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Subjectivity and Feminism
1960s and early 1970s took as its starting point the particularity of
women's social and cultural experience. Along with other opposi-
tional social movements such as those representing blacks or gays,
feminism has challenged the abstract universality of political theories
such as liberalism and Marxism, stressing the inability of existing
political models to deal with the varied constitution of human
subjects and the oppressive consequences of the suppression of
difference. The 1970s saw the emergence of more differentiated
notions of political activity which challenged previously clear-cut
distinctions between public and private, personal and political
spheres, and which took as a central theme not only economic
exploitation but also other forms of culturally based alienation and
deprivation. Young summarizes this shift:
The new social movements of the 1960's, 70's and 80's . . . have begun
to create an image of a more differentiated public that directly
confronts the allegedly impartial and universalist state. Movements of
racially oppressed groups . . . tend to reject the assimilationist ideal
and assert the right to nurture and celebrate in public their distinctive
cultures and forms of life . . . The women's movement too has claimed
to develop and foster a distinctively women's culture and that both
women's specific bodily needs and women's situation in male dom-
inated society require attending in public to special needs and unique
contributions of women. Movements of the disabled, the aged, and
gay and lesbian liberation, all have produced an image of public life in
which persons stand forth in their difference, and make public claims
to have specific needs met.32
Thus it is significant that a central focus of feminist theory has been
a critical exposure of the political implications of the separation of
public and private spheres. It has been argued that the "theoretical
and practical exclusion of women from the universalist public is no
mere accident or aberration";33 rather, the emergence of a public
sphere is itself intimately related to women's containment within the
private domestic realm. This guarantees the unity and cohesion of the
rational discursive public and contains desires and emotional needs
within the realm of the family, which provides an emotional refuge
for the alienated male worker while simultaneously constituting the
site of women's subordination and exploitation. The slogan that "the
personal is the political" serves to emphasize-that the supposedly
"personal" problems which have particularly affected women—rape,
abortion, child care, the sexual division of labor—are in fact political
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CHAPTER THREE
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phy. It is for this reason that Oakley feels free to invent some of the
characters in her autobiography, for, as the publisher's blurb states:
"In this honest, somewhat painful and absorbing account of her life
. . . every woman will find some reflection of her own personality
and feelings."21 The obligation to honest self-depiction which con-
stitutes part of the autobiographical contract is here mitigated by the
feminist recognition that it is the representative aspects of the author's
experience rather than her unique individuality which are important,
allowing for the inclusion of fictive but representative episodes
distilled from the lives of other women. The fact that the authors
discussed write autobiographies explicitly and self-consciously as
women is of central importance as an indication of the shifting
conceptions of cultural identity which are in turn echoed in the
changing forms and functions of autobiography.
Keitel has addressed this question in an analysis of the function of
contemporary forms of autobiography and autobiographical writing
in relation to the self-definition of oppositional subcultures. She
points to the emergence of distinctive literary "counter-public
spheres" in the 1970s and 1980s, centered on the specific interests and
experiences of groups such as women or gays, and reclaiming for
literary discourse a representative and mimetic function which has
been rendered increasingly problematic since modernism. Much of
this literature is primarily concerned not with negation but rather
with the affirmation of oppositional values and experiences, serving
to identify communal norms which are perceived to bind together
members of oppressed groups. In their emphasis on the authenticity
of the writing subject and the attempt to generate a process of
identification between reader and author, these literary forms can be
seen as reiterating certain aspects of the narrative tradition of the
eighteenth century, Keitel argues.22 The autobiographical writing
inspired by the women's movement differs, however, from the
traditional autobiography of bourgeois individualism, which presents
itself as the record of an unusual but exemplary life. Precisely because
of this uniqueness, the eighteenth-century autobiography claims a
universal significance. Feminist confession, by contrast, is less con-
cerned with unique individuality or notions of essential humanity
than with delineating the specific problems and experiences which_
bind womenjogether. It thus tends to emphasize the orHmary events
of a protagonist's life, their typicality in relation to a notion of
communal identity. "The legitimation for reporting these experiences
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reader, and that "the conviction prevailed that letters were the
spontaneous renderings of a person's innermost thoughts." 42
The confessional mode of the diary and letter which shaped much
of the writing of the period facilitated this appearance of authenticity;
the language employed was often relatively simple and unadorned,
simulating as far as possible the patterns of everyday speech. This
form of intimate address, coupled with an attention to realist detail,
was able to inspire strong identification in the reading public, as
evidenced by the contemporary reception of such texts as Pamela and
Clarissa. A comparison can be made between this kind of reader
response and that invited by the feminist confession^ the experience of
involvement and identification disdained as ^"^naive^reading by
much of modern literary criticism regains importance, exemplifying
the text's integration into the everyday life of its readers and its
success in confronting the personal and political problems which
affect them.
It is possible to argue, then, that contemporary feminism has
inspired a new preoccupation with the problematic of subjectivity
which first emerges in the eighteenth century, resulting in a renewed
attention to the psychological dimension of literature in the context of
gender politics. The cultural and ideological frameworks within
which this occurs are of course in many ways very different;
"femininity" is no longer a self-evident notion, but an ideology to be
interrogated from a perspective informed by feminist critiques.
