Reading Notes:
Elspeth Graham et al, "Pondering All These Things in Her Heart:
Aspects of Autobiography in the Autobiographical Writings of
Seventeenth-century Englishwomen," 51-71.
51: Humility and power of the secret, of concealment. Harkens back to
the power of the Virgin Mary and her secret motherhood of Christ, a
"secrecy" which "gives her a hidden reserve of enormous strength while
allowing her at the same time to maintain an outward appearance of
proper modesty."
52: Issues: Shifting boundaries between public and private; dangers of
slander and betrayal when a woman's "good name" were so crucial for her
well-being; creation of textual selves; and the author-reader relation
of mutual secrecy in autobiography.
Alice Thornton, A Book of Remembrances
53: It is a record of deliverance from various forms of
suffering, loss, illness, and death in the author's family.
It contains of A) of themes of
suffering and comfort inspired or informed by the Book of Psalms,
B) expression of need to vindicate her and her husband from accusations
of financial mismanagement, and C) specific expression of loss,
mourning, and suffering concerning her husband's death.
54: Excerpt from her Book which recounts her sorrow and
suffering in the face of what she sees as unwarranted accusations by her
friend Mary Breaks, in the face of her husband's death, and her sense of
her faith in God.
56: Secrecy and disclosure operate in a complex interrelationship of
emotional and pragmatic needs and issues concerning self-identity and
its control
This discussion by Graham et al shows the ambiguity of the "secret
story," and therefore of the "secret self." Stories by their very nature
imply communication with the 'other,' but certain stories, such as found
in journals, are meant to be kept in 'secret." Yet, even such stories
are viable only with an intended audience, difficult to keep only as
oneself. Although Thornton's Book was apparently not meant to
be a purely private journal, it plays at the boundaries of issues of
secrecy, disclosure, and the control of one's self-identity and agency.
Anne Wentworth, A Vindication of Anne
Wentworth
57: Issues of authority and authenticity
57: Is there a public Wentworth that hides between the lines a private
Wentworth? Or, is this a reading-into-the-text from a modern or
postmodern perspective? Or, are there so many inconsistent selves in the
text that it makes no sense to speak of an authentic inner self versus
the explicit facade that the text presents?
58: Wentworth is writing in a context in which Baptists like herself
were being persecuted in England. She also lived in a period where
members of Baptist congregations were required to testify to their own
faithfulness, in the face of a literal tradition of reading the Bible
that tended to be misogynist. This might have created a text as facade
in which her true thoughts and feelings had to be hidden under the
surface.
58-59: She interweaves contradictory, multiple attributions of madness
to her oppressors as well as to herself, and even uses madness to
describe her faith: "I confess myself to be beside myself to God."
Madness, connotes a kind of dissolution, or death, but what kind of
death?
Elizabeth Delaval, The Meditations of
Lady ...
65: A public, yet rather private, or confiding, intimate
manuscript of a life of secret friendships and longings, both for female
companionship as well as male romantic relationship, in the face of an
eventual arranged marriage. This is a text that revolves around issues
of secrecy, agency, and the body.
66. Her friend Mrs. Carter promises her tales of fairies, and "the
boundaries of real and imagined narratives, whose inter-relation is so
fundamental to the process of autobiography, coincide on the very issue
of secrecy."
68-9. "We may conclude by observing, then, the fascinating convergence
of required or approved secrecy, and subversive imaginative secrecy,
both in" Delaval's writing and in her life. "To be hidden was to be both
excluded from the wider world, and to be liberated from it, at least in
the 'court' of imagination."
This speaks to the interplay of secrecy, disclosure, intimacy, and their
attendant power; authenticity, authority, and the interplay of their
ambiguity.
In love, death, and faith, the power of the self's story in private, and
public, and at the interface of private intimacy and public disclosure.
Hilde L. Nelson, Damaged Identities, Narrative Repair, 1-35,
176-188.
Preface
xi: What makes our stories possible? Agency, and possible range of
agency is determined in part by our sense of identity.
Agency and identity are composed of many dimensions: material, cultural,
imaginative, and the like.
xii: Two forms of harm with regard to one's sense of identity are: deprivation
of opportunity, which can apply all dimensions, as well as infiltrated
consciousness.
xii: It may not always be obvious that the larger, dominant society
deprives any person or particular group (based on gender, race,
sexuality, religion, and the like) of their opportunities and
infiltrates their consciousness. One way to resist or overcome these
forms of harm to self-identity is through the creation of counterstories.
Counterstories can "resist the evil of
diminished moral agency . . . by uprooting the harmful stories that
constitute the subgroup members' identity from the perspective of an
abusive, dominant group, . . . [and thereby] alter the dominant group's
perception of the subgroup. [Furthermore], by uprooting the harmful
identity-constituting stories that have shaped a person's own sense of
who she is, counterstories aim to alter the person's self-perception.
Chapter I: Narrative Repair: Reclaiming Moral Agency
1: Nelson illustrates her ideas through the illustrative example of the
nurses at Cranford Community Hospital.
1-3: Diversity of nurses' backgrounds.
3: "Technical" (predominantly male) doctors and "touchy feely" (all
female) nurses.
3: Doctors seemed to see nurses as "Earth Mother with bedpan."
4: Military model of nursing as origin of these stereotypes?
4: To get the doctors to stop pigeonholing the nurses and denying them
in this way, "the nurses would have to counter the destructive stories
with better ones of their own."
