The Work of Memory: embodiment, materiality and home in Jeanne Bouvier's autobiographical writings

Abstract

In this paper I follow trails in the memory of work by reading the books and papers of Jeanne Bouvier, a French seamstress, ardent trade-unionist and passionate writer, who left a rich body of labour literature including four published historical studies, as well as the memoirs of her life, work and struggles. Work, action and creativity are three interrelated planes on which Bouvier situates herself, while memory and imagination are interwoven in the way she seeks to understand herself in the world with others. What emerges as a particularly striking theme from Bouvier's papers is a material matrix of mnemonic and imaginary practices, wherein bodies, places and objects are entangled in the narrative constitution of the self of the woman worker/writer.

Feeling narrative in the archive: the question of serendipity

“…(Whitehead, 1985(Whitehead, [1929: 155) I think Whitehead's lucid example of the feeling of listening to a note of music can be very well transposed in what I want to call the plane of narrative as feeling. Here let's start with an actual archive event: feeling a story, or to become even simpler, just a storyline, which in my current research of reading letters and papers of women trade unionists (Tamboukou, 2013(Tamboukou, , 2014b(Tamboukou, , 2015, is what I mostly do: 'I hear saying that women should stay at home […] I have never stayed at home, I have no home. I could not have one as I had to earn my bread' 4 (BHVP/AMB/FJB).…”

“…Bouvier did have a home: while reading her papers and particularly her letters I was actually struck by the persistence of the same address – 10bis rue Antoinette – at the heart of the touristic Montmartre today, but a working class area, as well as a bohemian artists’ colony in Bouvier’s days. 14 In a mood of always feeling as an ethnographer in the archive (see Tamboukou, 2015) I had promptly visited her home to establish its materiality and create a stage on which I could imagine Bouvier working, writing, acting, living. 15 But the flat in rue Antoinette, where she lived for a very long time never became a home for her: ‘I was caressing a sweet dream that I was not able to realise […] to buy a small house in the country.…”

“…(Bouvier, 1936: 98) The unfulfilled dream of a home in the country, as juxtaposed to the 'non-home' feeling of her Parisian flat thus initiated a conceptual theme: the importance of what I have elsewhere disccussed as the home/work continuum in the gendered memory of work. (see Tamboukou, 2015) It was in the process of 'prehending' Bouvier's valuation of home while reading the archive that such a conceptual novelty arose: the need to revisit the idea of home for single working women. As Whitehead has written, 'in each concrescent occasion its subjective aim originates novelty [which] in the case of higher organisms amounts to thinking about the diverse experiences ' (1985: 102).…”

“…(Whitehead, 1985:155) I think Whitehead's lucid example of the feeling of listening to a note of music can be very well transposed in what I want to call the plane of narrative as feeling. Here let's start with an actual archive event: feeling a story, or to become even simpler, just a storyline, which in my current research of reading letters and papers of women trade unionists (Tamboukou 2013(Tamboukou , 2014b(Tamboukou , 2015, is what I mostly do: 'I hear saying that women should stay at home […] I have never stayed at home, I have no home. I could not have one as I had to earn my bread' 4 (BHVP/AMB/FJB) Taking a short extract from an archived newspaper article that Jeanne Bouvier 5 , a French seamstress and ardent trade-unionist, wrote in 1922 in response to her comrades in the labour movement who had argued that women should stay at home and make it a haven in the world of capitalist exploitation, I want to map it on the chart of Whitehead's schema of prehensions as already explicated above.…”

“… 6. This storyline emerges from my archival research in May 2013, as part of my overall project of working with women workers’ narratives (see Tamboukou, 2013, 2014b, 2015). …”