Volume 25, number 2, October 1998

Margaret Henderson

WRITING THE SELF IN/AFTER THE POSTMODERN: POPPY AND HEDDYAND ME

Instead of representing a "truth," a "unity" or a "belongingness," a critical use of the self may come to emphasize the "historical conditions" involved in its speaking. Elspeth Probyn, Sexing the Self 28

A supposed "death of the subject" is a central tenet in the postmodern vocabulary of crisis, whether it be a dissolution of subjectivity by technology as in Jean Baudrillard, by consumer capitalism as in Fredric Jameson, or by a restructuring of gender relations as in Arthur Kroker. This essay, however, argues that the crisis may signal an expansion of certain epistemological, representational, and political positions available to women, as counter to postmodemism's subtext of loss. For the corpse is, of course, a particular version of subjectivity. When Foucault, among others, announced the death of "man" in The Order of Things, he was continuing a deconstruction of subjectivity begun by Nietzsche. Under attack is the Cartesian subject of bourgeois humanism- the unified, rational, coherent, and knowledgeable self, which is also assumed to be masculine. Nietzsche's Romantic philosophy which emphasises the irrational, and Freud's "discovery" of the unconscious seriously threatens the bourgeois conception of subjectivity.

These early challenges have continued as some of the key theoretical approaches of postmodernism (psychoanalysis, , and post- structuralism) have expanded and grown in influence, so that within the cultural space denoted by postmodernism, traditional humanist notions of subjectivity are problematised and largely discredited: "[t]he postmodern impulse tries to think or speak its way out of the (phallo)logocentric imprisonment of the subject in a hierarchy of encoded oppositions" (Barratt 222).

My feminist reading of two recent texts that can be termed "life writing," Poppy by Drusillu Modjeska, and Heddy and Me by Susan Varga, illustrates not only the workings of dominant postmodern subjectivity, but also politicises and redefines its categories. Feminism thus works as political "reality principle," in its focus on gendered relations of power and oppression, for those problematic aspects of postmodernism that I later discuss. As Elspeth Probyn suggests for

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feminism, these texts represent a "critical use of the self" in that they emphasise "the historical conditions involved in its speaking" (Sexing 28).

Rather than effecting a dissolution of subjectivity, the writers discussed here expand the discursive field to accommodate what Carole Ferrier terms "alternative subjects" (those who don't fit into the category of the white, heterosexual middle-class male ["Resisting" 104]). And while a number of feminists have noted the uneasy and, at times, conflicting relationship of feminism and postmodernism, with conceptualisations of subjectivity there is a degree of overlap. With postmodernism's and feminism's similar attack on the cultural and political authority of the subject of bourgeois individualism (which feminism identifies as masculine), postmodernism's retheorisation of subjectivity offers far more hospitable terrain for women to construct their own version of the self.

In their attempt to find an adequate way of representing women's subjectivity, Poppy and Heddy and Me demonstrate writing's role in transforming the expressive/repressive apparatuses of late capitalism and its problematised subjectivity. They take advantage of the cracks in the unified male subject to focus instead on a female subject in process and, on a cultural level, the cracks in the self-identity of "Australia" and also "Britain" (in the case of Poppy). By this I refer to the questioning which postmodern theory has directed towards notions of national (as well as individual) identity, and the gaps this has left for other stories to be told and other political demands to be made of not-so- unified Australian culture. These stories of white women moving toward the self-definition of a speaking position reveal structural and material networks of oppression masquerading behind Descartes' cogito ergo sum.

