Identity and Activism in Twentieth-century and Contemporary American Women’s Memoirs
Open Access
- Author:
- Mannon, Bethany Ober
- Graduate Program:
- English
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- November 11, 2014
- Committee Members:
- James L W West Iii, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
James L W West Iii, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Cheryl Jean Glenn, Committee Member
Sandra Spanier, Committee Member
Jacqueline J A Reid Walsh, Special Member - Keywords:
- Memoir
Women's Writing
Feminism
Digital Rhetoric
Life Writing
Comics
Religion
Sustainability
Neuroscience
Activism - Abstract:
- In Identity and Activism I argue that women’s literary memoirs have come to occupy a public role that goes beyond examining and representing the idea of a self. In the wake of second-wave feminism, a significant faction of memoirists intervenes in the debates sparked by gender equality movements. Using the work of theorists Sidonie Smith, Julie Rak, Gillian Whitlock, and Leigh Gilmore, I study texts published in recent decades, along with memoirs from earlier in the twentieth century that established themes like religion, sustainability, health, as topics of concern for women writers. In addition to prose memoirs, I study graphic memoirs, digital life writing sites, and online storytelling projects. These media represent the perspectives of writers who see personal narrative as an opportunity to speak publicly, but who have not composed or published a book-length memoir. Considering these instances of life writing outside of the mainstream publishing industry widens the field of literary studies to include texts produced by a different community of writers and for a different reading public. Each of the five chapters in this dissertation studies a cluster of texts linked by a similar theme or interest. Chapter one examines American women’s memoirs of the expatriate literary community in Paris during the 1920s. These authors experiment with memoir as a public document and pursue goals other than disclosing personal experience or private observations. Chapter two examines women’s memoirs of living and working in rural environments. Rather than essentializing women’s relationship to the environment, these memoirs envision an ecofeminism based on alternatives to urban gender roles and capitalist ambitions. Chapter three connects the memoir genre to the academic discipline of narrative medicine, which bases diagnoses and treatments on the stories patients tell. Graphic and prose memoirs by Ellen Forney and Kay Redfield Jamison explore the links between manic depression, identity, and creativity, and call into question the usefulness of understanding identity as fragmented. Chapter four examines spiritual autobiographies and argues that the memoir genre is linked to religious themes and religious habits of thought such as confession and conversion. Chapter five examines the personal narratives that men and women write for two sites, “My Duty to Speak” and the “Afghan Women’s Writing Project,” both projects that have contributed to changes in ideology and tangible reforms for gender equality. These projects are dynamic venues for telling stories that constantly develop and evolve, and reflect the ways personal narratives play a role in digital culture. This research demonstrates that a belief that individual stories have persuasive power and currency in social debates has propelled the “memoir boom” between 1990 and 2010 in North America, and explains why autobiographical narratives continue to proliferate. Memoirs are a form of public discourse shaped by particular historical moments and rhetorical situations, and are a form of feminist rhetoric. I conclude that women’s memoirs rearticulate and reconsider the projects of second-wave feminism and intervene in cultural discourses about gender.