Palimpsest: (Re)Reading Women's Lives

Abstract

Drawing on the postmodern and feminist critique of positivist notions of subjectivity, knowledge, and representation, this essay explores issues of self-representation in the life-history narratives of three female educators born early in the 20th century. This article focuses on how "double voicedness " functions as a narrative strategy that enables women to express conflicting conceptions of self. By rereading the women's life histories against traditional narratives of teaching, the authors acknowledge the layered mean ings-the palimpsest's surface and deep inscriptions-that form the fabric of women's lives and suggest how their emerging understandings of double voicedness might more deeply attune us to the multiple ways women actively construct, resist, and negotiate a gendered self.

Novel Identities: Catharine Maria Sedgwick's <em>Hope Leslie</em> as a Mentoring Framework for Curriculum Studies and Life Journeys

“…In Palimpsest: (Re)Reading Women's Lives, Jacobs, Munro, & Adams (1995) label and describe this once pervasive strategy through their construction of a metaphor, palimpsest, which is a term they borrow from art and literary history. An understanding of the literal meaning of palimpsest provides insight regarding a way that many early women writers explored and expressed their conflicted identities and ways of knowing.…”

‘I Got Married to Get Free of Home’

“…Life stories are an effective method for identifying various multi-discourse layers (Jacobs et al, 1995). Thus, the reading and interpretation of women's life stories must include attention to the complexity of voices and to those narrative elements in personal accounts in which self-image and experiences conflict with dominant cultural models.…”

“…And they may exhibit all these options at the same time. While an overt level may well represent conventional content considered 'appropriate', the other, usually unheard level represents content that in fact, if not in intention, clashes with, or diverges from, the overtly appropriate (Bloom, 1996;Jacobs et al, 1995;Ochs and Capps, 1996;Sands, 1996).…”

Stories of One's Own: Nonunitary Subjectivity in Narrative Representation

“…Rejecting this notion of the unified self, some postmodern feminists (Bloom & Munro, 1995;Braidotti, 1991;Davies, 1992;Hollway,1989;Jacobs, Munro, & Adams, 1995;Richardson, 1994;Walkerdine, 1990) argue that an understanding of subjectivity as nonunitary and fragmented is a move toward a more positive acceptance of the complexities of human identity-especially female identity. To accept that subjectivity is fragmented, however, is not to &dquo;promote endless fragmentation and a reified multiplicity&dquo; for, as Sidonie Smith (1993, p. 156) argues, this would be counterproductive to the narrative project.…”