ISF paper 2004:12
Imagined Childhoods
Modernity, Self and Childhood in Autobiographical Accounts1
Marianne Gullestad
Abstract: In this article I demonstrate interesting connections between the imagining of
nations and the imagining of childhoods. Much is written today about the imagined
communities of nations, while little is written about how adults look back at their own
childhoods. The article takes off from two paradoxes. The first paradox is that childhood
reminiscences constitute a crucial part of many modern life stories (written autobiographies
as well as life stories elicited through interviews), and that this fact has barely been studied
and theorized. The second paradox is that although life stories are becoming increasingly
popular, how to study them is becoming increasingly problematic. Can life stories told by the
adults help us understand childhood experiences from ”the child’s point of view”? The
difference between the self who tells and the self who was is at its greatest when people
narrate their childhood experiences. It is in this sense that childhood recollections can be
regarded as imagined childhoods. I distinguish between textual childhoods (the way they are
told) and lived childhoods (the way they are experienced). Childhood memories call into
question widespread notions of fact and fiction, requiring the scholar to open up the notion of
truth. The discussion brings together insights from many disciplines with implications for
both social and literary theory.
Key words: childhood, autobiography, life story, self-fashioning, reflexivity
The world went wrong that afternoon: there is evidence: a
photograph. My father said "Smile, Kay", and I smiled; but it is
really the day of my first dislocation. I lie on my stomach on the
grass, my baby sister on a rug to my right, just in front of me. I am
irritated and depressed because she has come to stay. Things have
changed: on removal day I turned on the kitchen tap to fill a cup
with water and couldn't turn it off, and the removal man was angry
with me: the first time an adult's anger has been directed at me. I
remember this now. Somewhere on the grass, beyond the
photograph, is an apple that I've been given to cheer me up, but that
I refuse to eat. We carry moments like this through a lifetime: things
went wrong; there was a dislocation between me and the world; I
am not inside myself. And he said "Smile, Kay", and I smiled: the
first deception, the first lie.
Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman (1986: 51)
This article takes off from two paradoxes. The first paradox is that childhood reminiscences
constitute a crucial part of many modern life stories, and that this fact has barely been studied and
theorized. The second paradox is that while life stories are becoming increasingly popular, how to
study them is becoming increasingly problematic. The aim of the article is to discuss the use of life
story material in literary criticism, history, and the social sciences by bringing together the study of
childhoods and the study of life stories (written autobiographies as well as life stories elicited
through interviews). A central argument is that a focus on childhood should become central to
current theoretical attempts to reconfigure the relations between texts and lives, because such a focus
intensifies and illuminates discussions about truth and authenticity in autobiographical narratives. At
the same time, the study of the connections between the textual and the social in life stories will
enhance our understanding of the role of childhood memories in the construction and objectification
of modern selves.
In order to discuss the various meanings which are implicitly or explicitly invested in the first years
of life it is crucial to distinguish between what can be termed textual childhoods, on the one hand,
and lived childhoods, on the other. A textual childhood is a childhood the way it is told, while a lived
childhood is a childhood the way it was experienced. The article focus on a whole set of questions
concerning textual and lived childhoods: Why are childhood reminiscences so important? Can the
changing roles and meanings of childhood reminiscences be studied as crucial parts of large scale
historical change? What is the relationship between social context and narrative form? When and
through which experiences do textual childhoods start and end? Which events are selected, how are
they presented, and what place and role are they given in the structure of the narrative? What is
implicitly or explicitly considered to be a good or a bad childhood? Are there significant differences
between the genders in the ways textual childhoods are constructed? Can life stories told by adults be
a good source for understanding childhood experiences, from "the child's point of view"?
While a discussion about the role of childhood memories is remarkably absent in most studies of
autobiography, there are some exceptions to the general rule. Psychoanalysis, for example, can be
interpreted as a long term telling of one's life story, with a particular focus on childhood. The analyst
is there to help patients understand and reconstruct their childhood stories, in order for them to be
able to live with these stories in the present. A successful analyst gives the analysand possession of
his/her own story, and that possession can be regarded, so to speak, as the appropriation by oneself of
one's own story.
While Sigmund Freud's ideas about children's sexuality have not been generalized - childhood is
popularly regarded as a stage of sexual innocence -, his emphasis on the significance of early
childhood experiences has been generalized to such an extent that it is now a common place
understanding in the Western world. This widely generalized psychological thinking is one part of
the answer to the question of why childhood experiences often have so prominent a place in life
narratives. Through the institutionalization of psychoanalytical knowledge, these ideas have become
crucial aspects of contemporary perceptions and understandings. Childhood is seen as the "natural"
foundation of the adult self.
Within literary criticism the late Richard Coe devoted most of his life to the study of childhood
through the life writing of poets. In his book, When the Grass Was Taller: Autobiography and the
Experience of Childhood (1984), he pointed to the fact that many professional writers only write
about the childhood part of their lives. He therefore wanted to see "the Childhood" as a separate
genre. Coe's work is particularly central to the aims of this artcle, because he attempted to focus on
the experience of childhood, and because he expanded the boundaries of literary criticism to include
insights from other disciplines.2
Coe's work, however, is not without problems. First, his generalizations hide many important
variations. It is not appropriate to speak of the experience of childhood in definite form. A second
problem is his division of childhood memories into "the trivial" and "the magic". Both notions are
retrospective adult categories and therefore are problematic as emblems of the experience of
childhood, seen from the child's point of view. The magic may be part of the experience of childhood
for the adult looking back, but the trivial is an outsider's point of view. For both the experiencing
child and the writing adult the so-called trivialities are far from trivial: this is precisely why it is
important to recall them many years later.
A third way of combining perspectives on autobiography and childhood can be found in the
discipline of history, particularly oral history. A prime example is the Destiny Obscure by John
Burnett (1982). In this book Burnett uses autobiographies written by working-class people as sources
to information about family and education in England from the 1820s to the 1920s.
The works of Coe and Burnett illustrate not only how different disciplines have used autobiographies
in very different ways, but also how they have worked with different kinds of material. While
Burnett was interested in the childhoods of working-class people, Coe was interested in the
childhoods of poets. While Burnett read life stories as information about a prior reality, Coe was
more interested in autobiographies as works of art.
Historians and social scientists have traditionally tended to use life stories in order to extract from
them information about life courses, while textual analysts tend to see life stories as narratives.
While social scientists emphasize the life, literary critics emphasize the story. Literary critics tend to
go to great writers' accounts for insights into the particular and unique aspects of their lives, while
social scientists tend to claim that their subjects are representative of the life courses of various
groups.
The study of life stories therefore provides fertile ground for inter-disciplinary work, especially
between the ways anthropologists, historians, sociologists and other social scientists analyze personal
recollections and other kinds of oral accounts elicited from informants, and the ways literary critics
understand life writings.
At present it is important to attempt, in different ways, to resolve the opposition implied in the
positions of scholars such as Burnett and Coe. In addition there is the additional challenge coming
from post-structuralist criticism. The value of post-structuralism is that many relationships which
were previously taken for granted have now been scrutinized. For example, post-structuralist
criticism has fundamentally problematized the relationships between language and subject; between
text and life. Analysts are therefore now faced with an even more radical dilemma. On the one hand
life stories can be read as transparent "data" about social life. This is, to put it bluntly, simply to link
life stories and history by imposing theories and methodologies on them. On the other hand, studies
can follow Pierre Bourdieu (1986) when he talks about the autobiography as pure fiction, a
"biographic illusion". Then one risks relating life stories to a pure textuality and thus isolating them
from human beings and from the social worlds where they are produced and read. The challenge for
life story analysis is to profit from post-structuralist insights without underwriting the most extreme
slogans, for example that the author is dead, that there is nothing but the text, and that
autobiographical writing should be read as pure fiction.
Post-structuralist criticism such as that of Paul de Man (1984) has taught us to take seriously the
conventions and the creativity of language but, armed with these insights, those of us who are
interested in society and culture must try to reconnect texts and lives in new ways, both theoretically
and methodologically. Also the researcher interested in "facts" need to consider seriously the
narrative aspects of life stories.
