(Ed. note: this performance essay comes in two hyperlinked parts.
Please consider opening the hyperlinks to text 2 and reading them in alternation to text 1)

We may safely assert that the knowledge men acquire of women, even as they have been and are, without reference to what they might be, is wretchedly imperfect and superficial and will always be so until women themselves have told all there is to tell.

John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women

1. "You're every sad song that I hear on the radio."

What follows constitutes a "subhegemonic articulation" of the self, not to mention a minor post-structuralist dispute with Gertrude Stein. (Um -- "self" and "post-structuralist" are permitted to breathe in the same sentence, yes?)

First, a little bit about myself. Last year, my partner and I accumulated even more credit card debt in order to visit Paris and stand at the graveplot of Gertrude Stein. This visit marked the completion, the culmination, the end of my education.

On another note, here's one way to have a nervous breakdown. First, write a memoir. Second -- and I'm sorry, Miss Stein, but the order is crucial here and does indeed indicate a causal relationship -- second, read autobiographical criticism.

And now -- what else? -- a little bit more about myself. I am the author of a little book about problems for women in higher education. This little book of mine is a memoir. I use my experience as one white-chick-with-complicated-class-status to illuminate the problems in higher education for other white-chicks-with-complicated-class-statuses. Yes, I, as a real person, assume that my problems are theirs, that "we" share some kind of identity, however textually fragile. One point established by my educational memoir is that, while a student, I felt no ties, no membership in an oppressed social group of women. My education purposefully refused to teach me about those ties, and I learned of that membership -- and learned indeed that membership has its privileges -- too late to save myself in academia. A primary purpose of my book is to teach women -- how arrogant of me! -- that they do have these ties, and indeed these responsibilities.
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2. "She's walking around in my sleep."

Estelle C. Jelinek and many others have observed that biographies by both women and men tend to factor out details about certain types of relationships, and to avoid and omit direct expressions of pain. (Hmm. What individual purpose does this omission serve? But anyway.) Jelinek notes that men and women effect this detachment in different ways, and lists the ways in which women writers tend to detach: we simply evade that subject matter; we utilize a reportorial style; we deploy humor. Elizabeth Winston suggests that manipulation of point of view --using second or third person -- is another device that can result in detachment from pain (in Jelinek 107). I would note that the use of a non-linear narrative structure can have the same result. (Indeed, I find in autobiographical criticism a general lack of discussion about narrative structure. But anyway.)

Where were we? Ah, yes. We were talking about me and my "arrogant" "little book." Detach? Deny? Is that what I'm doing?

Me? Do denial? Let me see if I get this straight: In order to reveal herself, a (woman) writer finds it necessary to transcend her desire to...reveal herself.... -- this self-denial for the sake of some assumed social interaction with her assumed reading community.

That is, the writer doesn't want to alienate readers from the horrors of her revealed Self. So she detaches both herSelf and her reader from the worst of those horrors. OK. And. Uncertain and deferred identities may lead to fractured narrative structure --
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3. "I'm in love with you, baby, and I don't even know your name."

But. Winston also notes that women writers also attempt to form a "special relation to their audience" (Jelinek 110). Does this idea of "special relation" contradict the idea of "detachment"? Is it possible that women life-writers are attempting to both attach and detach at the same time?

OK, here's one way to have a nervous breakdown. First, right a memoir. Second -- and I'm sorry, Miss Stein, but the order is crucial here and does indicate a causal relationship -- second, go to the library and read the canon of feminist autobiographical criticism. Oh shit, I thought -- I'm just a chick, just like most other chicks! I do everything they do. I attempt to establish a conciliatory relationship with my primary reader, who truly does seem dear to me. I presume to instruct her fondly, even as I presume an interaction between the two of us. I require her continuing acceptance and approval. I do address her directly, and indeed, begging her presence, demand affirmation by asking her if my actions are OK with her. As in, "Umm, I think my thesis director is sexually harassing me -- don't you think? I think I should file a complaint -- what do you think?" I'm indeed very much afraid of being accused of crankiness (sniff), of sentimentality (gak), of anger (gasp), of a Pity Party (CALL OUT THE DOGS!). And of course my narrative structure is disjunctive and thematically repetitive (thanks to Miss Stein), but I apologize for my repetition, endlessly saying, "I know I told you this before." (Miss Stein, who makes no such apology, spins in her grave every time I thus grovel, and approves of me not in the least.) And of course my memoir relates little of my romantic relationships, and of course it reports some painful events with a cold absence, like I'm Bob Woodward or some shit, and neglects other events altogether, and of course point of view is all over the damn place, and of course it's about as uncertain and self-deprecating as you can get without disappearing from the text altogether, and of course my narrative lacks closure -- what else? I'm not dead yet. In the library, among the masterpieces, I sit utterly appalled by my femaleness, which has obviously limited my creativity in some way -- I have simply done what everyone else has done. Damn. There's nothing new under the utterly oppressive sun.
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4. "If I'm not in love, I'm on the verge."

To attach, you have to know who you are. Even if you're pretending.

Don't you?

And here now, we will pay homage to Miss Stein, who wrote the book on Identity Deformation, before planting her former entity under a distinctly plain, American-looking gravestone. (By the way, how surprised I was to find Alice B. Toklas' name carved on the back of the same simple stone -- to find these two former entities lying head to head, and Miss Toklas now literally in Miss Stein's shadow. Hmm.)