While the conventional generic categories of the experimental novel, autobiography, and biography suit these texts, the evolving (and feminist and postmodern-inspired) category of life-writing seems more. apposite here than continuing the dichotomy between auto/biography and fiction. Life-writing is a preferable term because it is open to certain premises of postmodern and , particularly regarding subjectivity, the specifically female use of this form of writing, and the breaking down of boundaries and hierarchy (Whitlock, 245). Life-writing is not strictly a genre, but rather a term which encompasses writing that explores and reflects the shifting boundaries between truth and fiction, self and society, personal and public histories, and conventional genres. 2

These two examples of women's life-writing allow a number of questions to be raised concerning postmodern subjectivity and women's cultural production. The first is the problem of cognition and articulation. For example,

10 Volume 25, number 2, October 1998 autobiographical writing or, more specifically, the novel of women's self- discovery (Feiski, "Novel" 133), is politically important for oppressed groups because these forms allow the telling of previously silenced stories and the construction of authoritative speaking positions. These forms are therefore a site of consciousness-raising and alternative knowledge. If we accept the discrediting of the Cartesian subject and personal experience, then we are left with the problem of how to know and tell the story of the self, that is, how to create a potentially politicised individual and hence, collective identity. What are the possibilities offered by postmodern theories for my readings of texts of marginalised subjectivities? Do postmodern aesthetic strategies offer a viable politicised cultural practice?

Certain political problems and implications are produced by a reconceptualised subjectivity (or lack of subjectivity in extreme cases), related to the question of agency, identity, and self-knowledge. As Elizabeth Wilson points out, political movements need some form of collective aims and identity, which she sees as increasingly difficult to construct within the contemporary framework of fragmented and multiple subjectivities (153). Further, Jane Flax's warning regarding the death of the subject in postmodernism encapsulates feminist concerns: "I am deeply suspicious of the motives of those who would counsel such a position at the same time as women have just begun to re-member their selves and to claim an agentic subjectivity available always before only to a few privileged white men" (Thinking 220).

Modjeska and Varga take forms (the Bildungsroman and auto/biography respectively) that are conventionally coded as conservative genres and associated with modernity (Moretti 5), and expand them with postmodern and feminist modes of representing subjectivity. This experimentation proposes an alternative logic of subjectivity to late capitalism in that it denaturalises "becoming a woman" (as in Modjeska), specifies historical forces and dynamics acting upon the subject (for example, Varga), but also suggests how subjectivity might be conceptualised in a manner that is discursive, fragmentary, yet also collective and resistant. They point toward where a textual home might lie for female subjectivity.

Searching for Mothers

Modjeska's Poppy and Varga's Heddy and Me can be read usefully in terms of the mother-daughter dyad structuring both the textual and subjective production. In an interesting reversal of the birth process, the daughter tries to write or reproduce the mother's life and, in the process, she grows in her own self- knowledge (with this becoming part of the mother's reconstructed self). The subjective and textual relationship is thus symbiotic and relational.

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Poppy and Heddy and Me are based on a politicised notion of identity, that is, identity functions not only as personal but also political category, formed by social relations (often of oppression) and a psychic condition of alterity. By approaching both Heddy and Me and Poppy as allegories, the subjectivities produced and represented function as a parable of the conditions of women, something hinted at by Lalage: "I'd set out to tell Poppy's story, and had concluded by bowing to the story that is told through her" (308). I read Poppy, therefore, as the tale of a white, middle-class woman in postwar Britain (mediated by her daughter), sharing some features of the novel of self- discovery, while Heddy and Me's migrant narrative is also an allegory of twentieth-century Hungary, and more specifically the Holocaust and its after- effects. In both works, the search for the mother is a narrative of collective and individual liberation. But first we must examine how and what subjectivity is constructed, and to what effects.

Heddy and Me is working in the increasingly popular and politically important genre of auto/biography, while Poppy is fictionalised auto/biography, a novel that comments on the epistemological uncertainty and fictive strategies of autobiography. 3 Critics have commented on the irony of the growth in popularity of auto/biographical writing at the same time that its core category, the subject, is being radically problematised:

Current women's biography owes much of its success ... to ... [the fact] that life stories can be told, that the inchoate experience of living and feeling can be marshalled into a chronology, and that central and unified subjects reach the conclusion of a life, and come into possession of their own story; and second, the way in which biography partakes of the historical romance. (Steedman 103)

Auto/biograhical writing has also been politically important to the women's movement because of its role in consciousness-raising, its ability to reach a large and non-specialist audience, the marginalisation of women's lives from history, the production of a diversity of women's lives, and the possibility of reinventing our lives that auto/biography represents (O'Brien 128).

