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GIRL POWER: THEAMERICAN WOMAN’S COMING OF AGE NARRATIVE
By

Christy Rishoi

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
American Studies Program

2000

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ABSTRACT
GIRL POWER: THE AMERICAN WOMAN’S COMING OF AGE NARRATIVE
By

Christy Rishoi

Women have long known that identity is complex and contradictory, but in the
twentieth century their coming of age narratives finally voice this knowledge, which
originates in girlhood, and demonstrate that a liminal position in American culture is
productive of power and agency. Awakening sexuality, the body’s metamorphosis in
puberty, consciousness of difference from males, and the socialization into feminine
gender roles are thematized in the American woman’s coming of age narrative. Rejecting
the heroine’s narrative ending in romance, this genre has allowed American women writers
to create alternative subjectivities by rejecting the notion that identity is ever fixed. This
study examines the role of the coming of age narrative in American feminism and in
particular its crucial role in constructing counter-hegemonic discourses of femininity.
While activists have succeeded in winning legal battles that have changed the legal status
of women, these narratives perform the cultural work of exposing the painfiIl
contradictions faced by women as they come of age. Rather than sublimating the
contradictory aspects of self typical of traditional autobiography and the Bildungsroman,
the American woman’s coming of age narrative suggests that multiple subjectivity is

ultimately the source of individual power.

For Helen Rishoi
In memory of Don Rishoi

and

for Larry—

who makes my heart sing

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Acknowledgments

Throughout this project and my graduate studies, I have been privileged to work
with a remarkable group of people. My dissertation committee has been unfailingly
patient and supportive of my project through many ups and downs. Diane Brunner’s
dedication to social justice through innovative teaching inspires my own practice, and
Joyce Ladenson’s consistent support and kindness by way of graduate assistantships,
teaching opportunities, publication and fiiendship saw me safely through the roughest
stretch of my graduate years. To Dean Rehberger, I owe a debt of gratitude for
introducing me to a body of theory that finally helped me make sense of my own
worldview. Katherine F ishbum has been everything a mentor ought to be: supportive,
patient, knowledgeable, and there, in every sense of the word. Not incidentally, she
restored my faith in English teachers by putting Willa Cather on her syllabus.

Katie, Benjamin, Leah, Brianna, and Kevin have been as patient as one could hope
children might be While two dissertations were being written in six months time, enduring
transitions, deadlines, and postponed plans. I’m ready to play again, at last.

And finally, my beloved husband, Larry Juchartz, read and edited my work when
I could no longer see it clearly, encouraged me when I wanted to quit, listened while I
thought out loud, fed me When I was hungry, rubbed my back when it ached, and played
with our children when I could not. As it turns out, quest and romance are quite

compatible. Looks like we made it.

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Contents

I. Introduction: Identity and the Coming of Age Narrative l

2. Feminism, Autobiography, and Theories of Subjectivity 30

3. Coming onge in America 72

4. Specifying American Girlhood: Annie Dillard and Anne Moody 108

5. ‘Lying Contests’: Fictional Autobiography and Autobiographical Fiction 154
6. ‘Room for Paradoxes’: Creating a Hybrid Identity 191

Notes 229

Works Cited 248

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Identity and the Coming of Age Narrative

A great deal has been said about the heart of a
girl when she stands “where the brook and
river meet,” but What she feels is negative;
more interesting is the heart of a boy when just
at the budding dawn ofmanhood . ..

James Weldon Johnson
The Autobiography of an Ex— Coloured Man

Little by little it has become clear to me that
every great philosophy has been the
confession of its maker, as it were his
involuntary and unconscious autobiography.

Friedrich Nietzsche
BeyondGoodandEvil
“Read this——you’ll love it.” With these words, my mother hands me the copy of

Little Women her aunt gave her when she was twelve and plants a seed that will, nearly
three decades later, grow into this study. At age twelve, I am beginning to balk at
everything my mother suggests, but being constitutionally unable to resist any book, I
grudgingly begin to read Alcott’s novel. And like generations of girls before me, I fall in
love with finmy, feisty Jo and weep when Beth dies. Like Jo, I try to be good, but I have
big drearris that distract me from my daily duties. Jo voices my own secret desires when
she tells her sisters that she wants to do “something heroic or wonderful that won’t be
forgotten when I’m dead. I don’t know What, but I’m on the watch for it and mean to
astonish you all someday” (I72). My mother keeps me steadily supplied with
“underground” literature—girls’ books—and While I feign disinterest, she is right. I do
love these books, all of them: Alcott’s sequels to Little Women; Anne Frank’s diary;

Jane Eyre; Willa Cather’s complete works. At fourteen, I ask my ninth-grade English
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teacher if we will be reading any Cather, but her face tells me she has never heard of my
current favorite. I will have to wait twenty years, until graduate school, before I can talk
about Cather in school.

While coming of age, my reading life is thus split between school reading and
private reading, but it is women’s literature that feeds my soul. It also confuses me.
Many of the books my mother gives me glorify goodness, duty, and romance, but in the
world outside those books, it is the early I970s. Everybody says “do your own thing”
and “if it feels good, do it.” My own mother tells me I should never depend on a man to
support me: “Go to college, be self-sufficient, so when you do marry, you won’t be
financially dependent” I agree wholeheartedly, but I am swept away by the romance in
my books, which tell me, like Jo March’s mother tells her, that “to be loved and chosen
by a good man is the best and sweetest thing that can happen to a woman” (118). I am
calling myself a feminist at fourteen, buying Ms. magazine, reading Our Bodies,
Ourselves, and watching the horizon for the appearance of Mr. Rochester.

Nietzsche was right; all writing is autobiographical in some sense, regardless of
the explicit subject matter and regardless of whether we call it fact or fiction. We write to
extend our love affair with an idea or image, or we write to understand something we have
experienced, directly or indirectly. The author of a new book on “geek culture” tells a
radio interviewer that in his youth he was smart and different, and thus ostracized. His
book about the subculture of technologically savvy “geeks” is a recovery effort aimed at
rescuing the image Ofpeople like hirnselfin mainstream statute.I TS. Eliot certame
wrote in part to prove his worthiness in elite British literary circles with whom he
desperately wanted to be associated. Virginia Woolf’s anger at her exclusion from

membership in that same club is woven into much of her prose.2 Simone de Beauvoir’s

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massive study, The Second Sex, was called into being by its author’s knowledge of her
own status as Other. And my study is no different." Its origins are in my own coming of
age and the confirsion I felt about what it means to be a woman. Faced with conflicting
narratives of womanhood, none of which are explicitly spelled out, I committed many
social blunders but eventually (well into adulthood) reconciled myself to being a walking
contradiction. Still, there was—and is—great pressure on all of us to create order out of
chaos and to present ourselves coherently. The world wants to know how to interact
with us, and it does not know how to address itself to individuals who signal multiple or
oppositional identities. The imperative to develop a coherent identity that meshes with
society’s dominant ideologies is unspoken, but individuals who transgress cultural norms
are quickly brought into line or ostracized. This dynamic reaches critical mass in
adolescence, when individuals in the West are tacitly expected to coalesce their identities
and complete the journey to a unified selfhood. Given the social pressure to conform, I
began to wonder how an individual could find the courage and power to resist culturally
sanctioned roles. More specifically, I wanted to understand how girls become women and
how they cope with the conflict between their own desires and the social repression of
women’s desire. Though I came of age as the second wave women’s movement was
gaining a foothold in American culture, I did not then believe that these conflicts mattered
in any significant sense. Born too late for consciousness-raising groups, and too early to
take our equality for granted, women of my generation, race, and class assumed we would
go to college and “do” something, but we struggled with conflicting ideologies of
femininity. We did not hide our achievement around boys, but we were thought pushy if
we took the initiative in dating. We got the culture’s messages about flee love, but when
we acted on them we were sluts. We were expected to excel, but quietly and passively.

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Worst of all, we did not talk to each other about these issues in the way that women ten
years older than us did, as serious discourse about the place of women in Western society
remained cloistered in relatively remote (from our adolescent lives) locations. Like our
mothers, we did not know that other girls felt the same confusion and discontent that we
did, leaving many of us convinced that we were aberrations.

My mother enrolled in college when l was coming of age, and I watched as she
transformed into a blue-jean-wearing undergraduate who plunged into the history of
America slavery because she had been profoundly moved by the Civil Rights struggle as it
took shape in the late 1940s and 50s, when she was coming of age. Still unable to resist a
book, I read much Of What she read. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Manchild in the
Promised Land. Soul on Ice. I could not have articulated it then, but I was drawn to
these texts because they showed me that I was not the only one who felt out of step with
my culture. More than that, I learned that there were literally millions of alienated human
beings in America who, for a variety of reasons not of their own making, did not flourish
in society. But their stories—and my own—stayed on the sidelines of the American
master narrative. The autobiographical texts that form the basis of my argument here
thematize the cultural alienation and confusion that continue to resonate for me, leading
me to ask how writers are able to overcome the socially determining limits faced by
American women.

Stories of resistance and difference have always been in circulation, but they are
typically silenced in public discourse because they fail to invoke the universal subject of
liberal humanism. In general, narrative knowledge is delegitimated in Western societies
when it fails to conform to the empirical knowledge that has been valorized historically

by a group of elite white males. Thus, the stories and experiences of everyone else have

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been suppressed by those who control the terms and conditions of scientific discourses.
But as Jean-Francois Lyotard argues, the rules of empirical knowledge are established in a
circular, self-referential fashion, so finally “there is no other proof that the rules are good
than the consensus extended to them by the experts” (29). While the knowledge that is
disseminated through narration is often dismissed by dominant ideology, for women and
other socially marginalized groups traditionally excluded from socially sanctioned forms
of learning, narrative has been the primary means of sharing the knowledge that is
necessary for survival. Lyotard calls narration the “quintessential form of customary
knowledge” in that it inscribes a society’s criteria for cultural competence, and allows its
members to determine the validity and performance of any given narrative (19-20). By
means of narrative and anecdote, for instance, women have shared their unquestionably
empirical knowledge of childbirth with each other and subsequent generations, though the
validity of tlurt knong has often been ignored or dismissed in male-sanctioned medical
discourse.

In the West, we have privileged the consensus of empirical experrs’ knowledge at
least since the Enlightenment, and this consensus dismisses narrative knowledge as
unverifiable and therefore worthless. Lyotard contends that narration helps create and
sustain social bonds, unlike scientific knowledge which is “no longer a direct and shared
component of the bond” (25). Certainly, it is more than mere coincidence that groups
who rely on narrative to create knowledge have been constructed as primitive or inferior
by groups that seek to control knowledge by subjecting it to scientific proofs. Oral
cultures and groups, traditionally excluded from elite education, have been subjected to
the cultural imperialism of scientists who dismiss narrative knowledge as unverifiable

through argumentation or proofs, and therefore not genuine. Such cultures are

 
    
 
 
  
 

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subsequently classified, according to Lyotard, as different: “savage, primitive,
underdeveloped, backward, alienated, composed of opinions, customs, authority,
prejudice, ignorance, ideology. Narratives are fables, myths, legends, fit only for women
and children. At best, attempts are made to throw some rays of light into this
obscurantism, to civilize, educate, develop” (27). Lyotard argues, however, that
scientific and narrative knowledges are each judged by a separate set of governing rules,
and that the validity of one kind of knowledge cannot be judged by the rules of the other
(26). Moreover, Lyotard correctly contends that scientific knowledge cannot prove its
superior position as the “true knowledge without resorting to the other, narrative, kind of
knowledge, which fi'om its point of view is no knowledge at all” (29). In other words, in
addition to presenting the requisite proofs and argumentation, scientific discourse-—
ironically — necessarily includes narration as it builds a case for its own superiority.
Additionally, to qualify as true learning, scientific knowledge must present a coherent
narrative without gaps or contradictions that might be construed as false proofs or faulty
argumentation, and in this sense, scientific knowledge enjoys a symbiotic relationship
with liberal humanist selfliood, which posits a similarly seamless account of the
autonomous individual. But, as Lyotard contends, echoing John Donne’s 1624 Devotion,
“no self is an island; each exists in a fabric of relations that is now more complex and
mobile than ever before” (15).4

Women have always understood identity as complex and interconnected, and we
have historically relied on narrative to convey our contradictory, contingent truths and to
foster that human connectedness. As Alison Jaggar wryly suggests, women never would
have devised the liberal humanist account of identity with its conception of individual

autonomy and its valorization of the mind over the body which sanctioned a division of

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labor that allowed a few elite males to concentrate on mental activity while everyone else
attended to the quotidian, physical necessities of everyday life. Furthermore, argues
Jaggar, “[i]t is even harder to imagine women developing a political theory that
presupposed political solipsism, ignoring human interdependence and especially the long
dependence of human young” (46). The story of human connection in Western societies,
“the other side of the story” in Molly Hite’s phrase, has been told by women and, for
most of history, in private. Furthermore, the relatively few women’s narratives that did
gain public recognition have been viewed as if they were merely a mimetic transfer of the
author’s life into text (Hite 13). As Michel Foucault has argued, every member of a
society knows the “rules of exclusion”—the production of discourse is at once controlled,
selected, organized and redistributed according to a certain number of procedures, whose
role is to avert its powers and its dangers, to cope with chance events, to evade its
ponderous, awesome materiality” ( “Discourse” 216). Because women’s discourses were
potentially dangerous to the continued dominance of Western liberal ideology, women’s
narratives and texts have been carefully regulated to allow for inclusion only those
accounts that confirm hegemonic practices. The medieval definition of madness
exemplifies Foucault’s understanding of how exclusionary practices work: “a man was
madifhisspeechcouldnotbesaidtoformpartoftheeommon discourse ofmen. His
words were considered null and void, without truth or significance . . . .” (216). We need
only substitute the word “woman” for “man” in Foucault’s formulation to find a
profound description of the place of women in Western culture, for while a madman
might reverse his exclusion by reinscn'bing dominant ideology, a woman who shifts course
and voices the same discourse is still “just” a woman. Her discourse can never be that of

the “common discourse of men.” For Foucault, discursive exclusion relies on institutional

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reinforcement from schools, the publishing industry, and other practices to police its
borders and “exercise a sort of pressure, a power of constraint upon other forms of
discourse. . .” (219). The exclusion of women’s experiences and points of view fi-om
public discourses is the direct result of these institutional pressures which have silenced
the experiences of women and other marginalized goups. Women’s knowledges remained
largely underground, dispersed, because they were publicly constructed as insignificant
for failing to reflect universal truths. And what was true for women’s experiences was, in
turn, reflected in social attitudes toward the experience of girls. Nothing in female
experience resonated with the common discourse until very recently in history, and so it
has been defined as insignificant.

Now, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, we might agree with James Weldon
Johnsonthatagreatdealhasbecnsaidabout“theheartofagirl”asshemakesthe
transition into womanhood. We have witnessed nothing short of a revolutionary shift in
paradign about women in American society in the last thirty to forty years as nearly
every assumption about women has undergone intensive scrutiny, questioning, and
reassessment. But in 1912, when The Autobiography OfAn lit-Coloured Man appeared,
the details and meanings ofa girl’s passage fiom childhood to womanhood held
significance primarily in the circumscribed private domestic sphere inhabited by women.
Denigrated for lacking universal values and consigned to sentimental realm, literary texts
focused on girls’ coming of age issues received scant public or scholarly attention before
the last decades of the twentieth century.’ A geat many assumptions lie at the core of
this ancient silence; the idea that woman is an uncomplicated being whose life course is
dictated by biology and nature has been argued and defended by thinkers fiom Aristotle
toFreudand beyond. Indeed,this isthemasternarrativeofwomanhood inWestern

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society and it carries the weight and authority of more than 2000 years of philosophical
and scientific traditions. Yet in spite of that tradition, the lives of American women have
changed more radically in the last forty years than in any other comparable period in
history. This sea change became possible because women not only imagined a changed
social landscape, in Raymond Williams’ terms, they also took action to overcome the
“determining limits” of white patriarchal capitalist hegemony (86). In Carolyn Heilbrun’s
view, the task of her generation of feminists has been more “to dismantle the past than to
imagine the firture” (72), but articulation of women’s lives under patriarchy could not
avoid imagining alternate ways of being.° The work of imagination and deep social
change has reached every sector of American life where women exist, fiorn the small
consciousness-raising goups of the 19603 to organized activist goups to rigorous
scholarship in the academy, and while there continues to be vocal, sometimes violent
resistance to the increased social and political power women wield, there is little question
that feminism has succeeded in changing American culture. To all appearances, this
women’s movement has created lasting social change. Even the most strident enemies of
feminism acknowledge by their energetic attacks its far-reaching impact and
influence—even acceptance—but I find myself returning again and again to the narrator of
The Autobiograpr of an Err-Coloured Man and his comparison of male and female
coming of age experiences. It might be easy to dismiss his statement as a typically male
view of womanhood, but I wonder if Johnson has in fact articulated what women
themselves feel. Little Women ’1: Jo March wants desperately to be a boy because she
understands that adventure and power belong to males while women must be content
with “working and waiting”? But even in the twentieth century, Maxine Hong Kingston
writes of her longing to be a boy, that her parents might take pride in her achievements. I

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can dismiss the first part of Johnson’s statement— “A great deal has been said about the
heart of a girl when she stands ‘where the brook and river meet’”—as the highly doubtful
assertion of an earlier age, but it is much more difficult to dismiss what immediately
follows in Johnson’s text: the narrator’s assertion that “what she feels is negative”
puzzles and angers me simultaneously. Do most girls feel negatively about becoming
women? Whatisthecauseandnamreofthatnegativity?Whatdoesitmeantobecomea
woman in twentieth-century America?

These are the foundational questions of my study, and while I cannot claim to
answer them empirically or definitively, I have undertaken the work in part to take issue
with the continued devaluation of girls and women in American culture, which also
grounds the implicit assumption in some feminist theory that a negative view of
womanhood by women is “natural” and understandable given the many restrictions and
the suppression of self that are ostensibly unavoidable when a girl comes of age. While it
has been politically necessary and expedient (in order to force social change) to highlight
the ways and means of women’s oppression, chapter and verse, here I will argue that in
spite of the unquestionably repressive culture faced by American women of all
backgrounds throughout history, female writers of what I call the coming of age narrative
resist negative constructions of womanhood and actively create oppositional identities for
themselves. In order to create such an identity, however, the writer must also reject
conventional literary genres, whose ideologies make the construction of alternative
identities impossible.‘ Instead, women writers created a specific type of text—the
coming ofage narrative —that subverts traditional literary forms in order to construct
new forms of subjectivity and resist the male-defined discourse of womanhood.9 While it

would be naive to ignore the ambivalence with which many girls have approached a firture

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of performing a socially acceptable American womanhood, which Annie Dillard compares
to a living death, in the coming chapters I will argue that girls do not suffer gladly the
inevitable march to their socially mandated adult roles. As powerful as the master
narratives might be, they are riddled with contradictions and outright lies, a fact
recognized and exploited by female American memoir writers as they resist hegemonic
interpellations and attempt to claim a degree of agency while still acknowledging the
ineluctable social contexts which help determine their identities. Moreover, it is apparent
that women who write coming of age narratives construct these oppositional
subjectivities only in retrospect. In other words, the act of writing one’s coming of age
experience is also the act of ordering the conflicts and confusions—even chaos—related to
the construction of identity in adolescence, a feat not easily accomplished in medias res.
Women who write coming of age narratives construct discursive selves actively engaged
with American ideologies of womanhood in its myriad manifestations. In addition, these
texts violate the traditional boundaries of autobiography and fiction by subverting the
reader’s desire for coherent narratives that clearly signal their status as either truth or
fiction and that will reinscribe and verify a tmified selflrood. By fusing and blending
narrative devices, these texts use language and the act of narration to challenge hegemonic
constructions of identity and womanhood, and create a form of what Catherine Belsey
has termed the “interrogative” text, which positions the author as a contingent,
contradictory subject and raises more questions than it answers for the reader (91). While
realist texts present a fixed identity that reinforces the reader’s identification with the
universal subject, the interrogative text interpellates a reader who is similarly alienated
from dominant discourse and who identifies with a fluid, often contradictory subject

position. As Leigh Gilmore writes of postmodern autobiographical practices, these texts

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constitute a “site of identity production. . . that both resist and produce cultural
identities” (4). Moreover, these sites of identity production are constantly shifting, and
privilege contingent subjectivities by refusing to repress discourses that contradict the
assertion of autonomous selflrood. The coming of age narrative foregmunds the pain and
confirsion that accompanies a conflicted subject position—we all want to belong,
somehow, to a culture that recognizes only the coherent subject as normal—but these
texts argue that normality is, in the end, chimerical. And that insight is finally productive
ofpowerandagency forwomen. By focusingon adolescence, by definition a timeof
rebellion and resistance, and by foregrounding contradictory desires and discourses, the
coming of age narrative provides a congenial form for women writers to successfirlly
question the power of dominant ideologies to construct their lives.

The proliferation of second wave feminism as well as critical theory’s movement
toward poststructuralism has helped to encourage and validate a massive increase in the
publication of woman’s narratives. However, with few exceptions, previous studies
implicitly view women (to recast Sartre’s famous critique of Marxism) as if their lives
beganwiththeirfirstromance,orwidrmarriage. Eventhosestudiesthatfocusonthe
female Bildungsroman, such as Rachel Blau du Plessis’s work on the narrative strategies
of twentieth-century women writers and Barbara White’s work on fictional
representations of female adolescence, often focus on the teleology of adolescent quest,
ratherthan witlrthechildhood thatpreceded it. Indeed, the most influential studiesto
date have mainly been concerned with fictional representations of women’s lives, and use
autobiographical and other nonfiction texts of women writers primarily to bolster their
claims. Furthermore, previous studies have argued that quest and romance are rendered

mutually exclusive in women’s literatm'e, and implicitly suggest that romance always

12

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forecloses quest. In contrast, many coming of narratives refuse the either/or opposition,
insisting instead that romance and quest are entirely compatible, and thus valorize both
the self-in-relation and individual quest. My intention is to broaden the scope of literary
and cultural analysis of women’s lives by focusing on the transition from childhood to
womanhood as it is constructed in autobiography and memoir. And because there is a
deeply ingrained tendency to read autobiography as unproblematically truthful, I see a
need to make extensive use of feminist poststructuralist theory, which suggests that,
while experience plays a major role in determining what sort of woman the child becomes,
what is critical is how she creates meaning from those experiences from the discourses
available to her when she writes. The Freudian narrative of so-called normal femininity is
regularly challenged in twentieth-century coming of age narratives, as is the conception of
an essential womanhood (defined as self-in-relation) offered by liberal feminist
interventions such as that of Belenky, et al While these texts do lend credence to
poststructuralist theories of subjectivity as a process, they repeatedly assert the primacy
ofexperienceasproduceroftruth. Buttruthhere is a local and specifictruth; few female
autobiographers in any historical era have rhetorically suggested that theirs are universal
stories. Furthermore, most of the writers in my study tacitly recognize the unstable
nature of truth.

These texts demonstrate how twentieth-century autobiography constitutes a
sphere in which the dominant American ideologies of womanhood are fi'equently and
radically challenged and profoundly revised. While I do argue that all writing is
autobiographical in some sense, and further that texts identified as autobiography are
nonetheless fictions constructed by the writer to make “sense” of her life, these narratives
present a far more complex picture of female gender formation and practices than that

13

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found in most fiction precisely because of the ideological restrictions of fictional forms.
And while I would agree with du Plessis that the twentieth century has seen a shift in the
teleology of women’s lives as depicted in fiction, I would argue further that many
autobiographies go beyond simply imagining a different life trajectory for women—they
show women living it, hill of contradictions, but effectively resisting society’s scripts for

Rea-eating Womanhood

My goal is to build on a growing body of scholarship that deals with the
construction of womanhood by analyzing the ways in which subjectivity and identity”
are constructed in twentieth-century American coming of age narratives by women.
Whilethesetextsdoprovideevidencethatgrowingup femaleinAmericaisstilla
sometimes painful experience, they also demonstrate a great diversity of experience, much
of which is joyful and gives lie to the considerably flattened and simplistic view of
women’s lives expressed most memorably by Sigmund Freud in his exasperated question:
“What do women want?” Freud arrogantly answered his own question at great length,
assuming he was more qualified than women themselves to answer the question; Virginia
Woolf imagined Freud writing on women as “labouring under some emotion that made
himjab his pen on the paper as ifhe were killing some noxious insect as he wrote, but
even when he had killed it that did not satisfy him; he must go on killing it” (31), and
contends that only by calling women inferior could he see himself as superior (35).
Women’s own narratives of coming of age answer Freud’s question quite difl‘erently than
he did; any acceptance of a “lack” based on gender is entirely missing from these
memoirs, although their authors certainly recognize that, as women, they are perceived as

14

 

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inferior by American society. Instead, these narratives often reflect the widening horizons
for women in American culture and a strong resistance to normative femininity; female
quest takes many forms, and successful resistance to gender norms becomes possible and
even acceptable, if still sometimes unconscious or covert Du Plessis argues that when
women as a group are successful in questioning social gender norms, female quest
narratives in novels will no longer routinely resolve in marriage or death for the heroine
(4). In the memoirs I examine in the chapters ahead, there is a consistent thematization of
quest in lives that span the twentieth century, but here, unlike in novels discussed by Du
Plessis, narrative choices are not finally limited by the romance plot. I suggest then that
the narrative choices in fictional accormts of women’s lives have been far more constricted
than those found in women’s coming of age narratives.

Women autobiographers are no fleet from gender norm pressures than their
fictional cormterparts, but their narratives resist the suppression and limitations of their
opportunities and choices, and this resistance is ultimately productive. In addition, the
arguably artificial boundaries between fiction and autobiography produce a paradoxical
reader reaction; we are less forgiving of seemingly unlikely events or attitudes in fiction,
but in a nonfiction text there is a greater suspension of disbelief, allowing the writer
greater latitude in the construction of truth. Of course, in real life, preposterous (or what
Nancy Miller would call “implausible”) events and coincidences do indeed occur, but as
readers we have more structured expectations of fictional plot movement and character
behavior.'1 This phenomenon may explain why female autobiographers construct
themselves as less restricted in life choices than their fictional counterparts, even at this
late date. Although she did not write an autobiography, Louisa May Alcott will serve as
an example of this point. Alcott never married, choosing instead to support her parents

15

  

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and sisters through her writing, while she does not (or cannot) allow her fictional alter-
ego, Jo March in Little Women, to break with social norms. Indeed, lo is persuaded to
give up her crueer of writing adventurous “sensation” stories so that she may become a
more suitable wife in her fiance’s eyes. Alcott’s life was more complex than this brief
rendering suggests, but the point is that while women might commonly live lives that do
not measure up to the mythic norm, their fictional narratives suggest much less room to
negotiate gender norms than actually exist. While this might suggest the writers are
exhibiting classic false consciousness, I see this pattern as a example of counter-hegemony
at work. Raymond Williams defines hegemony as a complex concept of political and
cultru'al dominance, gained through an ongoing process ofoonsont,” and argues the the
window for resistance to hegemony lies in the imagination of individuals (86). Thus, by
imagining an altered view of the self, the individual reclaims agency and resists society’s
interpellation. And, as Barbara Bellow Watson contends, women’s literature enacts the
abstract politics of womanhood through highly specified characters, contexts, and
meanings (112). The writers considered here do not consciously set out to re-irnagine
womanhood, but in carving out space for alternative subjectivities, they are rewriting the
social scripts allotted to women.

My purpose then is to examine the ways women from a variety of backgrounds
construct their subjectivity in their coming of age narratives. Following a theoretical
thread on the nature of subjectivity beginning with Hegel and Marx, and continuing
flrroughthefeministpoststructuralistrevisionsofl‘eredby critics suchasChris Weedon
and Patricia Waugh, I argue that the texts of women’s coming of age narratives contest the
tenacious hold of the liberal hrunanist notion of self on Western notions of subjectivity.

Irnplicitly and explicitly, these texts assert that the self does not exist outside of language,

16

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historical context or culture, and they echo Simone de Beauvoir’s assertion that women
are made, not born (301 ).‘ 3 Yet, coming ofage narratives also assert the embodiedness of
identity, often through an apparently unconscious search for bodily knowledge. The
physiological changes of female puberty seem to work against the cultural pressure to
ignore the body, resulting in a notable bodily presence in the narratives I examine here. A
woman’s understanding ofher identity and how she came to be the person she is, as
related in these narratives, generally resists socially determined roles and life trajectories,
if sometimes in less than forthright ways. This is in marked contrast to women’s writing
of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the hegemony exerted great pressure on
girls who longed to “jump at the sun,” in Zora Neale Hm'ston’s phrase (Dust 21), to
come back into line and fulfill their womanly destiny as defined by social and cultural
norms.“ Further, the texts 1 consider here refuse the overdetermined subjectivity
suggested by Louis Althusser’s theory of interpellation by ideological state apparatuses
(ISAs) as well as later poststructuralist assertions that pronounced the “death of the
author.” Considered as a body of texts, twentieth-century women’s narratives argue that
it does indeed matter who wrote the life being examined and that the writer’s agency is a
given while simultaneously acknowledging that gender and other subject positions are
socially constructed. This view is no less ideological than the one that burdened previous
generations of women writers, but it does modify the strict opposition of individual
agency and constructed identity, a significant move toward the self-determination called
for by the women’s movement, in both the first and second waves. American women’s
coming of age narratives demonstrate the complexity and infinite diversity of American
women’s lives; once we read them, we realize it is nearly impossible to essentialize

women as long as their stories are told—and heard.

17

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Furthermore, these texts evince a complex subjectivity which cannot ultimately be
reduced to archetypes or to a single philosophical stance. The liberal humanist paradigm
of human nature retains a tight grip on Western culture, if these texts are any indication,
because most reflect the cultural imperative to fix subjectivity and produce non-
contradictory narratives of selflrood. While race and sex theoretically should not figure in
the liberal notion of human ‘essence,’ in practice these discourses and others do indeed
work to fix subjectivity. Some autobiographies will inadvertently encourage a reader to
interpret the subject’s identity through a single lens, resulting in, for example, Elizabeth
Wurtzel’s subjectivity seeming to originate in her clinical depression in Prozac Nation
(1994); likewise, Richard Wright’s Black Boy seems to suggest that his subjectivity is
determined by race. The implications of their titles aside, Wurtzel and Wright both
actively resist their interpellations as, respectively, a “depressive” and a “black boy” with
all the cultural baggage those terms imply. Both seek to deepen their subjectivity through
assertions of intelligence and multiple subject positions beyond the ones suggested by
their titles. However, adolescence—coming of age— is by definition a time when identity
is fluid and contradictory, and thus provides solid evidence for the notion of constructed
subjectivity. And, as I argue in detail later, while there is the appearance of fixed
subjectivity in the texts, readers, as well as the autobiographers themselves, deconstruct
and reconstruct the subject in light of what Norman Holland calls their own “identity
theme” (815). Thus, while there might be a sense of coherent subjectivity on the part of
the autobiographer at the time of writing, readers reinterpret the text in light of the
immediate cultural context in which they read, creating additional opportrmities for

subversive or alternate meanings.

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Although philosophy and the social sciences can provide literary analysis with
useful insights, it is difficult to use social theory unproblematically to analyze women’s
coming of age narratives since it tends to describe human development in prototypes and
universals that invariably reflect normative male development. But even for male
development, psychology theory makes broad assumptions about class, race, and
ethnicity, which results in partial insights and a great many caveats. Nonetheless, I will
make limited use of psychological theory in the coming chapters to pinpoint the
discursive practices that create the boundaries and teleologies of coming of age in a
particular time and place. In part, my analysis is modeled on the aims of contemporary
anthropology, which is to say that my intent is to describe the specificity of cultural
experience through the examination of coming of age narratives. These texts are what
Clifford Geertz defines as “first-order” interpretations—the creator of the text is playing
the part of the “native” in cultural anthropology, and in that role, she lays claim to being
the primary and privileged interpreter of her experience. But it is important to emphasize
the writer’s role in narrating her own life as an interpretive one; even she has no direct
accesstothe“uuth.”Asaliterarycritic,then,Iamherecreatingsecondoreventhird
order interpretations (15). Applying Geertz’s framework of ethnography to the study of
the coming of age narrative encourages a healthy, respectful stance to the exercise and,
most important, privileges the interpretation of experience rendered by the
autobiographer. While I will offer an analysis of subject construction in a number of
texts, I will attempt to do so from an “actor-orientation” in order to understand—and
interpret—the social, political and historical forces which help the narrator to construct
her identity and subjectivity in particular ways. Geertz points out that this is ultimately
an unattainable goal, but a necessary foundation for doing ethical and informed

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ethnography—and by extension, interpreting narratives of real peoples’ lives. Mindful of
Rabinow’s critique of Geertz’s removal of himself as subject in his ethnographic writings,
I have provided what I hope is a sufiicient sense of the “identity theme” that I bring to
my readings of mese narratives. I choose them (or they chose me) because, in one way or
another, each reflects some aspect of my own experience, so in attempting to make sense
ofthemeaningofthetexts, l amalsocreating meaning ofmy own experiences.”

Having defined a distinct genre of American women’s literature that I call the
coming of age narrative, I will explore the implications of my argument in the context of
the current debate on identity politics in the academy. As Linda Martin Alcoff notes,
“[t]he constitutive power of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and other forms of identity
has, finally, suddenly, been recognized as a relevant aspect of almost all projects of
inquiry,” and thus, the fact that the narratives I have discussed here provide evidence of
the social construction of subjectivity is hardly a radical assertion at this historical
moment. But I want to argue that, for women writers, the coming of age narrative
constitutesanaltemative literary formthatallowsthewritertoclaim agency inthe
construction of her identity, while also acknowledging the role of social discourses in
determining subjectivity. Because these texts ofien deny the distinction between fiction
and fact as key to the truth value of a text, the coming of age narrative is a genre that
resists discourses that fail to describe the writer’s knowledge and experience by
subverting the ideological premises of traditional literary genres. In other words, the
conventional plots, characters, themes, and ideological bases of fiction and autobiography
are revised or erased in the coming of age narrative, which allows the writer to inscribe an
alternative subjectivity and reclaim agency in defining herself. The writer’s self-definition

arises from direct experience in the world as well as fi'om the discursive formations

20

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specific to her historic location, and these narratives strongly affirm the role of experience
in identity-formation. Arguing against the notion that experience is a direct source of
truth, the coming of age narrative demonstrates the ways in which the meaning of
experience is mediated, not only by ideology, but also by other experience. Identity is
thus conceived of as cumulative, with each experience mediated by everything that has
come before, and subject later to reinterpretation in light of new experiences.

Furthermore, while I have carefirlly avoided making generalizations about
women’s lives irrmyrcadingsofthesetexts, by locatingthecomingofagenarrative in
texts across race, class, and time, I implicitly suggest that commonalities do exist. More
specifically, the central ideological assumption of the coming of age narrative is that
identity is created in the context of human relationships. All acknowledge the power and
pressure ofsocial norms, but the specific norms vary according to the writer’s historical
and cultural location. There is, therefore, no monolithic femininity invoked in the coming
of age narrative, but rather, many versions of femininity, which are highly specified
within racial, class, and ethnic discom'ses. Often, too, a girl coming of age will have to
contend with the discourses of womanhood as it is defined within her community, as well
the definitions imposed fi'om outside. What remains, then, when all the historically and
socially specific factors eliminate the possibility of essentializing what it means to
become a woman in America, is a self that, like other selves, “you find through love and
through your relations with family and finds” (Culler l 15).

The credit for this view of subjectivity and identity-formation belongs to feminist
theorists such as Carol Gilligan and Nancy Chodorow, who have been subject to much
criticism in recent years for purportedly essentializing women, but whose description of

female development has not only evolved into the master narrative of womanhood—it has

21

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gained widespread cunency across the gender divide as well. Before feminists described
the ways in which women construct identity, the master narrative of American identity
held that the individual is autonomous and that identity is inherent within each person;
the world of relationships and ideas was irrelevant to the nature of the true self.
lrnpereeptibly, however, the master narrative has radically shifted to valorizing the self-
in-relation to such a degree that it has become hegemonic. Women continue to be held
accountable for their ability to nurture relationships, and if a woman does not define
herself in terms of her relationships (wife, mother, daughter, fi'iend), she runs the risk of
being an “unnatural” woman (or worse). Increasing, however, public discourse is
acknowledging the centrality of relationships for American men as well. But while
American culture passed through spasms of backlash against the “feminization” of
selflrood, through comic jabs at the “sensitive” male who is in touch with his feminine
side, and through the attempts of some feminists to divest themselves of any vestiges of
traditional signs of femininity, the discourse has changed. In her 1999 study of American
men, Susan Faludiarguesthatthegrandnarratives ofAmerican manhoodevincedan
opposition between

the vision of the man who stood apart from society and the man who was
a part of society; the loner was not the ideal. The ‘Indian Fightcr’ was

~ ultimately a homesteader. Daniel Boone was not simply a tale of a
frontiersman taming the world with his rifle and his knife. Essential to the
myth of his journey into the wilderness was his retum from it to retrieve
his family and establish a new community. (10).

Unable to live according to the myth that has been handed down to them, American men
are, according to Faludi, deeply alienated and disillusioned. The myth has worked to

isolate men from the people most likely to care for and about them while simultaneously
encouraging them to devote their “true” selves to the public world of work. Yet men who

22

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have given the best of who they are to faceless corporate entities too often find that their
loyalty is not returned. Having thus neglected self-in-relation in favor of self—in-isolation,
many American men feel, as Faludi puts it, stiffed.

Related to the recognition that men have been as alienated as women by the myths
of the autonomous individual is a trend in popular psychology that is concerned with the
nurturance of boys in American culture. In his 1999 book, Raising Cain, Daniel J.
Kindlon argues that boys are harmed by the cultural perception that their primary
developmental ml: is to separate from relationship and establish themselves as
independent, self-sufficient individuals. As a result, boys are emotionally conflicted
because, according to Kindlon, a great need for connection clashes with a boy’s
recognition that he is expected to sever his dependence on relationships (3)."5 The current
assumption about manhood is that, to be healthy, it must be nurtured through a variety of
relationships, including those with women, beginning with the mother. Though I do not
argue that this account constitutes a universal narrative on manhood, it has gained cultural
capital in the past twenty years, and there is little public debate about its merits.
Counter-hegemonic discourse on identity formation has thus become hegemonic, and
evidence for its dominance can be found in the fact that many male coming of age
narratives written in the latter part of the twentieth centm'y thematize the self as
constructed in relationship.

But in an article for The Nation, Patrick Smith critiques what he considers the
excesses of contemporary memoirs, calling the worst of them “intellectual frauds” for
valorizing the private realm at the expense of what he considers the much more valuable
public realm. Smith produces only women’s texts as examples of memoirs that

“privatize” history and “refus[e] the challenge of unburying the past as it really was,” and

23

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thus he reproduces the ancient critiques of women’s literature. In other words, Smith
argues that by articulating the private realm, women writers do “violence” to history. But
Smith praises Angela 19 Ashes and other (mostly male) texts for their “dedication to public
discourse. . . or to some object or event outside the self. . . .The power of [Angela ’s
Ashes] lies in its account of an emerging consciousness— a universal experience that is
rarely articulated well.” The traditional critiques of women’s texts are, in other words,
alive and well, even in ostensibly left-wing periodicals. Smith’s definition of the correct
purpose of autobiography as that of articulating the “emerging consciousness” within
public discourse is limited and limiting in its notion of what constitutes consciousness,
and it is resisted in both male and female coming ofage narratives. To suggest that
consciousness is significant only in the context of public discourse is to deny the
constitutive element of the vastly more influential private world of relationship. The
world of the child and adolescent is almost by definition private, and it is during this time
that most individuals consolidate and define the major elements of their identities. In
other words, to recast the example that Smith finds exemplary, Angela 19 Ashes follows
the emerging consciousness of a boy within the context of the domestic sphere of family
relations, and gradually widens the scope of that consciousness as McCourt enters the
adult world. Indeed, the very title of McCourt’s text—referring to his mother—is
suggestive of the critical determining influence of human connection upon identity
construction.

In my view, the problem lies in the fact that the canonically exemplary coming of
age narrative of the socially isolated and alienated individual is rarely successfirl. Huck
Finn’scomingofageisarrestedbecause finally heisunabletoreconstitutethe selfin light
of his experiences. At the end of the narrative, Jim has joined his family, and Huck is left

24

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standing on the margins of society, attempting to persuade himself that a solitary life in
the territories is preferable to the comforts and supports of human company. And
Holden Caulfield, that other archetypal American literary male, has a mental breakdown
because the prospect of being emotionally self-sufficient is simply too painful—the
expectation that he do so creates an untenable inner conflict. The autonomous individual
is profoundly alone and lonely. In contrast, women, who have long labored under the
expectation that they must cultivate relationships to the exclusion of all else have created
a rite ofpassage in the coming ofage narrative that refuses the binary opposition and
recognizes the multivalent desires of the individual—for relationship and for agency.

In order to contextualize my argument, in the next chapter I provide a brief
overview of the history of the women’s movement in American culture, particularly in
the academy, foregrounding the philosophical disagreements that have deepened and
complicated feminist ideology in the academy and in the larger society. In my view, the
core issue at the heart of all feminist scholarship and activism is the struggle over female
subjectivity, and so I have situated my analysis in the historical concerns of the women’s
movement over the past three centuries. Women’s political activism has been deeply
informed by and responsive to the Enlightenment ideal of selflrood, and consequently,
autobiographical texts by women political activists, artists, and scholars have contributed
significantly to dismantling that ideal.

In the third clnpter, I examine the evolution of adolescence as a concept in
American culture generally, and in American literature specifically. Only recognized as a
distinct phase of development in fire last century, adolescence and its specific features are
now the focus of greatly detailed study in certain fields, most notably in psychology.

Until very recently, most such studies have used male models as the norm and as a result,

25

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their findings are ofien of limited use in understanding female development. I also review
an andrmpological perspective of adolescence, beginning with Margaret Mead’s
influential study of Samoan culture. Although her work has become highly controversial,
I borrow fi'om her methods (albeit lightly) and that of more recent anthmpological theory
to widen the lens in my analysis of literary texts. Finally, I explore the idea of “coming of
age” as it occurs in literature begirming with the Bildungsroman, and the ways in which
women writers have altered the traditional genre to reflect diverse patterns of
development. The aims of Bildungsraman and autobiography converge in the latter part
of the twentieth century, resulting in blurred genre distinctions and a radically revised
narrative structure. Ioffermy views ofwhat coming ofage means,and arguethatthe
proliferation of its treatment in American letters provides a usefirl indicator of the
changing conceptions of identity.

Next, I turn to Annie Dillard’s 1987 An American Chilcfirood and Anne Moody’s
1968 Coming of Age in Mississippi. While these texts are radically different in form and
content, their authors from opposite ends of the social spectrum in terms of privilege and
social standing,Ihave chosentodiscussthem intandem tohighlighthowthose
differences function in an autobiographical text and indeed might serve to determine its
form. As Sidonie Smith has written, Dillard’s very title seems to invoke a universal
subjectivity with the modifier “American” attached to another general category,
“childhood” (131). Dillard makes a seemingly transparent assumption that she is
describing a universal version of childhood, an observation borne out in the text by
numerous references to what “any” child feels or experiences, but also contradicted by a
richly specific textual self. Following Smith’s observation, I argue then that, in contrast,
Moody’s title invokes a highly specified subjectivity, placing her text/life story in a

26

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particular locale, and thus creating specific expectations in the reader. Unlike Dillard, who
writes that she “slid into [herself] perfectly fitted” (l l), Moody slides into herself and
finds the fit tmcomfortable and ill-sized. The pain and conflict that accompany her
attempts to create an identity she is comfortable with are never fully resolved in her text,
andsheremainsanunfinishedsubjecttoagreaterdegreedran is evidentintraditional
autobiographies. Indeed,thecomingofagenarrative isdistinguishedinpartbya
provisional subjectivity forged in ideological conflicts and subject to change as a direct
result of subsequent experiences.

Chapter 4 considers the problem of genre boundaries and truth in autobiography
in my discussion of Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (I 955) and two
texts by Zora Neale Hurston: Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and Dust Tracks on
a Road (1942). McCarthy answers anticipated questions about the reliability of memory
through the use of italicized passages in which she deconstructs her narrative, and
explicitly admits to using the conventions of fiction to fill in the gaps. In contrast,
Hurston’s autobiography is, according to Robert Hemenway, full of unacknowledged lies,
while Their Eyes Were Watching God is widely understood to be an “autobiographical”
novel that is revealing of aspects of Hmston’s life about which she remained silent in
Dust Tracks. These texts raise complex questions about the writer’s obligation to be
truthful, and the complementary problem of how, as readers, we ought to address the
unavoidable gaps and silences (in Macherey’s terms) of any autobiography.

In Chapter 6, I discuss the conflicts and issues surrounding the hybridization of
identities—national, ethnic, religious— that are the hallmark of many immigrant coming of
age autobiographies. The tension and confusion that accompany a child’s negotiation of

her parents’ identity with an “American” identity results in a particular and specific

27

 

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journey through adolescence that differs substantially fiom that of a child whose parents’
national/ethnic identity is not in flux. The autobiographical text of a first-generation
American girl is deeply informed by the conflicts between two cultures in addition to the
contradictions already inherent in a single culture. In addition to the usual host of identity
issues that beset a girl as she comes of age, she must also negotiate the difficult terrain of
ethnic subjectivity. Textual representations of these issues are as varied as the number of
combinations of cultures possible, and while I do not suggest that the texts I have chosen
for this discussion are necessarily representative of all such autobiographies, they do
illustrate the specific difficulties of identity formation in the context of major cultural
differences. Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1975) begins with her
mother saying, “You must not tell anyone what I am about to tell you,” thus setting the
stage for Kingston’s diflicult lessons in the secrecy and silence surrounding women’s lives
that is typical of Chinese culture in opposition to the relative openness of American
culture. Kingston’s text juxtaposes myth and realistic narrative as a formal device that
highlights the conflicting discourses and ideologies she negotiates in the process of
constructing a workable identity. Kate Simon’s 1982 Bronx Primitive also exhibits the
tensions inherent in immigrant subjectivity, but where Kingston is sometimes paralyzed
by the conflicts between Chinese and American norms, Simon quickly learns to take
advantage of the contradictions in order to do as she pleases, even though she is initially
confused by the contradictory messages of her parents and the wider society. As she
grows older, she flatly rejects much of the Old World interpellation of Jewish female
subjectivity offered by her parents. Furthermore, Bronx Primitive provides a reasonably
explicit model of Williams’ model of imagining agency, and the ways in which naming the

contradictions in ideology allows for resistance to the norm.

28

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Arguing that the construction of identity varies according to the particular
historical moment of the events narrated (but perhaps more importantly, the moment of
writing), I interrogate the construction of female identity in the coming of age narrative.
The institutions, practices, and prevailing hegemony at the time of writing exert certain
limits on what the writer can and cannot say, and on what discourses of womanhood will
be tolerated. While I would not argue that the decisions a girl makes in adolescence will
determine the woman she will become in any permanent sense, the process of coming of
age does involve examining one’s choices and deciding—consciously or not—what
direction one’s life will take. Alternatively, she might watch in dismay as her horizons
shrink, her choices become limited, and her life is seemingly mapped out for her.
Nonetheless, it is in adolescence that she learns, sometimes forcefully, exactly what forms
of subjectivity and narratives are available to her and which forms will cause her to be
marginalized. Of course, assenting to one of the socially sanctioned subjectivities
available to her will still not guarantee social acceptance. If Anne Moody had accepted
the hegemonic view of black womanhood, for example, it would have resulted in her
personal safety but not widespread social approval and acceptance. It is in adolescence
that the child becomes mother to the woman.

Throughout the study, I’m making a primarily positive argument about the
apparent increase in a woman’s range of acceptable subjectivities, and their ability to
resist social “limits and pressures” to create new discourses of womanhood. I do not
deny the genuine pain and conflict that are the consequences of rejecting received notions

of womanhood, but ultimately, this dynamic makes alternative forms of subjectivity

possible—even necessary.

29

 

Fe

A PfinCipal s
m Bu ironicall

5o. ‘ -
.mm m 13 m”). \

Feminism, Autobiography, and
Theories of the Subject

[Ojne is not born, but rather becomes, a
woman. No biological, psychological, or
economic fate determines the figure that the
human female presents in society; it is
civilization as a whole that produces this
creature
Simone de Beauvoir
The Second Sex

A principal goal of the feminist movement has been to honor and detail the
specificity of women’s experience, by making women’s individual voices and stories
heard. But ironically, this same movement often acted to suppress differences among
women in its early years. In her 1997 memoir, Rita Will, novelist Rita Mae Brown
recounts the banishment she endured at the hands of Betty Friedan and other white
middle-class NOW members, who “just about tore their Pucci dresses jamming the door
to get out” after Brown proclaimed her love for women at a 1969 meeting (228). Dubbed
the “lavender menace” by Friedan, Brown and other lesbian activists sought other, more
inclusive venues for their work (235). Historically, argues bell books, “the racial
apartheid social structure” has been reflected in every American women’s movement
(124). The nascent feminist movement attempted to replace the American master
narrative of womanhood with another, equally monolithic, but feminist paradigm, thus
tacitly acknowledging the rhetorical power of narratives to construct subjectivity. But

the early feminist narrative of universal womanhood, although it provided a counter-point
30

 

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to the universal male paradigm, effectively silenced women whose experiences diverged
from mat of white middle-class women. As Jonathan Culler argues, narrative has the
ethical function of giving us access to points of view far removed from our own—no
matter what subject positions we hold. Through a variety of narrative devices, we are
better able to understand what motivates behavior that might otherwise be unintelligible
to us (Culler 93). American feminism has accepted the challenge—indeed, the ethical
imperative—to value the power attendant to the recognition that women differ in
experience. In the final analysis, the lack of a master narrative of womanhood (or
manhood or any other subject position) is liberatory for all concerned. Fm'thermore,
recenttheorysuggeststhatnarrativepointofview isacritical factorinarticulatingthe
contours of ideology. Du Plessis, for instance, argues that cultural products such as
narrative serve to reinforce gendered discourse and ideology, and that, for instance, “the
romance plot in narrative thus may be seen as a necessary extension of the processes of
gendering” (38). Culler also reminds us that stories serve to “police” on behalf of
hegemonic discourses: “Novels in the Western tradition show how aspirations are tamed
and desires adjusted to social reality” (93). The trope of dashed dreams is conventional in
the literature of marginalized groups, but Culler suggests that the entire Western tradition,
which is by and large that of white males, thematizes the necessity of relinquishing ways
of being not sanctioned by dominant discourse. In other words, Culler implies that all
members of society are channeled into the dominant structm'es—ofien unwillingly— even
if some groups or individuals benefit from the system more than others. As Althusser
argues, we are all trapped and implicated in ideology (“For Marx” 23 5). Nonetheless, the
power of narrative to shift paradigms has been an important catalyst of change for the

second wave women’s movement. Stories told in public over many years have resulted in

31

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a massive cultural shift in point of view about the experiences of womanhood as well as
the widespread disillusionment of women across class, race, and ethnic lines.

