the whole show,’ she writes of her attempt to paint a mountain, but ‘It’s still a bad, horrid, awful, mean little tussock’ (99 [5 October 1933]).

Small strategies Throughout her journals, stories and letters, Carr swings from assured belief in herself and the rightness, indeed, ‘truth’, of her artistic vision, and a tendency to diminish her potential and her achievement – a tendency to make herself small: not a mountain ‘of splendid power and volume’ but a ‘little tussock’. This is taken to a curious extreme in Carr’s relationship with Ira Dilworth, her literary editor, loyal correspondent and steadfast friend. ‘Small’ lived for the length of that relationship in Ira’s waistcoat pocket – close to his heart. Dilworth writes to ‘Dear Small’ in November 1942, after the successful publication of The Book of Small: Remember ... other people may buy your books and think they have you but I know better – I know you won’t desert my waistcoat pocket – at least I hope you won’t ... That manuscript will be one of my real treasures and Emily said I might want to burn it. Will she never learn that we understand and love each other – you (Small) and I? (Quoted in Morra, 2006: 169) And in February of the following year, after a period spent convalescing in a Nursing Home, Carr writes to Dilworth, Dear Ira It’s Small – such a happy me at being home ... I know Emily has a tougher heart than they think. She says to tell you she’ll try & be



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patient & have courage Ira & to thank you for your dear brave letters & strength that she has leant on & felt so comfortable with. The kind things you said about the Mt. Douglas sketches helped her enormously. Thank you for your understanding and your love & prayers for Emily. Always your loving ‘pocketgirl’ Small (Quoted in Morra, 2006: 200) Emily is 72: a woman who has challenged with some success the literary and artistic establishment of her day. Yet, there is something very needy and even perverse in the revealed nakedness of her small creature self that hungers for the protection afforded by the combination of imagined father and guardian (and lover). The bifurcation of herself into Emily and Small allows Carr the emotional extravagance, naivety, irreverence and freedom from responsibility of a child that would otherwise be frowned upon, and had in the past been punished. ‘Small’ affords Carr the protection of ‘a man’s waistcoat pocket’ and the persona allows her a measure of freedom of expression otherwise unavailable to her. The persona of ‘Small’ allows Carr to diminish the antagonistic effect of an unacceptable, because unwomanly, Bigness (vulgarity). In her correspondence with her male patron and protector she is charming; she is coy. Carr’s ‘Small’ persona is a deflective device that works through naivety to claim a protective space under the guardianship of male authority and power. It maintains her sociability, and masks her unsociableness. This is of course a familiar strategy, familiar to all women who step outside the bounds of allotted feminine space for whom a male champion guarantees (a sometimes difficult) sociability; but women have also chosen the company of other women to bolster their confidence. This was either an option that was unavailable to Carr, or one that she was unwilling to create. She was supported by a small group of women who read and offered advice on her writing, but of the women and the advice she was often scathing; and of female artists she knew few. Feeling ‘a little depressed again’ after reading The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Carr compares her isolation to ‘all the artists there in Paris, like all the artists in the East, jogging along, discussing, condemning, adoring, fighting, struggling, enthusing, seeking together, jostling each other …’. Where they are supported in their creative endeavour by each other, she is solitary: ‘no shelter, exposed to all the “winds” like a lone old tree with no others round to strengthen it against the buffets with no waving branches to help keep time’. In typical fashion, she turns a




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sense of loss into a lack for which she blames herself: ‘Ba-a-a, old sheep, bleating for fellows. Don’t you know better by now? It must be my fault somewhere, this repelling of mankind and at the same time rebelling at having no one to shake hands with but myself and the right hand weary of shaking the left. Stop this yowl and go to your story and enter the joy of the birds’ (Carr, 2006: 156 [6 April 1934]). The fall into depression precipitated by solitude (a state that is both imposed and to some extent sought after) and Carr’s self-admonishment that pulls her out of self-pity into the positive energy of creative work (whether writing or painting) is the repetitive motif of her journals. Her lifewritings also affirm her reliance on and indeed her acceptance within the social world of family, church, writing group and those many others, artists among them like herself, with whom she corresponded vociferously and voluminously. But Carr’s consistent claim to singularity was one that underwrote her claim to distinction. The painting Scorned as Timber, Beloved of the Sky (see Figure 2) lends itself to an autobiographical reading. A spindly tree stands alone in a logged area of forest in which difference as identified with smallness ensures survival (artistic survival). The tree is isolated and thus might be understood to be ‘lonely’, but it is also thereby rendered special. (Interestingly, there are other trees of like kind spaced at distance in a diminishing sightline, suggesting others with whom the foreground tree [artist] might be aligned but to whom it [she] has no tangible relationship.) A small tree that has been stunted by a lack of access to light in the vast mass of a crowded forest is, by virtue of difference (and its lack of use value), given special access to the heavens and radiates light. Thus, what might at first be interpreted negatively is found to be of positive value. This spindly tree is somewhat different to that envisaged by Kant in his ‘Fifth Thesis’. Here he proposes that when the selfish and unruly passions of men are regulated by a civic union, ‘these same passions frequently do the most good’, and that accordingly, ‘All culture, art which adorns mankind are fruits of unsociableness, which forces itself to discipline itself’ (Kant, 1963: 17). ‘It is just the same with trees in a forest,’ he writes, ‘each needs the others, since each in seeking to take the air and sunlight from others must strive upward, and thereby each realises a beautiful, straight stature, while those that live in isolated freedom put out branches at random and grow stunted, crooked, and twisted’ (1963: 17) Certainly Carr’s tree is straight in stature, but, like Carr herself, it makes its claim to distinction through the deceptive aura of a ‘feminine’ neediness. I say deceptive because although Carr often represents herself as small in relation to the greatness of the task she has



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Figure 2 Emily Carr, Scorned as Timber, Beloved of the Sky, 1935, oil on canvas, 112.0 x 68.9 cm

set herself and the enormity of her artistic and spiritual aspiration, the reader understands that smallness as big (and Carr clearly expects the reader to interpret it as such). In a journal entry dated 7 March 1934 Carr remonstrates with herself: Oh, I’m a lazy woman. To paint one must make the supreme effort. I mean the effort of emptying oneself, the effort of abandonment … Oh,




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that great, big, huge, enormous something supreme that my stuff lacks so entirely, that oneness and unity, the thing that lifts one above paint, above rot, that completeness! I think if one could find that they would stand face to face with God. How could one ever hope to be holy enough to paint that way? (Carr, 2006: 146–7) Carr’s claim to smallness can often be read as humbleness (of a kind). The ‘effort of emptying oneself’ is ‘the effort of abandonment’ that is an effort towards the paradoxical state of the infinite, the achievement of which will render her a nobody and a somebody – she will be nothing and everything. Not chosen by the loggers Carr might be ‘scorned as timber’, that is, scorned as unfit for the uses of human society, but she gains stature in the ‘knowledge’ that she is ‘beloved of the sky’ – beloved of God. Small is thereby raised up to become one with the Divine; her smallness of ego represents a largeness and this largess of spirit that emanates from self but is ‘not self’ overflows into and is productive of Art: not quite perhaps what Kant had in mind when he spoke of a competitive unsociability that forced the individual to reach for the sky, and ‘by a contrived art’ developed ‘the natural seeds to perfection’ (Kant, 1963: 17). Is Kant’s thesis typically masculine, where Carr’s might be said to derive from the feminine? I’m not sure I would go that far, but I would say that the application of Kant’s thesis to Carr’s life and work reveals the conflicted antagonism of the feminine that he does not take into account.

Conclusion: social unsociability Emily Carr’s ‘official’ autobiography, Growing Pains, takes the form of ‘hundreds and thousands’ in that it is made up of 55 small stories (or stories of small) the first of which begins with ‘Baptism’ and the words, ‘My baptism is an unpleasant memory.’ The story represents the giant struggle of Carr’s life in miniature. Although a big girl, a little over four years old, it is her younger brother, Dick, ‘still in his cradle’, who dictates the proceedings that render her a baby. Emily’s baptism has been neglected, and Dick’s frail babyhood precipitates and directs the event that will result in her humiliation and associated bad behaviour. The young Emily is outraged; she is the victim of patriarchal power as represented by God, her Father, the Parson and even baby Dick, aided and abetted by her ‘big sister’, and even her Mother, to whom she runs for comfort. Cosseted in the cradle of maleness, baby Dick gurgles sweetly when the baptismal water is splashed on him, while Emily herself is



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distressed by the indignity of being ‘tipped flat like a baby’ by the parson, and is thus presented to God ‘kicking furiously’. Father presides over these proceedings ‘with the fat family Bible open at the page on which the names of his seven other children were written’. The names of Richard and Emily are added by Father to the list and then ‘The covers of the Bible banged, shutting us all in’ (Carr, 1946: 3). But Emily will not be shut in; the events of her life that proceed from this point are a ‘struggle for bigness’ that makes effective use of the circumstance and strategy of ‘small’. She refuses the God of the Presbyterian parson, Father and Mother, discovering her own relationship to the Divine outside the patriarchal institution of the Church. Carr acknowledges that ‘[t]o church-goers I am an outsider’, but insists that she is religious and always has been. She longs to get out of church and crisp up in the open air. God got so stuffy squeezed into a church. Only out in the open was there room for Him. He was like a great breathing among the trees. In church he was static, a bearded image in petticoats. In the open He had no form; He just was, and filled all the universe. (Carr, 2006: 436–7 [28 December 1940]) Here God is de-gendered and de-limited: he escapes Father’s Bible – like a genie from a bottle, expanding into infinity, a feat Emily herself accomplishes in the publication of The Book of Small. Self-authored, she is infinitesimal but not diminutive, found within but not bound by the leather covers in which she chooses to dress herself in a perverse parody of ‘the fat family Bible’. In January 1943, Carr signs off her letter to Ira, ‘Yours lovingly, Emily’ and writes a PS: ‘How do you like my dress of leather Look almost like a bible don’t I? Small’ (quoted in Morra, 2006: 193). Emily Carr’s autobiographical strategy of Small(ness) is ‘feminine’ in that it works in socially acceptable ways to defuse the antagonism of gender for which Kant’s theory of unsocial sociability does not take account. Contrarily, it might be understood as a form of manipulative ‘social unsociability’ and thereby feminist to the extent that it works both with and against patriarchy in order to achieve female selfauthorship and self-authorization.

Notes 1. Primarily carved house and grave posts. 2. This quotation and all subsequent quotations from Carr (2006) are reprinted with permission of the publisher. 3. A phrase Carr used in her journal entry dated 14 October 1933 (2006: 66).




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4. ‘Klee Wyck’, meaning ‘laughing one’, is the name she was given by the First Nations people of Ucluelet. 5. Carr was involved with the Kwakwaka’wakw, Gitksan and Haida. 6. The ‘Group of Seven’ included Franklin Carmichael, Lawren Harris, A.Y. Jackson, Frank Johnston, Arthur Lismer, J.E.H. MacDonald and Frederick Varley. Tom Thomson (who died in 1917) was also closely associated with the Group, though never an official member. 7. Carr referred to ‘fresh seeing’ in her first public lecture on art (given in 1930 to the Victoria branch of the Women’s Canadian Club), published under that title in 1972. 8. ‘ways of seeing’ is an oblique reference to ‘fresh seeing’. 9. ‘Contrary instincts’ is a reference to the discussion by Virginia Woolf (in A Room of One’s Own) in the first instance to the difficulties faced by a woman ‘born with a great gift in the sixteenth century’ of whom she says: ‘it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so ... tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty’ (2001: 41). The phrase is taken up half a century later by Alice Walker in her essay on the search for black women’s literary/ creative inheritance (1984: 235). 10. Virginia Woolf famously discusses the troublesome phantom of Coventry Patmore’s ‘angel in the house’ in her talk delivered to the Women’s Service League in 1931. She speaks of having to do battle with this phantom while attempting to write a review about a novel by a famous man: ‘She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily’ (Woolf, 1968: 285). 11. Question posed by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own (2001: 19). 12. Tamar Garb’s study of the Union (Sisters of the Brush: Women’s Artistic Culture in Late Nineteenth-Century Paris [1994]) is discussed and referenced in Moray (2002: 78–9). 13. Carr’s recognition and complaint about the strain of combining the duties of art with the duties of the domestic are reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s depiction of the modern female artist Lily Briscoe: ‘And it was then too, in that chill and windy way, as she began to paint, that there forced themselves upon her other things, her own inadequacy, her insignificance, keeping house for her father off the Brompton Road’ (Woolf, 1992: 18). 14. Carr’s words echo the male voice that runs through Lily’s head: ‘Women can’t write, women can’t paint’ (Woolf, 1992: 80).

Bibliography Carr, Emily (1942) The Book of Small (Toronto: Irwin Publishing). ——— (1944) The House of All Sorts (Toronto: Irwin Publishing). ——— (1946) Growing Pains: An Autobiography (Toronto: Irwin Publishing). ——— (1972) Fresh Seeing (Toronto: Clarke and Irwin). ——— (1997 [1941]) Klee Wyck, in The Complete Writings of Emily Carr [The Emily Carr Omnibus] (Vancouver, Toronto and Washington: Douglas and McIntyre and University of Washington Press).



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——— (2006 [1966]) Hundreds and Thousands: The Journals of an Artist (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre). Chadwick, Whitney (1990) Women, Art and Society (New York: Thames and Hudson). Crean, Susan (2001) The Laughing One: A Journey to Emily Carr (Toronto: HarperCollins). Kant, Immanuel (1963 [1784]) ‘Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View’, in Lewis White Beck (ed.), On History: Immanuel Kant (Indianapolis and New York: Bobs-Merrill Company). Moray, Gerta (2002) ‘“T’Other Emily”: Emily Carr, the Modern Woman Artist and Dilemmas of Gender’, Revue d’art canadienne/Canadian Art Review, 26.1–2, 73–90. Morra, Linda M. (ed.) (2006) Corresponding Influence: Selected Letters of Emily Carr and Ira Dilworth (University of Toronto Press). Shadbolt, Doris (1979) The Art of Emily Carr (Vancouver and Toronto: Douglas and McIntyre). Stein, Gertrude (1955 [1933]) The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (New York: Random House). Tippett, Maria (1982 [1979]) Emily Carr: A Biography (Markham, Ontario: Penguin). Walker, Alice (1984 [1974]) ‘In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens’, in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (London: The Women’s Press). Woolf, Virginia (1968) ‘Professions for Women’, in Leonard Woolf (ed.), Collected Essays, 4 vols (London: Hogarth Press), vol. II. ——— (1992 [1927]) To the Lighthouse (London: Vintage). ——— (2001 [1929 and 1938]) A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas (London: Vintage).




A Literary Fortune: Mary Fortune’s Life in the Colonial Periodical Press Megan Brown

But then, if she had been faultless, she could not have been the heroine of this story; for I think some wise man of old remarked that the perfect women were those who left no histories behind them, but went thorough life on such a tranquil course of quiet well-doing as left no footprints on the sands of time; only mute records hidden here and there, deep in the grateful hearts of those who had been blessed by them. (Braddon, 1863: 145) Mary Fortune was not a perfect woman or a woman of means but she left an extraordinary footprint in the colonial periodical press. She specialized in light and ephemeral journal fiction, detective fiction and urban ethnographies written from the street. The majority of her known published writing appeared in the Australian Journal, a miscellany based on the London Journal, that began production in Melbourne in 1865. Her writing suggests that she was educated and thought of herself as middle class. The standards she used to measure respectable behaviour were informed by this social position even if she did not always conform to those standards or have the financial backing to support it. Fortune wrote for the Australian Journal from 1865 until 1908 under at least three known pseudonyms (M.H.F., Waif Wander and W.W.) and produced an enormous body of work. While the writing under each pseudonym was unmistakably by the same author and the tone and subject matter interchangeable between M.H.F and Waif Wander, Fortune used W.W. almost exclusively for her crime fiction and in particular her long-running crime fiction serial ‘The Detective’s Album’.1 Fortune’s crime fiction alone numbers over five hundred stories. Her autobiographical writing in this context is a small but significant part of her prodigious output. 128



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Fortune wrote approximately 17 autobiographical vignettes and one serial memoir that ran for six episodes.2 Her autobiographical writing can be divided into two distinct geographical locations and times. The vignettes were published at irregular intervals between 1868 and 1871. There were only two published outside these years: ‘Our Colonial Christmases’ in January 1872 and ‘My Friends and Acquaintances’ in 1876. These articles were not directly linked but they did explore similar themes and were based on Fortune’s urban experience in the burgeoning city of Melbourne. This early work provides a rare female perspective into an urban metropolis, from the point of view of a woman on the streets at a time when women’s voices were absent from that kind of ethnographic interpretation. The later work was a serial memoir of Fortune’s experiences in the goldfields of Victoria. The serial started in September 1882 but the second instalment did not appear until January 1883 and the series finished abruptly in May 1883. Fortune never wrote any more autobiographical stories for the Australian Journal although she continued to write and publish fiction in the periodical until 1908. Fortune’s very first piece of autobiographical writing was a vignette entitled ‘Fourteen Days on the Roads’, which was published in the Australian Journal on 28 November 1868. She had been writing fiction for the Australian Journal for three years and was ostensibly a valued and well-established contributor. In fact in 1866 Fortune wrote the lead serials for the Australian Journal starting with ‘Bertha’s Legacy’ followed by ‘Dora Carleton’, ‘The Secrets of Balbrooke’ and ‘Clyzia the Dwarf’. Despite this, many of her contributions were still only accepted through the ‘Answers to Correspondents’ page, demonstrating that her relationship with the institution of the Australian Journal remained precarious. The opening lines of ‘Fourteen Days on the Roads’ hint that the author will challenge the reader’s expectations: It was in reality only ten days and eleven nights I confess; but fourteen sounds better, and looks better at the head of an article, and as I have acknowledged that in using the extra number I simply consider the ornamental tendency of the word, I don’t think you will have any objection to its remaining so. (217) Paradoxically the narrator has exposed her tendency to embellish the details of her stories but has openly confessed to the embellishment and sought the reader’s approval for her doing so. The account of her journey that follows reveals a woman at odds with her culture’s expectations who uses irony and parody to make pertinent cultural critiques.



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Her autobiographical writing becomes an articulation of her ‘unsociable sociability’. Female respectability was a serious but difficult issue for women to negotiate in the colonies and Fortune forefronts the issue early in the vignette. ‘Fourteen days on the road’ she tells her reader is ‘very suggestive; suggestive of chain gangs, and stonebreaking, and convict’s dress, and guards, and all that, and yet a moment’s consideration will assure you that the term is too short a one for any judge’s sentence’ (217). Despite the fact that the colonial citizens of Victoria in the mid-nineteenth century had very little direct contact with convicts, the issue still preoccupied their definition of themselves. The taint of the convict past was a difficult enough hurdle for men to overcome but particularly damning for women. So low was the public’s opinion of convict women that while squatters were willing to take convict men as workers they refused to take the women as servants because they were: ‘nothing more than a “burthen” on the station’ (quoted in Waterhouse, 2005: 124). There was also the spectre of uncontrolled sexuality that clung to female convicts. It was important for women to disassociate themselves from this taint. By evoking the least respectable of women and juxtaposing them against herself Fortune elevates her own status and elicits sympathy for her state of ‘genteel poverty’ because she was ‘neither tried or condemned, nor sentenced, excepting by the overwhelming influence of £. s. d.; to spend [her] fourteen days on the road’ (217). In choosing to write autobiographically Fortune took the risk of exposing her identity to the reading public and while she invited sympathy from her readers she also courted condemnation. Her ‘true’ identity was a closely guarded secret that was never penetrated during her lifetime. To write autobiographically the story being told is personal. The humour and the critical observations are owned by the narrator. In this first vignette, Fortune, or the persona of ‘Waif Wander’, admitted to being a woman and elicited sympathy for her status as a ‘wandering waif’. A work of autobiography differs from a work of fiction because the reader of fiction only expects the work to have an internal consistency within the world created by the author. Fiction is not bound by the ‘rules of evidence that link the world of the narrative with the historical world outside the narrative’ (Smith and Watson, 2001: 9). The writer of autobiography on the other hand includes details of the ‘world beyond the text’, the world of the narrator’s experience even if that world is recreated from ‘cultural myths, dreams, fantasies, and subjective memories’ (Smith and Watson, 2001: 9). Readers expect that autobiographical narrators will tell the truth. This expectation suggests that their work



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will be subject to a more critical reading and that their personal life, outside the words on the page, will also be subject to greater scrutiny. As Stanley Fish has noted ‘[a]utobiographers cannot lie because anything they say, however mendacious, is the truth about themselves, whether they know it or not’ (quoted in Smith and Watson, 2001: 2). Fortune’s biographical details uncovered by Lucy Sussex suggest that Fortune’s life may have been less than respectable and Sussex suggests that her desire for complete anonymity may have been to protect her income. Sussex argues that the ‘pseudonym shielded her ... from her reading public, whose Victorian values she decidedly did not share’ (1989: 183). The details of Fortune’s life equal any of the sensational fictional short stories that she wrote for the Australian Journal. Mary Helena Wilson was born in Ireland but moved to Canada with her father where she married Joseph Fortune while still a teenager. She gave birth to a son named Joseph George in 1852. In 1855 she followed her father to Australia, taking her son with her, but there is no record of her husband Joseph Fortune ever coming to Australia and he died in Canada in 1861. Fortune gave birth to another son in November 1856. She named Joseph Fortune as the father on the birth certificate but this appears to have been impossible. This child was probably born from an adulterous relationship. In 1858 her first son Joseph George died and later in that year she married Percy Rollo Brett – a mounted trooper. This would have made her guilty of bigamy as there are no records of her having been granted a divorce. This relationship did not survive and Brett later remarried without obtaining a divorce either. Lucy Sussex suggests that Fortune’s relationship with Brett was probably the impetus behind her writing about crime and that Brett often appeared as a character in her stories.3 Fortune struggled financially, which her writing confirms, and by all accounts she became an alcoholic. Police records also show that her remaining son was a habitual criminal. With such a history it is no wonder she guarded her ‘real’ identity so carefully. The experience of the English poet Laetitia Landon was a cautionary tale for all female authors who came after her: ‘gossipy whispers about affairs with editors and married men’ (Riess, 1996: 807) ruined her reputation and, despite her very considerable commercial success, she left England to avoid public condemnation and died mysteriously soon after. Reputation and respectability were weapons that could be used against women even in the colonies. Although women often found an increased freedom in the colonial environment ‘where social expectations about what women could and should do was more relaxed than in the old world’ (Bird, 1998:




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40), there was still a continuing preoccupation with respectability. This is clearly exposed in the ‘Answers to the Correspondents’ in the Australian Journal where almost every issue included advice on proper behaviour. Marriage and domesticity still largely defined women’s lives, and they were ‘expected to give birth, raise families and provide a moral, civilizing influence’ (Bird, 1998: 40). While ‘Fourteen Days on the Roads’ is not an urban story it is an important prelude to the series of vignettes Fortune wrote about her urban experiences. She uses this story as a justification for defying the textual repression imposed on women by the phallic order to describe her own pioneering journey. As Sidonie Smith points out, when a woman chooses to write her life story she ‘wrest[s] significance and, with it, autobiographical authority out of cultural silence. Desiring to become a generator rather than to remain merely an object of representation, she has sought to “come out of the wings, and to appear, however briefly, center stage”’ (Smith, 1987: 42). Fortune’s strategy for assuming this authority was firstly to establish her claim to respectability and then to establish her credibility as a pioneering female colonist. Fortune uses the rapidly changing surroundings of a travel narrative to create a ‘peripatetic and fluid self that embodied worldliness’ (quoted in Codell, 2003: 118). By stepping into a changing and at times carnivalesque colonial world, her surroundings ‘opened up ways of being that had been closed to her’ (Codell, 2003: 145). As Kristi Siegel suggests, writing autobiography presented particular challenges to women writing in the nineteenth century because they needed to strike a balance. ‘To get an audience, a woman needed to provide material that was reasonably exciting; to keep an audience, she needed to remain a lady’ (Siegel, 2004: 2). Fortune’s colourful background meant that she had an interesting story to tell but to maintain her respectable status she had to choose her words carefully. The colonial experience provided a clean slate to interpret cultural significance and some latitude with regard to feminine behaviour. The colonial world allowed for a new set of rules and Fortune not only attempts to document these and to advocate a new code but she attempts to renegotiate the social contract. In her serial memoir, ‘Twenty-Six Years Ago’, Fortune describes the practical problems of maintaining modesty in the mobile tent cities and tells her readers that ‘[t]here were some odd scenes exposed to the public in those days, even refined women got accustomed to perform wholly domestic duties without even a screen between them and the moving, talking, laughing, eating, or working population around them’ (February 1883: 340). It was the ability to adjust and remain fluid that established a woman’s



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ability to thrive in this world. Fortune privileges her own ability to do so and explicitly draws attention to it in ‘Fourteen Days on the Roads’. In this vignette the persona of Waif Wander describes her journey back to ‘the great metropolis of Victoria’ from the goldfields. It is both a journey in time and a metaphorical crossing of boundaries. Autobiographers perform ‘several rhetorical acts: justifying their own perceptions, upholding their reputations, disputing the accounts of others, settling scores, conveying cultural information, and inventing desirable futures’ (Smith and Watson, 2001: 11). Fortune engages each of these strategies in her autobiographical opus, and upholding her reputation and establishing respectability become a preoccupation that is never entirely successful and is fraught with inconsistencies and shifting views of herself. The tone and content of her writing shift between being proud and defiant of her unsocial position and wistful that her lack of sociability not only places her outside society but outside the family unit as well. From the first vignette, ‘Fourteen Days on the Roads’, her jaunty tone cannot completely mask her desire to belong. ‘Fourteen Days on the Roads’ is a story that intends to convey cultural information but in a way that underlines the narrator’s antagonism towards the structure of society. While the voice that she establishes is jaunty and cheerful it is at the same time scathing and satirical. She describes the journey as a learning experience and in such enthusiastic and glowing terms: I learned so many wonderful things! I really never knew how entirely ignorant of everything of serious consequence I was until I made that journey on the roads! (217) The reader waits with anticipation for promised enlightenment. One suspects that they will hear a tale of discomfort and challenge but that the writer will deliver an exposé of her Australian epiphany. What evolves however is a curious and damning critique of the colonial male camouflaged by humour and good cheer. Fortune steeps her words in irony, saying one thing but meaning the opposite. The tale is not sensational nor does it include incidents that are life-threatening or suspenseful. In fact the storytelling mimics the rhythm of the journey itself: regular and steady but digressive. The epiphany comes early: Accustomed to be considered a thing of some little consequence as a sentient being of the weaker sex, it was of material benefit to me to discover that, in the eyes of the carriers and the drivers my comfort




