Autobiographies
"Any life story, written or oral, more or less dramatically, is in one sense a personal mythology, a self-justification", write Raphael Samuels & Paul Thompson. "Any autobiographical narrative doubles as a morality; and this can be discerned not only in its shaping, but in the mythical elements which may be juxtaposed with unique personal memory". In short, the mythical elements in memory need to be seen both as evidence of the past and as a continuing historical force in the present.In England from the late nineteenth century onwards successful actors were particularly prone to record their lives for an admiring public. Their autobiographies often follow conventional narrative patterns and incorporate the mythologysing and self-justification to which Samuels and Thompson refer. Furthermore, their autobiographies not only function as an exercise in myth-making, but also as the performance in print of an already established public persona. Autobiography allows rge representation of a self already determined and constructed within a professional milieu circumscribed by the performative.The extent to which an actor or actress achieves control or autonomy over self-construction and self-representation through the act of writi
Autobiography, according to Brewer, is diegetic rather than mimetic and is "an extension of fiction rather than the reverse. As Barthes maintained the act of autobiography is inevitably a creation of an "other". A central problem of autobiographical memory is its lack of verdicality. Within this performance of autobiography occur narrative and mythical configurations, and self-justifications, which arguably extend, but also contain, our knowledge of the author. While Marshall's perspective, specifically on female autobiography, is one of liberation through the act of writing, the possibility that autobiography is yet another form of entrapment is just as plausible, especially as demonstrated by Tomas Postlewait. Like all forms of interpretation, how we construe our lives is subject to our intentions, to the interpretive conventions available to us, and to the meanings imposed upon us by the usages of our culture and language. It is a way of construing experience - and of reconstruing and reconstruing it until our breath or our pen fails us. Thus, when we read the opening pages of an autobiography, we are inducted into a world where the author is very quick to construct who they are and who they are not. In her third sentence she tells us that her mother and father, who were East End performers, were Jewish, but a few lines later adds that her fatherwas not in any way Hebraic in appearance, in fact very few people thought of our family as Jewish. If, on the other hand, we view memory as some type of belief system, then what is important is what people believe has happened, what is important is what people claim to remember, and the question of verdicality is one of secondary importance. Irene Vanbrugh's To Tell My Story takes us into a middle-class childhood in an Exeter vicarage, occasional visits to London, and a definite sense that young ladies of her social background did not normally choose a career on the stage. Yet, whether we agree with Marshall or with Postlewait, it is clear that "new possibilities of self-constitution" or the adoption of "a public mask" bring us back to the notions of self-construction and self-consciously contrived self-representation within the process of creating autobiography. ng autobiography is open to question, however.
Common topics in this essay:
Marshall Postlewait,
Jerome Bruner,
Paul Thompson,
Tomas Postlewait,
Samuels Thompson,
Story Life,
Ada Reeve,
Yarney Bull,
Samuels' Thompson's,
Tell Story,
act writing,
autobiographical memories,
late nineteenth century,
possibilities self-constitution,
view life,
mythical elements,
act autobiography,
autobiographical memory,
feature autobiographical,
feature autobiographical memories,
nineteenth century,
late nineteenth,
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Acceptance Essays