Reflecting on the impact of the second wave feminist movement and the discipline
of Women’s Studies in the year 2000, approximately thirty years after its beginnings, is
at once a satisfying and monumental task. Pinpointing the moment when Women’s
Studies courses appeared in American colleges is not difficult, but tracing the movement
of history that gave rise to the discipline is a complex and circuitous task If we need
proofthat history is not a linear narrative, then we need look no firrther than to the
ascendance of Women’s Studies as a formal academic discipline. The story is a familiar
one to feminist academics by now: the key players and the social movements of the
l960sthatcreatedflrecriticalmassnecessarytoforcetheacademytomake space for(if
not actually encourage) the serious academic study of women has taken on a mythic
significance (at least for those whose lives it changed). But the narrative begins long
before the 1960s, and it is this story that Women’s Studies has largely succeeded in
recovering. Women’s Studies has its own pantheon of theoretical giants, a respectable
history, many disagreements (only a genuine discipline could possibly be the site of such
passionate scholarly debate), and legendary figures to whom we pay homage, even as we
move beyond their achievements. What I hope to impart here is a sense of the
revolutionary impact of Women’s Studies on knowledge across the disciplines and to
trace significant sources of this massive paradigm shift. The formal study of women and
the primary assertion of feminists—that the experience of men cannot be assumed as the
norm for women—has shifted the way in which medical studies are carried out, literature
is read, politics is defined, society is described, and history is written. But in my view,
the journey of female adolescence remains undertheorized, still shaped by male

32

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paradigms. Among other claims, my study suggests that, in the coming of age narrative,
the female narrative paradigm has inflected and changed the way in which male writers
now construct narrative identity. But more critically, the American woman’s coming of
age narrative details the cultural work of women who, although they were generally not on
the fi’ontlines of the feminist revolution, nonetheless carried out the real work of social

change at the individual and community level.

FM and the Um of A utobiograplry
In her 1995 essay, “Making History: Reflections on Feminism, Narrative and
Desire, ” Susan Stanford Friedman writes:

As a heuristic activity, history writing orders the past in relation to the
needs ofthe present and future. The narrative act ofassigning meaning
to the past potentially intervenes in the present and future construction
of history. For feminists, this means that the writing of the history of
feminism functions as an act in the present that can (depending on its
influence) contribute to the shape of feminisrn’s future. (13)

My study specifically examines the attempts of individual American women writers “to
order the past in relation to the needs of the present and future,” but I also write from the
perspective that scholarly work by and about women must be preserved as an institu-
tionally protected endeavor. Although I argue that the feminist movement has
significantly and permanently altered the American social and political landscape, the
discipline of Women’s Studies is still far from safely ensconced in academia; with a
changed set of circumstances, the problems and possibilities facing Women’s Studies
today have shifted from those of the early days of the discipline. Friedman further argues
that we must recognize that feminist histories are not “exempt fi'om the politics of

historiography [or, one might add, hagiograpby]. Feminism too has its ‘winners’ and

33

 

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‘losers,’ its stratifications and contested terrains” (20). With that caveat in mind, I shall
attempt to sketch a brief history that recognizes the multivocal character of American
feminism, and to keep firmly in the foreground the notion that there is a hegemony in
feminist thought and studies. It is important for feminist scholars to continue to respect
the principle of resistance that won academic validation in the first place.

Perhaps the most urgent need for the present and future of feminist studies is the
need to remember the past—the struggles, the backslides, the theorists of previous
generations. Sometime in the 1980s, many Americans felt that women’s liberation had
been achieved (even though the Equal Rights Amendment failed to be ratified), and that
there was no longer a need for feminism. The battle had been won, and it was time for
people to get back to their lives. But that complacency has historical precedents: after
women finally won the vote in 1920, the same attitude prevailed to such a degree that
women’s lives were once again constricted and limited by social pressure. They could
vote, but their potential as full human beings continued to be severely limited. The battle
was not won, and the war had barely begun. The fact that women have been arguing for
their emancipation for centuries and that there have been numerous reversals in the
journey should alert us to the dangers of becoming complacent about the gains made thus
far. We retell the narratives of women’s struggles to avoid firture repetitions of those
notorious episodes in history, and we retell the stories of women’s lives in order to
remember where we have been. In this spirit, then, I briefly recount our origin “myths.”

In 1776, as the founding fathers gathered to write the declaration which would
throw off the shackles of England, Abigail Adams wrote to her husband John, entreating
him to “remember the ladies” in the document be was helping to write. Noting that the
revolutionaries were most particularly incensed because they were being held to laws in

34

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to include women
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which they had no representation, Abigail warned John that if he and his colleagues forgot
to include women in their blueprint of democracy, the “ladies. . . are determined to foment
a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice, or
Representation.” But John and the rest determined rather easily, in spite of their noble
call for a truly representative form of government, that only men of property and
education were sufficiently “acquainted with public affairs to form a right judgment.”
And so, dismissed as a “saucy” girl, Abigail saw her serious request go mheeded.‘

An organized American feminist movement began to take shape in earnest in the
nineteenth century, and the “woman question” was debated in the press, the pulpit, the
parlor, and the government. Many historians of the women’s movement assert that the
drive for women’s rights grew out of the abolitionist movement; many middle class white
women were active in the fight to abolish slavery, and as they argued for the right of black
people to own property, to vote, to be educated—that is, to enjoy full citizenship—they
could not help but notice that they too lacked the rights of full citizenship. Furthermore,
women abolitionists had to fight to be allowed to join abolitionist organizations and even
to speak in public. Sarah and Angelina Grimké, sisters who spoke out against slavery,
were attacked by ministers and in the press, not for their stand on slavery but for the
outrageous act of stepping out of the prescribed place of women by speaking in public.2
The Grimké sisters, among many others, realized that the emancipation of slaves and of
women were closely related issues, and they began to speak about both. However, male
abolitionists worried that combining the two issues would result in weakening the drive
for the abolition of slavery, so the “woman question” was often treated as a separate
issue, or ignored altogether.

35

 

Nineteenll
rind to women
men as it manifest
rights and more
Lotion where the
he proceedings, tl'
mated with so.

aslsion of norm

Nineteenth-century feminists concerned themselves with a whole range of issues
related to women’s lives. They questioned the assumption of the natural superiority of
men as it manifested itself in social institutions such as marriage, in politics, and in
religious and moral dogma. In 1840, a World Anti-Slavery Convention was held in
London where the women members of the American delegation were greeted with a storm
of protest and anger by participants. Consigned to the galleries and prohibited a voice in
the proceedings, these women were appalled and outraged that even male radicals greatly
concerned with social inequities showed no consciousness of the paradox inherent in their
exclusion of women.’ Two women present for that conference, Lucretia Mott and
Elizabeth Cady Stanton vowed to hold a women’s rights convention upon their return to
America in order to enlighten the allegedly radical men. Eight years later, the Women’s
Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, New York, wrote and approved a “Declaration of
Sentiments” modeled on and echoing the Declaration of Independence.“ That document is
surprisingly vivid even today, asserting as it does the “injuries and usurpations on the
part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute
tyranny over her.” The list of injuries and usurpations includes the civil “death” of the
married woman; the male monopoly on paid employment; the exclusion from full
participation in religion, medicine, and law; different moral codes for women and men;
and the destruction of women’s self-respect and powers. The Declaration of Sentiments
resolved that women must secure the right to vote, although it was included only after
lengthy debate. Stanton and Frederick Douglass argued that the power to choose rulers
and to make laws would enable feminists to achieve all the other rights they sought, and
thus convinced a majority of the members that it should be included.’ The focus on the

right to vote is the legacy of that phase of the feminist movement, but it is important to

36

member thin lh
Wmcn’s HV'CS. i

then the
'23: although An-
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remember that the movement has always been concerned with the entire spectrum of
women’s lives. It was never just about getting the vote.

When the Civil War broke out in 1861 , women’s movement activities came to a
halt although Anthony and Stanton continued to argue that a war for fiecdom must
include that of women. The debate was re-awakened after the war when the proposed
14th amendment to the Constitution, granting full citizenship to the former slaves,
included the word “male.”‘ Opponents did not wish to complicate passage of the
ammdmcnt by including the rights of women, and women’s rights advocates were urged
to step aside in favor of male Negroes. A similar battle took place over the 15th
amendment to the Constitution, which would prohibit the denial of suffiage based on
race. Women’s advocates attempted to have the word “sex” included, but without
success. As a result of these failed attempts, the drive for women’s suffrage became the
primary issue for the women’s movement. Most agreed on the importance of winning
the vote, but there was significant disagreement about how to go about achieving it. Two
factions developed in the late 1860s, with Stanton and Susan B. Anthony’s National
Women’s Suffrage Association advocating for a broad range of women’s rights and a
federal mandate allowing women the vote as the means to achieve those rights.’ Lucy
Stone headed a group called the American Woman Suffrage Association which limited
itself to activities aimed toward gaining the vote on a state-by-state basis, preferring not
to address issues such as marriage which were seen as more controversial.‘ These two
organizations remained separate until 1890, but used many of the same approaches to
their causes: lobbying, petitioning, and lecturing.’

By the time the two major women’s suffiage organizations merged, the women’s

movement had essentially become a single-issue cause. Founders of the movement like

37

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movement's new, yo
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Tm'abb dafllage

The Sufl‘mg

Stanton and Anthony remained committed to a wide-range of women’s issues, while the
movement’s new, younger leadership telescoped their interests to focus on the vote.
Stanton turned her attention to another long-standing interest—the role organized religion
(primarily Christianity) played in the subjugation of women. In 1895, Stanton and a
group of women published The Woman ’3 Bible, a feminist critique of the images of
women in the Bible.‘0 This work was so radical that even the Suffiage Association
publicly distanced themselves from Stanton, fearing the drive for sumage would be
irreparably damaged by association.”

The Suffi'age Association continued to make minor progress in a state by state
drive to win the vote until Alice Paul formed the radical Congressional Union in 1913,
whose only goal was a federal woman’s suffrage amendment, and which was willing to
use any means necessary, including upstaging President “Wilson’s inauguration. '2 Not all
women approved of Alice Paul’s tactics, but she and her group are credited with finally
creating enough pressure to get the amendment ratified in 1920, almost 75 years after
Seneca Falls. And after winning the vote, many activists, not to mention the American
public, thought their work was done, and equality had been achieved. Perhaps from sheer
exhaustion or perhaps in the belief that the vote would help to create equity under the
law, feminists neglected the myriad other issues involved with women’s rights, and the
movement languished until the 19605.

It would be wrong to put the blame entirely on the early women’s movement for
not following through. Indeed, progress for women seemed steady in some ways, as
clothing became less restrictive and women’s freedom of movement, both physical and
psychological, increased." A lengthy economic depression and a world war certainly
intervened in ways both positive and negative." A dearth of jobs for everyone meant that

38

 

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men were given jobs first—after all, they had families to provide for. But women needed
to provide too, in ways they hadn’t since the nineteenth century, perhaps by growing
gardens and canning, perhaps by doing others’ housework for the first time." The Second
World War provided new opportunities for employment and freedom for women as they
took over the jobs left behind by servicemen, only to be sent home afterward to their
“real” place in the home.“ And while the American woman went where she was told to
go when the men came home, there must have been a seething, subterranean swell of
discontent through the late 1940s and 1950s, for the 19605 spilled over with women’s
anger. Betty Friedan’s 1963 treatise, The Feminine Mystique, described and articulated
the nature of this unease for the American public, and a movement was reborn.

But this truncated mythology is unsatisfactory, not only because of its
abbreviated form, but also because this is, in fact, the “winners” history of feminism.
More to the point, it is the middle-class white woman ’3 version of feminist history.
Feminists’ interest in abolition, for instance, is told from the abolitionists ’ position, rarely
from the black subject position. Most minority and working-class women did not have
the luxury of returning to home and hearth after World War II ended." The story of
women’s progress told in the linear fashion of the familiar narrative is ultimately
unsatisfactory because it fails to take into account the enormous diversity of women’s
experience with the lack of rights. Abigail Adams’ life was very different fi'om Sojourner
Truth’s, and yet both were in the same position—“civilly dead,” to use the language of
Seneca Falls. And, alongside the activities of the white women whose work on behalf of
women’s rights forms the master narrative of feminism, women such as Ida B. Wells and
Mary Church Terrell were equally active in working to improve the lives of black

women.‘ ' Betty Friedan’s description of the “problem with no name” was not, as many

39

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pretended at the time, the problem of all women everywhere; it was the problem of
college-educated white housewives. As American feminism has evolved, this critique,
coming primarily from working-class women and women of color, has been largely
responsible for the continuing vitality of the women’s movement. The need to
Imderstand and account for the experience of women in all of its specificity and
complexity created a need to study women, not simply to advocate for women’s rights.
And it resulted in a proliferation of women’s narratives, authorized and privileged by the
burgeoning discipline of Women’s Studies. In order to understand how women’s
narratives—and coming of age texts in particular—have become a hegemonic form of
autobiography, I need to review the ideological premises and struggles of the women’s
movement in general, and Women’s Studies in particular.

As the ‘academic arm’ of women’s liberation, Women’s Studies was born of the
social and political movements of the 19605—ch rights and black liberation once again
became the midwife for women’s rights activism—and of the generally favorable climate
in higher education.’ 9 The GI Bill provided access to education for many World War II
veterans who would have been tmable to afford such an elite luxury before. The
university was gradually being transformed into an institution for the masses, and its
curricula began to reflect the changing demographics of the student population. Black and
working class students insisted on scholarly attention to their experience as they began to
take their places in the classroom, on both sides of the lectern. In the same spirit, women
insisted that half of humanity’s experience needed to be studied, examined and theorized.
And today, while Women’s Studies must continue to rationalize its existence and
credibility, there is enough vitality and interest to keep it alive. Far from being an

exhausted subject, the study of women continues to present new questions, problems,

40

 

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and avenues of inquiry.20 It is easy for hegemony to develop in any discipline as certain
threads seem to subsume others, and Women’s Studies has not been exempt from this
tendency. What redeems Women’s Studies to a great extent is its willingness to examine
what is left out. Feminist studies has been more responsive to critique than many
traditional disciplines, perhaps because it is still a young discipline and thus feels a greater
need to justify its existence. But continual self-examination and critique have also kept

the discipline from stagnating.

Theoretical Foundations

Because a linear myth of American women’s history is no longer sufficient, I must
now depart from the coherent “master” narrative of American feminism to examine a
select number of theoretical foundations as well as the wide variety of concerns that
Women’s Studies addresses, and to show the profound impact that feminist research has
had on American drought and culture as it relates to the proliferation of women’s life
narratives. The formal study of women finds its origins in the concerns raised by women
like Abigail Adams, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Margaret Fuller. These women and many
others have questioned the logic which kept women in a subservient position to men, and
since logical argument alone did not prove persuasive enough to bring about equity, the
next step became to formalize the logic through empirical and social studies.

Simone de Beauvoir’s massive 1948 treatise, The Second Sex, is encyclopedic in
its coverage of women’s lives, and sets the ideological agenda for Women’s Studies. Its
most famous assertion, that gender is a social construct, can be said to articulate a kind of
ground zero assumption on which feminist research in any area continues to stand. Even

the highly publicized critiques of Women’s Studies by feminist scholars seem to take for

41

 

 

 

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granted that womanhood is a social construction, disagreeing only about the most
effective means of achieving social justice for women.” Disagreements arise then over the
significance of particular constructions or whether intentional malice is involved, and over
the degree to which an ideological formation has caused harm. But among academic
feminists, critics and advocates, the notion of socially constructed gender roles is
hegemonic. It is fair to say that the vast majority of feminist scholarship and research has
been undertaken to find incontrovertible proof that woman is made and not born. It is
difficult to underestimate the impw this argument has had on all areas of knowledge;
because it takes more than a philosopher’s word to verify truth in a world that places its
trust in empirically-based truths, scholars in Women’s Studies as well as feminist scholars
in the traditional disciplines have challenged themselves to theorize about and study the
ways in which women’s roles have been constructed.

This agenda grew out of the longstanding goals of the women’s movement, and
explains how Women’s Studies came to be the “academic arm” of the movement. Because
it is so clearly connected to a political movement, unlike other disciplines whose origins in
similar movements were severed long ago, Women’s Studies has had to contend with the
charge of bias. That is, with an agenda that involves deconstructing the idea that woman’s
place is ordained by the “natural order of things,” feminist scholars clearly have a vested
interest in demonstrating the constructedness of womanhood. And most of us will find
whatweare looking for, whether in scientific dataor literature, ifwewantto find itbadly
enough. Consequently, feminist scholars have had to demonstrate their assertions
repeatedly, in the laboratory and elsewhere. While this onus has made progress slower
than it might be, many feminists have taken comfort in Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 treatise, The

Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which argues that new paradigms are not usually

42

 

 

 

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accepted by established scholars. Rather, a radical idea in circulation gains acceptance
among young, relatively unformed drinkers who make up the new generation of scholars
and who will be more open to the new paradigm and place it in circulation with other
ideas. Thus does scientific progress occur, and feminists thus have taken an analogous
position: “If not in our lifetime, then in our daughters’. . . .” To that end, Women’s
Studies scholars and feminists in the disciplines have been amassing a vast body of
knowledge which has in fact entered the current of scholarship to such a degree that the
insights gained are taken for granted to a great extent. We might be impatient with our
students for not understanding how good things are for them, as they seem to see little
connection in their lives to women of previous generations. Many do believe the war has
been won, and that there is no need for them to take up the feminist cause. This state of
affairs can be seen as positive, if feminists are willing to forego the gratitude of young
women who have not had to fight for the right to go to vote or go to college, much less
seriously study the lives of women. Many young women take for granted their right to
pursue a vocation and to make choices about their lives. We should not begrudge this
attitude: we want it to be as natural for women to exercise the full range of their
humanity as it once was for men alone. But neither must we allow complacency, for
history has shown that complacency leads to setbacks.

The field of Women’s Studies finally developed as a result of centuries of agitation
on behalf of women’s education. Although women began to gain significant access to
higher education in the early part of the twentieth century, the tides of opinion often
shifted on what the purposes of such an education might be. At mid-century, many
women’s colleges advocated a “feminine” curriculum whose purpose was to prepare

women for their future roles as homemakers.2 2 Friedan’s articulation of the discontent of

43

 

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college-educated housewives led some critics to charge that those women sufi‘ered
primarily from being overeducated. The renaissance of the women’s movement in
America brought the issues of women’s education into the foreground; lacking serious
scholarly work on women, the Women’s Studies movement sought to address that
absence. The connection between feminism and the agenda of Women’s Studies is
inextricable—contemporary feminist writers such as Kate Millett and Susan Brownmiller,
and rediscovered feminists like Virginia Woolf—provided paradigms and theories for a
new direction in research and scholarship, which in turn led to the creation of an academic
home for such concerns.2 3

The relationship between the political goals of feminism and the scholarly goals of
Women’s Studies is an an uneasy one; Women’s Studies is one of a very few disciplines
that explicitly and unapologetically encourages work that is beneficial to a particular
group. Deeply seated beliefs in the possibility of objective research are at the heart of
critical attacks on Women’s Studies scholarship as irrational and subjective, but this very
debate gets at the core of what Women’s Studies is all about: Feminist scholars argue that
all research is subjective, and that the pose of objectivity is just that—a pose. As a
result, Women’s Studies has privileged experiential teaching and learning as a means of
correcting the erasure of women’s experience in the academy, where the valorization of an
objective stance tends to minimize or ignore variations on purportedly universal

experiences, which, in turn, was responsible for the subjugation of women and minority

peoples.

44

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Feminism and the Autobiographical Act

Feminists’ questioning of women’s role in society led to an explosion of
scholarship examining every facet of life, involving all the disciplines. Feminist
scholarship is far-reaching, but here I will focus on just one area in which feminist theory
has created a significant paradigm shift in Western views of womanhood. There has been
an on-going analysis and dismantling of Western theories of identity in feminist studies as
a means to disrupt hegemonic notions of selflrood in order to make room for alternate
subjectivities. Thus, narratives, in the form of public testimonial, have been an effective
feminist rhetorical strategy for raising awareness about, for instance, rape and its violent,
anti-female basis in order underscore the fact that these acts are much more common than
public discourse previously admitted, and furthermore that the prevalence of violence
against women is irrefutable evidence of their inferior social position.“ Public
autobiographical acts of previously private experiences were—and are— used as political
tools to bring about social change.25 These autobiographical acts by everyday women
formed the basis of the early feminist critiques of patriarchy. Before the twentieth
century, autobiography was the province of the exceptional individual, and because
“exceptional” individuals were usually public or artistic men, written accounts of
women’s lives tended grow out of such extra-literary forms as diaries and letters, neither
of which garnered much respect as “literature’ unless of course they were written by
acknowledged literary “masters.” Caroline Kirkland’s remarkable fictionalized I839
account of her experiences in settling the western frontier of Michigan, and Mary Boykin
Chesnut’s extraordinary diary of the Civil War South were not originally intended for
publication, and thus were constructed very differently from such canonical

autobiographies as Benjamin Franklin’s and Henry Adams’. Significantly, Chesnut’s

45

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diary first came to prominence as a historical document illuminating the views of
individuals whose opinions were not widely heard during the Civil War. The few
women’s autobiographies that were published and widely circulated throughout history
were usually penned by “extra”-extraordinary women, such as Teresa of Avila and
Margery Kempe, both medieval Christian mystics, whose texts exist only, the writers
make clear, so that they may share their extraordinary spiritual experiences with others.2 6
Estelle Jelinek notes that, until recently, few male or female autobiographers revealed
details of their quotidian existence, and since few women lived “public” lives, their life
stories remained unpublished—and unheard (5).

Critical to the feminist literary project has been the recovery of a female literary
tradition, since central to feminist ideology is the recognition that women’s literature has
been suppressed throughout history. Further, feminists have argued that a reconsideration
of what constitutes literature is necessary, putting us in the vanguard of the canonical
debates of the last thirty years. Feminists have recovered many long-forgotten works by
women in the process of reconstructing the lives of women. The proliferation of literary
criticism by and about women that began in the l960s shows no sign of letting up, nor
any sign of stagnating in its range of concerns. After the initial years of defining the
position of women in literature by men and women, feminist literary criticism has
gradually moved from a largely historical project to a spectrum of theoretical concerns.
Black feminists realized early on, for instance, that the “rnadwoman in the attic” paradigm
rarely applied to the black artist, and began to theorize the particulars of art by black
women.” Literary critics were among the strongest and earliest proponents of the belief
that art is created in a particular historical and social context, arguing that the identity of
the author was crucial to the art she created. In spite of the fact that Barthes was

46

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proclaiming the “death of the author” at roughly this time, feminist literary critics are
generally in agreement that the specificity of the author is of great importance."

One prominent example of the recovery of a woman’s text is that of Harriet
Jacobs’ 1861 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Buried in obscurity, and dismissed as
fiction rmtil Jean Fagan Yellin documented the text in 1987, Incidents has taken its place
in the canon of women’s literature as well as women’s history. Its value lies in what it
reveals about the particulars of a slave woman’s life, and how that differs from that of a
male slave. Until Jacobs’ text was recovered, the male experience of slavery was assumed
to be universal and the issues of sexual double jeopardy were rarely dwelt on except as it
applied to how enslaved men felt about the rape of their wives and daughters. Incidents
allowed the woman narrator to speak as subject in her own history, and gave historians
and literary critics alike a different paradigm with which to view slavery.

In its early years, feminist criticism also focused on the critique of male literature
and how it contributed to and reflected the oppression of women. Judith F etterley, for
instance, argued that reading canonical literature has been historically a profoundly
alienating experience for women. Demonized or canonized or simply invisible in so much
literature written by men, women readers experience(d) powerlessness. As Fetterley
wrote in 1977:

To be excluded from a literature that claims to define one’s identity is

to experience a peculiar form of powerlessness—not simply the
powerlessness that derives item not seeing one’s experience articulated,
clarified, and legitimized in art, but more significantly the powerlessness
which results from the endless division of self against self, the
consequence of the invocation to identify as male while being
remindedthattobemale—tobeuniversal,tobeAmerican—

is to be not female. (xiii)

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Fetterley’s analysis (and reader response theory as a whole) opened up the possibility of
radical new readings of literature by male as well as female writers. The subject position
of the reader is critical in this paradigm, forcing a critique of the social effects of literary
depictions as well as their ideological underpinnings. While critique of male canonical
literature was one of the earliest manifestations of feminist literary criticism, in recent
years we seem to have to turned away from that focus to emphasize the history and
production of women’s literature. It is almost as if, collectively, feminist critics decided
they had spent too much time on images of women in men’s literature, and that the more
important task was really to validate women’s literature and theorize female subjectivity.

The creation of a feminist poetics has been formulated in part to counteract the
images of women in male-authored texts explicated by Millett, F etterley, and others, as
well as to privilege a distinct female literary history. As Elaine Showalter put it in her
influential 1979 essay, “Toward a Feminist Poetics,”

[T]he program of gynocritics is to consn'uct a female fiamework

for the analysis of women’s literature, to develop new models based

on the study of female experience, rather than to adapt male models
and theories. Gynocritics begins at the point when we free ourselves
fi'om the linear absolutes of male literary history, stop trying to fit
women between the lines of the male tradition, and focus instead on the
newly visible world of female culture. (“T oward” 131).

This effort has drawn upon theorists in a number of disciplines, especially philosophy
and psychology. Psychoanalytic assertions of essential womanhood by some feminists,
postcolonial explications of the diversity of women’s experience by others, and minority
women theorists’ arguments against urriversalizing the experience of women have
provided grist for the mill; consensus will certame never come but the attempts to

construct a feminist poetics have been responsible for great vitality in literary studies.

48

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As feminist literary scholars sought to recover “lost” texts, to rehabilitate
previously shunned texts and to create new woman-centered literature, they were able to
demonstrate that women have identities unaccounted for by dominant ideology. These
efforts resulted in the recovery of such literary gems as Kate ChOpin’s The Awakening
(1899), Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God(l942), and Rebecca
Harding Davis’ Life in the Iron Mills (1861)——and forced a reexamination of the literary
canon. Feminist critics such as Jane Tompkins (1985) and Cathy N. Davidson (1986)
have helped to rehabilitate the image of literature written for women, demonstrating the
serious and influential “cultural work” (in Tompkins’ phrase) of sentimental fiction, and
demonstrating the ways in which women’s literatrrre was systemically devalued by the
male literary establishment.” Feminist literary critics generally agree that literature is a
political site shot through with ideology, which may acquiesce to or resist a particular set
of circumstances. Jane Tompkins, for example, in her work on Uncle Tom ’3 Cabin,
shows how Stowe’s novel (and other sentimental novels, which were written for, by and
about women) encoded the domestic values of the nineteenth century. She writes that,
“[o]ut of the ideological materials they had at their disposal, the sentimental novelists
elaborated a myth that gave women the central position of power and authority in the
culture. . .” (“Sentimental” 83). Tompkins’ work on nineteenth-century fiction is in part
a re-examination of the cultural significance of women’s fiction, 3 body of literature long
dismissed by the New Critics in part because its popularity eclipsed that of canonical
contemporaries such as Hawthorne and Melville. According to Tompkins, the cultural
work of sentimental fiction served to validate—for women——the crucial role played by

the feminine sphere in the functioning of American society.

49

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The contemporary proliferation of writing by American women, ordinary and
extraordinary, is partly the result of two generations of women insisting on seeing their
lives, their narratives—in myriad variations—represented in art. but these texts also serve
the ideological goals of the women’s movement. The sum of these efforts has brought to
light a fuller account of the rich diversity of women’s lives than ever before, as well as a
significant challenge to the structure of male domination in the US. and elsewhere. But
the massive social changes wrought by the women’s movement are not simply the result
of women’s speaking and writing their lives. The consciousness-raising has led inevitably
to women’s realization that they have been invisible in history, in science, in
psychology—in short, everywhere in the academy and the larger world. Women’s
Studies was conceived as an antidote to the lack of female perspectives and questions, and
while it too has been denied firll “citizenship” as a “real” academic discipline, it is nearly
impossible to find a place in the academy where women’s concerns are not implicated in
scholarly endeavors, for good or ill. In disciplines as diverse as psychology and
anthropology, scholars have illuminated what it means to become a woman in a particular
cultural (and disciplinary) context. In the last thirty years, feminist scholars have also
succeeded in arguing that studying men and applying what is learned to women in a wide
range of fields fiom philosophy to medicine is wrong-headed, and has led to the
reproduction of views and theories which are normatively male. In carrying out her
ground breaking 1982 study on female identity formation and moral development, Carol
Gilligan, for example, described a process that differed fi'om the male pattern and noted
that for previous psychoanalytic theory, the descriptions of normal development are of
males. From Freud to Erikson, female development has been constructed as stunted or
inferior because it usually differs from that of males. Moreover, patriarchal signifying

50

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practices serve to naturalize this ostensibly empirical inscription of woman through
cultural images that reinforce hegemonic inscriptions of women as culturally insignificant
(e.g., as workers), or conversely, so significant as to engender romanticized myths (e.g., as
mothers). Gilligan’s In a Drflerent Voice and Nancy Chodorow’s 197 8 The Reproduction
of Mothering were among the early studies instrumental in delineating and detailing a
specifically female version of psychological development, with the explicit goal of de-
pathologizing female psychological development.

The degree to which American women writers have successfully challenged liberal
humanist notions of sclfhood which have historically excluded women is largely due to
the extended and thoroughgoing critique of patriarchal social structure by early feminists,
but also, significantly, to the feminist critiques of the construction of womanhood which
implicitly inscribed the specific oppressions of middle-class white women as universal.3 o
In other words, there is a discernible progression leading from a generalized discourse of
femininity as constructed by privileged white males throughout history to the current
recognition that femininity cannot be construed as a single discursive practice, even for an
individual woman. This insight was born of protracted, sometimes acrimonious debate
surrounding issues raised by the new discipline of women’s studies, issues which are
often dismissed by the current generation of feminists as antiquated. I want to recognize,
however, that the revolution had to begin somewhere, and in mapping previously
uncharted territories, scholars such as Gilligan, Chodorow, Showalter, and many others
built a platform for the much more complex edifice now in place. For example, the 1986
study Women's Ways of Knowing by Belenky et al. builds on Gilligan’s and Chodorow’s
studies by delineating a specifically female path in the development of selflrood, voice,

and authority, thereby putting forward a significant argument that at least one alternate

51

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epistemology to the liberal humanist model must be acknowledged.3 ' Lyn Mikel Brown
and Carol Gilligan’s 1992 study of female psychology in Meeting at the Crossroads,
which acknowledges the nwd to specify whose experience is being named, examines a
relatively privileged group of girls at a Cleveland school and concludes that ‘[f]or girls at
adolescence to say what they are feeling and thinking often means risking. . . [the loss of]
their relationships and finding themselves powerless and alone” (217). Louisa Pipher’s
1994 bestselling Reviving Ophelia describes the deep pain of contemporary adolescent
girls as they try to negotiate their way to adulthood in a culture that Pipher calls
“poisonous” for girls and women. A 1995 AAUW study challenges the cherished notion
that boys and girls are treated equally in US schools, and found that girls are still treated
as second-class citizens even at this late date.3 2 And these are only the most well known
efforts of scholars to study and describe what it means to be female in this culture.
Significantly, most of these studies err in the same way that The Feminine Mstique did in
1963, by describing the experience of middle-class white women and girls—there are no
equivalently well-known studies of working class females or of females of color.
Although the studies I cite above do not explicitly claim to be describing universal
phenomena, the fact that these are indeed the best known studies contributes to the
misperception that they are describing all girls, regardless of class, race, ethnicity, or
geographic location. In contrast, historical studies such as Deborah Gray White’s Ar ’n ’t I
a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (1985) and Gerda Lerner’s The Majority
Finds Its Past: Placing Women in History (1979) are exemplars of the work of recovery
essential to the feminist project without sacrificing the specificity which we have come to

lmderstand as necessary to the demands of good scholarship.

52

 

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In literary studies there has been a significant body of scholarship devoted to the
specific traditions and themes of women writers as well as a growing recognition that the
goals defined by the white middle-class founders of the modern feminist movement were
often too narrowly confined to the concerns and issues of that group. In the time since
second wave feminism altered the scholarly landscape in literary studies by questioning
and revising the canon, recovering silenced texts by women, and asking questions once
considered unworthy 0f literary study, many excellent studies have addressed the gap in
knowledge about women’s literature. The pioneering studies of Sandra Gilbert and Susan
Gubar, as well as Elaine Showalter examine the specific issues women writers faced as
they defied cultlual expectations in the very act of writing; Annis Pratt’s work on
archetypes in women’s fiction argues for a coherent, if problematic, set of thematic
concerns.3 3 To a great extent, however, women’s narratives—and coming of age
narratives in particular—remain undertheoriwd, perhaps due to critics’ unwillingness to
appear unsympathetic as they seem to dismantle women’s agency through a critique of
social and discursive practices that construct the individual’s identity. But in my view, it
is productive and necessary to critique women’s autobiographies through a
poststructuralist lens. If poststructuralism is the coin of the reahn, when we refuse to
consider the constructedness of women’s autobiographies and subjectivity, we risk
further marginalization of women’s literary works. As Molly Hite argues, women writers
are generally thought to be formally conservative in their texts, merely transcribing their
lives on the page. This view “presumes a ‘natural’ or ‘straight’ style and structure
subordinate to and in service of content” (15), which is another way of subordinating
women’s texts. Thus, my project is motivated in part by a desire to describe the formal

properties of the coming of age narrative, which I see as an innovation originating in

53

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women’s texts, but is now widely used in men’s autobiographies as well. I do want to
emphasize, however, that I do not accept mainstream poststructuralist theory
unproblematically, but feminist revisions of poststructuralism are illuminating and useful
in reading women’s coming of age narratives, precisely because these theories often
accurately explain why women commonly experience confusion and alienation as they
come of age.

Furthermore, several of the coming of age narratives I examine in the chapters
ahead contest the possibility of ever telling a verifiable truth in the course of writing a
memoir or life story. Mary McCarthy’s 1957 autobiography, Memories of a Catholic
Girlhood begins with a lengthy, italicized “To the Reader” section. Throughout the text,
McCarthy intersperses straight narrative with italicized passages in which she comments
upon the events she has related, and in particular, she deconstructs her own memory.
The following passage is typical of these sections:

There are some semi-fictional touches here. My midyear exam paper
for instance: I do not really know whether or not I was asked to
contrast the two Haeduan brothers or whether I wrote, “The death of
Dumnorix is ironic because a fickle man dies adjuring his followers to
keep faith with him.” But this was the kind of question Miss Gowrie
would have given and the kind of answer I might have made. (164)

McCarthy is ahead of her time in her use of the conventions of fiction to compensate for
the lapses in her memory, but readers of autobiography are often on guard for hints of
fictionalizing. McCarthy merely finds those places where she imagines a reader might
question the veracity of the account and then attempts to answer possible objections.
Despite her preemptive strike, however, the boundaries between fiction and
autobiography are blurred, leaving a reader off balance, uncertain about whether
McCarthy has given a fair and truthful account, or an embroidered, fictional rendering.

54

 

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Indeed, as I write, Ronald Reagan biographer Edmund Morris is being excoriated across
the United States for inserting a fictional version of himself into his narrative in order to
create an eyewitness account of Reagan’s entire life. In the past year, Nobel Peace prize
winner Rigoberta Menchl'r was the subject of a study by David Stoll, whose research
uncovered evidence that Menchl'r could not have witnessed or experienced a number of the
events she describes in her acclaimed 1987 autobiography, I, Rigoberta Menchri. This new
evidence has given rise to a heated debate between those who believe that Menchl'l’s
entire account is now discredited and those who believe that her political purpose—
bringing world-wide attention to the plight of Guatemalans—justifies the use of a
“composite” autobiography.” Clearly, many readers expect autobiography to present
only the “truth,” and find fictional elements suspect. Recently, theorists have coined a
term to categorizes these genre-bending texts— the “fourth genre,” sometimes known as
creative nonfiction, but it seems that many readers still want a clear distinction between
fact and fiction.” For example, readers of autobiography are frequently puzzled by
Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, which intersperses realistic narrative
passages with mythology, both familial and cultural. What are readers to make of the
story of Fa Mu Lan, the mythic woman warrior of Chinese lore, and its relationship to
the actual events of Kingston’s life? Kingston does not provide a concordance the way
McCarthy does, but in the act of juxtaposing the real with the mythic as if they were
equally influential in constructing her identity, Kingston effectively redefines the nature
of truth as it is understood in Western culture, and in the process stretches the generic
boundaries of autobiography.

This elemental tension between truth and fiction is not new to twentieth-century

autobiographical texts, nor is it unique to women’s texts. In 1861, Harriet Jacobs wrote

55

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“reader, be assured this is no fiction” (1) to no efi‘ect, as readers treated her narrative as
fiction for more than a hundred years. While former slaves, male and female, felt the need
to authenticate their stories through various means, it was particularly necessary for any
woman to justify her writing with arguments about the worthiness of her story or its
value to anyone but herself and with statements to the effect that, while her memories
may be somewhat faulty and her education stunted due to the evils of slavery, she has
done the best she could. On the other hand, Frederick Douglass seems to feel no such
need to apologize for the quality—or justify the existence—of his 1845 Narrative ofthe
Life ofFrederiek Douglass, although it too is accompanied by authenticating testimony."
Women’s rhetorical positions are in marked contrast to those of canonical male
autobiographers, many of whom seem to accept their memory of events unproblem-
atically and who apparently felt little anxiety about the inherent value of their stories.
Benjamin Franklin affects a small degree of humility in tone as he opens his narrative with
a letter to his son, but he is explicit about the inherent value of his story:

As constant good fortune has accompanied me even to an advanced
period of life, my posterity will perhaps be desirous of learning the
means, which I employed, and which, thanks to Providence, so well
succeededwithme. Theymay alsodeemthemfittobeimitated,
should any of them find themselves in similar circumstances. (1)

Rhetorically, Franklin’s text uses understatement to invoke his enormously privileged life,
already well known to his readers, as an assumed rationale for the act of wrltmg In
contrast, in the preface to her narrative, Harriet Jacobs writes with a degree of self-
erraccment typical of women’s autobiography before the twentieth century:

I wish I were more competent to the task I have undertaken. But I

trust my readers will excuse deficiencies in consideration of circumstances.

IwasbomandrearedinSlavery; andIremainedinaSlave Statetwenty-
sevenyears. SincelhavebeenattheNorth,ithasbeennecessary forme

56

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to work diligently for my own support, and the education of my children.
This has not left me much leisure to make up for the loss of early
opportunities to improve myself; and it has compelled me to write these
pages at regular intervals, whenever I could snatch an hour fi'om household
duties. (1)

Of course Jacobs is employing the same rhetorical strategies used by male slave narrators
to address a particular purpose; in this case, to demonstrate the detrimental effects of
slavery on an individual’s intellectual development,’ 7 and certainly to preempt the
inevitable criticism leveled at any woman who entered the public arena.3 ' Franklin’s text
is canonical because he is an accomplished, revered public servant, while Jacobs’ text is
valued for its propagandist properties (and undoubtedly for its prurient, though discreet,
glimpse into me sexual double jeopardy facing enslaved women).3 9 She is an extra-
ordinary woman by virtue of her life in slavery, her escape, and her unusual (for a former
slave) ability to write her experience, but even so, she seems to feel that she is
overstepping her place by daring to write her story. More to the point, Franklin’s text
narrates the events of his public life for the purpose of revealing the secrets of his success,
an account that does not include recognition of the domestic labor performed in his home
that enables him to be successful in the public realm—culturally sanctioned content for
autobiography. In contrast, Jacobs’ narrative relates events which take place in the
private domestic sphere, and therein lies the source of her authorial anxiety. Those
dynamics have changed dramatically of course, and the autobiographies discussed here are
the beneficiaries of that change. None have yet reached the status of, say, Benjamin
F ranklin’s Autobiography, but autobiographies by'women are inexorably changing the
canonical firmament.

Autobiography provides an especially productive site for the examination of the

constructedness of identity; it is “obvious” to many readers that a fictional character
57

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possesses a “constructed” identity. There is, after all, an author who had to sit down and
create a believable human being. But in autobiography there is no such immediately
obvious distinction between the author and the subject “created” in the text, and many
readers accept the truth value of such texts unproblematically. The presence of an “I”
that conesponds to the name on the title page authorizes the text in ways that novels do
not. Therefore, the temptation is to assume that the autobiographer has direct access to
the truth, having lived the experiences described. Phillipe LeJeune calls this assumption
part of the “autobiographical contract,” by which readers lmderstand how to read a text
when they realize that the named author is synonymous with the ‘I’ of the text, and thus
is a reliable narrator of the truth (193). Regardless of readerly (or authorly) assumptions,
however, autobiographical truths are as much constructed out of the ideologies and
discursive practices in circulation at the historical moment of writing as any work of
fiction. While childhood experiences undoubtedly shape the textual rendering given at a
later date, it is impossible for the autobiographer to recapture the ideology that gave the
experiences meaning at the time they occurred. Rather, the autobiographer sees the past
through the ideological lenses available to her to make “sense” of her experience as she
writes. In the case of the texts considered here, most of which reach back into early
childhood, we see the pact begin to unravel. Few of us remember conversations or events
from the age of two or three in detail, yet a significant number of female autobiographers
venture into this territory, (re)constructing elaborate dialogue and narratives with a proper
beginning, middle and end from early childhood.‘0 In her extensive survey, Estelle Jelinek
notes that, in contrast to male texts, the female autobiographical tradition since antiquity
has been marked by childhood memories and family history (13), providing strength to

the argument that female identity formation occurs in the context of relationships.

58

 

 

 

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Feminist Poustrucmmlh'r Revisions of Subjectivity

The nature and origin of the self are clearly as central to the study of
autobiography as they have been to Western philosophers since Plato, and even though
the discussion has by now evolved into postmodern conceptions of the self as constituted
in language and through society, the gravitational pull of liberal humanism retains its
powerful hold on the Western imagination. Even as posunodemism argues that
individuals possess multiple identities which are never fixed, there are myriad textual
moments when individuals do appear to have stable identities. In contemporary criticism
the order of the day is a dispersed subjectivity, and yet in the process of practicing
literary criticism, it is nearly impossible to avoid the appearance that meaning and
subjectivity can be fixed once and for all.

Strictly speaking, Rene' Descartes was a precursor of liberal philosophy, but
nonetheless, liberal humanism is most often associated with his “cogito ergo sum”
dictum, arguing first for a deep separation of mind and matter, but also crucially valorizing
the mind over the body. A “man” may take any bodily form, but as long as “he” is
capable of thinking he may be considered human." As Bertrand Russell notes, “...the
Cartesian system presents two parallel but independent worlds, that of mind and that of
matter, each of which can be studied without reference to the other. That the mind does
not move the body was a new idea. . . . It had the advantage of making it possible to say
that the body does not move the mind” (567). Coupled with John Locke’s idea that the
mind is tabula rasa until it is filled with experience (620-1), liberal humanism can posit
manasbeingdistinguishedbyhis abilitytothink,andthustoreasonasadilectresultof
experience. Classical liberal theorists subscribe to a metaphysical dualism, a belief that

the mind and body constitute two distinct spheres which are only slightly related. Alison

59

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Jaggar argues that contemporary liberal philosophy does not explicitly accept
metaphysical dualism, but it does accept that ‘Vvhat is especially valuable about human
beings is a particular “mental” capacity, the capacity for rationality,” which Jaggar terms
“normative dualism” (28). However, the belief that human nature is essentially fixed
remains the most lasting and influential element of Enlightenment philosophy, and it is
this aspect of h'beral hlnnanism that contemporary theory argues against by claiming that
human identity is contingent, constructed, and multiple.

Also central to liberal humanist thought is the concept of abstract individualism,
which Jaggar defines as "the assumption that the essential human characteristics are
properties of individuals and are given independently of any particular social context"
(42). For Hegel, nothing external to the mind of the individual affects what he terms “self-
consciousness,” because

[T]he world of the individual is only to be understood fi'om the individual
himself; and the influence of reality upon the individual, a reality which
isrepresentedashavingabeingall itsown. . . receivesthroughthis
individual absolutely the opposite significance—the individual either lets
the stream ofreality flowing in upon it have its way. or breaks offand
diverts the current of its influence. (335)

Feminists and theorists of other marginalized groups have implicitly challenged this tenet
through extensive research which demonstrates that the difference between dominant and
subordinate groups is the result of different social experiences.’2 Still, such research falls
on the deaf ears of Westerners, many of whom insist that since we are all born with equal
capacities, we are all the same and therefore any failure of an individual to attain full social
and political status is the result of that individual’s failure to develop the inherent mental

capacity.

60

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Writing in the early nineteenth century, Hegel expanded Descartes’ thesis by
describing the role the mind plays in determining selfhood, and arguing that “[s]elf-
consciousness is mind, which has the assurance of having. . . its unity with its own own
self’ (374). Hegel’s discussion in The Phenomenology of Mind of the master/slave
relationship illustrates the somewhat contradictory assertion that man must engage with
the outside world in order to define himself and achieve the desired unity of self. As
Kathy Ferguson phrases it: “The Hegelian subject always has to go outside itself in order
to know what is inside; by seeing itselfreflected in the world it discovers relations
constitutive of itself” (41). In the case of the master/slave example, it is the struggle for
domination that brings about self-consciousness; in the battle for dominion, each finds his
place in the social order regardless of whether he wins or loses.

The struggle for dominance marks the nature of the Hegelian subject in several
realms. In the course of attaining self-consciousness, man’s spirit detaches from nature,
and eventually incorporates and transcends it. All manner of passions, including sexual
mhfionsfamily,anddeath,membeconquemdfluougbreasonmordermm-atfirm
man’s primacy in the (male) order of things, which is public and universal. Women are
defined as “the everlasting irony of the community” (496), and, Hegel makes clear, are
therefore unable to participate in public universal citizenship. In Ferguson’s view, the
Hegelian process of becoming a subject involves rampant consumption: “Hegel’s subject
literally eats its way through the world, consuming and destroying. . . the objects of the
life world. . . . Taking its identity from destruction, the self-conscious self needs what it
destroys and destroys what it needs” (48). Feminists have longed both to be seen as
equal to the Hegelian subject and to generate viable alternatives to it. The primary basis
of much feminist thought has been an appeal to liberal humanism’s promise of equality

61

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for all by demonstrating women’s equal capacity for reason. Mainstream feminism has
thus attempted to revise liberal philosophy by changing its terms, but not its premises.”
On the other hand, some versions of feminism reject the Hegelian norm of domination,
seeking alternatives to consuming and conquering nature, and arguing for more peacefirl
and cooperative ways of attaining subjectivity.“

Nonetheless, Hegel’s system remains quite powerful in Western culture in spite
of later philosophical attempts to dismantle his arguments. As a young man, Karl Marx
was trained as a Hegelian philosopher, but he ultimately rejected Hegel’s metaphysical
dualism, arguing instead that humans are merely one biological species among others, and
it is the need to satisfy biological requirements which defines human nature rather than
the capacity for rationality (German ISO). In Marx’s view, Hegel’s error was in seeing
consciousness as produced by thought, whereas Marx argued that external circumstances
were unavoidably constitutive of the real. According to Marx, human nature is
determined by social relations, and most particularly by an individual’s position in the
prevailing mode of production: thus, “[i]t is not the consciousness of men that
determines their being but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their
consciousness” (Contribution 4).

Louis Althusser’s understanding of ideology constitutes a revision of the view
that fire German Ideology seems to promote; rather than a set of illusions, ideology
becomes a system of representations of the real relations in which people interact, and
which serve to ensure that the forces of production are reproduced. Ideology does not,
however, represent the “real relations which govern the existence of individuals, but the
imaginary relation of those individuals to the real relations in which they live” (165).
Ideology for Althusser is thus both real and imaginary—it constitutes the way in which

62

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people go about the business of living their lives, but it is imaginary in the sense that it
discourages or prevents a full recognition of the real conditions of existence. It is not an
illusory sense of consciousness, nor an abstract expression of real material conditions, but
the prerequisite for action in the social structure. Ideology exists in the “behavior of
people acting according to their beliefs” (57), and it exists in an individual’s concept of
what is “common sense” as well. Where we perceive an idea to be “natural” or “true” or
“right,” we see the contours of ideology, in the gaps and contradictions in the cultural
narrative. Ideology smooths over contradictions, seems to answer questions that it
actually ignores, and attempts to provide a coherent world view in service of the existing
mode of production.