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While the meaning is clear it seems impossible that this can be the wonderful thing that she has learnt. The tension between the establishment of respectability and her lack of worth in the eyes of the carrier is palpable. While the words on the page say that Waif Wander is ‘[a]ccustomed to be considered a thing of some little consequence’ there is a tension apparent that suggests otherwise. By writing autobiographically for the periodical press, Waif Wander underlines her value because being ‘of little worth’ and writing autobiography are contradictory impulses. Just as Victorian artists’ autobiographies were highly performative (Codell, 2000: 108), the persona of Waif Wander is humorously performing ‘worthlessness’ in commercial terms and highlighting the mercenary aspects of commercial transactions in a settler community. Her highly critical comments on manhood that follow reinforce this. During the journey Waif Wander views a rural election. Her critiques of both the voters and the candidates are humorous but scathing. She controversially compares the ‘sage and responsible’ men ‘who carried on their shoulders the fates of the shire members’ unfavourably with two sections of society that had been vilified in the colonial press. Ben, a rough colonial youth, and a Chinese man were the only men on the ‘road’ that she found worthy of praise: I shall not readily forget the only man on the roads who remembered that one of the weaker sex waited for her tea, on cold rainy nights, or in hot, dusty days, while they selfishly absorbed the fire and its comfort. I shall not forget that, during my fourteen days on the roads, not one voice asked if help was needed, or one hand was extended to even assist the woman in her dangerous descent so often during the day to be accomplished, from the top of a heavily and highly loaded wagon, save only that of swearing rude Ben. (221) Or: There was one other man, who when carriers were numerous, tried to boil the woman’s billy, and get her tea up to her elevated roost where she waited, tired and parched with thirst – one other beside Ben, and (pull your hats a little more over your faces, men of the ‘Road’) that man was a Chinaman! (221)



was not of any comparative value with the due and convenient adjustment of a loose keg or angular case. (218)

Given the very racist attitudes towards the Chinese immigrants at this time, who were described as a ‘pagan and inferior race’ in a parliamentary Victorian Gold Fields Commission of Enquiry (Goodman, 1994: 20) and suffered the ‘most from the hard edge of colonial racism’ (Goodman, 1994: 21), this is indeed an overt and incisive criticism of the colonial male. Fortune inverts society’s measure of relative human value to privilege those that are marginalized and to disrupt the idea of social order. She elevates her own judgement by presenting her humorous but antagonistic view of society and in doing so disputes the accounts of others. Fortune makes the transition as writer from the goldfields to the urban environment with apparent ease. Her incisive social commentary finds new and fertile ground and she also manages to convey an exciting sense of discovery for the rapidly developing city. Her narratives appear to shift in and out of what Lucy Sussex describes as flâneur mode (2006: 56) and her writing suggests that she had free access to the spectacle of the city. The flâneur provides a perfect example of unsociable sociability. He is both ‘a part’ of the crowd and yet ‘apart’ from the crowd. While this was seen as an accepted and unremarkable position for a male observer it was a striking position for a woman to assume in the nineteenth century. The public sphere was the male domain. The status of a woman on the streets was questionable. Fortune’s writing recognizes the limitations imposed on her because of her sex but merely modifies her version of flânerie to accommodate the vexed question of her legitimacy as an urban observer. By inserting herself into this very male tradition of writing, Fortune highlights the degree to which her autobiographical vignettes underline her experience of unsociable sociability. Fortune is authoritative in the way she interprets the emerging culture. However, while she assumes an authorial sense of superiority that marks her behaviour as unsocial, she cannot divorce herself from the reliance on the social framework. Her struggle with the two conflicting impulses is clearly exposed. Fortune’s choice to write from the position of a flâneuse demonstrates her desire to move beyond feminine limitations to assume a sense of authorial superiority. Feminist critics like Janet Wolff suggest that the sexual divisions of the nineteenth century rendered such a narrative position impossible (Wolff, 1990: 47). It was a mode of description favoured by Charles Dickens, George Augustus Sala and Marcus Clarke, and Fortune made it evident that she was drawing on and responding to their work.4 Melbourne was experiencing a period of unprecedented growth as a consequence of the gold rush and between the years




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1851 and 1861 the population of the city more than quadrupled (Davison, 2001: 53). Additionally the injection of money created by the discovery of gold accelerated the urbanization and modernization of the city. The importance of the flâneur/ journalist to the explication of the modern world is well established. The detached and marginal status of the flâneur combined with the developing capitalist system and the rise of the periodical press created a new kind of journalism that has often been described as ‘panoramic’, and Andrew McCann points out that it encompassed: a range of interrelated literary and sub-literary genres concerned with depicting the everyday, the local and the contemporary, especially as they are manifest in urban spaces: physiologies, guide books, urban ethnographies, ethnographic journalism, and light or ephemeral journal fiction. (McCann, 2004: 16) It was a global phenomenon addressing local concerns and it was often written from the point of view of the flâneur. Just as it thrived in London, Paris and New York, it was as McCann suggests the ‘dominant form’ in Melbourne because it ‘register[ed] and in some sense address[ed] the problems of locality and identity thrown up in the city as an avatar of global capitalism’ (2004: 16). As an experienced colonist, Fortune inserts herself into this form of journalism and positions herself as having the credentials to take her readers on her journey of urban discovery and offers to make sense of the urban world. However, to establish her legitimacy, rather than narrate her experience as if she is ‘the master of all she surveys’ she narrates it as a shared experience, acknowledging that her feminine position as a flâneur has both its detractors and its limitations. In the vignette ‘Under the Verandah’ ( June 1870) she intimates that the audience who reads Marcus Clarke would ‘most likely pass me by with a movement of the upper lip’ (599). She acknowledges that her choice of the title ‘Under the Verandah’ was provocative both because it made reference to a column Clarke wrote for the Argus which explored the seamier side of Melbourne life and because the ‘Verandah’ was a colloquial name for the Melbourne Stock Exchange – both worlds that ‘respectable’ women were excluded from. These references highlight her ‘unsociable’ desire to be regarded equally with her male contemporaries. However, she bitterly acknowledges that Clarke’s readers may view her writing ‘unfavourabl[y]’ and if so then she is ‘used to it’ (599). To counter this prejudice, Waif Wander uses inclusive language to divert attention away from the transgressive nature of a



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female conducting and writing about urban rambling. By staking the claim that others have walked in her shoes, or may do so in the future, her position as a female urban interpreter is legitimized. In her very first published urban vignette, entitled ‘Looking for Lodgings’, she opens by posing an inclusive rhetorical question: Had you ever the misfortune to be looking for lodgings, and to be driven to the painful necessity on a broiling summer day, with the thermometer at ninety nine, or so, in the shade, and a wind blowing in that aggravating way that utterly defies location? If you have, read and sympathise; if you have not, read, mark, learn, inwardly digest, and – don’t look for lodgings under similar circumstance, if you can avoid it. (266) By naturalizing her experience she attempts to counter the prejudice of a lone woman being out of place in the urban environment. Like Dickens she attempted to write as a member of the multitude and about the multitude. Dickens’s writing had struck a chord with his London readers because he produced representations of the everyday that were ‘mimetic of reality’ (Nord, 1995: 54). They described the London and the social structures that the middle and lower classes recognized as evolving around them. Additionally Dickens’s Sketches by Boz satirized pretension (Nord, 1995: 54). Fortune’s writing attempts to do the same. She writes of the everyday from the point of view of a woman in the crowd and is ferocious in her critiques of all pretension. This ferocity exemplifies her unsociable sociability as she attempts to navigate for her readers the confusing and confronting rapidity of change and the even more perplexing social categorization of the colonial world. Fortune’s writing allows her readers, particularly the female ones, the opportunity to participate vicariously in the life of Melbourne. For Fortune’s flâneuse the significant factor that detracted from her claim to respectability was her lack of funds and the means to change that. In ‘Looking for Lodgings’ she admits that the world may not view her as respectable because of it: ‘By a considerable stretch of the imagination I might be considered a respectable female, although I needn’t tell you, who know the shallowness of my purse so well, that I have no claim whatever to the term’ (266). This is an admission that the author knows may attract condemnation, but the appearance of genuine honesty is seductive and her preparedness to risk the exposure of her feelings of anger and frustration reinforces the sense of intimacy she cultivates in her writing.




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The rebellious tone however dominates as she attempts to change the reading public’s perception of respectability. Not only does she denigrate women who act as the enforcers of respectability but she also strongly criticizes restrictive women’s fashion and exposes them as a form of subjugation. In ‘Looking for Lodgings’ her views of both are expressed in a forthright fashion and there doesn’t appear to be any ambivalence in her words when she tells her reader that she ‘would’nt [sic] have lived inside that belt for an hour, no, not for the character of respectability which the pattern Miss Martha Simmons so cavalierly refused me’ (268). While her desire to be considered ‘respectable’ is important she will not claim it at any cost. In the transition from the goldfields back to the city the disadvantage of being a woman is felt by physical deprivation and lack of attention by the ‘men of the road’, but the first taste of social condemnation for her status as a lone woman is experienced in an urban environment at the hands of other women. Fortune suggests that other women enforce women’s sociability. In ‘Looking for Lodgings’ Fortune’s flâneuse is viewed with suspicion by the ‘respectable’ women who rent out rooms. Their judgement is exposed as both superficial and commercial. She describes the way they take an ‘inventory’ of the ‘length of her bonnet ties, and the quantity of the trimming’ on her dress (266). Fortune’s flâneuse finds that the landladies treat her as ‘a personal enemy’ (266). The vehemence of their disdain for her single homeless status surprises her. The transgressive and unsociable nature of her lone walking is highlighted as she becomes aware of the tainted double they associate her with. The prostitute like the flâneur epitomizes unsociable sociability. The prostitute, like the woman who lives by her pen, has only herself to sell. They are linked, not only by sex but ‘by their common participation in the world of commercial exchange’ (Nord, 1995: 122). It is always necessary to distance oneself from them. The women renting their rooms fear the figure of the prostitute because they are aware of their own engagement in commerce and the prostitute is their ‘debased, feared and disavowed double’ (Nord, 1995: 132). They transfer their suspicion to the applicant, who comes from the street, and elevate their own status as a property holder to deflect their discomfort at the commercial transactions they are engaging in. The descriptions of the flâneuse are defiant in the face of condemnation but the need to establish her moral superiority despite her impecunious state highlights her fear of social denigration. As Nord suggests, the vision that women derived from the ‘consciousness of transgression and trespassing, from the vexed sexuality her position



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implies and from [their] struggle to escape the status of spectacle to become a spectator’ (1995: 12) is strained as Fortune’s flâneuse attempts to accommodate both her desire to be accepted and admired by the reader while defiantly rejecting the standards used by society to measure respectability. Unfortunately her unsociable sociability overpowers her need for securing accommodation and she finds she cannot feign sociable compliance. She takes a natural but unladylike revenge by recklessly offending a potential landlady and ‘bows’ herself out of the house because she ‘saw that [her] respectability was not to be established by admittance under the roof of this immaculate virgin – of course, you will have guessed that she was an old maid – and the disappointment rendered [her] reckless of the consequences’ (267). Fortune’s flâneuse justifies her recklessness by suggesting that the enforcers of this kind of respectability ask too much and offer too little. She describes them as ‘frigid’ and ‘patronising’ and that their whole approach does not ‘argue well’ for the ‘unhappy female of respectability who may accept her hospitality’ (267). In this instance not only do her rhetorical strategies include justifying her own perceptions, she is also publicly settling the score for the treatment she has received. However, the immediate problem with this approach is that she and the street ‘were once more companions’. Her anger has moved her back to the streets and further from the respectability she desires. Torn between the conflicting impulses, she chooses to suggest a further transgressive desire of wishing that she was a ‘zinc, iron and bottle man, with the raggy coat and disreputable looking bag, who looks so perfectly cool and comfortable’ (267). Her desire to be one is both contradictory and provocative. A respectable woman cannot admit to desiring to be a man who lives on the streets. Rather than condone the fear the landladies have of the lack of ‘respectability’ of the intending lodgers, she inverts the issue of sexuality by attacking the landlady’s virginity. For the unsociable Waif Wander the street offers more comfort than the house of the virtuous. Fortune blames economic disadvantage for the landlady’s ability to question her respectability and suggests that it is the most serious drawback to attaining respectability in the colonies. She likens it to having a serious illness: If one is suffering from any chronic disorder, he is not apt to enjoy existence even under its most favourable aspect; but if he groans, chronically, under that worst of all diseases – impecuniosity – I defy him to enjoy it under any. (266)




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However, it isn’t only economics that confirms Fortune’s unsociable sociability. In ‘My Friends and Acquaintances’ she defiantly tells the readers that her friends regard her as a ‘very eccentric person’ and a ‘rather peculiar creature’ (197), and in ‘How I Spent Christmas’ she describes the grief that her isolated status imposes on her: My strange lot has almost been like that of poor ‘Topsy,’ who believed she ‘growed,’ as I never knew either mother or sister or brother; but I never did feel so utterly lonely and so thoroughly a ‘waif,’ as I did in this great city of yours on Christmas Day. (362) By aligning herself with a child slave she underlines the abject misery of her outcast status. This sets the stage for a moment of unbearable intimacy a few lines later when Fortune sees a Canadian ship and she chokes with emotion. While she cheerily lists aspects of her bright snow-filled memories, emotion overcomes her and she finishes the list with a despairing: ‘Oh, let us pass on and forget it all! I shall see it again no more!’ (363). These memories are unbearable and while she does not dwell on the pain she cannot seem to edit it out either. The humour and the irony are stripped away and only genuine despair remains. In both ‘The Dog Days’ and ‘How I Spent Christmas’ she describes her escape from the domestic as the same kind of desperate energy as needed to flee from a crime. At Christmas her marginal and lonely status makes being in the ‘vicinity of a regular family’ far too difficult to witness. She cannot ‘endure’ it because she is ‘simply flesh and blood’ (362). She is both attracted to the idea of domesticity and yet alienated by it. The happiest time Fortune’s narrator can recall was living in a tent in the goldfields leading a nomadic and peripatetic life. Yet equally she makes it clear that she wanted a happy family to belong to. The construction of her identity is torn between her longing for domesticity and her rejection of it. The difficulty of establishing respectability in her economic circumstances is parodied in a vignette entitled ‘My Advertisement’ (June 1869). Fortune is no longer on the streets but is still in the business of selling ‘herself’ by advertising in the daily papers her skills as a teacher or a housekeeper in ‘one of those periodical fits of industry which suggests to me a possibility of improving my circumstances’ (563). The responses to her advertisement illustrate the dangers awaiting women attempting to earn a respectable independent income. The first respondent was a pretentious woman who was evicted while interviewing Fortune and the second was a gentleman who wanted her to care for his snakes.



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At this point she decides to discontinue her search, economize some more and ‘make do’. Her fall-back is to ‘set to and write a lively, cheerful article for the JOURNAL, one which will exhibit the greatest faith in human nature, you know, and lead young readers to believe that there is not one bit of selfishness on earth. Ha, Ha!’ (565). While the absurd elements of humour are the focus of the story, the portrayal of the pitfalls of a woman attempting to earn a living is disturbing. On a personal level it also reveals that Fortune was reliant on writing for her income and it provides evidence that she felt that there was an expectation about what she could and could not write. While she jokes that she must write a ‘cheerful and lively article’ the reader can detect bitterness in the remark about selfishness and a wild madness in her repetition of ‘Ha, Ha!’ Fortune’s unsociable sociability is not only apparent in her selfdeprecating representation of her personal tribulations, she also demonstrates moments of genuine pleasure in exploring the city. There is also an evident pride, albeit tinged with regret, taken in writing about her remarkable life. In ‘Down Bourke Street’ she tells her reader that she ‘cannot at this moment recall to my recollection a more noble and beautiful street among the many noble and beautiful streets it has been my wandering fate to see’ (330). It is with pleasure and pride that she links her wandering with the beauty of the spectacle before her. Fortune celebrates both the energy and the transient nature of the crowd as well as acknowledging the fear the crowd inspires. Fortune’s description of Paddy’s Market in Bourke Street is a glowing depiction of the bustling metropolis, with its crowds, noise and ‘brilliant spectacle’ (330). Fortune describes in detail ‘the attractive windows’ and ‘brilliant sea of plate glass’ (330) that were symbols of the advent of the modern city in the nineteenth century. Into this modern vision she places a wide selection of female participants alongside an equally varied collection of males: Little girls – growing girls – full grown girls and women – old and young. Pups of boys and fops of men – tall and short – young and old. Fat and lean; rich and poor. Flaunting in all the colours of a lighted prism, or hanging in dirty tatters of no colours; all bodies moving and talking, and all going down Bourke-street. (330) This pride is also articulated in her serial memoir. In the first instalment of ‘Twenty-Six Years Ago; or, the Diggings of ’55’ she tells her readers there was ‘nothing of the namby-pamby elegance of ladies’ literature in our stirring, hardy and eventful life on the early goldfields’




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(September 1882: 33). The serial memoir was in some ways a fulfilment of a role she had already assumed. It provided a historical perspective to her life by tracing her arrival in the colony and her experiences in the goldfields. It was advertised in advance and for the first time it linked all three of Fortune’s pseudonyms.5 Below the title of the serial both the pseudonyms appeared together as follows: Waif Wander (W.W.). In the second episode Fortune also made the reader aware that M.H.F. was also her pseudonym. This suggests that the author felt confident about her position as a colonial writer and was optimistically attempting to consolidate her reputation. It also suggests that she, or the editors, felt that her life was significant and that her personal story was inseparably linked with the history of the colony. The first three instalments were vibrant representations of the multifaceted persona of Mary Fortune, as well as a first-hand historical account, but the promise of a more cohesive and unified version of self did not ultimately materialize. Not only was the serial disrupted by Fortune’s failure to provide the second instalment in time for publication but there was a marked change in the narration after the third instalment, and the author gradually disappeared from the text until the reader was left with ever-decreasing fragments of the author’s identity. The first instalment appeared in September 1882. It outlined her wonder and bewilderment upon her arrival in Melbourne and the exoticism and danger of her trip to the goldfields. The language and content strongly identified her as both the narrator and the active agent. ‘I felt’, ‘I had engaged myself’, ‘I distinctly recollect’ and ‘I took stock’ and other equally forceful examples appeared continually in the text. The March, April and May instalments were still narrated using ‘I’ but the active engagement dissipated and the narrator stepped back to take on the role of voyeur. The content was less optimistic and the humour of the stories no longer outweighed tragedy. The balance tipped firmly in favour of tragedy. The final sad episode played out with a child drowned because her mother was in a drunken stupor. This memoir ended abruptly and rather unsatisfactorily with: ‘It was a sad story, but after the usual inquiry, poor little Possy was buried, and the wretched mother went home to her friend’s in town’ (May 1883: 510). The dismal ending and withdrawal from writing any more autobiography suggests that something happened that confirmed for Fortune the need to remain hidden from public view. We know that the reading public attempted to find out who she was. In Henry W. Mitchell’s article about Waif Wander in the Avoca Free Press on Saturday, 20 March 18806 he apologizes for not being able to ‘place before [his] readers the



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full details of the life and work of this popular author but as her very name is shrouded in mystery, and as no one knows who she is or where she lives’, he decides it is not his place to ‘bring her forth from her obscurity’ (487). This confirms that it was Fortune’s conscious choice to remain anonymous. It was common in this era for women to use pseudonyms but they were often easy to penetrate. Fortune often appears to be in conflict about exposing her identity. At times she includes details that could identify her and at other times she makes use of deliberately misleading information. She states in ‘Twenty-Six Years Ago’ that she was joining her uncle in the goldfields but in fact it was her father, and she used an invented name for him. However, sprinkled throughout both her autobiography and her fiction are deliberate puns on her name that she draws attention to: ‘I have the misfortune (ahem!)’ she tells her readers in ‘Rat-Tat’. The scattering of simple clues to her identity in her texts while jealously guarding her identity suggests a love of mystery and a desire to be uncovered. Fortune was not a silent object of gaze but an active and articulate spectator whether she was in the goldfields or the city. Her voice, albeit veiled in anonymity, speaks to its colonial audience from the point of view of a woman in the crowd. Fortune self-consciously asserted her authority as an interpreter of the spectacle of the city and of the mobile tent cities. Fortune specialized in light and ephemeral journal fiction and urban ethnographies often written from the street. Most middle- and upper-class women who wrote for publication described the outside world from the security and the confines of the home, from the windows or from its verandah (Brett, 1989: ix). This is not the world that Fortune describes. Her fascination is with the public sphere. As Judith Brett describes it, Fortune: ‘jostles with those around her – the overdressed prostitutes, the fighting schoolboys, the gossiping matrons and the dapper business men of colonial Melbourne’ (1989: ix). In choosing to write autobiography as well as fiction Fortune signals the importance of retelling her own life experiences. Fortune’s continued presence in the Australian Journal implies a substantial readership, and some authority as a cultural producer; Stephen Knight goes so far as to suggest that ‘her work appears to be the main source through which this new world of the Victorian settlements was interpreted, in terms of place, people and the disruptions they faced and feared’ (1997: 33). If Fortune could have been content to remain a ‘social’ being then she, like other women who chose to conform and live within the bounds of respectability, would have left no ‘footsteps’. Instead her rejection of the domestic, whether enforced or voluntary, created an opportunity for her




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to share the narratives of her remarkable life. Her contradictory impulses of sociability and unsocial sociability combined with an urgent financial necessity gave her the momentum to create what has become a valuable legacy outlining her struggle for independence in a male-dominated social world. Fortune was a ‘wandering waif’ by her own admission. She was an unusual woman who celebrated her independence, however fragile: ‘God bless ye all, my dear friends, and grant me continued independence!’ (‘How I Spent Christmas’, January 1869: 365). Like the flâneurs she lived by her literary wits and on the margins of society, turning her words into a saleable commodity. She used personal experiences described with wit and sarcasm to construct her cultural and political critiques. She attempted to make sense of the rapidly changing world for her readers. Her words expose a woman at odds with her culture’s expectations. The cynical tone and ironic commentary detail a continual struggle to survive, and the peripheral details found in the Australian Journal suggest a problematic relationship with the institution. Her writing career spanned over 40 years yet her lifewriting ceased during the first 20. So while the strategies she employed to write in the very maledominated world of colonial Australia succeeded in fiction, they appear to have failed to sustain her in lifewriting. Perhaps the exploration of the tension between her desire to belong and the desire to set herself apart from society proved too painful and she retreated into a fictionally constructed narrative world where, writing as a male detective, she could avoid confronting her feminine unsocial sociability.

Notes 1. M.H.F. was only used on rare occasions and often just to camouflage the fact that Fortune had multiple contributions in one issue. This was particularly true in early 1869 when the periodical was transformed from a weekly to a monthly. Fortune had been providing one or two contributions each week for the periodical. This meant that in a monthly issue there were four or more contributions by her. No doubt the editors decided that all three pseudonyms were needed to suggest that multiple authors, rather than one contributing extensively, were at work. Fortune did write crime fiction as Waif Wander but generally the more gruesome and graphically detailed crime stories were written by W.W. 2. The autobiographical pieces from the Australian Journal are listed alphabetically below. 3. For a more detailed discussion on the biographical details of Fortune’s life there are a number of articles and books written or edited by Lucy Sussex. In addition to those listed in the Bibliography is her 2007 article, ‘The



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Fortunes of Mary: Authenticity, Notoriety and the Crime-Writing Life’, Women’s Writing, 14.3: 449–59. 4. Fortune wrote two stories that took titles directly from Sala’s work – ‘In the ’Bus’ and ‘The Key to the Street’ – and her story ‘What Passed’ was written in the same style as Sala’s ‘Twice around the Clock’. There are also multiple illusions and references to both Dickens and Marcus Clarke in a number of other stories. 5. The two pseudonyms had been associated earlier but one suspects by accident rather than design. Fortune wrote three linked stories under the heading of ‘Stories from my Chignon’ at irregular intervals. They were by Waif Wander but one of them carried the attribution of W.W. The initials W.W. were so strongly associated with crime fiction that this appeared to be an anomalous mistake rather than a deliberate linking of the two pseudonyms. 6. This article was published in the Australian Journal under the title of ‘NEWS DEPARTMENT’. It was a celebration of the writing of Waif Wander (W.W.) and filled the equivalent of one whole page of the journal. It was reprinted from the Avoca Free Press and included an introductory paragraph written by the editor of the Australian Journal.

Bibliography Autobiographical pieces published by Mary Fortune under ‘Waif Wanderer’ and M.H.F. in Australian Journal: A Weekly Record of Amusing and Instructive Literature, Science and the Arts. [Melbourne] (1865–1962): ‘A Chapter on Clock-Faces’ July 1870 by Waif Wander, 657–8. ‘The Dog Days’ April 1869 by M.H.F., 482–4. ‘Down Bourke Street’ 16 January 1868 by Waif Wander, 330–3. ‘Fourteen Days on the Roads’ 28 November 1868 by Waif Wander, 217–21. ‘How I Spent Christmas’ 30 January 1869 by Waif Wander, 362–5. ‘In the ’Bus’ August 1869 by Waif Wander, 762–3. ‘Looking for Lodgings’ 19 December 1868 by Waif Wander, 266–9. ‘Melbourne Cemetery’ November 1869 by M.H.F., 180–1. ‘My Advertisement’ June 1869 by M.H.F., 563–5. ‘My Friends and Acquaintances’ December 1876 by Waif Wander, 197–9. ‘My Lodger’ April 1870 by Waif Wander, 471–5. ‘Our Colonial Christmases’ January 1872 by Waif Wander, 255–6. ‘Rat-Tat’ September 1869 by M.H.F., 34–7. ‘The Spider and the Fly’ November 1870 by Waif Wander, 145–7. ‘Towser and Co.’ August 1870 by Waif Wander, 712–13. ‘Twenty-Six Years Ago: or, the Diggings from ’55’ serial memoir by Waif Wander, (W.W.) September 1882, January, February, March, April and May 1883 (33–7, 280–5, 338–43, 445–8, 508–10). ‘Under the Verandah’ June 1870 by Waif Wander, 599–602. ‘What Passed’ February 1871 by Waif Wander, 346–7. Bird, Delys (1998) ‘The “Settling” of English’, in Bruce Bennett and Jennifer Strauss (eds), The Oxford Literary History of Australia (Oxford University Press).




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Braddon, Mary Elizabeth (1863) Aurora Floyd (New York: Harper Brothers). Brett, Judith (1989) ‘Preface’, in The Fortunes of Mary Fortune (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin). Codell, Julie (2000) ‘“Serialized Artists” Biographies: A Culture Industry in Late Victorian Britain’, Book History, 3, 94–124. ——— (2003) The Victorian Artist: Artists’ Lifewritings in Britain, ca. 1870–1910 (Cambridge University Press). Davison, Graeme (2001) ‘Gold-Rush Melbourne’, in Iain McCalman (ed.), Gold: Forgotten Histories and Lost Objects of Australia (Cambridge University Press). Goodman, David (1994) Gold Seeking: Victoria and California in the 1850s (St Leonards, NSW: Allen and Unwin). Knight, Stephen (1997) Continent of Mystery: A Thematic History of Australian Crime Fiction (Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press). McCann, Andrew Lachlan (2004) Marcus Clarke’s Bohemia: Literature and Modernity in Colonial Melbourne (Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Publishing). Nord, Deborah Epstein (1995) Walking the Victorian Streets: Women Representation and the City (New York: Cornell University Press). Riess, Daniel (1996) ‘“Laetitia Landon” and the Dawn of English PostRomanticism’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 36.4, 807–27. Siegel, Kristi (2004) ‘Women’s Travel and the Rhetoric of Peril: It’s Suicide to be Abroad’, in Kristi Siegel (ed.), Gender, Genre, and Identity in Women’s Travel Writing (New York and Oxford: P. Lang). Smith, Sidonie (1987) A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions of Self-Representation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press). Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson (2001) Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Sussex, Lucy (1988) ‘Shrouded in Mystery: Waif Wander (Mary Fortune)’, in Debra Adelaide (ed.), A Bright and Fiery Troop: Australian Women Writers of the Nineteenth Century (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin). ——— (1989) ‘Introduction’, in The Fortunes of Mary Fortune (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin). ——— (1997) ‘Whodunit? Literary Forensics and the Crime Writing of James Skipp Borlase and Mary Fortune’, Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand Bulletin, 21.2, 73–106. ——— (1998a) ‘Cherchez La Femme: Finding Mrs Fortune: Detail of the Search for Mary Fortune’s Identity’, Hecate, 14.2, 56–65. ——— (1998b) ‘Introduction’, Mary Helena Fortune (‘Waif Wander’/ ‘W.W.’) C.1833–1910: A Bibliography, compiled by Lucy Sussex and Elizabeth Gibson (St Lucia: University of Queensland, Department of English). ——— (1998c) ‘Whodunit? A Postscript’, Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand Bulletin, 22.2, 111–13. ——— (2003) ‘Introduction’, in The Detective’s Album: Stories of Crime and Mystery from Colonial Australia by Mary Fortune (Shelburne, Ontario: The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box). ——— (2006) ‘Mary Fortune: The Only Truly Bohemian Lady Writer Who Has Ever Earned a Living by Her Pen’, Overland, 183, 54–60. ——— (2007) ‘A Woman of Mystery.’ http://lsussex.customer.netspace.net.au/ index.html.