Most present-day life narratives bear in one way or another witness to the historical, economic,
social and cultural processes of modernity. Modernization has today become a worldwide
phenomenon, no longer restricted to its Western forms. Narratives display a wide range of specific
reactions, adaptations, and resistances to modernity. Through the dislocating mechanisms of
modernity (Berger et al. 1973; Giddens 1991) social relations are now reorganized across large timespace distances, creating new problems, conflicts, and ambiguities for individuals to solve.
Childhood recollections as resources for the construction of the self
Students of autobiographies have focused on their nature as "metaphors of self" (Olney 1975). In the
words of Liz Stanley:
Autobiography has at its heart a project which is concerned with the artful
construction of a self in writing, a self which can be as it where looked in
the eye (1993: 131).
It is a central part of modern consciousness that individuals are not only abstracted from, but also
theoretically divorced from, and opposed to, the social and material conditions in which they live.
This is the basis for the ways in which individuals have been seen as fully autonomous and rational,
not only in philosophy, but also in theories of autobiographical writing (see, for example, Gusdorf
1980 [1966]). Analysts of autobiographies have so far not been able to use the full potential of their
materials for criticizing abstract and ahistorical notions of individual selves.
This is a crucial point where social theory since G.H. Mead (1934) has much to offer literary
criticism. It is more than a mere coincidence that at the same time as individuality and uniqueness is
"discovered" in social anthropology (Cohen 1994), the relational nature of selves is "discovered"
within literary criticism (Eakin 1994). Constructions of selves are usually culturally embedded to
such an extent that even the study of apparently atypical life stories of great writers in fact opens up
for the understanding of common cultural conventions of how a life can be represented. It does not,
however, have to be a question of one or the other - either autonomy or sociality - but of seeing
aspects of both in each life story.
I define the modern self as the continuous and processual effort of an individual to bring together his
or her various roles, identities and experiences. Roles, on the other hand, are the dynamic aspects of
the individual's various positions in the social structure, while identities are those qualities with
which the individual identifies and of which he or she desires social confirmation. Some identities
are directly tied to social roles, while others, such as national and ethnic identities, can be aspects of
several roles. Modern people construct many fleeting and situation-specific identities, but they
usually strive for a more or less coherent and continuous image of the self (Gullestad 1996: 17-32).
The perspective I have developed can be summarized as follows: 1) modern people engage in
various roles with different others in different contexts; 2) there is no one-to-one relationship
between roles and identities; 3) modern people embody multiple identities, simultaneously and
situationally; 4) the image of the self, as the sum of all the identities, is simultaneously unique as
well as dialogically and relationally constituted; 5) identities and selves are not timeless, contextfree, abstract, and fixed, but vary according to context, cross-culturally and over time; 6) identities
and selves therefore vary according to socially structured categories such as gender, age, and social
class; and 7) the construction of selves and identities is embedded within complex hierarchical
relations of cultural difference and unequal power (Gullestad 1996: 20).
Identities can seldom be considered as given, but are achieved through negotiated and reflexive use
of available life story material. What the individual becomes is dependent on the reconstructive
endeavors in which he or she engages. Autobiography in the broad sense of an interpretative selfhistory, is at the core of self-fashioning in modern social life.
Self-actualization extends to the body, and the body should be understood as a part of an action
system rather than merely a passive object. Body awareness is a means of constructing a
differentiated self and a way of attempting to integrate the self as a whole (Giddens 1991).
Autobiographies can also fruitfully be linked to theories of historical change. For example, there is
today a rapidly proliferating literature in the social sciences aimed at theorizing changing global
economic, social and cultural structures. The new emerging structures are variously called "postindustrial society" (Bell 1974), "late capitalism", "flexible specialization" (Piore and Sabel 1984),
"flexible accumulation" (Harvey 1989), "post-modernity" (Harvey 1989, Stephens n.d.), and "late
modernity" (Giddens 1991). There are many problems concerning the definitions of those terms, and
the areas and time periods to which they apply. However, all these theorists argue that there are
profound wide-ranging constellations of changes occurring globally since World War II. For lack of
better terms, I have provisionally called the present period from about 1970 a "transformed
modernity"; and the previous era the period of "classic modernity" (Gullestad 1996).
While modernity theories are usually silent about childhood, I want to make the argument that it is
now crucial to focus on the ways in which childhood experiences are used as resources in building
the modern self. The increasing interest in autobiography in general, and in childhood in particular,
can be interpreted as a heightened manifestation of the modern quest for a self. It started with the
Romantic movement to establish childhood as a realm of experience lying within each human being,
a landscape of feeling and a quality of life that might be continually reinterpreted. The appropriation
of such ideas into general social knowledge has tended to de-historicize childhood and allowed it to
be seen as existing in and of itself. Being regarded as the cause and the origin of the present,
childhood experiences are regarded as deep and genuine parts of the person; to be one's own in a
deeper and different sense than later experiences. The link between the child and the adult is
precisely the body as a repository of memories and an action system. Childhood memories are
perceived to be "deep inside", "natural", "authentic", and sometimes also the source of certain sorts
of power.
In her introduction to the book Children and the Politics of Culture (1995), Sharon Stephens focuses
on the fact that so many current books and research papers about children perceive modern
childhood in terms of risk, threat, and loss. She relates these perceptions to the fundamental political
and economic changes discussed above, suggesting that what is happening now to children and
childhoods - in their locally unique, globally articulated forms - is less a reflex of political economic
changes than a crucial part of the puzzle, an important 'generative node' for exploring and theorizing
capitalist society and its historic dynamic.
According to modern conceptions of childhood, children are supposed to be segregated from the
harsh realities of the adult world and to inhabit a safe, happy, and protected world of play and
innocence. This vision, Stephens argues, is now being threatened in many ways by global
developments of late capitalism and the many complaints about the "loss" or "end" of childhood
must be understood in terms of these developments. We are now witnessing shifts in the location and
nature of the boundaries between the material and the symbolic, between nature and culture, between
the private and the public, between men and women. These shifts involve a profound restructuring of
"childhood" and "the child."
These emerging patterns can be related to the centrality of childhood reminiscences in
autobiographical narratives. In modern autobiographical narratives there is generally a feeling of
loss. The ending of childhood is an experience of loss. One's own childhood is gone, as well as the
historical conditions associated with it. In addition, there is now, as Stephens argues, a heightened
sensibility all over the world that perhaps childhood itself is gone, in the particular version that
implies safety, happiness and innocence. My theory is that the moral panic brought on by the
emerging understanding that childhood has been eclipsed, intensifies the sense of loss, and thereby
intensifies motivations to tell one's own story.
Thus, I contend, autobiographical narratives become more, not less, central with the economic, social
and historical shifts to "late modernity". The autobiographical genre is being further actualized and
transformed by being extended to new groups and new contexts as a part of present changes. This
extension can be interpreted as a part of a contemporary struggle for grounded and local
constellations of meaning within increasingly global processes. Careful analyses of childhood
narratives are therefore necessary in order to theorize the emerging selves and the emerging contours
of late capitalist society.
The use of childhood experiences as powerful resources for the construction of self is also critical for
the explanation of other contemporary phenomena. Childhood memories have become a contested
site for many heated debates. According to recent discourses of psychology, there is in each and
every one of us "a child within" (Miller 1981), and therapy implies "getting in touch" with that child.
The metaphor of "the child within" is both new and old. It was coined and has reached overwhelming
acceptance during the last decades, but the starting point of its development lies in the eighteenth
century notion that human beings are endowed with a moral sense, an intuitive inner feeling for what
is right and wrong. Instead of being in touch with God or the Idea of the Good, human beings had to
be in touch with their own deeper selves (Taylor 1991). This subjective inward turn, implying a
conception of humans as beings with inner depth, has now been transformed into the idea that the
nature deep inside adult human beings is a vulnerable child.
