Telling Stories

The Use of Personal Narratives in the Social Sciences and History

Mary Jo Maynes, Jennifer L. Pierce, Barbara Laslett

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780801446177
• eBook ISBN: 9780801457791
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

In Telling Stories, Mary Jo Maynes, Jennifer L. Pierce, and Barbara Laslett argue that personal narratives—autobiographies, oral histories, life history interviews, and memoirs—are an important research tool for understanding the relationship between people and their societies. Gathering examples from throughout the world and from premodern as well as contemporary cultures, they draw from labor history and class analysis, feminist sociology, race relations, and anthropology to demonstrate the value of personal narratives for scholars and students alike.

Telling Stories explores why and how personal narratives should be used as evidence, and the methods and pitfalls of their use. The authors stress the importance of recognizing that stories that people tell about their lives are never simply individual. Rather, they are told in historically specific times and settings and call on rules, models, and social experiences that govern how story elements link together in the process of self-narration. Stories show how individuals' motivations, emotions, and imaginations have been shaped by their cumulative life experiences. In turn, Telling Stories demonstrates how the knowledge produced by personal narrative analysis is not simply contained in the stories told; the understanding that takes place between narrator and analyst and between analyst and audience enriches the results immeasurably.

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AGENCY, SUBJECTIVITY, AND NARRATIVES OF THE SELF

The problem of understanding human agency as simultaneously individual and social has long been at the core of theoretical and methodological debates in Western social sciences. In Telling Stories we demonstrate how analyses of personal narratives enrich these discussions. In this chapter we begin by examining the relationship between the individual and the social by delving into the identity of the narrator—that is, the person through whose authorial voice and subject position a life story is told and whose life is at the same time the story’s focus. Since narrators and analysts both draw on ideas about self and agency, we start out by historicizing the individual and selfhood as theoretical concepts and as everyday practices that develop over time and vary in different settings. We then review some of the major theoretical approaches to the historical and social-scientific study of individual agency and discuss the contributions to this field that analyses of personal narrative evidence can provide. We examine how their engagement with subjectivity distinguishes analyses of personal narratives from many other social-scientific approaches to human agency. By drawing on scholarship from a range of disciplines primarily within the social sciences and history, we develop a concept of the individual self that, while recognizing the social character of self construction, nevertheless does not reduce the individual to a mere constellation of social attributes such as race, class, or occupational status. We argue that the special importance of personal narratives in this regard lies in their ability to document the significance for social action of individual subjectivity as it is constructed and reconstructed over the lifetime. The chapter concludes with a discussion of memory—individual and historical—which serves as a bridge to chapter 2 on interpreting personal narratives in historical context.

Historicizing the Individual as Social Actor and as Life Story Narrator

The dominant theories and methods of the social sciences have tended to view individuals and their actions primarily through categories (e.g., race, gender, sexual orientation, social class or occupation, citizenship) that locate them in the “outside” or social world.1 Motivations, predispositions, and actions are typically explained largely through reference to these categorical affiliations. Individuals are thus reduced to clusters of social variables that serve as proxies for persons. Consequently, within such frameworks, human agency is reduced to social position; understandings of the relationship between the individual and the social remain superficial. Social actors are treated as if they had little or no individual history, no feelings or ambivalences, no self-knowledge—in short, no individuality.

Personal narrative analyses, in contrast, offer insights from the point of view of narrators whose stories emerge from their lived experiences over time and in particular social, cultural, and historical settings. These analyses offer insights into human agency as seen from the inside out; as such they can bridge the analytic gap between outside positionalities and interior worlds, between the social and the individual. They allow scrutiny of key subjective dimensions of motivation—emotions, desires, accumulated wisdom, acquired associations and meanings, clouded judgments, and psychic makeup—all of which are the product of a lifetime of experiences. The evidence presented in personal narratives is unabashedly subjective, and its narrative logic presents a story of an individual subject developing and changing through time. Alessandro Portelli sums up well the distinctive advantage of personal narrative evidence in his discussion of the methods of oral history: “The fact that a culture is made up of individuals different from one another is one of the important things that social sciences sometimes forget, and of which oral history reminds us.”2

Paradoxically, however, analyses of personal narratives are most effective when, rather than conceptualizing narrators as autonomous agents whose testimony offers transparent insights into human motivation, they explicitly recognize the complex social and historical processes involved in the construction of the individual self and, more deeply, of the ideas about selfhood and human agency that inform personal narrative accounts. Personal narrative analyses must draw on and can provide important insights into the history of the self and its variations at the same time that they have the potential to enrich theories of social action and human agency.