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——— (2009) ‘Introduction’, in Three Murder Mysteries by Mary Fortune (Canberra: Mulini Press). Tester, Keith (1994) ‘Introduction’, in The Flâneur (London and New York: Routledge). Waterhouse, Richard (2005) The Vision Splendid: A Social and Cultural History of Rural Australia (Freemantle: Curtin University Books). Wolff, Janet (1990) Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture (Cambridge: Polity).




‘You for Whom I Wrote’: Renée Vivien, H.D. and the Roman à Clef Melissa Boyde

Paris at the turn of the twentieth century was a creative hub for writers and artists who were drawn to the city for the freedom of expression fostered there. There were many public spaces in modernist Paris where they gathered, such as the well-known cafés on the Boulevard SaintGermain. But there were also public spaces in private settings – the famous salons conducted by women in their homes, such as those of Gertrude Stein and Natalie Barney. These modernist salons followed in the tradition established in seventeenth-century Paris in salons such as those held by Italian-born Catherine de Vivonne, Marquise de Rambouillet. For although the Marquise received her guests reclined on a lit de repos in the private sanctum of her bed-sitting room, the chambre bleue, the connections made and conversations had were on public matters both cultural and political. It was from these at once both public and private social gatherings that the literary genre of the roman à clef first developed. It was later taken up for its particular characteristics as a form of discursive fiction and lifewriting by the women who frequented early twentieth-century salons. The discrete – and discreet – circles of the modernist salons were a pivotal social space where non-conforming sexual subjectivities were enacted or performed, relationships formed and broken, artistic ideas proposed. When they wrote about their lives, the roman à clef and its coded conventions presented itself as the ideal genre. In her autobiography A Backward Glance (1933) Edith Wharton recalls that books she read on Paris before she lived there suggested: that the salon had vanished forever ... but before I had lived a year in Paris I had discovered that most of the old catchwords were still in circulation, most of the old rules still observed, and that the 148



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As Wharton understood, the Parisian salon, typically presided over by a charismatic salonnière committed to social life, had evolved since the seventeenth century as a site of sociability, a paradigm for the concept of a civil society. Individual identities were negotiated and moderated through its mediating influences. While the salon could provide a forum for ideas that ran counter to the hegemonies of Church and state, and offered both social mobility and a degree of gender equality, this ‘bourgeois public sphere’ (Habermas cited in Kale, 2002: 29) was nevertheless governed by its own codes and conventions. An acknowledgement of the power of language, both written and spoken, was central to its social operations. The salonistes were obliged to conduct their conversations according to the rules of ‘la politesse’ (Chesney, 2007: 100) and they became known as the précieux. The rules of conduct of the salon, developed and overseen by the salonnière, created an environment which prefigures what Immanuel Kant later conceived as the ‘unsocial sociability’ of ‘man’ and his ‘propensity to enter into society, bound together with a mutual opposition’ (Kant, 1963: 12). The term ‘coterie’, which had its antecedents in the banding together of groups of French peasants to contest their living conditions, became linked to the social formation of the salon. In this setting, new ideas, political thinking and artistic production were aired within the salon’s conventions of conversation to produce what Kant discerned as a model of civility or sociability: Women shaped the most buoyant stereotype of the French – civility. In the words of Immanuel Kant, who recognized the ‘true humaneness’ of feminine sociability, ‘The French nation stands out among all others by its taste for conversation, in which it is the model for the rest.’ (Bilski and Braun, 2005: 5) The salon as it evolved at this period has come to be perceived as the central site of ‘egalitarian sociability’ (Bilski and Braun, 2005: 4). Salon culture spread throughout Europe and the women who presided over them cultivated an environment which challenged the social structures of the court. The public/private presentation of the self through witty and stylized conversation meant that merit, for men and women, could overshadow birthright and rank. In the salon environment writing as



ineradicable passion for good talk, and for seeing the same people every day, was as strong at the opening of the twentieth century as when the Précieuses met at the Hôtel de Rambouillet. (Quoted in Bilski and Braun, 2005: 1)

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well as conversation were central for women as many turned to literature as a means of influencing social and political conventions (Broad and Green, 2009: 180). Most of the notable French literature of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries passed through the salons, often commented on and sometimes edited or partially written by the salonnières; and ‘Amazonian women who had dreamed of military power during the Fronde turned, during Louis XIV’s reign, to writing as a form of social and political expression; and memoirs were ideally suited to their agenda’ (Cholakian, 2000: 36). The roman à clef emerged during the early period of the salons as a genre which facilitated both writing about or disclosing individual experience and yet protecting personal information from public scrutiny. The genre of the roman à clef is imbricated not only with the salon within which it originated, but also with the concept of the coterie and the particular kind of readership it formed. Identifying a ‘rhetoric of coterie’ in which coterie is not ‘ever a purely textual phenomenon’, Lytle Shaw suggests that the term: involves both a mode of address and an actual context for that address, both a range of rhetorical, formal strategies and a staging ground for these strategies in empirical life. Reading a coterie thus might be considered an exemplary problem in considering this seam between the textual and the empirical. (Shaw, 2006: 4) Coterie writing has been dismissed by some critics as elitist and anti-democratic, only of interest to minority groups and particular audiences. But as Shaw points out this implies ‘a stable, knowable alternative: a model of audience in which common-sense notions of accessibility ensure a work’s status as “public”’ (2006: 5). The conceptual implications of public and private in the term ‘coterie’ resonate both with the generic conventions of the roman à clef and with the constitution of non-heterosexual sexuality constructed in discourse as an open secret: The discourse of science ... it was enough to make one’s voice tremble, for an improbable thing was taking shape: a confessional science, a science which relied on a many-sided extortion, and took for its object what was unmentionable but admitted to nonetheless. (Foucault, 1990: 64) Lifewriting, embedded within discourses of the confessional, was seamlessly linked to the closeted identities that were revealed and revelled in



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within the coterie. Modernist coterie writers, including Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Virginia Woolf, Hope Mirrlees, Renée Vivien and H.D., drew on the roman à clef’s antecedents in the seventeenth-century salon culture of Paris as well as its tradition of engagement with social, cultural and political ideologies and discourses. The roman à clef was an ideal form for lesbian lifewriting because of its capacity for both public and private engagement with readers, enabling simultaneous disclosure and disguise of real-life identities. As lesbian subjectivity was increasingly made visible through naming and classification in medical and psychological discourse, it was also structured as abnormal so that the ‘condition’ of lesbianism became at an individual level ‘unsocial’. Through a discussion of both the conditions of emergence of the roman à clef and its twentieth-century use by writers writing on lesbian and bisexuality, this chapter shows how the genre is distinctively positioned within lifewriting as both fictional and autobiographical, public and private, social and unsociable.

History of the roman à clef The genesis of the roman à clef is attributed to the seventeenth-century French writer Madeleine de Scudéry (1607–1701). Throughout the 1630s and 1640s de Scudéry was a regular participant of the famous salon conducted by the Marquise de Rambouillet and held in the chambre bleue at the Hôtel de Rambouillet. It was there that de Scudéry developed lasting relationships with the intellectuals, artists, political figures and other notable people of the time who met for discussion and entertainment (Cruickshank, 1969: 166). The importance of the chambre bleue to French culture at this period is indicated by a remark made by the Marquise de Sévigné in 1680 that at times ‘the Hôtel de Rambouillet was the Louvre’ (DeJean, 1989: 298). For even though Western history for a long time regarded the salons primarily as the place where préciosité – the art of good manners, witty conversation and style – was perfected, they were much more than this. Not only a centre of culture, the chambre bleue was also important to the generation of political intrigue. During the regency of Louis XIII’s widow, Anne of Austria, spies infiltrated the salons because it was suspected that they were centres of political dissent (DeJean, 1989: 301). The first roman à clef is generally regarded to be de Scudéry’s work Artamène, ou le Grand Cyrus, published in ten volumes between 1649 and 1653. Her next work Clélie is also a roman à clef, published in ten volumes from 1654 to 1660. In these lengthy and popular novels,




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de Scudéry disguised from the general reader the public figures whose political actions and ideas formed the basis for her narratives. Not only did the genre thinly disguise real-life figures by giving them fictional names and exotic locations but also it enabled a commentary on topics and events which were politically or culturally contentious – such as unconventional views about heterosexual marriage in Clélie and the idealization of Platonic love depicted in the Carte de Tendre, an allegorical map of the human heart. De Scudéry’s novels achieved tremendous popular success, readers no doubt being drawn into the fictional narrative through the resonances with contemporary events and people. Speculation that the fiction was based on auto/biographical material is evidenced by a letter dated July 1673 in which de Scudéry refuses a reader’s request for a key to the real identities of the fictional characters in her novels (McDougall, 1938: 111). However, in 1857 historian Victor Cousin found a rough key inserted in a volume of Cyrus in the Bibliothèque de L’Arsenal (Levi, 1994: 827) and with it and other historical material linked the characters in the 14,000page novel with their real-life counterparts. His ‘key’ was published in La Société française au XVII siècle, d’après le Grand Cyrus de Mlle. de Scudéry (1858) (McDougall, 1938: 111). Although de Scudéry’s novel is set in a different time and far from Paris in the ‘exotic’ location of ancient Persia, the key shows that the characters and events are drawn from her contemporaries and the events connected to the series of uprisings between 1648 and 1653 known as the Fronde. The Fronde, at times led by the Prince de Condé, was in part driven by an attempt to reduce the power of Anne of Austria’s prime minister Cardinal Mazarin. When Condé was imprisoned in 1650, women took over the command of the troops and rebel outposts – including Condé’s sister, the Duchesse de Longueville, who later evaded imprisonment by escaping from France disguised as a man (DeJean, 1991: 37). In de Scudéry’s novel the central character, Cyrus, is based on the Prince de Condé, Mandane is based on the Duchesse de Longueville (to whom the book is dedicated), Cléomire is the Marquise de Rambouillet and Cléobuline is Queen Christina of Sweden. After the Fronde ended in 1653, the salon at the Hôtel de Rambouillet began to decline. De Scudéry began a salon at her home in rue de Beauce, referred to as the Samedis, where she took the name of the Greek poet Sappho as her salon sobriquet. In Cyrus de Scudéry appears as Sapho [sic] and her lifelong friend Paul Pellison as Phaon. De Scudéry employs the Platonic relationship between Sapho and Phaon to explore new roles for women. Like her namesake in Cyrus, de Scudéry formed close



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and lasting relationships with women, evidenced by her prolific and intimate letters. One example is her 20-year friendship with Angélique Paulet, known in the chambre bleue as ‘la belle Lionne’ because of her long golden hair (McDougall, 1938: 26). The portrait of Paulet as Élise in Cyrus shows her surrounded by admirers: seated under the light ‘on cushions of carnation-coloured brocatelle’; her gown was of brightest blue; her luxuriant tawny hair plaited with blue ribbons and pearls – one lock falling negligently upon her neck which was encircled by a collar in gold, black enamel, and diamonds; and bracelets to match clasp her beautifully moulded arms. (McDougall, 1938: 27) This detailed description sensually evokes de Scudéry’s ‘intimate friend’, whom McDougall claims she ‘adored’, the friendship only ending when Paulet died at the age of 60 (1938: 26–7). To a twenty-first-century reader the combination of de Scudéry choosing to be known as Sappho, her promotion of Platonic love between men and women, and the fact that she never married but had intimate friendships with women and Platonic friendships with men such as Pellison, suggests another sort of key or code. The key is, of course, the central feature of the roman à clef, and the process of decoding it has become one of the genre’s chief attractions, intriguing critics and biographers as well as both coterie and general readerships.1 Because of the close relationship between fictional characters and living identities, novels written in the genre have been open to charges of libel.2 One of the earliest English writers to use the genre, Delarivière (Mary) Manley, ‘an inveterate autobiographer’, was arrested, along with her publisher and printer, after the roman à clef Secret Memoirs and Manners of Several Persons of Quality, of Both Sexes: From the New Atlantis, an Island in the Mediterranean appeared in 1709 (Manley, 1991: vi). The charges of scandalum magnatum were dismissed because of the fictitious names used, the fact that the key was published separately and Manley’s insistence that the characters and events were fictitious (1991: xv). In France Madame de Staël was exiled by Napoleon because of the alleged political commentary in her roman à clef Delphine (1802) (Levi, 1994: 623). In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the genre proliferated, often containing a satirical slant on prominent cultural or political figures and their ideas and expounded in the setting of a weekend at a country




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house or in the salon. In Thomas Love Peacock’s satirical novel Nightmare Abbey (1818) Samuel Taylor Coleridge is disguised as the character Mr Flosky, Lord Byron is Mr Cypress and Percy B. Shelley is Scythrop. W.H. Mallock’s The New Republic: or, Culture, Faith, and Philosophy in an English Country House (1877) is a satire based on the circle of Oxford scholars and writers which includes a commentary on Walter Pater and aestheticism. The popular Dodo (1893), by E.F. Benson, features a character based on Margot Asquith, second wife of Herbert Henry Asquith who became Prime Minister of Great Britain. Salonnière Lady Ottoline Morrell is portrayed in several romans à clef, including D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (1920), Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow (1921) and Osbert Sitwell’s Triple Fugue (1924) (Latham, 2009: 132). Another well-known roman à clef is Robert Hichens’s The Green Carnation (1894), a satire on Wilde and aestheticism, published anonymously. Wilde attempted to distance himself from the popular book, publicly refuting claims in the press that he was its author, and Hichens and the publisher eventually withdrew it when ‘both men saw with horrid and prophetic clarity how easily the book could be used against Wilde’ (Hennegan, 1990: 186). A similar prophetic clarity could be attributed to Wilde with his reference in The Decay of Lying (1891) to the desirability of art ‘breaking from the prisonhouse of realism’ (Wilde, 1973: 981). For modernist coterie writers the nineteenth century’s dominant textual form, classic realism, widely perceived as transparently depicting ordinary life, was unable to accommodate representations of lesbianism, evidenced in the banning and subsequent obscenity trial of Radclyffe Hall’s realist novel and roman à clef The Well of Loneliness (1928) which asks for societal acceptance of the ‘invert’. Stein’s comment that ‘characters in the novels of the Nineteenth Century ... were more real to the average human being than the people they knew ... and they would discuss them and feel for them like people they knew’ (Stein, 1976: 21) indicates why the form of classic realism could not accommodate positive representations of lesbians who, cast as criminals, prostitutes and inverts in psychological discourses, were the unfamiliar and undesirable. In order to represent lesbian sexuality without personal disclosure or prosecution many modernist writers not only experimented with form but, as well, many adopted the roman à clef, or elements of it, developed by de Scudéry centuries earlier, which offered disguise and/or revelation. By providing a key to unlock the secrets contained within the text, otherwise knowable only to a coterie readership, the roman à clef facilitates the unlocking of secret knowledge while at the same time pointing to what is culturally relegated to silence. In so doing, like the



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salon, it offers a space between public and private, a space where the ‘unsocial’ becomes ‘social’. Modernist writer Hope Mirrlees, whose experimental epic poem ‘Paris’ (1919) was published by the Hogarth Press and recently hailed as ‘modernism’s lost masterpiece’ (Briggs, 2007: 261), was a participant of Lady Ottoline Morrell’s salon at Garsington Manor in England and, when in Paris, attended Stein’s and Barney’s salons. Her roman à clef Madeleine: One of Love’s Jansenists (1919) is set in seventeenth-century France in the salon environment of de Scudéry and her contemporaries. The novel focuses on an outsider, the girl Madeleine Troqueville, a provincial from Lyon, and her ultimately unsuccessful attempts at transition from isolated passionate reader of de Scudéry’s romantic romans à clef to social saloniste at the chambre bleue. Madeleine’s mixing up of fiction and reality – she falls in love not only with the novels but with the novelist before they meet – is a metaphor of the genre itself. The novel is layered with allusions to Mirrlees’s close relationship with the classical scholar Jane Harrison and the coteries of modernism of which she was a part. Djuna Barnes’s satirical Ladies Almanack (1928) was written and circulated in the coterie of Barney’s salon at 20 rue Jacob, where the caricatured personalities and their lascivious debates would have been readily recognized. In London, Woolf published Orlando (1928), a roman à clef which thinly disguises Vita Sackville West, again recognizable to literary coteries ‘in the know’. Although published in the same year as The Well of Loneliness, these texts escaped the censorship that Hall encountered with her realist novel. Ladies Almanack was written in English but published and circulated on the Left Bank of Paris. Orlando, although widely reviewed and readily accessible in Britain, mixed fantasy and experimental elements to create a non-realist portrait that could not easily be linked to contemporary people or events. In her roman à clef Q.E.D. (written in 1903 but not published until 1950) one of the best known of all modernist salonnières, Gertrude Stein, reflected on the complexities of her relationships while a student at Johns Hopkins with two women, May Bookstaver and Mabel Haynes. Q.E.D. is set in a number of locations, in America and in Europe and on board steamboats between the two continents. While on board ship the character Adele, based on Stein, muses on her ‘unsocial’ status, referring to the other passengers as ‘all sure to be of some abjectly familiar type that one knew so well there would be no need of recognizing their existence’ (Stein, 1971: 53). Characteristically self-assured, Stein figures her lesbian character as choosing unsociability rather than being subject to it.




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Her only social encounters on board ship are with the two women (Mabel and Helen) and occur in the public spaces on the deck. Two other writers who chose the roman à clef to write about their lives, specifically their love relationships with women and the ‘unsocial’ status they experience as a result, are Renée Vivien and H.D. Both writers use thinly disguised characters, and events and allusions to classical mythology, to bring the unsocial lesbian to light.

H.D.: Paint it Today Poet and novelist Hilda Doolittle was born in America but lived for much of her adult life in Europe where she was a central part of avantgarde modernist coteries which included Ezra Pound, Barnes, Stein, Osbert and Edith Sitwell, Woolf and D.H. Lawrence. Pound named her ‘H.D., Imagiste’ for her experimental poetry influenced by abstract art, the Japanese haiku and the classical poetry of Sappho (Scott, 1990: 86). Her novel Paint it Today, written in 1921, is a roman à clef which was first published in 1992, 31 years after her death. The novel focuses on the central character, Midget, based on H.D., from her early childhood growing up in Pennsylvania and into her twenties. The central relationship is Midget’s love affair with Josepha, with whom she falls in love after breaking off her engagement to Raymond, ‘an irreverent youth’ (H.D., 1992: 7). The lesbian relationship at the centre of the novel reveals the unsociability of society – difference is relegated to outsider status: She and Josepha (and such as she and Josepha) lived isolated, clarid, separate and distinctive lives in America. That was natural. It was natural that she and Josepha and such as she and Josepha should be cast out of the mass of the living, out of the living body, as useless as natural wastage, excrementitious. (18) They leave what for them is an ‘unsociable’ America and travel to Europe where, however, they encounter an equal measure of unsociability: ‘it came as a shock to find that they were separated not only from the masses but also from the refined, the sensuous, the artistically differentiated as well’ (20). The relationship breaks down; Josepha returns to America, where she marries, and Midget stays on in Rome and meets an Englishman, Basil, whom she marries. World War I ensues and when it is over Midget and Basil separate. Josepha writes to Midget from Italy where she now lives and Midget replies – both women are pregnant. In the final chapters of



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the novel Midget gives birth to the child, Brindel, and meets a woman called Althea. The novel is unfinished and ends with a note announcing the next chapter ‘(In preparation, White Althea.)’. The key to Paint it Today is created from the editor’s annotations to the first edition. These link both the narrative developments and the characters to H.D.’s life and reference the classical and mythological allusions in the text which act as symbols of, and keys to, various moral, gendered or sexual types and modes. According to the editor, Cassandra Laity, the characters have the following real-life equivalents: H.D.’s lover, Frances Josepha Gregg, is depicted as Josepha in the novel; Ezra Pound, to whom H.D. was briefly engaged in Pennsylvania, is Raymond; the English writer Richard Aldington whom she married in 1913 is Basil; and the writer Annie Winifred Ellerman, known as Bryher, who she met in 1918 and lived with on and off, in ‘great seclusion’3 until 1946, is Althea. Paint it Today gives insights into the close-knit coteries in which H.D. moved that formed a central part of early literary modernism. Even for her daughter Perdita Schaffner, reading her mother’s fictional autobiographies is a revelation and disclosure: I’m caught up in the momentum. Then held up by jolts of recognition, clues and double clues, references and cross references – and the play on names. (Schaffner in H.D., 1984: 239) In Paint it Today H.D. uses the roman à clef as a way to combine the literary and the autobiographical. In the opening lines of the novel she evokes the modernist call to ‘make it new’: A portrait, a painting? You cannot paint today as you painted yesterday. You cannot paint tomorrow as you paint today. A portrait, a painting? Do not paint it of yesterday’s rapt and rigid formula nor of yesterday’s day-after-tomorrow’s criss-cross–jagged, geometric, prismatic. Do not paint yesterday’s day-after-tomorrow destructiveness nor yesterday’s fair convention. But how and as you will – paint it today. (H.D., 1992: 3) These lines expose the conventions and contradictions of realism: The most characteristic gesture of realism was to evoke and then symbolically differentiate itself from an unnatural world, and yet this gesture was its own contradiction; for in it the nature of realism was torn into rhetorical and logical shreds. (Cottom, 1991: 92)




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She, Midget, did not wish to be an eastern flower painter. She did not wish to be an exact and over-précieuse western, a scientific describer of detail of vein and leaf of flowers, dead or living, nor did she wish to press flowers and fern fronds and threads of pink and purple seaweed between the pages of her book. Yet she wanted to combine all these qualities in her writing and to add still another quality to these three. She wished to embody, as this other quality, the fragrance of the flowers. (H.D., 1992: 17) H.D.’s prose and poetry show links to the Decadent movement. Many of the Decadent writers wove homoerotic subtexts into their work through the construction of a homosexual literary genealogy which was based in Ancient Greek and Roman history and myth, in the Old Testament of the Bible and which also incorporated the Renaissance. The most well-known invocation of this canon is Wilde’s response at the obscenity trial to the prosecutor’s question, ‘What is the “love that dare not speak its name”?’: The love that dare not speak its name in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathon, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. (Quoted in Aldrich, 1993: 89) Decadence, and Romanticism, offered the possibility of representation of homosexual desire, while the roman à clef offered the further possibility of expressing difference discreetly yet affirming its existence by linking it to actual people. Paint it Today has many allusions to classical Greek and Latin literature and English Romantic and Decadent poetry. There are references to Wilde’s poem ‘Charmides’ (H.D., 1992: 59), to Swinburne’s poems ‘Hermaphroditus’ and ‘Fragoletta’ (65) and to figures from Greek mythology and history such as Cerberus (41), Psyche (42), Hecate (9) and Orestes (42). There are quotes from the anonymous Latin poem ‘Cras amet qui numaquam amavit, quique amavit, cras amet’ (Let those love now, who never loved before, let those who always loved, now love the more) and from Shelley’s translation of Plato: Thou wert the morning star among the living, Ere thy fair light was shed,



Midget draws on both Western and Eastern cultures, including conventions of imitation and of realist description, to outline a vision of artistic production which incorporates and moves beyond the real:


Both these quotations, as well as one from Heine, are in the opening chapter after Midget has met and fallen in love with Josepha. Her feelings are given the authority of classical poetry; it is as the Latin poem describes, both new – it ‘surprised a curious secret’ – and stronger than anything she has felt before – ‘her passion’ is ‘intense’ (12). However, while for Midget Josepha is ‘the light’ (7) to Midget’s family Josepha is ‘not normal’ and ‘not a good influence ... not quite the friend they would have chosen’ (9). To Midget’s ‘young erstwhile fiancé’ (based on Pound) the relationship between the young women is heretic: ‘You and that girl, a hundred years ago, would have been burned at Salem, for witches’ (9). Using unpoetic, plain language Midget acknowledges that ‘it would have been much better if the girl Midget had married the fiancé’ (10). In contrast, her references to Josepha are imbued with poetic and classical references: The past and the future, morning and evening star, hung there, a beacon in the darkness between this world and the future. She had, through the clarity of her youth, through the intensity of her passion, and through that fate or chance that had thrown her in Josepha’s way ... surprised a curious secret, surprised the secret or found the door to another world ... Morning and evening star had met and sung together. (12–13) When Josepha betrays Midget by marrying, having an ongoing affair with a married man and enlisting Midget to cover for her, she is linked with the famously promiscuous Messalina, the Roman Emperor Claudius’ third wife whom he ordered to be executed. The allusions throughout the novel form a code that can be read by those who have knowledge of the references as well as those who are ‘in the know’ about characters and events. As Debby Applegate suggests: deliberate symbolism ... internalized the very reading skills that foster the roman à clef, even as their authors shrank from personal scrutiny. Such symbolic reading cultivated the ability to see narrative occurrences as simultaneously constituting the surface plot and pointing away from it, toward an interior meaning or concealed life. (1995: 159) Josepha’s ignorance of the language of classical allusion symbolizes the breakdown of her relationship with Midget. When she realizes that



Now having died thou art as Hesperus giving New splendor to the dead. (12)

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Josepha does not know Latin, ‘Midget, who forgave everything, for some inexplicable reason could not forgive her this’ (H.D., 1992: 9–10). Basil and Midget, however, share an interest in classical culture. The choices Midget must make about her sexuality are signalled by Basil’s reference to her as ‘sister of Charmides’ (59). Wilde’s eponymous poem tells of ‘a youth in Greece, who fell in love with a statue’ (59). In the Louvre Midget sees the Venus de Milo. Surrounded by tourists she ‘dared not follow the curve of the white belly and short space before the breasts brought the curve to a sudden shadow’ (61). She turns to statues of two young men, Jason and a discus thrower, which make her feel ‘the uttermost calm of utmost friendship’ (64). Finally, she encounters two statues of Hermaphrodites: the first repels her, but the second charms her utterly. In this reticent manner the text alludes to the choice that Midget must make: between men and women or acknowledge her attraction to both. In a letter to Bryher, H.D., undergoing psychoanalysis with Freud, discusses the effect on her work of her perceived bisexuality: I have gone terribly deep with Papa [Freud]. He says ‘you have two things to hide, one that you were a girl, the other that you were a boy.’ It appears that I am that all-but extinct phenomena, the perfect bi-[sexual]. Well, this is terribly exciting, but for the moment, PLEASE do not speak of my own MSS., for it seems the conflict consists partly that what I write commits me – to one sex, or the other, I no longer HIDE. (Quoted in DuPlessis and Friedman, 1981: 425) The letter recognizes the inadequacy of language to express bisexuality. In the novel Midget, referring to her love for Josepha, ‘felt somehow that she was speaking the wrong language. She was speaking English’ (H.D., 1992: 12). At the start of the novel the child, Midget, is figured as a misfit as she grows up in the strictures of the cultivated American garden: There are white pear trees and a wysteria’s knotted vine stock ... The pear is an English Bartlett grafted with a French cuisse-madame. The two grafts are distinct in their blossoming and the wysteria smothers both down like a vine with ghosts of cluster ... The child itself, I would make dark cypress wood, rounded head, clawlike hands, an archaic, small Hermione, a nameless, foundling sister of Princess Minnehaha, a bird or intermediate, of a lost reptile race, clawing its way into the pear and wisteria tangle, to cling, to be lost, to defy worlds from there, to crack the sky with an ugly, screwed-up little face. (3–4)



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They had left the canoe safe ... and they were off, swift, light of limb, with intent purpose. The last thing that urged them was the fear of being overtaken by the storm …There was joy in them such as comes to the heart when certainty is upon us, after hours of tension and enervating unsatisfied expectancy. (83) When they reach the house the two women undress and lay out their clothes to dry on the marble base of a brazier, all the time gazing at each other. The garments they drape around themselves are like the thin veil of disguise that the roman à clef provides. In Vivien’s poem ‘You for Whom I Wrote’ desire is similarly figured: You for whom I wrote, oh lovely young women without names, You whom, alone, I loved, will you reread my verse On future mornings snowing coldly on the universe, By future quiet evenings of roses and flames? Will you sit dreaming, amid the charming disarray Of dishevelled hair, open robes, of her you never discover Wherever you look … (Vivien, 1982b: 47) H.D. and Vivien set up tableau-like scenes which invoke a classical, Sapphic past as a timeless staging of lesbian desire. Vivien infused not only her writing but also her life with a fin-de-siècle interpretation of Sapphism, performed in the society of Barney’s salon at her home rue Jacob with its Doric-inspired Temple de l’Amitié in the garden, and in the private space of her apartment at 23 avenue du Bois in Paris.