More troubling than "the child within", are the recent debates about instances of "recovered memory"
of sexual abuse (see, for example, Ofshe and Watters 1994). Some people - especially women - may
during therapy sessions late in life start remembering incidents of sexual abuse as children,
sometimes connected to satanistic rituals. Recovered memory therapy is related to the expanding use
of the formerly very rare diagnosis of "multiple personality disorder". According to this diagnosis the
person has many personalities, and each personality has different - and forgotten - memories.
On the one hand, a certain number of children are actually abused and it is no doubt a good thing that
more attention is being paid to this formerly tabooed suffering. On the other hand, the status of
memories fashioned within therapy is extremely problematic when there is no memory at all
predating therapy. This article does not take part in the discussions of these issues. It is, nevertheless,
interesting to ask why so much attention is now being paid to these phenomena, and the answer is
related to the changing conditions for the constructions of selves just discussed. Whether or not
satanistic abuse has taken place, and whether or not "multiple personalities disorder" is an apt
diagnosis, these phenomena obviously engage the popular imagination as key cultural metaphors in
contemporary society. Sexual abuse of children serves as an illustration of the power inequalities of a
male-dominated society and as an explanation for complex and complicated ailments and sufferings.
Multiple personalities serve as a metaphor for the struggle - and sometimes the celebration - of
moving swiftly between sharply differentiated social worlds.
Another example of a contemporary issue involving childhood memories, is the blossoming of
ethnicity, nationalism and religious fundamentalism in many parts of the world. Looking back on
one's childhood means to a large extent returning to the memories of the intimate sphere of everyday
life in the family, where group identities were peacefully transmitted as stories, myths, habits, food
practices, religious practices and so on. Being "in touch" with the "child within" can imply to
reinvent family practices and to reinforce the group identities that went along with them. Childhood
memories constitute a crucial part of the metaphoric resources needed to "imagine" nations and
ethnic groups. Sometimes one's childhood even symbolizes the nation (Koester 1996). There can
thus be an analogy, a parallel and a link between nations as "imagined communities" (Anderson
1983) and the "imagined childhoods" explored in life stories.
The fact that experiences of childhood are often assumed to be more "natural" than the constructed
adult self is another reason why childhood seems in peril today, when all apparently natural objects,
domains, etc. are being reconceived as socially constructed. Just as extreme versions of poststructuralism in textual analysis want to do away with a reality outside the text, extreme versions of
"post-modern" social criticism want to argue against a "nature" outside "discourse" or "culture".
However, childhoods are no less real for being socially constructed and, therefore, in a certain sense,
"imagined".
In addition, I want to make the even stronger point that textual childhoods in some ways can be no
less real for being narratively (re)constructed many years later, by the adult who is no longer a child.
In order to elaborate on this argument, I now want to say a few words about the study of life stories,
and then move to focus on the study of childhood memories in life stories.
The question of fact and fiction in the study of life stories
There are many definitions of life stories and autobiographies. The sociologist Daniel Bertaux, for
example, defines life stories as "accounts of a person's life as delivered orally by the person himself"
(1981: 7-8). In his pioneering research, Bertaux has focused on orally elicited life stories as historical
and sociological data and not as narratives. This definition, excluding written accounts from the
definition of life stories, is often used in the social sciences.
Underlying the exclusion of written accounts from the definition of life stories is a whole range of
unexamined cultural assumptions about the difference between writing and speech. Writing is
considered somehow artificial or fabricated, and thus inadequate to use as sociological data, while
speech is considered to be closer to reality, less constructed and more spontaneous.
There can, of course, be significant differences between written and oral accounts. The matter is
further complicated by the fact that written accounts can have an "oral" character, and oral accounts a
"written" character. Some written life stories contain mini-narratives that have been orally
transmitted many times before. Other life stories or parts of life stories contain material which has
never been told before. The point is precisely that writing may provide a space for explorations that
are different from those found in oral transmissions. Writing is a mediating process which allows
more time to reflect, to stylize, to choose the memories as well as the words to reconstruct them, to
try out different forms of representation.3 Yet, in spite of the differences between oral telling and
writing, there are also significant similarities. Both are verbal reconstructions of "what really
happened;" thus this volume contains analyses of both written and orally elicited life stories.
Within literary criticism there is a long history of debate about the definitions of various genres autobiographies, memoirs, novels, confessions, letters and diaries. For example, while
autobiographies focus on the inner life of the narrator, memoirs focus on people and events. A novel
is usually defined as being an independent and creative work of art.4
Many empirical life stories contain mixtures of genres, including parts which read like memoirs and
parts which focus on inner experiences, as well as poems and letters. Some autobiographies are close
to novels. They may be highly constructed, but all the same, can reveal profound truths about the
author. Other autobiographies are close to history, grounded in real events, but still fictional in a
certain sense.
Perhaps the most famous definition of an autobiography is Philippe Lejeune's: "A retrospective
account in prose that a real person makes of his own existence stressing his individual life and
especially the history of his personality" (Lejeune 1975: 14, translated from the French). It is a
specification of the conditions under which a text is generally understood to be an autobiography.
Many life stories, however, do not conform to this definition, in particular, the life stories of people
who are not poets or writers by profession, or those who come from Third World countries or from
working-class people within First World regions. The stories of such people may, for example, stress
the development of a group of people rather than just the history of the individual personality. As
James Olney (1972, 1980) and H. Porter Abbot (1988) say, definitions tend to be used normatively
and can reduce the field of study arbitrarily. In this volume, we want to open up the discussion to the
whole range of life telling by not starting out with overly strict definitions. As an anthropologist I
consider this an "ethnographic method" applied to textual analysis. I therefore use the terms "life
story" and "autobiography", in a loose and descriptive sense.
Lives are lived in cultural contexts, from which life stories are constructed. Thus, life stories make
possible the study of how diverse cultural resources and conventions are employed in the
reconstruction of life experiences. A life story is shaped not only by the material facts of social
existence, but also by deeply embedded notions and expectations about what is a culturally normal
life, as well as by conscious and unconscious rules about what constitutes a good story.
The dichotomy between fact and fiction haunts the social sciences as well as literary analysis and
psychoanalysis, although in different ways. There are strong traditions in Western modernity of
treating the cultural and the symbolic as deceptions and distortions of an underlying, more
fundamental reality. Since life narratives are not experiences and events but accounts of experiences
and events, the social scientist interested in "objective facts" has tended to regard the richness of life
writing and life telling as an impurity. Through after-thought, information about former events is
"distorted."
Psychoanalysis, for example, talks about distortions and insists that it is possible to specify more
precisely the relationship between the distortions and a more authentic set of meanings. It claims to
provide a method for the revelation of deeper and unconscious meanings, as well as a theory about
the motivations for distortions, which is the fear of facing emotional realities.
Without denying the value of psychoanalysis I approach life stories from a different perspective,
seeing such so-called distortions as meaningful and the "impurity" of written life stories as the main
source of their value as human documents. Both the fascination and the analytic problem of life
telling stem from the same source. It is their multilayered nature that gives us such pleasure in
reading them. The apparent impurity of autobiographical material can be reformulated as reflexivity,
as the heart of the matter, a central quality which needs to be theorized and studied by means of a
methodology of consciously working with loose inter-connections in many directions, rather than
identifying tight causal relations in one direction.
In order to construct a theoretical framework for empirical analysis, it has been important, first of all,
to draw on the rich developments within literary criticism during the last twenty years concerning the
study of autobiographies (Abbot 1988; Bruss 1976; Eakin 1992; Jelinek 1990; Gusdorf 1980;
Lejeune 1975, 1984; Olney 1972, 1980; Pascal 1960). Literary theorists locate autobiographies
between history and creative imaginative literature, though closer to creativity than to history. For
the analysis of childhood narratives, it is particularly interesting that certain theorists (Abbot 1988;
Barthes 1975; Bruss 1976; Olney 1980) emphasize an interplay between the different times of the
narrative: the now of the writing, the then of the narrated past and the time of an individual's
historical context. Another significant shift in the literary analysis of autobiographies is the turn from
bios to autos, that is, from a focus on the life to a focus on the construction of the self (Olney 1980).