According to Althusser there are no individual purveyors of ideology designed to
keep workers in line and reproducing themselves. Ideology exists necessarily for
Althusser, but is supported by the practices and institutions that he labeled “Ideological
State Apparatuses,” which include education, religion, the family, the law, and the arts.
The ISAs help to reinforce the existing social formation by perpetuating the myths and
beliefs necessary to secure the reproduction of the state, and thus the reproduction of the
relations of production, especially, for Althusser, the “capitalist relations of exploitation”
(154). Further, ideology’s main function, for Althusser, is to construct people as
subjects:

[T]he category of the subject is constitutive of all ideology, but
at the same time and immediately I shall add that the category
of the subject is only constitutive of all ideology in so far as all
ideology has the function (which defines it) of constituting
concrete individuals as subjects. (171)

The importance of the assertion that the subject is constitutive of ideology is in its

suggestion to subjects that they are autonomous individuals who enjoy complete freedom
63

 

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to decide who and what they are and will do at any given time. In Michel Foucault’s
description of the same dynamic, liberal humanism secures consent to the social order by
telling the individual, “Even though you don’t exercise power, you can still be a ruler.
Better yet, the more you deny yourself the exercise of power, the more you submit to
those in power, then the more this increases your sovereignty” (‘Revolutionary” 221).
Ideology convinces individuals that they are unique, irreplaceable in society, which in turn
prompts a certain acquiescence to the social order that constructs them in this way. Thus,
individuals who believe they are irreplaceable in their jobs will continue to go to work,
even if drey are exploited, demeaned, and otherwise dehumanized, because the prevailing
ideology convinces them of the importance of their contribution to the labor force.
Althusser conceives of this as “the elementary ideological effect” (172).

Catherine Belsey sees Althusser’s ideas as a reworking of Lacan’s ‘imaginary,’ in
that the relationship of an individual to society is analogous to Lacan’s rendering of the
child’s experience in the mirror-phase. In both formulations, subjects are given a unitary
sense of selfby supplying them with an object that reflects back this satisfying image.
Each of these images gives rise to a misrecognition because they idealize and misrepresent
the subject’s real circumstances. A child in the Lacanian mirror-phase is not as whole as
that reflection suggests, nor are individuals as free and coherent as ideology tells them
they are. Rather, both are pleased with the image of wholeness given back to them, and
so submit to it, in the process becoming subjects. But Althusser’s theory is ultimately
unsatisfactory, according to Belsey, because its definition of ideology is reduced to being
primarily an oppressive force that subjugates and’suppresses, and because it fails to
account for ideological struggle. However, the usefulness of Althusserian theory comes in

large measure by extension of the Lacanian insight that language is not only a social

64

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activity, but also significantly constitutive of social reality and being. According to
Lacan, when the child enters the symbolic realm, he does so because he needs a way to
account for ‘not-I.’ The process of understanding the difference between ‘I’ and ‘not-I’
involves imagining one’s relationship to the world, and in order to do that, the child must
enter into language, or the symbolic realm. In this sense, the child’s (and subject's)
unconscious is not an interior phenomenon, but the result of social relations. It is difficult
for the subject to access the unconscious because it permeates our being; never fixed,
language—and therefore subjectivity—for Lacan is a process of desire set in motion by
difference. Since an autobiography is literally a life constructed with words, the assertion
of language’s constitutive properties is a highly productive insight for autobiography
studies, suggesting as it does the ideological nature of language and its role in determining
how we see the world and how the world sees us. Nonetheless, the Lacanian account is
problematic in its assumption that women, lacking the phallus, have no access to the
symbolic order, resulting in a patriarchal construction of femininity that represses and
controls female subjectivity and desire. As such, Lacanian psychoanalysis defines
women by lack, and is therefore ultimately an inadequate theory of difference. Always in
the process of becoming, the Lacanian woman never reaches full subjectivity. As with the
grim determinism of Althusser, Lacan’s construction of woman fails to adequately
account for the large numbers ofwomen who do in fact resist and act as agents, despite
their supposed lack of access to the symbolic order of language.

Invoking Engels’ assertion that “[w]e make history ourselves, but in the first place
under very definite assumptions and conditions” (761), Raymond Williams argues for a
restoration of the notion of direct agency against Althusser’s overly deterministic view of

human subjectivity. Williams agrees that humans are ‘interpellated’ by ideology, but sees

65

 

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the location of ideology in a wider range of practices than allowed for in Althusser’s
theory. Where Althusser sees the purveyors of ideology in the ISAs of school, church,
and government as well as in the Repressive State Apparatuses of the police and military,
Williarnsarguesthatthe subject is constructed in language, which he alsoviews as
ideological. Beyond its constitutive property, language is historically and socially
determined. Warningagainstthetendencytosee ideologyas fixcdthemoment it is
mmedWflhamsarguesthatonlythedeadcanreasonablybereducedtoastable identity.
As for the living, “[alll the known complexities, the experienced tensions, shifts, and
uncertainties, the intricate form of unevenness and confusion, are against me terms of the
reduction and soon, by extension, against social analysis itself” (130). For women, a
groupwhosemnnehasbeenseenasfixedinfimeandspacethmughomhistory,the
implication of Williams’ argument is profoundly radical; taking Marx’s insight that social
being determines social consciousness and extending it logically beyond Marx’s own
primarily economic, class-based critique, Williams opens up a space for change and
resistance, not just for women, but for members of all socially powerless groups. But he
also warns us that the claim that people “define and shape their whole lives is true only in
abstraction. In any actual society there are specific inequalities in means and therefore in
capacity to realize this process. In a class society these are primarily inequalities
between classes” (108), but there are clearly other categories of inequalities in class
societies—race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity, to name but a few of the
more prominent types of social stratification. Conversely, Williams argues that the
“totality” of hegemony is an abstraction that fails to account for the active, contingent

processes of hegemony in practice (113).

66

 

 

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Williams uses Antonio Gramsci’s work on hegemony to problematize the Marxist
notion of ideology as the “expression or projection of a particular class interest” (108).
Hegemony, in Gramsci’s formulation, is quite different fiom either brute force or the
duping of unsuspecting subaltems. It often relies on more subtle forms, such as
appropriation of discourse and co-opting of interests to gain the consent of subordinate
groups. Hegemony is most often negotiated terrain, although of course there are no
summit meetings to hammer out these kinds of negotiations. It evolves, and is constantly
in the process of changing due to the continual need to renew the hegemonic by
incorporating and appropriating the interests of dominated groups. Even so, the
hegemonic is never able to dominate all aspects of society; there are always spaces of
resistance, some implicitly sanctioned by the hegemonic as “acceptable” forms of
oppositional or alternative culture. In Williams’ terms, hegemony is a “whole body of
practices and and expectations, over the whole of living: oru' senses and assignments of
energy, our shaping perceptions of ourselves and our world. It is a lived system of
meanings and values—constitutive and constituting—which as they are experienced as
practices appear as reciprocally confirming” (l 10). In other words, social and cultural
practices are interlocking in that they serve to mutually reinforce the hegemonic. Williams
firrtherarguesthatalthoughagency isexpressed inthe imaginationofindividuals, external
social forces exert “limits and pressures” on individual desire to resist hegemony, thus
coercing consent to normative subjectivity (87).”

Although now somewhat discredited, both Althusser and Lacan have provided
productive points of departure for more recent theoretical revisions of subjectivity.
Stuart Hall, for instance, has found Althusser’s theory of interpellation useful, but he

revises it to reflect concerns beyond the economic sphere. Terming Althusser’s definition

67

 

 

 

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of ideology too static and lacking in sufficient problematizing of how ideology is created,
Hall sees it instead as the vehicle by which we interpret experience. That is, ideology
constructs the definitions of our lived realities, but we cannot distinguish ideology from
the heal” because ideology creates reality. Moreover, for Hall, it is not possible for a
single ideology to construct us as subjects; instead, ideologies function as systems of
representation, with each nodal idea leading inexorably into a “whole chain of
connotative” associations. It is therefore impossible to isolate or identify a pure or unified
ideology. As a result, Hall argues (along with most poststructuralist, postmodernist, and
postcolonialist critics) that “[tlhere is no essential, unitary ‘1’——only the fragmentary,
contradictory subject I become” (109). This assertion directly opposes Althusser’s
argument thatwhen the subject is interpellated, s/he is “fixed” as a subject, leading to a
monolithic, essentialist view of subjectivity, which Hall argues is erroneous. He sees the
interpellation of the subject as an ongoing, plural, and contested process, never finally
fixedorunified—howcananyone interpellationmrlybemadetorepresentanddefine
us? The subject becomes a site of contestation as various ideologies and discourses are
articulated in and through the subject. Hall’s move is reflective of more recent trends to
see the subject as constructed of multiple and sometimes conflicted identities, and while
this might leave individuals confused by their inability to make their lived experience fit
into a neat schematic, it also opens up space for resistance and change. The lack of fixed
subjectivity contributes to an anxiety in some texts: for Maxine Hong Kingston, the
inability to pin down a stable identity creates a tension between the social imperative to
present a unified self and the lived reality of occupying multiple, often contradictory,

subject positions.

68

 

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Feminist poststructuralism is particularly useful in the analysis of coming of age
narratives as many of these texts implicitly theorize subjectivity, and explicitly
problematize the unitary subject. But these texts also argue against the lack of agency
suggested by much Althusserian Marxism and poststructuralist theory; far fiom showing
how women’s choices are dictated by social and cultural ideology, many demonstrate the
power of those who occupy the social margins. That is, while conventional wisdom
might see women as powerless to shape their destinies against the forces of cultural
imperatives, the women in these narratives often find ways to define themselves and
resist society’s interpellation. The more powerless the subject is, the more inventive and
creative she tends to be in shaping her life. Foucault reminds us that power is never
absolute or wholly negative; it also produces pleasure, discourse and productive
resisMce (“'I‘ruth” 61). The narratives I consider here in detail provide numerous
examples of the ways in which girls and women circumvent society’s power plays.
Gramsci points out that counter-hegemonic discourses always exist, thus allowing some
room for the subject to maneuver around the ideological imperatives found in school,
home, church, and other ideological spheres.

Patricia Waugh notes that the shift from a liberal humanist to a poststructuralist
conception of subjectivity is primarily a move away from consciousness and toward
language (7). The subject is thus constructed in language, and since language is
characterized by unstable, constantly deferred meanings, the subject too is constantly in
process, always denied a fixed identity. Although at first glance this notion seems to
makethe firllrangeofchoicesavailabletoeachindividuaLChris Weedonarguesthat

individual access to subjectivity is governed by historically Specific social
factorsandthe forms ofpoweratwork in aparticularsociety. Social
relations, which are always relations of power and powerlessness between
different subject positions, will determine the range of forms of

69

 

 

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subjectivity immediately open to any individual on the basis of gender,
race, class, age and cultural background. Where other positions exist but
are exclusive to a particular class, race or gender, the excluded individual
will have to fight for access by transforming existing power relations. (91)

Language or discomses will construct various meanings for the subject, which will open a
space for different subjectivities. The difficulty for individuals occurs when they seek to
adhere to a unified, uncontradictory identity in the face of often contradictory discourses.
As lane Flax writes, “[tjhe unitary selfis an effect of many kinds of relations of
domination. It can only sustain its unity by splitting off or repressing other parts of its
own and others’ subjectivity” (109), a move that sometimes leads to madness.‘6 Many
feminist theorists have noted the irony in the fact that, at a historical moment when
women finally began to be recognized as subjects, poststructuralists such as Roland
Barthes and Michel Foucault were declaring the ‘death of the author’ and the fallacy of
individual agency." But feminists working with poststructuralist theory have
substantially revised the rigid determinism associated with early poststructmalism such
that agency and social construction of subjectivity are not mutually exclusive theories of
identity. Nancy Miller argues that postmodern theory’s assertion that the author and the
subject are of no significance does not

necessarily hold for women, and prematurely forecloses the question of
agency for them. Because women have not had the same historical relation
of identity to origin, institution, production that men have had, they have
not . . felt burdened by too much Self, Ego, Cogito, etc. Because the
female subject has juridically been excluded from the polis, hence
decentered, “disoriginated,” deinstitutionalized, etc., her relation to
integrity and textuality, desire and authority displays structurally
important differences from that universal pattern. (Subject 106).

Waugh argues fitrther that it has been necessary for women to pass through a stage of
seeking a unified identity, having been denied access to subjectivity throughout history.

70

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In recent years, however, women’s texts often suggest “that it is possible to experience
oneself as a strong and coherent agent in the world, at the same time as understanding the
extent to which identity and gender are socially constructed” (13).

A second major assertion of post-structuralism is the notion that experience only
attains meaning through language, and since language is constitutive of reality, hmnan
beings cannot directly access the truth or meaning of experience without the mediation of
language. Since feminists have long asserted the primacy of experience as a producer of
knowledge, this is a contentious suggestion. However, Weedon argues that we “must be
able to address women’s experience by showing where it comes from and how it relates to
material social pmtices and the power relations that structure them” (8). That is, even
the meaning of experience is controlled by discourses often unrecognized as such by an
individual. A rapist, for instance, might be experienced as criminal by some, and “just a
typical male” by others, but how many other ways are available to “read” the actions of a
rapist? It is difficult to control the range of meanings assigned to experience precisely
because of the available range of discourses to explain it. While it can be difficult to live
with contradictory subject positions, the multiplicity of available discourses has proven
ultimately liberating for women and others in American culture. As soon as the
contradictions are named, a resistance to hegemonic rule becomes possible. The
patriarchal hegemony may not be easily overthrown, but it will be altered, and, if Gramsci

was right, it will have to change to incorporate new discourses or face its own demise.

71

 

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3

Coming of Age in America

Weareborn, sotospeak,twiceover; born
into existence, and born into life; born a human
being and born a man.
Emile
Jean Jacques Romseau
“Coming of age” is an imprecise, romantic phrase evoking the period in life during
which a child is physiologically, sexually, morally, and socially transformed into an adult.
The bodily transformation is involuntary, of course, but when children reach a certain age,
nebulously defined as puberty, they are expected to gradually assume adult
responsibilities and interests. It suggests a process with no clear beginning or ending, and
is usually depicted nostalgically only in retrospect by an adult—adolescents themselves
rarely display a misty romantic view of their coming of age. In the United States there are
few—if any—universally celebrated rites of passage that specifically mark either the
beginning of the journey or its successful completion, although there are rituals that are
tied to specific communities and cultures, and most depend on class, gender, ethnicity and
historical location: quinceafleras, debutante balls, a first pint of stout, the completion of
formal schooling, a firstjob, marriage, parenthood. In some cases the markers are tied to a
specific chronological age, but parenthood, for instance, may be reached with full cultural
approval well before the agreed-upon age in another group. An individual of thirteen or
fourteen may, for instance, be confirmed in the church or bar/bas mitzvahed in the
synagogue, signifying the attainment of spiritual adulthood and the right to participate in
the institution’s most sacred religious rites—taking communion or reading the Torah. As

important as these rites of passage are, in the West no one milestone confers full adult
72

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status; children who are recognized as adults by their religious group are unlikely to be
considered adults in other ways such as sexually, economically, or politically.

The journey of adolescence is also a physiological process that gradually
transforms the body of a child into a sexually mature adult body, and while most social
scientists now believe that the nature of adolescence is a culturally specific phenomenon
unrelawd to the universal physiological changes, popular lore in the West still blames the
hormonal changes of puberty for the emotional upheavals of adolescence. In their
anthropological study of adolescence, Alice Schlegel and Herbert Barry III note that the
transition from girlhood to womanhood in many primitive societies necessitates little
change in status since girls are already working alongside their mothers performing the
sametasksandrolesthattheywill laterassume asadultwomen,adramatic contrastto
Western society’s mandate that children decisively differentiate fiom their parents quite
early in life (30). In societies where the collective is privileged over individualism, “the
struggle over individuation may be absent or slight” ( Schlegel 31), clearly indicating the
social construction of adolescence. J. M. Tanner writes that little has changed biologically
about adolescence for many generations, although those events occur at earlier ages than
they did only two or three generations ago. In 1932, a typical English girl would reach
menarche at age fifteen, whereas in 1972 the average age was thirteen (2). A 1997 study
found that the average age of menarche for US. girls is twelve; however, it is important
to remember that puberty and the development of secondary sexual characteristics
usually begins approximately two years before the first menses, so the changes we
associate with adolescence are occurring much earlier than the generally agreed upon age of
thirteen.’ Biological variations at the end of the twentieth century are primarily due to
genetic factors according to Tanner, forcing the examination of social and cultural factors

73

 

 

to understand and interpret differences in coming of age experiences.

But coming of age is more than milestone events, and physiological changes: in
the cliched literary terminology, it is the journey “from innocence to experience” that
language arts readers often thematize; in Joseph Campbell’s mythological formulation, it
is the death of the child’s personality followed by the rebirth of a responsible mature
adult, achieved through some trial (123); in the view of many psychologists, it is the
birth of moral and sexual consciousness; according to Jung, it is a “psychic birth” that
accompanies puberty (7). In short, coming of age is a complex of biological, cultural,
psychological, and political events and changes whose meaning is largely determined by
the expectations of the culture in which it takes place. And, although the bodily changes
that accompany adolescence are universal, the meaning of those changes is socially
articulated through discursive practices that serve to define and articulate the parameters
of adolescence. The adolescent body is thus disciplined and rendered docile, in Michel
Foucault’s terms, through the organization and regulation of daily life in space, time, and
movement.2 According to Susan Bordo, “the discipline and normalization of the female
body. . . . has to be acknowledged as an amazingly durable and flexible strategy of social
control” (14); for many adolescent females, the bodily changes of puberty result in a
restriction in freedom of movement as family and society strive to control their sexuality.

Western discourse of adolescence tends to paint it monolithically as a bittersweet
time when brutal truths about life must be learned, and when the pleasures of
(heterosexual) love are suddenly apparent and desirable. This narrative universalizes
experience by glossing over innumerable possible variations on the journey that affect the
epistemic location of an individual, and ultimately serves to erase difference fiom the

social landscape. Because women, minorities, and the poor traditionally have been

74

 

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excluded or pathologized in major discourses of adolescence—historical, psychological,
and literary— which described and valor-izcd white male experience, these exclusions must
be named and the pathologies denaturalized to reveal the tensions inherent in coming of
age narratives that do not fit the paradigm.

17:: Historical Account of Adolescence

The concept of adolescence as a distinct phase of life is usually attributed to
eighteenth-century phiIOSOpher Jean Jacques Rousseau, who first defined the period
between puberty and the attainment of full adult social status as a separate and valuable
stage of life in his 1780 philosophical romance, Emile. Arguing that the adolescent
“would be a very feeble man, but . . . a strong child” (128), Rousseau’s aim was to extend
childhood—and innocence— as long as possible. For Rousseau, adolescence was a
second birth characterized by moral and sexual anxiety that reaches resolution in
adulthood, as well as the emotional mood swings now commonly seen as markers of the
onset of puberty:

As the roaring of the waves precedes the tempest,‘so the murmur of
rising passions annomrces this tumultuous change; a suppressed
excitement warns us of the approaching danger. A change of temper,
frequent outbreaks of anger, a perpetual stirring of the mind, make the
child almost ungovemable. (172)

Rousseau claimed that early sexual experience caused yormg men to be cruel, obsessive,
and temperamental, whereas prolonged innocence allows nature to follow its preordained
course in creating a compassionate, loving adult (181-2). Removed fiom the corrupting
influence of society and cloistered in nature, the youth is then open to firlfill his biological
destiny of becoming a good man in Rousseau’s terms. “[A] youth of good birth, one who

75

 

 

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has preserved his innocence up to the age of twenty, is at that age the best, the most
generous, the most loving and lovable of men (182). For Rousseau then, the moral
development of an adolescent must precede sexual development; sexual knowledge and
experience rupture the lessons nature will teach if it left to work its magic. In other
words, the emotional nature of the adolescent creates the compassionate, empathic adult
Rousseau views as ideal.

In his monumental two-volume 1905 study, Adolescence, G. Stanley Hall,
“rediscovered” adolescence in the early twentieth century, and came to many of the same
conclusions as Rousseau. Assuming that the age-specific characteristics of adolescence
were behavioral extensions of physiological changes, Hall’s work is an interdisciplinary
study of the emotional turbulence that he sees as a consequence of the physiological
processesofpubertythatfinallyabateinearlyadulthood. Hehasarguedthat
adolescence is a universal feature of human development since he saw its characteristics
caused only by physiological events, an assertion that Margaret Mead, for one, attempted
to disprove through her study of adolescence in Samoa. In the introduction to her book,
Coming of Age in Samoa, Mead criticizes social theorists like Hall for overgeneralizing
about adolescents:

They observed the behaviour of adolescents in our society, noted down
the omnipresent and obvious symptoms of unrest, and announced these as
characteristics of the period. Mothers were warned that “daughters in
their teens” present special problems. This, said the theorists, is a difficult
period. The physical changes which are going on in the bodies of your
boys and girls have their definite psychological accompaniments. You can
no more evade one than you can the other; as your daughter’s body
changes fiorn the body ofa child to the body ofa woman, so inevitably
will her spirit change, and that stormily. The theorists looked about them
again at the adolescents in our civilization and repeated with great
conviction, “Yes, stormily.” (12)

76

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is difficult to miss Mead’s irony as she challenges the scientific methods of her fellow
cial theorists. In light of the calls in recent years to “anthropologize the West,“
fead’s articulation of the need to study “primitive” peoples seems simplistic and naive.
re argues that the central question of her Samoan research—“Are the disturbances which
:x our adolescents due to the nature of adolescence itself or to the civilisation?” (16) -—
tuld be answered more reliably through anthropological study of a vastly different
vilization, and that the study of a so-called “simple” society would reduce the number
’experimental variables.

Although Mead’s study has been criticized in recent years for drawing
inclusions unsupported by her own field notes, her conclusion that “adolescence is not
wessarily a time of stress and strain” (137) resonates today for several reasons pertinent
my purpose here. Because female development has long been held up to the normative
ale model and found wanting, the simple insight that any number of variables might alter
e paradigm is liberating. Secondly, although Mead saw her Samoan informants as
ilturally remote from American girls, and further exhibited a certain blind spot regarding
eir “primitive” simplicity, her basic conclusion is still instructive} If society views
iolescence as an inevitably turbulent period, it has more to do with cultural factors (and
rhaps self-fulfilling prophecies) than with the forces of biology. Hall’s view that the
use of adolescence is predetermined by the biological events of puberty is precisely
ialogous to the historically contemporaneous arguments that women’s lives will
aturally” be determined by their reproductive capacities. But whereas boys become
en, and hence theoretically fiee of their biological disturbances, girls become women
to will ever alter be slaves to their biological destiny. Thus, Hall and others created a
aster narrative of adolescence, characterizing it as a difficult and unhappy time for both

77

 

 

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the adolescent and society at large. The discourse of adolescence and womanhood alike
became rigidly codified through the increasingly “scientific” study of both groups by
people who were neither adolescents or women in a colonizing move similar to one
described by Edward Said in his 1978 book, Orientalism. Said traces the modern
colonization stratey to Napoleon’s 1798 invasion of Egypt, noting that instead of
plundering the conquered land in the manner of earlier colonizers, Napoleon brought
scientists fiom all disciplines to “take the measure” of Egypt and its people. Turning its
mastering gaze on the Egyptians, France studied the “other” in order to create a narrative
that justified colonization (80-87). Similarly, adolescents and women have been studied
and scrutinized by the gaze of men of intellect who presumed they understood both
groups better than members of the groups themselves, and ultimately asserted mastery
through scientific discourse that allowed them to define women and adolescents in
similarly negative terms. Just as there was no equivalent study of France by the
Egyptians, women (and adolescents) did not launch similar studies of men, a fact that
Virginia Woolf noted with some dismay in A Room of Her Own:

Have you any notion how many books are written about women in the
course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men?
Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the
universe? (26)

Before the systematic study of adolescence, and before the industrial revolution
changed American family life once and for all, the adolescent did not labor under the sort
of negative perceptions Margaret Mead describes. Adolescents provided considerable
and valuable labor to assist the functioning of family life, either by working within the
family or doing similar work for others. They assumed the responsibilities of marriage
and parenthood at a much earlier age than now considered desirable. According to David

78

 

 

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Bakan, the concept of adolescence emerged in America largely as a response to late
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century industrialization. Its principal purpose was to
lengthen childhood in order to allow sufficient preparation for work in the growing urban
industrial centers. The massive social and cultural changes wrought by industrialization
raised new concerns about how to manage the growing number of people who were no
longer children, but not yet legally adults. Bakan notes that three significant social
movements during this time period—mandatory public education, child labor laws, and a
separate set of legal procedures for adolescents—helped to consolidate and codify
adolescence as “the period of time between pubescence, a concrete biological occurrence,
and the ages specified by the law for compulsory education, employment, and criminal
procedure” (75). That is, legal definitions of who must go to school, who can work and
when, and who qualifies for merciful (juvenile) justice helped to bring adolescence forward
as a social reality.

Sustaining the idea of adolescence as it evolved historically, Bakan argues, has
been the implicit belief in what he calls “the promise,” which not incidentally echoes the
American dream: “. . . ifa young person does all the things he is ‘supposed to do’ during
his adolescence, he will then realize success, status, income, power, and so forth in his
adulthood” (83). lmplicitly, Arthur L. Stinchcombc agrees, arguing that rebellion and
alienation occur only in high school students who do not expect to gain socially or
materially as adults by conforming to the requirements of the lmstated social pact (49).
But alienation is not solely the province of marginalized people. The alienated white,
middle-class male became codified in American culture in the late 19508 with James
Dean’s Rebel Without a Cause; indeed, it could be argued that the foundation of 19605
disaffection with authority originated with the alienation of middle-class white males who

79

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consistently positioned themselves as outsiders to the so-called Establishment.

On closer examination, Bakan’s social compact could not reasonably be taken
seriously by girls until very recently; women’s status has changed considerably in the
past few decades, but a cursory look at the history of women’s lives in America would
certainly yield a different set of requirements leading to an entirely different definition of
success. Stinchcombc skirted the edge of recognizing the existence of at least two social
agreements when he noted in 1964 that high school girls were not as likely to rebel
because they saw marriage as a probable career (5-6). Revising Bakan’s universal promise
to suit the specificity of women’s lives might yield a culturally constructed understanding
thatifayormggirldoesallthethings she issupposedtododurirrgheradolescence, she
wiflflrenredizeasuccessfulmarfiagewaprospemusmmwhowfllprovideherwith
status, a house, children, and a reason for being. But on fin'ther analysis, this narrative
articulates the goals and aspirations of primarily middle-class white women. How does it
sound in the ears of, say, working-class women, or poor women whose status may
appear permanent, and who may view home ownership as beyond the realm of
possibility? What incentive is there for a nonwhite, nonmiddle-class individual to meet
thetermsofthe agreementthattheoretically guarantees success, butin reality operates
more like the proverbial carrot on the stick? The emptiness of the promise becomes
painfully clearassoonaswe shiftthecontextoutofsmalltownwhiteAmerica, since
tmtold numbers of people of color and women have faithfirlly carried out their end of the
bargain—done all they were ‘supposed to do’ to ensure the fulfillment of their fondest
dreams—and have been rewarded with disappointment. But broken social compacts do
not usually bring about revolutions, because the key phrase here, “If you do everything
you’re supposed to do, you’ll be successful,” suggests that any failure to attain the

80

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desired goals is the fault of the dreamer, not the dream—or indeed the entire social
structure which bases itself on the possibility of the drearn’s fulfillment. Those for
whom the dream does not materialize turn the blame inward, believing they somehow
failed to meet the terms ofthe agreement’ Those who know that there are highly
specific, but unstated, entrance requirements may doubt the validity of the promise, but
they are likely to be defined by society as too lazy or too focused on their victimimtion
to be successful, and thus are silenced. The requirements for adolescents are equally
lmspecified, and yet most adolescents are well aware of the criteria by which they will be
judged.

There is a similar problem with the gendered discourse of adolescence, which
typically has established a tenaciously normative model of adolescence; Rousseau’s
archetypal Emile is a male adolescent, and, except for one chapter on girls in an otherwise
minutely detailed study of adolescence, G. Stanley Hall’s paradign of adolescent
development is also male. Until the late 19605 and early 1970s, few psychologists, social
theorists, philosophers, anthropologists, or literary theorists understood that to describe
or theorize about a universal adolescence was to erase myriad variations on the theme in
favor of a normatively white, middle-class, male paradign. When feminist scholars began
to study women’s development in the seventies, new models and possibilities came to
light as the old paradigns were deconstructed, unpacked and challenged. And, when it
became apparent that many early feminist studies created a monolithic portrait of
oppressed womanhood meant to account for all women, later theorists sought to describe
the ways in which multiple factors such as ethnicity, class, sexuality, religion, temporal
and geographic location affect the experience of being ferrrale.‘5 The discourse of
psychology and the social sciences continues to profoundly afi‘ect cultural perceptions of

81

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adolescence, so while I believe that the tendency of these discourses to create grand
narratives obscrn'es difference, and enables society to categorize and thus master the
others, it is critical to define the contours of the master narrative in order to weaken its

hold on the social imagination.

Psychological Accounts of Adolescence

In Louise J. Kaplan’s wistful phrase, adolescence marks the “farewell to
childhood” as the child begins the journey to adulthood in earnest, gappling with issues
of identity, morality, and sexuality. Much psychological theory foundationalizes adult
personality and character through an examination of early childhood experience; in this
view,thesuccessfirlresolution oftheoedipalphase laysthe gormdwork foran
emotionally healthy adulthood as Freud defined it—later life events are determined by the
courseofthe oedipal sequence, and noneareascritical inthe formation ofpersonality.
The classical account of the female oedipal drama holds that the little girl learns that she
does not have a penis at about age three. Her automatic assumption is that she was
castrated, and thus is inferior. This “lack” injtn'es her self-esteem as she becomes
preoccupied with her imagined loss which she experiences as a wound. Since her mother
and otherwomenshareherlack,theybecome objectsofcontemptandthemother is
specifically blamed for the loss. The girl then rejects her mother—her first and primary
love object—andtmnstoherfathcrwho hastheprized appendage, and, she imagines,
might provide her with one as well. The girl begins to view her mother as a rival for her
father’s love, eventually wanting a baby instead of a penis from him. In Freudian theory,
the proper outcome of this sequence is a heterosexual orientation.7 Thus, an incomplete

or unresolved oedipal sequence is partly responsible for a girl’s inability to shift the locus

82

 
 

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of her sexuality away from the infantile preoccupation with the clitoris to what Freud
sees as me correct origin of a healthy female libido—the vagina (Three 614). Failing to
shifl into a sexuality that allows the female to become the object of sexual relations
creates problems for the female adolescent which continue into adulthood, giving rise, in
Freud’s view, to hysteria and other psychopathologies.

According to Nancy Chodorow, in her influential 1978 study, The Reproduction of
Mothering, the social organization of gender originates with the fact that, in our society,
womendothemothering,andthusraisedaughterswhocanandwishtomother,andsons
whose ability to nurture has been suppressed. Chodorow confirms Freud’s description
of the oedipal phase, but differs with his interpretation of its proper outcome. Whereas
Freud argued, for instance, that boys must reject their mothers in order to identify with
their Men, for Chodorow, this system leads to emotionally detached men and to
emotionally nurttu-ing women who are thus prepared for fixture mothering roles.
Furthermore, daughters feel less need to separate from their mothers than boys, leading to
more fluid ego boundaries and the tendency to define themselves in relation to others (93).
However, the valorization by feminists in several disciplines of the communal, relational
subjectivity described by Chodorow as the central characteristic of female development
ignores the cost of fluid ego boundaries and self-in—relation socialization. Lyn Mikel
Brown and Carol Gilligan argue that the cost is no less than the loss ofvoice and a strong
sense of selflrood; girls struggle between wanting what Brown and Gilligan term
“authentic relationship” and “fearing that if they voice their feelings and thoughts they
will jeopardize relationships” (176). The result is that girls struggle to trust what they
know from their lives against a social imperative to relinquish their selfhood in the interest
of cultivating relationship. In adolescence, then, girls struggle not to lose what they know

83

 

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from childhood, as their coming of age narratives movingly demonstrate. That is, acting to
preserve relationships improves girls’ social and cultural capital, but often results in a loss
of selfand voice because many girls fear the isolation that often accompanies a woman
who attends to her own wishes and feelings.

Chodorow’s concept of self-in-relation has proved useful in understanding and
reframing normal female development beyond the borders of her own discipline. Indeed,
her arguments are among the primary assertions that reopened the question of the value of
women’s texts which were once routinely dismissed because they were said to fail to
describe universal erqrerience. Feminist theorists used Chodorow’s insights to argue that
the universal experience was in fact code for male experience, although, it must be noted
that however useful it has been, her theory nonetheless reinscribes another master
nanative that also essentializes gender characteristics. In addition, Chodorow’s use of the
Freudian oedipal fiamework has been critiqued as a continuation of phallocentric theory
which many believe to be of limited use. And, as Kaplan notes, Freud’s revolutionary
emphasis on theories of early childhood has caused subsequent psychological theorizing
to obscure and even ignore the vast changes wrought by adolescence (15), in addition to
elisions of sexual, racial, and class difference.

Further, Freud’s assertions—that infantile desires and the eventual differentiation
from the mother are of primary importance in the development of healthy adult
personality—have led to a tacit assumption by many psychologists that the adolescent is
merely reenacting the earlier individuation from the mother, on a larger and more
permanent scale. But Chodorow argues that “mother and daughter maintain elements of
their primary relationship which means they feel alike in fundamental ways” (110),
resulting in less perceived need for daughters to separate from their mothers. Although

84

 

 

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this sameness seems to lead, in practice, to many adolescent girls’ desire to see
themselves as distinct and separate from their mothers, Chodorow views the fulfillment
of this desire as finally impossible, since girls are in fact raised by their mothers, who see
their daughters as essentially similar to themselves. Furthermore, the supposed
universality of the requirement that girls differentiate fiom their mothers is seriously
undermined when the relationships of nonwhite, nonmiddle—class families are examined.
Brown and Gilligan, in their 1992 study of adolescent girls at a Cleveland private school,
for example, found that the girls who were marginalized by color or class in the
predominantly white school often reported close relationships with their mothers in
which conflict was not feared, where both mother and daughter felt flee to voice a range of
feelings, which allowed “both mother and daughter [to] feel the power they have to affect
one another and thus the depths of their connection and love” (226). But this is not the
dominant view of mother-daughter relationships, and it remains on the margins of
mainstream psychological discourse, which retains significant traces of Freudian theory.
Few psychologists who write about female development are able to avoid
Freudian terminology, paradigms and biases. Peter Blos, for instance, argues that normal
female development calls for the adolescent girl to emotionally disengage from her mother,
and that this task can only be accomplished with the mother’s assistance and guidance.
Part of this desirable turn from the mother is accomplished by a new focus on
relationships with boys, which he describes as emotional, romantic, possessive and
envious. Some girls attempt to negate their inevitable feminine role by being tomboys or
by focusing on their studies, which Blos maintains is “counterbalanced by her turn to the
other sex.” Further, Blos claims that what girls achieve at this stage is not “genuine”

femininity because their relationship to boys is marked by aggression and possessiveness,

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and that “[t]hese infantile modes of object relation barely hide the narcissistic aspect of
her yeamings—narnely the need to find a sense of completeness through object
possession” (62). B105 fails to imagine both the possibility of positive and desirable
relationships between females in a variety of contexts, and the possibility that a girl might
find firlfillment in other spheres beyond the (hetero) sexual. And finally, Blos’s biases do
not allow for an analysis of the cultural context and ideological origins of the behavior he
describes as normal.

Attempting to redefine normal development, Erik Erikson argues that many
psychoanalytic theories about womanhood depend upon acceptance of the idea of genital
trauma, that moment when the girl suddenly realizes she does not have a penis, and never
will. This theory, according to Erikson is faulty because it exposes “truths especially
true under the circumstances created by the method” (274); that is, Erikson is suggesting
that there are inherent biases in the Freudian account which predispose its practitioners to
diagnose women’s development as problematic. Erikson argues instead for a paradigm
shift which creates a normative theory of female development that privileges the
psychological significance of what Erikson terms a “productive interior”:

This would allow, then, for a shift of theoretical emphasis fiom the loss of
anexternal organtoasenseofvital innerpotential; fi'omahateful
contempt for the mother to a solidarity with her and other women; fiom a
“passive” renunciation of male activity to the purposeful and competent
pru'suit of activities consonant with the possession of ovaries, a uterus,
andavagina; and fi'omamasochisticpleasm'einpaintoanabilitytostand
(andtounderstand)painasameaningfirlaspectofhumanexperiencein
general and of the feminine role in particular. (274-5)

Erikson’s assertions represent the beginning of the movement away fiom pathologizing
female psychology and mother/child relations taken up and legitimized by the women’s
movement. Although Erikson was unable to conceive of healthy female identity and

86

 

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development that did not include a woman’s eventual commitment to the “love of a
stranger and to the care to be given to his and her offspring” (265), the move away from
woman’s lack is an important one in psychological theory. More generally, Erikson
argued the destiny of any individual is a blend of anatomy, history, and personality—not,
as in Freud’s formulation for women, simply anatomy (285). Finally, as Joseph F. Kett
notes, Erikson sees identity formation as an “interchange between the individual and his
community, a process by which the community recognizes a young person as distinct
fiom other youth” (80), signaling another crucial move away fiom the self-absorbed,
interior and individualistic Freudian model of personality formation, one that prefigures
feminist theories of female psychology which have tended to emphasize communal and
collaborative models.

The mistake of most psychology theorists beginning with Freud, according to
Kaplan, lies in an overemphasis on sexual development as the determining factor of the
course of adolescence. Rather, Kaplan sees adolescence as a period in which humans
develop into socially, emotionally, morally and sexually mature individuals—a training
period, as it were, in preparation for the adult assumption of power in all its
manifestations. For Kaplan, as for many contemporary psychologists, neither biology,
nor society, nor experience will alone determine the self that emerges at the end of
adolescmce:

In human psychology the direction of causality is not linear. Past and
present overlap. Present conditions can and often do determine the effects
of the past. How much and in what ways the preconditions of infancy
and childhood will exert their influence on adulthood is largely contingent
on the solutions that emerge during the adolescent passage. (108)

The solutions that are available during any adolescence are largely dependent on the

discourses available to understand and/or resolve the past.
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Literary Accounts of Coming of Age

In literary history, the Bildungsroman, or novel of development, appeared at the
same historical moment as Rousseau’s Emile, reflecting the Enlightenment preoccupation
with the achievement of the autonomous individual. Originating in eighteenth-century
Germany with Goethe’s 1795 novel, Wilhelm Meister ’s Apprenticeship, the
Bildungsroman rested on a male paradigm of education and experience until well into the
twentieth century. A traditional Bildungsroman describes the journey of a sensitive boy
from childhood through his coming of age as an adult. Schooling is often depicted as a
stifling form of education in contrast to the value of educative experiences in the wider
world. Frequently, generational conflict develops between the protagonist and most of
the adults in his world, although there is often a mentor figure who helps usher the boy
into adulthood. The boy’s search for his true vocation is the outward manifestation of his
simultaneous search for selfhood, usually requiring him to leave his family and home at a
young age to find his own path as an individual. Moving fi'om a rural, protected home to
a dangerous urban setting brings about the most significant educational experiences of his
life, leading first to self-doubt, but ultimately to a reconciliation with the world as he finds
it. In adapting to the world and deciding upon his vocation, the protagonist finally comes
of age as a man.’

In defining the Bildungsroman, I have specified a male protagonist because the
tradition begins with a male model, and because the plot prototype simply does not
reflect the development of female protagonists until well into the twentieth century.
Joanna Russ notes that a major difficulty for women writers historically has been the
severe limitation on the number of plot patterns allotted to heroines; in much of

literattu'e, women figure instead as representations of social roles with little existence

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outside their social functions (4-5). As Elizabeth Abel et al. have observed, the
development of an individualistic, solitary figure rarely reflects the developmental path of
females. Novels depicting female coming of age diverge from the normatively male
Bildungsroman through different values and experiences in that “[t]he heroine’s
developmental course is more conflicted, less direct: separation tugs against the longing
for firsion and the heroine encounters the conviction that identity resides in intimate
relationships, especially those of early childhood” (10-1). Furthermore, the
Bildungsroman constitutes a European male modernist tradition emanating fiom
Enlightenment ideals of integrated universal selflrood and is “animated by a concern for
the whole man unfolding organically in all his complexity and richness” (Swales 14). The
word “organic” here is highly suggestive of Hegelian selfhood, achieved “by exclusion of
every other from itself. It takes its essential nature and absolute object to be Ego; and in
this immediacy, in this bare fact of its self-existence, it is individual. That which for it is
other stands as tmessential object, as object with the impress and character of negation”
(Hegel 231). This model of selflrood, although hegemonic in the Western literary
tradition, fails to reflect the lived realities of individuals who are not of white male
European background. As a model, it may fail to account for the developmental path of
individual white males as well, many of whom feel pressure to conform to the paradigm
regardless of need or desire, a point to which I will return shortly.

In the last twenty years, critics have routinely pronounced the traditional male
Bildungsroman dead; it is now commonly seen as an anachronistic genre that survives
only as parody in such novels as John Irving’s 1976 The World According to 6017). The
contemporary male Bildungsroman “denies the individual’s ability to achieve any sense
of personal identity and worth in an era of alienation from the society whose values in

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former times might have confirmed selflrood” (Braendlin 75), but female revisions of the
model demonstrate the continuing vitality of the genre, as well as an ongoing cultural
preoccupation with how identities emerge and evolve.9 Esther Kleinbord Labovitz argues
that the female Bildungsroman only appeared when Bildung was genuinely available to
women——“[w]hen cultural and social structures appeared to support women’s struggle
for independence, to go out into the world, engage in careers, in self-discovery and
fulfillment, the heroine in fiction began to reflect these changes” (7).

According to Abel et al., there are two main nanative patterns in the female
Bildrmgsroman: first, the chronological narrative of apprenticeship that most closely
resembles the traditional novel of development, and second, a narrative of significantly
delayed development which describes a heroine who might have initially fulfilled
traditional roles of wife and mother, but who then “awakens” to her own lack of self-
development and begins a process of self—discovery (11). Beyond structmal differences,
however, female Bildungsroman diverges significantly from the male model in terms of
thematic focus. As pioneering feminist literary critics such as Elaine Showalter and Jane
Tompkins reexamined fictional heroines through the lens of Bildungsroman, the definition
gradually evolved to refer to all experience, not simply education (Bildungsroman is
sometimes translated as “novel of education”), but they were unable, according to
Labovitz, to fit the prototypical quest motif into most female fictions of development
(245). Thus, Jane Eyre and Little Women are now often described as Bildungsromans
although they do not meet the traditional definition.’ ° Noting that it is traditional among
critics of Bildungsroman to revise the genre’s definition, Abel et al. have adapted the
original critical model to reflect a female path of development ( l 3). Annis Pratt’s work
with Jungian archetypes in women’s fiction, for instance, has been critical to the revision

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of the definition of Bildungsroman, as have studies by Barbara White and Rachel Blau du
Plessis, among others. The challenge remains to conceive of a genre flexible enough to
encompass various paths of development, and while feminist critics have succeeded in
recovering the Bildungsroman for female use, there is still a tendency to describe a one-
size-fits-all journey of development, one that ends up sounding as much like a grand
narrative as the earlier model.

Replacing one grand narrative with another is perhaps the result of recycling an
already-established literary form that restricts the norms of male development in the first
place, and has in any case proved entirely unsuitable to female narrative. If, as I believe,
the goal of liberatory critiques and literary practice is to release individuals from the
straight-jacket of culttual interpellation, perhaps the mold should be discarded. In my
view, twentieth-century American women’s autobiography has already parted ways with
traditional forms of autobiography and Bildungsroman, finding them to be unsatisfactory
models,andcreatedagenrethatlamdefiningasthecomingofagenanafive. Thisgenre
has its origins in the earlier genres, which developed side by side in eighteenth-century
Europe, and reflected the philosophical rise of individualism and the consolidation of the
liberal humanist subject. However, as Sandra F ricden notes, the lmes between
autobiography and Bildurtgsroman have been blurred in the latter part of the twentieth
century. As the idea of Truth has been challenged and even discarded, many
contemporary theorists assert that autobiography is simply a fiction created by the self.”
Fiction writers, in turn, now routinely blend their personal experience into purportedly
fictional narrative. The result is the effective end of traditional forms of autobiography,
for both female and male writers. Fricden points out that the moralizing tone found in
such canonical works as Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography is now nearly extinct, as

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autobiographers no longer “humbly portray their erring ways as a negative illustration nor
self-righteously present themselves as exemplary” (305).

While most of the texts I discuss in the next chapters are explicitly categorized as
autobiography or memoir, they also owe a debt to the Bildungsroman as it has been
reconceived in less modernist and more inclusive terms by women and minority writers of
the twentieth century. Braendlin claims the “new Bildungsroman asserts an identity
defined by the outsiders themselves or by their own cultures, not by the patriarchal
Anglo-American power structure” (75). Citing a renewed interest in the genre by
minority writers, Braendlin notes that a body of work now exists that reflects shifting or
variant ideologies of subject formation and rejects rigid generic bormdaries. The new
Bildrmgsroman, writes Braendlin, valorizes the epistemology of experience and the role of
community and self-in-relation as the primary influences on development (76-7).
Significantly, Braendlin defines the genre as a “more or less autobiographical novel,
reflecting an author’s desire to universalize personal experience in order to valorize
personal identity” (77).

Women’s coming of age narratives are structurally and ideologically descended
from the novel of development and the traditional autobiography in that, like the older
forms, the coming of age narrative privileges the autonomous individual who feels at odds
with society.12 But instead of following the development of a coherent universal subject,
the coming of age narrative is defiantly specific; rather than valorizing a social integration
that requires the partial denial or repression of the subject’s identity, these narratives
avoid the teleology of a unified self by constructing subjectivity as provisional. The
subjects of coming of age nanatives, like the Bildungsroman hero, construct themselves as

outsiders, but unlike him, they remain marginalized at the end of their texts. In the

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traditional Bildungsroman, the textual end of the hero’s journey also marks his re-
integration into society, but women’s coming of age narratives often refirse closure,
preferring instead an ambiguous textual ending that affirms the provisional nature of
identity. Smith and Watson note that the autobiography today is arguably the American
master narrative, and that it has grown out of earlier forms of life narratives—most
notably the Bildungsroman, but also diaries, letters, and oral forms used primarily by
marginalized groups (14), but I would amend their statement to argue it is the coming of
age narrative—female and male—that is the archetypal American nanative. If Smith and
Watson are correct, then we face the startling notion that most—if not all—Americans see
themselves as outsiders, an idea brought full circle by Susan Faludi’s 1999 book, Stwed,
which describes the deep sense of alienation felt by American men. Most of the men
Faludi interviewed believed “the promise” as it is formulated by Bakan; they fulfilled
their part of the social compact, doing everything society said they were “supposed” to
do, but the implied rewards of status, income, and success never came, resulting in
widespread alienation. The pattern of disillusionment and alienation from one’s
immediate and larger social conth is a defining feature of the coming of age narrative; it
is the quintessential outsider’s genre.

The disintegration of strict genre boundaries has resulted in fewer autobiographers
who position themselves and their experience as exemplary; men are as likely as women
to write their narratives in terms of their private selves. Indeed, the texts that purport to
tell exemplary lives today are often cynically regarded. Consider the de rigueur
presidential candidate autobiography that is invariably ghost-written and focused solely
on public achievement; personal hardship and private conflict are included only insofar as

they demonstrate the would-be president’s resiliency and moral fiber. Although these

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texts are commonly seen as rhetoric designed to make the candidate look appealing and
electable, they also provide perhaps the most transparent and self-conscious example of
the way in which an autobiographer (or the ghost writer) constructs an identity that
serves to portray the self in a specific light." These texts come the closest to replicating
the traditional autobiography in that they are intended to show an exemplary public life.
In contrast, the most critically acclaimed autobiographies by men in recent years
thematizetheprivatedramaofgrowingup,andareofienwrittenbyordinmy men.
Angela ’s Ashes was written by a man who grew up to be a public school teacher, and yet
Frank McCorn't’s memoir has been widely praised for its brutally honest portrayal of a
difficult childhood. The private and public realms have clearly blended to such a degree
that a domestic, private focus in personal narrative is now sanctioned and privileged even
for white males.

The Coming of Age Narma've

Traditionally, the grand narratives of coming of age for boys and girls differed
greatly, and while it may now be acceptable, even laudable, for male authors to construct
their lives in terms of relationship, the journey to manhood is still significantly different
from the journey to womanhood. A boy is still expected, for example, to separate himself
emotionally fi'om his family, especially his mother, while a girl is still expected to nurture
the emotional ties to her family of origin. These varying expectations result in detectable
differences in how men and women reconstruct childhood in coming of age narratives, just
as there are detectable differences in how boys and girls are socialized.l ’ The preeminent
autobiography theorist, Georges Gusdorf, argued that the ideology of individualism is
responsible for the cultrual phenomenon of autobiography; there is no autobiographical

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impulse in societies where there is no “conscious awareness of the singularity of each
individual life” (29). But as Susan Stanford Friedman and others have pointed out, this
theoretical model exhibits a masculine bias, and is flawed when applied to women and
minorities. First, it ignores the fact that society imposes a group identity on marginalized
individuals,andsecond, itdoesnottakeintoaccountthatidentity isconstructed
differently for men and women. Drawing on Chodorow’s theories, Friedman argues that
women’s sense of “identification, interdependence, and community” informs their
construction of selflrood (38), and finther, this collective identity informs the practice of
autobiographical writing by women. The differences in the ways boys and girls are
socialized also determines how men and women reconstruct childhood in coming of age
narratives.