Renée Vivien: A Woman Appeared to Me In The Pure and the Impure Colette recounts the first evening she spent at a dinner party at Vivien’s apartment, her neighbour across a courtyard, when Vivien ‘tossed off her drink with the obliviousness one sees in bridesmaids at a country wedding’ (Colette, 1968: 89). Leading up to this moment, Vivien’s life, particularly her childhood, had been fragmented. She was born in England in 1877 into a wealthy family and christened Pauline Mary by her American mother, Mary, and her British father, John Tarn. The family moved to Paris when Vivien was about a year old, returning to England a few years later. Her father died when



By the end of the novel Midget is no longer lost. While canoeing with Althea they are caught in a rainstorm:

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she was nine and the family fortune was willed to Vivien and her sister Antoinette, causing a rift between Vivien and her mother who was left out of the will. As soon as she was old enough Vivien returned to Paris, changed her name to ‘Renée Vivien’ (which translates as ‘reborn life’) and not long after began a relationship with the young American heiress Natalie Barney. Together they travelled to Eressos Skala on Lesbos, the birthplace of Sappho, with the dream of reigniting a coterie of women artists and writers there. Vivien’s novel A Woman Appeared to Me centres on a group of women in Paris at the turn of the twentieth century who, like the Decadents, promote the credo of a love of beauty and art and express this in their work through allusions to classical history and mythology. In her life and work Vivien embraced Decadence – she was reclusive, enigmatic and, as the artist Romaine Brooks’s word portrait of Vivien in her memoir shows, unsocially social: There comes before me the dark, heavily curtained room, overreaching itself in lugubrious effects: grim life-sized Oriental figures propped up on the chairs, phosphorescent Buddhas glowing dimly in the folds of black draperies. The air is heavy with perfumed incense … A curtain draws aside and Renee Vivien stands before us attired in Louis XVI male costume … During the meal [she] leaves us to bring in from the garden her pet frogs and a serpent which she twines round her wrist. (Vivien, 1982b: xviii) Towards the end of her life Vivien seemed to be acting out a perverse form of Decadence. Colette writes: I did not notice that evening her almost total abstention from food, but later on I discovered that she subsisted mainly on a few spoonfuls of rice, some fruit or other, and alcohol – especially alcohol. (Colette, 1968: 89) Vivien died aged 32 from a combination of alcoholism and starvation. Vivien wrote openly about lesbian love in most of her poetry and prose written and published in French rather than English. A Woman Appeared to Me, her first novel, was published as Une Femme m’apparut in 1904. Exemplifying the roman à clef’s capacity to be both fiction and auto/biography, it contains thinly veiled accounts of Vivien’s life and loves: the nameless first-person narrator is Vivien, her friend Violette Shilleto appears as Ione and her lover Natalie Barney is the character



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Vally (Barney, 1992a: 262). Barney, who writes that ‘If I had one ambition it was to make my life itself into a poem’, refers to A Woman Appeared to Me as ‘our real-life novel’ (Barney, 1992b: i and 24). Another principal character is the androgynous San Giovanni, a mystic and devotee of the cult of Sappho who perhaps represents not only Barney and Vivien but their Paris circle which revived the cult of Sappho. The idea of a composite portrait reinforces the roman à clef’s capacity to comprise both fiction and autobiography. For the knowing reader4 the work is both fiction and auto/biography but it can equally be read without knowing the details of the lives. Following its publication in English in 1982 a key to its other characters has been provided through the research of feminist literary critics who form another ‘in the know’ readership. Olive Custance is the character Dagmar, Eva is based on Barney’s one-time lover Evalina Palmer and the character Hélène is the Baroness de Zuylen de Nyevelt (née Rothschild) who became Vivien’s lover after her first failed relationship with Barney (Vivien, 1982b: xiii; Jay, 1988: 14). The novel tells the story of a meeting between the narrator and Vally and their passionate relationship which is doomed by Vally’s infidelity and the narrator’s jealousy. The initial intensity of the relationship has profound repercussions for the narrator, who ignores her sick friend Ione’s request to join her in ‘the health-giving Midi’ (Vivien, 1982b: 23) with a promise of coming ‘later’ (24). But the narrator has no intention of leaving her lover Vally and when Ione dies she is haunted by dreams of her death. When the relationship with Vally ends, the narrator takes consolation in an affair with Dagmar, a young bisexual poetess, but that ends when Dagmar finds her ‘Prince’ (52). The narrator finds ‘asylum’ from her pain and disappointment with Eva, who becomes her lover (55). They seem happy until Vally’s return a year later and the novel ends with the narrator’s ‘terror of choosing’ between them and her decision, recounted cryptically: ‘When the words were finally uttered, a sigh rose from the shadows’ (63). The novel’s setting is fin-de-siècle Europe, post the Oscar Wilde trial and concurrent with the pathologization of lesbianism as inversion/ perversion. Another of Vivien’s poems gives a profound sense of the experience for a lesbian at that time: The hyacinth bleeds the hillsides red ... I am a woman, I have no right to your beauty … Watching us pass, no one wanted to understand That I chose you simply. (Vivien, 1982a: 69)




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Vivien’s choice of the roman à clef for the novel provides disguise in a climate of persecution and hostility. Before and after writing A Woman Appeared to Me she made other decisions about disguise. Barney writes how Vivien gave her a notebook filled with her poems with the dedication ‘For Natalie, and for her alone’ (Barney, 1992b: 20). However, when Barney wanted to publish them Vivien agreed only on the condition that her name appeared as the non-gender-specific ‘R. Vivien’ (Barney, 1992b: 20). As well, in 1909 Vivien published her translation of Sappho’s fragments anonymously (Jay, 1988: 63). When, on a later volume of passionate love poetry to women, she added her Christian name ‘some scandal ensued’ (Jay, 1988: 15). The need for secrecy at this time is raised by Vally in A Woman Appeared to Me: I won’t have this mixing of the artist’s personality with the work created in suffering. This organized public spying on the private life of a writer I condemn violently as I do these dastardly profanations of graves that pass as posthumous biographies. (Vivien, 1982b: 37) According to Barney, when Vivien was approached for interviews: fearing the invasion of her privacy, she paid a governess to stand in for her, the most unpoetic looking woman imaginable. This woman passed herself off as Renée Vivien, discouraging further enthusiasm or pursuit. (Barney, 1992b: 21) Vivien’s novel confounds the expectations held by (male) critics that art resembles life (the mimetic basis of classic realism) and shows the concept as irrelevant for women writers. In receipt of letters from a number of such critics, San Giovanni reads excerpts: Laughing, she unfolded a letter: ‘Mademoiselle – I regret that I cannot find in your work a single trace of masculine influence. To resemble nature – is that not the highest aim a writer can conceive of?’ ‘The best way to resemble nature, in writing, is to make mistakes in spelling,’ interrupted Vally.5 (Vivien, 1982b: 34) Views such as those expressed by the male critic represent what is considered in the novel to be both outmoded and oppressive. Vally, in a statement characteristic of the Decadents, declares ‘to be as different as possible from Nature is the true function of Art’ and San Giovanni adds ‘Representation is nothing but vulgar imitation of the Real ... Nature is



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inimitable. Art is unimaginable’ (Vivien, 1982b: 14). The narrator’s reply to San Giovanni that ‘you yourself are the bizarre flower of some unknown dream’ indicates the limits of mimetic representation where ‘difference’ remains unrepresented – in this case an androgyne in love with a woman. Further insights into the hostile environment at that time are created by the insertion of fictional quotes from the letters of critics and admirers – the secretary of the Action Provinciale writes that ‘Sappho, truly human, burned at last with the true love, the natural love, for a man – with the inevitable love instead of a morbid and abnormal passion’ (Vivien, 1982b: 35). In another letter an ‘admirer’ of San Giovanni’s work refers to her as ‘Madame’ which ‘annoys’ her and she finds his request for her portrait ‘an offense and an insult’ (35). The discussion of marriage, the references to Sappho and the intense use of conversational dialogue to express non-conformist ideas is reminiscent of the salon environment and de Scudéry’s pioneering romans à clef. For women writers narrating unconventional lives, the roman à clef is a genre which fosters a potential departure from confessional, linear narratives or the personal disclosures of diaries, memoirs and letters. Hovering between fiction and autobiography, it allows for the discursive exploration of ideas and subjectivities. Yet, although as fiction there is plenty of scope to move away from autobiographical narrative, in always also staying close to lived experience, it authenticates and gives voice to the process of writing about lives that do not conform to social norms. Living reclusively both Vivien and H.D. embraced ‘unsociability’. Through the use of the roman à clef, however, they offer texts which uncover the ‘secret’ of lesbian lives for readers who unlock the codes they contain and also, and importantly, bring them into sociability for those ‘lovely young women without names’ whom Vivien imagines and addresses from beyond the grave.

Notes 1. For a discussion of the generic features of the roman à clef see Boyde (2009). 2. Latham (2009) discusses a number of legal scandals associated with the roman à clef. 3. H.D.’s daughter Perdita Schaffner writes: ‘I was part of a very bizarre ménage. We lived in great seclusion, on the shores of Lake Geneva, Switzerland’ (H.D., 1984: 236). 4. An example of the ‘knowing reader’ is exemplified by a reference in the prologue to ‘the Woman with the cloak of ermine’. In Adventures of the Mind Barney includes a word portrait of herself written by Lucie Delarue-Madrus,




Melissa Boyde

who describes Barney in her salon: ‘in the middle of this dense crowd, which is gathered around her charm, is Natalie. Dressed in white, wrapped in some ermine cape, smiling and detached’ (Barney, 1992a: 138). 5. The reference to mistakes in spelling is a further clue that Vally is based on Barney. Delarue-Mardrus comments in Adventures of the Mind on ‘Natalie’s private grammar’: ‘writing a couple she had known for twenty years, she bravely wrote down in her letter: “How are yous, Y-O-U-S?,” because, she said, “I say you to both of them, then I have to add an s, don’t I, as in all French plurals!”’(Barney, 1992a: 139).

Bibliography Aldrich, R. (1993) The Seduction of the Mediterranean: Writing, Art and Homosexual Fantasy (London and New York: Routledge). Applegate, D. (1995) ‘Roman à Clef’, American Literary History, 7, 151–60. Barney, N.C. (1992a) Adventures of the Mind, trans. J.S. Gatton (New York University Press). ——— (1992b) A Perilous Advantage: The Best of Natalie Clifford Barney, trans. A. Livia (Norwich, VT: New Victoria Publishers). Bilski, E.D., and E. Braun (2005) Jewish Women and their Salons: The Power of Conversation (New Haven: Yale University Press). Boyde, Melissa (2009) ‘The Modernist roman à clef and Cultural Secrets, or I Know that You Know that I Know that You Know’, Australian Literary Studies, 24.3–4, 155–66. Briggs, Julia (2007) ‘Hope Mirrlees and Continental Modernism’, in Bonnie Kime Scott (ed.), Gender in Modernism: New Geographies, Complex Intersections (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press). Broad, J., and K. Green (2009) A History of Women’s Political Thought in Europe, 1400–1700 (Cambridge University Press). Chesney, D.M. (2007) ‘The History of the History of the Salon’, NineteenthCentury French Studies, 36.1–2, 94–108. Cholakian, P.F. (2000) Women and the Politics of Self-Representation in SeventeenthCentury France (Newark: University of Delaware Press). Colette (1968) The Pure and the Impure (London: Secker and Warburg). Cottom, D. (1991) Abyss of Reason: Cultural Movements, Revelations, and Betrayal (Oxford University Press). Cruickshank, J. (ed.) (1969) French Literature and its Background: The Seventeenth Century (Oxford University Press). DeJean, J. (1989) ‘The Salons, “Preciosity”, and the Sphere of Women’s Influence’, in Dennis Hollier (ed.), A New History of French Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). ——— (1991) Tender Geographies: Women and the Origins of the Novel in France (New York: Columbia University Press). de Scudéry, M. (1653) Artamenes or the Grand Cyrus, trans. F.G. Gent (London: Printed for Humphrey Moseley at the Prince’s Arms in St Paul’s Church-Yard and Thomas Dring at the George in Fleet Street. University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, MI, S2144).



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——— (1678) Clelia, An Excellent New Romance, trans. J. Davies and Havers (London). DuPlessis, R.B., and S.S. Friedman (1981) ‘“Woman is Perfect”: H.D.’s Debate with Freud’, Feminist Studies, 7.3, 417–30. Foucault, M. (1990) The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: The Will to Knowledge (London: Penguin Books). H.D. (1984) Her (London: Virago Press). H.D. (1992) Paint it Today (New York University Press). Hennegan, Alison (1990) ‘Personalities and Principles: Aspects of Literature and Life in fin-de-siecle England’, in Mikulas Teich and Roy Porter (eds), Fin de Siecle and its Legacy (Cambridge University Press). Jay, K. (1988) The Amazon and the Page: Natalie Clifford Barney and Renée Vivien (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press). Kale, S.D. (2002) ‘Women, the Public Sphere, and the Persistence of Salons’, French Historical Studies, 25.1, 115–48. Kant, Immanuel (1963 [1784]) ‘Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View’, in Lewis White Beck (ed.), On History: Immanuel Kant (Indianapolis and New York: Bobs-Merrill Company). Latham, Sean (2009) The Art of Scandal: Modernism, Libel Law, and the roman à clef (Oxford University Press). Levi, A. (1994) Guide to French Literature: Beginnings to 1789 (London: St James Press). Manley, Delarivier (1991) New Atlantis, ed. Ros Ballaster (London: Pickering and Chatto). McDougall, D. (1938) Madeleine de Scudéry: Her Romantic Life and Death (London: Methuen). Scott, Bonnie Kime (1990) The Gender of Modernism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press). ——— (ed.) (2007) Gender in Modernism: New Geographies, Complex Intersections (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press). Shaw, L. (2006) Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press). Stein, G. (1971) Fernhurst, Q.E.D. and Other Early Writings (New York: Liveright). ——— (1976) A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein, ed. R.B. Haas (Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow Press). Vivien, R. (1982a) The Muse of the Violets, trans. M. Porter and C. Kroger (Tallahassee, FL: The Naiad Press). ——— (1982b [1904]) A Woman Appeared to Me, trans. J.H. Foster (Tallahassee, FL: The Naiad Press). Wilde, O. (1973) Complete Works (London: Collins).




Writing Food Writing Fiction Writing Life: Marion Halligan’s Memoirs Dorothy Jones

Since completing a book usually requires long periods of solitary withdrawal, writing tends to be an unsociable activity, even though the author’s ultimate aim is to reach out and engage widely with potential readers. Writers require audiences, but the reading public is not always content to encounter them solely through their work, often probing for personal information it believes will help them better understand the books. Many readers seek more direct contact with writers through book signings and hearing them read publicly from their work. While modern criticism confidently proclaims ‘the death of the author’, academic journals regularly solicit autobiographical material from authors, who find themselves caught in a paradox of unsocial sociability. They must withdraw temporarily from the world in order to relate to it through their writing, and, once published, find that readers may even lay claim to their personal lives. Autobiographers are further enmeshed in this paradox of unsocial sociability as they determine which intimate details of their private lives to withhold and which to publish, a process which becomes still more complex when the author is also a fiction writer. Just as novelists construct characters, so autobiographers construct a self-image, although most readers regard memoir and novel as quite separate genres, assuming that one records actual events while the other is pure invention. Nevertheless, this does not deter them from trying to read writers’ lives in their works of fiction, and may help explain why Marion Halligan likes to tease readers by deliberately blurring boundaries between memoir and fiction even while asserting the two are quite distinct: ‘If a memoir is fictional it is a novel’ (Halligan, 2004b: 160). Halligan is particularly interesting in having written both a novel and a memoir in response to the same major life-changing event, the death of her 168



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husband, and the interaction between the two books affords a rich field for literary exploration. A leading Australian author, Halligan, noted primarily for her novels and short stories, has also published essays, memoirs and journalism. Her work, which has been widely anthologized and won numerous literary awards, is part of that great flowering of Australian literature originating in the 1970s and stimulated significantly by increased government funding channelled through the Literature Board of the Australia Council, that Halligan herself went on to chair from 1993 to 1996. She published her first short story in 1980 at the age of 40 and her first book, a novel, Self Possession, appeared in 1987. Early years of marriage were taken up with raising a family and working as a schoolteacher, but Australia Council grants and fellowships enabled her to leave teaching and write full time. Halligan’s fiction and autobiographical writing both focus on daily life, placing considerable emphasis on domesticity: ‘the domestic is what I know and that’s where all the important things happen, birth, death, marriage, all that stuff’ (quoted in Molloy, 1992: 117). This suburban content, however, has drawn criticism. Susan Midalia condemns Self Possession for ‘political complacency’, chiding the author’s middle-class sensibility (Midalia, 1996: 96). Ken Gelder includes Halligan’s novel The Fog Garden (2001) in his attack on the ‘rarefied aesthetics – epicurean, tasteful, stylish, delicately cultivated’ which he considers symptomatic of a deep conservatism in contemporary Australian fiction, particularly in women’s novels built around the garden ‘as a kind of beautiful, orderly refuge and inspiration – usually functioning as a metaphor for literary writing’ (Gelder, 1996: 49). Such representations of Halligan’s work as bourgeois and elitist constitute a very limited reading. Her fiction often portrays the hardships underprivileged people endure, while her apparently secure suburban havens frequently prove fragile, troubled places. Halligan herself is totally unapologetic about her subject matter: ‘I think suburbia is one of the great achievements of the human spirit’ (Halligan, 2004b: 15). Much of her fiction focuses on home and family relationships and, while rarely adopting an overt feminist stance, reveals a keen awareness of female disadvantage and gender discrimination. In a story, ‘Beneficiaries’, the narrator – a writer named Marion – describes family possessions divided with her sisters after their parents’ death. Two fountain pens fall to her lot. One ‘a stout navy blue job with a gold nib’ belonged to her father. ‘It somehow reminds me of Mr Menzies in a double-breasted suit’ (Halligan, 1993: 108). The other, ‘very small, marbled green and brown and cream’ has on its cap ‘a round ivory-coloured



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head, big-eyed, bobbed-haired, wearing a little flat black hat’ (107). Significantly, it is this, her mother’s pen, the narrator chooses to write with, just as Halligan, in all her work, continues to provide a woman’s perspective on the world. Suburbia and domesticity also figure largely in her books of memoirs – Eat My Words (1990), Cockles of the Heart (1996), The Taste of Memory (2004) and Those Women Who Go to Hotels (1997), co-authored with Lucy Frost. Eat My Words is the only one Halligan specifically describes as autobiography, though she claims, perhaps a little artlessly, not to have realized this at first: it wasn’t till it came back from the printer, a real book, between covers, not a manuscript, that I realised it was also an autobiography … It isn’t a straightforward chronological autobiography, but my life is the spine of it, the skeleton, what gives its flesh shape and holds it together. And all cooks know that meat tastes better on the bone. That’s where the real flavour comes from. (Halligan, 2004b: 7) Artificial distinctions between autobiography and memoir solidified in the nineteenth century when a hierarchy of values was established, with autobiography considered ‘a developmental narrative which orders both time and the personality according to a purpose or goal’ (Anderson, 2001: 8), and consequently superior to the more rambling, less serious genre of memoir. Halligan finds a relatively loose structure better suited to her intentions than more conventional autobiography: You can see your life as a straight line from birth to death, a kind of time line, with notches marking significant events, a firmly ruled line. Or you can see it as a series of loops, turning back on itself, linear still, but forming circles, or ellipses, possibly moving forward as it loops backward, or perhaps sideways, but not marching ever onward like a Christian soldier. Maybe it’s a spiral, the loops higher or lower, upwards or downwards, differently angled. I prefer this view to the ruled straight line. (Halligan, 1996: 227) Although Eat My Words and The Taste of Memory can be classed as culinary memoirs and Cockles of the Heart and Those Women Who Go to Hotels as travel writing, food and journeys are closely entwined structural motifs in Halligan’s memoirs and fiction both. Recipes are scattered throughout the texts of Eat My Words, The Taste of Memory and Cockles of the Heart, while travel, particularly between Australia and France, plays



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an important part in the food writing. Cockles of the Heart describes a circuitous car trip where the author and her husband follow the ancient pilgrimage route through southern France leading to the shrine of St James of Compostela in Spain, with Halligan noting the restaurants where they eat along the way. Frequent references to food in nearly all her writing reinforce what is for her the important motif of sociability, a quality she sees as greatly nurtured through domesticity. Food connects people both to one another and to past experience. Memory both tests and tastes the past, and Halligan’s choice of title, The Taste of Memory, alludes in part to the famous passage in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past where the adult narrator, drinking lime tea and eating a Madeleine cake, is overwhelmed by childhood memories. She recalls personal relationships through recollections of previous meals, evoking pleasurable nostalgia in her readers by recording details of a shared past: When I came to write Eat My Words I realized that my awakening to food in those postwar years when rationing and austerity gradually gave way to plenty, was of much the same pattern as the country’s. That as I learned, so did Australia. Of course I see no causal connection here; it was an accident of my age, of being born when I was. (Halligan, 2004b: 3) Food is also an important motif in Halligan’s fiction, where it is not only a prompt to memory but an important means of communication – ‘a language we all speak’ – with strong literary associations. Halligan claims literature is full of meals as she notes famous fictional repasts, including Leopold Bloom’s breakfast of pork kidneys, the boeuf en daube Mrs Ramsay serves at dinner, the liver eaten by the Portnoy family and Falstaff’s pennyworth of bread accompanied by an intolerable deal of sack (100–1). After deciding at one point to omit all references to food in her own fiction, she admits: ‘I found I couldn’t do it. Quite impossible. The kind of novels I write need food’ (93). Halligan believes food is also important in lifewriting, claiming ‘the artist: the novelist, the biographer, the autobiographer’ require it as an aid to achieving verisimilitude, poignancy or irony (95). Language and food, after all, have orality in common: ‘both have the same organ, the tongue; it is the tongue that speaks, and the tongue that tastes’ (Halligan, 1996: 93), and anyone who consults a recipe book necessarily engages in a process where food is transmuted into words so it can again be reconstituted as food.