Such popularity and political influence emphasises a disjunction between certain postmodern theoretical questionings and what actually is occurring. This disjunction can be attributed to a degree of generalisation and gender- blindness in some of postmodernism's theoretical and political formulations. The structures of feeling 4 that women exist within and transform by discursive and material practices, and the emergent culture of feminism (or Felski's "feminist counter-public sphere" [Beyond 9]), seem to undercut the evacuation of a politicised culture that typifies some reactionary strands of postmodernism.

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These texts inhabit the site of epistemological uncertainty engendered by postmodern speculations regarding not only subjectivity, but the interrelated categories of language, truth, cognition, history, and reality. Of the two, Poppy appears more formally influenced by the limitations of conventional forms of life-writing, as evidenced in the book's Acknowledgments:

When I [Modjeska] began this book my intention was to write a biography of my mother and I expected that I would keep to the evidence. In the writing of it, however, I found myself drawn irresistibly into dream, imagination and fiction. ... To stick only to the facts seemed to deny the fictional paradox of truthfulness, and the life that the book was demanding. (318)

Its theoretical awareness and self-reflexivity is apparent throughout. Heddy and Me, while apparently more conventional in form, does undercut the unified subject and project of biography with subtle and perhaps unconscious displays of epistemological doubt breaking through the surface of the text.

Both can be described as "research in progress" (Trigg 138), in that the process and method of constructing the self is foregrounded. For example, the types of evidence and their limitations are emphasised: taped interviews, eye witness accounts, the author's retracing of her mother's life in Budapest (Heddy), and the speculations of the biographer required by the significant gaps in lives that the conventional forms of evidence of documents and memory cannot fill (Poppy). The interpretation and shortcomings of evidence are made clear, thus the self constructed is only partial, a product of the biographer as much as the revelation of the central protagonist's authentic self. Though Poppy's double structure is far more apparent than in Varga's work, Heddy and Me also shares this feature of the biographer/narrator's own subjectivity being re-presented.

In an attempt to expand the strategies of biography to accommodate "alternative subjects" (Ferrier 104), Varga and Modjeska search for the mother amongst the psychological, the everyday, and the masculine-coded worlds of history and politics. This has two effects: first, Varga's and Modjeska's method incorporates rather than denigrates the emotional and domestic life of women, and second, it reconceptualises the notion of objectivity and its relationship to subject formation. The subject is thus given a fuller expression of its determinants, and is historically situated in the process. As we observe with Heddy and Poppy, they are not trapped by the language of the unconscious, nor are they passive victims of historical events.

In fundamental ways, however, Heddy and Me and Poppy move in opposite directions which can be attributed to the differing textual strategies that result in different representations of subjectivity. As one reviewer remarked of Heddy

13 Margaret Henderson, "Writing the Self" and Me, "somehow at the end one doesn't really know [Heddy] beyond her obvious positive qualities. ... Heddy, the resourceful heroine, keeps her distance, revealing only what she wants us to see" (Phelan 20). This impression is caused by two factors: the less psychoanalytically inflected framework adopted by Varga, which relies more heavily on Heddy's "writing" of her story than the fictionalised approach taken by Modjeska. For example, much of the text is constructed through Heddy's recollections—her three minute speech about her life is emblematic of her tidy anecdotes, dates, places, names, and neat stories of surface details (6). This emphasis on a fairly superficial rendering of the past is perhaps a method to conceal and control the traumas of Heddy's life. The trauma, instead, is played out in the change of narratorial emphasis from Heddy to Susan when Susan enters adolescence (her voice becoming equally, if not more important). Here the psychic scarring of the Holocaust enters the narrative.