Broadly (and ahistorically) speaking, the process of growing up for a boy means
increased independence from others and a heightened sense of his separate individuality.
For a girl, the process means initiation into the world of women, by which I mean that
becoming a woman signifies the attainment ofa mature understanding ofher relatedness to
other beings, especially other women. Manhood is associated with self-sufficiency, while
womanhood is associated with continuing interdependence. In some sense, this assertion
is merely a reflection of what our society accepts as natural: boys must repudiate their
mothers to become men, but girls must identify with their mothers to become women.
While I do not suggest that this is a necessary teleology, many coming of age narratives
reflect these norms, or if they do deviate, the resulting life is either tragic or pathological,
or both. The pervasiveness of this dynamic has not disappeared in recent years, but it is
nowmuchmorecommontofind female authorsthernatizingathirstforthewiderworld,

and male writers admitting a lingering attachment to home and family.’ 5 Significantly,

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instances of male authors writing about female coming of age, or vice versa, are rare.
Obviously, some writers do cross this line—Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D 'Urbervilles
comes to mind, as does William Faulkner’s The Sound and the F ury—but these are
relatively rare occurrences. Faulkner’s view of his tale of Caddy as “his finest failure” is
telling; he claimed that the narrative structure of the novel grew from his repeated
attempt to capture Caddy’s story, but it is significant that none of the four sections that
constitute the text etc written from her point of view." Caddy is doomed because she
isn’t “properly” socialized into womanhood; her mother is effectively unavailable to
Caddy as an agent for socialization or support. For Caddy there is no collective,
connected, self-in-relation—denied a nurtured, interconnected entrance into womanhood,
when she finds herself grown and without the support structure that membership in the

community of women provides, she is lost.

American Grand Narratives of Coming of Age

Before turning to a closer analysis of women’s coming of age nanatives, it will
useful to examine briefly several novels that illustrate the differences between male and
female constructions of childhood; each has been regarded as a grand nanative of
American coming of age, and at least unofficially regarded as required reading for
American adolescents. Little Women (1868), arguably the grand nanative of American
girlhood for generations, is an idealized version of Louisa May Alcott’s own childhood
that vividly illustrates how girls are socialized to be women, particularly through Alcott’s
fictional self, 10 March.‘ " As in the traditional Bildungsroman, Jo is eventually integrated
into the society with which she is at odds, but with the difference that Jo continues to

view herself as an outsider, even after she has accepted her place in the society of women.

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Alcott’s contemporary, Mark Twain produced the boys’ version of the archetypal
American coming of age narrative in 1884: Huckleberry Finn holds up the ideal of the
autonomous individual, morally at odds with society, who chooses solitude rather than
give in to a restrictive (and feminine) society. Huck Finn’s coming of age is the polar
opposite of Jo March’s journey; where she must relinquish her desires in order to claim
womanhood, Huck claims manhood by the assertion ofhis free will.l ‘ The hero of
Catcher in the Rye (1951), Holden Caulfield, like Huck F inn, appears at first to be the
archetypal (if profane) Bildungsroman hero, but he is ultimately betrayed by the path he
is socialized to follow. Like 10 March, Holden is an outsider, so although his background
is privileged, he constructs himself as marginal. The differences in the narrative outcomes
of these novels are highly suggestive of the potential power—and destructivencss—of
marginalization. Each of these narratives exemplifies the coming of age narrative, in that
they invert the conventions of traditional autobiography and Bildungsroman, creating a
hybrid subjectivity for its hero that implicitly critiques liberal humanist valorization of an
autonomous—and socially isolated— selthood.

Little Women teaches female readers the value of serving others and forgetting
themselves, of setting ambition aside for marriage and family, and of hiding their negative
feelings. But they also learn how a community of women nurtures one another, despite
women’s differences, through all of life’s passages. The central problem for 10 March in
becoming a woman is deciding how she will reconcile her unwomanly ambitions and
tendencies— that is, her claim to individualism as well as a public life—with the
immutable fact of her sex. Her resolution of this conflict and her reconciliation of
seemingly irreconcilable desires lies at the core of Little Women because Jo’s ambitions _

have nothing to do with fillfillment in the domestic sphere. Furthermore, the resolution

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will require Jo to relinquish her cherished role as hero, and turn herself into a heroine,
which, in Du Plessis’ terms, is “her last act as an individual agent.” According to Du
Plessis, quest and romance are mutually exclusive paths in the nineteenth-century novel,
and furthermore, social as well as literary convention pressure females to sunender their
quest for self (14). Meg characterizes Jo’s “castle in the air” as full of “nothing but
horses, inkstands, and novels. . .”; Jo wants to do “something heroic or wonderful that
won’t be forgotten after I'm dead. I don't know what, but I'm on the watch for it and mean
to astonish you all someday” (I 72). Jo’s conflicts are difficult because, of all the girls,
she is the farthest from the ideal. Her journey to little womanhood is fraught with
disappointments and bitter lessons, leaving Jo and her reader with the unmistakable
impression that becoming a woman is a series of compromises of one’s individuality—
and so it is. The novel resolves neatly because even ornery Jo finally accepts the role
society defines for her by story’s end, although she does manage to put her own imprint
on it. This struggle to find a definition of womanhood one can live with is a critical,
paradigmatic rite of passage for girls in twentieth-century coming of age narratives.
Brown and Gilligan’s study of young girls coming of age in contemporary America seems
to verify that the tensions and conflicts girls experience have changed only in specifics
since Alcott wrote Little Women:

Removing themselves fiom relationship, these girls struggle daily with
the seduction of the unattainable: to be all things to all people, to be
perfect girls and model women. As their new-found capacities for
abstract thought emerge, girls find it easier to disengage themselves
from relational conflicts altogether. (180)

Clearly, one of the central concerns of coming of age for girls continues to revolve around
balancing their own desires with those of others. For all the gains of feminism in the last

thirty years, girls apparently still feel they must shunt aside any needs, feelings or desires
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that seem to conflict with the cultural imperative to protect their relationships and to
nurture interdependence.

Jo refers to herself as “the man of the house” while her father serves in the Civil
War, introduces herself to Laurie as a “businessman—girl, I mean,” and generally bemoans
the great injustice in her fate in being born female. She is deeply disappointed in being
female, preferring instead to play all the swashbuckling, romantic male roles in the sisters’
homemade melodramas, and fancying the role of breadwinner for her genteel (but poor)
family. But as Joanna Russ reminds us, a woman who tries to fill a male role is lmtenable
in our culture, because she will be considered a failure as a woman (7). The idea of Jo
“providing” for her mother and sisters strikes most readers as faintly charming, but in the
main, absurd. The central action of the novel serves to socialize Jo to accept and
appreciate her place in a circle of women, forgoing the agency of the hero in favor of the
passivity of the heroine.1 9 In a culture with distinctly drawn roles for men and women, it
is critical for Jo to recognize and accept her womanly attributes if she is to be integrated
into society.

The first and most difficult fault Jo is asked to overcome is her wild temper.
Alcott writes that “[P]oor Jo tried desperately to be good, but her bosom enemy was
always ready to flare up and defeat her, and it took years of patient effort to subdue it”
(90). Jo’s lessons in repressing her anger come, as many others do, at her mother’s knee.
Having been angry for days at her youngest sister for burning a treasured manuscript, Jo
fails to warn Amy about thin ice when they are skating. When Amy falls through and
nearly drowns, Jo is tear-fully repentant for not forgiving Amy sooner, thus connecting
her anger to guilt. She calls her temper “savage,” and fears she will do great harm with it

someday; in other words, by feeling and voicing anger, Jo nearly kills her sister. As

99

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Judith Fetterley points out, “in the world of ‘little women,’ female anger is so
unacceptable that there are no degrees to it”; all anger has terrible consequences (3 80).
Furthermore, in order to maintain the nurturing firnction of women’s culture, each
member must keep the greater good of its community in mind at all times. Jo is never
completely successful in repressing her feelings (and readers applaud because her
expressed desire to “paddle her own canoe” is her most appealing characteristic), but with
the simple passage of time and the indoctrination she receives, she finds more socially
acceptable outlets for her sometimes unmanageable feelings. The preservation of the
“little sisterhood” of women is of paramount importance in the socialization of women,
and Jo is carefully taught to put it above her own individual desires. Although Jo has a
true vocation for writing, she is not concerned about whether her work fits standard
notions of what literature is. She simply must write. However, the action of the plot
pushes Jo to place her writing in its proper perspective——in a secondary position to her
place as a woman. Although Jo does not take her writing seriously, when she does write,
it consumes her. After a period of intense writing, Jo returns to the real world, cross and
hlmgry. Her art is not romanticized; it is literary “labors,” and eventually Jo concludes it
is not enough to sustain her. With Meg happily married, and Amy crooning blissfully
with Laurie, Jo is finally bothered by her solitude: “An old maid, that’s what I’m to be.
A literary spinster with a pen for a spouse, a family of stories for children, and twenty
years hence a morsel of fame, perhaps” (530). This is clearly an unhappy vision, for
despite Jo’s mother’s sermon to the contrary, it is apparently not all right to be an old
maid under any circumstances. Jo’s discomfort at the prospect of old maidhood
reinforces the notion that a little woman is happily and wisely married, which will allow

her to take part in the collective identity of womanhood. The advantage of a collective

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identity is that an individual is not isolated from others—she belongs somewhere, and her
identity is tied to that belonging. As much as Jo relishes her solitary episodes of writing,

they do not sustain her; she has been raised in the company of women, to work together
with other women to ensure their common good. As Nina Auerbach writes, “[tlhe
communities of women which have haunted our literary imagination from the beginning
are emblems of female self—sufficiency which create their own corporate reality, evoking
both wishes and fears” (5). Alcott’s March women are models of collaborative economic
and social self-sufficiency, and Little Women valorizes a socially connected model for
coming of age.

Huck Firm, in contrast, is almost completely alone in the world. His father is a
dnmk Who is in jail more often than not, and who kidnaps Huck in an attempt to take
control of the fortune Huck has earned with Tom Sawyer. If Huck has a mother, he does
not mention her. The Widow Douglas stands in as the civilizing and nurturing influence
of society in Huck’s life, a fact that Huck sometimes appreciates, but just as often finds
oppressive. Significantly, Huck is reasonably happy being cared for by the widow, as
long 33 he takes an occasional break fiem file structure of society by, say, sleeping
outside, or playing hooky fi'om school. It is ultimately the oppression endured at his
father’s hEnid, however, that finally drives Huck away fiom society down the Mississippi

River. But the myth of American identity, according to Nina Baym, “holds that, as
something artificial and secondary to human nature, society exerts an unmitigatedly
destructive pressure on individuality. . . . there is only one way to relate it to the
‘mdividnakm an adversary” (71). Thus, in order to discover his essential self, Huck
instinctively knows he should seek his destiny alone. And yet, by the end of the novel,

Huck is merely contemplating this move— “I reckon I got to light out for the Territory

[01

ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can’t
stand it” (245)—but he has not actually lefi. The text’s formation of Huck’s identity

shows him developing morally and socially in relation to others, with the runaway slave,

Jim, who serves as Huck’s surrogate mother, father, and community for most of the
novel. He knows he is expected to stand on his own in the world, yet he hesitates to
leave behind the comforts offered by human society.

An even starker contrast to Alcott’s mythic female path of development, The
Catcher in the Rye ’s Holden Caulfield could well be a twentieth-century incarnation of
Huck Finn. At age sixteen, Holden is alienated on many levels—from his peers, fi'om his
family, fi‘om society. Like The Adventures of Huckleberry F inn, The Catcher in the Rye
is not a perfect example of the paradigm of male individualism, since Holden clearly
suffers from a lack of connection to the world around him. He could use, in other words,
some sense of the collective identity the March girls enjoy. But he feels he should not
depend on anyone but himself because he has taken the cultural imperative for male self-
sufficiency to such an extreme level—before he is mature enough to be truly independent
—that he suffers a nervous breakdown.

Like Huck Firm, Holden Caulfield is clearly adrifi: he is failing four classes and is
about to be expelled fi'om the expensive prep school he attends. Instead of calling his

Parents for help and support, Holden decides it is time he toughed it out alone, since this
is “0‘ the first time he has been kicked out of a school. All aging teacher, Mr. Spencer,
nukes a half-hearted attempt to help Holden get his priorities in order, but this teacher
also immicitly accepts the notion that Holden must find his own way in the world,
without meaningful support. The only acceptable path to manhood involves asserting
one’s individuality against society, but as Holden proves, not all boys are able to

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successfully enact that rite of passage. He tries to enact his version of Huck Finn’s
paradigm by striking out for the “wildemess” of New York, on his own, and in doing so,
to complete his passage to manhood. Like Huck’s, Holden’s coming of age is finally
unsuccessful—he ends up in a mental institution, which, as we have seen, signifies his
inability to assume his assigned part in the common discourse.

Holden’s enactment of male coming of age falls short of the ideal because he is
unable to negotiate the terrain successfully. However, as an example of the way men are
expected to negotiate their passage to manhood, it provides a telling critique. Model
males are defined by solitary individualism, and The Catcher in the Rye does reflect the
cultural expectation tlmt boys must not create their identities in relation to others.
Indeed, Salinger appears to be critiquing this paradigm, since his protagonist suffers so
greatly from lack of relation to anyone or anything. The social path to manhood requires
that men all but cut ties to their parents, especially their mothers. If they fail to
individuate from their female parents, they are looked upon as failed men. Holden’s
desire for connectedness is seen in his making contact with his twelve-year sister, Phoebe,
while he plays at being grown-up. Borrowing money from Phoebe, Holden claims he is
going to strike out for the wilderness—the West—for real, but when Phoebe insists on
going with him, his unconscious purpose is lost. He will not grow to manhood (that is,
become self-sufficient) with his little sister at his side, and yet he cannot bring hirnselfto
leave her behind. Instead, he watches her ride the carousel in Central Park, and weeps
uncontrollably. He knows he is supposed cut this tie, and yet it is the only tether he has
to society. Holden’s inability to sever the connection to his sister effectively prevents
himfiomenactingflreriteofpassagehetacitly understandshe isexpectedtomake. In
contrast, we know the March girls have made it safely to womanhood when we see the

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petty squabbles and rivalry that informed their adolescent relations transformed into a
profound sense of interdependence upon each other. This dependence is not a negative;
rather, as Friedman notes, it is a siglificant source of support and validation. While the
rest of society devalues women, women value their relations with each other. As such,
they are countering with an alternative view of subjectivity from the dominant,
individualistic paradign.

Coming of age stories, then, depict the various degees of success with which their
protagonists negotiate the socially sanctioned paths for boys and girls to adulthood.
While Americans do not mark these rites of passage with formal ritual, there is
nonetheless a paradign that each child knows that he or she must enact (having been
taught it implicitly) in order to fulfill society’s definition of gendered adulthood. The
child who follows the path prescribed for members of the opposite sex faces social
approbation or even ostracization. Thus, many coming of age narratives confi'ont the
ways in which the subject, willingly or not, is gadually guided toward his or her
culturally ordained role in life.

If, as I am arguing, Little Women, Huck F inn, and The Catcher in the Rye constitute
gand narratives of coming of age in America, we might expect to see the same conflicts
and processes, as well as similar subjectivity construction, enacted in autobiogaphies.
Myra Jehlen argues that the novel “evolved to deal with the psychological and emotional
issues of a patriarchal society” (600), a point which is borne out in these three novels. In
Jehlen’s view, the interior life of the novel is female, even if the character in question is
male, so that Holden Caulfield’s struggle to assume a comfortable identity can be seen to
reflect the female side of his character. Further, she argues that there is a tragic element in
the novel, “a doomed encounter between the female self and the middle-class world”

104

(597), an apt description of Holden’s—and Huck’s dilemma. An androgynous identity,
according to Jehlen, is the prerogative of males in the traditional novel, allowing them to
act from their male side and feel from their female side (596), but Holden is unable to
perform the socially sanctioned script of masculinity by enacting his male side, siglifying
his pathological condition in terms of the normative masculinity of middle-class society.
Conversely, because she learns to deny her male side, Jo March is able to exercise the
only power available to her by accepting her place in the private realm of women. As
Jehlen correctly observes, the interior lives of women characters are a defining feature of
the novel, and any move by female characters toward public, exterior lives and action is
effectively extinguished in most novels; Jo’s fate in Little Women exemplary of this
nanative me

On the assumption that novels are more easily molded into tidy narratives
reflecting, consciously or not, various ideologies, I want to argue that the pressures Jehlen
observes in the novel also appear in female coming of age narratives, but the binary
opposition between exterior and interior is successfully resisted in these texts. Annie
Dillard, for instance, describes coming to consciousness as a dramatic event. Her nanative
of gearing up is nearly all interior, and based on that text alone, we cannot draw any
conclusions about her later ability to act in the public realm. Of course, the fact of
publishing at least one book (although she has published extensively) suggests that Dillard
is able to shifi between interior and exterior life as needed and, crucially, at will. Like
Alcott, Dillard wants to do something important when she is grown, but unlike Alcott,
who subsumed her own story of resistance and alternative subjectivity in favor of a
fictional marriage plot, Dillard’s nanative is labeled autobiogaphy, which necessarily
implies that she did indeed find the power to act in the public realm.

105

The limits of Jehlen’s formulation are immediately apparent, however, when it is
applied to a text that does not originate in the middle class. Anne Moody learns to
differentiate between her exterior and interior life at an early age, although this division is
not necessarily gendered; in her case, the opposition clearly arises from a racial awareness
that, in order to survive in a white world, her interior life must be suppressed. Moody’s
interior life, however, as related in her memoir, is rich with feeling and power, and indeed,
contra Jehlen’s assertion, she is able to harness the power of her interior life to enable
action in the public realm of the civil rights movement. As Watson argues, women and
other rrrarginalized groups learn “to conceal what power they do have to protect
themselves” (113), a strategy that is thematized in Moody’s text.

Although the privileged American coming of age narrative idealizes the solitary
individual at odds with a conformist society, canonical male narratives in fact reveal a
subtext that demonstrate the detrimental effects of the social isolationism encouraged by
the liberal humanist account of identity. In the final analysis, Huck Finn and Holden
Caulfield suffer from their lack of human connection, leaving only escape or madness as
narrative choices. The alternative female subjectivity described by Gilligan, Chodorow,
and others in which women construct their identities in relationship is, at this historic
moment‘s hegemonic ideology that does not take notice of women’s narratives that do
not conform to the dominant construction of female subjectivity. Conversely, because
the ideology of self-in-relation is ascribed solely to women, we ofien fail to recognize
when male narratives inscribe and privilege relationship. The American woman’s coming
of age narrative is not uniform in its performance of female identity; Anne Moody
constructs herself as an entirely autonomous individual with no need for relationship,

perhaps in part because she is disappointed repeatedly in her relationship with her

106

family, her community, and her nation. At the other end of the spectrum, Maxine Hong
Kingston’s identity originates almost completely in her relationships to the women in her
life. On the whole, these narratives insist on the specificity of human identity as it is
contextualized historically, socially, and culturally, and on the critical determining factor
of social relationships throughout history.

[07

4

Specifying American Girlhood:
Annie Dillard and Anne Moody

Power is the ability to take one’s place in
whatever discourse is essential to action and
the right to have one’s part matter.
Writing A Woman ’3 Life
Carolyn Heilbrrm
Unconcemed with representing an exemplary public life, the American woman’s
coming of age narrative dwells in the specificity of what Adrienne Rich has called the
“politics of location,” referring to the multiple subject positions held by every individual.1
As such, these texts resist the universalizing impulse to erase difference precisely because
it is difficult to discern any recurring patterns. But, as Clifford Geertz observes, the lack
of universality in a particular cultural text does not detract fi'om its ability to illuminate
significant features of the human condition (44). “To be human,” writes Geertz, “is not
to be Everyman; it is to be a particular kind of man, and of course, men differ” (53).
While his use of “man” and “Everyman” is dissonant in the context of my analysis of
women’s narratives, the principle is sound—and still radical, in spite of critical theory’s
preoccupation with difference over the past thirty years. Becoming a subject is a
complex, dynamic process with multiple determining factors, none of which guarantees a
stable identity. For Geertz, we “complete or finish ourselves through culture—and not
through culture in general, but through highly particular forms of it. . . .” (49). Paired with
Althusser’s conception of the social formations that he calls Ideological State
Apparatuses— schools, religion, family, politics, communications, and the arts (1 50)-

Geertz’s definition of culture, as a symbol system with a historical context by which
108

people create knowledge and assigl meaning, provides a usefirl framework for peeling
away the layers of history to articulate the multivalent individual life. Few, if any,
individuals will have equal access to all the “tools” of culture, and it is this variable that is
the foundation of difference within and across goups. Thus, it is not possible to draw
conclusions about what it means to come of age as a woman in America per se, given the
vast diversity of its people, but it is possible to limn the contours of particular pockets of
the culture through the study of individual accounts of coming of age, while resisting the
impulse, in Geertz’s words, “to take refuge in bloodless universals” (43).

Yet the impulse to universalize about experience is powerful and pervasive, as is
the tendency to treat experience as an unmediated producer of truth. In Chris Weedon’s
view, theory needs to problematize women’s experience by articulating the discursive
sources, and how they are implicated in material reality; for Weedon, naming the origins
of conflicting subjectivities unmasks the relations of power, which in turn opens up the
possibility for counter-hegemonic discourses to be heard (8). In feminist discourse,
essentializing practices have often been the result of well-meaning attempts to galvanize
women, whose dispersion across class, race, and other divides has made feminist political
solidarity such a difficult feat. At bottom, the creation of master narratives, regardless of
the source, is a form of what Linda Alcotf has called “speaking for others”; it is a
representation and interpretation of a life which is necessarily mediated by ideology
(“Problem” 9). Furthermore, for Alcoff, “the impetus to always be the speaker and to
speak in all situations must be seen for what it is: a desire for mastery and domination”
(24). But what if the master narrative is created by an individual whose social location is

on the margins?

[09

Specifying the Universal in An American Childhood

Although it would be overstating the case to assert that Annie Dillard is
aggessively speaking for others in an attempt to master and dominate, her 1987 memoir,
An American Childhood, fiequently lapses into universalizing statements, starting with a
title that evokes archetypes and immediately positions her text as representing all
American childhoods. And yet, the use of the indefinite article ‘an’ siglals a particular
childhood that is attached to a larger unified narrative of American-ness. The ambiguity
of Dillard’s title is reflected in the text itself as the narrative voice shifts hear the
particular to the universal. Dillard occupies a social location which has historically
rendered itself as normative; that is, she is a white, upper middle class, Protestant—and
female. Only byvirtueofhersexcansheclairn social marginalization, butbyand large,
she makes no such claim. Rather, I want to argue that Dillard is attempting to claim
membership in the pantheon of the literary coming of age canon which has traditionally
excluded women’s journeys from contributing anything to the illumination of American
culture. As Tillie Olsen observes, in male literary criticism, “women writers, women’s
experience, and literature written by women are by definition minor. (Mailer will not
gant even the minor: ‘the one thing a writer has to have is balls’)” (47—8). The g'ounds
for women’s exclusion typically were cast in terms of the purportedly trivial and highly
specified content of women’s lives. The archetypal coming of age passage has been
canonized as male, as I discussed in the previous chapter, but here, Dillard ofien erases
sexual and other difference through frequent lapses fi'om first-person into second- and
third-person narrative. Moving the narrative focalizer away from explicit identification
with a specific narrator—Dillard—to a universal ‘you’ or ‘the child,’ this technique
disrupts the nanative flow and works to erase differences between Dillard and other

110

individuals. Since most of the narrative does describe a historically contextualized
embodied, class-, sex-, ethnic-, and race-specific individual life, it is productive to ask
what purpose is served by these textual departures. The first such passage occurs only
eleven pages into An American Childhood:

Children ten years old wake and find themselves here, discover themselves
to have been here all along; is this sad? They wake like sleepwalkers, in
full stride; they wake like people brought back from cardiac arrest or from
drowning: in medias res, surrounded by familiar people and objects,
equipped with a hundred skills. They know the neighborhood, they can
read and write English, they are old hands at the commonplace mysteries,
and yet they feel themselves to have just stepped off the boat, just
converged with their bodies. just flown down from a trance, to lodge in an
eerily familiar life already under way. (11)

By shifting the narrative point of view, albeit briefly, to a gand narrative of childhood,
Dillard suggests that her own coming of age is much like everyone else’s regardless of
time, place, race, sex, class, or any one of dozens of subject positions. Though this move
may be read as universalizing, it is subverted by the text's pervasive suggestions of
marginalization and resistance. Jill Ker Conway argues that “[m]emoirs full of abrupt
transitions and shifting narrative styles are sure sigls that their authors are struggling to
overcome the cultural taboos that define [them] as witnesses rather than actor’s in life’s
events” (88). While I would agee that these shifts do signal narrative tension, I read them
instead as evidence that Dillard is claiming a position as definer and creator of identity.
She is philosophizing rather than universalizing, and thus the textual ‘lapses’ into an
apparent third-person master narrative in An American Childhood are in fact Dillard’s
meditations on the meaning of life. Her philosophy throughout the memoir echoes
Martin Heidegger’s notion of being ‘thrown’ or projected into existence, or, as Dillard

puts it, in medias res. Thus, we are projected into a specific set of social circumstances,

1]]

already in place, a constant of human existence, according to Heidegger.

The passages that depart fiem first-person narrative are revealing as, ironically,
they can be read as pointers to textual silences, in Macherey’s terms, which implicitly
convey the ideological underpinnings of the narrative. Macherey argues that “[w]hat is
important in the work is what it does not say," and furthermore, "what it cannot say is
important because there the elaboration of the utterance is acted out. . .” (87). Strictly
speaking, the second- and third-person nanative sections are not silences, but nonetheless
they function as silences that are productive of readerly questions. What Dillard seems to
be unable to say is that her narrative has value without referencing the universal; in other
words, she has implicitly accepted the notion that a cultural narrative must be universal to
be of value in illuminating the human condition. As Heilbrun points out, there are “many
moving [autobiogaphies] of women, but they are painful, the price is high, the anxiety
intense, because there is no script to follow, no story betraying how one is to act, let
alone any alternative stories” (39). An American Childhood is an important text precisely
because it does reveal the specificity of a particular cultural formation, regardless of the
relative privilege of Dillard's position, and as such, it is an attempt at creating an
alternative way of writing the narrative of a life. But this attempt is not without its price,
as Heilbrrm suggests, and as Dillard’s use of third-person narration attests.

Immediately following the passage quoted above, the narrative returns to a first-
person narration that serves to restate the subtext of the previous passage by specifying;
that is, Dillard uses her own experience as a way of testing the philosophical theory she is
developing throughout the text:

I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered
myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again. I woke
at intervals until, by that September when Father went down the river, the
intervals of waking tipped the scales, and I was more oflen awake than

I 12

not. I noticed this process of waking, and predicted with terrifying logic
that one of these years not far away I would be awake continuously and
never slip back, and never be free of myself again. (11).

The first-person narrative is deeply concerned with the meaning of a life, so Dillard’s
reconstruction of her childhood, far from generalized, is carefully located in a specific
historic location where she constructs herself as an outsider due to her specific childhood
interests, viewpoints, and preoccupations.

The central metaphor for coming of age in An American Chiltflrood is that of a
Sleepwalker who gradually awakens, an image Dillard deploys most consistently in the
second- and third-person narrative passages throughout the text, which serves to
authorize her interpretation of her life. To write that she, Annie, awakened bit by bit
does not carry as much cultural weight as to assert that “all” children come to
consciousness in this way, thus firrther revealing a certain authorial anxiety. For Dillard,
awakening means to become aware and conscious of self, the world of the senses, and
most powerfully, to the contradictory, even hypocritical, moral universe of adults. In
Heidegger’s view, this awakening is tantamount to Da-sein, which is marked by the fact
that “in its being this being is concerned about its very being” (I 0). In other words, the
state of existence, for Heidegger, is characterized by an acute self-consciousness of one’s
place in the world (what feminists might call self-in-relation) as well as one’s mortality.
Arguing that the process of coming to consciousness is achieved without effort or conflict
(though not without pain), Dillard writes:

Like any child, I slipped into myself perfectly fitted, as a diver meets her
reflection in a pool. Her fingertips enter the fingertips on the water, her
wrists slide up her arms. The diver wraps herself in her reflection wholly,
sealing it at the toes, and wears it as she climbs rising fi'om the pool, and
ever after. (I I)

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As Sidonie Smith has argued, Dillard seems to be positing an identical “suit of skin and
suit of self" which assumes an unconflicted and fixed subjectivity (Subjectivio; 132). The
possibility of a bad fit is not acknowledged here as Dillard’s metaphor invokes a coherent
and unified identity, which raises the question, as Seyla Benhabib writes, of “how [a]
finite, embodied creature constitute[s] into a coherent narrative those episodes of choice
and limitation, agency and suffering, initiative and dependence” (161), and which is
precisely the problem Dillard struggles with in her narrative. Despite her claim of a
comfortable sense of identity, Dillard’s memoir reveals numerous sites of contestation
between herself and society. Contradictions to the image of a perfectly fitted selfhood are
simply present in the text, but unacknowledged as such, again because the imperative to
present a coherent self is pervasive in Western society. While this image does call upon
liberal humanist notions of self by invoking a generic description of childhood, Dillard
also actively challenges the separation of mind and body so central to liberal thought.

The body’s tactile and sensory experiences—and the knowledge produced by
those experiences— are critical to her growing self-awareness as she frequently reads the
text of her life through the body, which helps to determine the meaning she assigns to her
experience. Of course, the body’s response is not the only mediator of meaning, as the
discursive signifying practices of her specific historical location contribute to her
interpretation of her own experience as well, a point I will develop shortly. lmplicitly,
Dillard recognizes that the body is capable of transmitting and receiving knowledge, and
she attends carefirlly to the clues it gives. Slipping into second-person narration, Dillard
describes how she “knows” her neighborhood: “It was your whole body that knew those
sidewalks and streets”(104), thus suggesting that her knowledge of the city extends

beyond the cognitive recognition of street names and embeds itself in her very body,

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which she suggests is true for “you” too. Dillard is positing a body capable of knowing
the streets and the landscape, in the same way our bodies know our signatures without
cognitive assistance. And because our bodies know certain things, so we, as beings made
up of body and mind, know things. Dillard sees her body working in concert with her
mind as a means to know and understand, and thus makes a profoundly anti-humanist
argument. “Knowledge,” she writes, “wasn’t a body, or a tree, but instead air, or space,
or being— whatever pervaded, whatever never ended and fitted into the smallest cracks
and the widest space between stars” (107; emphasis added).

The body is also capable of showing and using its knowledge in Dillard’s text.
Feeling the “inexpressible joy” and “the gratitude of the ten—year-old who wakes to her
own energy” (107-8), Dillard begins to run down a sidewalk in Pittsburgh as fast as she
can: “I knew well that people could not fly—as well as anyone knows it—but I also
knew the kicker: that, as the books put it, with faith all things are possible” (107).
Having noticed a physical dissipation and calming of this “inexpressible joy” as each day
wore on, she decides that for once she wants “to let it rip” (108). Running, then, down
the sidewalk, for blocks and blocks, arms flapping, heart pounding, lungs burning, Dillard
is ‘flying’ at last, though her feet never leave the ground. From this extremely physical
moment, she comes to know her own capacity to “let it rip” in every sense without
fearing looking foolish in others eyes. She has tested her own capacity for boldness
through a bodily act, and in doing so, she acknowledges that her body is inextricable from
her mind in the process of knowing.

The materiality of life is foregrormded early in An American Chilcflrood, when
Dillard asserts in the first chapter that the foundation of her identity is in part determined
by the topology of her geographical location. To tell the story of her childhood, she

115

“anthropologizes” her self by means of a distancing, third-person narrative “thick
description” whose purpose is to make sense of a elliptical, contradictory social context.2
Her physical exploration and experience of her home, her neighborhood, and Pittsburgh at
large, as well the ideologies contained in those sites, is explicitly acknowledged in the text
as significant determinants of Dillard’s subjectivity, and these details mitigate any
universalizing by grounding the narrative in place. Throughout An American Chilcflrood,
the history and geography of Pittsburgh are tied to the development of her subjectivity?

A child is asleep. Her private life unwinds inside her skin and skull; only
as she sheds childhood, first one decade and then another, can she locate
the actual, historical stream, see the setting of her dreaming private
life—the nation, the city, the neighborhood, the house where the family
lives—as an actual project underway, a project living people willed, and
made well or failed, and are still making, herself among them. (74).

If coming of age is an intensive period during which an individual begins to make sense of
the cultural “webs of significance” that contextualize subjectivity, and the individual
strands of that web exert their ever more powerful pressure on the formation of
subjectivity, then the influence of the “historical stream” can be distinguished as one of
many determining factors of subjectivity. Here again, echoes of Heidegger’s notion that
we are “thrown” into history can help us situate Dillard’s philosophical musings as
radically anti-liberal humanist, for although she is again using the universal third-person
narrator, she is arguing that humans are contextual beings whose identity and
consciousness as beings arises in recognition of the social context into which life projects
them. Following Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer claims that before we consciously
come to know ourselves, we first “understand ourselves in a self-evident way in the
family, society, and state in which we live” (276), and it is this assertion that we see

Dillard making in the passage above. Moreover, for Gadamer, we are owned by tradition

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long before we own it ourselves. While Gadamer defines authority (which I read as
“hegemony”) as “that which has been sanctioned by tradition and custom” (280), I
understand it to be the discursive formations, social practices—the “historical stream” in
Dillard’s words—and the particular history that has been handed down. In other words,
no discourse or practice emerges fully formed from thin air; rather, it is a constantly
evolving formation, influenced by other discourses and practices that are also constantly
shifting. For Geertz, the web is composed of words, gestures, visual information, sounds,
and objects, which are used to make sense of lived experience. Broadly defined, these
“significant symbols” are the discursive practices in circulation at a given moment in a
specific culture when individuals are born, which they will use throughout their lives “to
put a construction upon the events through which [they live]” (45). But the meaning
attached to these symbols is variable across and within cultures, their meanings
continually revised and adapted. Consequently, the meaning of experience cannot be
fixed, but rather is fluid and provisional.

In the growth of children into adulthood, the lack of fixed meaning is most clearly
evident in the changing interpretation given to various constants of life4 —parents,
religion or education—as we grow older, and although Western culture, alter Hegel, tends
to view adult identity (or essence) as fixed, the evolution of meanings assigned to these
constants continues throughout life. At one level, Annie Dillard provides evidence for
this claim through a detailed explication of her childhood view of adult skin, which she
saw as a “defect” and viewed, at least in retrospect, as evidence of adults’ ongoing
physical degeneration in contrast to the “wholeness” and “absence of decrepitude” in
children's bodies (24). But the evolution of her viewpoint brings her to the realization
that adult beauty, when it had been displayed, was earned, and constitutes evidence of

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adult power. Echoing Gadamer’s notion that we belong to history before it belongs to us,
Dillard realizes that “[w]e could not, finally, discount the fact that in some sense they
owned us, and they owned the world” (24; emphasis added). Despite this overwhelming
evidence of adult power, Dillard takes pride in the specific instances of power wielded by
her parents: her mother’s beauty, her father’s tallness, their wit and splendor. She hopes
other adults are as awed by their superiority as she is. But of course this view changes as
Dillard enters adolescence, when she will scrutinize her parents for any hint of weakness
or hypocrisy.

Deconstructing wholeness is key in the process of coming of age. From a
psychological perspective, wholeness or coherence comes under scrutiny in adolescence
as the assumptions of childhood are questioned; according to Kagan, “the resulting
incompatibility [of old assumptions and new perspectives] is resolved by delegitirnizing
the earlier assumption” (96). A common example of this evolution in thought is that a
child’s unquestioning belief in the goodness of God is challenged in early adolescence by
the realization that there is great pain and suffering in the world. Instead of rationalizing
ways in which a benevolent deity might co—exist with a suffering world, the adolescent is
just as likely to reject any belief in God. Faced with a paradoxical world, the adolescent
has no choice but to leave behind the simpler perceptions of childhood, and find ways to
reconcile earlier assumptions with new perceptions. Ideology of childhood in the latter
part of the twentieth century holds that childhood is a time of innocence, precisely
because a child’s world-view is believed to be coherent. As Weedon writes, the practice
of seeing ourselves as coherent subjects begins in early childhood; “[w]e learn that, as
rational individuals, we should be non-contradictory and in control of the meaning of our

lives” (76). The loss of a unified world-view—and by implication, a unified self—is

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constructed as a negative, so coming of age is widely viewed as bittersweet; indeed, a
cornerstone of psychological theory holds that the healthy individual possesses a unified
personality (Erikson 92). Furthermore, as Norman Holland argues, the reader “will have
different ways of making the text into an experience with a coherence and significance that
satisfies” (816), but when the text thwarts that desire for narrative coherence—as drese
coming of age narratives so often do— the reader also experiences the alienation of a
fragmented identification. And yet it is precisely this identification with the fiagmented
sense of self common in women’s coming of age narratives that have made them so
powerful in shifting dominant ideologies of womanhood. That which was a “problem
with no name” was gradually named and articulated in complex detail, and while new
ideologies can be as restrictive as the old ones, it has become difficult in this postmodern
age to accept uncritically the notion of a unitary subjectivity.

Annie Dillard describes paradigmatic shifts in understanding that occur throughout
her adolescence, which are part of the process of self-examination that Gadamer claims is
necessary to attain self-knowledge; indeed, these shifts are a distinguishing feature of
coming of age in America. No longer accepting the received tradition unproblematically,
the adolescent is on a quest to understand the world through her own eyes. As a child,
Dillard loves church and believes passionately in God; as an adolescent, she notices that
her parents never attend church—they drop her off and pick her up, signaling to Dillard
their unforgivable hypocrisy. Contrasting the materialism of the wealthy Presbyterian
church and its fur-clad congregation with the simplicity of Christ’s radically anti-
materialist life and message, Dillard rejects religion entirely, even writing a formal letter of
resignation to her pastor, noting that she “knew enough Bible to damn these people to
hell, citing chapter and verse” (196). Church is also the site that finally codifies class and

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gender difference for Dillard. Realizing that a random event of birth is the ticket of
admission to her church—and to life—Dillard defines birthright as the families and
institutions that constitute the individual. She realizes that she cannot escape the
ideology that gives her a privileged position while others are unfairly excluded, although
she tries to distance herself from her own privilege by aligning herself on the side of the
excluded. Her pastor’s radio ministry brings in letters of admiration from “Alaskan
lumbeljacks and fishermen. The poor saps. What if one of them, a lumbeljack, showed
up in Pittsburgh wearing a lumberjack shirt and actually tried to enter the church building?
Maybe the ushers were really bouncers” (195).

By virtue of her birth, Dillard is interpellated by a specific set of what Althusser
would clearly see as Ideological State Apparatuses—here, an upper class Presbyterian
church and all its related organizations and institutions. Though Dillard is socialized to
accept her privilege, she recognizes the absence of fairness or rightrness in her unearned
inheritance of privilege. Her insight that others are excluded from those sites by virtue of
their dg'fierent social location results in a deep disillusionment which the adult Dillard
reads as a loss of innocence. The loss is signified most clearly by her anger and her
rejection of her family’s values. Of course, the rejection is without teeth as she is
powerless to remove herself fiem her church, family, school, neighborhood, or city. She
can only wait, restlessly, until she can leave home. It is unlikely she will, in the end,
completely reject the values with which she was raised, but she is undergoing a fairly
classic process of moral development, leading presumably to some reconciliation between
her radical rejection of those values with those she is trying on for size. As Kagan writes,
events and thoughts that do not mesh with one’s assumptions “provoke the mirnd to

resolve the uncertainty and, through that work, premises are changed” (96).

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Though Dillard does not explicitly claim a marginal status, and indeed, seems
rather to claim the center through her title and her use of a narrative voice that
unproblematically assigns mythic meaning to higlnly specific experience, the coherent
surface is frequently shattered in moments that hint at outsider-status despite her
relatively privileged position. The most sustained evidence of the lack of complete
narrative coherence are the passages that deal with Dillard’s growing awareness of boys.
Through the new lenses puberty provides for her, a previously known quantity, boys,
become mysteriously powerful.‘ At ten, Dillard is sent to dancing school where both
boys and girls wear white cotton gloves: “Only with the greatest of effort could I
sometimes feel, or fancy I felt, the warmth of a boy’s hand—through his glove and my
glove—on my right palm” (89). The warmth, imagined or real, of the boys’ hands is
related to her burgeoning interest in the opposite sex and her attempts to understand how
they are different fiem girls. Inexplicably, the boys have changed as has the girls’ attitude
toward them. Later, Dillard realizes that “the boys had been in the process of becoming
responsible members of an actual and moral world we small-minded arnd fast-talking girls
had never heard of” (91 ). While it is unlikely that Dillard, at fifteen, articulated her
interpretation of the boys’ social position in quite this way, in the process of
constructing her coming of age narrative she realizes that while she had been exploring,
dreaming, and attending to her interior life, her male peers were preparing to ascend to
their rightful position of power and authority.

Dillard notes that she had assumed the boys shared both her dreams and values. A
romantic, she dreamed of playing professional baseball, or exploring the Himalayas and
she believed all children, including boys, had the same kinds of dreams. Not only did
Dillard fail to realize that few girls were likely to fulfill many of the dreams she had, but

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the boys of her peer group were not dreaming these sorts of dreams either. Instead,
“[t]hey must have krnown, those little boys, that they would inherit corporate Pittsburgh,
as indeed they have. They must have known that it was theirs by rights as boys, a real
world, about which they had best start becoming informed” (92). The temporal aspect of
Dillard’s observation suggests that this insight is something constructed in the process of
writing the memoir rather than something the child subject understood explicitly. Unlike
Dillard, her male peers apparently recognized themselves as they were hailed as subjects
by the ideologies of Pittsburgh’s ruling class. By contrast, the girls were “vigilantes of
the trivial” who never thought twice about the world outside school, family, and country
clubs (91), a description that profoundly echoes Friedan’s definition of the “feminine
mystique.” According to Friedan, American signifying practices in the late 1940s and
1950s consistently and persistently placed women and girls in the domestic sphere while
simultaneously discouraging feminine interest in the world beyond. In her 1997 memoir,
Wait Till Next Year, historian Doris Kearns Goodwin writes that in the years after World
War H, the president of Mills College (a school for women) was arguing that higher
education was irrelevant to their certain firture of marriage and motherhood, and further,
might actually make them unhappy with their domestic roles (73). Surrounded by
messages that told them that marriage and motherhood were all they needed to be content,
middle-class white housewives were often unable to even name the source of their
discontent.6 Though Dillard comes to recognize the terms of her interpellation, she does
not recognize herself as the subject beirng hailed, and thus is able to tnrrn away.

The passage in which Dillard compares the futnue of boys with that of girls,
quoted above, is another instance of third-person narration in which Dillard distances her

own voice again, but this time to soften the anger that is actually hers. She is not

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speaking for all girls everywhere here, nor is she even speaking for all the girls in her own
1950s Pittsburgh peer goup; she is speaking for herself Elsewhere, she explicitly
acknowledges this move.7 Moreover, the narrative time is cloudy in this section, making
it difficult to discern exactly when Dillard consciously recognizes the disparity of choices
available to males and females in her world. Again, it seems unlikely that she could
articulate the outlines of ideology quite so clearly at fifteen, but elsewhere in the text she
refers to the blinding rage that marks her adolescence (158). At some level, she
urnderstood that her options were limited by her sex, whereas the boys were somehow
being prepared for important roles involving the exercise of agency and power. She also
realizes that she (but here too she writes in the third-person “we” and “the girls”) is being
prepared for something, and looks to what her parents count as important for clues about
exactly what sort of life she is expected to assume when she reaches adultlnood. “It was
something, however, that ballroom dancing obliquely prepared us for, just as, we were
told, the study of Latin would obliquely prepare us for something else, also unspecified”
(91). Realizing that she was being prepared for an unwanted and unspecified future with
Latin class and ballroom dancing, Dillard rebels to such a degee that her parents decide to
send her younger sister away to boarding school when she reaches age thirteen, rather
than cope with two adolescents in one house. She has recognized that she is not an
autonomous agent, that there are invisible forces constructing her life agairnst her will. In
Altlnusserian terms, Dillard is being interpellated by the specific ideologies in circulation
while she is coming of age. However, Dillard does not entirely recognize herself as she is
being called into being; the material reality of her existence is, of course, familiar to her,
but she is caught off-guard when she realizes that tlnese material practices are prodding her

irnto a highly structured subjectivity. As Belsey points out, the ideologies in circulation at

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any given historical moment are always contradictory, but again, that very inconsistency
provides the window of opportunity for change (45).

Turning her gaze upon the adults that surround her, Dillard is confronted with
men who, in her view, were bewildered by their families and who “seemed to be looking
around to the entrance to some other life” (194). She sees the women coping, raising their
children alone, and wasting little time; they are the volunteers that keep the Ideological
State Apparatuses afloat. But occasionally, some of these women went “carefully wild,”
and Dillard reads this behavior as the overflow of suffering that could no longer be
contained. Everywhere confronted with evidence of women’s constricted lives, Dillard
identifies with males; in church, she assumes the boys are as outraged as she is by what
she sees as blatant hypocrisy. She is bewildered to discover that the boys are indeed
praying earnestly in church, and they are not at all disdainfirl of tlneir surroundings. Still,
the altemative—identifying with females—is even less attractive. Since books are
Dillard’s primary source of information about the wider world, she takes her cues from
them, and they, almost without exception, valorize the activity of males. “No page of
any book described housework, and no one mentioned it; it didn’t exist” (216).
lmplicitly, women do not exist either.

Often, girls who love to play baseball and football or who want to cure cancer, as
Dillard did, are told by at least one significant adult that these are inappropriate pursuits
for girls. But this scene was apparently not played out in Dillard’s childhood; her
parents left her to her own pursuits and did not dampen her many entlnusiasms by
steering her toward play that would also, ostensibly, prepare her for the same firture
which requires a background in bdlroom dancing and Latin. Perhaps this accounts for the
fnrry with which Dillard hurls herself through adolescence; she disapproves of “most

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things in North America” (222), which are, of course, the moral ideologies of adults who
are imperceptibly but surely pressing and molding their children into highly specific roles.
Dillard’s anger gives rise to a volatility which even she realizes makes people flinch;
“[b]lack hatred clogged my very blood. I couldn’t peep, I couldn’t wiggle or blink; my
blood was too mad to flow” (224).

Furious with her parents and her entire culture because of their hidden agenda for
her life, Dillard feels the loss that accompanies crushed dreams. No one had told her that
her horizons were limited, and she had dreamed freely and unselfconsciously throughout
her childhood, nmaware of the limitations she faced. As Williams writes, contra
Altlnusser, determining limits must be overcome in the imagination before social change
takes place, and imagination is, in fact, the key to agency (86). Grief constitutes the
meaning of adolescence for Dillard, which is predictably determined by the discourses
surrounding coming of age:

So this was adolescence. Is this how the people around me had died on
their feet—inevitably, helplessly? Perhaps their own selves eclipsed the
sun for so many years the world shriveled around them, and when at last
their inescapable orbits passed through these dark egoistic years it was too
late, they had adjusted. (224)

For Dillard, adulthood, and particularly womanhood, means a shnmken horizon and fixed
borders, even a livirng death. As Heilbrun notes, the ideals of “safety and closure” for
women “are not places of adventure, or experience, or life” (20). Dillard constructs
childhood as a time when selfhood is unfettered by adult limitations, but because the child
self is still focused on her own image of wholeness, she does not notice when the world
begins to shrink around her. By the time her ego shifts the self away fi'om center stage,
she has already passed through g'ief and accepted what she cannot change. Loss of world

is a defining feature of Dillard’s adolescence, and although she enjoys a high degee of

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material privilege and social acceptance, she feels entirely alienated from her social
surroundings. Perhaps it could be argued that Dillard fails to read the signs of ideology
while she is growing up, and thus suffers great disillusionment when she realizes she is
being goomed to marry someone who will inherit Pittsburgh, rather than becorrning an
agent in her own right. Perhaps she suspects her story will end, as Du Plessis has it, as
soon as she accepts a man in the standard romance plot, and she is reluctant take a step
that, conventionally, requires her to relinquish her agency (8). Certainly, she perceives
discursive practices as conspiring to interpellate her, depriving her of the exercise of tlne
flee will guaranteed by humanist discourse. But, after Foucault, I would argue that the
notion of free will is at least partly illusory, given the power of language and discursive
practices to fix the individual socially, and furtlnermore, it is Dillard’s perception that she
is being interpellated that enables her to resist. That is, if ideology must be invisible to
work effectively, its failure to incorporate Dillard’s interests explains her ability to
question the dominant narrative of white American womanhood.