Dorothy Jones

Food is also intimately linked to hospitality, ‘the giving of pleasure to friends’ (Halligan, 1990: 13), and Halligan’s Canberra house has been redesigned to include ‘not a kitchen that you eat in but a dining room you cook in’ where guests and cook entertain one another during a meal’s preparation (Halligan, 2004b: 254–5). This offer of hospitality extends to the author’s readers as she entices us with promises of delicious food to enter not merely her kitchen, but her life. Of course we experience both food and hospitality by proxy, through reading about them, as her title Eat My Words indicates. While we may devour the words in her memoirs by reading, we can also eat them through the recipes she provides. Can we, perhaps, test her lifewriting by actually cooking recipes presented so reassuringly they appear quite easy to make? Communicating a recipe is to offer a gift, an act of hospitality, for the word derives from the Latin recipere, meaning to receive. Nevertheless, there is a catch. To eat one’s own words is to admit to being wrong, or to retract a previously confident assertion, so in eating the author’s words by cooking her recipes we acknowledge the possibility of error. When made, the dish may fall short of expectations, perhaps through mistakes on our part or because the words on the page seemed to promise more than they actually delivered. We can also adapt the recipe to suit our own tastes, ending with something significantly different from what the writer intended. Although the recipes embodied in the text may appear as expressions of fact, fiction is never far away. Similarly, whenever we read – whether novel, autobiography or instruction manual – we must construct the author’s meaning in our own minds, approximating her act of creation with varying success. Although, in her memoirs, Halligan warmly invites us into her home, we usually see just one room, the kitchen/dining room, where, being sociably entertained with food and conversation, we may not realize how much of the house is out of bounds even if we also have easy access to the garden, where food and company are also provided. Halligan’s account of her Canberra home exemplifies the kind of unsocial sociability which lifewriting often necessitates. While the house is represented as comfortable and lived-in, visiting it on the page is a little like walking through a stately home where the selected rooms on display are roped off, allowing us to look but never enter. We can only imagine the lives of former inhabitants without actually participating in them ourselves. To explore more intimate spaces in Halligan’s writing we must move into the house of fiction. Comparing Halligan’s second culinary memoir The Taste of Memory with her novel The Fog Garden brings the complex relationship between fiction and lifewriting into closer focus, raising questions as to why she has written both a novel and a memoir relating to the same life-changing



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event. The death of a beloved husband after 35 years of marriage is central to each. Graham Halligan died of cancer in November 1998, The Fog Garden appeared in 2001 and The Taste of Memory in 2004. Both works explore bereavement and grief while reflecting on what it means to be a writer. All Halligan’s books of memoir allude frequently to her previously published fiction, but The Fog Garden, whose protagonist, the newly widowed Clare, happens to be a writer, is her only novel to do so. Moreover, she attributes to Clare’s authorship fiction already published under the name Marion Halligan, even including page references in the Acknowledgements section at the front of the novel. Both works, however, differ greatly in tone. Although companionable and relaxed, The Taste of Memory is pervaded by deep sadness, while The Fog Garden, written closer to Graham Halligan’s death, is more dramatic and emotionally intense. The Taste of Memory follows the structure Halligan prefers for memoir, ‘a series of loops, turning back on itself’ (Halligan, 1996: 227). Individual chapters, which can stand alone as essays, are punctuated by three separate sections in diary form, each headed ‘Passages of Time’, covering a period between 11 October 2002 and 23 November 2003 – possibly the time span of the book’s composition. If Halligan’s autobiography is the skeleton holding Eat My Words together, then The Taste of Memory, with its meditation on the relationship between art and desire, is structured around an account of her marriage and its untimely end: This book … is another set of stories of my life in food, and travel, and especially gardens … I am older now and sadder. That married life which began with such shyly burgeoning hopes ended in anguish, as all long marriages, all long partnerships, will, must, in the death of the beloved other. (Halligan, 2004b: 10–11) The Taste of Memory ranges widely over topics of food, travel and gardens, interspersed with reminders of death, even as its author celebrates the joys of living. Accounts of meals enjoyed with her husband are dotted throughout the entire book, for food plays a key role in maintaining the bonds of family life. Its opening chapter ‘On the Bone’ introduces the subject, describing what part it played in the author’s childhood and in her courting days: ‘Graham was my first dinner party’ (5). It continues with a brief encapsulation of the marriage and its sorrowful conclusion: Till death do us part, we said blithely. Of course we knew we were not immortal, but somehow we did not believe it. (11)




Dorothy Jones

Another chapter, ‘Sailing on Ships’, summarizes the marriage in terms of travel, describing the author accompanied by husband and children on journeys to England and Europe in the 1960s and 1970s and concluding with the account of a 1998 voyage Halligan and her now seriously ill husband make to New Zealand: ‘In Christchurch we saw his family, everybody knowing it would be the last time’ (67). Gardens, ‘these nourishing spaces’, form a principal theme in The Taste of Memory. Descriptions of actual gardens, like the author’s own in Canberra, mingle with garden images drawn from European culture, for the nourishment gardens provide is emotional and aesthetic as well as literal, through the fruit and vegetables grown there. The flourishing Canberra garden Halligan and her husband started from scratch when first married – ‘our block was a clay pan full of builder’s rubble’ – develops into an image of their marriage. On Graham’s death friends gave gifts of flowering plants and shrubs to be planted in one area of the garden as his memorial: A paradise-garden, a Garden of Eden … in fact, mostly our gardens are fallen gardens, there is a serpent in them. Mine was illness, the cancer that destroyed the image of perfect safety. (164) ‘Passages of Time’, those sections of the book presented as diary entries, show how life continues after bereavement, bringing the narrative forward almost to the date of the book’s publication. Seasonal change in the garden marks the progress of days, weeks and years. In October 2002, ‘The garden has gone from being thickly all over yellow with daffodils to densely blue, blue with forget-me-nots’ (69). In an entry for October 2003 we read: Gardens get you used to the idea of decay. The lilacs are browning, the wisteria is falling, the Queen of the Night tulips are finished, the camellia flowers withered. But the roses are covered with buds. (239) The author has a new friend, her ‘gentleman caller’, John, and is working on another novel. Memories of her dead husband, however, still fill her mind, as the entry for 23 November 2003 indicates: Last week was five years since Graham died, somehow an inconceivable length of time. As Clare found out in The Fog Garden, grief is an enormous emotion and does not go away. She saw it as a great cathedral in which she could sit, and understood that, like a real stone cathedral, it would be many years in the making. (245)



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This is just one of Halligan’s many allusions to The Fog Garden in The Taste of Memory, but, in the novel, the cathedral imagery helps reveal the heroine’s feelings, while creating significant links between the author and her character. Its opening pages are, in fact, a careful blend of memoir and fiction to which Halligan pointedly draws her readers’ attention. While Clare perceives marriage as a complicated construction a couple build throughout their years together (Halligan, 2001: 260), bereavement forces her into a very different edifice: The cathedral of grief was as lofty as ever, but she sat in it, for its comfort, mysterious, perhaps unavailable; cold, demanding, a place of wonder. Still ambiguously splendid. Needing a lot of learning. (140) The cathedral image is developed most fully in the opening pages where an initial chapter entitled ‘lapping’ is followed by an ‘introduction’ – both set out as author statements – followed by yet another section leading directly into the narrative and also entitled ‘lapping’, which presents the fictional heroine Clare, and her dying husband Geoffrey. The first ‘lapping’ section (which, for clarity, I refer to as the foreword) is headed, ‘Lower Snug, Tasmania, 11.12.98’, with a dedication, ‘For Graham who died, 18.11.98’ (1). This section concludes with a footnote, dated 14.6.99. The foreword records the author’s visit to Tasmania soon after her husband’s death and though much of it describes sitting on the beach watching other visitors and children playing, this is interwoven with an account of her own distress when glimpsing married couples expressing their affection: ‘for instance at the moment when the man nestles his hand in the hollow of his wife’s neck, and leaves it there, comfortable, habitual’ (1). In imagination, the husband’s hand resembles a nestling bird which she then incorporates into the cathedral image, paying further tribute to her own dead husband who was, by profession, a medievalist: But my bird perches there, in the cathedral of my grief, high upon one of the corbels of an arch. You knew all the vocabulary of cathedrals. Corbels and bosses, groins and squinches, you would point them out as we stood heads bent back looking at them, and now I can’t even remember the names, let alone the meanings, you it was who kept them for me. (7) In yet another example of how easily boundaries between different genres become blurred, this entire foreword, together with its accompanying footnote, was first published in The Best Australian Essays 1999




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and later incorporated into the novel with only very minor editorial changes.1 In the ‘introduction’, Halligan next introduces her protagonist, Clare, informing us her husband died ‘a bit over a year before the end of this novel’ (9): Clare isn’t me. She’s like me. Some of her experiences, adventures, terrors, have been mine. Some haven’t. We have the same profession. Both of us have had to come to terms with being widowed, and sometimes we have made similar choices. Not always. Her voice is quite like mine. She enjoys a similar bowerbird cleverness, a kind of sly sharpness in the collection of matter. (9) Halligan appends her own name to the introduction, concluding, ‘The first piece in the book is about me. The rest of the novel is about Clare’ (10). This overlap in the lives of author and character is in some respects the novel’s essence. Its two opening sections force readers to confront squarely the relationship between fiction and autobiographical writing. Where exactly is the line demarcating the character Clare from her creator? Halligan claims it is very clear: This is a novel, it owes a lot to the events of my life but it is still a work of fiction … The main character is a woman called Clare, who is very like me but isn’t me. (Halligan, 2004b: 10) Readers and interviewers, however, seem so to have confused Clare’s experiences with events in Halligan’s own life that she finds it necessary to emphasize how distinct they are. ‘Believe me, I know about writing memoir; my next but one book, The Taste of Memory (2004), is a memoir. The Fog Garden isn’t’ (Halligan, 2007: 25). A desire to emphasize that her novel is a work of fiction may well have been one motive for writing The Taste of Memory. She explains the similarities between her character and herself, for example, by claiming that novelists are very lazy when it comes to making things up: The novelist’s life is what she has got to work on: what happens to her, her friends, what she reads in the paper. Out of the events that come into her ken she constructs the edifice of her story. (2007: 25) Halligan’s own experience of bereavement was so overwhelming it prompted an urgent need to write. When her husband died, she was



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When my husband died I did not think of writing a novel about the powerful emotional events happening to me, but I started noting them down as a kind of therapy. Then I realised they were forming stories, stories always and uncannily about love and death, and I started writing them, not in my own voice but through a person called Clare, who became my heroine. This turned into The Fog Garden. (Halligan 2007: 25) Through fiction Halligan has sought to involve readers in the terrible experience of bereavement. Like Graham Halligan, Clare’s husband has been a scholar of medieval French literature and, like the Halligans, the two fictional characters have travelled regularly to France. Clare and Geoffrey’s kitchen is not so much ‘a kitchen you eat in, … as a dining room you cook in’ (Halligan, 2001: 211), just like the author’s in The Taste of Memory. Clare’s garden, which figures importantly in the novel, bears a strong resemblance to the Canberra garden in Halligan’s memoir, and Clare also plants an area with flowering shrubs in her husband’s memory. Such similarities do not, however, transform the novel into autobiography. When asserting The Fog Garden is not a memoir, Halligan insists, ‘I need fiction to be frank in a way I never could have been in a memoir’ (2004b: 10). At first sight, this appears a doubleedged statement suggesting the novel is actually revealing all – presenting hidden truths excluded from her memoir writing. While there is an age-old debate as to whether fictional works may not be more profoundly truthful than those labelled non-fiction, Halligan’s claim that fiction allows her greater frankness acknowledges how society regards so many emotions and experiences accompanying bereavement as unmentionable. Tormenting, agonizing grief may last for years, but even one’s closest friends will eventually tire of hearing about it. She writes in the foreword: People ask me, Are you all right? Oh, I say, yes, I’m all right. This means, No, of course I am not all right but what the hell is the point of saying so? What good will it do? (2001: 6) The novel allows Halligan to dwell on a widow’s perpetual grieving in ways that might be difficult in propria persona. Clare writes little notes



working on a novel, later published as The Point, she had begun as he first fell ill, ‘but another book [The Fog Garden] sprang out of the intense emotions prompted by his death’ (Wyndham, 2003: 13). She explains:

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I am cold. Come to my bed and warm me. Love me. You do not need to make love, to love me is enough. Loving, of course, is huger than making love, warmer, longer, harder. It lasts beyond the grave. To an extent. (165) Fragments of information appear on the other side of these notes: details from a menu, notice of a Council meeting, sentences from an old political pamphlet. Clare imagines some future archaeologist puzzling over the two-sided messages, while Halligan demonstrates how heartrending sorrow mingles with humdrum events in daily life. The Fog Garden is an extended meditation on grief, revealing that bereavement takes many forms. Clare’s friend, Polly, has endured the death of a close family member – possibly a child – in a sudden, terrible car accident. Another friend, Elvira, lives with the fact that, after many years of marriage, her husband has left her for a young man: you’re lucky. Your husband is dead, you can grieve, whole-hearted and with real tears. But what if the sod is living on the other side of town with his new love … are you supposed to stop loving him, just because he’s stopped loving you? (219) Clare also knows she may be facing another bereavement – the possible death of a child whose ‘textbook heart should have failed at birth’ (123). Her now adult daughter undergoes yet one more in a series of prolonged, dangerous operations which, against all expectations, she survives, and although this recovery partially softens the harsh reality of Geoffrey’s death, Clare knows the threat of mortality still hovers. Even more unmentionable than prolonged desolation is the surge of sexual desire sometimes accompanying bereavement. Halligan writes: ‘I have known the strange energetic erotic excitements of grief, and written a book about them’ (2004b: 11), and her novel dwells on the recently widowed Clare’s intense sexual longing. While she has no wish for another husband, ‘her body would like someone to make love to it’ (2001: 26). Early in the novel she has a brief affair with a man who, together with his wife, had long been friends with Geoffrey and herself. This ends once the lover tells his wife, and all three decide, with some difficulty, to continue as friends. The whole episode is mildly funny, particularly since Clare and her lover spend so much time discussing



to her dead husband on the backs of torn-up sheets of paper, tucking them into her bedclothes:

their respective marriages, but the liaison becomes yet another way Clare explores her past relationship with Geoffrey. Halligan claims: ‘Fiction has always been autobiographical,’ citing Charlotte Brontë’s Villette as an example. Establishing such close links between herself and Clare, however, has laid her open to speculation, indicated by her response to an interviewer who asks whether Clare’s affair was real: She answers with practiced speed and a smile: ‘I point out that if you look quite carefully, she says she might be inventing it. So you don’t know if she’s invented him, or if he’s real … You’re the first person who’s put it in those words. Most people are more circumspect.’ (Wyndham, 2003: 13) The novel actually demonstrates the process whereby events in a writer’s life are transformed into fiction, linking it to the possible love affair Clare will soon experience. When introduced into the novel, she is writing a story, with a newly bereaved widow as central character who is befriended by another, older widow. Not long after her husband’s death, Clare, overwhelmed by sexual longing, is working on her ‘widows’ story, choosing where the narrative will take her next: ‘Or perhaps she is letting the narrative choose …’ (Halligan, 2001: 27). Halligan’s narrative then moves immediately, and without warning, into a description of Clare in bed with her lover, whose existence has not previously been mentioned in the novel. A few pages later, a section headed ‘vermillion: a short story’ presents the sexually charged story of two widows Clare had begun writing earlier, giving us insights into her literary technique. Scattered suggestions and details provided in the earlier chapter are now assembled into a completed narrative containing fragments of the writer’s own experience, while also differing from it quite significantly. Although the adulterous love affair may also be a figment of Clare’s imagination – a narrative development in some work of fiction she is writing – its descriptions differ in tone from her two short stories incorporated into the novel’s text. It is, however, presented in a very literary context. Immediately after the ‘vermillion’ short story comes a description of Clare and her lover in bed listening to a recording of Dante’s Inferno describing the adultery of Paolo and Francesca whose affair was triggered by the act of reading about yet another pair of adulterous lovers, Lancelot and Guinevere. Narratives enclose one another like nesting Chinese boxes and, later in the novel, Clare and her lover also discuss the story of Tristan and Iseult. There is a certain dry humour




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in these analogies and Halligan clearly enjoys teasing her readers here. All characters in The Fog Garden, including Clare herself, are of course products of Halligan’s imagination, but the narrative’s self-reflexivity is tantalizing. Clare accepts invitations to read and talk about her work at various literary festivals and she sometimes seems to deliver to her audience segments of the novel Halligan has written. At one point she contemplates reading ‘The Sins of the Leopard’, the name of an earlier section in the novel she inhabits. At a festival in Tasmania she reads a story called ‘The Unquiet Grave’, yet another title of an earlier section in The Fog Garden.2 Incorporating autobiographical material within works of fiction raises problems for many writers, especially when reviewers speculate or interviewers quiz them about it. Difficulties arising from the inclusion of autobiographical detail are also compounded by what Helen Garner describes as ‘the dangerous and exciting breakdown of the old boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, and the ethical and technical problems that are exploding out of the resulting gap’ (1999: 189). Halligan, for all her assertions that fiction and memoir are quite distinct, is well aware of the problems involved when incorporating autobiographical material in stories or novels. She comments in The Taste of Memory on how her husband saw himself in all her male characters: the thing is, however tall or short or thin or fat, however precise or sloppy in their habits, garrulous or taciturn, kind or cruel, Graham always thought my male characters were him. (Halligan, 2004b: 257) Pointing out how strikingly different a particular male character actually was, prompted the response: ‘You just made him the opposite of me, that’s how I can tell he’s based on me’ (257). Memoir also causes similar problems. When writing Eat My Words, Halligan decided, with her husband’s agreement, to refer to him as Cosmo, and he also appears under that name in Cockles of the Heart. Graham, however, grew to dislike the Cosmo figure: I think Graham thought that Cosmo was not him, he was a character in a book, very like him but other, not somebody he liked particularly. I don’t think anything can be done about this; whenever a person is put in a book, however truthfully his story is told, he still somehow becomes a character, not himself. That goes for the most strict of biographies. (10) Halligan has published two short stories about an academic who taught French at Newcastle University, ‘Salut Dr. Appleton’ and ‘Vale Professor 10.1057/9780230294868 - The Unsociable Sociability of Women's Lifewriting, Edited by Anne Collett and Louise D'Arcens


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Appleton’. The first focuses on her own gaucherie and inexperience as a young girl, and in the second much later story, which reads both as an essay and as a work of fiction, she expresses surprise and dismay that when this man eventually died, extracts from the earlier story were included in his obituary: What I did know, though – I the person, myself not the sign on the page – must have known since I acted on it so thoroughly, though doubtless not admitting then, is that writers are vampires, are cannibals, are carrion feeders on anything whose life so much as shimmers within the ambit of their eyes. Whose life … yes … and death too if it makes a good story. (Halligan, 1993: 133) Halligan writes about both these stories in The Fog Garden, attributing their authorship to her character Clare (Halligan, 2001: 240–1), and, significantly, given her interest in food writing, she also endows Clare with the cannibalism metaphor: ‘writers cannot always be cannibals. So they tell themselves’ (238). Bereavement has driven Clare to write about her husband’s death and its immediate aftermath, including her adulterous love affair: Ever since Geoffrey began dying the world has offered her shapely intricate narratives of sex and death. They fall into her pen. They loop and spiral their frail elaborate structures around the central enormous fact of his death. (134) She initially decides not to publish since the stories seem to betray not only herself, but other people: ‘Clare knows that all writing is betrayal, or rather that you have to choose which betrayal it will be, your friends or your art’ (167). She has shown the stories to her lover, who, either by accident or design, has allowed his wife to read them, thus releasing Clare from what she regards as the principal barrier to their publication. ‘But – and here’s the irony, an exquisite one – now the wife has read them and knows the secrets they contain, they are no longer unpublishable’ (240). There is a rather sharp interchange between the two women about the prospect of publishing: And what you’ve ended up with is love letters to my husband. I think if you look carefully you will see that they are love letters to my husband. (237) The lover’s request that the stories not be published greatly angers Clare. During their affair, when publication had seemed impossible, he had been 10.1057/9780230294868 - The Unsociable Sociability of Women's Lifewriting, Edited by Anne Collett and Louise D'Arcens



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delighted to read them. ‘It was like making love twice, once in the flesh, again as these other people’ (235). After it is all over, however, he says: ‘I’ve been thinking, would I want my children reading this, knowing these things’ (248). Clare insists that authors write to be read. ‘The work does not achieve its existence until it has been absorbed by another set of eyes. And of course it is what she has been wanting all along’ (242). In another metaphor derived from food, though less directly than the cannibalism one, she acknowledges that: ‘all writers are tarts in the end’ (134). Although it forms an important narrative thread in The Fog Garden, Clare’s adulterous liaison is just part of her extensive grieving process. Much of the novel concerns the texture of Clare’s daily life – her domestic surroundings, her friendships, her garden – focusing particularly on objects, an important motif in all Halligan’s writing. Remembered details of shared domestic life are themselves precious objects: She thinks of the year of Geoffrey’s dying, and how they remembered their past, forming it into little stories for one another’s delight. Like small beautiful objects passed back and forth between them, to admire the craft, the skill, the intricate detail, the devotion. (70) In memory Clare keeps returning to a physical object, the yellow post-it note Geoffrey had placed on the door of their wall-griller warning of a loose handle, a now poignant reminder outlasting the man himself (60). She also recollects a favourite quotation from Samuel Johnson: ‘Things are the sons of heaven, … words are the daughters of earth’ (130), and the novel’s final section is entitled ‘the sons of heaven’. About a year after Geoffrey’s death, Clare visits Paris, falling ill there with a fever, signifying her persistent sense of loss and grief, and wonders if she can remain strong enough to withstand bereavement: She thinks of a china cup, so good at containing: hot liquids, cold, a bunch of flowers, borrowed sugar. Until it cracks, and leaks, and maybe breaks. So strong while it’s whole, but all the time so fragile too. And once it’s cracked it’s done for, it’s no good, its next step is to break. Whereas she hopes her cracked state is temporary, that she will be healed and strong again. (279) This echoes Halligan’s opening lines in her introduction: ‘I do not crack. I do not crack. Though it could be thought that I might’ (1). Once recovered, Clare buys a set of old but unused sheets from an antique shop to convert into new dining-room curtains, speculating they may have



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been sewn for her trousseau by one of the many women whose potential husbands died in World War I (290). The sheets have a story, possibly a sad one, that Clare will never know, but she transports them to Australia along with a set of silver Georgian teaspoons bought in London en route to Paris. Back in her Canberra house, she enjoys both sets of objects now absorbed into the home she and Geoffrey constructed together: The hands that used the 1828 spoon are generations over and over turned into dust. The green light gleams through sheets that have spent the better part of a century in lavender drawers, unused, and whether because of tragedy or plenty no one will ever know. And here they are, the spoons, the sheets, alive and well on the other side of the world, being seen. Being gazed on and delighted in … And the words that are the daughters of earth, she has them too. (294) The Taste of Memory’s final chapter, also entitled ‘The sons of heaven’, employs the same Samuel Johnson passage (from the preface to his famous Dictionary), which Clare recollects in The Fog Garden: I am not yet so lost in lexicography, as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven. Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas: I wish however that the instrument might be less apt to decay, and that signs might be permanent, like the things which they denote. (Halligan, 2004b: 258) Halligan notes that although Johnson may consider ‘things’ as God’s creation (or made from materials He created), and therefore superior to words, a mere human device: ‘the things which words denote are not permanent’ (258), and may even, when decayed or destroyed, be memorialized through the power of language. For her, objects and language are intimately connected and much of her final chapter includes descriptions of greatly cherished household objects, many with ‘affectionate narratives attached’ (256), which contribute significantly to transforming her house into a home and also convey the texture of family life. Unsurprisingly, there are many cooking utensils among them: The omelette pan I bought for Graham. The madeleine moulds, without which we would be eating pleasant plain cakes and not thinking about Proust or memory. The great chef’s knives bought at Dehillerin near Les Halles. (256)




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Like Clare’s house in The Fog Garden, Halligan’s also includes ‘curtains made of old (but never used French linen bedsheets’ (264). While such objects carry personal stories from Halligan’s own life, she has also incorporated quite a number into her fiction. But just as food represented verbally in a recipe may emerge as markedly different when the reader actually cooks it, so objects, however substantial, will inevitably change their nature through an author’s choice of language and context. In a short story, ‘Family Album’, the narrator remembers a refined maiden aunt who seems to epitomize 1950s elegant femininity: ‘I remember her dress in full colour: bands of scarlet poppies and golden ears of wheat on cream silk, full and sensuous’ (Halligan, 1998: 66). In Halligan’s more recent novel, The Apricot Colonel, one character wears a remarkably similar dress: ‘It was made of some slippery sort of fabric … and I could see how the dress slid over her limbs and yet clung. The fabric was white with a pattern of scarlet poppies and yellow wheatears and blue cornflowers. I recognized it as art silk’ (Halligan, 2006: 21). The dress assumes a very different range of meanings, however, when the wearer is later revealed as a middle-aged man who likes to cross-dress in his mother’s clothes. Yet, despite differences in tone and context, the resemblance between these two fictional garments still remains. Such patterns of dissimilarity and resemblance indicate some of the problems in relating a novel, The Fog Garden, to a memoir, The Taste of Memory. Both have comparable subject matter arising from the author’s bereavement and both deal with aspects of that experience, represented through the weighty, substantial image of a medieval cathedral. Halligan argues that her readers should recognize how memoir and novel are totally distinct genres and not muddle the two, although apparently encouraging them to do just this. Autobiography and fiction are interleaved at the opening of The Fog Garden, while her conclusion to The Taste of Memory deliberately echoes that of her novel, using the same chapter heading and including substantial reference to the Samuel Johnson quotation from which it is derived. In both books, the central figure (Clare in one case, Halligan herself in the other) finally retreats into her own home which, in the novel, greatly resembles the author’s Canberra house, to contemplate life among cherished objects made precious through past associations, both personal and historical. After the emotional turmoil of bereavement, the suburban home represents comfort and continuity. The beloved spouse is dead, but the home he and his wife established will continue to hold and sustain memories of the life they once shared. Each book offers a resolution of sorts to the pain of loss.



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The question, however, still remains. Why has Halligan chosen to write both a novel and a memoir based on the same intensely personal experience, both published within a very short space of time? A life-shattering event like the death of a much-loved husband after 35 years of marriage must inevitably command a writer’s attention and provide compelling subject matter. It is scarcely surprising the experience should inspire more than one book and spill across different genres. Intense grief has many manifestations, from gut-wrenching torment to sad resignation, and Halligan chooses to write about both extremes, focusing on the former in her novel, and dwelling on the latter in The Taste of Memory, with its measured, reflective tone. The novel presents the bereaved woman’s private, inner world, while the memoir exhibits the public face people are expected to maintain, even in situations of dire personal suffering. Can one book be considered more ‘truthful’ than the other? Even in a non-fictional context, language still proves tricky, as Halligan indicates when recounting her husband’s reaction to being portrayed as Cosmo: ‘Whenever a person is put in a book, however truthfully his story is told, he still somehow becomes a character, not himself’ (Halligan, 2004b: 10). The Fog Garden and The Taste of Memory each present their own kind of truth, although the novel assumes certain aspects of memoir and the memoir inevitably contains some fictional elements. Both books reveal a writer who cherishes sociability, which, for her, is firmly grounded in the domestic life she so enjoys portraying even in the teeth of dismissive criticism. Nevertheless, while sociably inviting readers to share in aspects of her personal life, she also, in a spirit of unsocial sociability, deploys all her literary skill to ensure they intrude no further than she chooses, holding them at bay with both reticence and fictionality.

Notes 1. ‘Lapping’ (Halligan, 1999), 208–13. A section from The Taste of Memory, ‘Desire and Discontent’, appears in Dessaix (2004), 31–4, although some of the more personal details which appear in Halligan’s book are omitted from the essay. 2. In the novel, the chapter headings are given in lower case, but when Clare is described reading, or proposing to read passages from her writing, the titles are given in upper case.

Bibliography Anderson, L. (2001) Autobiography (London and New York: Routledge). Dessaix, R. (ed.) (2004) The Best Australian Essays 2004 (Melbourne: Black Inc.).




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Garner, H. (1999) ‘Looking for Something to Read’, in Peter Craven (ed.), The Best Australian Essays 1999 (Melbourne: Bookman Press). Gelder, K. (1996) ‘Politics and Monomania: The Rarefied World of Contemporary Australian Culture’, Overland, 184, 49–50. Halligan, M. (1990) Eat My Words (Sydney: Angus and Robinson). ——— (1993) The Worry Box (Melbourne: Minerva). ——— (1996) Cockles of the Heart (Melbourne: Minerva). ——— (1998) The Living Hothouse (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press). ——— (1999) ‘Lapping’, in Peter Craven (ed.), The Best Australian Essays 1999 (Melbourne: Bookman Press). ——— (2001) The Fog Garden (Sydney: Allen and Unwin). ——— (2004a) ‘Desire and Discontent’, in Robert Dessaix (ed.), The Best Australian Essays 2004 (Melbourne: Black Inc.). ——— (2004b) The Taste of Memory (Sydney: Allen and Unwin). ——— (2006) The Apricot Colonel (Sydney: Allen and Unwin). ——— (2007) ‘Love, Actually’, in ‘The Australian Literary Review’, The Australian, 4 April. Halligan, M., and L. Frost (1999) Those Women Who Go to Hotels (Melbourne: Minerva). Midalia, S. (1996) ‘The Contemporary Female Bildungsroman: Gender, Genre and the Politics of Optimism’, Westerly, 41, 89–104. Molloy, F. (1992) ‘An Interview with Marion Halligan’, Southerly, 52, 112–31. Wyndham, S. (2003) ‘Cravings of a Hungry Heart’, ‘Spectrum’, Sydney Morning Herald, 8–9 March: 13.