This shift, I would argue, is not just an internal development within literary criticism, but is related to
the general cultural changes to "late modernity" discussed earlier. In addition I would also argue that
in order to understand autos - constructions of selves - it is equally important to focus on bios - on
how life experiences are used to create representations of selves.
Within literary criticism Philippe Lejeune (1975, 1984) has revised his focus on the
"autobiographical pact" between the writer and the reader; Paul John Eakin (1992) has reopened the
issue of reference in autobiographical writing; and H. Porter Abbot (1988) has recast autobiography
not as a specific form, but as a specific kind of reading act. The main difference between an
autobiography and a novel lies not so much in the factuality of the one and the fictiveness of the
other, but in the different orientations that they elicit in both writers and readers.
Autobiographical texts can be socially and culturally defined in ways which may allow us to read
them not only as revealing the act of constructing meaning out of experiences in the world, but also
as revealing experiences in the world. Writing one's autobiography can be regarded as a situated
practice involving the writer and his/her imagined readers. This practice results in a text, which can
be read and interpreted by actual readers, including researchers.
There are additional new trends in literary criticism aimed at rethinking the relationship between
various kinds of texts and social life. Some literary critics working with the Renaissance now
approach anthropology and the other social sciences under the labels of "a new historicism" or "a
poetics of culture". (See for example, Greenblatt 1989, Montrose 1989, White 1989). Other literary
critics are beginning to turn their analytic gaze to non-fictional texts, such as bureaucratic documents
and other texts traditionally analyzed by social scientists and historians.
Within the social sciences there are also new trends giving serious attention to problems of textual
analysis. literary techniques have recently been used to analyze cultural practices (Geertz 1983), as
well as the process of anthropological writing from participant observation to field notes to the
anthropological monograph as a genre (Clifford and Marcus 1986). The sociologist Liz Stanley
(1993), among others, has pointed to the continuities between textual analysis and the analysis of
everyday social interaction. Much of the time social life consists of construction, presentation and
negotiation of accounts or versions - everyday verbal "texts" - rather than behavioral events
themselves. People in ordinary social life are concerned with textual representation, but normally
they take it as self-evident that accounts or versions somehow refer to real events in the world. The
challenge for social scientists is to recover the various ways that autobiographies touch history (and
in some important ways make history) without forgetting that they are also stories (Eakin 1992).
The crucial question then, is how to redefine texts in relation to experiences, lives, and contexts
without reducing the texts to mere reflections of prior realities. The relationship between text and life
is dynamic, in the sense that human beings use conventional narrative means to give shape to their
experiences, and in the sense that the experiences are to a certain extent constituted by the way they
are told. Narratives are not only distilled from life. They also flow back into life. In the words of
Jerome Bruner (1987: 15):
the culturally shaped cognitive and linguistic processes that guide the selftelling of narratives achieve the power to structure perceptual experience, to
organize memory, to segment and purpose-build the very "events" of a life.
In the end, we become the autobiographical narratives by which we "tell
about" our lives.
Narratives, words, and classifications construct social reality as much as they express it. One
dimension of such processes is power, in the sense that a struggle of classification is generally a part
of every kind of struggle between individuals and groups. Besides, the voluntary telling of one's life
story can be an act of empowerment.
When attempting to reconstruct their experiences as accurately as possible, autobiographical tellers
and writers are actively engaged in constructing the world and their identities within it, in shaping
the modalities of social reality and accommodating themselves to the multiple and shifting positions
within the world they both constitute and inhabit. At the same time, life stories are not only socially
produced; they can also be socially productive. With such a definition of the field, life stories are not
merely translations of lives into texts, but also integral parts of life itself. Through a symbiotic
process, writing (or telling) one's life story helps not only to rework the past but also to rework the
present through the past.
Each life story touches history in many ways at once. First, a life story is a subjective account of the
interrelations between one historic individual and the social world. Subjectivity is a part of history.
Second, a life story usually contains historical information about people and events. Third, when
such information is modified in order to conform to certain ideals and goals, these transformations
can be informative about the cultural values and ideas of specific groups. Fourth, the very genre
conventions of life telling are part of an intersubjective cultural heritage. When telling their life
stories, people make creative use of an extensive and complex body of cultural knowledge. A life
story is thus unique, but also conforms to social and cultural ideals and conventions. It is precisely
this tension which makes life stories such interesting and important historical documents.
Studying childhoods
Before discussing the relationships between life stories of childhood and experiences of childhood, I
want to say a few words about child research in general. By problematizing notions of childhood,
child research provides an important part of the background for my research. Such a
problematization is necessary, because popular notions of children and childhood are usually
extremely ambiguous within modern society. Children are defined by their biological immaturity as
well as by their dependence on adults. Children are both idealized as more innocent than adults, as
well as marginalized as less competent than adults.
Philippe Ariès (1962) was the first to alert us to the fact that in other cultures and in other historical
periods, the idea of childhood may not exist in any of the ways it has been defined in the modern
Western world. Aries argued that the particular modern idea of childhood as a separate life stage
emerged in Europe between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, together with modern practices
associated with the notions of education, family, home, privacy and individuality. These ideas
developed slowly. According to Hockey and James (1993: 60) the history of childhood in the West is
the history of a particular and changing vision of what it means to be a child. For the Puritans in the
seventeenth century, children - the literal manifestation of the sins of the flesh - represented
uncontrolled and irrational beings. By the eighteenth century the situation was reversed. John Locke,
for example, argued that the mind of the newborn child was a tabula rasa, a blank sheet upon which
sensations were imprinted (Hockey and James: 65). Jean Jacques Rousseau, whose writings came to
be very central to modern understandings of childhood, stressed the child's innocence and the
corrupting influence of society as the only source of evil in children (Rousseau 1762).
For Rousseau "the child" was primarily a boy. His pedagogic theories were meant for boys; the most
important thing to teach girls was obedience. Rousseau also wrote about "the noble savage", thus
demonstrating that the emergence of "the child" as a more "natural" being was intimately tied to
other universalizing categories (such as nature/culture, male/female, advanced/primitive and race) in
the history of European colonialism. The modern category of the child emerged along with the
equally ambiguous category of the primitive, and they were often constructed as analogues of each
other; the child as primitive and vice versa.
From various accounts of contemporary childhood, Hockey and James distill the following four
characteristics of childhood as a modern cultural construction:
1.
the child is spatially and temporally set apart as different, as 'other';
2.
the child is said to have a special nature, and to be associated with
nature;
3.
the child is innocent and therefore
4.
vulnerably dependent.
(Hockey and James: 60).
To this list could be added Ennews' (1986) assertion that the modern child has a particular obligation
to be happy. As already noted, these characteristics are now being threatened by current social and
economic changes, and this is probably one reason why it is possible to distill them; why they are not
just taken for granted. Cultural patterns often become most clear when new and competing patterns
are emerging. According to James and Prout (1990), childhood must not be seen as a constant - i.e.,
in naturalistic and universalistic terms.5 The study of childhood therefore means exploring the ways
in which being a child is conceived and articulated differently in culturally specific sets of ideas and
philosophies, attitudes and practices which combine to define the nature of childhood. Therefore, I
want to argue, we should no longer talk about the study of childhood, but instead always about the
study of specific childhoods.
The analysis of childhoods can be broken down into three different kinds of research areas:6
1)
Facts in the lives of children. The crucial question is how particular childhoods are formed.
The underlying premise is that childhoods are economically, socially, and historically
constituted, existing beyond the activities of any particular child or adult. This research area
concerns the overall material and historical structures and the location of individuals in
relation to factors like region, social class, ethnicity, race, religion, and gender - as well as in
relation to wars and other political events.