On closer inspection, it is clear that Dillard has been exposed to oppositional or
counter-hegemonic discourses all along. Indeed, the late 1950s and early 1960s of
Dillard’s adolescence constitute a transitional moment in the social roles of American
women, especially those who were white and middle class. In 1963, during Dillard’s last
year of high school, Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, which articulated
the discoth of women who otherwise seemed quite privileged. Dillard’s memoir does
not mention the then-nascent women’s movement, but as a discourse beginning to enter
the mainstream, it constitutes one of Gramsci’s “traces of history” that fail to leave an
inventory on individuals. Nonetheless, as Said argues, it is critical to take such an

irnventory in order to adequately articulate subjectivity (25). Thus, as a historical

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subject, Dillard cannot avoid being affected, perhaps unconsciously, by the discourse of
feminism. Although the words “feminism” and “women’s movement” appear nowhere in
An American Chiltfllood, there is substantial evidence of the oppositional discourses
available to Dillard as she was growing up. Her mother introduces surprising, even radical
ideas to counter the dominant ideology of womanhood. For irnstance, she teaches her
daughters how to curtsy, an indispensable sign of good breeding—and she teaches them
how to play poker. A small enough gesture, but powerfirl in its contradiction of the
discourses of girlhood in that social location. More critically, her mother’s “energy and
intelligencesuitedherforageaterroleinalargerarena. . .thantheoneshehad. . . . She
saw how things should be run, but she had nothing to run but our household . . . . She
was Samson in chains” (115). Confined to a socially sanctioned womanhood, Dillard’s
mother has a nearly classic case of “the problem with no name,” Friedan’s ironic
definition of the discontent of educated white housewives, but the example of her
intelligence and rmusable abilities is not lost on her daughter. An American Chi/mod
tacitly recognizes the sexism that keeps Dillard’s mother from operating on a larger stage
than her own home. While the nineteenth-century options of marriage or death for a
heroirne were losing their gip on the American imagination, what was left at that historical
moment was either marriage—or not. The marriage option is knowable and clear, but its
opposite is ratlner murky. The assumption that marriage will occur in Dillard’s white,
upper-middle class, Protestant milieu is so strong, even for Dillard’s mother, that it seems
unnecessary to even mention it. Marriage is a transparent fact of life here, as is the right
of males to inherit social power. The transitional moment is signaled variously however;
marriage is not so sacred or serious, for instance, that Dillard’s mother feels constrained

fi'om engaging in playful hazing of her daughters’ suitors. Nonetheless, the same motlner

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who teaches by example that “[t]orpid conformity was a kind of sin” is part of the
conspiracy to channel her daughter into a way of life that Dillard objects to on moral
grounds as an adolescent.

In Du Plessis’s terms, the source of Dillard’s angst lies in the conflict that results
when the female hero faces the incompatibility of romance (marriage) and quest in
women’s fiction arnd lives Nineteenth-century women’s fiction concluded with the
termination of quest, either through marriage or death, but Du Plessis argues that in the
twentieth century, women writers developed an “array of narrative strategies . . .
explicitly to delegitimate romance plots” (3). In Dillard’s memoir, which is profoundly
concerned with quest for self and vocation, the narrative ends before a choice between
romance and quest must be made. And yet, the act of textually “authoring” her life
symbolically reveals Dillard’s rejection of tlne heroine’s sacrifice of quest, as well as her
resolve to reinvent womanhood for herself. The final pages reinscribe Dillard’s social and
geogaphic milieu, and invoke the cultural myths that contextualize her implicit decision
to pursue quest—American culture, she learns from her father, is “Dixieland pure and
simple” (252). It is a stock market crash, a World’s Fair, Harlem, the Dust Bowl, P.T.
Barnum, and Jim Thorpe, but “[a]bove all, it was the man who wandered unencumbered
by family ties”-—.lohnny Appleseed, Daniel Boone, whalerman, the gandy dancer, “Huck
Finn lighting out for the territories; and Jack Kerouac on the road” (253). As Morwenna
Griffiths points out, “imagining you are anyone who counts in history tends to mean
imagining you are a boy” (25). The mythic models Dillard invokes are exclusively male,
but Dillard rejects the one-to-one correspondence; at the end of An American Chiltflzood,
she makes it clear that her intention is to light out for the territories too. Having situated

and geunded herself geogaphically, the territory she seeks is, of course, not only a

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geogaphical one, but one that will allow her to continue the quest begun in childhood,
which she understands she is expected give up as she matures. Unwilling to do so, Dillard
recalls her father’s own quest: quitting the family business to follow a long-held dream,
then buying a boat and sailing for New Orleans to seek the Dixieland music he loved. He
never arrived, too lonesome and too fearful of what people at home were saying to
complete his journey. But as she prepares to leave home for college, Dillard wonders if
her father still tlninks of himself in the way she did, “as the man who had cut out of town
arnd headed. . . down the river toward New Orleans” (254). Her father’s apparent loss of
quest, symbolized by his love of loud Dixieland jazz, is signified by Dillard’s speculation
that“[i]f ithadeverbeen atall, ithadbeenbeena longtime since Fatherhadheard the
music played loud enough,” and finally she wonders if the “music” will be loud enough in
her own life to suit her passionate quest (254-5).

While implying that she will not subsume self in romance, Dillard makes no
parallel suggestion that quest and romance are incompatible. In the same breath with
which she contemplates becoming a medical missionary to the Amazon, Dillard thinks she
will marry the current love of her life, and in this way suggests that she is writing her own
life beyond the either/or dichotomy of quest and romance. Taking a both/and view, she
resists the female social trajectory prescribed in the l950s and 60s for women of her race
and class, and thus challenges the social arnd cultural construction of gender. As I have
already said, Dillard’s social marginalization is strictly gender-based, but for her, the
oppression of self occasioned by that factor alone is enough to create resistance. As a
child, her resistance takes the form of unfocused, powerless anger which in turn leads her
to push the cultural limits through such behaviors as drag racing and quitting church. As
Heilbnm has observed, “[tJhe expression of anger has always been a terrible hurdle in

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women’s personal progress” (25). Rarely taken seriously, female anger is shrugged off as
evidence of woman’s irrational nature. In Dillard’s case, this problem is compounded by
her age: as an adolescent, she is taken seriously by no one except herself. Dillard’s
rebellion against social limitations is thus diffused, while discourses on adolescence
simultaneously offer her parents the explanation that she is “just being a teenager” so
there is nothing permanent or valuable in her desires. No one, not even Dillard herself,
apparently understands the source of her rage. The traditional Bildungsroman is also
characterized by the protagonist’s rage and alienation from society, but unlike the earlier
genre, An American Childhood ends without the conventional social reconciliation.
Indeed, a defining characteristic of tlne American woman’s coming of age narrative is the in
medias res ending which suggests that identity and subjectivity are not achieved once and

for all when maturity is reached. The journey is never finished.

Hegemonic Inscription of the Body in Coming of Age in Mississippi

Annie Dillard imagines that coming of age is like “slipping into your skin perfectly
fitted,” which suggests that adolescence is a time for coalescing selflnood and identity into
a comfortably unified whole, though her text belies that assertion. The choice of
metaphor is telling irn that Dillard enjoys a degee of social acceptance and integation not
shared by all, so although she deploys the image as a universal dreary of identity, closer
arnalysis reveals it is a highly specific construct. As I have argued, Dillard’s universalizing
move seems to erase difference in coming of age experiences and fails to account for
alternate discursive patterns that constitute subjectivities along a range of practices. But
the flaw in Dillard’s metaphor of perfectly fitted skin is immediately apparent when the
discourse of race is added, and indeed, the metaphor is not particularly apt for Dillard

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either. Nonetheless, the “skin” of society is constructed to the specificity of white
experience, so clearly, Dillard will experience whiteness as a transparent, gound zero
norm against which the other is measured, but she rarely recognizes race as a critical
aspect of her own subject position.’ In contrast, Anne Moody did not have the luxury
of forgetting race. In her 1969 autobiography, Coming of Age in Mississippi, she enacts a
reversal of Dillard’s erasure of race, instead privileging racial discourse arid practices as
the primary origin of her identity. Where Dillard can delight in her ability as a child to
shift from conscious awareness to oblivion, Moody can only recall being painfirlly aware
from a very early age, with no respite item the harsh realities of the external world.

It is almost a cliche in the scholarship on women’s lives that women’s
contributions have been overlooked, undervalued, and systematically suppressed by the
dominant culture. The time and place seem to make no difference— it is simply a given
that in almost every era, arena, and culture, the significance of women’s contributions has
been systematically erased. The American civil rights movement of tire 50s and 605 is no
exception; the drive for equality for African Americans was apparently led by Martins,
Malcolrns, Stokelys, Hueys and Bobbys. The only woman many Americans associate
with the Civil Rights movement is Rosa Parks, but the mytlnology surrounding her actions
claims an almost accidental quality to her activism—Parks was just too tired the day she
refused to yield her bus seat to a white passenger. The myth erases the reality of Parks’
political activism long before that day in 1955, and further, the fact that plans for a
massive boycott of Montgomery’s segregated public transportation system were already
in place. Parks was no political innocent, but received notions of women as apolitical
carry far more cultural weight than the reality of women’s lives, and as a result, the
significance of Rosa Parks’ contributions have been largely lmdervalued.

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Indeed, the contributions of Afiican American women to the struggle for civil
rights have only been seriously studied in mainstream scholarship in the last fifteen to
twenty years. Crucially, this body of scholarship has established the long and proud
tradition of black women’s activism, which has taken many creative and powerful forms,
and fnrrtlner demonstrates that, far fiom being peripheral to the movement of racial uplift,
black women have been at the very center of activism since the nineteenth century.
Charles Payne puts it plainly: “Men Led, But Women Organized.” Payne notes that
“historically, black women have always fulfilled social roles not commonly played by
women in white society. . . .” (2). Combined with the widely held stereotypes of black
womanhood, the dominant narrative of Afiican American activism has historically erased
black women’s presence. But recent history and cultural investigations demonstrate
repeatedly that African American women have been organizers and activists for as long as
they have been in America.9 It may have been men who got the media attention, but it
was women like Ella Baker who was irnstrumental in foundirng SNCC, setting policy and
establishing a notably antibureaucratic and antihierarchical organization that attracted
volunteers regardless of their status (Payne 3). And it was women like Anne Moody,
who might have remained an anonymous foot soldier in the Civil Rights movement had
she not written Coming of Age in Mississippi, in which the most critical stance is that of
resistance to external definitions.

Moody both accepts and rejects the subjectivity imposed on her by whites as
well as blacks, and, as Gramsci argues, that conflicted stance helps maintain hegemony’s
dominance. But as we know, in the time that Anne Moody comes of age, American
blacks begarn to successfirlly shift the hegemony. For a time, American whites were able

to maintain their dominant position over blacks through a paternalistic discourse that

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constructed blacks as childlike, ignorant, and unable to provide for their own well-being.
As a result, white ideology reasoned, black interests would be best served through the
fulfillment of subservient roles—in this way, black material needs would be provided for,
and, not incidentally, white material desire for economic and social dominance would be
maintained. White hegemony, in the final analysis, failed to maintain itself because it
failed to adequately incorporate black interests. It failed because its view of black
material and bodily needs (jobs with adequate pay, decent clothes, shelter and food, and
so on) did not mesh well with blacks’ material and bodily desires. The contradiction that
confronted blacks was the disparity between white society’s claim that it was looking out
for and taking care of blacks’ needs, and the actual lived reality which showed blacks quite
clearly that their interests were of trifling concern to the hegemonic order. With the
recognition of those contradictions came the impetus for creating a powerful counter-
hegemonic force which ultimately forced a reconfiguration of American hegemony.
Further, counterhegemonic discourse gained hold because people like Anne Moody
recognized the contradictions of the white definition of black subjectivity, and did so in
large measure due to the pressures placed upon their bodies. Few would argue that
hegemony in this country is still overwhelmingly white. But by successfully forging
alliances with members of other groups devalued by hegemony because of their
association with the body—the youth, whose bodies were associated with sex, the
soldiers and conscientious objectors, whose bodies were exploited as cannon fodder, and
women, whose bodies were associated primarily with reproduction—blacks were able to
significantly shift white hegemony by forming a coherent historic bloc which forged a
major change, in part by publicly challenging the hegemonic valuation of its members as
bodies.

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Moody does not foreground gender as constitutive of identity, in part because
liberal discourse allows for only one defining feature of subjectivity. Thus, her text most
often valorizes the category of race, but gender may be the central origin of the text.
Indeed, given the prominent role played by black men and the mostly unseen work
performed by women in the civil rights movement, I would argue that the text exists in
part to counter the unspoken assumption that a civil rights worker is always a black man.
As bell hooks has argued, radical black males involved in the movement, such as Martin
Luther King, Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and Amira Baraka “all argued that is it is
absolutely necessary for black men to relegate black women to a subordinate position
both in the political sphere and in home life,” thus reproducing the model of white
patriarchy (94—95). And Michele Wallace remembers that “[i]t took me three years to
fillly understand that Stokely was serious when he said my position in the movement was
‘prone,’ tlnree years to understand that the countless speeches that all began ‘the Black
man. . .’ did not include me” (“Black Feminist” 6).

As an African American female coming of age during the heyday of the civil rights
movement, Moody attempts to draw on discourses other than those of race as she moves
to claim agency in constructing her own identity, and though she actively resists the
ideology that constructs her primarily as a body, she is inexorably drawn to the
discourses she is explicitly rejecting. Coming of Age in Mississippi fits squarely ill the
Afiican American slave narrative tradition, a genre that found new utility during the Civil
Rights movement for reasons remarkably similar to those that gave rise to the tradition iii
the eighteenth century: a continuing need to demonstrate the structural inequalities in
American society by means of detailing the sometimes horrific and usually degrading
personal experiences gave rise to such texts as Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised

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Land (l 965), and Alex Haley’s I964 rendering of The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
Much as the slave narratives did more than a century before, these new narratives worked
to convince the nation that the horrors of racism were untenable, particularly in a society
that proclaimed its dedication the ideal that “all men are created equal.” The civil rights-
era memoir, of which Moody’s is exemplar, dispenses with the peripheral documentation
used to authenticate the testimony of the slave narrative itself, but retains the literary
conventions specific to the rhetorical purpose of effecting social change.1 0 In particular,
the latter-day narrative details the material deprivations experienced in childhood; the lure
of crime or promiscuity; accounts of maltreatrnent— physical and emotional—by
whites; the barriers to higher education, which is seen as the best hope of escaping
poverty and oppression; a description of how the author “escaped” the bonds placed
upon him or her by the dominant white society. The closing pages of civil rights-era
memoirs contain reflections by authors on the narrow ‘escape’ made fi'om the debased
existence that doom Afiican Americans to unending poverty, crime, and ignorance,
accompanied by dire predictions for the future if racism is not conquered. Sometimes the
memoirist owes his redemption to an outside force— Elijah Muharnmed for Malcolm
X—but fiequently the texts suggest that the authors “made it out” of the ghetto or the
sharecropper’s shack through the exercise of their independent fiee will. For Anne
Moody there was no Elijah Muharnmed; only a rare teacher offering quiet encouragement
to resist white hegemony. In most instances, Moody writes that she was actively
discouraged fi'om resistance by both family and commrmity members.

Portraying herself thus as a solitary individual at odds with both black and white
society, Moody constructs an identity of protest which serves as the lens by which she

attempts to articulate a coherent subjectivity. The civil rights movement provided an

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outlet for Moody’s anger over social injustices, but ultimately, the movement could not
address the underlying issues of hegemonic discourses of black womanhood. Like the
slave narrators of the nineteenth century, Moody escaped the conditions she was born
into, but, urnlike them, she sees little hope for change by the end of her memoir. Published
when Moody was just 29 years old, Coming of Age in Mississippi aflirms the courage and
centrality of women in the movement, but also raises several critical issues. Specifically,
Moody’s representation of her life begs the question: How does an individual find the
personal courage arnd power to resist a dominant culture that systemically devalues and
denigates her existence? Althougln she is unable to completely rid herself of the
constitutive power of racial discourses, Moody’s text illustrates Foucault’s assertion that
power is never just a function of a repressive state apparatus. Foucault argues that
individuals assent to power because it “doesn’t only weigh on us as a force that says no,
but it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms krnowledge, produces
discourse” (“T ruth” 61). In the historical context of segegated Mississippi ill the era of
Jim Crow law, Foucault’s argument can help us to understand how Anne Moody (and
many thousands more) stopped assenting to white power. Quite simply, white
hegemony functioned primarily as a repressive force in relation to African Americans that
failed to reproduce itself by adequately incorporating black interests.

Born to a family of poor sharecroppers, Moody begins to question her assigned
place irn life at an early age, despite the often overt hostility of whites and despite her
family’s attempts to force her to accept her place. In an environment that valued black
women primarily as domestic workers and sexual objects, Anne Moody pushed herself to
scholastic achievement, economic self-sufficiency and a sense of self-worth with little

support or encouragement, even fiom her own family. In a milieu that produced fear and

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hatred of any black who did not know her place as the white community defined it,
Moody found extraordinary courage in the face of geat personal danger to devote her
considerable intelligence and energy to the civil rights movement. Rewarded neither by
appreciation fiom her own community, nor even by a measure of tire fame won by black
male leaders, Moody’s passionate dedication to the cause of civil rights might be seen to
defy expectation. Autobiography presents an opportunity for the subject to construct
herself, consciously and unconsciously, so in order to understand how Moody finds the
power to resist external self-definition, we need to examine how she constructs her
identity. As Sidonie Smith has argued, the self created by the autobiogapher isn’t “an a
priori essence, a spontaneous and therefore ‘true’ presence, but rather a cultural and
linguistic ‘fiction’ constituted through historical ideologies of selfhood and the processes
of [our] storytelling. . . . As a result, autobiography becomes both the process and the
product of assigning meaning to a series of experiences, after they have taken place, by
means of emphasis, juxtaposition, commentary, arid omission” (Poetics 45). Thus, to
answer my central question about how Moody is able to resist her powerfirl social
‘hailing’ as a black female, it will be helpful to examine the way in which Moody
implicitly theorizes subjectivity in relation to the workings of power and hegemony,
which, irn order to reproduce themselves, must necessarily create spaces of resistance.

Gramsci’s theory of hegemony rewrites the simple opposition of dominant and
subordinate classes, making the workings of coercion and consent operative in subtle but
important ways. For Gramsci, the concept of hegemony needs to be paired with that of
domination. Consent and force are nearly always employed in concert, although usually
one or the other is the main means for achieving dominance. But in practice, most

dominant goups do not simply achieve that status by creating and perpetuating what

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would be for them a desirable symbolic order; they must also convince subordinate
groups to subject themselves to the hegemonic social order by incorporating the interests
of the non-hegemonic. Consent to that order might mean that subordinate groups are
fervent adherents to the hegemonic, even if their best interests are not necessarily being
served by that order. But that individuals might agee to an order which does not have
their best interests in mind is evidence of the power of ideology and the conflicted nature
of human subjectivity." On a conscious level, individuals might recognize that their
desires are invalidated by the dominant discourse, but they are still capable of social
practices which implicitly reinforce the hegemonic. Furthermore, this conflicted
subjectivity helps hegemony to maintain its status, because if a historic bloc is able to
articulate the contradictions of its existence, it is then in a position to mount a serious
challenge to the form and content of the hegemonic (Gramsci 167). Thus, it is in the
interest of the dominant order to smooth over social contradictions, altlnough it is a
delicate balance; if the contradictions become too obvious, then historical blocs can
become counterhegemonic forces which might then become revolutionary forces.

While most theorizing about the workings of hegemony focuses on ways that
consent is gained by the promulgation of a worldview passed off as truths, I am arguing,
after Foucault, that hegemonic discourse does not merely work on people’s minds—it
exerts pressures on their bodies as well. After the abolition of slavery, white hegemony
shifted fiom the use of force as the sole means of maintaining donrinance to a more subtle
emphasis on securing the consent of American blacks to remain in their subordinate social
position. In Althusserian terms, abolition necessitated a move fionr Repressive State
Apparatuses to the ideological ones already in position. This is not to igrore the

historical fact of widespread lynching, which clearly has no consensual component.

1 38

Describing the years that Anne Moody was coming of age, C. Vann Woodward writes
that Mississippi had stubbomly resisted implementing Brown v. Board of Education as
well as other efforts to dismantle segregation, and that resistance became increasingly
violent as the 1960s began (173-5). Violent coercion continued to play a significant role
in the domination of American blacks after the end of slavery, but with the advent of legal
protections, it became necessary for whites to secure the implicit consent of blacks to
white social hierarchies.’2 The disconuse of dominant whites in the American south
remained essentially the same as it had been in slavery: blacks are best suited for manual
labor," are lazy, are oversexed, are igrorant, are, in a word, irnferior.

Against this public backdrop, however, are the invisible social structures that
either support or reject individual members of a group. Patricia Hill Collins and others
have described the strong network of support that a community of black women often
provides, which usually nurtures various strategies of survival, resistance, and activism
(141-2). And yet Anne Moody seems to have enjoyed no such network of support. She
describes her mother as beaten down by too many children, inconstant men, and the need
to work long hours in white people’s homes; Moody views her mother as unsupportive,
and thereby implicitly challenges the narrative of womanhood proposed by Chodorow,
Gilligan and others, which argues that women create their identities in relationship with
others. While it is absurd to suggest that Moody’s subjectivity is created autonomously
and in isolation, I want to argue that, by highlighting her social and cultural alienation,
Moody is adapting the gand narrative of the autonomous individual in an attempt to aligr
herself with “universal” American values. This move has its origin in the slave narrative
tradition, but produces a paradoxical effect: in the process of persuading others that she

is worthy of full citizenship and the right to define herself as human, she must detach

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herself from relationships with others in order to prove her worthiness. Indeed, Moody
alienates, or is alienated by, nearly every individual she comes into contact with, white or
black. In her representation of self, Moody’s construction of her identity of protest is
similar to Richard Wright’s in his 1944 memoir, Black Boy. Both Wright and Moody
position themselves in opposition to everyone—whites, of course, but also family
members and the larger black community. While Wright and Moody are deeply angy
with whites, both reserve their deepest scorn for blacks who, in Wright’s words, “make
subservience an automatic part of [their] behavior” (I96). Knowing that the culture
expects them to act subservient or go without work, neither Moody nor Wright can bring
themselves to play the game of dissembling. Here too, Moody (and Wright) adapts the
discourse of rugged individualisnr, which does not admit a need for ongoing relationships
with other human beings or a need for assistance as the individual climbs to success.
Coming of A ge in Mississippi recounts numerous scenes depicting the life of
Afiican Americans under Jim Crow, including one that gave Moody her allotted fifteen
minutes of fame, as a press photo of her was prominently featured in the national media.
As part of a CORE (Congress On Racial Equality) protest, Moody and several others sat
down at a segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter in Jackson, Mississippi and asked to be
served. The white waitresses refused, then fled when the press descended on the store
and began to ask the protesters what they hoped to gain. White high school students
surrounded Moody and the others, chanting “anti-Negro” slogans and attempting to place
nooses around their necks. For hours, the tlnree protesters were beaten and smeared with
ketchup, mustard, sugar, and pies. When, after enduring hours of abuse, the president of
Tougaloo College (where Moody was a student) arrives to personally escort the
protesters to safety, Moody writes that although ninety police protected them fiom the

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mob, they did not stop the white hecklers from throwing things at them as they left (263-
267). There are many such anecdotes throughout Moody’s text, as she articulates in
minute detail the indignities and abuses suffered by blacks under the Jim Crow systenr, as
well as the threats to their personal safety as they tried to dismantle the oppressive social
order. While I do not wish to suggest that Moody is exaggerating her experiences, I do
want to draw an analogy between the litany of abuses she recounts in her text and similar
scenes ill the nineteenth-century slave narratives: in both cases, the rhetorical strategy of
overwhelming the reader with numerous heartrending and horrific examples of white
mistreatment of blacks works to enlist reader empathy for the cause of racial uplift.’ ‘
Moody’s text, like the slave narratives, is meant to sway readers to accept the premises
of the civil rights movement’s call for equality.

There are other instances that recall not only the slave narrative, but the African
American literary tradition generally. Moody recounts an early experience, classically
paradignatic of Afiican—American narratives, of the moment when she realizes that her
skin color places severe limitations on the life options available to her. When she is
seven, Moody, her mother and siblings walk to town for a Saturday matinee, where the
children unknowingly enter the white lobby with their friends. Moody’s mother
explodes in anger and drags her children out of the theater as she tells Anne “urn gonna try
my best to kill you when I get home. I told you ‘bout running up in these stores and
things like you own ‘em!” (38). Moody is socialized by her mother (and many others) to
know her place, and thus illustrates the powerfill role of the family Ideological State
Apparatus in socialization. As Williams contends, “[t]he true condition of hegemony is
effective selfldentification with the hegemonic forms: a specific and intemalized

‘socialization’ which is expected to be positive but which, if that is not possible, will rest

14]

on a (resigned) recognition of the inevitable and the necessary” (1 18). For Moody,
however, the socialization is not positive and she rarely concedes that her assigned place
in society is ‘inevitable’ or ‘necessary.’ Incident after incident shows her mother (and
nearly everyone else in the narrative) taking sides against young Anne, most notably by
fi'equent and various reminders that she has none of the rights she believes are her due.
As Collins notes, black “[mlothers may have ensured their daughters’ physical survival,
but at the high cost of their emotional destruction” (123). In Moody’s case, what is
destroyed is a sense of connection to her family and her community; she reads no one as
trustworthy once she has a clear picture of her social milieu. Throughout her narrative,
Moody represents her mother as a repressive force on a roughly equal level as that of
whites, but she never explicitly recognizes the likely reasons for her mother’s behavior. It
has been necessary for black parents since slavery to train their children how to survive in
the white world.1 5 This training sometimes looks cruel and spirit-crushing from the
outside, but there can be little doubt that it was done in love, with the goal of helping
children survive in a world hostile to their presence. And, as Patricia Hill Collins argues,
“survival is a form of resistance...” without successful survival strategies, “struggles to
transform American educational, economic, and political irnstitutions could not have been
sustained” (140). Moody may have been too young when she wrote her story to fully
appreciate and understand her mother’s motives in teaching a set of survival strategies
that seemed only to limit the child’s inclination to believe the world is hers for the asking.
The incident at the movie house spurs a desire in Moody to discover white
people’s secret. Deciding that there must be a better explanation of the widely differing
material lives lead by whites and blacks, Moody is determined to uncover the secret of

white power. Since she sees the source of that power as “secret,” it is perhaps logical

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that she look for answers in places that are normally covered—namely, white people’s
“privates.” Moody contrives a game of “playing doctor” with her siblings and white
children in her neighborhood so she can discover the reason white people had better lives
than she and other blacks. Disappointed by her findings, Moody asks her mother and her
white employers to tell her the secret, but no one will explain the difference to her
satisfaction. Although Moody the author does not directly theorize about the effect of
her investigations on her own identity, these memories contain implicit suggestions about
her eventual ability to resist. That she found no physical differences between herself and
white people may have suggested to her that there is no basis for believing she is inferior.
Seeing no significant differences, except perhaps that white people were lazy which
explained to her why they had blacks do all their work for them, Moody accepts herself
as inherently equal, perhaps even superior because she is not prone to the contradictory
and preposterous logic of segegation and J irn Crow. Her fiiendship with white children
is thus altered by the sudden realization that she is different from them:

I had never really thought of them as white before. Now all
of a sudden they were white, and their whiteness made them
better than me. I now realized that not only were they better
than me because they were white, but everything they owned
and everything connected to them was better than what was
available to me. (38)

This classic epiphany is conventional in the Afi'ican American literary tradition beginning
with the slave narratives and continuing to the present day. Harriet Jacobs writes that,
until the age of 12, she had no conscious awareness of her difference fiom whites:

No toilsome or disagreeable duties were imposed upon me. My mistress
was sokindtomethatlwas always gladtodo herbidding, andproudto
labor for her as much as my young years would permit. I would sit by her
side for hours, sewing diligently, with a heart as fiee fionr care as that of
any fies-born white child. . . . Those were happy days—too happy to

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last. The slave child had no thought for the morrow; but there came that
blight, which too surely waits on every human born to be a chattel. (7)

For Jacobs, the idyll’s end comes with the death of her first mistress, who bequeaths
Jacobs to her five-year old niece, Dr. Flint’s daughter. Jacobs ties this change in
circumstances directly to the the loss of innocence that inevitably accompanies the
adolescent slave girl’s coming of age. Likewise, the narrator of James Weldon Johnson’s
1912 novel, The Autobiography of an Err-Coloured Man, experiences a similarly dramatic
shift in perception at age nine when he is astonished to find himself counted among the
black students by his school principal (16-19). Some writers have implicitly resisted the
necessity of depicting this moment in their writing; Zora Neale Hurston, in keeping with
her “I am not tragically colored” world-view, pointedly avoids this master narrative of
blackness in Their Eyes Were Watching God, in which Janie Starks experiences many
conflicts on the road to self-fulfillment, but ultimately betrays no loss of self due to her
skin color.l 6 Janie does have her moment of recogrition, however, when, as a small girl,
she is shown a photogaph of herself and the white children her gandmother works for,
and fails to recognize herself. As she tells the story of her life, Janie says that until that
moment she believed she was “just like de rest.” (9). To counteract the negative effects of
that recogrition, Janie’s gandmotlrer leaves her job to provide a normatively black
context irn which to raise Janie. The trope of difference appears frequently in civil rights-
era literature as well, but with less emotional restraint than in earlier periods. No longer
politically confined to portraying sadness in response to being oppressed, Amira Baraka,
Lorraine Hansberry, and others of the Black Arts movement gave free creative rein to the
anger they felt by being Othcrcd in American culture. More recently, Toni Morrison
invokes the trope of difference in her 1970 novel, The Bluest Eye, through the figure of

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Pecola Breedlove, who is drawn to representations of whiteness because she believes that
beauty and love adhere only to white objects.

Moody’s quest to understand the implications of color reflects Robert Coles’
assertion in his 1964 study, Children of Crisis, that the “‘usual’ problems of gowing up
find an additional dimension in the racial context. In a very real sense, being Nego serves
to organize and render coherent many of the experiences, warnings, punishments, and
prohibitions that Nego children face” (336—7). Much of Moody’s material surroundings,
and the difference between what she has and what others have is explained to her through
the prism of color. Color determines everything about her existence, and it is this fact
that she implicitly recognizes as the primary origin of her marginalized social position.

At ten, Moody begins working a series of domestic jobs to earn money to help
support her family, buy herself school clothes, a used piano, and to pay for college. She
recounts a familiar litany of misuse at the hands of many of these employers, but she also
reports a time-honored strategy of resistance used by black women domestic workers.
One employer, Mrs. Burke, actively tries to force Moody to maintain a submissive
position by such means as tricking her into using the back door. In response to this
stratagem ——and many others—Moody honors Mrs. Burke’s request once, but the next
time she knocks at the fiont door again. Resistance to white employers’ demands,
although not always emphasized, can be found throughout African American history, and
appears frequently in protest literature as well. Collins writes of a more subtle practice
used by black domestic workers (demonstrating the F oucauldian circulation of power) in
which they feign gatitude for handouts of old clothing, for instance, but immediately
throw the items away as soon as they leave their jobs (142). Moody persists in her own

determined resistance to many such incidents until Mrs. Burke finally concedes victory,

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and lets Moody do things in her own way. Moody writes that had she not, she would
have quit her job. That position, in retrospect, may have been cavalier, because most
domestic workers did not have the luxury of quitting their jobs if they did not like the
conditions of their employment. However, the necessity of being finely attuned to one’s
employer’s limits probably suggested which methods of resistance would be the most
successfill, and which methods would result in being fired. Collins writes that black
women’s acts of resistance are historically masked by behavior that seems, outwardly, to
conform to white demands on black women, allowing them to feel a greater sense of self-
worth than seems possible (91). Citing the exarnple of Fannie Barrier Williams, who in
1905 called the black woman “irrepressible,” Collins argues that resistance would not
have been possible had black women not rejected their historic interpellation as nnarnmies,
tragic mulattas and other images that serve to control and repress the expression of black
difference (92). Moody’s description of her battles of will with Mrs. Burke and others
include little sense of fear or anxiety; in fact, throughout the book, it seems that Moody
rarely hesitates to speak her mind or act on her political beliefs at a time when it was
extremely dangerous to do so. Her memory of herself as fearless and alone is suggestive
of how she chooses to create her identity-for this book and posterity, a point to which I
will return shortly.

The job with Mrs. Burke plays a significant role in Moody’s awakening political
sensibility. Emmet Till’s 1955 murder and the lynchings of local blacks heighten racial
tensions in Centreville, Mississippi, and in response, Mrs. Burke begins to have secret
meetings at her house. Moody is never quite able-to discover the specific purpose of
these meetings, but she overhears the words “nigger” and “NAACP” in the women’s
discussions, after which Mrs. Burke is careful to give Anne the afternoon off when the

146

meetings are held. She hears enough to know that the NAACP has something to do with
black people, and wonders what had white people so worried and mm. When she asks
her mother about the NAACP, Mrs. Moody angrily tells her that she must never mention
that word around any white person, but does not define the term. Finally Moody asks
her homeroom teacher, who explains the NAACP’s purpose and its goal of getting a
conviction in the murder of Emmett Till. Over dinner, Mrs. Rice tells Moody about
lynchings and less extreme forms of terrorism enacted against blacks all over tlne South,
resulting in Moody’s new understanding of her social position, which she defines as “the
lowest animal on earth” (128). That description is, of course, more than coincidental. As
Henry Louis Gates has pointed out, blacks have been constructed as more similar to
animals than human in philosophical, political, and other discourses beginning at least as
far back as the Enlightenment" Historically, blackness has been defined primarily in
terms of the body, whereas whiteness has been seen as occupying the realm of the mind,
reinforcing the Cartesian privileging of mind over body. Given Western bias against all
things corporeal as debased, it served white hegemony well to fix the meaning of
blackness in terms of tire body.”

Exactly the same age as Emmet Till, Moody finally concedes feeling fearful as she
observes the reactions of whites—and blacks—in Centreville after his death.
Admonished by her mother to act as if she knows nothing of Till’s death when she goes
to work, Moody shakes uncontrollably once there, breaking dishes and avoiding the
Burke family as much as possible. Still, Mrs. Burke cannot let the opportunity to remind
her of her place slip by:

[Emmet Till] was killed because he got out of place with a white
woman. A boy from Mississippi would have known better
than tlnat. This boy was fi'om Chicago. Negoes up North have

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no respect for people. They think they can get away with anything. . . .
that boy was just fourteen too. It’s a shame he had to die so soon. (125)

For the first time that Moody explicifly recognizes, Mrs. Burke’s attempts to subdue her
and instill fear worked:

[Wlhen she talked about Emmett Till there was something
in her voice that sent chills and fear all over me. Before Emmett
Till’s murder, I had known fear of hunger, hell, and the Devil.

But now there was a new fear known to me—the fear of being
killed just because I was black. (125)

Deeply affected by the racial tensions in her town, and unable to imagine what to do with
her anger, she buries herself in schoolwork, jobs, and extracurricular activities. She keeps
herself busy, apparently so she will not have time to think. As a black female, Moody is
contending with signifying practices that construct her as intellectually inferior, lazy, and
unambitious. Her anger propels her toward high achievement as a means of proving the
stereotype wrong, and in a very real sense she has accepted the liberal notion that if she
can demonstrate her worthiness, she will be accorded a full measure of respect and
respectability by white society. In contrast, Dillard’s response is an exact reversal;
ideology has already constructed her as a high achiever with a particular destiny. In
rebelling against her interpellation, Dillard reconstructs her image by breaking rules and
resisting everything that conspires to channel her into a particular life. Instead of filling
every flee moment with activity, as Moody does, Dillard becomes studiously bored,
filling her time with petty “infractions” such as drag racing and sexual play. Both Moody
and Dillard refirse to accept the “hail” of their cultures, but with highly contradictory
results. Though she refllses the highly sexualized, intellectually inferior image assigred to
her, Moody is unable to change the ideology at large. Had she chosen, say, to be sexually

promiscuous and drop out of school early, society would have had its image of black

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females confirmed, but the interpellation is unchanged despite evidence to the contrary.
By the same token, although Dillard noisily rejects the subjectivity offered by her milieu,
her behavior does nothing to tarnish the image that is her birthright as an upper middle
class white female. Neither woman is able to entirely shake off the stereotypical
expectations despite their strenuous efforts to do so, nor do their efforts effect a
significant shift in paradigns.

Moody’s busy life may explain in part why she comes across as fiiendless and
fearless, but there is certainly more to it. Coles notes that “growing up as a Nego child
had its special coherence and orderliness as well as its chaos. . . . ” these children were
“lonely, isolated and aflaid. . . but they also knew exactly what they feared, and exactly
how to be as safe as possible in the face of what they feared” (339). The need to make
herself safe also explains why Moody threw herself so fanatically into staying busy
during every waking moment, as well as why she would not see herself as primarily
fearful. She kept herself too busy to notice the fear that was almost certainly lurking in
her subconscious. Giving her life the coherence and orderliness she craved allowed her to
survive, which, as we have already seen, is the basic requirement for resistance. Although
it might appear that such a period of heavy involvement with school, jobs, and activities
is apolitical in nature, I would argue that in fact, Moody was actively resisting external
definitions of self during this period that precedes her involvement in organized activist
groups. Through high achievement in scholastics, sports, and music, Moody is
demonstrating that she rejects social definitions of herself as a black female who is best
suited for domestic work. Significantly, Moody almost completely leaves out discussion
of her own sexuality, creating a highly charged textual gap that is perhaps best understood
in light of what Collins calls the “controlling images” of black womanhood (67). These

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images—mammy, matriarch, welfare mother, tragic mulatta—share a common concerrn
with the sexuality of black women, according to Collins, who argues that the purported
asexuality of the mammy figrre creates a mythic mother figure while the other images
represent uncontrolled sexuality (78). In the Aflican American literary tradition, women
writers have consistently resisted these stereotypes, often by appropriating the liberal
rhetoric that valorizes mind over body.’9 Frances E. W. Harper, for instance, creates a
protagonist who might have been read as a tragic mulatta in her 1892 novel, lola Leroy,
but whose moral compass is so strong, she is able to reject the fence-sitting that is the
ostensible cause of the biracial woman’s tragedy. In choosing to publicly identify herself
as black and to devote her life to racial uplift, lola Leroy resists the teleology of tragedy,
finding instead a noble mission and personal fulfillment in her work with the former
slaves.

Similarly, Moody implicitly rejects her interpellation by white and black society
through a consistent reversal of expectations of her embodiment. In other words, Moody
inscribes the body as a sigr of hegemony, and by extension a site of counter-hegemonic
practices. But Coming of Age in Mississippi cannot acknowledge Moody’s sexuality
because to do so would be to reinscribe the hegemonic codes of black womanhood. While
Moody labors to distance herself flom any hint of promiscuous sexuality, claiming no
interest in boys until she is in college, Dillard is relatively flee to subtly allude to her
awakening sexual desire. There are gaps, however, even in this silence about sexuality in
Coming of Age in Mississippi: Moody recounts how she started a fashion trend by
wearing tight jeans to school, but she acknowledges neither the sexual nature of her
classmates’ responses, nor her own enjoyment of displaying her sexuality. As a domestic

worker, she must certainly have encountered the sexual double jeopardy that she

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describes as entirely commonplace in her town— “Just about every young white man in
Centreville had a Nego lover” (130)—arld yet, she makes no mention of so much as a
close call. If irn fact she did manage to avoid unwelcome advances, perhaps it can be
explained by her written manifestation of herself. Though signs of the body are
prominent in her text, Moody flequently attempts to distance her self flom her body in
the narrative, with the notable exception of chronic hunger, and headaches which seem to
flare in response to stress too geat for her to handle. These headaches allow for
occasional retreat fiom the chronic but nevertheless acute tensions associated with the
mask of double-consciousness that Moody cannot escape. The hunger and headaches
work subtly to remind her of her own embodiedness—a fact that she is desperately trying
to deny. The imperatives of white society with respect to black bodies require
acceptance of oneself as valuable for labor and, in the case of womern, sex, and little else.
If Moody is to successfully resist that definition, she has few options except to prove
sheismorethanaworking, sexualbody.20 Andyet sometimes she givesintothatvery
definition, as she does by wearing a risque costume for her tumbling performances and by
noting her coach’s appreciation of her body.

Moody’s text suggests that the body is inscribed by hegemony, in that physical
activity such as sports and domestic labor, skin color, and representations of sexuality
serve as cultural signs that signify social position.2 ' In contrast to the ideology of white
female purity signified by innocence and inactivity, feminine blackness is signified
through labor and wanton lust. These are the ideologies Moody tries to resist, and yet
paradoxically, she seems ahnost drawn to bodily discourses. The early curiosity about
genitalia I discussed earlier, the decision to wear tight pants in high school (and set a new

fashion trend), the close observation of her mother’s frequently changing body in

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pregnancy, the interest in transvestism, and many other examples serve to focus on the
body in Coming of Age in Mississippi, but Moody continually slides between the body
and the intellect, the “real” and the ideological, brute force and hegemony. She realizes
early, however, that signs are unstable: her cousins look white, and yet they are defined
as Nego. The “logic” of the color line eludes her as Moody repeatedly demonstrates her
inability to read signs correctly, but this is also the ultimate source of her resistance.
Overtly, Moody strives to live the life of the mind, but her cultural milieu repeatedly
works to return her to the body. After performing her tumbling act for her college,
Moody is approached by the dean and asked if she is a physical education major.
Although she explains she is planning to major in biology, the dean sends the physical
education instructor to try to change her mind (245).

Moody’s resistance to work as a site of hegemony is evident in her realization
that field work is a death sentence, as well as in her refusal to accept Mrs. Burke’s
mastery over her. Less overtly, Moody accepts some expressions of her embodiment,
such as tumbling, but very clearly refuses to embody hegemonic interpellations of black
female sexuality; there is no direct expression of sexual desire on Moody’s part, although
she circles the issue in representing her mother’s too frequently unwanted pregnancies, in
her reaction to her stepfather’s sexual advances, and in seeming not to notice the sexual
nature of her schoolmates’ response to her tight jeans. Moody writes that her college
boyfl'iend tried repeatedly to kiss her, but she steadfastly refuses for a long time before
she finally allows it. Dreaming one night of having intercourse with her boyfriend,
Moody becomes aflaid that if she does kiss him it will inevitably lead to intercourse (230-
1). She makes up her mind to “quit him” so she will not have to give in, and although she

does finally kiss him, her emphasis on kissing and her eventual loss of interest in settling

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into a sexual relationship are a pointed counter-hegemonic representation of black
womanhood. Clearly, Moody is refusing to accept the externally imposed definition of
herself as highly sexualized (230-232). Arlyn Diamond suggests that Moody’s
referencing of Margaret Mead’s classic Coming of Age in Samoa sigrals her desire to
anthropologize her culture as well as her own life (221), but I see Moody as more
interested in articulating the contradictions in black identity discourses during the civil
rights era. Initially establishing an identity of protest and marginality to distance herself
flom her uncomprehending family, she next aligns herself with the critique of white
hegemony. Moody everntually protests the identity imposed on her by the black leaders
of the civil rights movement, and finally wonders if Aflican Americans ever will overcome
(384). Her quest for self, like Dillard’s, is unfinished, but in Moody’s case there is little
evidence that her quest resulted in agency, with the significant exception of her book,
which sigrifies her agency in defining herself. But since her memoir was published,
Moody effectively vanished flom public life, refilsing to be interviewed or to answer the
mail addressed to her that continues to pour in to her publisher.22 Coming of Age in
Mississippi ends without resolution; for Anne Moody, quest continues in other,

unspecified, spheres.

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5

Lying Contests: Fictional Autobiography and
Autobiographical Fiction

People are prone to build a statue of the kind
of person that it pleases them to be. And few
people want to be forced to ask themselves,
“What if there is no me like my statue?”

-—Zora Neale Hurston
Dust T racks on a Road
A thing may happen and be a total lie;
anotlner thing may not happen and be truer
than the truth. . . . story-truth is truer
sometimes than happening-truth.
—Tim O’Brien
The Things They Carried

As a consequence of poststructuralist and postmodernist theories that call into
question the notions of stable identity and transcendent Truth, the boundary between
autobiogaphy and fiction has become increasingly blurred. If truth is contingent and
subjectivity is constructed, and both are the products of language and discourse, it follows
that there is no difference between fact and fiction. And yet, readers continue to read
autobiogaphy quite differently than they read fiction. As Phillipe Lejeune has pointed
out, there is an implied contract between the autobiogapher and the reader which
“[guarantees] ‘identity’ sealed by the name of its signer” (209). Moreover, since
autobiogaphy is a referential genre, Lejeune argues that it also promises to convey the
“irnrage of reality”——that is, the autobiogapher implicitly swears that “the evidence I shall
give shall be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” (211-12). But in recent

years, some fiction writers have subverted the autobiographical “contract” by conflating
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the author’s identity with that of the protagonist while some autobiographers explicitly
fictionalize their life stories, effectively nullifying the contract. Tim O’Brien’s 1990
novel, The Things They Carried, for example, chronicles the Vietnam war experiences and
coming of age of a protagonist/narrator named Tim; since O’Brien, a former GI himself, is
a reasonably well-known literary chronicler of the Vietnam soldier, it is difficult to avoid
conflating Tim the narrator with Tim O’Brien, the writer. But the text itself frequently
erases the resemblance and undermines the realistic style by allowing the author’s voice to
intrude upon the narrative. A recurring narrative involving a Vietnamese soldier killed by
Tim is variously told fiom first- and third-person points of view, but finally, O’Brien
writes:

[T]wenty years ago, I watched a man dies on a trail near the village of My
Khe. I did not kill him. But I was present, you see, and my presence was
guilt enough. I remember his face, which was not a pretty face, because
his jaw was in his throat, and I remember feeling the burden of respon-
sibility and grief. l blamed myself. And rightly so, because I was present.

But listen. Even that story is made up.

I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is

truer sometimes than happening-truth. (203)
O’Brien problematizes the referentiality of the text by giving the narrator his own name
while simultaneously destabilizing the correspondence between himself and the literary
character through a meditation on the nature of truth. Theorizing through a subversion of
narrative desire, O’Brien suggests that fictional truth can be as reliable as factual truth,
and, conversely, that facts provide no guarantee of truthfulness. The desire for stable
truth and a unified subjectivity is refllsed, because, as The Things They Carried suggests,
reality can be truthflrlly conveyed flom a multitude of angles.

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Similarly, in her 1957 memoir, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, Mary McCarthy
subverts the illusion of truth by interspersing the straightforward chapters of her text
with italicized interchapters which serve several purposes: first, McCarthy deconstructs
her own memories by adding the “testimony” of other family members that sometimes
corroborate, but just as fiequently question her version of events. Second, the
interchapters work to bridge the gaps between the vignette-like chapters. There is no
attempt at constructing a comprehensive past in Memories, which McCarthy argues is
impossible because the early death of her parents ruptured the continuity of family
mythology, but the commentary of the interchapters functions as a bridge flom the
preceding story and the one that follows. Finally, and most significantly, McCarthy uses
the italicized passages to “confess” to irnventing parts of her story. She does not define
these fictional touches as lying, but rather claims that “if you are in the habit of writing
fiction” (as McCarthy was) there is a geat temptation to “[arrange] actual events so as to
make ‘a good story’ out of them” (164-5). In a lengthy “To the Reader” introduction,
McCarthy writes that her readers often assumed that she had invented these recollections
of her coming of age, and she wonders, “Can it be that the public takes for ganted that
anything written by a professional writer is co lpso untrue?” (3).l Anticipating Monique
Wittig’s I969 plea to women to “[m]ake an effort to remember. Or, failing that, invent”
(89), McCarthy notes that she is most tempted to fictionalize when her memory fails
her: “the story is true in substance, but the details have been invented or guessed at”
(97).2 In her willingness to explicitly confront the provisional nature of truth and the
extent to which memory and narrative work to construct truth, McCarthy anticipates the
poststructuralist critique of liberal humanist notions of subjectivity. Memories of a

Catholic Girlhood subverts the reader’s desire for a seamless, coherent narrative by means

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of the author’s metanarrative on the autobiography she has written and, in the process,
McCarthy rewrites the autobiogaphical contract to allow for fictionalizing truth and
subjectivity.

Both O’Brien and McCarthy are adapting a technique pioneered in the twentieth
century by the German dramatist Bertolt Brecht, known as the ‘alienation-effect’
(verfiemsdungseflekt), which works to destroy the illusion of reality often created in
theatrical productions. In Brecht’s view, drama could be a vehicle of social change if,
instead of identifying with the dramatic narrative, the spectator is alienated and detached
fiom the action by means of devices designed to unveil the workings of the theater. A
typical Brechtian device has an actor addressing the audience in the midst of an otherwise
“realistic” play, thus ignoring the invisible “fourth wall” which encourages a suspension
of disbelief on the part of the audience? The effect of this technique, in Brecht’s view, is
to “free socially-conditioned phenomena flom that stamp of familiarity which protects
them against our grasp today?” Familiarity—and realism—can function to hide the
ideological underpinnings of social behavior, so disrupting the familiar encourages
resistance to the status quo. By addressing the reader directly in their texts, and
subverting desire for nanative coherence, McCarthy and O’Brien break the code of
realistic fiction and traditional autobiogaphy, both of which call for readers to suspend
disbelief and accept the narrative’s ideology uncritically.’ Readers are thus “alienated” as
the anticipated narrative is defamiliarized, resulting in a rupture of generic requirements
and the gand narratives that accompany them. O’Brien deconstructs the image of the
soldier by revealing the fears lurking behind the facade, effectively feminizing a male
narrative, while McCarthy provides a variety of narrative threads, some admittedly

fictional, as equally valid renderings her story. Fiction, quite as much as autobiogaphy,

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has traditionally valued a coherent, uncontradictory nanative which adheres to generic
conventions of plot and characterization, but O’Brien and McCarthy problematize these
notions, creating the hybrid of autobiography and fiction that marks the American
woman’s coming of age narrative.