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Writing as Cultural Negotiation: Suneeta Peres da Costa and Alice Pung1 Wenche Ommundsen

Mina Pereira, the narrator of Suneeta Peres da Costa’s novel Homework, is born with feelers on top of her head: small protuberances, or antennae, which grow bigger at times of emotional stress. ‘She might be a little bit sensitive, that’s all’ (Peres da Costa, 1999: 5), her parents explain, defending their daughter against insensitive strangers accusing her of being an alien, an extraterrestrial, a mutant. Mina is sensitive, as is the young protagonist of Alice Pung’s autobiographical narrative Unpolished Gem, sensitive to their difference as reflected in the eyes and behaviour of schoolmates and friends, sensitive, in particular, to cultural conflicts and competing demands arising as they navigate the gulf between their family and the wider Australian society. The extraordinarily sensitive cultural feelers which are the birthright of migrant children give them the ability to negotiate the treacherous terrain which separates their home from the wider world and thus to act as go-betweens between their parents and mainstream society. Tracing the process of socialization as cultural negotiation in these two stories about growing up Asian in Australia I argue that the young authors also negotiate conventions of lifewriting, migrant writing, coming-of-age narratives and women’s writing to accommodate their particular sense of belonging – and not belonging – within the literary and cultural traditions which form part of their complex inheritance. Homework and Unpolished Gem are books that challenge generic distinctions. Both straddle the divide between fiction and lifewriting, but they do so in very different ways. Homework is a novel which with some justice could be located within the magical realist tradition, but Mina’s story, give or take a feeler or two, is closely modelled on the early life of the author. It’s almost as if it makes use of non-realist elements (Mina’s feelers, her mother’s transformation into a bird) in order 187



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to deliberately distance itself from autobiographical genres – a means, perhaps, to protect the author and her family from unwelcome scrutiny. Unpolished Gem acknowledges its autobiographical status, but makes good use of a number of novelistic devices, among them, as we shall see, an Epilogue in the form of a parable which throws into doubt the veracity of the conclusion. The hybrid form may in each case be linked to the position from which the author views her story, and her life. Peres da Costa was 22, Pung 25, when their books came out. Unlike many autobiographical texts, theirs are not reflections on childhood and youth from a ‘safe’ distance, but reports ‘in the middest’, where, one must assume, the conflicts, tensions and insecurities which inform each story are only partially resolved, and the real-life models for the figures who populate each story are very much alive and capable of offering their own version of events. As stories about the childhood of Australian-born daughters of Asian migrants, both texts are centrally about vulnerability, a vulnerability which is echoed in the storytelling situation, particularly at moments where the distinction between character, narrator and author becomes blurred and the told life, inevitably it would seem, is projected onto the lived life. As readers of life stories told by young adults, we are positioned to ‘read’ the author as well as her story, which may be a way of explaining the enormous popularity of young authors (and Alice Pung is a prime example) on the speaker circuit following the publication of their books. The expectation is that the story is unfinished, that it will continue outside the text and that, as readers, we can be part of it, or at least gain access to it, in ways unavailable to readers of more distant and ‘finished’ narratives. The conflicted socialization through cultural negotiation which I have identified as a central theme of both Homework and Unpolished Gem is thus carried over into the generic make-up of each text as the author devises strategies aimed at exercising a measure of control over its reception. ‘This is not the story of my life,’ Peres da Costa seems to insist. ‘This is not a refugee story,’ Alice Pung argues. In one sense, they are both right, and their denial protects them, post-publication, from the kind of personal scrutiny their stories seem to invite. On the other hand, the denial works a bit like René Magritte’s famous painting This is not a Pipe: what we see so obviously both is and isn’t a pipe that the prohibited reading if anything becomes even more insistent. Alice Pung’s book starts with the sentence ‘This story does not begin on a boat’ (Pung, 2006: 1). It is not, it thus announces, a victim story, not a story about refugees, trauma or persecution. Instead it is the story of



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Alice in Wonderland, that wonderland being a Melbourne suburb called Footscray, ruled over by a benign and generous government, where little green men guide pedestrians safely across busy roads, staircases move all by themselves and old people receive enough money every fortnight to live a life of abundance. The blurb on the back cover takes the idea further: ‘The story does not begin on a boat. Nor does it contain any wild swans or falling leaves.’ By marking its distance from the prevailing genre of diasporic women’s lifewriting,2 stories of persecution and suffering under despotic and patriarchal Asian regimes, Unpolished Gem sends two seemingly contradictory messages to its readers. On the one hand, like so many other publications by the younger generation of women writers in Asia and in the diaspora, it refuses victimization. On the other, it soon becomes apparent that Alice has her tongue firmly planted in her cheek. The Australian wonderland turns out to be every bit as confusing and troublesome as the one her namesake found at the bottom of the rabbit-hole, and the narrator’s family, we soon learn, has seen more than its share of political turmoil, human atrocity and leaky boats. The strategy somehow allows Pung to have her cake and eat it too: asserting her difference from the victim-stories which have dominated the popular genre of Asian women’s writing and at the same time telling a version of that story.3 Homework is the story of Mina Pereira, second daughter of middleclass Catholic Indian migrants. Her father, who works as a counsellor in the Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs, was born in Goa, her mother is a Bombay-born medical doctor. Their migrant status, while important to understanding the background against which the main drama is acted out, plays only a secondary role in the spectacular disintegration of the family which is the main focus of the narrative. Migration and cultural difference provide a thematic framework for destinies that are highly individualized: elaborate chains of metaphor link the mother’s madness and its effects on other family members to recurrent tropes of diasporic writing such as food, home, sex, language and education. Gesturing towards the magical realist tradition as well as the Bildungsroman and the migrant story, the novel takes us from the birth of Mina, whose physical abnormality marks the alienation of her whole family, to a dramatic climax at the threshold of adolescence, when she sheds her feelers and leaves her traumatic childhood behind. By comparison, Unpolished Gem seems a more conventional second-generation coming-of-age migrant story, which takes the young protagonist from early childhood within the diasporic community, through the turmoil of



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adolescence which inevitably involves her in the clash of cultures, to early adulthood which brings about an enhanced understanding of her parents’ generation and acceptance of her own place in a family history marked by upheaval as well as continuity. In fact, Pung’s relationship to the story she tells is much more complex: a double voice maintained throughout the text dramatizes a profound ambivalence as she negotiates the social and cultural distance she has to travel on her journey from the migrant and working-class suburb of Footscray to the University of Melbourne. Telling her own story, she also pays tribute to a family history of extraordinary hardship and resilience – from pre-Communist China to Cambodia, from Pol Pot’s Killing Fields via Vietnam and Thailand to Australia, from relative prosperity to utter destitution to migrant success story. Reading these texts side by side I do not want to underplay the important differences between them. Not only generically distinct, they also make their appeal to different markets. Pung’s book may mark its distance from Jung Chang, Adeline Yen Mah and refugee writing, but by evoking such texts it nevertheless inserts itself into the diasporic tradition and promises a distinctly Australian and contemporary version of the Asian migrant narrative. Homework, though set in Sydney, was not published in Australia, which, according to the author, was a deliberate choice on her part: Even though it’s set in a Sydney suburb, its coordinates and being are international and ‘expatriated.’ And I desperately wanted to avoid being ghettoised as a local migrant author. I felt a publishing contract that began overseas might help that. (Peres da Costa, quoted in Waldren, 1999: R10) The two books are thus both ‘Australian’ and ‘diasporic’ in quite different ways. They also deal with very different types of migrant experience: middle-class, university-educated and English-speaking migrants in Homework; in Unpolished Gem refugees whose lack of English forces them to start at the bottom of the social ladder and seek work and social contact within the confines of their own ethnic community. Both books, moreover, defy any easy ethno-cultural classification. Mina’s father insists that he is Goan and not Indian, and that the Indian annexation of Goa is an example of postcolonial imperialism. When his daughters are asked to bring a flag to school, he gives them a Portuguese flag; when Indira Gandhi is assassinated, he cheers while his wife weeps. In Unpolished Gem, Alice’s grandparents’ experience of successive waves of persecution, in China and in Cambodia, underscores complexities of ethnic, class and



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national affiliation which easily get lost in the process of hyphenation when Australia becomes part of the equation. In terms of cultural or textual specificities, then, Peres da Costa and Pung’s books have few similarities. But these very differences mark points they have in common, such as the problematizing of any simple notion of ethnicity and belonging. One area where they make for pertinent comparison is in the cultural negotiation undertaken by the young protagonists. Girls and young women are crucial links in processes of cultural investment, cultural transmission and cultural preservation. Their functions are multiple and varied: from objects of exchange in patriarchal marital economies to custodians of cultural knowledge; from vulnerable beings in need of constant protection and vigilance to dangerous rebels; from exploited labour to agents of change. In equal measure sociable and quarrelsome they put into play the social antagonism Kant refers to as ‘unsocial sociability’, with, in the case of Mina and Alice, the added complication of having to face double and often contradictory social norms. Caught between competing cultural regimes they become the focus for intense scrutiny, their bodies and minds figured as battlefields as well as sites of transformation and exchange. In Homework and Unpolished Gem these battles and transformations are worked out across recurrent themes of migrant experience such as education, mother–daughter relations and sexuality. As the eldest daughter in her family, Alice is from an early age made to shoulder responsibilities she is ill equipped to handle: negotiating the rivalry between her mother and grandmother, acting as go-between in her mother’s dealings with the English-speaking world, helping with cooking, cleaning and the care of younger siblings, setting an example for her brother and sisters. Above all else, she has to perform well at school. Destined by her family to become a lawyer, she is sent to a private school and put under tremendous pressure to get high marks and gain university entrance. Alice’s own attitude is ambivalent. She resents the pressure, but has her own reasons to obey. While her parents see her success as a vindication of the family unit, the culmination of their process of integration into Australian society, to Alice, education is a ticket to freedom, a means to escape the burden of being the good Asian daughter and the prospect of being somebody’s equally obedient and subordinate wife. She knows, however, that acceptance by, and integration into, the cultural mainstream is only ever partial, and worries that she is destined to be ‘some sort of permanent exchange student’ (Pung, 2006: 237), fascinating to her peers because of her perceived exotic appeal, which she bitterly resents, but never one of them.




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That night our parents realised something that probably shook them from their sleeping dream, the semi-dazed dream they entered when they rested from too many taxi-shifts, or when they closed their eyes from the fatigue of opening too many stitched buttonholes. They realised that their children were Watchers, just as they were. We watched everyone else, as tonight we watched our classmates in their smart suits and sophisticated frocks climb onto the stage to pose for photographs. (Pung, 2006: 186) Simultaneously embodying the stereotype of the Asian high achiever and hating it, performing the role of the good and obedient daughter and disliking herself for accepting it, Alice eventually cracks under her conflicting pressures. At 17, she suffers a nervous breakdown which leaves her feeling like an empty shell, dreading failure while at the same time resenting the measures of success imposed on her. But even in this fragile state of mind she remains a high achiever, eventually succeeding in gaining entry to the University of Melbourne, the pinnacle of her parents’ migrant dream. Her depression gradually lifts as she takes on new challenges and gains some measure of autonomy, but her dilemma is not resolved. The second voice which has accompanied her narrative, offering an ironic, almost cynical view of the migrant success story, does not go away; if anything, it is strengthened as she gains greater understanding of her position within the wider community. The second voice serves as a constant reminder of the paranoid perspective she has internalized: watching herself being watched by non-Asian Australians, imagining herself into the imagination of people for whom her achievements serve to confirm racist stereotypes: ‘All was well, all stereotypes were fulfilled and everything was in its proper place. Onwards towards the Great Australian Dream’ (Pung, 2006: 200). This profound ambivalence about the cultural values attached to education marks a central paradox in the negotiation of cultural belonging: it is precisely within those institutions (exclusive private schools, sandstone universities) that represent social and educational privilege, thus, seemingly, ‘proof’ of entry into the mainstream, that the young Asian is made to feel most like an outsider, tolerated but conspicuous, burdened by difference as the badge of simultaneous acceptance and alienation.



Her achievements at school do not gain her ‘insider status’, a fact that is painfully brought home to her parents at her high school valedictory dinner:

In Homework the Asian child as high achiever becomes the subject of comic hyperbole. At the tender age of three Mina’s elder sister, Deepa, fills in her parents’ tax returns and reads Candide in her spare hours after preschool; once at school she drives her teachers to distraction by her insatiable thirst for knowledge well beyond their limited horizon. Deepa is frequently exasperated by the stupidity of adults. ‘Who ever doubted that Joseph K. was a figment of a realist imagination?’ (Peres da Costa, 1999: 80) she laments after she is mistakenly placed in an ESL (English as a Second Language) class in her new primary school. Compared with this model of academic perfection Mina must by necessity fall short, her failure to live up to her sister’s standard becoming at the same time a further cause for alienation and a means by which she asserts her own individuality. Refusing to practise the violin, falling asleep in kindergarten, unable to complete her homework, she becomes a compulsive non-achiever, a disappointment to her ambitious parents, a puzzle to her teachers. But Mina is clearly not quite as dim as she wants others to believe. Her seeming stupidity is an act of rebellion, but it is also a plea for acceptance by her non-Asian peers, to whom cleverness is a mark of migrant difference: ‘if I had to be a fool to fit in, then so be it’ (Peres da Costa, 1999: 106), she reasons. Her frequently overblown rhetoric, pompous verbosity and convoluted reasoning in fact point to an Adrian Mole-type of imagination: immature, precocious, self-indulgent, but very far from stupid. Like Deepa, Mina moves between exhibitionist displays of intellectual superiority and rebellion against her family’s exalted standards. From model students to juvenile delinquents, they act out personal and cultural conflicts arising from the dual pressure of home and school by alternating between over- and underachievement. Trying to fit in, it would seem, for Deepa and Mina inevitably leads to both alienation and self-alienation – there seems to be no way to reconcile conflicting demands. Having a bi- or multicultural identity is not in itself presented as a problem for the protagonist in either book, on the contrary: cultural multitasking, like bilingual proficiency, comes naturally to children, to the envy of their parents and their monocultural peers. Superb performers, they know perfectly well how to behave at home, how to behave at school and how, when and where to shift cultural gears. Where they do run into difficulties is when their various roles collide, when, for example, home and school cannot be kept separate, or when they are made to shoulder the burden of dysfunctional parents. In both Homework and Unpolished Gem such conflicts come to the fore in the relationship between the young protagonist and her troubled mother.




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Migration and madness cast deep shadows over mother–daughter relationships in each book, complicating the already fraught processes of maternal separation and adolescent rebellion which are integral to the socialization of all young women. When the migrant dream of a large suburban home and financial security comes true after years of struggle, Alice’s mother falls into a deep depression. No longer required to work, she loses her sense of purpose, at the same time as her lack of English isolates her from the ‘aliens at her table’ (Pung, 2006: 143), her increasingly anglicized offspring. As the eldest daughter, Alice bears the brunt of her mother’s illness in several ways: having to carry an increased responsibility for housework and childminding, and becoming the principal target for her mother’s bitterness at ‘losing’ her children to a world she herself is unable to enter. Alice, the mother claims, has become so thoroughly Westernized that she will marry a white ghost, forget her filial duties and neglect her parents as they grow older. The pressure to excel at school while somehow also remaining immune to the values of the school culture, combines with an ever-increasing workload to bring about Alice’s own breakdown in her final year. All that is left of her, she feels, is a shell, a void to be filled by others: ‘I had done everything right, and I had turned out so wrong. I turned out empty. I turned out faulty’ (Pung, 2006: 190). For Alice, recovering from her trauma means not so much resolving her dilemma as learning to live with it. As she develops a stronger sense of self she also learns to appreciate what her parents have done for her, and understands their fears and insecurities as the inevitable flipside of the migrant success story they have worked to realize. Her migrant dream is not so much about security and riches as it is about escape, escape from unreasonable and conflicting expectations, escape from all manner of roles which have become irrelevant to her increasingly confident sense of a personal and cultural identity forged out of her diverse background. Homework also concludes with the protagonist’s escape from the trauma brought about by parental dysfunction, but Mina’s final liberation is more complex and ambiguous in terms of its psychological and cultural implications. Her mother’s decline from competent medical practitioner to manic depressive, delusional bird-woman is indirectly linked to migration and cultural conflict. Identified as a permanent refugee, knowing only departures but not fixed destinations (Peres da Costa, 1999: 149), she can be read as the tragic figure of the alienated migrant who has forever lost any sense of belonging. A more direct reason for her madness, however, is her loss of fertility. After a hysterectomy, mourning her lost womb, she becomes obsessed with eggs and



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birds. She starts roosting in trees, building nests and stealing birds’ eggs. ‘I had to wonder’, her daughter reasons, ‘whether she thought she was recuperating for herself the very thing that had long ago fallen away: those eggs that once arrived and departed with solid regularity inside her very body’ (Peres da Costa, 1999: 160). Gradually losing touch with reality she allows her home and family to descend into chaos, eventually, and rather enigmatically, taking flight, seemingly disappearing forever out of her daughters’ lives. Apart from a brief reprieve when, much to Mina’s distress, she becomes obsessed with her daughter’s budding sexuality, the mother is set on a course of self-destruction which eventually also brings about the death of her husband and the destruction of the family home. To Mina, the loss of her mother is explicitly linked to the loss of childhood, innocence and security, but also to the cultural anchors represented by the parents. Speaking of her loss, she marks her distance from the past by the overblown rhetoric she associates with her ‘adult’ self: I had spoken all the idioms and minor vernaculars that are lost in the blood that is shed when you lay yourself down at the borders of the world. I felt I have loved and lost and mourned too long! And where, I now wondered, was a lap on which to lay my woeful head, where the arms of familial love to pull me back each time I came to that precipice and looked down, as I called my mother’s name and it echoed back from the deep valley of lonesomeness, echoed back and enveloped me? (Peres da Costa, 1999: 251–2) It is at this moment of crisis that Mina is finally able to pull off her feelers, the physical manifestation of her personal and cultural alienation. This ‘last rite’ is represented as simultaneous liberation and loss, a rupture of her ‘umbilical cord to the world’ (Peres da Costa, 1999: 254), but also the gesture which sets Mina free to take flight and leave her troubled past behind: And on and on each one of us arrives and advances, flying with her face forever gazing at the nebulous sometimes hideous and occasionally divine shapes of the history from whose thigh she sadly slides. (Peres da Costa, 1999: 259) The metaphorical web which links the mother to the world, as well as to history, childhood and trauma in Mina’s overactive imagination, is so dense as to make any simple interpretation reductive. To read Homework purely as an account of cultural alienation would be to misrepresent its




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psychological complexity. What emerges clearly from Mina’s confused and sometimes confusing rhetoric, however, is the sense that the coming into being of the daughter can only happen through a rupture with what her mother represents: the maternal bond of childhood but also cultural continuity. Like Alice in Unpolished Gem, but through much greater symbolic violence, Mina enacts a female version of the Oedipal drama, the Electra complex: it is only when the mother has been eliminated, displaced or neutralized that she can begin to explore her own identity. The family’s response to the sexual awakening of the protagonist makes for a telling contrast between the two stories. As Alice reaches her teens, the family tighten their protective net around her: her every move is monitored, her telephone conversations supervised. Suddenly, it seems, she has entered a world ‘in which every man under the age of twenty was a precocious pervert and every man over twenty a potential paedophile’ (Pung, 2006: 97). At the same time, she becomes an object of attention for would-be matchmakers with marriageable sons, and while her own parents seem less than enthusiastic about the idea of an arranged marriage, the prospect of Alice partnering outside the ethnic group troubles them and makes them reinforce their vigilance. A white boyfriend signals acceptance into the mainstream community and is thus something to be proud of, but he is also perceived as a threat: the promiscuous sexual practices among white Australians mean that he may not be trustworthy, and even if he is, the union represents the loss of cultural continuity and the prospect of filial neglect. As for Alice, she bitterly resents the numerous restrictions imposed on her: To raise a girl, I realised, you’d need gallons of Social Conditioner with added Spirit Deflator. Rub onto every limb until limp, put the child into a chair and wait until she sets. When appendages harden, you know you have a perfect young woman – so still and silent and sedate that you could wrap your precious one up in cotton wool and put her in a cabinet. Ah look at the darling geisha behind glass. (Pung, 2006: 105–6) The difference between boys and girls is brought home in the warning that lends the book its title: ‘The Cambodians have a saying: “A girl is like white cotton wool – once dirtied, it can never be clean again. A boy is like a gem – the more you polish it, the brighter it shines”’ (Pung, 2006: 216). To polish or not to polish becomes a major dilemma for Alice in her relationship with her white boyfriend Michael, who accepts, but finds it hard to understand, her sexual reticence. Sex is



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I wanted to know whether he wanted to go out with me just to spite his parents. To say, look here, you Capital-L Liberal folks, I’m different from you, I’m going out with this authentic, culturally oppressed ethnic minority, and she’s going to give our kids the third-world gene, and there’s nothing you can do about it! (Pung, 2006: 230) Plagued by the sceptical voice which by now has become fully internalized, Alice finds the strain on the relationship too great to bear. Acknowledging that their feelings for each other are genuine, she nevertheless breaks with him, justifying her decision to herself by rehearsing her parents’ warning: ‘the only thing of value left of me to give him would leave me valueless’ (Pung, 2006: 270). Her reasoning strikes a somewhat odd note, a not quite convincing declaration of faith in the supreme value of sexual purity. As we shall see, it does not go unchallenged. In Homework, Mina enters puberty in denial: she does not want to grow up, refusing to acknowledge the changes happening to her body: ‘the landscape of my entire body now threatened to erupt with these subtle mutations, and I vowed then and there – a New Year’s resolution – to never affirm them in the mirror’ (Peres da Costa, 1999: 215). But the world conspires against her. For a brief period, her mother comes out of depression as she vicariously goes through a kind of second puberty, reconnecting with her lost fertility as the onset of menstruation provides evidence of her daughter’s. She drags a reluctant Mina to a department store to shop for a bra, she peppers her conversation with references to her daughter’s maturity, she is the cause of acute embarrassment when she forces Mina to answer a question about masturbation at a sex education class organized by her school. An even greater blow comes as Mina discovers her childhood friend Quentin in bed with her sister. Her sense of betrayal, by her family, by Quentin, by her body, combines with the disintegration of the family (her mother’s madness, her father’s extravagant electrical installations in the basement) to produce a rite of passage of near mythic proportions. With the simultaneous loss of her father, her mother, her home and her feelers she is left with very little – but something, the ending suggests, has also been gained. What that something is remains an open question – a new independent self, a new cultural and sexual identity, or simply the painful consciousness that she is responsible for her own destiny?



only part of her misgivings, however: she also worries that he likes her more for her exotic appeal than for herself, that she is nothing but his ‘third-world trip’ (Pung, 2006: 222), a kind of political trophy:

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In both Homework and Unpolished Gem cultural negotiation is inseparable from the negotiation of personal relationships inside and outside the protagonist’s family unit. Like individual relationships, it is also unpredictable and unstable. The focus in each book is on family dynamics and the protagonist’s internal mechanisms for coping with conflicting pressures; it is not, or only to a lesser extent, on their actual acceptance into the wider society. We do not learn how Alice’s schoolmates view her, but are privy to her internal rehearsal of stereotypes and prejudices. There seems no objective reason to believe that Michael goes out with her because he harbours fantasies of Asian exoticism, but in Alice’s imagination this is a possibility she is unable to dismiss. In the case of Mina, her ‘alien’ status seems to be more a function of feeling like an outsider, and behaving like one, than it is about the way she is treated. The sensitive cultural feelers she shares with Alice combine with the normal insecurities of childhood and adolescence to produce defence mechanisms of extraordinary tenacity, but they also leave her with a fragile, easily unsettled sense of self. The migrant child as cultural citizen is in some sense too accomplished for her own good. A competent performer in diverse cultural settings, she can adopt the perspective of each: see herself and her family as she imagines they are viewed by the mainstream, choose the outsider’s perspective to assess classmates and friends. But this proficiency can come in the way of the child’s strong need to belong, to be accepted and to be loved. The internalized conflict, particularly in the case of highly intelligent and sensitive children like Alice and Mina, leaves her vulnerable to mental distress and psychological disturbances. It is interesting to note that the trauma experienced by both the protagonist and her mother is primarily personal and cultural in nature: in neither case does it seem to be a direct function of the physical and economic hardship they have experienced through migration and resettlement. In fact, it is the middle-class, professional migrants of Homework who suffer the most acute and irreparable psychological damage, while the refugees in Unpolished Gem seem better equipped to overcome culture shock, not without scars, but with the resources to deal with them. Mina and Alice are both survivors, living to tell the tale of their skilful but accident-prone navigation between childhood and adulthood, and also within and between cultures. Their role as negotiator or go-between calls for high-level cultural competence, but also for other qualities and strategies developed along the way. As cultural double agents, they become skilled at reading their environment, picking up clues and withholding information, but their tactics also expose them to risks and



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dangers. As in most operations involving double agents, theirs is one in which truth tends to become the main casualty. Both Alice and Mina learn at an early age that the secret to surviving a double existence and pleasing their dual constituencies is to become consummate liars. They lie about school to their parents and about their family to their schoolfriends. Alice keeps both mother and grandmother on side by telling them different stories of her affections. Mina spins elaborate tales to cover up her own and her family’s idiosyncrasies. Lying also becomes the source of their greatest trouble: the fear of being caught out, the punishment when they are. As they grow older, they learn that there are different ways of protecting others from the truth: rather than barefaced liars, they become politicians, spinning persuasive but ambiguous tales that cannot be pinned down to a single interpretation. The conclusion to Unpolished Gem offers an outstanding example of cultural double agency at work: telling the same story twice and by so doing, sending different messages to different readers. The story relates to the book’s title and the cautionary message of gendered standards for sexual purity: if a girl loses her virginity, she is damaged for life, whereas a boy grows more valuable the more practice he gains. As argued above, Alice concludes her story by reluctantly embracing her parents’ position: by breaking with Michael she removes the temptation to compromise her ‘gem’: like white cotton wool, like the white rabbit depicted on the book’s cover, she remains unsullied. But this is not the only ending. The Epilogue which follows the final chapter concludes on a seemingly unrelated anecdote from Alice’s childhood, the story of the Easter Bunny. When Alice was seven her grandmother gave her grandchildren chocolate eggs and bunnies for Easter. While her brother and cousin devour the treat immediately, Alice resists the temptation, wanting hers to last as long as possible: ‘I knew I had self-control, and I knew soon I would be the richest girl in the whole of Bliss St, Braybrook. Dedication, preservation, reward – I had it down pat’ (Pung, 2006: 281). However, when she finally decides that it is time to give in to temptation, she discovers, ‘horror of all horrors’, that the chocolate is spoilt, melted and covered in ants. Contemplating the ‘squished tragedies’ that were once her ‘pride and joy’, she is comforted by her grandmother, who offers to replace the spoilt chocolate, but scolded by her mother: ‘That’s what you get for keeping things for too long’ (Pung, 2006: 281). Alice promises herself that she will never go to the same trouble again. Juxtaposing the ‘parable’ of the Easter Bunny with the cautionary tale of cotton wool and polished gems, Alice Pung, it would seem, leaves her reader with a choice of endings: to give in to temptation can make




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her worthless, but to keep something for too long can make it worthless. The dual messages neatly summarize Alice’s dilemma, but they do something else as well. To the untutored reader who reads the book as a straightforward account of Alice’s life – and we can imagine that her parents, if indeed they are able to read it at all, fall into this category – the ending signals that she has heeded their warning and still does. To readers more familiar with figurative interpretations, the suggestion that she has changed her mind on matters of sexual purity is clearly available. To readers who remember what happens to Lewis Carroll’s Alice when she reaches Wonderland, the clean white rabbit which sits on the young author’s lap in the cover photo may not be as innocent as it looks: it certainly has the capacity to get her into a lot of trouble. Whether, as readers, we allow the ‘truth’ of the parable to override the truth of the literal ending is, I would suggest, more a function of cultural than of personal preferences. By positioning different readers differently in relation to her story, Alice Pung neatly illustrates the double agency practised by migrant children as they learn to negotiate the terrain between their family and the wider social and cultural world. Alice no longer needs to lie: her political skills protect her against too much truth. Breaching the gap between school and family, between the narrator and her younger self and between immigrant culture and the Australian mainstream, Pung and Peres da Costa do not underplay the potential for conflict, but theirs is never a tragic vision. The greatest testimony to successful cultural negotiation, greater even than the young protagonist’s skilful double-dealing, is the confident deployment of humour to expose discrepancies while simultaneously diffusing tensions arising from them. Comparing a number of recent publications by migrant writers, Tony Simoes da Silva has observed that the ‘new generation of ethnic minority writers uses humour as foundation to the re-writing of an Australian identity’ (2004: 61). By so doing, he argues, they distance themselves from the more tragic and nostalgic vision that informed earlier migrant writing. The new ‘identity’ which emerges in the work of the younger writers is less concerned with marginalization and more likely to explore ‘the complex material histories of the new communities articulated through the politics of class, gender and sexuality’ (Simoes da Silva, 2004: 59). Their deliberate retreat from earlier traditions of diasporic lifewriting serves the same function of marking out a territory which is theirs to conquer. The Singaporean writer Hwee Hwee Tan memorably illustrated the generational gap between Asian women writers in her review of Anchee Min’s novel Wild Ginger. ‘Ever since Jung Chang’s Wild Swans became a



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global publishing sensation,’ she writes, ‘booksellers have decided that the Beautiful Chinese Literary Heroine is a golden goose’ (Tan, 2002: 66). Referring to this publishing phenomenon as ‘Chinese Chick Lit’, she describes its basic formula: ‘a feisty, exotically gorgeous woman suffers hell. Hell comes in the form of an oppressive regime (usually the Cultural Revolution) or through abuse inflicted by male power figures (heartless fathers or cruel husbands)’ (2002: 66). Anchee Min’s book, she argues, replays this formula, and by so doing reinforces Western stereotypes of Chinese exoticism and misogyny. To Tan, such stories are not only clichéd, they are also irrelevant to the lives of contemporary Chinese women: I suppose I was asked to review this book because I am a Chinese novelist. But the Chinese women in Wild Ginger and all the other books in the Chinese Chick genre strike me as completely removed from the experience of the contemporary Asian woman. In the novel, Wild Ginger is regularly beaten with belt buckles and has to wrestle with big issues like the struggle for political liberty and the freedom to love. Quite honestly, the major issues I’ve had to struggle with the past month were a) how to lose weight, b) how to remember where I’ve parked my car in the labyrinthine car park and c) what shade of highlights I should get for my hair. To tell you the truth – and this may disappoint Western readers who love the mythical figure of the Chinese Chick – most Asian women I know are more like Bridget Jones than Madame Mao. (2002: 66) Cleverly reversing the generic label, using the term ‘chick lit’ (normally used for books like Bridget Jones’s Diary and its copycat followers) to designate publications by Chinese diaspora writers, Tan speaks up for a generation of writers for whom the Cultural Revolution, Indo-Chinese wars and even the Tiananmen Square massacre are distant memories, as far removed from their own experience as foot binding and other ‘exotic’ customs so beloved by Western readers. At the same time, she promotes a very different kind of writing, in which Asian women, in their homelands as well as in diaspora, encounter dilemmas which are neither exotic nor traumatic, but instead identical to those faced by young women across the world as they negotiate the conflicting pressures and desires of a global modernity. The heroines of Tan’s own novels, Foreign Bodies (1997) and Mammon Inc. (2001), may be read as Asian (and rather more sophisticated) versions of Bridget Jones – though one suspects the ‘chick lit’ label is one the author would be unwilling to embrace.




