The Power of Testimony: How narrative displaced invention

Abstract

The Power of TestimonyHow narrative displaced invention Vivian Gornick (bio) Ionce wrote a book about the great nineteenth-century suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton. I did that because I'd become embroiled in an argument over whether the women's movement could produce literature as well as testimony, and I'd gone looking for the poetry in the movement. In Elizabeth Stanton I found it. When that remarkable person sat down to explain women and equality to her government, testimony achieved poetry. She was born in 1815 in upstate New York into a rich and distinguished family of conservatives who opposed slavery but dreaded [End Page 176] social disorder. Elizabeth, alone among the Cadys, was possessed of a radical temperament. When at the age of twenty-four she fell in love with Henry Stanton, an impassioned abolitionist, she married him against her father's will, and the two went blithely off to England to attend the first international anti-slavery congress ever held. To her amazement the congress refused to seat her, as women were to be seen, not heard. Afterward, Stanton would often say that it was here in London in 1840 that for the first time in her life, she realized that in the eyes of the world she was not as she was in her own eyes; she was "only a woman." As an abolitionist she'd been a fellow traveler; now as a budding feminist she discovered that it was this cause that aroused her strongest feelings. She further discovered that for her, feeling strongly was associated—as it had been for men from time immemorial—not with falling in love but with agency: agency come to life through devotion to some large unmet human need that might have gone unaddressed for decades at a time but would not be permanently stilled. In 1848 Stanton, along with Lucretia Mott and three other progressive-minded women, held a two-day convention in Seneca Falls (the town in upstate New York where Stanton lived) calling for social and political equality for women. The event was life-changing. Thereafter she was defined by the intellectual excitement that the cause of women's rights aroused in her. She'd always known she had a good mind, but now, as the years after Seneca Falls wore on and she found herself writing petition after petition on behalf of equality for women, she discovered that she was a visionary thinker, one who saw hidden in the discrimination against her sex something of humanity writ large: its unholy predilection to aggress against itself, to inflict hierarchies of privilege and deprivation on one's fellow beings, to countenance with ease ourselves living contentedly in the light while others flounder and go under, living as they did in the dark. It was as though the human condition itself stood revealed in feminism's reawakened call for social justice. [End Page 177] As the decades wore on—the 1840s giving way to the '50s and '60s—and the feminist cause, long defined by the struggle for suffrage, made no real progress, the movement itself grew increasingly conservative. Stanton, however, remained unrelentingly radical and experienced a growing split between herself and her movement; very soon she found herself isolated. The more alone in the world she felt, the more philosophical she became. In 1892 she stood up to deliver her final public address, a speech that to this day remains one of the great entries in the canon of American personal essays. Its title: "The Solitude of Self." The thing she wanted her audience to consider, she said, was the individuality of a human being: that which Protestant American culture held as a first value. In one sense, the idea of the individual is a declaration of proud independence; in another, it is the recognition that we are, in fact, a world of Robinson Crusoes, all of us alone on the island of life, but none more so than women: No matter how much women prefer to lean, to be protected and supported, nor how much men desire to have them do so, they must make the voyage of life alone, and for safety in an...