2)
Ideas and images of childhood. The aim is to study the particular cultural conceptions, ideas,
and beliefs about children in different historical periods and social groups, as well as ideas
about why people want to have children. Such ideas are revealed through the study of explicit
discourses about childhoods, through the study of the gaps and silences in such discourses,
and through the study of how children and childhoods are used as metaphors in other kinds of
discourses and practices.
3)
Experiences of childhood. The crucial question is what it is like to be a child. To answer this
question implies, among other things, to focus on children as social actors and explore their
points of view. To search for children's points of view means not only employing a focus on
children, but first and foremost seeing society and culture from the points of view of children.
One part of childhood experiences is constituted by activities organized by children, often
called "child culture". Usually research aiming at recovering children's points of view is
based on direct observation of and conversations with children. In addition, adult researchers
can draw on various other sources. For example, they can analyze texts written by children
(Steedman 1983), as well as childhood reminiscences written by adults. When trying to
recover the points of view of children who lived long ago, analysts have to rely on traces left
by children and traces left by adults recalling their childhoods. Adult researchers must try to
mentally inhabit the positions of children in different times and places in order to portray and
analyze social life. To record children's points of view is, however, only a part of the
research. The goal is to aim at more general understandings, beyond particular, individual
children.
This focus implies a shift in the understanding of socialization and human development from
looking at children as passive recipients to seeing them as active and creative participants in
their own socialization. When cultural ideas and practices are transmitted to children, these
ideas and practices are usually changed and transformed in the process. Because children are
usually not taken seriously as informants on their own lives,7 knowledge about children's
points of view is therefore needed in order to be able to judge the validity, relevance, and
adequacy of other kinds of knowledge about children and childhood.
These three research concerns are equally legitimate. While the last research focus suggests studying
children as children in order to grasp their perspectives on the world, the two other research foci are
explicit adult perspectives on children's lives. However, as we shall see, the study of children's points
of view is implicitly also an adult perspective.
Searching for childhood experiences in adult narratives
I now move to a discussion of the relationship between life stories and childhoods. For the scholar,
the most problematic task, in relation to autobiographical material, is searching for children's points
of view. The central question is whether adult childhood recollections can serve as sources for the
understanding of childhood experiences.
On the face of it, it is not obvious that the study of life stories written by adults has very much to
contribute to the study of childhood from children's points of view. In fact, many arguments can be
cited against using such life stories to understand experiences of childhood. One argument is that the
difference between the self who writes and the self who was (Barthes 1975) is at its greatest when
people narrate their childhood experiences. Childhood recollections are colored by the later
experiences and concerns of the author in the present, making the life narratives inherently unstable.
Depending on the kind of life each person lives, childhood memories are often continuously
reinterpreted and reworked (and in a certain sense even repeated). In the light of new experiences the
evaluation of certain events or periods may change completely. The narrated childhood can be
constantly changing, dependent as it is on what goes on in the writing present. A second argument is
that childhood memories are reconstructed from a distance in time and are often of a private nature.
Because of the distance in time, they are half forgotten and obscure. Because of their private nature,
they cannot easily be verified.
These characteristics of life telling cannot be denied. An unmediated rendering of the childhood past
from the point of view of the small child is impossible (Heinritz 1996). Yet, through the poetic
imagination of the adult story, it may sometimes be possible to catch glimpses of what it is like to be
a child. The childhood part of an autobiography can be read as the product of a dialogue between the
child the author once was and the adult he or she now is. Childhood memories are not only partially
forgotten, they are also partially remembered. In addition to stressing how much is forgotten, I
therefore also want to stress how remarkably much we actually remember. Childhood memories, like
all memories, are not only inherently unstable, but also somehow inherently continuous. The
interesting question becomes what is remembered and selected for presentation in a life story. Why
are certain things presented in life narratives and not others? Is it possible to identify certain typical
motifs and pivotal instances in the process of growing up? Are there similarities between the textual
childhoods of adults and the themes that are important in current studies of children?
Childhood reminiscences demonstrate particularly well that childhood is not only perceived as a
stage or a time period in each person's life, but also as manifesting certain qualities of life. It is in
relation to this second notion of qualities that autobiographical utterances such as "I did not have a
childhood" are meaningful. In this utterance, a modern notion of childhood can be discerned,
implying notions of protection, love and play as contrasted with hard work and misery. When
childhood is defined in relation to certain qualities of life it is not necessarily limited to childhood as
a stage in life.
While children's stories are often stories about how to become an adult (suggesting that adulthood is
a mystery), childhood stories written by adults often show adults struggling to recover childhood
(with childhood as a mystery to be explored). Children usually have a very acute awareness of being
children, and they can take the points of view of adults, though they do not usually have enough
experience to analyze what is happening to them or around them with some distance. The social
landscape of childhood remains a background, taking on meaning later, from different
circumstances. Some stories written by adults can thus have the advantage of a clearer perspective on
childhood.
Adult writers often end their textual childhood in very definitive ways, thus putting it into
perspective.8 The adult writer may for example choose one incident as the emblem of a transition.
"After this accident my childhood ended," Ruth Behar (1996: 217) writes in an autobiographical
article. While the changes in actual childhood may have been gradual, the textual childhood is often
clearly delineated.
Authors demarcate their lives as children in many ways, according to both individuality and cultural
tradition. The following list contains a few examples of the textual moments when childhoods end:
Loss of innocence in general.
Loss of sexual innocence.
Loss of trust in adults.
Loss of safety, sometimes connected to the death of parents or caretakers,
sometimes
connected to wars or other political events.
Loss of the association of the senses often felt to be a privilege of childhood.
Experience of death, often the death of grandparents.
Achievement of more symmetrical power relations.
Assuming new responsibilities.
Starting to perform adult work tasks.
Moving out of the family.
Marriage.
All of these dimensions are problematical, insofar as they depend on the social and historical context.
For example, while work can be a small part of contemporary Western childhood, it is an intrinsic
part of childhood in most other cultural contexts and historical periods. Many endings to childhood
imply a sense of loss, suggesting that a childhood cannot easily be perceived from inside, but mainly
from a point of view literally or figuratively outside the experience perceived as belonging to that
childhood.
"Naive" and "sentimental" childhood recollections
Particular mixtures of distance and closeness in childhood recollections may be further illuminated
by some 18th century ideas formulated by Friedrich Schiller. In Greek antiquity there was, according
to Schiller (1795), an identity between feelings and thoughts and between human consciousness and
the surrounding world. But this "naive" attitude soon deteriorated and turned into the more distanced
forms of the "sentimental" attitude. While the Homeric epos displayed a more direct and
uncomplicated relationship to nature, the Romantics' great love for and interests in nature were based
on feelings of otherness and alienation. These various conceptions of nature are closely related to
conceptions of childhood: the modern autobiographical genre developed together with the
"sentimental" attitudes, in Schiller's sense, toward nature and children. However, Schiller's scheme is
not really temporal and historic, but rather of a typological nature. For example, he considered the
writings of Goethe, his contemporary, as "naive". In the same way, there are examples of both
"naive" and "sentimental" childhood discourses within contemporary autobiography.
One example of a "sentimental" attitude towards children and childhood is provided by Carolyn
Steedman (1983: 82), writing about the publication of children's writing in England during the last
150 years:
It [children's writing] has been employed to reinforce general social theories
about childhood: Childhood as an area of innocence, or as a charming arena
of budding adult sexuality or of children as bearers of some important yet
inarticulate message for adults. What has been especially valued by readers
in the past is the flattering mirror of adult intention that some child writing
seems to provide.
Similar things can be said about much research on children as well as about autobiographical writing
about childhood. The relationship of the adult scholar to the material obtained from children is
similar to the relationship of the adult narrator to the experiences of the child he or she once was.
There is always a distance between childhood as lived and childhood as narratively reconstructed. In
both research and autobiographical writing, there is distance; knowledge about childhood is always
mediated knowledge. Even the search for children's points of view is thus an adult perspective. This
adult perspective on childhood is also a particularly modern endeavor.