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Neither Unpolished Gem nor Homework would easily fit into the ‘chick lit’ genre, however defined. Their stories of childhood and adolescence in Australia nevertheless share the preoccupation with the here and now of young women’s lives, as well as the rejection of stereotypes, whether ethnic or literary, which underpins Hwee Hwee Tan’s argument. The unsocial sociability which structures the relationship of the protagonists to their immediate environments also works to chart the authors’ position in relation to generic expectations and literary establishments. Insisting on what their books are not (migrant writing, refugee narratives, stories of victimhood and exotic misogyny, straight autobiography) they negotiate a contract with the reader on their own terms, but one in which the rejected generic ‘ghosts’ are not so much banished as driven underground, where they continue to haunt the stories. The irony, already foreshadowed by the authors themselves, is that in their mostly enthusiastic reception, both books were celebrated as outstanding examples of the very categories from which they seek to distance themselves. Cultural negotiation thus takes place in both the context of cultural production and that of cultural difference. The former involves the author in the deliberate positioning of herself and her work in relation to communities of writers, readers and critics in which she functions simultaneously as both insider and outsider. A similar insider/outsider status characterizes Alice and Mina as they navigate between family and school in their quest to mark their difference and at the same time to belong. From small aliens to competent cultural citizens, they chart the passage from competing pressures and conflict to the understanding born of experience, bitter and sweet. As coming-of-age stories, Homework and Unpolished Gem trace a familiar pattern of conflict, lack of security and search for identity, but their resolution, while gesturing towards the conventional reintegration of the protagonist into the community, in each case insists that integration can never be complete: that which is unassimilable, alien, unsociable remains as a constant challenge, or indeed, it is suggested, as the very condition for success.

Notes 1. This essay derives from the project ‘Building cultural citizenship: multiculturalism and children’s literature’, which involves as Chief Investigators Clare Bradford and Wenche Ommundsen and as research fellows Debra Dudek and Kate McInally. The author would like to acknowledge the input of her co-researchers and the support of the Australian Research Council, Deakin University and the University of Wollongong.



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2. The specific references are to the influential books Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang and Adeline Yen Mah’s Falling Leaves, which spawned a large number of publications detailing the oppression of women under both pre-Communist and Communist regimes in China. 3. The same strategy is used, more explicitly and self-consciously, by another young Asian-Australian writer, Nam Le, in his acclaimed first book The Boat (2008).

Bibliography Chang, Jung (1991) Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (London: HarperCollins). Fielding, Helen (1996) Bridget Jones’s Diary (London: Viking Press). Le, Nam (2008) The Boat: Stories (New York: Albert Knopf). Min, Anchee (2002) Wild Ginger: A Novel (Boston: Houghton Mifflin). Peres da Costa, Suneeta (1999) Homework (London: Bloomsbury). Pung, Alice (2006) Unpolished Gem (Melbourne: Black). Simoes da Silva, Tony (2004) ‘Rethinking Marginality: Class, Identity and Desire in Contemporary Australian Writing’, Life Writing, 1.1, 45–68. Tan, Hwee Hwee (2000) Foreign Bodies: A Novel (New York and Sydney: Pocket Books). ——— (2001) Mammon Inc. (London: Michael Joseph). ——— (2002) ‘Ginger Tale: Yet Another Chinese Heroine Faces Political Adversity – Will They Ever Stop?’, Time International, 27 May: 66. Waldren, Murray (1999) ‘Home and Away’, The Australian, 17 April: R10. Yen Mah, Adeline (1997) Falling Leaves Return to their Roots: The True Story of an Unwanted Chinese Daughter (London: Penguin).




The Language of Recognition: Carolyn Slaughter and Alexandra Fuller Tony Simoes da Silva

This chapter focuses on two memoirs detailing childhoods lived in southern Africa on the cusp of momentous historical and political upheaval, Carolyn Slaughter’s Before the Knife (2002) and Alexandra Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight (2002). Both authors came to Africa as the children of white British migrants, the former as the daughter of a minor British colonial administrator, the latter as the daughter of a family moving to Rhodesia in the aftermath of Ian Smith’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI), which took place in 1965. Before the Knife is set in ‘the dying days of the British Empire’ (Slaughter, 2002: 13), while the second work encompasses a period that sees its author go from being a British subject to being a Rhodesian, a Rhodesian-Zimbabwean, a Zimbabwean and in time a resident of the USA, possibly naturalized as well. The contrasting backgrounds, combined with Fuller’s personal details, succinctly convey the rapid pace of change in the post-World War II period as successive European empires collapsed throughout the world. Essentially works concerned with the story of an individual self, the memoirs constitute also documents that detail the impact of social, political and historical changes as seen through the perspective of white people in Africa. To this extent the memoirs are ‘naturally’ informed by a latent awareness of the constitutive role of race on an identity category understood broadly as ‘white African’, but specifically as a settler subjectivity. Together they foreground a sense of settler ‘unsocial sociability’ that has come under increasing scrutiny in the postcolonial moment but one that is inseparable from social and political conditions of British imperial and colonial ideologies. Although Carolyn Slaughter and her parents leave Africa in the course of the memoir, their presence as British colonizers creates the behavioural and identity trails that Alexandra Fuller’s family will come to emulate in their capacity as British settlers. While the story 204



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of whiteness is not a primary concern in either novel, its outlines grow increasingly evident in the narrative of self-identity of English people for whom Africa embodies conflicting emotions, at once home and away, belonging and exile, safety and anxiety. As sociologist Zygmunt Bauman points out in words aptly relevant here, such experiences often ‘provoke a wholesale and time-compressed “revaluation” of values and a substantial rearrangement of the value hierarchy. Rules, norms and patterns until recently perceived as proper, effective and laudable must be recast as erroneous, useless and condemnable’ (Bauman, 2008: 62). Despite the different concerns that impel them, the memoirs hold up a mirror to the conditions of a number of people caught up in the increasingly unstable setting of post-World War II Africa. Told through the eyes of the adult Carolyn, Before the Knife’s historical and political awareness often reads as if a direct rebuttal of Slaughter’s father’s views and even her eventual animosity to the Empire may be seen as a reaction to its association with her father. Slaughter writes in a voice that first shifts back to early childhood before returning to the grown-up woman now living and working in America. Typical as this may be of a text written retrospectively, here the shift reflects the traumatized self’s frequent bouts of crisis and dissolution. Fuller’s text again rehearses a set of dichotomous voices, of child and adult, but the difference between them is far more stable, something that relates closely to the tone of the narrative. To Slaughter’s constant threat of self-destruction Fuller counters with a mature and frequently subtle account of the collapse of the white regime in Africa. The scathing criticism of the British Empire in the opening pages notwithstanding, Before the Knife is essentially Slaughter’s personal story of survival. Fuller, in contrast, writes with a constant eye on history – even if only through white African eyes – and positions both herself as a writer and her work as a part of Zimbabwe’s future. For Slaughter Africa is merely the past, for Fuller it is inserted in a continuum to which she envisages always belonging. Uncannily, moreover, Before the Knife and Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight both explore also the complex levels of unsocial sociability at the heart of the family unit. The troubled and troubling mother–daughter matrix depicted in both texts, which also draws other family members into its orbit, is central to this process. In both cases ‘family relations and their entanglements with cultural and historical forms of violence, petty legalism and the terrors law can impose’ (Gilmore, 2001: 147) illustrate the force of a survival instinct that binds the Slaughter and Fuller families, respectively. Indeed, despite Gilmore’s dismissive views of the tendency to place women’s experience within a ‘thematic continuity



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which makes movement from cradle to autobiography to grave into a more or less shared story of female turning points, crises and conversions’ (Gilmore, 1994: xii), Slaughter and Fuller both encourage this approach by making the experience of women central. This is particularly clear in Slaughter’s portrait of a young girl’s abuse at the hands of her father. Drawing on the work of a vast number of women writers ranging from the Sylvia Plath honoured in the memoir’s title, to Virginia Woolf, Olive Schreiner, Charlotte Brontë, Jeanette Winterson and others, Slaughter writes the kind of text Elaine Showalter calls ‘a document in the history of female aestheticism’ (Showalter, 1977: 285). The citations and allusions she draws on coalesce to create a narrative that foregrounds the solidarity inherent in common and shared experience. Even Alexandra Fuller’s work, much less inflected by literary sources, overtly references Schreiner, Karen Blixen and the Doris Lessing of The Grass is Singing (1950) to convey the full impact of her mother’s situation as a white woman in a British settler colony. Trauma theorist Cathy Caruth has proposed that ‘[o]nce we begin to entertain a notion of autobiography in which the focus is, paradoxically, on someone else’s story, the hitherto neglected class of narratives we call memoirs will emerge in quite a new and revealing light’ (Caruth, 1996: 56). As texts set in twentieth-century southern Africa, the works of Slaughter and Fuller mobilize, at various points in the authors’ lives, ideologies that impact on writer and reader in ways worth exploring in some detail. The memoirs’ intimate stories of a self’s relationship with the African continent in turn emerge as significant social documents of a gendered colonial existence. Thus the memoirs are embedded in relations of production, circulation and consumption which the writers are largely powerless to control, though not necessarily unable to attempt to negotiate, or even to manipulate. It is in this sense that they best illustrate the force of a Kantian understanding of adversity and conflict as central to change and progress, for the texts highlight the role of self-writing as a means of self-healing that parallels the hidden influence of social forces.

I Before the Knife appeared in 2002 and in it Carolyn Slaughter tells of her life in the British Bechuanaland Protectorate, now Botswana, as the daughter of a minor colonial administrator. Slaughter’s memoir was written well after the events it records but she relies closely on childhood notebooks from her time in Africa and later in England. Writing the book in the USA, where she is now settled, Slaughter makes no reference to a physical



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return to Africa but she visited her sister, Angela, in London. The only two surviving members of their family, they struggled briefly to come to terms with their shared experiences, before, Carolyn writes, Angela ‘made it clear to me that she didn’t want to excavate further’ (Slaughter, 2002: 266). Unlike Alexandra Fuller, who consults openly with her parents, however unpleasant their views may be in their undiluted racism or self-serving solipsism, for example, Slaughter focalizes the past exclusively through her personal experience and her memories of it. Despite the brief ‘Prologue’ set in the present, she starts the memoir proper by taking herself back to her childhood; she will begin in the beginning in order to account for an end she knows already as lived experience. Slaughter’s parents come to Swaziland, the tiny enclave where they will spend the next three years, following a year in England (2002: 22) where they travelled after India’s independence in 1947. Thereafter they move often, first to Maun, in the Bechuanaland Protectorate, and again to Francistown, Gaborone, eventually to Pretoria and Cape Town in South Africa. Although dates are usually omitted, perhaps a conscious attempt to validate her personal recollections, the memoir includes sufficient detail to outline a temporal as well as a physical framework. She writes, for instance, that as ever more African colonies gain their independence, ‘the protectorate changed its constitution and began to take steps toward freedom and self-rule’ (235). This would suggest a date of 1964 or 1965, with independence proper in 1966 eventually taking the family back to England. There is a certain irony in the parallel between their peripatetic African life and the Empire’s own incremental retreat to a centre of faded glory and diminished returns. Incidentally, and perhaps because it is written well after the events it recounts, the memoir is highly critical of British colonialism, frequently describing it as cruel and doomed to fail. Although, as noted earlier, such a posture may be understood partly as the product of Slaughter’s adult consciousness, obviously more politicized, it shows also how the personal and the political interact in ways that are at once mutually disruptive and complementing. Writing with a pointed awareness of the demands of lifewriting for a truthful and authentic narrative, what Philippe Lejeune defined as an ‘autobiographical pact’ (1982) between writer and reader, Slaughter uses the memoir’s real beginning to make the shocking disclosure that she was raped at the age of six by her father. To reiterate, the beginning of the memoir qua lived life is in effect its end, re-enacting the trauma of the rape that split Carolyn from her family, from her childhood and in time from Africa. She writes on the second page of her memoir, in the ‘Prologue’: ‘This rape, and the others that were to follow, obliterated





in one moment both the innocence of my childhood and the fragile structure of our English family life’ (Slaughter, 2002: 14). The abuse will continue for years afterwards, and all the while her sister, sleeping in the same room, pretended not to see or hear anything. Angela’s reluctance ‘to excavate further’ into their childhood lives, when Carolyn contacts her many decades later, is thus possibly an acknowledgement of her guilty silence, if equally a sign of her powerlessness. For Carolyn, however, her sister’s refusal to revisit the past re-enacts their mother’s own disavowal of the whole experience. Angela’s restated silence seems to Carolyn to condone the abuse she endured as a child and as an adult, for such is the nature of trauma. Indeed, Angela’s continued silence in the present condemns her sister to further psychological torment in the future. Yet, and crucially, it is also a central element in a web of unsocial sociability that impels her to revisit and rehearse the trauma of her childhood. Underlining on the one hand the survival narrative that the memoir articulates, the silence also confirms the extent of the writer’s isolation from her family. As she asserts, referring to the intimate knowledge of her abuse that the family shared and nurtured: ‘We all knew. I showed my mother all the proof she needed, and my sister was right there in the room with me, in the bed across from me’ (14). Later, retracing the impulse behind the book, she remembers going to ‘mother because I did not know what else to do. She took one look at me and her face contorted. What have you done to yourself? I was confused by the question. I said, Dad did it.’ The mother ‘was swept into [a breathless hysteria] until she was angrier that I had ever seen her, or would ever see her again. Don’t you EVER tell a lie like that again, she screamed, grabbing my shoulders and shaking me. Do you hear me? Never, ever say that again’ (267). That hushed knowledge signifies as the betrayal dissected in detail, painfully, graphically, even obsessively in the memoir; it is both the trigger for the present book and the focus of the hermeneutic quest it articulates. In fact she waits, seemingly unaware that she is doing so, for her father’s death to recover the memories of his abuse. For the little girl and later for the adult tortured by the memories of her abuse, the silence is especially harrowing because of its gendered nature. Although the father rapes her, she feels that the act is authorized by her mother and sister. That they may have chosen to keep quiet about what they witnessed to protect themselves is something Slaughter overlooks, though it would seem hard to blame her for reacting in this way. Significantly, the rhetorical overkill with which she relives the memories positions the writer almost as a sacrifice to her father’s lust proffered by her mother and sister. Striving to make sense of her mother’s reaction, for example, Slaughter traces the father’s abuse to the mother’s frigidity. And while it is unclear when her 10.1057/9780230294868 - The Unsociable Sociability of Women's Lifewriting, Edited by Anne Collett and Louise D'Arcens


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mental state starts to deteriorate, Mrs Slaughter spends ever more of her nights alone, leaving the husband to abuse Carolyn and, later – though it is never made entirely clear how or how often – her younger sister Susan (‘before my father turned his attention to Susan, that would come later, when, year by year, he came to fix upon her a deadly obsession that in the end made our mother superfluous’ [87]). Elsewhere, referring to her mother’s increasing alienation from her husband, she recalls an occasion when ‘At a hundred and five degrees she’d turned to ice’ (51) and later calls her ‘the Ice Queen’ (85). Before the Knife posits ‘the mother–daughter relationship as a site of enigmatic trauma’, to borrow Gilmore’s words (Gilmore, 2001: 102), a relationship that is fundamentally inflected by the mother’s failure to act on the knowledge of her husband’s abuse of their daughters. Significantly, for Carolyn the oppressive memory of such dereliction becomes inextricably associated with the Africa of her childhood. Both in her mind and in her writing Africa takes on a conflicted symbolism, a place of immeasurable beauty and of unforgettable pain: ‘cordoned off: one part contained the beauty, the other part was in darkness’ (Slaughter, 2002: 89). More than that, Africa is the setting of a break with the mother that forever haunts Slaughter’s own life and the memoir. Hence the conflation in the text of a return to some of the most damaging dissociative experiences that mark her childhood, chiefly the rape by her father with the rupture with an Edenic Africa of which she writes nostalgically but ambiguously throughout the memoir. Although not quite the dramatic Conradian canvas of Heart of Darkness (1901), Africa provides the background to Slaughter’s psychodrama in ways that resonate with Marlow’s own psychological and moral undoing, and with Kurtz’s death. Writing Before the Knife allows its author to come to terms with the dual memories of personal trauma and historical trauma, re-signifying a narrative of abuse and victimhood into an act of agency and self-affirmation. It also gives Slaughter the impetus to recollect and collate the fragments of her past as a narrative that repeatedly rehearses the possibility of forgiveness as self-healing. Commenting on the political and formal impulse of autobiographical stories of great personal pain and distress, Leigh Gilmore proposes that ‘the knowing subject works with dissonant materials fragmented by trauma, and organizes them into a form of knowledge’ (2001: 147). The allusion to the moment ‘before the knife’ that Slaughter borrows from Sylvia Plath refers primarily to her one attempt to kill her father in her room – perhaps in her bed – in order to put an end to the horror of her nights. Had she succeeded, the abuse would have survived in her body and in her mind, but the actual physical acts of violence 10.1057/9780230294868 - The Unsociable Sociability of Women's Lifewriting, Edited by Anne Collett and Louise D'Arcens




against her would have been stopped. However, her failure meant that father and daughter grow ever more intertwined in a relationship that destroyed any shred of love and respect between them (Slaughter, 2002: 174–5). She remarks on their relationship: ‘I hated my father … and I hated myself. That he should be such a father … that I should be such a daughter’ (112). However, that failure is also important for the way it drives mother and daughter even farther apart from each other, in a perverse twinning of longing and contempt that parallels her interaction with her father. Decades after leaving Africa, secure in the attic room of her American home, Slaughter is dramatically haunted by the memories of her African childhood: When I came to, my teeth were chattering, but they didn’t feel like my teeth at all. They felt like my milk teeth used to feel, light porcelain with little ridges, and I thought that if I didn’t stop them from chattering against one another like that they might fall out of my head ... I was shaking and then I realised that I was bleeding, and when I felt between my legs my fingers were covered with blood. I began sobbing and I couldn’t stop. I screamed once and then went silent and I lay there like the dead thing that I was. (265) Present and past merge to re-enact the moment of trauma, the adult Carolyn reduced once again to the helpless child in Swaziland. For Georges Gusdorf, ‘[a]utobiography is the second reading of experience and it is truer than the first because it adds to experience itself consciousness’ (1980: 29). Having started the memoir through an act of rupture, the moment when Africa ‘died’ for her because it was the setting of her rape, Slaughter ‘returns’ there to conclude her story. And in this instance, as in the earlier epigraph she borrows from Plath, the rather obvious allusion to attics, madness and trauma situates the novel and its female author within a community of women whose conditions resonate with her own. In a moment rich in the symbolism of a gendered artistic sensibility that the title of the memoir seeks to evoke, the room in the attic emerges as a safe space of her own that is simultaneously coded as a place of entrapment, disturbed by the enduring memory of her African childhood. In her words: And then, quite simply, I wasn’t there at all. I was very small, six years old, and I was lying in my bed in Swaziland, listening to the hum of the electricity generator waiting for it to stutter out and for



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Such convoluted sentence structures, endlessly meandering towards the dark of the night, act here as an objective correlative of the moment she desperately wants and needs to forget, but only after reliving it as part of the therapeutic act the memoir constitutes. In a return to the memoir’s central motif, the figure of the father-rapist appears again as Plath’s Nazilike patriarch, the brutalizing figure whom the speaker in ‘Daddy’ wishes to kill but to whom it then succumbs. Furthermore, through its powerful critique of a violence clearly signified as patriarchal, the memoir frames it with a late imperial and colonial ideological vortex that partly accounts for it. As she remarks at one point: ‘While my father was setting the stage for an impressive colonial career, my mother was as miserable as sin’ (41). It is an insight picked up again towards the conclusion, as the author struggles still to make sense of her mother’s betrayal. Then she links the mother’s regular nervous collapses to her condition as the wife of a minor British colonial administrator who grows more anxious as he recognizes his own insignificance within the colonial project. Discarded in India in 1947, he fears being sent back to Britain once again to rejoin in the banal existence which only the Empire could alleviate. As suggested earlier, the memoir sets a clear link between the late imperial and colonial world of British southern Africa and the family’s destructive path, both of which they cannot control. Ultimately, retelling the story of her childhood allows Carolyn Slaughter to accept that in order to let go of the memory of the rape and its legacy, she will need to forego the memories of (her) beautiful Africa. She writes, many years after the family left Africa, that ‘[t]he life we had there vanished into time ... I used to suffer at the idea of being among people who wouldn’t know where I’d come from and what I’d seen. How could I tell them of the beauty of Africa?’ (271). However, the question serves also as the answer to the trauma of her own life. In the memoir’s concluding paragraph, she states: Now I see that no place is more beautiful than another, and beauty belongs to anyone who loves it. The polished light of America has come from Africa and will make its way to Havana and Helsinki before landing back in God’s lap ... A flower born for a day is as much part of the loveliness of the earth in Siberia as it is in the Kalahari. These days, substitutes will do. (272)



my night light to vanish into the darkness with everything else: my bed, the shape of the window, the cupboard with toys on top of it. (Slaughter, 2002: 264)


In a narrative dense with graphically confronting moments, where little is left to the reader’s imagination, this understated passage impresses for its revelatory tone. Much of the memoir is characterized by a refusal or an inability to contain and control the memories of the rape Slaughter endured at the age of six, an experience that so obviously informs the work. The reference to ‘what had happened’ in Swaziland (48) serves as a refrain that taunts the author’s memories of the childhood spent in Swaziland just as it teases the reader struggling to make sense of the memoir’s fraught act of remembering. As the writer puts it earlier, ‘something had happened in Swaziland that no amount of washing could whiten’ (37), recalling Stephen Kern’s view that ‘memories of childhood are the most severely fixed, the last to disappear in amnesia’ (1983: 47). As Before the Knife concludes, though, Slaughter seems to put the memories of her childhood behind her, laying to rest the three most influential formative elements in her life: the memory of Africa, the trauma of the rape and the mutually destructive relationship with both her parents. Slaughter’s writing is raw and uncompromising, turning the memory of abuse that exists now essentially in her grown-up mind into a tangible, audible and olfactory reality. The repetition of the moment of trauma, both through direct retelling and through reliving in memory aspects of the experience that return to haunt the present, becomes one of the many ways in which she consciously situates her writing within a larger body of work concerned with female experience. This is a time she remembers most of all for the betrayal of her mother, and the narrative blends the personal quest for healing with an artistic one for voice and self-expression spoken in a language both sentimental and visceral. Before the Knife allows Slaughter to recreate the past in the present, but only after – because? – the past refuses to be silenced, forgotten. ‘[T]rauma’, Caruth notes, ‘is not locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual’s past, but rather in the way that its very unassimilated nature – the way it was precisely not known in the first instance – returns to haunt the survivor later on’ (1996: 4). Thus for Slaughter, the day ‘the storm broke’ in her head was also the day when she realized that she would have to go back to her childhood to render the sexual textual (Showalter, 1977; Moi, 1985). Narrating and reliving the experiences in her past allow her to rearrange them, within her consciousness, perhaps even to erase them therein. Yet, at the end of the memoir, she has made little progress in her quest to understand her mother’s behaviour in the past, especially her inability to protect and rescue Carolyn from an abusive father. Ultimately the peace she settles



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II In contrast to Before the Knife’s ‘farewell to Africa’, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight reclaims the continent as the key constitutive element in Alexandra Fuller’s identity. Although as a memoir the narrative is strongly inflected by the familial context of its author’s upbringing, the African setting is fundamental to the subject self whose story we read. Carolyn Slaughter recalls Africa as a physical and quasi-mythical setting of her childhood, but for various reasons she grows to accept that her love for it will come to an end. As she concludes the work, letting go of Africa offers a way out of the infernal situation in which she finds herself, though it is unclear how enduring the relief brought by distance really is. In part, as the daughter of a British colonial functionary, her hold on Africa was as much ruled by emotion as it was by bureaucracy. Fuller’s hold on Africa is perhaps no less precarious, but from her perspective staying on plays as important a healing role as abandoning it does for Slaughter. Moreover, Fuller writes as a white African whose awareness of a new political dispensation in the place of her birth shapes the quest for new ways of being African. Writing from outside Zimbabwe, a place that her parents too have now left to settle elsewhere in Africa, the memoir is partly a heartfelt writing back to Africa. This is in fact one of the ways in which it reveals its awareness of Karen Blixen’s romantically plaintive tribute to Africa, Out of Africa (1937). Carolyn Slaughter’s Africa exists in the past, and in the act of writing up Before the Knife she will not go back there, not physically, anyway. However, Fuller travelled often to Africa, first to Zimbabwe and, after her parents left the country, to Zambia. In another allusion to Blixen’s text, the claim to an African identity is mediated here through its engagement with the idea of a postcolonial white African consciousness. Unwittingly, perhaps the narrative superimposes a template of personal trauma that is increasingly the story of the white African on Zimbabwe’s post-independence nationalist narrative. In what emerges almost as a textbook illustration of Gilmore’s views on the political and social significance of the memoir of self as genre, the book Fuller writes intertwines a narrative of trauma and survival with an act of testimony that in Zimbabwe, and indeed in Africa, is intrinsically political. Tracing her family’s African life, she produces a historical



for with Africa rings inherently false because the continent is simply much too close to a surrogate mother figure and in that capacity it too let her down all those years earlier.