McCarthy’s observation that her readers tend to assume she is “making up” her
stories contradicts Molly Hite’s assertion that women writers are nearly always assumed
to be writing autobiogaphically, regardless of the putative genre of their work. Noting
that readers commonly conflate first-person narrators with their authors, Hite sees this
assumption as inevitable in the case of women fiction writers, who “find it diflicult to
evade the imputation that they are ‘writing themselves,’ in the sense of transcribing in
narrative form their own experiences, emotions, attitudes, and ideas” (Foreword xiii). The
unspoken critical assumption, according to Hite, is that the female author’s experience is
often regarded as unmediated by language, discursive practices, or power relations, which
in turn provides the basis for dismissing women’s literature. In contrast, I argue that the
coming of age narrative problematizes the notion of a unitary self as a transcendental
source of meaning, and that the act of writing is itself implicated in the construction of
self. As Hite points out, women’s autobiogaphies historically have been written partly
in response to a gowing awareness of the discourses and ideologies which construct their
identities; culturally marginalized individuals, by definition, “have had little or no say in
the construction of [their] own socially ackrnowledged identity,” and thus they are
unlikely to see the act of writing the self as a simple matter of transcribing an essential
self (xv). The coming of age narrative inscribes the competing discourses that construct

subjectivity, and resists erasing their contradictions.

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The response of early poststructuralists to the contingent and constructed nature
of subjectivity was, initially, to pronounce the the ‘death of the author’ (Barthes), and by
extension, the ‘death of the subject’ (Foucault). Reasoning that the coherent subject is an
artifice of discourse, poststructuralism argued that the subject is meaningless, and that the
concern of criticism should properly focus on the text’s discursive practices, and the
relations of power therein. As Janice Morgan points out, this pose differs little flom that
of New Criticism, whose focus was on the ‘work’ rather than the author or the historical
context of the text (3) In both systems, autobiogaphy’s necessary invocation of
historical context and other matters beyond the text/work defines it as inferior (for New
Critics), or hopelessly compromised (for poststructuralists).

Yet, as Morgan notes, it is in the context of these contemporary theoretical
developments that autobiogaphy has enjoyed a newfound critical respect, with
prominent theorists such a James Olney and Georges Gusdorf arguing that all literature is,
at bottom, autobiogaphical (5). This last argument has served to valorize what is
commonly called autobiographical fiction as well as to destigmatize critical focus on the
correspondences between authors and their texts. Instrumental in this critical revision has
been the critique of feminist theorists such as Nancy K. Miller, who points out the irony
inherent in pronouncements of the death of the subject at the precise historical moment
when women and other marginalized people were finally, successfully claiming their
subjectivity. In this view, it is no coincidence that as society’s Others claim subjectivity
and agency, privileged white male theorists argue that both concepts are illusory. But
significantly, the distinguishing features of a postmodern selflrood closely resemble the
definitions of identity constructed by authors from socially marginalized goups. In other
words, W.E.B. DuBois’s assertion that black identity is characterized by a “mask of

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double-consciousness,”6 and the idea of identity as a construction resulting from human
relationships7 (once solely the province of women writers) are now canonical markers
of subjectivity.

According to Liz Stanley, early literary blending of autobiogaphy and fiction
allowed women writers geater freedom irn claiming a specifically female selflrood since the
category of fiction made denial of the ‘real’ more plausible (59). Ironically, however, that
same alchemy of fact and fiction has also been the basis of women’s exclusion flom the
autobiogaphical canon when, as we have seen with Lejeune, autobiogaphy is defined as a
presentation of the ‘whole trutln.’ But, as Mary McCarthy suggests, memory is
unreliable, fictionalizing inevitable, and thus the self constructed by the autobiogapher is
by definition contingent. The act of writing, then, serves to connect flagnentary
memories in order to impose meaning on events that might otherwise be seen as
meaningless or unrelated. Stanley argues further tlnat, since memory is limited and
fictionalizing necessary, “all selves invoked in spoken and written autobiogaphies are by
definition non-referential even though the ideology of the genre is a realist one” (62).
Echoing both McCarthy and O’Brien, Stanley argues that “fictions often enable more of
‘truth’ about a life to be written than a strictly factual account” (67). It is this assertion I
wish to test through a discussion of two Zora Neale Hurston texts: the first, Dust Tracks
on a Road, is categorized as Hurston’s autobiogaphy, whereas the second, Their Eyes
Were Watching God, is considered fiction, but is often described as a fictionalized account
of Hurston’s life. In reading botln, I focus on what—ifany— difference genre makes in

the coming of age narrative.

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Lying Contests: Signifying Coming of Age

As I argued in chapter 3, the American woman’s coming of age narrative is a
hybrid of the traditional Bildungsroman and the canonical autobiogaphy, archetypally
male genres reconstituted into a form more congenial to the social and cultural locations of
women. As a genre that breaks with established forms, the coming of age nanative
reflects the liminal location of its practitioners. In other words, the referential claims of
the traditional autobiogaphical subject and the unitary subjectivity of the Bildungsroman
hero is of no use in the coming of age nanative, which, by my definition, ruptures gand
narratives of American selflrood by narrating an alternative identity formation which is
marked by the marginal status of the subject. Here, however, I want to reestablish the
older generic boundaries in order to theorize ideological differences between Dust Tracks
on a Road and Their Eyes Were Watching God. Ultimately, I argue that the traditional
autobiogaphy is insufficient to the project of narrating private identity formation for
Hurston, whose treatment of the process in Dust Tracks suggests she views the
autobiogaphical act as a public one that properly foregrounds the larger social context
inhabited by the individual. In contrast, however, Their Eyes Were Watching God
provides a coherent, fully realized account of its protagonist’s inner life with the larger
culture serving as a backdrop. The fleedom to “sigrify” on her life through a fictional
narrative affords Hurston the necessary breathing room to theorize subjectivity. Before
turning to Their Eyes Were Watching God, however, it will be helpful to consider
Hurston’s construction of a public self in her autobiogaphy, because while many critics
consider Dust Tracks a failure on several counts, I argue that Hurston was not in fact
writing her “autobiogaphy” according to standard formulas. Instead, she radically revises

the definition and subverts liberal humanist ideologies of the autonomous self.

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Alice Walker, who is largely responsible for the recovery of Hurston’s literary
reputation, considers Dust Tracks on a Road the “most unfortunate thing Zora ever
wrote” (“Zora” 91), and Robert Hemenway, in his introduction to the second edition of
Dust Tracks, details the deceptions and inconsistencies in Hurston’s text, and wonders
why she would choose to dissemble in a text that, by convention, promises to tell the
whole truth. Hurston was evasive about her birth date, for instance, her age at certain
critical moments is unclear, resulting in, as Hemenway notes, a ten year gap in her
narrative. Hurston was actually twenty-six when she enrolled in high school, but her text
suggests she was sixteen. She reduces her first husband to his initials, completely neglects
to mention her second marriage, and generally avoids specifying her private life. But
Hurston is also surprisingly vague about her public life, devoting a scant eight pages to a
writing career that was then still considered prolific and admirable. Clearly, Hurston’s
view of the autobiogaphical contract differed flom received wisdom about its
conventions, and the resulting text profoundly resists the requirement of veracity.

Of what value then is Dust Tracks on a Road, if it is so widely regarded as
unreliable? Hemenway argues that its value lies in its “representative” nature, as the
narrative of a woman whose career defied all odds and because it provides an enlightening
glimpse of how a major artist sees herself (Introduction xiv). More bluntly, I want to
argue that Hurston’s “lying” reflects her understanding of tlne function of lying contests in
the context of black culture, and furthermore, that the “lies” she tells suggest tlnat Hurston
is, in fact, telling the whole truth, as she sees it. She is, as Gates points out, specifying
according to her own definition in Dust Tracks, where she defines it as “giving a reading”
(Signijying 198). As Art Spiegehnan has argued, “the categories of fiction and nonfiction

have become useless. . . . all art making is a kind of lying because willfully or unwillfully

162

you select and that selection sets a whole stream of assumptions in motion” (Complete
Maus). Hurston’s narrative choices reflect her understanding of the individual’s right to
“spin” the truth as she sees fit, although she sorely tests the reader’s ability to accept her
version of truth by extending the boundaries of what can be constructed to include even
such apparently straightforward truths as dates.

Writing of her girlhood, Hurston devotes an entire chapter of Dust Tracks to the
storytelling she heard on the store porch in Eatonville and how those “lying” sessions
inspired her own fanciful stories. Here she defines lying contests as “straining against
each other in telling folks tales” (63) through such stock characters as Brer Fox and Brer
Rabbit, but expands the meaning to include signifying stories in Their Eyes Were
Watching God. The practice of signifying in Aflican American culture encompasses a
variety of forms, including loud-talking, testifying, lapping and playing the dozens.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. argues that signifying is “a rhetorical act that is not engaged in
information giving. Signifying turns on the play and chain of signifiers, and not on some
supposedly transcendent signified” (Figures 23 8).8 Elsewhere, Gates claims that Hurston
is apparently the first scholar to defme and analyze the trope of signifying, as well as the
first writer to represent it in print.9 For Hurston, the “lies” of signifying practices,
which she defines as “showing ofi” (0f Mules 16]), represent more durable truths than an
ostensibly straightforward account ever could. Thus, the purpose of storytelling is not to
impart information, but rather to engage in a free play of sigrifiers that invoke a range of
meanings and truths having multiple sources and origins. The lack of a transcendental
signifier enables Hurston to signify fleely on her own life story in Dust Tracks on a
Road, as well as in Their Eyes, such that botln narratives are equally valorized as vehicles
of truths.

163

To return to the negative assessments of Dust Tracks on a Road, it is true that
Hurston’s text lacks many of the traditional markers of autobiogaphy, particularly its
exclusive focus on the life path of the writer. Walker’s point that Dust Tracks rings false
after the first few chapters may stem hour the fact that Hurston flequently turns away
florn self-revelatory narrative toward what could be described as an etlnnogaphic “thick
description” irn which her cultural nrilieu stands as a trope for her private self. Even in the
chapter on the importance of storytelling in Hurston’s youth, her inclination is to let the
stories speak to her own inner life and public geogaphy. That is, through much of Dust
Tracks, Hurston articulates her selfhood by means of flee indirect discourse, a description
that is often applied to Their Eyes Were Watching God, but which I argue is equally apt
for the autobiogaphy. Gates writes that the indirect discourse of the “speakerly” text in
Aflican American literature “privilege[s] the speaking black voice” (Figures 249), but in
Dust Tracks, Hurston has radically revised this notion away flom the individual speaking
voice toward privileging the collective voice. Francoise Lionnet proposes redefining Dust
Tracks as an “autoethnography” which she defines as “the definirng of one’s subjective
etlnricity as mediated through language, history, and ethnogaphical analysis. . . a kind of
‘figural anthropology’ of the self” (383). Noting that Dust Tracks “does not gesture
toward a coherent tradition of introspective self-examination with soul-baring displays of
emotion” (3 85), Lionnet argues, conectly, that Hurston’s text refuses to invoke a
transcendent purpose—or signifier—40 drive the nanative. Rather, her vocational
mission of collecting the folk tales of the rural south, coupled with her understanding that
these stories are unfixable, changing according to the rhetorical situation, infuses Dust
Tracks with a collective sense of self. As Will Brantley contends, Hurston seems more

inclined to articulate the “emotional sources” of her life, which are situated in black folk

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culture (191). In other words, Hurston’s story is embedded in the larger narrative of her
culture, which implicitly tells her own story. This is precisely the problem with the text
for many critics: Hurston frequently erases self in favor of telling stories about others or
philosophizing about the state of the world: the paradigm of traditional autobiography
finds too many gaps and silences here. In Hemenway's words,

Dust Tracks fails as an autobiography because it is a text deliberately less
than its author’s talents, a text diminished by her refusal to provide a
second or third dimension to the flat surfaces of her adult image. Hurston

avoided any exploration of the private motives that led her to public
success. Where is the author of Their Eyes Were Watching God? (rootix)

Clearly searching for the paradigmatic conventions of autobiography, Hemenway
pronounces the text a failure. Behind the condemnation lies the expectation that
autobiography will be coherent, linear, comprehensive and, most critically, will explicitly
articulate the private self. But these expectations belie the hegemonic ideology associated
with autobiography, that the autobiographical imperative to focus on an individual
journey reflects the liberal humanist ideology that values the autonomous individual
whose fiee will is the primary source of identity. Hurston actively resists the traditional
text by making the relevant social discourses an integral part of the text. In refusing to
portray her inner life to any great extent, Hurston subverts the master nanative of self-
writing and denies the reader’s desire to see that particular nanative unfold.

But while I suggest that Hurston is redefining a genre with Dust Tracks, I do not
mean to ignore extenuating circumstances in her life which might also account for some of
her narrative choices. In particular, Hurston’s dependence on the patronage of wealthy
whites such as Fannie Hurst and Annie Nathan Meyer throughout her adult life creates a
potential conflict for her, even if she wanted to “tell the whole truth.” In this sense, the

construction of Dust Tracks may reflect Hurston’s need to maintain the “stories” she had
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originally told to secure the patronage she relied upon. For instance, as I mentioned
above, Hurston gave conflicting birth dates throughout her life, but in general seems to
have “lost” approximately ten years in her text. When she returns to high school, she
passes for sixteen, although she is in fact, twenty-six. And, as Hemenway writes, when
she matriculates at Barnard College at age thirty-four, the people responsible for her
admission believed her to be a typical college fieshman (Introduction xii). More
seriously, Hurston’s commentary on race in Dust Tracks is often contradictory and is
frequently read as accomodationist. As Brantley writes, readers and critics alike have
been able “to accept all of Hurston’s eccentricities, save those regarding race. In the nexus
of gender, family, region, nation, and race, it is race that remains the most problematic
issue for Hurston ’s readers, if not for Hurston herself” 212, emphasis added). That
readers find Hurston’s positions on race implausible says more about readerly desire than
the relative truth-value of Hurston’s apparent attitude, and yet there are unquestionably
contradictory assertions made in her text. Following an eyewitness account of a black
man who nearly causes a riot because he insists he has a right to a haircut and shave in a
shop that serves only whites, Hurston reflects that perhaps she should have defended the
man’s rights: after all, “he was one of us.” But she quickly tums away from this
possibility, noting that the livelihood of fifteen other blacks (including herself) would
have been lost if they had taken his side, and concludes that “. . . self-interest rides over
all sorts of lines” (164), a statement which becomes highly significant when considered in
the context of Hurston’s adult life. Claiming she has “no lurid tales to tell of race
discrimination at Barnard,” she also notes that she quickly became its “sacred black cow”
(169). And, according to Hemenway, Hurston’s private letters reveal that her benefactor

forbade her to attend the Barnard Prom (xiii), which makes her claim that she experienced

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no discrimination seem disingenuous. So while she mocks the “Race” men and women for
their over-eager readiness to defend blacks from all hints of inferiority, in the next breath
she dryly notes that “no Negro in America is apt to forget his race” (218).

In Hurston’s autobiographical rendering, coming of age entails resisting the
ideology of the autonomous individual through the invocation of a black collective
identity, admitting the exigencies of dependence upon other people (including whites) for
a variety of reasons, but paradoxically dissenting with contemporary identity politics. In
other words, Hurston ironically refuses the notion that race is the primary basis of black
identity, while at the same time she seeks to celebrate the specificities of black folk
cultme. Dust Tracks argues further that quotidian needs drive and construct identity as
surely as racial and gender discourses. A continuing need to secure financial support for
her research and writing necessarily formed Hurston’s autobiographical construction of a
self, an assertion that Hemenway and other critics continue to see as less than truthful
because it seems to accept an accomodationist view of race issues. In this sense, Dust
Tracks is a pragmatic text not unlike Booker T. Washington’s 1899 autobiography Up
From Slavery, which has been similarly faulted for its muted representation of the
realities of racial oppression in the United States. But Washington was under constant
pressure to raise funds for Tuskegee Institute, and like Hurston, could in afford to alienate
potential contributors.’ 0 Both texts resist the unspoken expectation that African
American texts must thematize social protest; instead they construct identities that
speak to the truths arising from their particular goals and aspirations. Because Hurston
wished to continue her work collecting folk tales, for instance, the foregrounding of those
stories in her text serves to advertise her ethnographic work. Furthermore, Alice Walker

argues that Hurston was “more like an uncolonized African than she was like her

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contemporary American blacks, most of whom believed, at least during their formative
years, that their blackness was something wrong with them” (“Zora” 86). Walker
speculates further that Hurston’s relatively rare experience of coming of age in the all-
black community of Eatonville was responsible for creating an individual with an
unusually confident sense of racial pride, so the resulting comfort with black racial
identity was inconceivable to her many critics (“Looking” 100).

For Hurston, the autobiographical act is conceived as a public statement that
contextualizes the individual life in relation to community identity, and she expects the
reader to bridge the interpretive gap between general descriptions of her milieu and the
discrete incidents fi‘om her own life. As she writes in the opening chapter of Dust
Tracks, “. . . I have memories within that came out of the material that went to make me.
Time and place have had their say. So you will have to know something about the time
and place where I came from, in order that you may interpret the incidents and directions
of my life” (3). The text, accordingly, situates Hurston in a particular social context,
emphasizing the “material that went to make me” and suggesting that these factors are
more salient that Hurston’s specific acts. The specific feelings and individual events
related to coming of age are thus less important and less telling than the cultural backdrop.
But as I suggested earlier, this approach to autobiographical writing is antithetical to the
traditional form, which valorizes the autonomous individual. More specifically,
Hurston’s text also posits an identity in opposition to the traditional self of African
American autobiography, which Stephen Butterfield defines as

[A] member of an oppressed social group, with ties and responsibilities to
the other members. It is a conscious political identity, drawing sustenance
from the past experiences of the group, drawing sustenance from the past
experience of the group, giving back the iron of its endurance fashioned

into armor and weapons for the use of the next generation of fighters. (2-3).

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So while Butterfield’s definition invokes the notion of group identity, the basis of that
identity is primarily related to shared oppression. Butterfield’s model, based on a
tradition established in male slave narratives, and entrenched as tradition by the Harlem
Renaissance, valorizes the statement of individual oppression and personal triumph over
adverse circumstances.“ But the autobiographical model of black women has always
differed from the black male paradigm. Joanne M. Braxton sees black women’s
autobiography as “an attempt to define a life work retrospectively and as a form of
symbolic memory that evokes the black woman’s deepest consciousness. . . . [and] an
occasion for viewing the individual in relation to those others with whom she shares
emotional, philosophical, and spiritual affinities, as well as political realities” (9). The
critical difference between Braxton’s definition and that of the traditional male text is
found in the focus on human relationships as a determinant of identity, and this may
explain the manifestation of selfhood Hurston creates in Dust Tracks on a Road, for if the
genre demands the performance of rugged individuality apart fiom any cultural context,
there is little space for Hurston to articulate the feminine narrative of connectedness and
relationship. In other words, although Dust Tracks expressly details and celebrates black
community and culture, it does so at the expense of human connectedness, for Hurston is
at pains to distance herself in her autobiography from her peers in the black community,
as well as from her benefactors. But, seen another way, it could be said that she had
already, five years earlier, narrated the inner life that she neglected to mention in Dust
Tracks on a Road. The fictional story of Janie Crawford, widely acknowledged to be
based on Hurston’s experiences, apparently provides a more felicitous vehicle for
explicating the inner self. As I have argued, fiction has long provided women with a
“safe” place to develop specifically female selfhoods, in that a writer may paradoxically

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feel greater fieedom to bluntly state her perspective under the protective cover of fiction.
While I make no claim here that Their Eyes Were Watching God is factually Hurston’s
own story, I do argue that the novel develops Hurston’s philosophy of selflrood more
deeply than Dust Tracks, and shows identity to be a journey that unfolds through an

evolving process of Ieaming and knowing the self.

Janie ’s Ways of Knowing

After its publication in 193 7, Their Eyes Were Watching God was met with nearly
universal condemnation by the black male literary establishment for breaking with the
tradition of black protest fiction. Richard Wright was perhaps Hurston’s harshest critic,
bitterly attacking her novel for perpetuating an image of the Negro as minstrel. Alain
Locke wondered when Hurston would “come to grips with motive fiction and social
document fiction.”' 2 Mainstream black male writers and intellectuals demanded that
Hurston conform to their vision of black art, something she consistently refirsed to do. In
1928, Hurston wrote:

I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow damned up in my
soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to
the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given
them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it. . . . No,
I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.
(“How” 153)

Hurston’s view here does not differ significantly from that of another African American
woman of letters, Frances Harper, who in 1861 wrote that “[w]e are blessed with hearts

”l3

and brains that compass more than oin'selves in our present plight. . . Harper seems
to be looking forward to the day when blacks might look up to the horizon and recognize

that their lives are much richer than the relentless focus on oppression admits. Out of

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this world view, Hurston created a new type of black woman character; neither black
mammy, conjure woman, loose black woman, nor even a tragic mulatta, Janie Crawford is,
according to Barbara Christian, the first instance in African American literature of the
story of a black girl’s development, “not from widrout, but fiom within” (57). While
such a narrative might seem commonplace today, it is important to recognize what a
radical departure Hurston’s novel was from contemporary norms for black fiction in the
19308. In marked contrast to Wright’s 1940 novel Native Son, which depicts Bigger
Thomas as repressed and defined by white constructions of his identity, Hurston shows
Janie in the process of constructing herself The movement of the narrative takes Janie
fiom being defined by others to defining herselfthrough the meaning she assigns to her
experiences.

Geta LeSeur terms Their Eyes a “Black Bildungsroman” to differentiate between
narratives of the European tradition and the particular patterns of the African American
version of the genre (19). In general, LeSeur argues that the Black Bildungsroman must be
defined separately due to differing sociological and historical contexts which result in a
divergence in the growth of black and white children-—black children simply do not
flourish as well as white children (21). These texts, writes LeSeur, differ fiom
autobiography in that they are “novels of initiation, childhood, youth, education, and the
various other definitions used for the Bildungsroman, with autobiographical components”
(26), an argument that strikes me as tautological. LeSeur claims that the protagonists of
Black Bildungsroman are “not concerned with what is specific to them as artists, but with
something more generally shared in the human erqrerience” (26), but there is a telling
conflation of the “hero or heroine” and the “artist” in this argument. Nonetheless, LeSuer
makes a crucial point when she notes that the black female Bildungsroman does not limit

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its purview to the protagonist’s youth, but instead sees Bildung as a life-long process, an
observation that accurately captures the major thematic concern in Their Eyes Were
Watching God (101 ).

Since the novel first regained widespread recognition in the early 19703, the
question of whether Janie succeeds in creating her own identity has been the primary
focus of critical debate. Specifically, critics have examined the problematic question of
Janie’s achievement of voice (and hence, agency) in the novel, given that, although Janie is
ostensibly telling Pheoby her own story, the bulk of the novel is written in the third
person. This charge seems ironic in light of Annie Dillard’s choice to use third-person
narration as a means to authorize and philosophize about the meaning of her experiences.
Robert Stepto was among the first critics to question whether Janie truly achieves her
voice in Their Eyes, since most of her story is told by an omniscient third person narrator
rather than Janie herself. Stepto argues that this fact implies that “Janie has not really
won her voice and self at all. . . .” (166), and yet, Stepto seems not to recognize that
women’s narratives historically have been seen as inferior precisely because they relied
too much on a feminine ‘1’. Thus, women writers have sometimes removed the subjective
narrator in order to lend greater authority to their narratives. Gates addresses this
dilemma by describing the text as the first example of a Speakerly text in the African
American tradition, a text with “particular rhetorical structures [which] seem to exist
primarily as representations of oral narration, rather than as integral aspects of plot or
character development. These verbal rituals signify the sheer play of black language
which Their Eyes seems to celebrate” (Signifying 181, 194). Therefore, the representation
of Janie’s voice is depicted primarily in what Gates terms as “fiee indirect discourse,”

which is neither the voice of a character or a narrator, or the two combined; “rather, it is a

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bivocal utterance, containing elements of both direct and indirect speech. It is an
utterance that no one could have spoken, yet which we recognize because of its
characteristic ‘speakerliness,’ its paradoxically written manifestation of the aspiration to
the oral” (208). For Gates, the problem of Janie’s achievement of voice is overcome by
recognition of Hurston’s stylistic variation of traditional depictions of voice. John F.
Callahan argues that “the two major voices in Their Eyes Were Watching God do not
contend; rather, they cooperate and collaborate” (118). “Author and character work
together, each shares authorship and authority— collaboratively” (l 19).

In her foreword to the 1990 edition of Hurston’s novel, Mary Helen Washington
recounts the debate about Janie’s voice at a well-attended MLA session in 1979, during
which Alice Walker “found her own voice” and rose to defend Hurston’s choice to allow
Janie silence at strategic points in the novel, arguing that women do not necessarily have
to speak when men think they should and affirming women’s right to choose where and
when to speak (xi-xii). The question of Janie’s voice is a crucial one in determining the
success of her quest for self, but it is not the only way in which her blooming selfhood is
manifested. Even during the long periods ofJanie’s public silence, her identity is in
process, growing in private as she comes to know and understand her self on her own
terms. Janie’s eventual ability to name her own experiences is demonstrated not simply
in her voice, but in her actions and in the evohrtion in her ways of knowing herself.

My argument grows out of Alice Walker’s point that Janie’s growth of
consciousness is not necessarily indicated by her actual voicing of her knowledge. The
process of constructing the self is problematized through the imposition of competing
ideologies embodied in the persons of Nanny, Logan, Jody, Tea Cake, and the collective
community of Eatonville. Thus, the question of whether Janie is able to voice her

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knowledge simplifies her quest to an unreasonable degree. Conflating the achievement of
voice with the achievement of self ignores other concrete demonstrations of Janie’s act of
self-creation, which diverges fiom the male pattern of selfhood in significant ways.
Moreover, Janie’s absence of voice in the narrative is sometimes an unreliable indicator of
her self-concept. It is axiomatic by now that women tend to define themselves within the
context of their relationships; Janie’s story affirms this argument, as others impose their
texts on her and she tries them on for size, either accepting or rejecting their definitions of
her. Chris Weedon notes that “subjectivity. . . is precarious, contradictory, and in
process, constantly being reconstituted in discourse every time we think or speak” (33),
or, I would add, act. It is productive to view Janie’s tale in these terms, as it helps to
justify the sometimes contradictory assertions the narrative makes about Janie’s self-
expression. Instead of requiring Janie to exhibit a unified self through a full rendering of
her own story told in the first person, her identity is more productively seen as still in
process, even at the end of the novel, by which time she is in her forties, well past
adolescence. We can then look beyond J anie’s verbal expression to determine the success
of her quest for selfhood.

Research in the developmental psychology of women over the past twenty years
or so hasjlluminated different epistemological paradigms for women, describing
alternative paths to selfllood fiom those attached to male developmental patterns that
provide a useful fiamework from which to evaluate Janie’s growth from object to subject.
In Women 's Ways of Knowing, Belenky et al. trace five distinct ways of knowing in
which women may develop the self, voice, and mind. While I find these categories of
knowing usefill in understanding how Janie is able to pursue quest when she is

discouraged at every turn from doing so, it is important to note that the categories

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described by Belenky et al. may overlap, and that not every woman will pass through
each of the stages described. In other words, these ways of knowing might represent
stages of growth for some women, while others will only experience some of the stages,
which represent an epistemological continuum fiom simple, passive silence to complex,
constructed knowing. In the bumpy process of becoming, Janie moves from being a
passive recipient of others’ knowledge to a complex constructor of the meaning of her
own experience who recognizes the authority inherent in her hard-won knowledge of self.
At the age of six, Janie is conflonted with a picture of herself with the white
children with whom she is being raised, but fails to recognize her own image: “Ah don’t
see me” (9). Others must point her out in the picture because has no clear sense of self;
she does not even realize she is black. The source of self-definition resides in others here,
and Janie relies on them to construct her subjectivity. She is called “Alphabet” during
this period in her life “cause so many people had done named are different names” (9).
As Sigrid King points out, naming has special significance in the African American
tradition: “Afro-Americans have been made aware that those who name also control, and
those who are named are subjugated” (683), an assertion which explains the widespread
rejection of slave names alter abolition, and indeed into the twentieth century.l ‘
Kimberley W. Bentson notes that the narner objectifies the named, forever marking her as
other. Arguably, few six-year-olds would be able to name themselves effectively or to
wrest power from others to fillly assert their own identities, but Janie’s case is unusual
by virtue of the name bestowed upon her—Alphabet. A sign without a concrete
signification, Janie is defined as all and as nothing. By dubbing Janie Alphabet, her
namers fix her as an object not worthy of fixing, and thus exercise control over her

subjectivity. For Gates, Janie’s early identity as a “nameless child” underscores the great

[75

degree to which her journey enables her to claim a voice (185), and consequently to
assume a complex subjectivity.

Recognizing the significance of this problem, Janie’s grandmother leaves her job
with the white people, removing Janie from the shadow cast by white hegemony and
ideology. In her adolescence, removed fiom the white gaze that defines her as other,
Janie’s quest for self begins in earnest. At sixteen she finds herself under a pear tree
“stretched on her back listening to the alto chant of the visiting bees” and watching them
pollinate the blooms. Enchanted, Janie transforms the narrative of the bees and the pear
into one that illuminates her sexuality: “So this was a marriage!” (10). This image
informs her knowledge of the meaning of love, and she trusts that knowledge to such an
extent that it becomes the litmus test by which she will test the validity of her three

marriages. Her grandmother, however, reads Janie’s awakening sexuality as dangerous,

and moves quickly to safeguard her granddaughter against reenacting her own
life/narrative.l s The pollination experience represents Janie’s first genuine attempt to
claim her own subjectivity and agency, but Nanny subjugates her by forcing her own text
of subjectivity on Janie. Nanny had once hoped to “preach a great sermon about colored
women sittin’ on high, but they wasn’t no pulpit for me” (15), so she concludes that
black women are “de mule uh de world” (14). Unable to transcend her own status as a
mule, Nanny has made it her life work to protect Janie fiom assuming that same identity.
Equating “sittin’ on high” with material wealth, Nanny sees the middle-aged Logan
Killicks with his “often-mentioned sixty acres” (20) as Janie’s best hope of escaping the
negative definitions of black female subjectivity. For Janie, though, Nanny’s vision

desecrates the promise of the pear tree, and silences her attempt to name her own reality.

[76

Janie obeys Nanny’s directive to marry Logan Killicks because, in Belenky et al.’s
terms, she is positioned as a silenced krrower, which is marked by “unquestioned
submission to the commands of authorities, not to the directives of their own inner
voices” (28). Knowing that marriage to Killicks contradicts her own vision, Janie
submits because she has not yet learned to privilege the knowledge she has, a common
enough dynamic among children and adolescents who, by cultural agreement, are not as
wise as their elders. A closely related epistemological position is that of received
knowing, defined as a reliance on others’ knowledge, which Janie assumes after her
marriage as she tries to understand others’ definitions of marriage: “Janie had no chance
to know things, so she had to ask” (20). Denying the validity of her own vision, Janie
asks for advice from others and is told that she will learn to love Logan within the context
of their marriage. Janie has little confidence in her own knowledge, believing that others’
knowledge is more reliable, so she assumes her position as wife and “wait[s] for love to
begin” (21). But when the marriage fails to transform her feelings toward Logan, Janie
once again turns inward to listen to her own “still small voice.”1 6 That voice grows clearer
and more insistent as Logan stops talking in “rhymes” to Janie and starts demanding that
she take on the role of mule in his household. Janie’s response to these demands moves
her into the position of subjective knowing as she renews her quest for self-firlfillment. In
Du Plessis’s terms, Janie is resisting the dominant ideology of womanhood precisely
because it posits a loveless maniage as the end of quest. In Belenky et al.’s formulation,
“newly acquired subjectivism leads the woman into a new world., which she insist[s] on
shaping and directing on her own” (76). Janie finds herself at the gate, looking up the
road, and seeking to create an alternative subjectivity because “[s]he knew things that

nobody had ever told her” (23). Her newly discovered authority allows Janie to reject

I77

Nanny’s and Logan’s contradictory definitions of black womanhood as analogous to a
mule, and, paradoxically, as someone placed on a pedestal. A growing confidence allows
Janie to reject her interpellation, but she continues to seek her identity outside her self.
As a result of her failed marriage to Logan, Janie reinvests hope in the image of love
promised by the pear tree.

Janie’s quest for selflrood seems to be aided by the appearance of Joe Starks, who
speaks to her “for far horizon” (28). She hesitates to leave with him, not because she is
married to Logan, but because “the memory of Nanny is still powerful and strong” (28),
but most important, because her quest is unfulfilled. But as an increasingly subjective
knower, Janie is able to walk away from the past and to reject her interpellation because
she is learning to assert her own autonomy. She can act because, in Williams’s terms, she
has imagined a new way of being in which her own authority is privileged. During her
courtship with Joe, Janie learns to listen to what one of Belenky et al.’s subjects called
her “infallible gut.” Janie believes that the answers she is searching for can be found
within herself, which allows her to leave with Joe, reflecting the argument that, in order to
assert and define themselves, women must learn to rely on their intuition and authority
(Belenky 54). But for Janie, intuition proves fallible as Joe’s promises play out in
unexpected ways. Promising to place her on a pedestal, Joe provides Janie with a means
of escaping Logan’s definition of her as a mule, but Joe’s ends up interpellating her more
successfully than either Nanny or Logan. As mayor of Eatonville, Joe will not permit
Janie to speak in public, and she endures twenty years of silence because Joe expects her
to “class off” from the rest of the folk. He gives her social position and material wealth,
but he does not allow her to join in community life. Silencing Janie, he positions himself
as the authority on who Janie is and should be.

178

The pear tree has already begun to wither again before Joe and Janie reach
Eatonville, as Joe makes plans to be a “big voice” in town, and although he spends fieely
on gifts for Janie, she notices that he has stopped talking in rhymes. When Eatonville
celebrates Joe’s election, Janie is asked to say a few words to the townspeople, but
before she can formulate a response, Joe cuts her off: “‘Thank you fuh yo’ compliments,
but mah wife don’t know nothin’ about no speech-makin.’ Ah never married ha for
nothin’ lak dat. She’s uh woman and her place is in de home’ “(40). Foreefully imposing
a text of wifehood on Janie, Joe psychologically and literally limits Janie’s capacity to
speak for herself. Michael Awkward argues that Joe’s expectations of Janie differ little
from Nanny’s; while Nanny may have lacked the place on high to deliver her text, Joe
Starks appropriates the place on high for himself alone and projects his vision onto
Eatonville. Starks “is not only a ‘big voice’, but an extremely effective executor of that
voice. . . . Starks is characterized by an ability to coordinate voice and action.” Awkward
further points out that Joe is able to become a “big voice” precisely because of his ability
to turn his vision into action, but “Starks perverts that relation [between voice and action]
by executing a self-oriented text that denies others self-determined action and voice” (70).

While Joe denies authority to everyone in Eatonville, it is through Janie that this
travesty is most deeply felt. The bigger Joe’s voice gets, the smaller Janie’s exterior
becomes. But because she privileges her inner knowledge of self, her identity never
disappears completely; instead, it continues to evolve. Matt Bonner’s mistreated mule
and Janie’s reading of it demonstrate the growth in her identity as she compares her own
lot in life to that of the mule, which underscores Nanny’s equation of the black woman
with a mule—both are domesticated beasts of burden in the hegemonic economy of the

novel. As Matt seeks to assert his authority over the mule by mistreating it, the

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townspeople bait the creature into misbehavior in order to signify on Matt. Janie is
appalled, however, and mutters to herself that the mule has “had his disposition ruint wid
mistreatment” (53). Then a “little war of defense for helpless things was going on inside
her. People ought to have some regard for helpless things. She wanted to fight about it”
(54). Realizing that she is similarly helpless, Janie clearly identifies with the mule’s
situation and longs for someone else to notice that she is as mistreated as the mule. But
she represses these feelings, deciding it wouldn’t do to make a fuss. “It makes it hard tuh
git along” (54). Astonished when Joe buys the mule so it can live a comfortable life as it
sees fit, Janie is inspired to make a speech pronouncing her judgment on Joe’s action,
telling him that “[y]ou got tuh have power tuh fiee things and dat makes you lak uh king
uh something” (55). The irony of her speech is lost on Joe however, as he revels in his
own good deed, apparently unaware that he has appropriated her idea when he frees the
mule. Acknowledging Joe’s power underscores the fact that he does not use his power to
flee Janie from his text as he has just freed the mule from Matt Bonner’s interpellation.
Effectively, Janie’s position has just become lower than the mule’s. Indeed, the daily
sight of the mule, who is master of his own destiny from that moment on, serves to
remind Janie of just how low her status is. If even a mule has more agency than she, then
surely Janie’s power and identity is in danger of disappearing altogether.

Hmston writes that Joe’s silencing of Janie results in a self-protective division of
her inside and outside selves that deepens as the bloom dies on their marriage. As Janie is
increasingly defined primarily as Joe’s Storekeeper, he finds reason to fault her for all
manner of minor problems in the store. After one such episode, he tells Janie that “All
you got tuh do is mind me” (66). When Janie argues she knows “uh few things”, Joe
retorts that she could “see ten things and don’t understand one.” Episodes such as this

180

teach Janie that it is useless to fight back, but she takes note of her inner self—division.
Rather than being psychologically debilitating, this division of inner and outer lives allows
Janie to protect the part she cherishes—her interior knowledge—which is still alive and in
process while externally c0ping with and surviving her marriage. This division of self
radically revises the liberal humanist conception of the unity of identity without the
normative accompanying suggestion of inferiority. In other words, Hurston reverses the
privilege accorded to the monolithic self and applies it instead to the multi-dimensional
self. When Joe slaps Janie for ruining his dinner, she realizes she must never again show
Joe her inner self. I quote from the text at length here because this moment is pivotal in
Janie’s eventual ability to resurrect her own voice:

Janie stood where he left her for unmeasured time and thought. She stood
there until something fell off the shelf inside her. Then she went inside
there to see what it was. It was her image of Jody tumbled down and
shattered. But looking at it she saw that it never was the flesh and blood
figure of her dreams. Just something she had grabbed up to drape her
dreams over. In a way she turned her back upon the image where it lay
and glistening young fruit where the petals used to be. She found she had a
whole host of droughts she had never expressed to him and numerous
emotions she had never let Jody know about. Things packed up and put
away parts of her heart where he could never find them. She was saving
up feelings for some man she had never seen. She had an inside and an
outside now and suddenly she knew how not to mix them. (67-8)

Although Janie will remain silent on the outside for many years, her thoughts demonstrate
the dynamic nature of her creation of identity, which is largely the result of interpellation
by others’ discourses, but also the tenacious integrity of her private vision.

When Janie learns to separate her inner and outer selves, she simultaneously
resurrects the image of the pear tree, allowing herself to revive her romantic vision of love
while living a mundane, loveless life on the outside: “. . . one day she sat and watched the

shadow of herself going about tending the store and prostrating itself before Jody, while
I 81

all the time she herself sat under a shady tree with the wind blowing through her hair and
clothes” (73). In this way, Janie is able to cope with what is otherwise an intolerable
existence. But though this coping mechanism allows her to resist Joe’s definition
inwardly, it does not empower her to act. Awkward argues that it is only when Janie
sees evidence of Joe’s deteriorating health that she gains the courage to deflect his text.
Joe’s “big voice” no longer corresponds to his physical self, which Janie reads as the
source of his increasingly disparaging insults of her. Attempting to shift public attention
flom his own aging, Joe repeatedly calls attention to Janie’s signs of age and she
recognizes that his death is imminent. “She saw he was hurting inside so she let it pass
without talking. She just measured out a little time for him and set it aside to wait” (73).
Quietly, Janie realizes she will soon be fleed fl'om Joe’s tyranny, and so she sees no need
to assert her voice.

But the dissonance of Joe’s abuse grows because, despite his assertions to the
contrary, Janie does not look old—Joe does. “For the first time in their relationship,”
notes Awkward, “Starks is unable to create a sense of harmony between words and
reality. . . .” (77). Joe’s diminishing power gives Janie the courage to fight back hr a
moment when, as Gates points out, she signifies on Joe’s manhood: “When you pull
down yo’ britches you look lak the change uh life” (75). Reversing their relationship, it is
Janie who uses voice to name Joe and, consequently, herself. As Gates writes, “Janie
writes herself into being by naming, by speaking herself flee” (Signifying 207). The truth
of her signifying is verified as Joe’s health deteriorates immediately; Janie’s signifying
leads directly to his death, suggesting the power of Janie’s knowledge. Joe’s death and
Janie’s ascendancy as a reliable knower signals the critical importance of an accurate

vision of self. In Gates’s view, this moment signals Janie’s achievement of voice, and

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thus authority, although “not a sign of a newly found unified identity. Janie’s speaking
voice, rather, is an outcome of her consciousness of division” (203 ), which Hurston does
not represent as problematic. For a moment before she announces Joe’s death to
Eatonville, she checks in the mirror to see if “her girl self” had waited for her; “the young
girl was gone, but a handsome woman had taken her place. She tore the kerchiefflom her
head and let down her plentiful hair. The weight, the length, the glory was there” (83).
Outwardly, the only change Eatonville sees is the lack of the omnipresent kerchief Joe
had insisted Janie wear to cover her hair in public. Janie’s covered hair—her “glory” — is
analogous to her covert identity, so the permanent removal of the kerchief symbolizes a
quiet rebellion and the accompanying inner growth of the subject. Privately though, Janie
recognizes the power of others’ texts to shape her, and realizes that she hates Nanny for
desecrating her vision of life: “Here Nanny had taken the biggest thing God ever made,
the horizon. . . and pinched it in to such a little bit of a thing that she could tie it around
her granddaughter’s neck tight enough to choke her” (85). Rejecting previous discourses
that, in her view, interpellated her erroneously, Janie sets about to create an alternative
subjectivity that privileges her own vision of life and love. Realizing she is a “rnotherless
child”, Janie finally acts to create self according to her own design. Still, in some senses,
she continues to wait passively for an opportunity to remake her identity.

Opportunity in the form of a steady stream of suitors is gently rejected for being
simply a continuation of the old constructs which Janie has now firmly rejected. Having
established by now that Janie defines herself within relationships, it is not surprising that
the next stage in her growth is precipitated by her relationship with Tea Cake. The
difference now is that she is far clearer about the name of relationship she is willing to

accept. While it might be problematic for contemporary readers that Janie is unable to

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define herself outside of her relationships with men, Janie has established a reasonably
effective mode of self-realization within the contexts of her relationships, although it is
difficult to avoid the conclusion that, had she chosen better, her coming of age would not
have been delayed for so long. But as Du Plessis reminds us, quest for self and romance
are not usually compatible in women’s fiction, so Hurston’s narrative can be seen as a
transitional text in that Janie’s quest for self takes place in the context of romance, and
continues beyond the traditional marriage ending. Between her marriages to Joe and Tea
Cake, Janie is adding to the arsenal of identity an important element of identity and
relishing the “fleedom feeling” (86) which she is no longer willing to subsume in exchange
for relationship.

Janie’s reinvention of self is dynamic and radical in the context of her relationship
with Tea Cake Woods. Nellie McKay points out that Hurston scholars are divided about
how much credit Tea Cake should be given for the eventual full emergence of Janie’s
identity. But McKay sees much of Janie’s marriage to Joe as the vehicle for Janie’s quest
for self, so she is in fact primed to make that quest active by the time Tea Cake appears
(61 ). Awkward disagrees though, seeing Tea Cake as yet another text seeking to impose
its ideology on Janie, although he concedes that Tea Cake’s view of marriage is relatively
liberating for Janie. Still, as Awkward correctly notes, many interpretations of Their Eyes
gloss over numerous nanative moments when Tea Cake acts as an archetypal domineering
male (83). Maria Tai Wolff sees the difference between Tea Cake’s text and those of
Janie’s earlier relationships in that Tea Cake invites Janie “to live a text, to formulate a
role. In the narrative of Janie’s life, knowledge accepted fiom a prepared text—one that is

told—is opposed by knowledge gleaned flom experience” (31).

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In our historical moment, it is difficult to see Janie’s relationship with Tea Cake as
unambiguously positive. In my view, Tea Cake forces a text on Janie quite as much as
Joe ever did, but the nature of the text is qualitatively different and, most important, it
corresponds more closely to Janie’s own text for herself. Tea Cake is, at last, the bee to
Janie’s bloom. Wolff argues that there are always at least two texts which Janie must
reconcile: “The first, which comes flom the spoken opinions of others and corresponds
to the ‘outside’ image of her, is ahnost forced on Janie. The second is less easily
explained: it is something she knows and is always capable of possessing, but it must be
brought out and valued” (30). Tea Cake, hour this perspective, can be seen as a catalyst
to Janie’s identity formation, although it must be remembered that he also continues the
pattern of domination established in Janie’s first two marriages. As Awkward notes,
Janie has failed to actively assert a personal text after Joe’s death, apparently leaving her
a relatively blank page for Tea Cake to inscribe his text upon (82).

But as Belenky et al. argue, a woman in the subjectivist position of knowing goes
through a period in which her self-concept is unstable. Separated flom her most recent
and long-standing definer, Joe, Janie observes and considers a whole range of possible
self-definitions. She is in no particular hurry to fix her identity. Because she defined
herself internally for so many years, her inner voice has grown in stature as she gradually
learns to privilege her intuitive knowledge over the truth imposed by Joe. In her
relationship with Tea Cake, Janie remains in a subjectivist position, but her quest for self
moves tentatively into external manifestations. Belenky et al. note that women in this
position develop “strategies for knowing [that] grow out of their very embeddedrress in
human relationships” (85). Thus I argue that Janie’s dependence on Tea Cake’s text for

the creation of her own identity is a legitimate and productive strategy. Some

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contemporary readings of Their Eyes Were Watching God express disappointment in
Janie’s continuing reliance on her relationships as the source of her identity, but such a
view ignores the fact that many women (and men) do in fact define themselves out of or
against their relationships." It has been a highly productive means of self-creation for
women throughout history, and indeed, it is arguably impossible to define oneself in
isolation fl'om human interaction. Through her characterization of Janie, Hmston
challenges the liberal humanist notion of a unified, autonomous self.

Tea Cake’s appeal for Janie (and for many readers) is largely a function of his
charming playfulness. For twenty years, Janie was denied the joy of active participation
in the cultural life of her community. Tea Cake signals his alternative text for Janie by
teaching her to play checkers, a small enough gesture, but hugely significant to Janie as it
constitutes an invitation to step off the pedestal on which Joe has placed her. While a
text is once again asserting itself on her, it represents a radical change for Janie, one she is
more than willing to embrace after Joe’s repressive regime of truth. Subjectivist women
are defined by their openness to change, which is often expressed in terms of rebirth
(Belenky 82). Janie seems to have been searching for the opportunity Tea Cake
offers—to recreate herself. Telling her fl'iend Pheoby that “new words had tuh be
thought and new words said. . . .He done taught me the maiden language all over” (109),
Janie accepts Tea Cake’s challenge to re-invent herself and find new words to name that
reality. The “maiden language” is Janie’s own inner voice, which she finally heeds.

Janie and Tea Cake’s courtship is marked by her exploration of the uncharted
territory of her subjectivity. She challenges many of the texts that have been imposed on
her as black, woman, and mayor’s wife. Tea Cake invites her to actively and equally

share his life, but, most of all, to enjoy herself. But in the final analysis, Janie’s text is

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largely dictated by him; she wears clothes he likes to see her in and eventually leaves
Eatonville to marry Tea Cake and “start all over in Tea Cake ’s way” (108, emphasis
added). Although she claims to have lived Nanny’s way and now means “tuh live mine”,
Janie accepts Tea Cake’s way as her own. In order to live out this new text, Janie must
define herself in opposition to the old one, necessitating a move away flom the place
where the old identity is embedded. Tea Cake’s apparently egalitarian view of his
relationship with Janie is undermined by his flequent retreat into sexist domination of her.
These episodes force Janie to retreat periodically into her former mode of protective self-
division. The most dramatic instance occurs when Tea Cake perceives a threat to his
relationship with Janie by Mrs. Tumer’s brother. This apparent threat gives rise to a
“brainstorm” that leads him to beat Janie, “[n]ot because her behavior justified his
jealousy, but it relieved that awful fear inside him. . . . He just slapped her around a bit to
show he was boss” (140). His demonstration of power arouses the envy of the other
men, allowing him to brag that “Janie is whereva wants tuh be” (141). The fact that
Janie also beats Tea Cake for far more provoking evidence of faithlessness might justify a
reading of their relationship as egalitarian, but Janie is silenced and subdued by Tea
Cake’s beating, while the same cannot be said in reverse. Janie’s silence does not signal
her acceptance of his brutality; it does, however, suggest she is retreating into her former
mode of survival by dividing her inside and outside selves.

However, despite Tea Cake’s domination, the alternative text he offers Janie
provides her with choices. There are important instances of Janie asserting her own text
in their relationship, that has developed out of her experiences in marriage with Joe.
Within days of their marriage, Tea Cake disappears with Janie’s money for nearly

twenty-four hours, leaving Janie dissolved in a heap on the floor and fearing she’s been

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made the fool. When he finally returns, regaling her with his adventures, she tells tell “if
you ever go off flom me and have a good time lak dat and then come back heah tellin’ me
how nice Ah is, Ah speck to kill yuh dead” (119). Aiming to “partake wid everything”,
Janie is clearly defining a new role for herself in opposition to the one she has lived since
she left Nanny’s house. She will no longer allow herself to be “classed off’ flom others
as she immerses herself in life with and among the folk on the muck. Janie and Tea Cake
work the bean fields side by and side, and both participate in domestic chores. Janie
learns to shoot a gun better than Tea Cake, and even begins participating in the communal
telling of “big stories”.

The journey for Janie and Tea Cake is far flom smooth, however, and their
relationship undergoes more than a few serious crises in trust. The greatest test ofthe
integrity of J anie’s newly created self-concept comes when Tea Cake, transformed by
rabies, threatens to kill her. Were Janie truly defined by his text alone, she would have
found herself transformed by his altered perception of her. But, signaling her investment
in her own definition of self, Janie rejects Tea Cake’s rabid interpellation of her and kills
him before he can kill her. Even her murder trial fails to dissuade her flom the truth of
why she had to kill him; the strength of her vision convinces first the white court, and
finally, more grudgingly, Tea Cake’s fliends.