Heddy and Me, therefore, is more controlled and involves narrative closure: the problem of the self (both mother and daughter) is resolved. Heddy recounts her life, Susan finds her identity and her father when she faces up to the trauma of the Holocaust, and the mother-daughter conflict is ameliorated by acknowledgment and acceptance of subjective commonalities: "1 chat often with Heddy on the phone. We rarely talk about anything important, but it is comfortable chat. We like each other. We have things in common, Heddy and I" (302). In this case, however, such narrative closure is not a result of an inherently conservative impulse in auto/biographical writing, but rather that the historical forces structuring Heddy's life (the Holocaust, Nazism, Stalinism, postwar immigration) lead to a reduced and changed status for the conventional significance of the individual. Heddy can be interpreted as withdrawing into a kernel of survival in her historical context. She is a middle- class, Hungarian Jewish woman who has that identity and the roles implied (mother, wife, and daughter) to use as a survival technique in situations of extreme upheaval, dislocation, and genocide. The gaps and silences in Heddy and Me need to be interpreted in the situation implied by Adorno's aphorism of no poetry after Auschwitz, where historical trauma has problematised representation on an imaginative and moral level (34).

In contrast, Poppy's search for self is structured by a desire for separation from the demands placed upon women as mothers, wives, lovers, daughters, and workers. The novel is set in a social context where the self can exist above subsistence level. Modjeska's narrative accordingly stresses the subjective and psychic interior as part of the central process of Poppy's individuation.

As mentioned in relation to Heddy, both texts illustrate that the subjective may only be partial, or a figure of multiple contradictions, surrounded by gaps and

14 Volume 25, number 2, October 1998 silences. Although the narrative may move toward a form of closure (Heddy and Me), or the evidence may be painstakingly collated and organised (as in Poppy), as reader or as the subject of biography we can never know that life entirely. Yet these limits to subjectivity do not stop these works representing political consciousness or knowledge in their mixture of textuality and history.

The selves constructed in both novels are primarily the mother and, to a lesser extent, the daughter. The mother-daughter relationship is not an unproblematic source of knowledge, in that censorship can still occur. The stormy relationship between Susan and Heddy, and the embarrassment of Lalage mean some things cannot be asked of the mother. Heddy and Poppy are both members of the middle class, but are marginalised by gender and for Heddy (in the context of the rise of European Nazism) Jewishness as well. Their problem regarding subjectivity is very different. For Heddy, it is history; for Poppy, finding the self. Their sex means that they are defined primarily in relation to others, and their fulfilment of others' needs; thus they are more than just nurturers of their own children, but nurturers in general. This social role is an ideologico-historical overlay on their reproductive capabilities and their primary identity as biological mothers. Heddy's struggles to save her children and to rebuild shattered lives become not a revelation of some essential feminine, but rather a task produced by the historical juncture she is located in, that is, a part of collective survival. Poppy's story is that of passive resistance against the feminine role which, in postwar Britain, is ideologically based, yet masked by a biological discourse: "With the mother at centre stage of government policy, psychiatric strategy, popular sociology and everyday thinking, she could only have thought she was failing us" (Poppy 86).

The myth of Ariadne provides Poppy with a metaphor for her own life, because of her habit of plaiting fabric scraps into twine. Ariadne's story seems to be her own: "with a ball of twine so that other people could find their way" (16). Is Poppy's life exemplary of the female condition: "always a life-line to other people's lives and therefore split from our own?" (16)

The representation of Poppy's subjectivity is archetypally postmodern because of the textual and theoretical frameworks involved: "MOdjeska conducts her explorations in a series of voices that constructs a material braid out of the complex abstractions of the last twenty years of Western feminist writing" (Brook 8). Not just one story, but a number of contradictory selves (or more importantly, voices) struggle to emerge, whereas Heddy tries to maintain a core identity (verging on social front) of the good Jewish Hungarian woman as a way of maintaining self in the face of historical circumstances. Poppy's narrative of the fragmented, white, middle-class British female in repressive postwar British society does not engender the nostalgia holding together

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Heddy's identity. Lalage attempts to explore her mother's life because it represents a failure to fulfil the conventional expectations of middle class females: "Poppy wanted an ordinary family. ... All' any of us saw was the family, cure and poison both" (9). Lalage wants to know what happened below the surface details of Poppy's mental illness and marriage breakdown and, in the process, realises she must also examine how we construct women within a particular social order. How do we mark them? "[W]e mark a woman by her kind and progeny. But it doesn't tell me who she was" (12). Instead, the section titles of Poppy are the areas where Poppy exists more fully: family, memory, history, voice, work, love, place, faith, and friends.