An autobiographer, like any scholar, is always faced with the dual task of analyzing events both as
they happen and as they appear in retrospect. The creative challenge is to reconcile the appearance of
an event as it is taking place with its meaning when the outcome is visible. A certain degree of
"sentimentality" are intrinsic parts of the search for children's points of view, in research as well as in
autobiographies.
"Sentimentality", in the sense described above, can account for the idealization of some scientific
approaches (e.g. the study of children's lore), as well as the problematization of other approaches
(e.g. Freud and psychoanalysis). These different attitudes are paralleled in autobiographies. A
childhood may, for instance, be experienced as a lost paradise or as a burden in the present. Life
telling is not only a dialogue between writer and reader (or between teller and listener), but also
between the narrator and his or her former selves. It is just this aspect of dialogue which makes life
narratives such a disputed and challenging source for cultural analysis. The writing present is
privileged in the sense that it influences the selection of events from the past and colors their
presentation. But the childhood part of the past is also privileged, in a certain sense. It is the
childhood experiences that provide the basis for later learning and creativity. Through the earliest
perceptions of the world, each person acquires some of the basic ideas, images and metaphors which
later structure his or her experiences and meaning-making in the world. The child of the past is
therefore in a certain sense the "father" or "mother" of the autobiographer.
On closer inspection, nevertheless, neither childhood nor adulthood are clear-cut and self-evident
entities. The differences between two-year- olds and ten-year-olds are in some ways equally great or
greater than the differences between twelve-year-olds and fifty-year-olds. Autobiographical writing
can be analyzed in terms of partially successful attempts at bridging the gaps among various
experiences.
For example, Ruth Behar (1996: 237) asserts that
the body is a homeland - a place where knowledge, memory, and pain is
stored by the child. (...) Living a childhood and writing about it as an adult
are fundamentally different experiences, but the value of autobiography is
that it creates forms of embodied knowledge where the (adult) self and the
(childhood) other can rediscover and reaffirm their connectedness.
There are paradoxical mixtures of distance and closeness between childhood and adulthood. Many
people experience a more or less permanent childhood with respect to some people (e.g. older
relatives). Some childhood memories actually become stronger over the years, due to changes of life
stage, such as, old age, or due to other kinds of change. Suddenly a memory formerly in the
background may reappear with new strength. The relationship between childhood and adulthood is
thus generally of a dynamic, complex and overlapping nature.
Reflexivity in life telling can be analyzed as a creative struggle between adulthood and childhood,
between identity and difference and between closeness and distance. Its raw material is experience,
the experiences of the writer. The value of this struggle is the uniqueness of the point of view: the
same individual does the experiencing and the writing. The distance in time is thus complemented by
what might be called an intimacy of understanding.
Autobiographical writing displays different modes and degrees of "naiveté" and "sentimentality",
depending on, among other things, the authors' distance (in time as well as in space) from the events
described, their concerns and motivations in the present, their varying ability to narrate and their
knowledge of and stance toward established genres of narration. Even within one and the same life
story, there is usually a mixture of widely different childhood discourses.
When narrators are occupied with creating a self out of various life experiences, their interest in
childhood per se may be marginal, except as a resource for the self. Many life tellers thus do not find
meaning in childhood itself, but in themselves having been children. Since children are considered as
more innocent than adults and are not expected to be sexualized nor to be able to transcend their
conflicts, it is culturally possible to write more freely and intensively about childhood events than
about later events. In adulthood one is expected to be more responsible, and this fact may be a
limitation in the writing of events during adult life. Therefore adult life is often portrayed in more
generalized and less interesting terms.
It can be useful to distinguish between childhood as theme, on the one hand, and childhood as
subject matter, on the other. The theme concerns what the narrator discovers in his or her subject
matter - in other words, the narratively developed significance found in events and experiences.
Many life stories exemplify adult themes in childhood subject matter. This does not, however,
preclude either occasional glimpses of intense childhood emotions or long passages about the
practices and routines of childhood everyday life.
I want to challenge the assumption, deeply embedded in Western modernity, that there is a
fundamental contradiction between truth and authenticity, on the one hand, and literary
constructedness, on the other. It is often through literary or imaginary means that a narrator can
construct an approximately authentic account of experiences from the point of view of the child in
the narrated past.
This is the point where social scientists have much to learn from autobiographical analysis within
literary criticism. But it is also a point where a focus on childhood issues may add something to
literary criticism: childhood reminiscences, in particular, can be true without being historically
accurate. The distinction between historical accuracy and poetic truth (Gusdorf 1980; Olney 1972,
1989; Pascal 1960; Personal Narrative Group 1989) is beautifully exemplified James Olney's (1996)
analysis of an episode of betrayal in Richard Wright's Black Boy. The episode is not historically
accurate, because it never happened to Wright, but to somebody else. Olney argues, however, that
the episode is true. By the power of the writing, the episode is made into an emblem of the betrayal
of all black boys. Wright is therefore not wrong in presenting it as his fable and his truth, as a
member of a community.
In addition, and even more importantly, it is useful to differentiate further according to point of view.
In previous work (Gullestad 1996), I have argued that both historical facts and poetic truths may be
more or less distant from the points of view of the experiencing child of the past. There are thus
various kinds of "childhood truths" in autobiographical accounts. One life story may contain many
different kinds of childhood discourses. First, there is poetic truth, created by literary means: the
distance between then and now is (more or less) conflated, creating a textual on-the-spot quality. The
more openly "sentimental" a recollection, the more there is a split between then and now and a
movement between them, as well as a textual progression in time. The more "naive" a recollection,
the less dynamic it is in terms of time, and the more intensity and power it has. While the
"sentimental" account can be interpreted as a chain moving in time, time in the "naive" account
almost becomes a place - hence its timeless and on-the-spot quality, in literary terms. Paradoxically,
it seems as if a certain timelessness in literary terms can be a precondition for a historically valid
interpretation of one's own childhood memories, of how certain incidents came to shape one's
understandings of self and society.
While "naive" and experience-near accounts can contain some kinds of childhood truth (existential
and poetic truths from the point of view of the child), "sentimental" and distanced accounts can
contain other kinds of truth (poetic truths from the point of view of the adult and/or historical
accuracy). For example, childhood recollections can be historically accurate, but if they are used by
the author to support certain adult themes, they can be inauthentic as recollections from the point of
view of the child and authentic as recollections from the point of view of the adult.
Motivations
Why do people take the trouble to tell their stories? Often a person has many motivations, and there
are many different roles given to one's childhood past. James Olney (1996: 41) emphasizes the
genuinely human aspects of story-telling, saying that "we are all of us living an on-going story, and
we all have an imperative need, I believe, not only to live that story that is ours, but to tell it as well."
In a certain sense, this is profoundly true, human beings are not only tool-makers but also storytellers.
But it is also a fact that stories come in various genres, and that the development and transformations
of the autobiographical genres are culturally and historically situated. For example, Martine Burgos
(1996: 122) observes
that the emergence of the "I" as the subject of utterance and, at the same
time, as the hero of a life story depends on the interiorization of social
ruptures which characterize the modern period and give the possibility of
individual self-affirmation.
While Olney includes all humankind, Burgos relates life telling to modernity. In a certain sense, both
are right. Life telling in general cannot be restricted to modernity, but certain kinds of life telling
have developed within modernity and are now being transformed and extended to new groups within
the current stage of "transformed" and transforming modernity. There are fundamental
interconnections between the kinds of lives people live and the kinds of stories they tell. Modern
autobiography both serve as a resistance to and as expressions of modernity. Many people
experience changes, ruptures, and fragmentation in their lives, and they make representations of their
selves by trying to tie some of the fragments together again through reflexive life narratives.
In some life stories childhood reminiscences serve mainly to provide a context for a story about
something else, for example a conversion narrative. In other life stories, childhood experiences
provide emblems for later experiences. Since a person usually has several motivations, childhood
reminiscences have many aspects of meaning and may serve many roles. For example, childhood
writing can be a quest for personal origins, sometimes associated with cosmic origins. According to
Olney (1996: 41-42) "there seems to be something like a compulsion for writers in particular to
return, in memory and narrative, to their childhoods to see how they become the writers that they
are." However, people who are not professional writers are also preoccupied with origins and the
first moment of consciousness, as evidenced in formulaic openings such as "I was born .... My
parents were .... My first memory is ...." The textual childhood formally starts in terms of birth and
experientially in terms of the first memory.