In her three marriages, Janie employs distinct ways of gaining self-knowledge. In
her first marriage, she allows herself to be interpellated, although she does not recognize
the subjectivity she is called to assume. Janie’s marriage to Joe is marked by inner growth
which occurs as a result of her careful observation of the dissonance between her own text
and that of others. Finally, in her marriage to Tea Cake, Janie creates knowledge through

direct experience with the larger world, and she signifies on it by fleely assigning meaning

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to that experience. Janie has become what Belenky et al. define as a constructed knower.
Women in this position listen to a “voice of integration,” which the psychologists
describe as a “fusion of reason and intuition and the expertise of others (133). Janie’s
journey has taught her the necessity of employing all of these strategies in constructing
her self, privileging none above the others. Additionally, constructed knowers feel
compelled to conflont life in all its complexity, both externally and internally, “[a]nd
they want to develop a voice of their own to communicate to others their understanding
of life’s complexity” (137). It is this powerful impulse that propels Janie back to
Eatonville, where “Mouth Almighty” stands ready to judge her. Janie claims not to care
anymore, because she is ready to preach the sermon of her life to Pheoby. Her primary
need seems to be to voice her complex understanding of her experience; she privileges her
inner voice, but is finally confident enough to listen to others and learn flom them too.

Hruston’s representation of coming of age extends its boundaries to suggest that
the process of attaining subjectivity is not limited to adolescence. Indeed, Tea Cake tells
Janie that “God made it so you spent yo’ ole age first wid somebody else, and saved up
yo’ young girl days to spend wid me” (172), an observation borne out by the activities
Janie and Tea Cake engage in during their courtship, coded as adolescent behaviors:
fishing all night long, going to the movies, learning to drive, playing checkers (105). And
there is no suggestion that Janie is finished with the process of constructing her
subjectivity at the end of Their Eyes Were Watching God. Furthermore, Janie’s
subjectivity is decidedly constructed in and through relationship, not only to her
grandmother and her three husbands, but through the community of Eatonville as well.
As with the protagonists of other coming of age narratives, Janie does not accept the

ideology that requires women to relinquish quest in favor of romance. Steadfastly clinging

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to agency regardless of her marital status, Janie simply leaves her husbands (either
physically or emotionally) when it is clear that they will not permit the continuation of
her quest. The shifting point of view may suggest that Janie’s authority is undercut by
the third-person narration, but Janie herself refutes that assertion in the final moments of
the novel by suggesting that talk not backed up by experience is meaningless: “. . . talkin’
don’t amount tuh a hill uh beans when yuh can’t do nothin’ else. . . .you got tuh go there
tuh know there. Yo’ papa and yo’ mama can’t tell yuh and show yuh. Two things
everybody’s got tuh do filh theyselves. They got tuh go to God, and they got tuh find
out fuh theyselves” (183). Janie has done precisely that. The act of narrating her own

story is the most important indicator that she has indeed found out for herself.

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‘Room for Paradoxes’:
Creating a Hybrid Identity

I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is
large, so that there is room for paradoxes.

—Maxine Hong Kingston
The Woman Warrior

Clearly, some individuals find it possible to repress difference in order to
construct a unified identity. But for the American-bom child of immigrants, the clash of
cultural identity is necessarily foregrounded as living parents stand in clear contrast, if not
outright opposition, to the new American culture.1 Caught between two cultures,
children of immigrants struggle with self-definition: Am I an American? A Pole? A
Polish-American? If the latter, what exactly is that? Homi K. Bhabha might define tlmt
subject position as the “third space”——-neither one nor the other, but forever in between.2
Occupying this third space allows the individual to escape fixed identity, according to
Bhabha, but in my view also places her in a position of permanent uncertainty in a culture
that values certainty, even if it is chimerical. In Bhabha's view, positioning ourselves in
that in-between place will flee us of the repressive apparatuses of nationalism, allowing
us to assume a subject position that is neither/nor, one that thus enables individual
agency. While that position sounds plausible in dreary, I argue that maintaining an “in-
between” position is impossible in practice. It is a fine ideal to sit ‘perched on a
hyphen,” in Richard Rodriguez’s words, but many immigrant narratives suggest that one

is, at any given moment, identified as one or the other.3 A first generation American will

19]

find it difficult, if not impossible, to stand comfortably between two or more cultures and
feel she is occupying both spaces at once. More likely, [she will feel outside both
cultures; the immigrant texts I discuss in this chapter explicitly conflont the deep
alienation and confirsion that result flom a hybrid subject position. But as I have aheady
suggested, it is a productive conflict that creates a space for alternative forms of identity.
When a choice is forced between the binary opposition of “American” and “foreign”
—-and American discourses tend to encourage the denial of foreignness—immigrants
invariably feel that a significant element of their identity has been devalued or even lost,
just as the sexual identity of intersexed individuals who were “assigned” a sex at birth
argue that they lose an integral part of their identities when their sexual ambiguity is
surgically altered. The intersexed individual’s bodily knowledge of his/her sexually
ambiguous identity is a physical manifestation of the subjectivity of the immigrant.‘
Although flaught with emotional pain and conflict, a hybrid or ambiguous social
location is ultimately liberating for the subject of the coming of age narrative, allowing her
to choose elements of identity that originate in the different discourses that interpellate
her. In my view, the Venn diagram, in which the overlapping space of two (or more)
circles creates a new and distinctive identity that draws on some aspects of the separate
spheres, provides a better graphic model of hybrid identity construction than Bhabha’s
amorphous third space.’ Kathy Ferguson argues for a ‘mobile,’ rather than multiple,
subjectivity to “avoid the implication of movement flom one to another stable resting
place, and instead to problematize the contours of the resting one does” (158), a move
that would prevent Bhabha's “third space” flom becoming yet another fixed identity.
Ferguson calls mobile subjectivities “relational, produced through shifting yet enduring

encounters and connections, never fully captured by them” (154), a description that could

I92

be applied to many individuals, but which 1 find particularly productive in reading
immigrant narratives. Unlike “native” Americans whose families have lived in the United
States for generations, and whose culture shock is but a distant memory, recent
immigrants cannot avoid the recognition that they occupy a dual identity, at the very
least, shifting from one position to another depending on the social context. But Shirley
Geek-Lin Lim argues that the ambivalent identity of immigrants is a dialectic, “as in an
optical illusion, their identities encompass[ing] more than one figure simultaneously . . . .
[t]hough we know both figures exist, we can only see one at a time” (22). Furthermore,
Lim claims that immigrants themselves can only be conscious of one identity at a time,
suggesting the difliculty of occupying an “in between” place for more than a passing
moment.

As I have been arguing, identity is produced by multiple discourses, acknowledged
or not, but clearly, many individuals are able to deny contradictory selfllood by
employing what Kenneth Burke has called “terrninistic screens.” According to Burke,
when attention is focused on one view of reality, attention is necessarily deflected fiom
other views.6 Thus, because Anne Moody focuses primarily on race as a determinant of
identity in her memoir, she does not explicitly acknowledge other, equally salient,
elements of her subjectivity, specifically gender and class. Similarly, Annie Dillard’s
conscious awareness of herself as female deflects her attention somewhat fl'om other
discursive constructions of her identity. This move is overdetermined in the liberal
humanist tradition, and authorized in academic and scientific discourse which has long
claimed that a unified identity is a marker of healthy personality. There is, in other
words, great cultural pressure on the autobiographer to present a coherent textual

identity, and to deflect attention from contradictory aspects of selfllood. But for many

I93

American-bom immigrants, racial and ethnic difference foregrounds duality, and thus
forces a conscious conflontation with identity.

Furthermore, the specificities of social construction of gender are variable across
cultures, so for some women immigrants, American culture has provided greater
opportunity for education and better material circumstances, but when American
ideologies of womanhood conflict with those of the country of origin, a girl coming of age
is forced to conflont—and explicitly define—her identity as a woman. The process of
constructing an identity is further complicated for American-bom immigrants as the
discourses of at least two cultures become entwined at the site of individual
consciousness, often requiring a more explicit consideration of self than what is usually
necessary for people who come of age in their native lands. For instance, according to
San-Ling Cynthia Wong, Chinese immigrant literature flequently explores adult sexuality,
especially in the context of heterosexual relationships, whereas American-born Chinese
writers are conspicuously vague about sexuality. Wong speculates that American-bom
Chinese, struggling with racism and a sense of homelessness, may feel a special urgency to
create a Chinese American identity: “The effort may be so all-consuming. . . that it
forecloses further imaginative venturing; formulation of a serviceable identity then
constitutes the culminating achievement of which subsequent experiences are but
applications or variations” (124). American ideologies of sexuality may also explain the
reluctance of American-born Chinese to treat sexuality in their literature; at various times
in US. history, for example, Asian women have been considered at one extreme sexually
repugnant or at the other, highly desirable “exotic” sex objects. A desire to avoid being
stereotyped in these ways, then, may explain the absence of sexualized characters in the

literature of American-bom Asians, who, with their clearer grasp of American norms

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(compared to their foreign-bom parents) would likely be aware of signifying practices
that serve to Other them. In this subtle but insidious manner, dominant views of Chinese
by Americans work to shape the identities of immigrants and their textual representations
of self in much the same way that stereotypes of black women have (partially)
determined their subjectivity.’

Twentieth-century strategies for creating-an immigrant identity in the United
States have ranged flom assirnilationism to accommodationism to cultural separatism, so
the American-bom children of immigrants have shaped their subjectivity in response to
the specific discourses in circulation as they come of age. In addition, the dominant views
of non-immigrant Americans toward those of foreign parentage have shifted in response
to historical changes which affected the degree of acceptance felt by immigrants at any
given historical moment. In general, the less an immigrant looks like she is of European
descent, the more Othered she tends to feel in American society. Her response to being
Othered culturally, in addition to the widespread cultural Othering of females generally,
will then shape her identity in myriad ways. I turn now to two quite different coming of
age narratives written in the context of female immigrant identity formation: Kate
Simon’s 1982 memoir, Bronx Primitive, and Maxine Hong Kingston’s 1975
autobiography, The Woman Warrior. Simon’s family is willingly trying to assimilate, so
Kate’s mother explicitly constructs a radical view of womanhood for her daughter while
implicitly enforcing old world gender codes. In contrast, Kingston’s family actively seeks
to instill a ”pure” Chinese womanhood in young Maxine, and while she initially rejects
this construction, eventually she achieves an uneasy hybrid of Chinese and “American”
identity. In reconstructing their coming of age, both writers thematize the special

difficulties of the American-bom child of immigrant parents in creating identity. Neither

I95

woman is able to unproblematically reject the old culture or embrace the new. Thus,
while the circumstances of their lives in the US. differ a good deal, and while they were
born a generation apart, Kingston and Simon faced a similar dilemma of negotiating

identity amidst competing cultural claims.

A “World of Paper Strengths: ” The Education of Kate Simon

Spying on her brother and his fliends playing “King of the Hill” in a vacant lot,
Kate Simon feels a distinct letdown when she realizes that the game that had seemed so
mysterious to her was only the boys’ ritual of urinating into a bonfire in an empty lot.
The game with the powerful name merely demonstrates to her “a feeble power that was
an accident of birth,” and thus Simon’s view of the masculine world is de-mystified. She
knows that it was supposed to be a “man’s world,” but she begins to realize that this is
not such a remarkable or mysterious thing, and that she can hold her own in that “world
of paper strengths” (134). This moment of truth in Simon’s 1982 memoir, Bronx
Primitive: Portraits in a Childhood, is one of many from which she constructs an
identity. The first volume in what would be become three volumes of autobiography,
Bronx Primitive focuses on the experiences that transform a child flom a “primitive” being
into a “civilized” and conforming member of society. In Simon’s telling, the
transformation is sometimes violent, sometimes disappointing, and often traumatic.
More particularly, Bronx Primitive illustrates the forces, influences, and experiences that
press and mold a girl into assuming her proper place in American society: of how a
woman is made, not born. But Simon’s autobiography is also a memoir of resistance, as
the “King of the Hill” episode demonstrates. A complex web of social and cultural forces

are at work on Simon, but at the distance of later years, she remembers questioning them.

196

Education, in the broadest sense of the word, is key to Simon’s glowing
understanding of the world, but in a different sense than had held true for immigrants of a
slightly earlier period. Fictional and autobiographical narratives such as Anzia
Yezierska’s 1925 novel, Bread Givers, and Mary Antin’s 1912 autobiography, The
Promised Land, tell of young immigrant girls who yearn for the education that America
promises, even to girls. Learning has long been valued by Jewish tradition, but until the
mid- to late nineteenth-century, it was largely reserved for boys and men. Education
meant religious study of the Torah and Talmud, and secular training held little value. By
the time of mass emigration to America, an education was within a girl’s reach. Book
learning and formal education were finally available to girls who had only been able to
dream of the chance to go to school in the old country. An education signified the
promise of economic flaedom and social acceptance, but Simon, just a generation removed
flom Antin and Yezierska, becoming educated comes to mean much more than formal
schooling. In addition to the usual subjects in school, Simon gets an education out in the
world. Crowded living conditions and lack of privacy drove her and other children out
into the Bronx neighborhood to observe and learn. Such a situation would have been less
likely for earlier women, since tradition would have bound them to their mothers’ sides to
learn domestic arts.

As if to dispel any notion that hers is a timeless, universal story, and to situate it
geographically and ethnically, Simon opens her memoir with a chapter titled “Lafontaine
Near Tremont,” detailing the precise topographical location of her childhood. Beginning
with the larger view of the Bronx neighborhood, Simon gradually telescopes her vision to
focus on the building, and then on the apartment in which she came of age, implying, as

the coming of age narrative convention demands, that her experience and subjectivity are

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marked by a particular time and place. She is who she is because of where she came horn,
and the specificities of that time. The experience of coming of age, then, is profoundly
affected by a complex web of factors and experiences—geographic and historic location,
gender, ethnicity, sexuality, class—that are far flom universal. As Lois McNay argues
in her feminist gloss of Foucault’s later work, subjectivity is never overdetermined, but
rather, “against [a] background of multiple determinants, individuals act upon themselves
and order their lives in numerous and variable ways” (65). The autobiographical act
accomplishes exactly this ordering of experience to articulate the discomses of identity.
Still, it may be possible to suggest some strands of commonality in the journey of
growing up that, while they vary in specifics, do carry across time and place to some
degree.8 Awakening sexuality, the body’s metamorphosis in puberty, consciousness of
difference flom males, and the socialization into feminine gender roles are thematized in
American women’s coming of age narratives, which suggests the significance of the body
in the creation of knowledge.9 But there are variations even in these themes, because if it
can be said that all females experience these life passages, they do not occur at a conscious
level for all young girls, and even if they do, it is the articulation of the passage into an
autobiography that imposes meaning in hindsight. The past can never be duplicated
precisely as it was experienced, so while the grown writer may look back and construct a
narrative fiom a series of events that make sense of her sexual awakening, for instance, she
likely did not understand the events as a sexual awakening narrative while she was
experiencing them. Nonetheless, as I have argued, the act of writing autobiography is an
interpretation of memories, a construction of meanings that make sense to the individual
herself in the historical, political, ideological and discursive context of her life.

Consequently, it matters little how the writer interpreted an event at the moment it

I 98

occurred; interpretations are endlessly revisable as understanding is filtered through new
experiences. Without doubt, discursive practices contemporaneous to an event shape the
initial interpretation, but all retellings will be revised in light of constantly shifting
discourses. Thus, the autobiographer is unable to access any original or transcendent
meaning; rather, her autobiographical text constitutes an interpretation that is situated in
a particular temporal space and which can never be duplicated.

Writing after the sexual revolution of the 1960s, as well as the heyday of second
wave feminism, Kate Simon inscribes a self that she could not have created before those
particular movements shifted public discourse by authorizing open discussion of
sexuality. As I mention above, Simon is only a generation older than Mary Antin, but
because she wrote her memoir in 1982, she—unlike Antin— can explicitly articulate the
sexual aspect of her coming of age. The crowded living conditions that send lovers to
rooftops were likely much the same for Antin as for Yezierska, but because Simon is
writing in the 19803, she is able to represent what her predecessor could not. Simon’s
memoir is dotted with small moments that contribute to her growing understanding of sex,
although she is given no concrete knowledge by her parents or others with direct
experience. She must therefore add each experience, each hint, to her storehouse of
knowledge and come to her own conclusions as she seeks to know and understand the
body’s role in subjectivity. Unfortunately, the understanding she comes to about sex is
troublesome and problematic. The silence that surrounds sex in her youth is emblematic
of the arguments made later by feminists in regard to women’s sexuality; silence, for
Simon, leads to a great deal of fear and ignorance, something that the women’s movement
has sought to dispel by speaking what was formerly unspeakable. And her story

suggests what psychologists have been arguing since Freud: children are sexual beings

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who understand a great deal without being told anything by adults. Thus, when Kate sees
two dogs mating and ms to her pregnant mother to go “help” them because she believes
someone glued them together, her mother’s response is a flat “No. I’m staying here and
so are you. Mind your own business” (61). An awkward silence ensues, and Kate
believes she has done something wrong. “I shouldn’t have told her about the dogs. I
didn’t ask her why. She didn’t tell me” (61).

Further into her mother’s pregnancy, Kate wanders to the rooftop, and sees a pair
of lovers having sex. Laughing, she runs back to her apartment to tell her mother, but as
soon as she sees her, she remembers “the face that had turned to stone when I asked her
to help the dogs. I looked at her belly; maybe the people on the roof were making a
belly” (66). Simon also begins to equate overheard bits of conversation about childbirth
with sex, and wonders why anyone would do anything that might cause her to endure the
horrors of birthing. Grown women did not include young girls in open discussions of
childbirth, but the few things Kate overheats flighten her. Presumably, mothers were
protecting their daughters flom the realities of the pain of childbirth, but the flagrnented
information only heightens fears for Simon. When her mother goes into labor, nothing is
explained to the children. They are sent outside and told to wait until their father gets
home. They only know that something is happening to their mother, and that it has
something to do with a baby. Kate hears screams as her mother labors through the night,
but nothing is said, and no one reassures her. Her interpretation of these flagrnents of
knowledge causes her to reject the new baby who has caused her mother such pain. She
believes that the reason her mother often becomes angry with her for no apparent reason
isthatKatetoohadbeena source ofgreatpainwhen shewasbonnclearlyaharmful

assrunption. By revealing her dismal education in sex, Simon serves the political agenda

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of feminism tacitly by showing the impact such silences had on her. As Adrienne Rich
writes, “We have had the truth of our bodies withheld flom us or distorted; we have been
keep in ignorance of our most intimate places” (“Women” 189). This is the rallying cry
of the feminist movement, and Simon’s text bears witness to the destructive meanings
ascribed to women’s bodies and experience by patriarchal signifying practices.

Bronx Primitive, like The Woman Warrior, is an immigrant nanative, and although
Simon was born in Poland, her family emigrated to the US. in the 1910s when she was
only four years old. Earlier immigrant narratives thematize the great pressure on
immigrants to prove that they were willing to work hard to become good citizens, willing
to leave behind their old world ways and assimilate. Antin’s The Promised Land for
instance, is dominated by scenes that demonstrate her parents’ and her own struggles to
become Americans. She waves the flag incessantly and believes the American dream
wholeheartedly, even in the face of evidence that the dream is not flrlfilled for everyone.
Her father is never able to make a successful business in the U.S., but she blames his
personal shortcomings for his economic failure, rather than questioning the dream itself.
By contrast, even though her parents are also immigrants seeking a new and better life in
America, Kate Simon’s recollection of her childhood hints at no tension about the need to
assimilate, except in an early chapter when she notes that the adults in her multi-ethnic
Bronx neighborhood are instantly on guard when they hear “lmaccented English.” Some
of this can be explained by Simon’s age when she arrived, whereas for Antin, who was
closer to 10, coming to America meant the opportunity to go to school, something that
was unthinkable before. Simon was so young when she arrived that she had not yet had a
chance to understand that her life was far less circumscribed in the US. than it would

have been had she grown up in Poland. Simon was writing her story in the context of a

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different rhetorical situation flom Antin, but nonetheless she displays a similarly wide-
eyed, uncritical acceptance of Anglo-American culture. What is different about Simon’s
account is her apparent assumption that she belongs in that culture; in conhast, Antin’s
account is riddled with a narrative anxiety that suggests she believes she must prove to
Americans that she too deserves to be an American.

The conflict between a daughter who wants to shed the old world auditions and
the Orthodox rabbi father who hies to control her in Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers
exemplifies the prototypical immigrant story, which thematizes generational and cultural
tensions. Generally, these narratives oppose parents bound by tradition to their children
who often want to live the much fleer life of an “American.” One of the more interesting
aspects of Kate Simon’s story is that her parents wanted to assimilate, and so she was
raised in an ahnosphere that was dynamic and fluid in the sense that traditions were
actively being altered as she grew up. Her mother, retaining her fluency in Polish,
Yiddish, and Italian, took English language classes as soon as she could after arriving in
New York. Unlike some immigrant mothers, Simon’s did not fear the strange new place
she had come to— she wanted to see everything, right away, and was accommodated by
aunts and uncles who watched Kate and her brother while she went exploring. Simon’s
father had arrived some two years before she and her mother arrived, and he was
distinctly displeased to be tied down to a family again. Although he was anxious to shed
his Old World self, he had very old world ideas about the place of children, and especially
about the place of girls. He did not like his daughter running the sheets like a “wild
beast,” and as Kate grew older, he expected lady-like decorum out of her, long before she
had left childhood behind.

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A crucial aspect of anyone’s education are the lessons in gender roles, and Simon’s
memoir is rich in recognizing the process of engendering femininity. These forces are
often conhadictory, but the subtlety of those paradoxes allows ideology to reproduce
itself, unquestioned. In Simon’s case, however, ideological conhadictions are often
blatantly obvious to her, making resistance to a stereotypical gendered identity that much
easier, since the existence (and acceptance) of alternative narratives allow for a more
complex subjectivity. Emigrating flom Poland as a toddler allowed Simon to avoid the
inevitable teleology of marriage, children, and death. Horizons expanded for girls who
emigrated to U.S., and the younger they were on arrival, the looser the grip of Old World
values on their futures. Beyond that, Simon’s mother was already carving out a
progressive identity in Poland. There she had owned a business and fallen deeply in love
with a Gentile before she met Simon’s father. Not so progressive that she could
overcome the difficulties of an exogarnous marriage, she was still able to conshuct an
alternative identity in a marriage more acceptable to contemporary values. But Kate was
sent to school, just like her brother, and she reaped the benefits of having a mother who
held modern ideas about being female. Insh'ucting her daughter with the knowledge she
has gained through marriage and motherhood, Simon’s mother advises her daughter to

Study. Learn. Go to college. Be a schoolteacher and don’t get married
until you have a profession. With a profession you can have men

fliends and even children if you want. You’re flee. But don’t get married,
at least not until you can support yourself and make a careful choice.

Or don’t get married at all, better still. (48)

But Simon senses that this would be seen as beyond eccenhic among her fliends; it was
understood that girls would marry young, so Simon kept her mother’s unusual views on

the importance of an education to herself.

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In addition to her mother, Simon has other models of womanhood to examine:
Fannie Herman, a neighbor who is terrified of the outside world, and who relies on Kate’s
mother to help her negotiate foreign territory such as the butcher shop; Mrs. Haskell,
whose preparations for the end of the world look remarkably like Yom Kippur
preparations; fashionable Mrs. Silverberg, who is carted off to the insane asylum one
night. Simon inscribes her fascination with these various manifestations of womanhood,
but does not emulate any of them; each model parades before her consciousness as an
option—here is one way of being a woman. And yet, these are problematic models, for
collectively they suggest to Simon that womanhood is flaught with emotional danger and
suppressed desire. With the exception of her mother, Simon is surrormded by women for
whom femininity (and marriage in most cases) means enclosure, madness, and reshiction.
As Bordo argues, agoraphobia can be read as a parody of domesticity, and hysteria (or
madness) as a heightened version of normative femininity (16-17); Simon receives an
object lesson in the pitfalls of feminine ideologies simply by observing her female
neighbors’ unhappy responses to their own lives.

In Bronx Primitive, Simon demonshates that gender is defined for her by what it is
not, and what she cannot do. F eminism’s critique of gender has long included the view
that man is viewed as the norm, while woman is the Other. Thus, females must often
contend with a world that materially and psychologically reshicts their movement. Only
eighteen months older than her brother, Simon is given the responsibility of watching him
flour a very early age. As they grow older, the disparity in their fleedom gives rise to
Kate’s bitterness and perhaps a nascent feminism:

His opportunities were much greater than mine. His role with the

baby was to kootchy-koo her as he dashed in flom school and down to

the street while I thumped the carriage down the five flights, up and

down again with pillows and blankets, up and down again with the
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baby. While he, the grasshopper, sang and danced, I, the ant, sat
demurely rocking the carriage. He was in the full sun, I in the shade;
he was young, I was old. (137)

This clear-eyed understanding of the limits placed on girls is surely the articulation of the
adult writer, and echoes Nancy Chodorow’s thesis on how mothering is reproduced,
although here the reproduction is not willing. The passage illushates the process by
which girls are hained for motherhood, which is marked by confinement, and
simultaneously we see how a boy learns to be a father. Simon’s brother is already
performing the identical version of masculinity seen in their father, by which neither male
is bound by domesticity, but is instead flee to roam at will. Simon’s memoir turns on the
theme of feminine responsibility for others, and on a view of herself as old when she was
still a child. Furthermore, coming of age often carries with it an imperative to put aside
the androgyny of childhood and begin to take on the social norms of womanhood, as we
have already seen in Dillard and Moody’s texts. The imperative is tacit and the
underlying ideologies are unspoken, as when Kate’s father threatens to keep her inside
when, at age eleven, she is caught wrestling with a boy. It is made clear to her that
wrestling is an unacceptable behavior for a girl of her age, just as it is clear that babysitting
duties are appropriate for girls, but Simon’s father does not make plain to her the sexual
dangers he fears, or why babysitting is an acceptably safe expression of female sexuality.
Like Maxine Hong Kingston, Simon learns many vivid lesson through “mistakes” which
are then corrected by her parents or other members of her community. These mistakes
are mystifying to both Simon and Kingston, because, until they are slapped, cursed,
punished, and silenced, they are unaware of the ideological laws they have broken.
Further confusing the issue, parents are often silent about the very existence of the
cultural laws of female behavior, even after they punish their daughters. Simon does not

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suffer these reshictions gladly, but neither does she verbalize her objections. She learns
instead how to wage silent battles and enjoy private victories over the oppressive
reshictions imposed on her.

Education in the strictest sense is certainly influential in shaping Simon—as
cormtless theorists on the left have argued, the school is profoundly influential in shaping
and molding children into obedient, productive citizens— but as an adult writer, Simon
sees formal schooling as of secondary importance in relation to the education she receives
outside of school: at the movies, at the library, and in the sheets. In a chapter titled
“The Movies and Other Schools,” she reveals that the movies were a far more tantalizing
source of knowledge than school, for on the screen she is exposed to ways of being far
removed flom her own circumstances. The movies articulate an unconhadictory, neatly
ordered world of gender roles where fathers come home flom work at the end of the day
to perfectly coiffed wives, pretty, docile daughters, and polite sons. Mothers speak
gently and lovingly to their children in the movies, a stark conhast to the shouting, coarse
interchanges Simon hears in her Bronx neighborhood. The mothers Simon knows limit
their maternal duties to feeding, clothing, and seeking medical advice for their children, but
beyond that they want their children out of their way. The fantasy movie world of
rolling green lawns, tennis, and carefully conholled emotions is significant for Simon
because the conhast to her own world feeds her imagination, and allows her to
question—if only to herself— the social order she knows. In particular, Simon observes
that there are different ways of being married:

From what I could see, and I searched, there was no Love on the block,
nor even its fairy tale end, Marriage. We had only Being Married, and that
included the kids, a big crowded barrel with a family name stamped

on it. (45)

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Movies, then, serve as a point of conhast as well as a source of interpretation. While
love in the movies was “a very foreign counhy. . . . smooth and slinky” (45), at home in
the Bronx it appears that romantic love is non-existent. Simon’s parents move in separate
spheres and fight over money and how to discipline the children. But in a moment that
signals an increasingly complex understanding of multiple ways of being, Kate sees her
father cutting her mother’s toenails, and makes a cognitive leap in interpreting the scene as
a sign of her parents’ intimacy and affection: “Something, another branch in the twisted
hee that shaded our lives, was going to keep us safe for a while” (54). Having found
“love on the block” after all, Simon’s movie-inspired definition of love finds alternative
means of expression in her parents’ mundane gestures.

Becoming educated, for Simon, also involves learning what it means to be a Jew.
Simon’s family is secular—they go to temple on the High Holy days, only so as not to
give the goyim something to wag about. Her brother has a pretty singing voice, so he
sometimes sings at the synagogue, but otherwise they are not observant. They have only
one set of dishes, meaning that theirs is not a kosher house, unlike Kate’s fliend Helen
Roth’s family which boasts four sets of dishes, one being reserved for Passover only. A
crucial shift occurs one Sabbath Friday as Kate’s mother is saying the traditional prayer
while lighting the candles. Mid-prayer, she blows the candles out and says she will never
perform the ritual again. She says she does not believe in it, never did, and there is no one
around whom she must please by continuing the ritual. Thus, religious Judaism slides
away, but Simon notes that the rhythm of the week remains exactly the same as before,
with the characteristic smells of Friday preparations, and the quiet of the Sabbath.
Simon’s Jewish identity is not articulated or understood through any incidents of anti-

Semitism, nor through religious practice. Rather, it is a thread that is woven into the

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fabric of identity, neither more or less important than other threads. Furthermore, as with
other parts she hies on for size, Simon articulates the experimental nature of her identity
as a Jew in her text. Just as she weighs different ways of being female, so she performs
various versions of Jewishness in the process of finding one that suits her. In addition to
her mother’s rejection of religious ritual as a mode of being Jewish, the mystic Judaism
practiced by her fliend Helen Roth’s father serves as an examme. For a time, Simon
entertains the idea that Mr. Roth might be training her to become a “miracle rebbitsin”
(115) so that she might be the one to discover the secrets ofthe earth by breaking the
numeric code of the sacred texts. She gives up after countless hours of drawing geomehic
shapes and combining letters and numbers, but this small drama conhibutes to her
conshuction of identity. She does not directly articulate what sort of Jew she is, or how
being Jewish affects who she is, but the childhood game of hying on identities serves her
well as she comes of age. But she also understands that identity can be arbitrary: after
becoming close to a number of Italian families in her neighborhood, Simon concludes that
“Italians were really sort of Jewish anyway” (94). As a result, there is no assertion of an
essential Jewish or female self in Bronx Primitive; indeed, there is no successfirl model of
unified subjectivity for Simon to use. Instead, a plethora of possibilities is arrayed before
her watchful gaze, subverting any suggestion that a unitary self is possible.

Although Simon does generalize about the behavior of other ethnic groups in her
neighborhood, the sheer presence of ethnic and gender alternatives suggests that she is not
locked into a particular hajectory. Here, the subject is created—partly consciously,
partly not—through hial and error by means of performing various identities
imaginatively. As her neighborhood comprises many ethnic groups, and since many of

her close fliends are Italian, Simon has a chance to evaluate non-Jewish identities too. She

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observes that the Gentile families she knows celebrate Christmas by getting drunk,
playing cards, and pinching women; only women, children, and the old men go to church
to celebrate the birth of Jesus. Simon’s knowledge of other ethnic haditions, however,
only brings criticism flom her Jewish peers. Because her knowledge of the “wider
world”l ° stigrnatizes her, Simon decides to keep her observations to herself. She learns to
be on “one side of the street, sort of Jewish, on the other sort of Italian, yet always hying
to arrange a comfortable melding” (94). The result is a sort of hybrid Jewishness, one that
Simon feels she must hide flom peers whose sense of identity appears less conflicted than
her own.

As she comes of age, Simon is presented with various subject positions that seem
to require a choice, but in many cases she chooses to meld subjectivity rather than make
an either/or decision about how she will identify herself. Along with the obvious issues
of sexuality and gender difference, coming of age is also concerned with fulfilling the
norms of class. Simon’s mother participates in a mandolin orchesha, which was
privileged and supported by Yiddish socialists because it was a communal activity
(Dobroszycki 202), and yet Kate’s father insists that she play the piano, a sign of
American individuality and upward mobility (Howe 261 ). Andrew R. Heinze notes that
Jewish immigrants widely inscribed the piano as an insh'ument of social mobility as well
as of music. Creating a refined home was said to inculcate a taste for high culture in
children, and piano lessons became a common element in girls’ upbringing. Fluthermore,
writes Heinze, it was widely believed that piano skills made a girl a more valuable
commodity in the Jewish marriage market (142). As a solitary activity that valorizes
individual achievement, piano playing was seen as antithetical to the socialist ideal of

collectivity, but Kate’s father dreams of producing a prodigy, a child who is better than

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other children. The clash in parental ideologies ultimately results in Simon taking her
mother’s side, since her mother’s more accepting attitude is less sh'essful than her father’s
high expectations that play should be sacrificed for piano practice. The war between
mandolins and pianos in Simon’s family is emblematic of a greater ideological sh'uggle
between the parents: the father urges his children to think of themselves as special and
superior to others (a clearly liberal humanist notion) whereas the mother’s philosophy of
class consciousness can be srunmed up in her response to her husband’s bigohy toward a
black man— “Es is doch a mench ” ——-“and yet he is a man” (52). Interestingly, while
Kate admires her mother’s clear morality, she is ultimately persuaded by her father’s
desire to see her rise above the immigrant class—to achieve autonomous individuality.
She resists his efforts to turn her into a prodigy, but nonetheless chooses to continue her
schooling through college.

While haditional autobiographical practices posited a universal subject and invited
readers to identification, Kate Simon’s memoir is marked by the focus on specificity that
I have suggested is the hallmark of the coming of age narrative. The highly detailed
specificity of time and place discourages over-identification on the part of the reader,
since relatively few readers—if indeed any—will share the writer’s exact circumstances.
lmplicitly, however, this narrative feature suggests to the reader that different social,
temporal, political and geographic locations conshuct different forms of subjectivity, and
thus open the possibility of resistance to dominant ideologies of identity. Like Dillard,
Simon begins her memoir with a geographic and ethnographic description of her childhood
that, by implication, is a key determinant of who she is. She claims neither an essential, a
priori subjectivity, nor does she claim that her experiences are universal. They are simply

hers. But her experiences bear wihress to how much was unspoken in earlier days, and

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the deshuctiveness of certain kinds of silence. Tillie Olsen reminds us that for every
woman like herself, there are countless others “born to the wrong circumstances——
diminished, excluded, foundered, silenced” (448). Kate Simon’s memoir narrates a very
different immigrant childhood than the kind that were sanctioned in the narratives of the
early part of the century, and as a result, she pursues the feminist project of speaking the
forbidden. Adrienne Rich argues that

[U ]ntil we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we
cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for women is
more than a search for identity; it is part of our refusal of the self-
deshuctiveness of male-dominated society. (“Women” 39)

This is the cultural work of the woman’s coming of age narrative—to define experience
and subjectivity in female terms without sacrificing specificity. Bronx Primitive
represents coming of age as a series of choices to be weighed and decided, showing the
reader a conflicted, conhadictory individual who continually reconstitutes herself in light
of new knowledge and information. Simon’s text tacitly suggests that an essentialist
identity has no more than “paper shength,” and against that, the individual can create her
own identities.

David Biale et al., argue that Jews “constitute a liminal border case, neither inside
nor outside—or, better, both inside and outside” (8), and as such are in a unique position
to challenge the notion of a hybrid identity; Biale argues that hybridity lingers as a
synonym for the melting pot, and prefers instead the term “multiplicity” as a way to
articulate the simultaneous performance of several identities while suppressing none
(“Melting” 32). Arguing that Jewish identity has always been a blend of religious, ethnic,
gender, and national locations, Biale et al., claim that being Jewish in modern America is

by definition “to lack a single essence” (9). But lacking an essence does not necessarily

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mean that one is comfortable in that “in-between” space, in Bhabha’s terms. While it is
hue that Jews have occupied multiple subject positions throughout the diaspora, living in
a culture that valorizes the simple and single identity may produce a conflicted stance in
relation to the multiple self. The assertion of Simon’s memoir is that it is unnecessary to
choose between distinct identities; it is possible to consciously choose how to identify
oneself without being caught iii-between. The Iirninal space becomes a newly-constituted
full subjectivity in its own right, though it remains contingent and in process. The ability
to choose among available identities also implies the ability to shift those choices at will.
Biale argues that American Jews are a “kind of intermediary ethnic group, one of the most
quickly and thoroughly accultlnated, yet, among European immigrant ethnicities, equally
one of the most resistant to complete assimilation” (31), and as such, may provide a
usable model of multiple subjectivity. As Biale points out, Jews were once considered
“colored” in American racial discourse, and became “white” only when the issue of civil
rights took precedence over the earlier social urgency associated with immigration (26), a
factor that may account for the relative ease with which Kate Simon’s family found a
place in America. But at this point, I want to consider how identity-formation is affected

when acculturation is impeded by more visible signs of racial difference.

Mythology and Narrative in the Creation of Identity: The Woman Warrior

“You must not tell anyone,” my mother said, “what I am about to tell you” (3).
With these words, Maxine Hong Kingston opens her Memoirs of a Girlhood Among
Ghosts, signaling her intent to end the silencing that had marked her socialization and
coming of age. In a radical departure flom the familiar linear narrative of autobiography,

Kingston uses five separate narratives, only one of which focuses directly on her own

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experiences, to define the contours of her identity. Each narrative is a story unto itself,
and yet they are unified by their impact on Kingston’s subjectivity. More noticeably
multivocal than many coming of age narratives, The Woman Warrior draws on a host of
myths, nanatives, and voices to articulate the discourses which constitute Kingston’s
subjectivity, creating what Lyotard would call narrative knowledge. The text, then,
valorizes the power of narrative— “talk-story” in Kingston’s words—to articulate a
theory of subjectivity. Like the other coming of age narratives discussed here, Kingston
posits a subject constantly under revision, refusing to suggest that she has arrived at a
“finished” self. Toward the end of The Woman Warrior, she writes: “I continue to sort
out what's just my childhood, just my imagination, just my family, just the village, just
movies, just living” (239), thereby naming the major discorrrses by which she continues to
constitute her identity. These discourses are constantly shifting as well, but having
passed out of the “storm” of adolescence, Kingston suggests that she is no longer buffeted
by the shifts; she has learned instead to accept a provisional identity.

The primary task of identity formation is deeply complicated for the female child
of immigrants, and while I do not wish to universalize across cultures, it is dificult to
imagine an easy passage for any immigrant child, regardless of national origin.
Autobiographies, literature, oral histories, and even theory testify repeatedly to the
delicate and often painful negotiation of identity that is experienced by immigrants.
Inscribed with the culture of her parents while hying to negotiate a place in mainstream
American culture, the immigrant child must decide how to be, at the most basic level.
American-bom Chinese solutions to this dilemma have varied historically: some, like
sociologist Rose Hum Lee, advocate for complete assimilation into American society.11

Others like Jade Snow Wong choose to serve as “cultural bridges” or interpreters between

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traditional Chinese and American cultures.12 In the 19608, Chinese Americans took a cue
flom the civil rights movement, and rejected mainshearn white American norms in favor

of recovering their anceshal heritage. In the last twenty years, according to Gloria

 

Heyung Chrm, Chinese Americans have felt the need to move beyond the “pan-Asian
American” identity established out of political necessity in the 1960s toward a
multivalent identity that includes not only ethnicity, but also gender, economic status,
sexuality, and political affiliation.’ 3 These solutions, however, are the conscious
discursive conshuctions of adults, and as Kingston repeatedly shows, they are not
necessarily intelligible to the girl who is coming of age, who must make sense of the
discourses before she can choose among—or be chosen by—them. The attempt to
understand possible ways of being is severely hampered for Kingston, who is silenced
flom all directions: by her parents because she is female; by Chinese American society
because it fears deportation and violence; by white American society because she is
female and foreign; by her own confusion and guilt. Paradoxically, loud speech is
normative and expected in Chinese culture.

Silencing is continually reinforced for Kingston throughout her childhood and
adolescence, fast and foremost by her mother, Brave Orchid. The Woman Warrior’s first
narrative, “No Name Woman,” begins, as I have noted, with Brave Orchid’s admonition
to keep secret the story of Kingston’s aunt, who disgraced the family by bearing an

illegitimate child and then committing suicide in the family well. There is no ambiguity in

 

Brave Orchid’s message to her daughter: “Now that you have started to menstruate,
what happened to her could happen to you. Don’t humiliate us. You wouldn't like to be
forgotten as if you had never been born” (5). With one story, Kingston’s mother

conshucts her daughter's sexuality in terms of the dangers that accompany it. Her aunt

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has no name because the family has repudiated her for transgressing village norms, and for
failing to “maintain the real” for them (14). Although Kingston’s family is by now far
flom the anceshal village, her mother enforces its structural realities through the explicit
analogy drawn to Maxine. The warning serves to police the hegemonic order of the old
counhy, but it is simultaneously undermined by counter-hegemonic discourses that allow
Kingston to name the conhadictions, which in than flees her to imagine her aunt into
being. The counter-hegemonic discourses that empower Maxine to create alternative
narratives of womanhood come flom several sources, but the most influential source is,
interestingly, her mother. “She said I would grow up a wife and slave,” writes Kingston,
“but she taught me the song of the warrior woman, Fa Mu Lan” (24).

The haditional Chinese myth of Fa Mu Lan dominates “White Tigers,” the second
section of The Woman Warrior, which Kingston inhabits in a first-person narrative. The
imaginative fusion of the real girl and the mythic one is flamed by the remembrance of her
mother’s teaching her the chant of Fa Mu Lan along with the fact of her debased status as
a female. Although this narrative is often deeply unsettling to Western readers socialized
to seek nonconhadictory selfhood, both in themselves and in narrative, “White Tigers”
allows Kingston to conshuct herself as valuable as a female. The text describes a fifteen-
year period in which Fa Mu Lan is separated flom her family while being trained in
warrior ways so that she might avenge her people. For seven years, an old couple teaches
the young girl how to tune her body to nature and to strengthen her for battle. After
returning flom a survival test, she undergoes another eight years of haining in “dragon”
ways, and learns that “[y]ou have to infer the whole dragon from the parts you can see
and touc ” (34) because dragons are too large to see all at once. Significantly, Kingston
was born in a Dragon year herself, and she even takes pride in the fact that both she and

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her mother are Dragons. According to hadition, people born in dragon years are known
for their majestic spirits, fearlessness, shength, and fierce protectiveness of those they
love.l ’ By having her Fa Mu Lan alter ego become expert in dragon ways, Kingston
imagines her identity taking on the strength associated with the dragon totem.

Detaching Fa Mu Lan’s identity flom the negative connotations of womanhood,
Kingston h'ansforms the impediments associated with femininity into more neuhal facts
of life. In conhast to the meaning Brave Orchid confers on menshuation in “No Name
Woman,” for Fa Mu Len/Maxine, menstruation is no impediment to power. The old
couple demystify and demythologize the onset of menarche simply by defining her as a
sexually mature adult. But instead of worrying that she will humiliate them, the old
people ask her to wait before bearing children. Fa Mu Lan is valued, in other words, for
the contribution she will make to her people, which allows Maxine to imagine herself an
agent of history. Unable to completely shed the haditional discourse of femininity
however, Fa Mu Lan/Maxine wants to “use the conhol you taught me and stop this
bleeding,” subtly signaling her desire to be flee of feminine bonds. The old woman,
however, equates menstrual blood with “shitting and pissing” (37), and thus underscores
the impossibility of escaping an embodied womanhood. But by making this analogy, the
old woman effectively neuhalizes the sexual dangers that Brave Orchid invokes as the
assumed result of menarche.

Throughout “White Tigers,” the narrative shifts between reinforcing haditional
gender codes and Kingston’s attempts to subvert them. Maxine’s version of Fa Mu Lan
is married, in absentia, to a man to whom she was promised when they were both babies,
but instead of being a shanger, he is her best fliend and loves her enough to be a “spirit

bridegroom” (3 7). When she retums to her family in preparation for taking her father’s

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place in battle, her mother and father are so proud of her that they kill a chicken for
dinner, “as if they were welcoming home a son” (40), but painfirlly tattoo her back with
their “revenge” and thus inscribe and appropriate her body in service to the clan (40-41 ).
The use of the female body to renew and preserve the pahilincage finally sounds a false
note, when, after vanquishing all enemies, Fa Mu Lan abruptly ends her warrior life, and
is silenced once more. Kneeling before her parents-in-law, she says “Now my public
duties are finished . . . . I will stay with you, doing farmwork and housework, and giving
you more sons” (53-4). Fa Mu Len/Maxine is celebrated and fed well in exchange for her
“perfect filiality.” Having no village to save, however, the “real” Maxine sh'uggles to
discern something she can do to make her parents proud, and, more important, so they
will not sell her when they return to China. V

Sidonie Smith calls the woman warrior a “privileged female avenger,” but argues
that the holy radical story of feminine power lies with the “witch amazons” that Fa Mu
Lan flees after she has liberated her pe0ple. Inscribed as archetypal women with bound
feet and small voices, these “ghosts” are hansformed into genuine women warriors:

Later, it would be said, they turned into the band of swordswomen who
were a mercenary army. They did not wear men’s clothes like me, but
rode as women in black and red dresses. They bought up girl babies so
that many poor families welcomed their visitations. When slave girls and
daughters-in-law ran away, people would say they joined these witch
amazons. They killed men and boys. ( 53)

Smith notes that these avengers represent “all that is unrepressed and violent in ways
both sexual and textual, in the narrator herself as well as in the social order” (Poetics 159).
Unlike Fa Mu Lan, whose actions work to preserve the status quo, these women use

unauthorized power to upset the pahiarchal order by literally killing the source of that
order. Fluldamentally, Kingston’s retelling of the Fa Mu Lan myth is an expression of

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her desire to be valued as males are valued. But before she reaches that point of
recognition as an adult, Kingston's anger is expressed as a desire to be a boy. Worn down
by countless Chinese maxirns, such as “Feeding girls is feeding cowbirds”l 5 (54), and
“Girls are maggots in the rice” (51), young Maxine responds with screaming tanhurns,
which only result in her being labeled a “bad girl.” Thinking at first that a bad girl is
ahnost the same as a boy, she insists she is not bad, but claims she might as well have
said, “I’m not a girl” (55). Although she fiercely and vehemently resists her parents’
conshuction of femininity, she is not immune to wishing the situation otherwise. She
earns shaight A’s until the emigrant community made it clear that any self-improvement
or development in girls was “for the good of my firture husband’s family, not my own”
(56). She goes away to college: “Berkeley in the sixties—and I studied, and I marched to
change the world, but I did not turn into a boy. I would have liked to bring myself back
as a boy for my parents to welcome with chickens and pigs” (56). That kind of
recognition is reserved for boy children, a situation that Kingston recognizes but cannot
accept. Understanding where all roads are supposed to lead for girls, Kingston refuses to
learn to cook and breaks dishes every time she washes them. This antipathy toward
domestic activity is apparently permanent, according to Kingston, who says she still
burns food when she cooks, and leaves her dirty dishes to rot in the sink.

Ultimately, then, the woman warrior proves to be a flawed model of womanhood
for an American-bom Chinese girl who does not like armies, and whose family, unlike Fa
Mu Lan’s, did not need a champion. Fa Mu Lan’s story valorizes male deeds and the
erasure of femininity, but in the real world, Kingston comes to see that martial arts, far
flom being a sign of male power, “are for unsure little boys kicking away under

fluorescent lights” (62). As King-Kok Cheung points out, the conhadictions of

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patriarchal fictions are more easily discerned in everyday life than they are in mythology
(88). Proficiency in male activities ensures the warrior woman’s success, but it provides
no help to young Maxine. Nevertheless, she does find one point of similarity between
herself and Fa Mu Lan: “the words at our backs” (63). Noting that the Chinese idioms
for revenge are “report a crime,” and “report to five families,” Kingston realizes her skills
with words and “talk-story” will allow her to avenge the wrongs inflicted on her by
whites and Chinese alike.

The third and fourth narratives are dominated by the stories of Brave Orchid and
Moon Orchid, Kingston’s mother and armt, respectively. Although the sisters have very
different stories, both are productive of identity formation for Kingston. As I noted
earlier, Brave Orchid’s contradictory socialization of her daughter allows Kingston to
name the inconsistencies and eventually construct a different way of being for herself.
Weedon reminds us that “[w]here there is a space between the position of subject offered
by a discourse and individual interest, a resistance to that subject position is produced”
(109). This process is not without pain for Kingston, however, because, as she writes,
she believes that her parents love her in theory, and that they only repeat the maxims
because that is “what one says about daughters.” Nonetheless, she decides to leave
Chinatown because she needs to “get out of hating range,” and because she refuses to
“shy [her] way anymore” (62).

The “Shaman” narrative follows the story of Kingston’s mother, Brave Orchid,
and her life in China, before Maxine is born. Brave Orchid’s husband has left for the
United States, their two oldest children are dead, so Brave Orchid enrolls in medical
school and proceeds to create an independent, professional life for herself, even buying a
slave girl to serve as her nurse. Like Fa Mu Lan, she is welcomed by villagers where ever

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she goes, and she exercises great power over the “ignorant” peasants. Refusing to treat
dying people, she is associated only with renewed health, and thus she mythologizes her
own success. Among the first women to become doctors in China, Brave Orchid is one of
the “new women, scientists who changed the rituals” (88). And yet this is not how her
daughter sees her—faced with a mother who is surrounded by mountains of dirty laundry
from the business herparentsrun in America, Kingston cannotappropriatehermotheras
a model of feminine resistance until her mother talks-story about her life. Indeed, as
Brave Orchid tells her, she has “no idea how much I have fallen coming to America” (90);
many tellings of this story are necessary before Kingston recognizes the power of her
mother’s nanative.