The epigraph in Poppy suggests the journey that follows: "To renounce the vanity of living under someone's gaze." Poppy's life is the embodiment of women's position of always being watched, always the object of the gaze, never the subject herself. She progresses from daughter, to wife, to mother in prosperous Britain, to failed wife and mentally ill, the result of always living for others and being caught in contradictions which the book tries to map. Her mental breakdown is a turning point, yet it is never fully comprehensible: Lalage says, "I come to the point where I can respect her silence on this episode and accept the limitations of what I can know" (Poppy 84).

According to Lalage, "Poppy recovered because she found her voice": the remainder of Poppy examines what it means for her to find her voice, in that she begins to live for herself, and outside the conventional boundaries that contain women (Poppy 93). Radical social worker, lover of Marcus, and follower of the Bhagwan are identities Poppy assumes in her quest for separation and self. In Poppy's quest for the many answers to the question "Who am I?" ("I am the mother of three daughters. I am the wife of two men. I am a worker. ... I am many, not one. I am none of these things" [277]), Modjeska alludes to the changing social position of women, particularly as it affects both herself and her mother (89-90). Modjeska's criticisms are not limited to the shortcomings of the conventional biographical genre, but also to the split between what she terms the mother and father tongues (public/private and self/object splits [151]), the denigration of women's subjective experiences, and the repressive social and psychic relations that women are expected to exist within.

Heddy's story is told by a mixture of historical information and personal recollections. This has two effects: Heddy controls much of the subjective dimension of her life, and she can only be understood in relation to the larger historical framework. The amount of historical information included is required due to the lack of knowledge of the Hungarian Jewish experience of most Australian readers; as Varga remarks, "[t]here are, of course, innumerable works on the Second World War and the Holocaust, but not much available in

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English on Hungary and the Hungarian Jews" (303). Heddy's story is thus a contribution to collective memory and, in Varga's observation of rekindled anti-semitism in post-Communist Hungary, a warning about the future.

Heddy's personal history is dictated by economic and historical events. Her family loses its wealth, and the comfort and gentility of pre-War bourgeois Budapest, due to Heddy's father's gambling. A fall from material comfort and the loss of trust in her father when she is a child is far more traumatic for Heddy than the War years:

I am puzzled by the enormity of the feeling, and she cannot put a finger on just what it was—but I suspect that whatever is obsessive, fearful and dark in her comes from the years when her father gambled everything away on the horses. (27)

Heddy marries out of this genteel poverty, but then the War begins:

It was a schizophrenic existence over the next few years. They lived a life that was prosperous, happy and settled, and they lived a life of insecurity, fear and foreboding. They glimpsed the void and were afraid to look in. (30)

As the War progresses and the oppression of Jews intensifies, Heddy loses more members of her family to illness and labour camps. The social status of Jews has shifted from tolerated members of the Hungarian bourgeoisie to abject other. Heddy must fight for her family's and her own survival under German occupation and the implementation of, the Final Solution. Heddy rises to this struggle:

I notice, and not for the first time, that Mother glows when she talks of the war years, whereas her face fades and strains when we get to the present. Back then, the stage was large, and irrational forces dictated events. Now the wars are subtle and small and there never is a clear victory. (227)

Heddy's life after the war is structured by the experience of migrating to Australia. This part of her life is dominated by her attempt to return to "normality," to recreate the comfortable and secure life in Budapest she lost first due to her father's gambling, and then to the War.