But there are other roles for childhood memories, too. Some are related to formal matters; for
example, childhood recollections may help give the story a structure. Other reasons are more
substantial. Very often, writing about one's childhood is a quest for understanding, a quest for the
healing of pain, and/or a quest for empowerment.
There is an interesting paradox in the fact that, as already noted, many textual endings imply a sense
of loss felt over the disappearance of wonderful childhood, while many vivid and intense
recollections convey emotions of pain, deception and humiliation felt during childhood. One such
recollection is presented in the vignette opening this introduction.
Often the most vivid and "naive" childhood recollections give shape to experiences of deception,
denial, humiliation, and powerlessness. This may perhaps partly be explained in relation to the
process of narration: it is easier to give narrative form to episodes with breaks and turning points
than to quiet feelings of bliss. Another interpretation may lie in the central characteristics of modern
childhoods. Within the contexts of modernity the biological immaturity of children is often, in one
way or another, socially translated into asymmetry of power between children and important adults,
usually changing as the child grows older. Small children have the right to be loved and protected,
but they also experience that they cannot always have what they want, and that adults do not always
listen and understand. From the point of view of the child such moments of denial or non-recognition
are often painful. From the point of view of social theory, such moments can be described as the
assimilation of a set of social rules, prohibitions, and prescriptions. Whether characterized by
subordination, resistance or both, they can be seen as the moments where a child enters a cultural
universe, and cultural ideas and values come to enter a child.
For many people, writing can be seen as a way for the adult to redress asymmetries experienced as a
child. In this sense life telling not only says something but also does something. This point is nicely
demonstrated by Gelya Frank's (1996) analysis of the prologue and the beginning of the
autobiography written by Diane DeVries, a woman born with quadrilateral limb deficiencies. The
events of Diane's birth story set up a likely future in which she would be helpless and a burden,
rejected and unloved by others. In her story, however, Diane transforms that image, achieves social
acceptance, and comes to lead a rich life. Through the power of the narrative about her birth and the
months following that event, she transforms herself from a helpless passive object to an active
subject. The sources of Diane's narrative are family stories, combined with an imaginative
construction of a decisive turning point in the form of a memory. Frank's analysis demonstrates the
crucial importance of the beginning of each life story for self-construction, and how early childhood
events are used as resources for that end.
The various motivations for telling one's childhood recollections might be summarized as follows:
Quest for a self, for self-identity.
Quest for origins.
Quest for a cosmic anchoring of one's life.
Quest for reasons.
Quest for a pattern.
Quest for understanding.
Quest for the "magic" world of the past.
Quest for the "child within".
Quest for the healing of pain.
Quest for empowerment.
Quest for revenge.
Quest for structure. According to genre conventions, the narrative gets a structure
by
getting a beginning.
Quest for a social world which is gone and the desire to recreate the experiences of
a social group and/or a generation.
Sources
What sources do narrators draw upon in constructing their life-stories? Memory is, of course, the
first and foremost source. The memories we continue to remember are usually the ones we tend to
retell or revisit in our minds. But memories are also grounded in social life and are constructed in the
course of life within particular social groups (Koester 1996). They have to be distinguished from
representations of memories. Some memories exist as brief and fleeting flashes and images. Other
memories can be more closely related to stories. An experience may contain an embryonic story, but
it requires imagination and cultural knowledge to draw it out. Once a story starts going, that narrative
can come to shape the memory of the events by its own narrative force. In some cases we remember
those experiences that can be narrated as stories, and we remember those stories which contain
important and emblematic experiences. If one loses the story, one often loses the memory.
The person who narrates the story of his or her childhood can draw on such sources as:
Memories of strong childhood emotions. The emotions of pain and loss seem to be
particularly central, but intense moments of joy are also important. These memories
are often reconstructed through literary means, as poetic truths.
Memories of everyday life during childhood. These memories are often
reconstructed with much historical accuracy.
Research in archives and other ways of ensuring historical correctness.
Stories that others have told and that are kept alive in the family lore.
Picture albums with family photographs. These sources often focus on happiness
rather than pain. "Smile!", parents say, somehow implying: "remember, you had a
happy childhood!"
Extrapolations from what the writer has become in the writing present. If the
writer, for example, has become a famous writer, he or she may locate the origin of
the creative self as early as possible in childhood. Or if the writer suffers from
anxiety in the present, he or she also may locate the reasons for that anxiety in the
childhood past.
Childhood narratives as sources for social and historical studies
Historians and social scientists have for a long time used life stories in order to glean from them
information about society and culture. However, the information contained in life stories should not indeed in many cases, cannot - be obtained without taking into account the author's motivation,
perception of audiences, textual strategies, and general cultural knowledge.
In many childhood recollections, the problems and/or pleasures of learning to read and write are
strongly emphasized. For example, this theme is discussed in Robert Elbaz' (1996) analysis of three
different narratives about multicultural life situations. The children in these stories must grapple with
the violence of language, if they are to survive in a world which is not theirs from the start. The texts,
each in its own way, tell about the narrator's attempts to measure up to and overcome this linguistic
violence.
How a life is divided up within a life narrative as well as the metaphors used to describe childhood
are generally dependent on the metaphors for life. For example, "life as a journey" implies different
stages of life and images of childhood than "life as a woven cloth". When life is a journey, one's
childhood past can be experienced by the adult as a landscape left behind ("all of this is gone now"),
but also continuously present as an inner landscape which can be recalled at any point in time. The
metaphor of "the child within" relies on a view of life as complex layers around the child. Childhood
experiences keep their raw vitality, at the same time as they may be covered up and forgotten. Such
tensions between being almost irretrievably lost and continuously present can lend childhood
memories the magic qualities described by many adult writers and analysts.
From these various metaphors one can learn not only the cultural spectrum of conventional ways to
tell a childhood, but also the cultural views about what constitutes a normal or an abnormal
childhood. Many ageing Norwegians, for instance, seem to see stability and security as the normal
childhood pattern. If they moved from one location to another during childhood, this is often
communicated as an exception, motivating them to write their story.9
Usually, life experiences and stories are influenced by factors such as historical change, age, gender,
class, ethnicity and race influence life experiences and life narratives. In particular it is often highly
significant whether the narrating person is a man or a woman and whether the narrated past is one of
a boy or a girl. By means of an analysis of French auto-biographical writing in the 19th and the 20th
centuries, Daniel Fabre (1996) has traced how being a boy was connected in various ways to the
lives of birds (stealing eggs, taming birds, hunting birds, etc.). Every stage in the development of
French boys from childhood to adolescence was marked by new ways of knowing and mastering the
natural and the social world, symbolized by their relationships to the ways of birds. The passion for
birds provided a lived and written model of male childhood. Through prolific metaphors, this
represented the path to sexual identity and to the language of love. In Fabre's analysis, the passion for
birds is simultaneously a part of male children's culture and a set of metaphors used by writing
adults. He shows interesting and complex interconnections between this informal and self-directed
"education" out in nature and the formal acquisition of reading and writing in school. This is a
change that each author had to undergo. But it is also an expression of social and historical changes
from a rural childhood to an urban middle-class childhood. If one continues his argument to the
children of the nineties, there are now many indications of a new change of emphasis from books to
pictures (film, TV, video). In this way life stories reveal multiple and fluid gender identities, forged
in relation to other people under specific historic, social, economic, and cultural circumstances.
The childhood of the scholar
James Olney (1980) has made the point that every analyst of autobiographies is a "closet
autobiographer." When life stories are orally elicited, the stories are influenced by the interviewer
and the context for the interviews, and this influence is reinforced through the interviewer's further
editing and analysis. Similar things happen in the analysis of written material. The analysis is
influenced by the personal experiences of the reader. Something happens in the encounter between
text and reader; readers create the text while interpreting it and, to some extent, they find their own
truths in the texts under study.