As a child, Maxine focuses on Brave Orchid’s treatment of the slave girl.
Comparing the price of the slave to the cost of her own birth, Kingston believes her
mother showed more enthusiasm for the slave than she does for her own daughter. Brave
Orchid emphasizes her daughter’s worth by telling her that girls were given away free
during the war, while Brave Orchid had paid two hundred dollars for Kingston’s birth.
This might have been her way of showing her daughter that she was indeed very valuable,
but Maxine understands it as another threat of being sold or given away because she is
female. Her fears are not assuaged by Brave Orchid’s midwife stories; upon learning that
girl babies were sometimes suffocated in a box of clean ashes kept handy by the birthing
bed for just this purpose, Kingston wonders if her mother had ever killed any babies. By
extension, the unspoken question for Kingston is whether she would have been killed too,
had she been born in China.

As much as Brave Orchid seems to enjoy her independence, when her husband
sends for her after fifteen years away, she goes without hesitation and takes up the life

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she will later describe to her daughter as that of “a wife and slave” without protest (l 12).
At eighty, afier years of working long days in the laundry, Brave Orchid still works in
California’s tomato fields. Her strength is too subtle for the child to see, but as an adult
Kingston recognizes that Brave Orchid does not embody the ideal of femininity that she
repeats uncritically to her daughters. The model Chinese woman appears instead in the
form of Moon Orchid, Brave Orchid’s sister, who comes to America at age 67, having
been left behind in China by her husband thirty years earlier. A stunning example of
docility and patience, Moon Orchid is a “silly” and childlike woman, even in her sister’s
eyes. Distracted by bright color and movement and completely unable to perform the
simplest tasks, Moon Orchid is the ornament she was raised to be. With Brave Orchid’s
encouragement, she appears at her husband’s door ostensibly to claim her rights as First
Wife. But her husband has laid claim to a very different life in America with a second
wife, so he dismisses Moon Orchid and her family as “people in a book I had read a long
time ago” (179). Having been thus deprived of her sole raison d’étre, and being
completely unprepared for any other role in life, Moon Orchid begins a gradual descent
into madness, and dies in a California state mental institution. But Kingston admits that
this narrative is an embellishment of her brother’s brief eyewitness account of the reunion
of Moon Orchid with her husband. Like McCarthy, Kingston invents a nanative that
renders coherent the few factual details she has in order to confer meaning on her
resolution to major in math and science.

Moon Orchid’s story, like the other stories in The Woman Warrior, is instructive,
but this time the lesson is immediately clear to Maxine and her sisters: “Brave Orchid’s
daughters decided fiercely that they would never let men be unfaithful to them. All her

children made up their minds to major in science or mathematics” (186). These same

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children had been dismissive of their aunt when she arrived fi'om China, but her inability
to cope with change touches them and teaches them the necessity of self-reliance. Science
and mathematics appear particularly solid and reliable against the landscape of human
inconsistency and MM. Here again, Brave Orchid’s adaptability and strength is a
counterpoint to the idealized image of womanhood that even she presents as desirable.
But her life undermines her explicit ideology, and as her daughter notes, while she
preaches the virtues of silence, Brave Orchid is in fact a “champion” talker, who, as
Cheung argues, “nurtures [her daughter] to entertain contradictions, to doubt absolutes,
[and] to see truth as multidimensional. . . .” (99). But before she reaches that point,
Maxine is effectively silenced by the play of contradictions. As I discussed in relation to
Annie Dillard, naming the contradictions in adult ideologies is a crucial step in the
adolescent’s moral development, but until that naming and subsequent rejection of adult
moral hypocrisy occurs, the child experiences confusion. Perhaps this confusion is only
constructible by the adult writer in retrospect, but the consequences of a lack of coherent
identity is thematized in the immigrant’s coming of age. Situated at the crossroads of two
cultures, Kingston’s confusion is figured by her—literal or figurative—inability to speak.
Kingston’s mother cut her frenum—-the membrane that “anchors” the tongue——
when Maxine is very young, “so that you would not be tongue-tied. Your tongue would
be able to move in any language. . . . Your fienum looked too tight to do those things, sol
cut it” (190). Maxine questions her mother about this when she is older, naming a
contradiction—“But isn’t ‘a ready tongue an evil?”—to which her mother responds that
“Things are different in this ghost country” (191). Thus, while Brave Orchid explicitly
recognizes that her daughter will need different social skills in America, Maxine suspects

her mother has other, more sinister motives because of Maxine’s failure to speak in school

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for three years. In fact, she was silent because she did not speak English, so the tongue-
cutting story may be unrelated or, indeed, apocryphal. Regardless, Kingston uses the
metaphor of her cut tongue to double the figrue of her inability to speak English,
translating into a long silence, which may also be apocryphal, but which nonetheless
works to embody a conflicted identity. The inability to speak (English) is interpreted by
her American school as a lack of intelligence—literally a zero IQ score. Throughout her
childhood and adolescence, Maxine struggles with silence, reaching its climactic moment
when she cruelly tortures another Chinese American girl who is more silent and passive
than Maxine herself has been for years. After many minutes of hair pulling, cheek
pinching, and taunting the mute girL Kingston finally begins to weep, asking her, “Why
won’t you talk. . . . Do you want to be like this, dumb (do you know what dumb means)
your whole life? Don’t you ever want to be a cheerleader? Or a pompon girl?” (210). As
painful as this episode is for the other girl, it speaks most clearly to Kingston’s own
confirsed identity as she is growing up. She might as well be addressing herself in this
passage, but in the process of tormenting the other girl, Kingston betrays her own
enormous self-hatred and a desire to be “American-feminine.” Like Moon Orchid, the girl
at Chinese school is excessively dependent; silenced by both American and Chinese
culture, she is at risk, according to Maxine, of being abandoned since she is not marriage-
material, and further, she will be unable to find work because she does not speak. These
are Maxine’s own fears; wanting to transgress the norms of Chinese womanhood, but
fearing the consequences of doing so, she is caught with a half-voice that symbolizes her
in-between position. Kingston writes that she feared she would be the token crazy girl
that every family or village had: “I thought talking and not talking made the difference

between sanity and insanity. Insane people were the ones who couldn’t explain

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themselves. There were many crazy girls and women” (216). With typical subtlety,
Kingston marks the plight of women as an inability to speak their experience. Yet she
also uses her supposed craziness to her own advantage, driving away suitors who are
advertising for wives by dropping dishes, picking her nose, and pretending to limp. Thus,
silence is not always disempowering, but Kingston is angry with the Americans for not
letting Chinese talk, and angry with the Chinese for being secretive.

Further complicating the silence valorized by Kingston’s parents is her realization
that “Chinese women’s voices are strong and bossy” (200), and that “the emigrant
villagers are shouters, hollering face to face” (199). A number of scholars have argued
that the stereotype of the docile, obedient Chinese is a Chinese American response to
fears of deportation, internment, or violence. Elaine H. Kim contends that the lively
behavior of Chinese in Chinatowns differs from the silence and inhibition shown by
American-bom Chinese, arguing that this is evidence of the repressive influence of
American culture on Chinese subjectivity (307-9, n.12).“ In The Woman Warrior,
Kingston thematizes this point contrasting the loud emigrants with the whispery
“American-feminine” voices the Chinese American girls develop in response to American
signifying practices that valorize a demure, self-effacing version of femininity (200).
Intriguingly, Kingston blames her mother and Chinese culture for the throat pain that
plagues her. In an outburst that signals a pending separation from her family, Kingston
tells her mother

I don’t want to listen to any more of your stories; they have no logic.
They scramble me up. You lie with stories. . . . I can’t tell what’s real and
what you make up. Ha! You can’t stop me from talking. You tried to cut
off my tongue, but it didn’t work. (235)

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But, in fact, it is “American” ideologies that silence Kingston more effectively than her
family. I certainly do not want to dispute the confusion that clearly affected her, but
while her parents explicitly attempt to enforce silence, there seems to be very little actual
silence in her household. Nonetheless, both the explicit lessons taught at home and the
implicit lessons learned in the larger American society result in a permanent inability for
Kingston to remain silent, signified by recurring throat pain, suggesting that this figure
signifies her ongoing struggle with identity: “The throat pain always returns, though,
unless I tell what I really think, whether or not I lose my job, or spit out gaucheries all
over a party” (239). The need to say what she “really thinks” is formed in response to
both American and Chinese constructions of femininity, but the throat pain also suggests
that Kingston’s body is able to signify the depth of her knowledge of what is true for her.
Further, Kingston’s “dried-duck” voice is a metaphor that aptly describes a larger
difficulty in identity formation. That is, Kingston struggles with choosing either an
“American-feminine” or a traditional Chinese identity. The narrative firnctions to
reconcile the choices in favor of a both/and subjectivity.

Kingston recognizes that each of the available models of womanhood is flawed,
but also that there is something she can—and does—take from each example. Elionne
Belden writes that submission to authority and denial of the self in favor of the
collectivity is highly valued in traditional Chinese culture (22), creating deep conflict for
American immigrants who must make their way in a society that valorizes autonomous
selflrood. Of course, it can also create new opportrmities for individuals who seek
altemate ways of being, but choosing an alternative identity exacts an enormous price.
For a Chinese girl coming of age, turning one’s back on traditional ways is certain to result

in at least misunderstanding and disapproval in the best case; in the worst, she may face

225

complete rejection and ostracization by both her family and the “American” culture. She
may find, with James Weldon Johnson’s “Ex-Coloured Man” that she has “sold [her]
birthright for a mess of pottage” (21 1). Unlike Annie Dillard, however, Kingston does
not turn to male role models for alternatives; in the process of writing the memoir
Kingston realizes that it is women’s narratives that have determined her identity.’ ’
Furthermore, Kingston suggests that she actively cultivated an American identity, yet The
Woman Warrior honors the Chinese culture that engendered her, leaving Kingston on the
borderlands of cultural identity. As I have argued, a border identity is frequently
accompanied by great pain and social confusion, but as Kingston shows, it is also a highly
productive location for the creation of alternative subjectivities.

The text leaves the question of the nature of Kingston’s subjectivity uncertain,
which ultimately leaves the reader unsettled as well. If Holland is correct in arguing that
readers interpret texts through their own identity themes, searching for textual evidence
that will confirm a solidly unified identity, then the experience of reading a text like The
Woman Warrior can only be profoundly unsettling. Kingston is not merely representing
a split textual self; she is also creating a split between her text and her reader, and a split
in the reader. Afier Benveniste, Belsey terms realistic texts declarative in that their
ideological project is to fix the subject as unified and unchanging by smoothing over
ideological contradictions and thus reproduce the social order. Classic realism, writes
Belsey, “[imparts] ‘knowledge to a reader whose position is thereby stabilized, through a
privileged discourse which is to varying degrees invisible” (91). In other words, readers
are reassured and comforted by the coherent narrative of the realist text. In contrast, The
Woman Warrior refuses the reader’s unity by discouraging easy identification with a

protagonist/author whose own identity theme is constantly shifting. This is the hallka

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of the interrogative text, which “literally [invites] the reader to produce answers to the
questions it implicitly or explicitly seeks” (Belsey 91). Further, the interrogative text
“refirses a single point of view, however complex and comprehensive, but brings points of
view into unresolved collision or contradiction” (92). In my view, the coming of age
narrative is generally an interrogative text, but paradoxically, the refirsal of a stable
position can also confirm the reader’s identity theme if that theme is also contingent.
Unlike the declarative text, the coming of age narrative rarely constructs a seamless
reality, and thus cannot confirm the existence of a rmified, essential self. But like the
interrogative text, the coming of age narrative confronts the reader with ideological
contradictions, and invites or posits answers to the questions it poses. It is, therefore, an
ideal form for representing of multiple subjectivities. The implied reader of such a text is
one whose own identity theme is split, contingent, and fluid. I recognize that dominant
Western discourse represses contradictions and privileges the notion of a simple, unitary
identity, but in practice, legions of Americans live with the knowledge that their identities
are multiple and contradictory. Historically, a multiple or alternative subject position has
led to social marginalization, but in recent years, more and more Americans—even middle-
class white men—claim marginalimtion in one sphere or another. But as Cho-yun Hsu
has argued, marginality can be somewhat neutrally “defined as one’s own ambiguous
status of belonging simultaneously to more than one collective entity” (227). Women
have long known that identity was complex and contradictory, but in the twentieth
century their coming of age narratives finally voice this knowledge fi'om their girlhoods
and demonstrate that a liminal position in American culture is productive of power and

agency.

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Notes

228

Notes

Chapter 1: Identity and the Coming of Age Narrative

1. Jon Katz. Geeks: How Two Lost Boys Rode the Internet Out of Idaho. New York:
Villard, 2000.

2. Florence Howe writes of Eliot’s status as the century’s major poet in the mid-
twentieth century and “[olf course be fit the mold (or was it constructed around him?) of
the New Criticism, to practice which one needed only the poem—and the memory of all
other poems in the male, white, Western tradition of poetry” (3). Eliot has also been
criticized for writing to an audience of men exactly like himself—well-edueated, white,
and affluent. Howe notes further that Woolf was essentially self-taught, but that she
knew from her reading that other women authors had also sought their female literary
forebears. Howe contends that “[Woolf] writes critical essays not to rescue a single
stream of dramatists or poets, but rescue hundreds of ‘lost’ female voices, writing often in
the forms not usually honored by literary critics—the diary, journal, memoir,
autobiography, and letters” (6). Woolf’s anger at women’s exclusion from the literary
realm certainly permeates the text of A Room of One ’s Own. She must have responding,
at least in part, to Eliot’s disdain for and neglect of women’s writers, and in particular to
her own difficulty in achieving respect for her literary work.

3. There is even a term for literary criticism that acknowledges the critic’s subjectivity.
For a comprehensive view of the debate on the propriety of “the autobiographical move”
in literary criticism, see Veeser.

4. Donne, XVII Meditation. The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne. Ed.
Charles M. Coffin. Modern Library, 1952. 441.

5. Some feminist critics also find fault with sentimental literature for its poor quality.
Jehlen, for instance, wonders “[l]f the choice is between Susan Warner and Melville, why
were we not all born men?” (589), and Ann Douglas argues that the proliferation of
sentimental fiction devalued the work of Hawthorne, Melville, and other high canonical
American Renaissance writers. For a spirited and effective defense of this body of
literature, see Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American
Fiction.

6. Heilbrun neglects here to account for the work of feminist science fiction writers such
as Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time (F awcett Crest, 1979), Joanna Russ, The
Female Man (Bantam, 1975 ), and Sally Miller Gearhart, The Wanderground: Stories of
the Hill Women (Persephone, 1979). According to F ishbum, these texts re-imagine the

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human condition by inventing a future that valorizes the “feminine” values of nurturing
and cooperation. Nonetheless, as Fishburn points out, these new worlds are constructed

in terms that reproduce the notion that there is indeed a “natural” difference between the
sexes (“Reforming” 32).

7. “Work and wait” is the motto Little Women’s March sisters take up at the suggestion
of their mother to help pass the time until they are reunited with their father.

8. Belsey, for instance, argues that the classic realist text serves the ideological end of
presenting subjectivity as “fixed and unchangeable, an element in a given system of
differences which is human nature and the world of human experience, and to show
possible action as an endless repetition of ‘normal’, familiar action” (90).

9. Joanna Russ, for instance, posits the existence of humans who possess the
stereotypical characteristics—positive and negative—of both men and women, as
suggested by the title of her 1975 science fiction novel, The Female Man (Bantam).
Ultimately, however, Russ condones the female values of oneness with nature and self-in-
relation.

10. Although I use the terms “subjectivity” and “identity” more or less interchangeably
throughout my study, I do recognize that these terms are associated with specific
philosophical and theoretical traditions. The Oxford English Dictionary traces the word
“identity” to the 14th century, when a “need was evidently felt of a noun. . . to express
the condition of sameness,” and indeed, the OED’s first definition of the word
emphasizes the “condition of being the same.” But more pertinent to philosophical usage
is the second definition: “The sameness of a person or thing at all times or in all
circumstances; the condition or fact that a person or thing is itself and not something
else,” which is associated with John Locke’s philosophy, i.e., “Consciousness always
accompanies thinking. . . .in this alone cansists personal identity.” In other words,
identity is a concept strongly associated with the liberal humanism of the Enlightenment
that posits an opaque, essential selflrood. For marxist and other theorists who critique
the liberal humanist paradigm, the concept of identity is a political claim that claims it is
not political. The term “subjectivity” then has been preferred by marxists as a way to
foreground the claim that identity is constructed, a meaning that the OED has not yet
acknowledged. In Foucault’s view, for instance, subjectivity is produced by discourse
and power relations.

11. Nancy K. Miller contends that women’s fiction (and, I would add, women’s
autobiography) has historically been denied credibility because it so often violates the
reader’s expectations of plot. Miller reads this as an implicit assumption that literature
should “reinscribe received ideas about the representation of life in art” (“Ararchnologies”
340). Ideology determines what received ideas are normative, and if a particular event is

230

seen as outside the norm, it is dismissed as implausible. One of example of this dynamic:
In Little Women, Jo March turns down a marriage proposal from a boy with whom she is
highly compatible, and with whom she shares a warm and egalitarian friendship. This one
plot turn disappointed generations of readers who saw Jo’s marriage to Laurie as the
expected outcome. Miller might contend that Jo’s action is more than adequately
motivated by her repeated expressed desire to “paddle her own canoe,” and thus within
the novel’s economy, Jo’s decision is entirely plausible.

12. See Williams, Marxism and Literature, Chapter 6.

13. But in Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants and Natural Selection
(Pantheon, 1999), Sarah Blaffer Hrdy argues that, in significant ways, human beings are
born women or men. She argues, for instance, that males are genetically selected to be less
likely to care for children than women are because they can never be absolutely certain a
child is theirs, whereas mothers know that a child is theirs, and thus are biologically more
disposed to engage in child care.

14. Again, Little Women is exemplary of this pattern.

15. Here I am mindful of Rabinow’s call to “anthropologize the West,” which he argues
would allow us to see “how exotic its constitution of reality has been. . . [and to]
emphasize those domains most taken for granted as universal; . . . make them seem as
historically peculiar as possible; show how their claims to truth are linked to social
practices and have hence become effective forces in the social world” (241). Doing so,
according to Rabinow, would shift Western hegemony, and, I would add, begin to address
the imbalance of power that has been the result of Western dominance in naming the
Other.

16. See also Olga Silver'stein and Beth Rashbaum, The Courage to Raise Good Men
(Viking, l 994).
Chapter 2: F eminism, Autobiography, and Theories of Subjectivity

1. See Butterfield, Friedlander and Kline. Abigail Adams’ letter to John Adams, March
31, 1776. John Adams’ reply to Abigail Adams, April 14, 1776. 120-21.

2. Papachristou 9-10; Evans 79-81.
3. Papachristou 18; Evans 81.

4. Rpt. in Papachristou 23-26 and in Hole and Levine 429-433.
231

5. Papachristou 25; Evans 104.

6. Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Sojourner Truth were appalled at the
exclusion of women in the rights granted by the 14th Amendment, but Lucy Stone and
Frederick Douglass feared that the addition of women’s suffiage might endanger the
amendment’s ratification. Evans 122.

7. Ibid. 123.
8. Ibid. 124.

9. Although the two organizations reunited under the leadership of Lucy Stone’s
daughter, Alice Stone Blackwell, and Susan B. Anthony, the old divisions over strategy
remained. Evans 152-54.

10. Papachristou 86-7.

11. During this period, a temperance movement emerged as well, drawing large numbers
of women to its cause. Women’s interest in restricting the sale of alcohol was the result
of their status as married women—the law afforded them no protection or recourse from
the abuse and abandonment of alcoholic husbands. Separate women’s temperance
organimtions were necessary because, as with the abolition movement, women were
excluded from participation in men’s groups. But the combination of the suffrage and
temperance movements brought down the opposition of the liquor industry to women’s
rights, forcing a separation of the two issues. See Evans 125-30 and Papachristou 88-97.

12. Evans 166-67.
13. Daniel 55-59.

14. See Daniel, chapter 3, for background on the effect of the Great Depression on
women’s roles. See also Evans 198.

15. But in the nineteenth century, Catherine Beecher published a comprehensive—and
widely used—manual of domestic responsibility in her 1841 A Treatise on Domestic
Economy (Schocken, 1977). Beecher argued that while men properly control the political
and economic spheres, women should have dominion over the domestic realm, including
housework, child care, health, and family morality. Thus, while nineteenth-century
women did indeed engage in a wide range of practices such as growing food for home use,
the advent of mass-marketed foods and more efficient domestic technologies coupled with
a thriving industrial economy in the early twentieth century lessened the need for such
intensive domestic labor for middle-class women.

232

16. See Evans, chapter 10.

17. Papachristou 25; Evans 104.

18. See Lerner, chapter 6.

19. Evans 273, 265. Daniel 276-282.

20. There is, for instance, a significant trend in feminist scholarship in the area of
evolutionary biology and psychology, which generally argues that there is indeed a
biological basis for coding certain behaviors as gendered, and which tends to argue against
a purely social constructionist view of gender identity such as that implied by De
Beauvoir’s statement that women are made, not born. (See Hrdy, n. 13, p. 232 above).
Natalie Angier argues in Woman: An Intimate Geography (Anchor, 2000), that the female
body is biologically designed to support specific behaviors.

21. See Patai and Koertge, Professing Feminism and Sommers, Who Stole Feminism?.
Both studies argue that feminists have sabotaged their own agendas through sham
scholarship and cult-like behaviors.

22. The debate over the proper aims of higher education for women goes back at least to
the early twentieth century, when college enrollment soared among women, but whose
professional options were severely limited. Some women’s colleges attempted to match
the rigorous standards of elite male schools, but most focused their efforts on channeling
women into home economics programs. See Daniel 110-112, and Minnich 415-16.

23. Millett’s 1970 study, Sexual Politics, broadened the definition of politics to include
the structure of power in society, and she used primarily literary works to support her
argument that social relations between men and women reflect patriarchal power relations
to the detriment of women. Brownmiller’s breakthrough 1975 study, Against Our Will,
provides a historical, anthropological, and political view of rape, and argues that it is a
violent, not sexual, act.

24. The battle over the meaning of rape continues. In their study, A Natural History of
Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion (MIT Press, 2000), Thomhill and Palmer use
an evolutionary framework to argue that the act of rape is an adaptive behavior designed
to ensure the propagation of the male’s genes. Although they do not unproblematically
view rape as a neutral act simply because they believe it is a biologically determined
behavior, Thomhill and Palmer tend to discount data that do not support their thesis. For
instance, they claim that the fact that most rape victims are of childbearing age supports
their argument, while they downplay the psychological consequences and the fact that
significant numbers of rape victims are children and elderly women.

233

25. Sénchez-Eppler argues that the rhetorical strategy of drawing public attention to
particularly horrifying and brutal acts upon the body as a means to agitate for change was
adapted from abolitionist rhetoric by nineteenth-century feminists. Like the earlier
feminists and the abolitionists, second wave feminist rhetoric invoked the vulnerability of
women’s bodies in order to demonstrate the secondary status of women (17-21).

26. Teresa of Avila’s 1565 Life, (Penguin 1957), The Book ofMargery Kempe,
(Jonathan Cape, 1936), written in 1436, and Harriet Martineau’s 1877 Autobiography
(James R. Osgood) are among the texts that have become canonical examples of the
women’s tradition in autobiography, and early studies of women’s autobiography
invariably include analyses of them.

27. The Madwoman in the Attic is the title of Gilbert and Gubar’s highly influential 1979
studythatpositedanauthorial anxiety among Britishwomenwriters inthenineteenth
century due to their perceived lack of literary foremothers.

28. For example, see Miller, Changing the Subject 106; Hull and Smith, “The Politics of
Black Women’s Studies”; Rich, “Notes Toward a Politics of Location.”

29. Cathy Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America, and
Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, I 790-
l 860.

30. One of the earliest and best-known critiques of the white middle class bias in
feminism can be formd in “A Black Feminist Statement,” written by the Combahee River
Collective in 1977, which argues that although black women have been involved with
feminism from the start, the denial of raci as a factor in the oppression of black
women’s lives in the mainstream feminist movement of the seventies forced the
establishment of the National Black Feminist Organization in 1973: “A combined
antiracist and antisexist position drew us together initially and as we developed politically
we addressed ourselves to heterosexism and economic oppression under capitalism” (15).
Furthermore, the statement notes that black women feel a solidarity with progressive
black men, since “[olur situation as Black people necessitates that we have solidarity
around the fact of race, which white women of course do not need to have with white
men, tmless it is their negative solidarity as racial oppressors” (l 6). See also Rita Mae
Brown, pages 223-239, for an account of the treatment of lesbians in the mainstream
feminist movement.

31. Although Belenky et al. are often faulted for essentializing female development,
black feminist theorist Patricia Hill Collins reiterates their assertion that while white male
philosophers and psychologists tend to use visual metaphors to describe knowledge (i.e.,
knowledge as illumination, knowing as seeing, truth as light) women tend to ground their

234

epistemological claims in metaphors of voice—speaking and listening—which parallels
the traditional African American emphasis on oral culture (1 13, n. 2).

32. See How Schools Shortchange Girls: The AA UW Report: A Study of Major Findings
on Girls and Education.

33. It seems to me that Pratt’s archetypal framework unnecessarily forecloses the
possibility of reading a particular female plot otherwise. For instance, Pratt argues that
the conflict between society’s expectations of a woman and her own desires “renders
characterizations ambivalent, tone and attitude ambiguous, and plots problematic” (11).
In my view, that same conflict marks the potential beginning of successful resistance.
While the majority of women may not have successfully resisted gender norms, clearly
the conflicts and contradictions of the dominant social narratives of womanhood are the
most productive sources of resistance.

34. For reports on the controversy over Menchr'r’s book, see Robin Wilson, “A
Challenge to the Veracity of a Multicultural Icon in The Chronicle of Higher Ethication,
January 15, 1999, pages, A14-A16, and Greg Grandin and Francisco Goldman, “Bitter
Fruit for Rigoberta, " in The Nation, February 8, 1999, page 25-28.

35. Contemporary autobiography often fits the definition coined by Robert Root, Jr. and
Michael Steinberg, of a “fourth genre” or creative nonfiction. Root and Steinberg’s
anthology, The Fourth Genre, defines its spectrum as encompassing personal essays,
memoirs, literary journalism, and academic/cultural criticism, its hallmark a dissolution of
old generic boundaries.

36. However, I do recognize that as Douglass rewrote his life story in the 1855 My
Bondage and My Freedom and the 1893 Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, he
increasingly distanced himself from the distinctive rhetorical form of the abolitionist slave
nanative.

37. Literacy and the lack of any form of education is consistently thematized in the slave
narrative genre. James W.C. Pennington, for instance, writes of his inability to forgive
slavery for depriving him of an education. See Olney, “ ‘I Was Bom,”’ 153, 156. See also
Gates, Figures in Black. and F ishbum, 48, n. 26.

38. Evans 92; Papachristou 9-10.

39. Robin Winks characterizes the sexual assaults, brutal whippings, and other acts of
brutality of the fugitive slave narratives as “pious pornography” (vi). See also Trudier
Harris, Exorcising Blackness (Indiana UP, 1984), for a discussion of the literary uses of
lynching and other acts of brutality in later Afiican American literatrue.

235

40. Male autobiographers (including ihmous ones) are increasingly including early
childhood memories as public interest in autobiographies grows exponentially to include
marginalized and/or unknown subjects, and as the line between private and public spheres
grows ever more difficult to distinguish. See, for instance, McCourt.

41. My use of the male pronoun and “man” in this section follows the use and intentions
of the philosophers discussed. Elsewhere, I use female pronouns when I am clearly
discussing female texts and issues. In all other cases, I use plurals to avoid sexist usage,
butalso becausemanyoftheargumentslmakeinthisstudy applytotextswrittenby
men who are marginalized in American society.

42. For an overview of studies on sex role socialization, see Weitzrnan. Studies have
repeatedly confirmed that boy babies and girl babies are handled and perceived
differently, and that these differences tend to reinforce social norms of gender.

43. See Jaggar 27-50.

44. See, for instance, Katherine Fishbum’s The Problem of Embodiment in Early Afiican
American Narrative. Fishburn argues that the slave narratives resist the liberal humanist
separation of mind and body, by positing embodiment as a critical source of knowledge
for the slaves. See also Jaggar and Ferguson for definitions of the radical, Marxist, and
socialist feminist accounts of subjectivity.

45. I thank Kevin Asman for clarifying this point for me.

46. Feminists have long argued that the cause of much so-called madness in women is a
direct result of a conflict between romance and desire. The same conflict is responsible for
the limitation in women’s narrative plots according to Du Plessis (4). Davidson and Du
Plessis both argue that historically there were only two possible narrative outcomes for
female characters—marriage or death. But in the real world, madness and spinsterhood
were surely among the (still limited) outcomes for women who either chose not to follow
society’s script, or else tried to forget their own desires when they chose romance. Either
way, it is quite clear that most women are not allowed to have both romance and
vocation. See Chesler, chapter 1.

47. As Nancy Hartsock writes, “it seems highly suspicious that it is at this moment in
history, when so many groups are engaged in ‘nationalisrns’ which involve redefinitions
of the marginalized Others, that doubt arises in the academy about the nature of the
‘subject,’ about the possibilities for a general theory which can describe the world, about
historical ‘progress.’ Why is it, exactly at the moment when so many of us who have
been silenced begin to demand the right to name ourselves, to act as subjects rather than
objects of history, that just then the concept of subjecthood becomes ‘problematic’? Just

236

when we are forming our own theories about the world, uncertainty emerges about
whether the world can be adequately theorized?” (196).

Chapter 3: Coming of Age in America

1. For an abstract of a study on puberty in American girls, see Marcia E. Herman-
Giddens et al., “Secondary Sexual Characteristics and Menses in Young Girls Seen in
Office Practice: A Study from the Pediatric Research in Office Settings Network.”
[Online] Available http://www.pediatrics.org/cgi/content/abstract/99/4/505. Jan. 25, 2000.

2. See Discipline and Punish 135-169, on docile bodies.
3. Rabinow 244 (see n. 2, p. 241, below)

4. For sustained critiques of Mead’s study of adolescence in Samoa, see Derek Freeman,
The Fatefirl Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis of Her Samoan Research
(1998) and Michael Orans, Not Even Wrong: Margaret Mead, Derek Freeman, and the
Samoans (1996). Freeman was the first and most forceful critic of Mead and her
research, arguing that her stay in Samoa was too brief to allow careful study of Samoan
sexuality, and that she not only misrepresented herself to the Samoans, but also to her
mentor, Franz Boas. Combined with the recantation of one of her Samoan“informants”,
these critiques have dealt a serious blow to the reputation of America’s most famous
anthropologist, and forced the discipline itself to re-examine its paradigms. See also The
Feminine Mystique. Friedan critiques Mead for relying on Freudian frameworks which
connect creativity and assertiveness with masculinity, and passive receptivity with
femininity, while her research showed that anatomy was not, in fact, destiny (Chapter 6).
Furthermore, Friedan takes Mead to task for writing one version of femininity and living
quite a different version.

5. Chesler argues that a great many of women’s psychiatric problems historically have
been the result of blaming themselves for their disillusionment with their lives instead of
turning the blame back on society, which would result in rage, rather than madness.

6. Among the early challenges to monolithic feminism, perhaps the best-known is Hull,
Smith and Scott’s collection All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some
of Us are Brave: Black Women ’s Studies. Ed. Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and
Barbara Smith. See also Andre Lorde’s “An Open Letter to Mary Daly,” in Sister
Outsider. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing P, 1984, and Paula Gunn Allen, “Who is Your
Mother? Red Roots of White Feminism,” in The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine
in American Indian Traditions. Boston: Beacon P, 1992 (1986).

237

7. Chodorow 94.

8. For more on the Bildungsroman tradition, see Martin Swales, The German
Bildungsromanfi'om Wieland to Hesse (Princeton, Princeton UP, 1978; Wilhelm Dilthey,
Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung (Leipzig and Bern, 1913); Marianne Hirsch, “The Novel
of F orrnation as Genre: Between Great Expectations and Lost Illusions, Genre 12 (Fall
1979), 293-311; Jerome Buckley, Season of Youth: The Bildungsromanfi-om Dickens to
Golding, Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1974.

9. See also Felski 133, and Labovitz 8. For an overview of critical works on the female
Bildungsroman, see F uderer, The Female Bildungsroman in English: An Annotated
Bibliography of Criticism.

10. For a detailed discussion of Jane Eyre as Bildungsroman, see Karen E. Rowe,
“’Fairy-Bom and Human-Bred’: Jane Eyre’s Education in Romance” in Abel et al., The
Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development. See also the introduction in same volume.
For a discussion of Little Women as a novel of development, see Elizabeth Langland,
“Female Stories of Experience: Alcott’s Little Women in Light of Work” in Abel et al.,
The Voyage In.

1 1. See Leigh Gilmore, Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women 's Self-
Representation (Cornell UP, 1994). See also James Olney’s collection, Autobiography:
Essays Theoretical and Critical (Princeton UP, 1980), and Jeanne Perrault, Writing
Selves: Contemporary Feminist A utography (U Minnesota P, 1995).

12. Jehlen argues that the novel is “always about the unitary self versus the others”
(595), which is also apt as a skeletal description of the Bildungsroman.

13. Here I think of John McCain’s nanative of his years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam,
which was relentlessly used in his recent bid for the presidential nomination—John
McCain: An American Odyssey (Touchstone, 1999). The implication of this narrative is
that McCain is a man who demonstrated great courage in the face of unimaginable
adversity, which somehow translates into excellent credentials for the presidency of the
United States.

14. One study involved the observation of eleven mothers who were each placed in a
room with a six month old baby with a doll, a train, and a toy fish. The women who were
told the baby was a boy offered him the train, whereas the women who thought the child
was a girl picked up the doll for the baby to play with. The baby was, in fact, a boy, but
the women who believed he was female commented on “her” obvious femininity. See
Jerrie Will, Patricia Self, and Nancy Datan, unpublished paper, cited in Carol Tavris and
Carole Offir, The Longest War: Sex Drfl'erences in Perspective, Harcourt, 1977.

238

 

15. See, for example, Willie Morris, North Toward Home, (Y okrrapatawpha Press, 1982
[1967]); Frank McCourt, Angela ’s Ashes, (Scribner’s, 1996); Henry Louis Gates, Jr.,
Colored People: A Memoir, (Knopf, 1994); Russell Baker, Growing Up, (Knopf, 1991).

16. For more of Faulkner’s discussion on The Sound and the Fury, see Frederick L.
Gwynn and Joseph L. Biomer, eds. Faulkner in the University. Charlottesville: U of
Virginia P, 1959.

17. As Showalter has written, Little Women has influenced many remarkable women,
and interestingly, not a few women autobiographers mention this novel by name (Sister 's
42). “I identified myself passionately with Jo,” writes Simone de Beauvoir in her 1958
Memoirs of a Dutifitl Daughter. Many years later, de Beauvoir told her biographer that
she had, as a child, taken note of Jo’s reluctance to marry, “and I think it was fiom this
book that the idea first came to me that marriage was not necessary for me, even though,
of course, Jo does get married. I saw that all the March girls hated housework because it
kept them from what really interested them, the writing and drawing and music and so on.
And I think that somehow, even when very young, I must have perceived that Jo was
always making choices and sometimes they were neither well reasoned nor good. The
idea of choice must have fiightened me a little, but it was exhilarating as well” (Bair 69-
70). Adrienne Rich also felt an affinity with Jo, sharing a quick temper with the fictional
character (Of Woman Born 46), and bell hooks remembers reading all of Alcott’s books as
a girl, and finding “remnants of myself in Jo, the serious sister, the one who is punished.

I am a little less alone in the world” (Bone 77).

18. Though I find Little Women and The Adventures of Huckleberry F inn equally
influential as grand narratives of American childhood, literary maxims hold otherwise. The
third edition of Benet 's Reader ’s Encyclopedia, published in 1987, calls Huck Finn “one
of the greatest creations in American fiction” (466). Little Women, however, is merely a
‘inder read story” (575).

19. Again, Du Plessis argues that the last act of a female hero in nineteenth-century
fiction is to turn herself into a heroine (14). In other words, when a woman relinquishes
quest in exchange for romance, she also relinquishes her ability to, in Jo March’s words,
“paddle her own canoe.”

Chapter 4: Specifiring American Girlhood: Annie Dillard and Anne Moody

1. Rich, “Notes Toward a Politics of Location.”

2. My use of the phrase “anthropologizing the self,” borrows from Rabinow’s call for
anthropologizing the west as a means of uncovering the constructedness of Western

239

 

notions of reality (241). “Thick description” is Geertz’s preferred method of writing
ethnography, which he admits is interpretive, but attempts to avoid imposing coherence
(17-18).

3. Dillard consistently thematizes place in her writings, most notably in Pilgrim at
Tinker Creek (Harper’s Magazine Press, 1974), a personal nanative of Dillard’s minutely
detailed exploration of her own neighborhood in Virginia.

4. Here I am expanding Peter Winch’s concept of a “limiting notion”. While Winch
argues correctly that birth, death. and sexual relations are significant and central to every
known human culture (though obviously the form these practices take varies greatly), I
argue here that parents, religion, and education frmction similarly for adolescents in
American culture. Winch contends—and I agree—that it is “ofthe utmost importance to
be clear about the ways in which these notions enter into” a given culture (322), so for my
purposes in studying narrative constructions of American adolescent girlhood, I have
substituted the constants with which this group must invariably interact.

5. Not that Dillard acknowledges the onset of puberty; it is a rare coming of age narrative
that explicth mentions menarche or other physical changes associated with puberty.
Interestingly, of the narratives I discuss in this study, only Kingston and Simon confront
cultural constructions of menarche directly. See Chapter 6.

6. See The Feminine Mystique, chapter 1. Although Friedan’s text is now widely
criticized for overgeneralizing about women’s lives, for a particular class of
women—those whose husbands earned enough money to enable their wives to stay at
home—the description touched a deep nerve. F riedan quotes many women whose
complaint is essentially the same: I have everything I wanted, but I’m still unhappy.
This is the “problem with no name,” and Friedan’s thesis holds that the origin of the
problem lies in women’s enforced isolation from the larger world. Drawing heavily from
popular women’s magazines, Friedan finds a marked effort to valorize the joys of
domesticity and to discourage interest in politics, social issues, and careers.

7. Discussing the books she was reading, Dillard uses the third-person “we”: “We read,
above all, The Diary of a Young Girl.” But then she pauses to write “I say ‘we,’ but in
fact I did not know anyone else who read these things” (179).

8. There is one notable exception to my statement that Dillard does not recognize her
own whiteness, and even there the recognition is implied. Dillard writes that she had, at
sixteen, begun to follow the family maid around the house, “trying to get her to spill the
beans about being black; she kept moving” (216).

240

 

9. See Lerner, Majority, chapters 5, 6, 7, 8; Lerner, ed. Black Women in White America:
A Documentary History (Vintage, 1972); Collins, chapter 7.

10. For an analysis of the generic conventions of the slave narrative, see Olney, “ ‘I Was
Bom’: Slave Narratives, Their Status as Autobiography and as Literature.”

11. See Gramsci, “Notes on Italian History,” in Selections fiom the Prison Notebooks,
55-64.

12. According to C. Vann Woodward, lynching “attained the most staggering
proportions ever reached in the history of that crime” in the 1880s and 18903, while
advocates of segregation and disfianchisement were simultaneously consolidating their
dominance in the American South (4344). Activism by the N.A.A.C.P. and others
helped bring about near eradication of lynching by the early 1950s, but Southern
resistance to the civil rights movement resurrected the practice with a vengeance in 1955
with the murders of Emmet Till and two others (143, 173-4). See also Harris, Exorcising
Blackness.

13. This, of course, is also Booker T. Washington’s position in Up From Slavery. There
is, however, some evidence that Washington’s position was rhetorically calculated to
deflect white hostility toward his school and to serve his perennial firndraising needs for
Tuskegee Institute. See Louis R. Harlan’s introduction to Up From Slavery, vii-xliii.

l4. Olney 153.

15. Deborah Gray White writes that enslaved parents were particularly concerned with
teaching their children to “walk the tightrope between the demands of the whites and
expectations of the blacks without falling too far in either direction.” For instance,
children needed to learn that conversations among blacks were to be hidden from whites
(93). White points out how difficult it could be for enslaved children to please both their
masters and their parents.

16. Hurston, “Why I am Not Tragically Colo .”

17. See Gates, Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the “Racial ” Selfi chapter 1.
18. Fishburn argues that “the very bodies that were the occasion 0f Afiican peoples’
enslavement. . . . carried with them a tacit, inborn knowledge of our ‘relatedness-to

Being’” (1), thus inverting the traditional view that bodies were solely problematic for
African American slaves.

241

 

19. See Christian, Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892-1 976,
chapter 1.

20. In Ann Petry’s novel, The Street, Lutie Johnson commits murder rather than assent
to a rape that symbolizes her image as an uncontrollably sexual black woman.

21. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of T ransgression (Cornell
UP, 1986).

22. See H-Net discussion, “Teaching Anne Moody Coming of Age in Mississippi
Discussion, August 1997. Online. <http ://www2.h-net.msu.edu/~women/arehives/
threads/disc-moody.html>. According to Black Women in America: An Historical
Encyclopedia, edited by Darlene Clark Hine (Carlson, 1993), Moody left Mississippi in
1964 to become a civil rights project coordinator at Cornell University in Ithma, New
York. The H-Net discussion airs rumors, none of which I can substantiate, about Moody
becoming a lawyer in New York City, or living in France, or writing children’s fiction.
Moody did publish one book of fiction in 1975, titled Mr. Death: Four Stories, now out
of print, as well as various uncollected stories.

Chapter 5: ‘Lying Contests’: Frbtional Autobiography and Autobiogrqrhical Fiction

1. Many of the chapters in Memories of a Catholic Girlhood were first copyrighted as
separate stories in either The New Yorker or Harper ’s Bazaar. See copyright page.

2. See also p. 4, 124, 166 in McCarthy for variations on this assertion.

3. The fourth wall was an innovation of classic realistic drama that attempts to provide an
audience with the illusion of a coherent, believable world in which the actors “become”
the parts they played. For a discussion of classic realism in literature and the interrogative
texts of Renaissance drama, see Belsey, 91-102.

4. See Willett, Brecht on Theatre, p. 192, 125-126.

5. While it is true that earlier writers of both autobiography and fiction have explicitly
addressed their readers, i.e., Harriet Jacobs: “Reader, be assured this is no fiction”; and
Charlotte Bronte: “Reader, I married him” (Jane Eyre), the direct address I am describing
here differs significantly in that the coming of age narratives often take the reader “behind
the scenes” so to speak, showing the workings of the narrative much as Brecht wanted to
show spectators the theatrical machinery that creates the illusion of reality. In this
sense, the coming of age nanative shares many of the characteristics of metafiction,
which, according to Patricia Waugh, “self-consciously and systematically draws attention

242

to its status as an artefact in order to pose questions about the relationship between
fiction and reality” (Metafiction 2).

6. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, 45.
7. See Chodorow, Gilligan, Belenky et al.

8. For a discussion of the practice of signifying in African American culttue and
literature, see Gates, p. 236-250.

9. See Gates, Signr'jying, 196.
10. See Harlan, Introduction to Up From Slavery,xxxviii.

11. See Richard Wright, “Blueprint for Negro Writing” (194-205), and Langston Hughes,
“The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain ” (91-95) for representative statements
arguing, respectively, for the integral role of social protest and the specificity of African
American culture in literature. Rpt. in The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader. Ed.
David Levering Lewis. New York: Penguin, 1994.

12. Quoted in Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography 241.
13. Letter to Thomas Hamilton, quoted in Gates, Signijying, 173.

14. Frederick Douglass writes that he changed his name twice before settling on Douglass
at the suggestion of a white abolitionist supporter (322); Malcolm X, Amira Baraka, and
Muharnmed Ali are among the more famous twentieth-century examples of the practice of
rejecting the names that symbolized the enslavement of African Americans.

15. LeSeur argues that sexual awakening is conventional in the Afiican American female
narratives of initiation, and I would not disagree (101). However, it is not conventional in
my definition of the coming of age nanative, although Janie’s sexual awakening as
represented by the blooming pear tree is conventional for these texts in that Janie’s
discourse (of romance, in this instance) resists a dominant ideology, and attempts to
create a narrative of womanhood that honors the integrity of her vision.

16. Belenky et al. refer to the tentative knowledge emanating from a woman’s inner voice
as a “still small voice,” a Biblical reference to the voice of God (1 Kings 19: 11-12).
According to Belenky et al., Maimonides uses the same phrase to refer to intuitive
knowledge.

243

 

17. See Mary Helen Washington’s Foreword to Their Eyes Were Watching God and
Robert Stepto, From Behind the Veil.

Chapter 6: ‘Room for Paradoxes ’: Creating a Hybrid Identity

1. Following the standard usage of literary scholars and historians of Chinese America, I
usetheterrn Chinese immigrarrttorefertoChinese Americanswhowereborrr inChina;
American-bom Chinese refers, of course, to the children born in the US. to Chinese

2. See “DisseminiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” p.
139-170 in The Location of Culture. Also published in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi
K. Bhabha.

3. Rodriguez, “Does America Still Exist?” (Harper's , March 1984) 57-8.

4. The role of biology in identity is a complex issue, and beyond the scope of this study.
However, questions raised by the activism of intersexed individuals in recent years
suggests that sexual identity is not in fact simply a social construct. For instance, the
case of John/Joan involved a boy born in the early 19603 who underwent surgical
reconstruction of his genitals and hormone therapy after a botched circumcision when he
was eight months old. Doctors reasoned that he would suffer emotional trauma if he had
to live as a man with a mutilated penis, but with a surgically constructed vagina, hormone
therapy, and personal counseling, he could expect a normal life as a female. The
underlying assumptions of this reasoning, according to Diamond and Sigrnundson, was
that “individuals are psychosexually neutral at birth” and that “healthy psychosexual
development is dependent on the appearance of the genitals” (qtd. in Dreger 2). But
John/Joan, now an adult, is married to a Woman and is the father of their adopted children.
In fact, he has revealed that he never felt comfortable with his assigned female identity,
and had secretly discarded the female hormones he received at puberty. Indeed, at
fourteen, he decided to identify himself as male (Dreger, “Ambiguous Sex,” 1-2). The
outcome of this rather well-known case is anecdotally corroborated by other intersexed
individuals assigned a gender through surgical intervention, but found that the elimination
of their sexual ambiguity robbed them of a significant portion of their identity. Many
have expressed the wish that they been given the chance to decide if they wanted surgical
alteration. The experience of intersexed individuals suggests that gender is significantly
determined by biological factors that cannot be erased by social variables. See Heino F. L.
Meyer-Bahlburg, “Gender Assignment in Intersexuality.” 10.2 (1998): 1-21. Bo
Laurent, “Intersexuality—A Plea for Honesty and Emotional Support.” [OnlinelAvailable
http://ahp.web.org/pub/perspective/intersex.html; Alice Dreger, Hermaphrodites and the
Medical Invention of Sex (Harvard UP, 1998).

244

 

5. The Venn Diagram uses circles to represent an action in set theory, where the
positions and overlap of circles indicates the relationships between the sets. After John
Venn, 1834-1923, British logician. See Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary of the English
Language (Portland House, 1989).

6. See Language as Symbolic Action, 44-62.

7. See, for instance, Yung, Chinese Women of America: A Pictorial History and Ling,
Women Writers of Chinese Ancestry.

8. Again I find Winch’s use of “limiting notions” useful. Though I want to be careful not
to generalize, the specific limiting notions I attribute to American female adolescents—
sexual awakening, body changes, consciousness of difference from males, and the
socialization into feminine gender roles—are paradigmatic tropes in the American
woman’s coming of age narrative, regardless of class, ethnicity, place, or time.

9. In their 1999 study, Sparks of Genius: The Thirteen Thinking Tools of the World ’s
Most Creative People (Houghton Mifilin), Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein devote an
entire chapter to the concept of “body thinking,” which they argue is a mode of knowing
common to brilliant scientists as well as artists.

10. A Wider World is the title of the second volume of Kate Simon’s memoirs. (Harper,
1986).

l I. See Chun, p. 79-81. See also Wang for historical contextualization of Chinese
American identity.
12. See Chun, chapter 2.

13. Ibid., p. 128-9. Chun is drawing on David A. Hollinger's work in Postethnic America:
Beyond Multiculturalism. New York: Basic, 1995.

14. Being born a Dragon under the Chinese zodiac is considered lucky and highly
desirable; birth rates rise dramatically in Dragon years. Dragon people are defined as
strong, energetic, authoritative, unpredictable, eccentric, stubborn, selfish, and morally
principled. See “The Dragon.” Online. <http.www.wlu.edu/~hhil/dragon.html.

15. The use of cowbirds in this maxim is no accident; these black birds lay their eggs in

other birds’ nests. They do not raise their own young. For a discussion of parenting in a
cross-species context, see Hrdy.

245

 

16. See also Benjamin R. Tong, “The Ghetto of the Mind.” Amerasia Journal 1.3
(Nov. 1971): 1-31.

17. However, in China Men, Kingston articulates the male narratives that also work to
determine her identity, and that of all Chinese in America.

246

 

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