Exploring the Nature of the Dialogical Self: The Young Widow Memoir

Abstract

This paper intends to contribute to the ongoing debate on identity construction by offering a textual analysis of two memoirs that depict the experience of young widowhood: Unremarried Widow by Artis Henderson (2014) and When it Rains by Maggie MacKellar (2010). I refer to the texts as young widow memoirs and identify them as a sub-genre of the grief memoir. Drawing on Paul Eakin's concept of narrative identity and Hubert Hermans' dialogical self theory, the analysis investigates how the memoirists use narrative to negotiate and represent the multiple subject positions and conflicting voices that arise out of the experience of young widowhood, and how they position selves which existed prior to their loss in relation to their post-loss selves. The memoirs under review are shown to rebuild a relatively stable sense of self out of the multiple voices of loss.

The cultures of grief: The practice of post-mortem photography and iconic internalized voices

“…Den Elzen (2017) has recently used the construct of Dialogical Self theory (Hermans & Gieser, 2011) to explore the grief experience in the memoirs of young widows. She reports what seems to be a common feature of the grief experience (Brinkmann, 2017;Den Elzen, 2017;Golden, Dalgleish, & Mackintosh, 2007;Neimeyer, 2007): a feeling of the "fragmentation of selfhood" (Den Elzen, 2017, p. 57), which needs to be somehow accounted for and reconstructed dialogically. This aspect directly points to the idea of grieving as an experience related to the loss of "the other in me".…”