On Writing in a Collaborative Spirit: Nancy Mairs’s Ethic of Community

Abstract

Much has been made of Nancy Mairs’s determination to “speak the unspeakable,” her “transgressive” assertions of identity as a fully embodied, and fulfilled, crippled1 woman addressing such forbidden topics as religion, sex, and clinical depression (Ordinary Time 8, 25). Like countless other “scribbling women”2 before her, Mairs has encountered both indirect (cultural/conventional) and direct (confrontational) discouragements for her explorations of a textual self. Indirectly, she inherits, of course, Western critics’ definitions of autobiography as individual and public, recorded retrospectively in chronological prose (Gusdorf, Lejeune). Many feminist scholars have criticized this “public” tradition because “women, for obvious social reasons, have traditionally had more difficulty than men about making claims to their own public importance … The housewife seldom offers her life to public view” (Spacks 112).3 The stress on individuated identity has likewise been taken to task. Nellie McKay argues that “for those outside the dominant group, community identity permits the rejection of historically diminishing images of self imposed by the dominant culture” (175). Nancy Mairs seems precisely to value taking strength from community. She quotes Rosemary Radford Ruether that “it is almost impossible for an individual alone to dissent from this culture,” that “alternative cultures and communities must be built up to support the dissenting consciousness” (Ruether 128, qtd. in Mairs, Voice Lessons 23), and she praises as “adventurous young scholars” her PhD committee members who encouraged her to write a genre-defying, often-autobiographical “original literary dissertation” (which was to become Plaintext) (Voice Lessons 35).