On Home Ground: Politics, Location, and the Construction of Identity in Four American Women's Autobiographies

Abstract

In his essay Autobiography and Making of America, Robert F. Sayre compares autobiography to architecture, suggesting that American autobiographers like American houses, with many imported imitations of foreign styles...and mixtures of these styles with new forms and experiences (155-56). Although Sayre focuses his essay around what he calls major autobiographies-those by Ben Franklin, Walt Whitman, and Henry Adams-he concludes by recognizing that he has left out the rest of story-of what went on in House (168), suggesting that stories of women ought to be included in critical edifice he is erecting. But he says nothing to dispel impression he creates that reading of women's autobiographies would be illuminating chiefly of domestic, private spheres of existence. I would like to carry Sayre's metaphor of autobiographical house further, arguing that autobiographeme1 of home, whether in men's or women's autobiographies, enacts a complex politics of location, set into a foundation of cultural history and socioeconomic positioning, that goes far beyond narrow confines of domestic space. For postcolonial autobiographer, man or woman, home is a particularly charged autobiographeme, a contested site on which cultural conflicts of larger society are played out in microcosm; and autobiography is not just an exercise in recapturing past, but a future oriented project that seeks to establish a secure home ground where subject may reside without fear of displacement or humiliation.2 Bell hooks notes in her essay Homeplace: A Site of Resistance that home has a subversive value (47); Chandra Talpade Mohanty points out that the very practice of remembering and rewriting leads to formation of politicized consciousness and self-identity. Writing often becomes...a space for struggle and contestation about reality itself (Cartographies of Struggle 34). When a people no longer have space to construct