Conceptualizations of the self—of the knowing, feeling, acting subject—although of keen interest to philosophers, are rarely scrutinized explicitly in the realm of everyday life. Still, abstract notions about the self and subjectivity inform everyday practices. Awareness of the historicity of the self, of changing philosophical and practical postulations of the self, is important for thinking about personal narratives and about human agency. In Telling Stories we engage primarily with modern Western understandings, narratives, and theories of the self. However, it is important to keep in mind that notions and narratives of the self have altered through history and also have varied across the globe. We will on occasion draw on evidence about comparative notions of the self as a means of highlighting the potential for cultural variability. Moreover, as we discuss more fully later in this section and elsewhere, prevailing understandings of the self are never monolithic; they can vary according to such contours as gender, social hierarchy, race, religion, or region. For example, scholars of Native American culture argue that fluid and communalistic understandings of the relationship between the individual and society have typified some Native American cultures in contrast with a more sharply drawn self-society demarcation that came to predominate in hegemonic European cultures.3

Modern Western notions of subjectivity have been constructed in and through Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment intellectual discourse as well as in everyday activities such as seeking employment, writing letters, going to confession, shopping, parenting, or visiting the doctor’s office.4 Innovative presumptions about human agency and motivation contributed to the emergence of modern political theory and practices, economic institutions, social-scientific disciplines, and personal ambitions. Enlightenment thinkers imagined a sturdy and boldly universal human subject, one who was more self-assured and more capable of clear thought and autonomous action, whether in the realm of ethically correct choices or of market investments, than had previously been presumed. Enlightenment theorists did not speak with one voice, nor did they subscribe to a common epistemology. However, they shared an interest in and emphasis on the individual human’s capacity to reason and subsequently to act accordingly. Kant’s postulation of the possibility of ethical action, Rousseau’s social contract, and Smith’s homo economicus, for all of their differences, shared this commonalty. More subtly, modern notions of the human subject also informed a variety of genres of writing in addition to theoretical treatises; these include personal narrative genres such as letters and autobiography as well as the wildly popular fictional form—the novel. It is not a coincidence that Rousseau wrote in all of these genres in addition to writing political theory. (We will discuss various genres of personal narrative writing more fully in chapter 3.)

Central to the Enlightenment project was the search for universal truths discoverable by all reasoning persons. Not surprisingly, Enlightenment claims about human subjectivity also tended toward the universal. Historicizing these inherited notions of subjectivity and agency—that is, rethinking them in light of the historical moment and settings in which they were produced—has been an important component of critical traditions in Western philosophy and social science. This critical perspective has also been at the center of intellectual projects such as subaltern theory and other strains of postcolonial theory. Historicizing the subject is a necessary dimension of understanding and interpreting personal narratives.

Michel Foucault is certainly among the most prominent, controversial, and influential critics of Enlightenment thought and its understandings of the human subject. As Richard Wolin writes:

Foucault…seeks to demonstrate the compromised origins of the modern “subject.” In his view, the illusions of autonomy conceal a deeper bondage…From early childhood, the subject is exposed or “subjected” to what Foucault labels the “means of correct training”: an all-pervasive expanse of finely honed behavioral-modification techniques that suffuse the institutional structure of civil society, schools, hospitals, the military, prisons, and so forth.5

According to Foucault, Enlightenment human sciences and modern institutional practices have disciplined modern subjects in an unprecedentedly intrusive fashion, even as subjects began to proclaim themselves to be free agents. Foucault’s own historical investigations, and those of his followers, document the operation of this institutionalized disciplining of the self.