Nevertheless, the attempt to use autobiographical writing as a means
to self-knowledge embroils the author in a variety of problems and
contradictions, some of which are already apparent in the eighteenth-
century context. Thus Schleiermacher, for example, is already aware
of one of the paradoxes of autobiography, namely, that the process of
critical self-scrutiny can be counterproductive by destroying the
spontaneity of self it intends to uncover: "Inner life disappears as a
consequence of this treatment. It is the most deplorable form of self-
destruction."43 Twentieth-century critics are able to challenge more
explicitly many of the assumptions underlying the project of self-
knowledge through literary self-expression. A deconstructive
reading, for example, can easily undermine confession's attempt to
emulate speech rather than writing, its struggle to control the
open-ended play of language through constant reference to an
illusory ideal of a determining subject. And from a Foucauldian
perspective, confession as a supposed liberation from censorship and
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selves as obsessive and neurotic. Any insight gained through the act
of confession does not appear to be translated into action, but merely
generates increased feelings of guilt in the author at the extent of her
own failings: "Then I think, how sick and tired I am of it; it's always
the same reproduction of the same person who suffers, but who never
draws conclusions for action from this suffering. I should stop
suffering some time, I think, then there'd be something new to talk
about."55 Of course, the very point of the feminist confession is to
confront the more unpalatable aspects of female experience as general
problems, not to present idealized images of women as positive role
models. Nevertheless, such passages are an indication that the project
of self-disclosure as a means to self-emancipation may be more
fraught with difficulties than it first appears.
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Christopher Lasch and Richard Sennett, who use the term "nar-
cissism" to designate the current preoccupation with personal identity
which marks most Western societies and is perhaps most clearly
manifested in the United States. There exists, it is argued, a contem-
porary tendency to confuse or to merge public and private selves, and
consequently to reduce the complex operations of social and political
institutions to questions of personal feeling and individual motive.
The therapeutic sensibility reigns supreme: politics is increasingly
viewed in purely individualistic terms and reduced to simplistic
ideologies of self-awareness and self-expression. Not only is such a
cultural phenomenon dangerously naive in reducing complex social,
economic, and political structures to a personal and psychological
level, but it can be oppressive rather than liberating in engendering
what Sennett calls "destructive Gemeinschaft." The pursuit of inti-
macy, community, and mutual self-disclosure leads to an attempt to
break down all barriers between individuals, failing to recognize the
importance of play, ritual, and distance in social interaction. All
aspects of individual behavior take on a deeper significance in relation
to the inner self they are assumed to express, burdening individuals
with the imperative to prove continually their authenticity. Hence the
emphasis upon personal self-validation through the exchange of
confessions. Self-expression is increasingly viewed as the highest
good and as its own justification, and Sennett comments upon the
self-defeating logic of this compulsion to authenticate the self through
continually speaking of it: "The more a person concentrates upon
feeling genuinely, rather than on the objective content of what is felt,
the more subjectivity becomes an end in itself, the less expressive he
can be. Under conditions of self-absorption the momentary disclo-
sures of self become amorphous."57
A number of criticisms have been made of the general diagnosis of
contemporary culture in the writings of Sennett and Lasch, most
obviously in relation to their androcentric assumptions. Lasch's
nostalgia for the traditional bourgeois patriarchal family as a suppos-
edly necessary basis for the development of a strong superego reveals
a conspicuous absence of recognition of the oppression of women as
a defining element of this family structure. Similarly, the "fall of
public man" is revealed as exactly that, the disappearance of a form of
public life enjoyed by a select male bourgeoisie from which women
were almost completely excluded. Sennett in particular has a tendency
to idealize the autonomous, rational and psychically repressed bour-
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the text closer to its goal of transparent self-disclosure. Yet the more
words that are generated by the confessional text, the more clearly it
reveals itself as infinitely extendable, an endless chain of signifiers that
can never encapsulate the fullness of meaning which the author seeks
and which would put an end to writing itself.
This lack of identity between the text and the life, experience and
its representation, is of course a central problem of autobiography,
and, in a broader sense, of literature itself. "Writing perpetually
stands in for a reality it can never encompass."73 Moreover, not only
does the life call into question the authority of the text, but the text
begins to undermine the reality of the life. Although the confession is
chosen to convey immediacy and spontaneity, the very process of
recording intrudes upon that which is being recorded and changes it.
"If you record a day of your life, does the decision to do so change the
shape of that day? . . . Do you change the balance, distort the truth?"
asks Millett.74 Life itself is revealed as literary material awaiting
processing by the author, who begins to experience her own life self-
consciously as a text. The more strenuously the author pursues
immediacy as a means to disclosing the truth of her life, the more
clearly the confessional work reveals itself to be caught up in
contradictions and paradoxes which undermine any such project.
On the one hand, then, feminist confession expresses the longing
for, and belief in, the value of intimacy, as part of its critique of an
instrumental and rationalized public world. The process of self-
discovery through the exploration of inner feelings may help to fulfill
important needs for women who have often suppressed their own
desires in accordance with an ethic of duty and self-sacrifice. On the
other hand, the desire for self-validation through confession can
engender the self-defeating dialectic described by Sennett and Lasch.
The yearning for total intimacy, immediacy, and fullness of meaning
serves only to underscore the reality of uncertainty and lack, so that
attempted self-affirmation (Bekenntnis) can easily revert into anxious
self-castigation (Beichte). The process of introspection, of the analysis
and evaluation of motive, can intensify feelings of guilt rather than
resolve them; the compulsion to disclose oneself as fully as possible
leads to a search for ever more telling details, the continual interro-
gation of one's own motives, in the search for the impossible ideal of
absolute honesty. In this context Sennett is correct to reaffirm the
connection between the modern stress on authenticity and its Puritan
precedents. "In both, 'What am I feeling?' becomes an obsession. In
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