4-5: Story of "dehydrated and disoriented elderly patient"
6: Counterstory stands against the Master
Narrative as a story that "resists an oppressive identity
and attempts to replace it with one that commands respect."
7: Formation of Counterstory: Identify oppressive
elements of master narrative, and then retell the story to make relevant
moral elements visible.
7: Alter dominant group's perception of a given subgroup; alter
oppresssed person's perception of herself.
9. Found Communities and Communities of Choice
Found communities: families, nations, neighborhoods
Communities of choice: friendships, urban relatonships (trade unions,
political action groups, support groups)
Example: For many, working at Cranford Hospital is a found community;
Nurses steering committee is a community of choice.
11: What makes a Counterstory as 'story'? Depictive,
selective, and interpretive sequence of events; also, connective:
13: Depictive of previously excluded elements; selective with regard to
highlighting key inaugural, transitional, and/or terminating motifs; and
interpretive in terms of a particular person/character's attitudes, values,
actions. Also, connective, in the way they connect diverse narratives.
15: Counterstories are stories of self-definition, and they can be: nonmoral,
weakly moral, or strongly moral. Of these, the most critical is the
strongly moral counterstory, in which one finds "the ability of morally
developed persons to install and observe precedents for themselves which are
distinctive of them and binding upon them morally."
16-17: It refers to concrete histories and situations that must be affirmed
or repudiated. Such counterstories are concrete, purposeful, and
self-defining. They often revolve around defining moments that
require courage and determination. The example Nelson gives is of refusing
to remove contraceptive implants. These moments are moments of
identity-formation.
18-19: Two kinds of counterstories, based on whether they
are strongly moral or weakly moral: The nurses, self-consciously redefining
themselves against the grain of the dominant hospital culture, are strongly
moral. The novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, is weakly moral, in that
the effect is to set an upright example, with the possible influence on
readers as being transformative by way of setting a moral example.
Narrative Repair
20-21: "The immediate purpose of a counterstory is to repair [damaged]
identities." It is to revise stories that have deprived people unfairly or
unjustly of opportunity. Examples Nelson gives are the redefinition of
nurses' identities at Cranford Hospital, or the U.S. governments redress of
Japanese Americans' internment during World War II. Of course, the nurses
and the Japanese Americans can be said to have lost various opportunities:
financial, professional or career, and social. But just as more important,
to the extent that they internalized the narratives of damaged
self-identity, they also lost self-respect and suffered the ensuing
emotional damage. So, narrative repair also works to undo the pernicious
effects of an infiltrated consciousness.
Identity and Agency
22: Identity is a function of how others understand oneself as
well as how one understands oneself. Agency involves both the
freedom to act/restrain oneself, as well as a constellation of social
conditions: 1) the ability to understand and act upon moral norms, 2)
ability of those around one to understand a given person as morally
responsible, and 3) the ability of the agent to see herself as morally
responsible. Think, for example, about cases of bullying and what
happens both individually and socially.
27: Nelson gives the example of the nurse Pilar Sanchez, who is seen by the
doctor as emotionally overindulgent towards her patient rather than morally
responsible in conveying to them their own condition of terminal leukemia.
How I Identify Me: Infiltrated Consciousness
28: Nelson uses the example of the 1944 film Gaslight, in which
the protagonist played by Ingrid Bergman begins to doubt her own sense of
sanity when she suspects her husband of wrongdoing for no good
[apparent] reason even though he has actually murdered her aunt and
married her in order to steal the aunt's jewels. Yet, according to Nelson,
Benson who uses the example of the Bergman character to illustrate a case of
infiltrated consciousness, fails to distinguish between deception and
oppression. In the case of deception, the only thing missing is transparency:
Once the facts come to light, surely the Bergman character will be
able to resist her husband. For Nelson, however, it is not just deception
but oppression. In the case of oppression, not only must the facts come to
light, the subject (Berman's character) must also come to trust her own
judgment. The problem is not self-transparency but self-worth, or
self-respect (think again of bullying).
Stories, Stories!
If we recall Brockelman's discussion of the need for faith in
his concept of Time and Self, and think about the stories of the
nurses at Cranford, we can see how religion, love, and death might
be so integral to one another, as also may be the case in the film Gaslight,
and the story of the Japanese Americans interned during World War II.
Faith in one's own story may be seen as essential to one's sense of
self-worth or self-respect, as going in hand in hand with valuing and
respecting others. Faith, self-love, and love-for-others then become
inseparable, and their inseparability becomes especially apparent when there
are issues of life and death involved.
But, what is it that makes the emergence of self-respect and self-love
possible? Stories are key, according to Nelson, or more precisely, counterstories.
176: The Assessment of the Counterstory
When Counterstories Go Bad: Four Types of Stories Gone Bad: Boomerang,
Hostage, "We are who I am," and Bathwater
177-8: Boomerang: Exception proves the rule. Passing as a member of the
dominant group
179-181: Hostage: Takes hostage of alternate master narratives to dislodge a
particular master narrative. Ex. An elderly woman who declines the "decline"
narrative, continuing to be active, well-dressed, and so on, but at the
expense of her daughter's well-being, since she now provides
financial, logistical, emotional support in sacrifice to her mother.
181-182:"We are who I am": Overgeneralizing from a particular case: Betty
Friedan's Feminine Mystique, as describing a specific socio-economic group
of women.
182-183: Bathwater: Dislodges the oppressed as well as the oppressive master
narrative: Ex. treatment of "disabled," as "disabled" rather than at least
"otherly abled" or "differently abled." Consider cases such as Temple
Grandin, animal scientist who is autistic.