My whole life is the struggle for normality—to recover after those awful teenage years, then after the wreck the War made of my life, then the strain of emigrating. I'm always just tTying to get back to normal, live an ordinary life. (43)

This loss of a way of life is reflected in her attachment to material possessions, and her emphasis on "normality":

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One thing I could not understand was Mother's relationship to things, and her passion for order. ... What are one of the first signs of a disintegrating life? When your possessions, the objects of most familiarity in your life, are taken away, or sold off, or have to be hidden. What are the signs of your life reintegrating? When you get back the first stick of furniture and can put your own linen on your own bed again. Or so it was for Heddy. (225)

Unlike Poppy, Heddy does not rebel against the bourgeois social order; her life is spent actively trying to reproduce it in her work, her children, her marriage, and her lifestyle. Heddy is never passive or stagnant: she shifts between towns, countries, cultures, suburbs, but her own self seems driven, produced by a mixture of fear of, and nostalgia for, the past. Her subjectivity is marked by a core identity of survival, so that her psychic and physical need for stability is projected outwards.

Heddy's self-construction as unified, conscious, and in control of her life is challenged at a number of moments in the text. In recalling the family's gambling-induced poverty, Heddy's usually precise memory fails: "Here, she is stumbling about with images only, not sure of how things fitted together, but with an overwhelming sense of the dark mood, of being swept along by an inexorable fate" (53). Heddy lets slip with an anecdote of how she "borrowed" money from her husband which Susan remarks is completely out of Heddy's tightly controlled character (58). And the cumulative trauma of history cannot be kept at bay even in the midst of material prosperity in Australia:

But the drama turned internal. The more deeply cherished dreams of harmony, happiness, did not always turn out. In adjusting to another life, we lost or diluted much of our former selves. And repercussions, echoes of the past, came years later to bedevil us in forms that we often did not understand, or even recognise. (184)

Both Heddy and Me and Poppy demonstrate the tension between the ostensible task of auto/biography to know or reveal the self within the demands of narrative closure, and what Shari Benstock describes as "the impossibility of its own dream: what begins on the presumption of self-knowledge ends in the creation of a fiction that covers over the premises of its construction" (11). By foregrounding their own complicity in constructing the subject and the inevitable gaps and silences, these two texts display an awareness of the limitations of subjectivity imposed by discursive constraints. They do not abandon the project of representing women's subjectivities. Instead, experience and identity are problematised by Varga and Modjeska: they may commence with a desire for the true self, but what they find is how selves are made, and why.

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In their appropriation and problematising of the Bildungsroman and auto/biography towards the idea of life-writing, by the influence of postmodern and feminist codes and concepts, the texts are transformed so that alternative subjects can speak. Although postmodern theories of subjectivity may appear politically troubling, with the overlap of feminism and its questions of power and oppression the crisis in subjectivity provides a more open terrain, to explore and overcome the obstacles to finding a voice and speaking position.

Writing, of course, is a key element in their strategies, and therefore reiterates the importance afforded cultural politics in feminism. Writing as method of self-expression, and as complement to voice and notions of speaking position, is part of forming collective identities or raising political consciousness. Writing is thus a critical link between experience as ontology and as epistemology. As Probyn explains, "[b] oth of these levels—the experiential self [ontology] and the politicization of experience [epistemology]—are necessary as the conditions of possibility for alternative speaking positions in cultural theory" (Sexing 16).

These texts demonstrate the continuing importance of women's experiences and writing women's lives for a feminist cultural politics, hence the enduring and powerful insights encapsulated by "the personal is political." Furthermore, they very much reflect the impact of feminism and postmodernism on the changing narrative structures and strategies that represent women. Though working within a changed social and intellectual context as compared to the early consciousness-raising novels and auto/biographies of the second wave women's movement, these texts fulfil the crucial functions of consciousness- raising and demystification of patriarchal capitalism.

Felski's argument for the political necessity of the novel of female self-discovery can be modified so as to account for the postmodern shift in conceptions of subjectivity ("Novel" 147). The novels or texts of female self-(de)construction are very much necessary fictions, sites of connections and contradictions among individual and collective selves, and the social world.