It has been claimed that scholars should, as a part of the research process, systematically reflect upon
their experiences during anthropological fieldwork. Such a reflexive use of the autobiography of the
scholar is not self-adoration, but a crucial part of scholarship (Okely 1992). While reflexivity is well
developed within psychoanalytic therapy, it is relatively recent within anthropological and
sociological scholarship. Psycho-analysts use themselves as instruments in order to understand: the
self-analysis of the therapist is an integrated part of the therapeutic project. Similarly, scholars
working with life stories should reflect upon the relationship between their own personal experiences
and their choice of texts, their choice of research questions, and their interpretations based on these
choices.
This issue is, in my view, also one of those issues which is intensified by a focus on childhood. The
general neglect of research on children in many areas of social science is connected not only to the
social marginalization of childhood, but also to the problematic relationships many scholars have to
their own inaccessible childhoods as well as to their own children. A research perspective on
children as creative social actors seems to necessitate a certain degree of reflection on the part of the
scholar. If not, the research is bound to be heavily "sentimental", in Schiller's sense.
In the opening vignette of this introduction I quoted from Carolyn Steedman's book Landscape for a
Good Woman (1986), an early example of a new autobiographical trend in feminist scholarship. In
this book she courageously reflects on her own as well as on her mother's childhood. The book
stands on its own, but it also provides a fascinating framework to the reading of her first book, an
analysis of a story written by three little girls (The Tidy House, 1982). According to Steedman's
analysis, the girls were attempting, through the writing of their story, to come to terms with the
ambiguities of motherhood. Mothers want children, but children, once they are there, also represent a
burden and a nuisance. In her autobiographical book Steedman reveals that the ambiguities with
which the little girls were struggling - as daughters of mothers and as prospective mothers -were also
her own and her mother's deeply experienced ambiguities. She does not herself make explicit the
intimate connection between her own experiences and the research questions she asks, but she
provides rich material for such a sociology of knowledge. Through her own autobiography one
understands more clearly why and how she was able to make such a lucid and innovative study of the
writings of working-class girls.
While most analysts are "closet autobiographers", Ruth Behar is also a scholar who has come out of
the closet and has addressed these questions in several works. She found that she could not begin to
analyze the childhood materials of the life stories she had elicited before she came to grips with her
own childhood experiences. In one article (1996), she constructs an account of how she came to
remember her "child within," the nine year old girl in the cast. This moving autobiographical account
demonstrates the possibility as well as the necessity for the adult to remember the child she once
was. In addition, Behar illustrates the theoretical point that to study childhoods, a certain reflexivity
about one's own past is a scholarly prerequisite. And when speaking about childhoods in a "late
modern" context, reflexivity necessarily seems to imply a certain openness and vulnerability.
Closing note
I have, in this article attempted to open up new ways of reading and analyzing childhood life stories
by framing a range of dichotomies presently haunting the field. The point is to show how these
dichotomies can constitute range of analytical possibilities rather than polarized analytical choices
and programs. For example, the dichotomy between life and text can be overcome by examining
historical lives through a careful textual analysis, including an analysis of perception of audiences
and what the life telling does to the person who tells his or her story. One does not have to look at the
texts as either transparent windows on an exterior reality or as pure constructions. It is possible to
look at the ways in which autobiographical texts - as reconstructions of experience - both reflect and
shape their contexts of creation.
The dichotomy between fact and fiction can be overcome by attempting to specify as precisely as
possible the nature of the various kinds of authenticity and lack of authenticity in auto-biographical
accounts. A recollection can be inauthentic from one analytic point of view and authentic from
another. It can, for example, be authentic or inauthentic as a poetic creation, as a historical fact, or
both together. To overcome the polarization between fact and fiction is thus also to overcome the
polarization between historical accuracy and poetic truth.
I have used the concepts "naive" and "sentimental" in order to say that there is always otherness "sentimentality" - when an adult narrates his or her childhood. But all accounts are not equally
distant. Through the strengths of emotions and by literary means some recollections can get a breath
of life which represents a certain "naiveté." The concepts "naive" and "sentimental" should thus not
be used as polarized oppositions, but as matters of combination, mode, and degree.
In a similar way, the dichotomy between the general and the specific may be resolved as well.
General human truths can in my view only be derived from the most faithful and detailed insight into
what it means to be a particular person in particular situations.
The dichotomy between subjectivity and objectivity can be overcome by pointing to the cultural and
historical aspects of subjectivity, on the one hand, and to the culturally mediated nature of
objectivity, on the other. I do not want to give up the notion of objectivity, in the sense of precision,
argumentation, and intellectual honesty. Instead, I make an argument for a richer, in some senses
truer objectivity, by virtue of taking into account the socially mediated nature of all subjectivity and
objectivity.
It is not accidental that these conclusions are drawn on the basis of an examination of the nature of
childhood recollections. Childhood recollections intensify some of the dilemmas of life story
analysis and thus force analysts to sharpen their analytical tools. There are both differences and
continuities between childhood and adulthood, and the boundaries and nature of that relationship
seem to be profoundly challenged by the shifts to the transformed "modernity."
The paradox that childhood reminiscences often loom large in life narratives in terms of amount,
intensity, and centrality, at the same time as they have so far obtained little theoretical attention, can
provide a key to the cultural analysis of "late modernity." Just as "in the modern world everybody
can, should, will 'have' a nationality, as he or she 'has' a gender" (Anderson 1983: 14), everybody
also "has" a childhood (Stephens 1997) and, I would like to add, a self. The continuous scrutinizing
of childhood experiences is a central and "natural" part of the creation of representations of the adult
self. But to the extent that childhood experiences have been naturalized, they have also to some
extent been taken for granted and marginalized. This article should be read as an argument for more
research examining the changing role and meanings of childhood recollections in autobiographical
narratives, as well as for more research examining the increasing use of childhood memories for selfcreation throughout the world.
NOTES
1)
This article is an adapted version of the introductory chapter to Marianne Gullestad, ed.,
Imagined Childhoods: Self and Society in Autobiographical Accounts. Oslo: Scandinavian
University Press, 1996.
2)
Building on Coe's work, a seminar entitled "Le récit d'enfance en question" (Cahiers de
Sémiotique Textuelle 12) was held in France among literary critics in 1988.
3)
This process is very similar to the process of producing ethnographic texts from field
experiences (Clifford and Marcus 1986).
4)
However, it can also be said that fiction is only independent to the degree that it discloses
reality. In other words, imagination is perhaps not only the ability to invent, but rather the
capacity to disclose that which exists.
5)
Sharon Stephens (1995) has criticized the limited notion of culture underlying the otherwise
very useful discussion of James and Prout. Notions of childhood should not be linked to
"cultures" as integrated and bounded wholes, because then we lose sight of the current global
historical situation where notions of distinct organically integrated cultures are less likely to
be useful than ever before. We just can't grasp what is happening to globally pervasive
modern childhoods today by means of such older culture theories.
6)
This way of distinguishing between research questions can also be useful when discussing
other matters, for example the study of adolescence and youth: experiences of adolescence;
facts in the lives of adolescents; images and ideas of adolescence.
7)
The focus on children's points of view is particularly central at the Norwegian Centre for
Child Research in Trondheim. (See, for example, Tiller 1989, Åm 1989.)
8)
Some writers distinguish between childhood and adolescence, while others do not. The
"discovery" of youth as a clearly defined period with a beginning and end appears to be more
recent than the "discovery" of modern childhood. According to Musgrove (1964: 33), the
adolescent was invented at the same time as the steam engine. When there is a distinction
between childhood and youth, the last three or four items above can textually be the end of
youth rather than the end of childhood.
9)
Many of the ideas in this introduction are grounded in my work with Norwegian
autobiographies elicited through the contest "Write your life." The results are published in the
book Everyday Life Philosophers (1996).
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