Feminist postmodernists have developed a related critique of Enlightenment ideas about human agency. Joan Scott argues in her book Only Paradoxes to Offer that French feminists who contributed to and employed Enlightenment language were inevitably drawn into untenable positions. In their efforts to grant women political status they ran aground on paradoxes which are inherent in the liberal concept of citizenship, and the concept of the individual that underlies it. For example, Olympe de Gouges’ rewriting of “The Declaration of the Rights of Man” tacks back and forth between universality and particularity as she attempts to include women in the category “human.”6 The critique of the hegemonic Western self launched by Foucauldians and feminists is critical to our framework for discussing personal narrative analyses. We emphasize, however, that historicizing the self does not make individuals or their senses of self disappear. Historians and social scientists still need to grapple with questions of particular forms of agency and types of relationship between the individual and the social even after “the death of the subject.”

But the theoretical terrain is quite complex. Ongoing and wide-ranging discussions in social theory, history, and political strategy point to the tension between projects aimed at criticizing Enlightenment understandings of the self (as coherent, autonomous, and stable) on the one hand, and others that call for a redefined selfhood or identity as a still necessary basis of political action, on the other.7 The Enlightenment postulation of a universal human subject, critics agree, often disguised underlying presumptions that linked rationality and political selfhood to “independence” and hence excluded women, enserfed or enslaved people, and in some schemes even wage-earning men. Still, philosophical debates about the Enlightenment waiver between criticizing its particular ideas about human agency and capturing some version of that agency for subalterns. Within the strictures of Enlightenment discourses, women and other excluded groups did indeed use the universal language of human rights to claim political agency.8

Carla Hesse’s biographical study The Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern illustrates several important dimensions of the emergence of modern notions of the self; it also shows the links between gendered ideas about the self and forms of personal narrative. Hesse argues that the practices of the literary marketplace as it was legally reformed in the French Revolutionary era set up new possibilities for the articulation of female selfhood. Within clear institutional and legal limits, women writers “used the cultural resources of modern commercial society to…[stake] a successful claim for themselves as modern individuals in the public world.”9 Hesse focuses on the life and work of Louise-Felicité Kéralio-Robert (1758–1822), a historian and novelist, and the novelist Isabelle de Charrière (1740–1805). She examines specific social practices rather than just prescriptions and theories. Women were not as “free” in practice as men because of legal constraints such as those limiting married women’s ownership of intellectual property, and the requirement for married women writers to secure their husband’s consent to publish. “During the French Revolution,” Hesse argues, “the legal identity of married women writers…was a dual identity, recognized as at once morally autonomous and juridically subordinate. Free to write, they were not free to make their writings public, or to create independent public identities.”10 This “doubled identity” made a woman writer a complex sort of an individual, located in a very specific and contradictory subject position. Pseudonyms (often male) disguised the not-fully-autonomous persons behind the seemingly morally and politically autonomous authorial personae. However, despite the ongoing constraints on female authors, there was an explosion of female writing and publication beginning with the Revolution. Women authors asserted their moral and intellectual agency through their writing, even if their works reflect the contradictions women authors faced as political and legal subordinates.11

Hesse’s study reconstructs a historically specific selfhood. She also underscores the close link between modern claims to individual selfhood and the evolution of specific forms of writing, which in this era were primarily though never exclusively the domain of educated elites. We will take up the question of forms of writing and narratives of the self more fully in chapter 3, but for now it is important to point to the connections between the emergence of hegemonic modern Western notions of the self and the social and cultural history of reading and writing. European social and literary historians have noted and tracked connections between narrative forms such as autobiography and the novel and middle-class identity formation.12 Autobiography in particular has been regarded as a literary expression of the individualism that was also a central tenet of emergent liberal economic and political philosophy. The connection between writing and defining the self marginalized not only most women but also lower-class men, people from oral cultures, and other subaltern voices. This observation cautions us about the historical limitations of personal narrative analysis: Where we rely primarily on written records, available narratives of self will perforce be skewe...

Table of contents

• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Agency, Subjectivity, and Narratives of the Self
• 2. Intersecting Stories
• 3. The Forms of Telling and Retelling Lives
• 4. Personal Narrative Research as Intersubjective Encounter
• 5. Making Arguments Based on Personal Narrative Sources
• Notes