document that counters what historian Terence Ranger calls Zimbabwe’s ‘nationalist history’ (2005). This, he notes, is history that seeks to rewrite the past to meet the political needs of an incumbent government in the present rather than to account of the past with any degree of accuracy. In Zimbabwe’s post-independence nationalist history, white Africans figure dichotomously as colonial oppressors or outsiders with no claim to an African indigenous identity. In the frank and brutally intimate story it creates of a white African family in Rhodesia and later in Zimbabwe, however, Fuller’s work holds up a mirror that subverts Mugabe’s biased history. Drawing confidently on a subtle understanding of the shifting discourses on the formation of self, she posits a series of possible selves available to the white person in a decolonizing Africa that counter the single colonizer or settler self identified by postcolonial theories. White Zimbabwean scholar Anthony Chennells argues that ‘[i]n Zimbabwe, where a short twenty-four years has reduced an arrogant and all powerful white elite to an anxious and embattled minority, the idea of a stable colonial identity is untenable’ (2005: 135). Therefore, side-stepping the kind of blame narrative that is ‘naturally’ linked to white Africans, Fuller is able to intervene much more forcefully in the revisionist reassessment of Rhodesia’s past and Zimbabwe’s present. Born in England, Fuller moved to Rhodesia in 1966, a year after the Unilateral Declaration of Independence by a white minority fearful of the British government’s resolve to grant the colony its independence. The Fullers come to Rhodesia in pursuit of the 1000-year rule of white Africans in Rhodesia that the UDI aimed to enshrine as one of the last bastions of European civilization in the continent. As the writing of a white African, Fuller’s memoir both recognizes the image of whiteness that works such as Blixen’s set in place and re-engages with it to consider the complex ways in which people like her family can claim to be African. For example, the mother’s assertion, early in the book, ‘[to] have breeding’ (Fuller, 2002: 4), clearly recalls the aristocratic Blixen but the comparison is immediately undermined by Mrs Fuller’s drunkenness. Her lack of decorum when in the presence of her black servants brings into relief the multifarious nature of white African identities to which Chennells refers. Belonging in Africa, the text implies, is about more than imported pedigree, romantic idealism or indeed political zealotry; the Fullers earn their right to belong in Africa, as Africans, through the sheer drama and trauma of their African life experiences. Indeed, ‘their’ unsocial sociability is crucial to the ideological function they play in Rhodesia’s unique political setting, for their vulnerability authenticates their claim to Africa. Paradoxically, Africa appears at once as the elixir of



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life and a poison capable of fatally infecting the white African person. True to type, the white African subjectivity is shown suspended somewhere between Blixen’s innocent Africa and Kurtz’s hellish version. Telling her personal story and that of her family allows Fuller to recreate the series of events that produced the Mrs Fuller readers meet, the abusive and offensive drunkard drowning her sorrows in alcohol and self-pity but also the woman whose indescribable suffering demands a degree of empathy, compassion and perhaps even understanding. As the memoir reveals, slowly but powerfully, Mrs Fuller may not be very likeable, but there are good reasons for her present state. Central to these are the deaths of three of her children, in infancy or in uterus, but especially of the two-year-old Olivia Jane left in the care of nine-yearold Alexandra. The trauma of that experience lives on with mother and daughter in ways that impel the writing of the present book and recalls Gilmore’s comment on mother–daughter relationships as ‘enigmatic sites of trauma’ (2001: 102). An invisible force is at hand to bring them together just as it renders them asunder. From the outset Fuller writes lovingly of her mother, drawing on a frank depiction of her foibles that also helps to explain them away. The revelation of the intimate knowledge an adult child often has of a parent underlines the memoir’s claim to truthfulness. The bravura performance of the Mrs Fuller who rails loudly, violently and dangerously against the new political conditions in post-independence Zimbabwe does little to endear her to contemporary, ‘postcolonial’ readers but it is in effect a key narrative conceit in her redemption in the eyes of her daughter. The exposure of her mother’s weaknesses of character becomes the means through which Fuller unveils Mrs Fuller’s traumatic life in Rhodesia, later in Zimbabwe, Malawi and finally in Zambia. In this way the memoir foregrounds its own reliance on a settler unsociability that is central to the memoir’s redemptive impetus. The writing is richest thus as a cultural site when it reflects, engages with and elaborates on the discursive conditions of its production. Central to this process is the telling of each death of the Fuller children and of its effects on the family, lending the memoir a kind of internal cohesion that rests in the act of narrating the family’s growing sense of loss and fragmentation. For each time the Fullers experience the loss of a loved one they are first torn apart and then bound tighter by the experience. Each time, too, the relationship between Bobo and her mother undergoes a range of profoundly unsettling and damaging changes, and as the mother’s mental state worsens the young girl grows increasingly alone. As in Slaughter’s work, the mother’s situation is seen





as a product of a combination of alcohol abuse, emotional scarring and of historical conditions inextricable from the colonial setting the family inhabits. In direct contrast to Slaughter, though, Fuller does not blame her mother, seeing her rather as a victim of circumstances that are partly social and partly political. Fuller’s memoir too renders the unsocial sociability of a colonial setting in all its force, but while Slaughter’s work privileges the personal self, the latter frames a settler figure that is inherently politicized. To put it differently, the antagonistic impulse of an unsocial sociability propels the rehabilitation of the settler self. Mrs Fuller’s first loss occurs when Adrian dies of meningitis in 1968, ‘not yet old enough to talk’ (Fuller, 2002: 30), alone in a hospital bed after the parents are encouraged to go away to rest; he was the second child in the family, born after Vanessa and before Bobo, Alexandra’s family nickname. Seeking to help Mrs Fuller come to terms with the loss her husband takes her on a trip round Rhodesia. With a keen eye for the narrative effect that lifewriting thrives on, Fuller uses this instance to situate herself at the heart of her mother’s recovery. She writes: ‘I am conceived in the hotel (with the casino in it) next to the thundering roar of the place where the Zambezi River plunges a hundred metres into black-sided gorge. The following March I am born into the tame, drizzling English town of Glossop’ (33). The use of the present itself seems to underline this desire for inclusion in a narrative that is hers but from which as yet she is absent. The second child, Olivia Jane, dies at the age of two, and as noted above this is the death with the greatest impact on both Fuller and her mother. Charged with keeping an eye on her younger sister while visiting relatives, Bobo forgets about Olivia long enough for her to drown in a small duck pond. Fuller recalls that ‘[m]y whole happy world spins away from me then – I feel it leave, like something warm and comfortable leaving in hot breath – and a chill settles on top of my stomach’ (89). In the concluding paragraph to the section on Olivia she writes: ‘[n]o one ever came right out and said in the broad light of day that I was responsible for Olivia’s death and that Olivia’s death made Mum go from being a fun drunk to a crazy, sad drunk and so I am responsible for Mum’s madness’ (94). Olivia’s death is described by Fuller as the exact moment when her ‘life was sliced in half’ (‘Afterwards’, 95). Thereafter the family’s existence becomes so utterly miserable that their life begins to resemble pantomime, however unkind this may sound. Following Olivia’s death Mrs Fuller suffers a serious nervous breakdown, one in a series that eventually see her diagnosed with manic depression (306). She recovers briefly after falling pregnant once again but by then her health requires hospitalization. In the chapter devoted



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to the baby brother who dies of a miscarriage, and whom Bobo and Vanessa had already named ‘Richard Steven Fuller’ (194), the family’s latent conflict with Zimbabwe climaxes. When Bobo asks her mother about Richard’s whereabouts, she replies that ‘He … went away … That’s what happens when you have a baby in a free African country. A government hospital.’ Bobo’s impression that the mother’s ‘voice is tight and cold, brittle like thin slices of glass’ (200) conveys the vulnerability of a woman whose daily existence seems perversely fated to defy the mythology of the settler’s resilience and stiff upper lip. Yet it would be unfair to overlook how, as a white woman, Alexandra Fuller is able also to look back critically on the kind of narrative symbolized by her own mother’s ‘stuck record, Tragedies of Our Lives’ (20). Contrasting her mother’s own view of herself to how others see her – the readers, her husband, their daughter and the African servants – Fuller creates a political, ethical and aesthetic framework in which the white African’s self-inscription is cast as flawed and limited but inherently believable. Like Before the Knife, the text illustrates Frank Bongione’s view that ‘past events are seen in the light of the memoirist’s current attitudes and beliefs, which give those events much of their meaning’ (2001: 16). Aware that any representation of childhood is susceptible to the temptations of nostalgia, Fuller negotiates what Svetlana Boym calls a ‘romance with the past’ (Boym, 2001: xiii–xiv) through an overt and subtly (self-)critical engagement with the knowledge readers bring to an encounter with white Africans. After all, Kammen remarks provocatively, ‘[n]ostalgia is … essentially history without guilt’ (1991: 688) and Fuller knows that in the postcolonial moment guilt is key to the white person’s journey to atonement and redemption; the guilt of whiteness speaks in Africa of a commitment to place and time that nostalgia makes it hard to articulate. In this way she unconsciously invokes Paul John Eakin’s assertion that ‘Identity narratives teach that the self is dynamic, changing and plural’ (1999: 46) and positions herself as a new Zimbabwean white self. She writes her story and that of her family fully cognizant of the changed world in which the book will circulate, one where stories like theirs may still retain some of their romantic appeal but now attract also derision and contempt. Yet, in common with the way she deals with her mother, Fuller neither endorses nor criticizes her father’s vocabulary (he refers to the Zimbabwean soldiers who regularly visit the family to deal with Mrs Fuller’s vitriolic but rather Quixotic attacks on the new political dispensation as ‘baboons’ [Fuller, 2002: 13, 165]), a silence that can be read either as a reflection of her discomfort with what she





witnesses or as a refusal to engage with the change in the political and social conditions in Zimbabwe. To be sure, Fuller’s love for her father qualifies her reticence to criticize him but in this way we see emerge again the agonistic force of a Kantian emphasis on conflict. Writing as an adult, she is almost blindly proud of a father who thrives on the life stage that Africa provides for a performance of a virile masculinity that feeds directly into colonial discourses of racial superiority and conquest. That is the natural response of a daughter socialized into love for her father, a man’s man, a fighter and provider. Although an account of how Fuller came to be her present self, the book is a celebration of her parents’ ability to survive in an Africa that throws everything at them – war, drought, poverty, death and almost unspeakable trauma. It is also a story of the parents’ absolute commitment to each other, and of a loving relationship that sustains them in the face of all manner of adversity. But Fuller’s real concern rests with women like her mother, caught between the relatively empowering domesticity their colonial subjectivity affords them, where they run the household and often manage small armies of servants but are oppressed by the stultifying feelings of frustration and despair their positions induce. Almost endemically they turn to alcohol abuse, an aspect that in Fuller’s work creates humour and poignancy, in Slaughter its sense of utter helplessness. Summarizing the divergent positions of Roland Barthes, Paul de Man and Adrienne Rich on autobiography, Leigh Gilmore asks in Aubiographics: ‘In whose voice can the subject of autobiography speak? Its own multivocality becomes fraught with potential silences’ (1994: 72). Such a question is central to work like Fuller’s in ways that do not apply in Slaughter’s case. For in Fuller multivocality is in fact core to a reiteration of the story of white loss and dispossession in Africa. Privileging the intimate narrative of self, and of the child within the domestic familial sphere, the memoir underplays the obvious ways in which whiteness signifies in Africa and elsewhere. In postcolonial Africa, even dispossession and displacement do not prevent her parents from moving with ease between various African countries, and Fuller too is able to live where she chooses to. Despite the discomfort and even trauma attached to such frequent dislocations, the parents’ mobility is a privilege inseparable from the colour of their skin. Works of lifewriting that recount childhoods lived in Africa in times of much social and political transformation, Before the Knife and Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight resonate with each other as much for the obvious



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similarities as for the glaring differences. Both are written by women whose childhoods were touched by almost indescribable violence, loss and alienation, the true nature of which their victims do not remember, or force themselves to repress. Both are impelled by a common focus on a problematic mother–daughter relationship which of itself provides both the thematic impulse to the works and their generic unity. It is in this context that they best reflect the transformative potential of an unsocial sociability. Retelling the story of her childhood allows Slaughter to put to rest the haunting shards of her memory. But the memoir cannot recover for the writer the mother whose loss she mourned, nor can it erase the violation of her idyllic childhood in Africa. Telling the story of her desperate need for a mother’s love and approbation, Slaughter finds in women’s writing an ideological and psychological framework for her recollections. Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight brings Alexandra Fuller back to the Africa of her childhood, an Africa which she knows has now been taken away from her but in which she believes people like her may still have a place. For Fuller ‘Mother Africa’ is symbolized by a real mother whose idiosyncratic ways reflect Africa’s difficult relationship with white settlers like the Fullers. Unlike Slaughter, Fuller returns to Africa to be with her mother time and again, and in a gesture that brings full circle Gilmore’s assertion on the relationship between mother and daughter she concludes the memoir by quoting directly from a letter from her mother. Then, addressing her readers directly, Fuller remains the loving daughter who set out to celebrate her parents’ lives in the form of a personal memoir: ‘Mum takes little pills every day now. She says, “They’re just enough to keep my brain quiet, but not so much to knock me out”’ (Fuller, 2002: 309). ‘Wrapping up’ the family’s African odyssey, Fuller resorts to a quasi-epistolary style that might be read as addressed just as much to Adrian, Olivia Jane and Richard Steven, the siblings whom she never quite knew and whose loss so painfully binds her to her mother. True to form, Mrs Fuller remains as unreconstructed a Rhodesian as she ever was. In the letter from which her daughter quotes, she comments on the progress with the building of a new house. In an echo of the class snobbery she voiced early in the memoir, the mother writes to Bobo that the parents’ life in Zambia is ‘more like township squalor every day’ (310), but rather than arrogance of the earlier statement – ‘we have breeding’ (4) – she has resigned herself to the demands that a future in Africa, as a white African, will make on her. She has learned to live with the disquieting presence of an unsociability that is central to her current social status in postcolonial Africa.




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Selected Bibliography 223

Index

Africa 5, 9, 204–19 Africans, white 204–5, 206, 213–14, 217, 218, 219 Aldington, Richard 157 Anselment, R.A., 104–5 authenticity in authorship 77–8 in fiction 13, 177 food required for 171 in lifewriting 10, 49, 107, 130–1, 185, 207, 210, 215 opposed to genre 188–9 in political writing 25 of traditional Irish life 72–3 authority biblical 100 from canonical writings 18 cultural 79, 143, 159 patriarchal 73, 121 from personal experience 18–19, 21, 25, 26, 31, 63, 79, 132, 143 from religious tropes 20–8, 30–1, 33 women’s, for political intercession 19–21, 24 autobiography see also lifewriting distinguished from fiction 130 distinguished from memoir 170 and fiction 168, 175–6, 177, 179–80, 184, 187–8 as self-justification 90–1, 94, 102–3 as victim story 189 Barnes, Djuna 151, 155 Barney, Natalie 148, 155, 161, 162–5, 165–6 Benson, E.F. 154 Bernard, St 23 Bible 97, 99, 100, 103, 113, 125, 223 Blasket Islands 15, 71–86 Blixen, Karen 206, 213 Bourke, Angela 72, 74, 79–81

Brontë, Charlotte 179, 206 Burke, Edmund 46 Calvinism 101 Carr, Emily (Canadian painter and writer) 14, 107–25 anti-patriarchal struggles 113, 124–5 artistic isolation 121 artistic religion 118–19 authenticity in 107 big–small paradox of 109, 115–17 exhibitions of painting 108, 115–16 reputation 108–9 ‘small’ persona analysed 121–5 paintings: The Little Pine 109, 110; Scorned as Timber, Beloved of the Sky 122–3 works: The Book of Small 109, 114–15, 125; Growing Pains 109, 114, 119, 124–5; The House of All Sorts 109; Hundreds and Thousands 108, 109, 110–12, 113, 116–17, 118–19, 120–1, 122, 123–4, 125; Klee Wyck 108, 126; Selected Letters 120–1, 125 Chang, Jung 200, 203 childbirth 92, 98–102 children, abuse of 54, 57–9, 62, 65, 66, 68, 206, 207–9, 211, 212 Colette, Sidonie-Gabrielle 161, 162 coteries, literary 150–1 Coughlan, Patricia 75–6, 78, 81, 82 D’Orleans, Louis, 34 de Pizan, Christine (15th-century French writer) 1, 12, 15, 18–33, 33–4 anxieties, maternal 28–33 autobiographical selfpositioning 18, 19, 21–4, 27–8 as political analyst 19–20, 32

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Note: figures in italics refer to references in notes.

promotes political roles for women 20, 25 self-presentation as Mater Dolorosa 19–28, 30–1, 33 works 19–20: Epistre a la royne 20–1, 24; Epistre de la prison de vie humaine 22, 24–6, 27, 31–2; Heures de contemplacion sur la Passion de Nostre Seigneur 26–8, 31; Lamentacion sur les maux de la guerre civile 1, 24–6; Le Livre de ladvision Cristine, 21, 26, 28–31, 32–3; Livre du corps de policie, 32–3 de Scudéry, Madeleine 151–3, 155, 165 novels 151–2 sexuality of 153 Decadent movement 158, 162–4 Doolittle, Hilda 151, 156–61, 165 works: Paint it Today 156–61

required for narrative authenticity 171 Fortune, Mary (Australian writer) 11–12, 128–45 biography 131–2, 144–5 fictional self-presentation 140–4 as flâneuse 135–9, 144 rhetorical strategies 133–4, 139 satire 134–5, 137 works: ‘Fourteen Days on the Roads’ 129, 133–4; ‘Looking for Lodgings’ 137–8; ‘Twenty-Six Years Ago’ 132, 141–3 Freud, Sigmund 160 Fuller, Alexandra (white African writer) 204–5, 206, 213–19 attitudes to colonialism 213, 218 love for father 218 relationship to mother 215–17 works: Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight 204, 213–18, 219

Eakin, Paul John 8, 10, 13, 49, 61, 217 Edgeworth, Richard and Maria 46–7 Emberley, Julia 61, 63–4, 67–8, 69 empire, British 204–5, 206, 207, 211, 214 ethics and collaboration 54 and lifewriting 8, 9, 10, 13, 49, 180 of ransom in warfare 32 and self-preservation 50 ethnicity 191

gardens 173–4 Gilmore, Leigh 9, 12, 213, 218 on mother–daughter relationships 209, 215, 219 on relational identity 7, 205–6 on trauma testimony 10, 15, 209 girls, cultural roles of 191 Grotius, Hugo 19

families see mother–daughter relationships see girls, cultural roles of fiction as predation 181 truth in 171, 177, 185 Fish, Stanley 131 flâneuse 135–9, 144 food connected to language 171–2, 184 as motif of sociability 171–3 as prompt to memory 171

H.D. see Doolittle, Hilda Hall, Radclyffe 154 Halligan, Marion (Australian writer) 11, 13, 168–85 criticism of 168 domestic focus in 169–70 food in 170–3, 181 rations her sociability 172, 185 on truth in fiction 177 works: Eat My Words 170–1, 172, 180; The Fog Garden 169, 172–85; The Taste of Memory 170, 171, 172–7, 180, 183–5 Heine, Heinrich 159 Henry IV 29, 31 Hichen, Robert 154 history, nationalist 214 Hobbes, Thomas 2, 19



Index 225

Index

Hutchinson, Lucy (Puritan writer) 91–2 Huxley, Aldous 154 identity, relational 7, 13, 89, 103, 104, 205–6 illness 92–7, 173–4, 178, 194–5 Irish Constitution (1937) 73 Isabeau, Queen 20–1 Johnson, Samuel 182–3, 184 Johnson, Yvonne (Native Canadian writer) 9, 54–69 collaborative lifewriting by 9, 54–7, 59–61, 68–9 colonial dispossession of 57, 64 critique of violence 66–8 narrative strategies in 61–4, 66–8 works: Stolen Life 9, 54–69 Kant, Immanuel 5, 11, 71, 109 essentialism in 4 flawed modelling of gender 125 on human progress 1–3, 206 theory of competitive endeavour 111–12, 115, 124, 149, 191, 218 Landon, Laetitia 131 Lawrence, D.H. 154, 156 Le, Nam 203 Lejeune, Philippe 10, 207 lesbianism 12, 40, 151–65 pathologized 151, 163 Lessing, Doris 206 lifewriting, women’s authenticity in 10, 49, 107, 130–1, 185, 207, 210, 215 collaborative 9, 54–7, 59–61, 68–9, 77–8, 80–1 and ethics 8, 9, 10, 13, 49, 180 and healing 8, 69, 206 limitations of self-exposure in 11, 168, 185 and memory 208–9, 212 as self-justification 90–1, 94, 102–3 spiritual 75–7, 89–98, 104 and unsociable sociability 3–7, 11, 13, 33

Mac Curtain, Margaret 73, 75–6, 82, 84, 85 magic realism 187, 189 Mallock, W.H. 154 Mater Dolorosa 19–31, 33, 73 Maynard, Max 120 Melbourne 135–6, 141, 142, 189 memoir distinguished from autobiography 170 Mendelson, Sarah 97, 104 migrant writing 187–94 and audience 188, 202 rhetorical strategies in 187–8 Min, Anchee 200–1 Mirrlees, Hope 151, 155 modernism 12 Montague, Sir John 29 Montaigne, Michel de 2 Morrell, Lady Ottoline 154, 155 mother–daughter relationships 57, 191, 193–6, 208–12, 215–19 narrative, providential 90–8, 104–5 nationalism, Irish 72, 74 and language 72, 74 negotiation, cultural 187, 191, 198–200 education in 193 through evasion and lying 199–200 Ó Criomhthain, Tomás (Irish writer) 71, 74 Ó Súilleabháin, Muiris (Irish writer) 71, 78–9 Paris 29, 136, 182, 183 painters in 108, 117, 121 salon culture in 148–9, 151, 155, 161, 162, 163 Peacock, Thomas Love 154 Peres da Costa, Suneeta (migrant Australian writer) 187–91, 193–200, 202 mother–daughter relationships in 194–6, 197 treatment of sexuality 197 use of magic realism 187, 189



226

works: Homework 187–90, 193–6, 197–200, 202 Peterson, Linda, 104 Plath, Sylvia 206, 209, 210, 211 Plato 158 Pound, Ezra 156, 157 Pung, Alice (migrant Australian writer) 187–94, 196–200 mother–daughter relationships in 191, 193–4, 196 refusal of victim position 14, 188–9 treatment of sexuality 196–7, 199–200 use of narrative indirection 199–200 works: Unpolished Gem 14, 187, 188–92, 193–4, 196–7, 198–200, 202 Reformation, Protestant 100 respectability, women’s fragility of 47–8, 90, 103, 130–2, 139–41, 143 Rich, Adrienne 218 Richard II 17 Robertson, Eliza Frances (British Regency writer) 10–11, 37–51 legal victimization of 10, 41–3, 50–1 newspaper denigration of 39–40, 46 uses lifewriting for legal critique 45–7, 49–50 works: Destiny 47; The Life and Memoirs of Miss Robertson, Late of Blackheath 43, 44–6, 50; Who are the Swindlers? 43–4, 46 roman à clef 12, 148, 154–5, 159, 161 combines fiction and autobiography 162–3, 165 connected to the salon 150 history of 151–6 and rhetoric of coterie 150 vehicle for discussing sexual taboos 12, 151, 154, 158, 165 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 3–4, 7, 9, 14

salon 148–55 as egalitarian space 149 fosters roman à clef 150, 165 as generator of fresh ideas 151 as public–private space 148–9, 155 rules of 149 as site of sociability 149 Sappho 152, 153, 156, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165 Sayers, Peig (Irish writer) 15, 71–86 authorship questioned 77–8 collaborative writing by 77–8, 80–1 as ideal of Irish womanhood 72–6, 86 as Mater Dolorosa 73 as oral artist 78–81 parodies of 75 spirituality of 75–7 works: Peig 71–4, 81–6; Machtnamh Seana-Mhná 71 ‘scandalous memoirs’ 10–11, 37, 41, 47–8, 51 gender politics underlying 47–8 Schreiner, Olive 206 Shelley, Percy B. 154, 158 Sitwell, Edith 156 Sitwell, Osbert 154, 156 Slaughter, Carolyn (white African writer) 204–13, 215, 216, 218–19 abused by father 207–10 critique of colonialism 207 relationship with mother 208–12, 219 view of Africa 209–11, 212–13 works: Before the Knife 204, 205, 206–13, 218 Smith, Sidonie 8, 132 sociability food as motif of 171–3 Stein, Gertrude 148, 151, 154, 155–6 stereotypes ethnic literary 188, 200–3 of Irish women 72–6 Sussex, Lucy 131, 135, 144 Tan, Hwee Hwee 200–2 Tanner, Laura 67, 69



Index 227

Index

Thornton, Alice (17th-century British writer) 89–103 scandals concerning 90 uses lifewriting for selfjustification 90–1, 94, 102–3 works: Autobiography 90–103 Toklas, Alice B. 121 trauma 54, 206 of child abuse 61, 207–8 enables belonging to place 214 exorcised through narrative 210–11 in family relations 9, 215 testimony 8–10, 14–15, 213 ‘unsociable sociability’ 1–7, 18–19, 78, 83, 109, 141, 144 and autobiography 168 as challenging tradition 14 in collaborative writing 9 colonial aspects of 130–8 effected through critical writing 129–30 enables political critique 12, 19 enforced by environment 71 expressed in war 19 as family dynamic 198, 205, 208 of the flâneuse 135, 138 in historical context 19 as individual–community tension 71–2, 81, 110–11 and lifewriting 3–7, 11, 13, 33

as maintaining reputation 37–51, 90 in males 111–12, 115, 124–5 as migrant experience 191, 202 modelled in the salon 149 negotiated using male protection 121 in religious writing 89–103 as settler experience 10, 204, 214, 216, 219 spirituality as 76–7 and trauma 12, 15 in writing process 55–69, 202 unsocial sociability see unsociable sociability Vivien, Renée 151, 156, 161–5 and disguise 164 works: A Woman Appeared to Me 162–5 Waif Wander see Fortune, Mary Wharton, Edith 148–9 Whitlock, Gillian 6, 7–8, 9, 80–1 Wiebe, Rudy (Canadian writer) 54–69 see also Johnson, Yvonne Wilde, Oscar 154, 158, 160, 163 Winterson, Jeanette 206 Woolf, Virginia 115, 126, 151, 155, 156, 206 Yen Mah, Adeline 190, 203



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