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor W. "Cultural Criticism and Society." Prisms: Cultural Criticism and Society. Trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1981: 17-34. Barratt, Barnaby B. Psychoanalysis and the Postmodem Impulse: Knowing and Being Since Freud's Psychology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993.

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Baudrillard, Jean. Selected Writings. Ed. Mark Poster. Cambridge: Polity, 1988. Benstock, Shari. "Authorizing the Autobiographical." The Private Self. Theory and Practice of Women's Autobiographical Writings. Ed. Shari Benstock. London: Routledge, 1988: 10-33. Brook, Barbara. "Spaces in Memory." Rev, of Poppy, by Drusilla Modjeska. Australian Women's Book Review 3.1 (1991): 7-8. Felski, Rita. Beyond : and Social Change. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1989. "The Novel of Self-Discovery: A Necessary Fiction." Southern Review. 19.2 (1986): 131-48. Ferrier, Carole. "Resisting Authority." Shaping Lives: Reflections on Biography. Ed. Ian Donaldson, Peter Read, and James Walter. Canberra: Humanities Research Centre, A.N.U., 1992: 102-109. Flax, Jane. Thinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary West. Berkeley: U of California P, 1990. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. 1966. New York: Random House, 1970. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodemism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991. Kadar, Marlene. "Coming to Terms: Life Writing—From Genre to Critical Practice." Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice. Ed. Marlene Kadar. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1992: 3-16. Kroker, Arthur and Frazer, Marilouise, (eds). The Hysterical Male: New Feminist Theory. New York: St Martins, 1991. Modjeska, Drusilla. Poppy. Ringwood: McPhee Gribble, 1990. Moretti, Franco. The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture. London: Verso, 1987. O'Brien, Sharon. "Feminist Theory and Literary Biography." Contesting the Subject: Essays in the Postmodern Theory and Practice of Biography and Biographical Criticism. Ed. William H. Epstein. West Lafayette: Purdue UP, 1991: 123-33. Phelan, Nancy. "From A Distance." Rev, of Heddy and Me, by Susan Varga. Australian Book Review July 1994: 20. Probyn, Elspeth. Sexing the Self Gendered Positions in Cultural Studies. London: Routledge, 1993. Steedman, Carolyn. "Women's Biography and Autobiography: Forms of History, Histories of Forms." From My Guy to Sci-Fi: Genre and Women's Writing in the Postmodern World. Ed. Helen Carr. London: Pandora, 1989: 98-111. Trigg, Stephanie. "A Gift of Sorrow: Modjeska's Poppy." Scripsi 6.3 (1990): 137-42. Varga, Susan. Heddy and Me. Ringwood: Penguin, 1994. Whitlock, Gillian. "Graftworks: Australian Women's Writing 1970-90." Gender, Politics and Fiction: Twentieth Century Australian Women's Novels. Ed. Carole Femer. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1992: 236-58. Wilson, Elizabeth. Mirror Writing: An Autobiography. London: Virago, 1982.

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Endnotes

Marlene Kadar defines life writing as letters, diaries, autobiographies, biographies, and 'the fictional frame in which we might find an autobiographical voice" (4,7). The theoretical problematising of subjectivity, history, cognition, and representation in general (all postmodern insights), applies to both biography and autobiography. In such a context, "life-writing" does seem a valid alternative to accommodate works no longer easily confined by the truth-fiction dichotomy, although at times it does tend to erase significant generic, reading, and political differences. For the purposes of this essay, life writing is the more general term applicable to the texts under consideration, but in particular instances I will use the more precise auto/biography. My use of the term "auto/biograph" denotes that, in writing biography, the narrator's own self is (re)constructed, and implicated in the process. Probyn explains Raymond Williams' concept thus: the structure of feeling designates the relations that articulate, at any moment, "the material life," "the social organisation" and "the dominant ideas." While it may not be necessary to weigh which, if any, element is determining, it is necessary to determine the particular configuration formed by these three elements. (Sexing 24)

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