And now, homage. Ahem [cough]. As Charles Bernstein has written in "Professing/Stein," "Stein's works not only do not require but also positively hinder allegorical and metaphorical interpretations or paraphrases" (145). Point well taken. Please pardon me as I nonetheless both interpret and paraphrase. Near and far as I can tell, Miss Stein believed that writers must avoid any consciousness of audience because knowing to whom you write means concerning yourself with your relation to whom you write. And relation requires concerning yourself with your own identity. And identity ruins creativity. "Identity is recognition," she says. "I am I because my little dog knows me" (84 What). Miss Stein asserts that when you concern yourself with your dog's ability to recognize you (your text, your text as you), creativity drops cold dead, and you suffer starting fits. Miss Stein argues for writing out of "entity," not identity; and she uses "entity" to mean a sort of unidentified being, an unconstructed single subjectivity. "And so it is always true that the master-piece has nothing to do with human nature or with identity, it has to do with the human mind and the entity that is with a thing in itself and not in relation" (88 What)

"Not in relation," she says. Cain't have none of them relations, she says.

And further: "[T]he minute [a work] is necessary it has no possibility of going on...[a master-piece] is opposed to the business of living which is relation and necessity" (86,88 What).

Miss Stein and I disagree on the degree to which it is possible to write from an unidentified perspective free of social conditioning. I must also note crankily that Miss Stein neglects, in "What Are Master-pieces," to unpack this notion of the master's pieces, flip it on its white back and reveal its (pardon me) penis.

Most oppressive is this idea of master-pieces avoiding necessity. But of course. The masters have no need of necessity.
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5. "She'd give half of Texas just to change the way he feels."

But we must be careful with quoting Miss Stein, as any quote we take from her work, no matter how large, is bound to be contradicted elsewhere. For instance, she says elsewhere that "Speeches are in answer" (10 How). (Really, Miss Stein? To whom?) "A grammar loads hay onto a wagon" (67 How). (More on this later.) And she says, "A sentence is a duplicate. An exact duplicate is depreciated. Why is a duplicated sentence not depreciated. Because it is a witness.... A sentence then can easily make a mistake. A sentence must be used" (32 How).

And, because memory is linked to identity, "this is what makes secondary writing, it is remembering" (89 What). Miss Stein asks: "What is the use of being a boy if you are going to grow up to be a man, the boy and the man have nothing to do with each other, except in respect to memory and identity?" (90 What). (For my own work I would ask, What is the use of being in school if you are going to grow up to be educated?) In denying the use of (the fragility of) memory, Miss Stein permits a political self-denial, a detachment from the possible usefulness of sentences designed to duplicate an individual, political memory. In this way, she permits the masters to perpetuate -- rather than necessarily change -- the social effects of an empowered boyhood.

Miss Stein discusses audience but not purpose. It would seem that she would sniff at my own impulse to instruct my dear reader; she would say about my little book that "it may be very popular but actually it is quite dull" (90 What). (Or, it may be very political, but actually it is quite dull.) She could not bear to read me reading my life, duplicating a search for knowledge necessary to change.

And yet -- and yet -- she says: "At the same time every one in a curious way sooner or later does feel the reality of a master-piece. The thing in itself of which the human nature is only its clothing does hold the attention" (88 What).

When your purpose is to duplicate a necessarily perceived, and perceived as necessary, reality to a student-reader audience...with the purpose of inciting that audience to necessary change -- OK? -- ...how does one do this without asserting, even while subverting, identity, truthfulness, and relation?

And now, a frontal aside. You're thinking, Why Stein? As Bernstein says, "Reading Stein is one of the great pleasures, but the discourse about Stein...well, it's not nearly as interesting" (142). Again, pardon moi, et mea culpa. I must claim here A Writer Thing and am forced to Sally forth and Springer another confession upon you. I have a Jones for Miss Stein. I have no choice but to respond to Stein, since her past (like Virginia Woolf's) haunts me, is an active part of my own "continuous present." In fact, and as you can see, she is occasionally one of Woolf's "Angels" in my house, necessarily assassinated. I stand at her graveplot, the triumphant daughter -- but not. It is because of Stein that I duplicate me myself -- because of her that I duplicate me myself.

(Me who? You who?)

In my educational biography, I claim no real memory, and no certain identity, and certainly no linear progression, but I claim significance of subject matter and subjectivity, and I presume arrogantly to teach my reader. Must I not attach in order to teach? And yes, in order to attach (to an assumed reader), must I not detach (from an assumed response to pain)? It is a bizarre Bermuda Triangle: there's me here, my reader close by (attaching?), and my pain over there (detaching?). All three of us, vanished from the master's radar screen.
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6. "Baby, I still believe in you and me."

But wait. Multitudes. Fits and starts. It's not what you want to say, it's what you want to say in this moment to whom. You see, as a woman writer I am manipulated not just by my dear readers, but by all the other, non-dear readers as well. Sometimes I have to utter utterances over and over, in multiple moments to multitudes, in different ways to different readers. Not all of my readers are my students. Some are men who dispute my claims regarding the realities for women in higher education. Some are more privileged women who do not care about my claims and do not see me as sister. Some are teachers who eternally grade me. Some are teachers who are implicated in my accusations. Some are family, separated from me by my own education, who eternally cannot love me.

The plot of my manifesto-memoir spins in its graveness. I can only tell the same story again and again, with differing purposes, to differing audiences.

My writing reflects a feminist pedagogy, not what Virginia Woolf calls the "dominance of the professor." To teach-write, I focus on my student-reader and require not dominance but equation. My experience equals yours. "Show don't tell": I presume to instruct by example, not profess-ing. For this reason I assert a True I (it's really me, this really happened), even as I am telling her, I have no idea who I am and I have no idea who you are. Use this as you can, as you will. Equation suggests relation. Relation cannot be about dominance. I deny my dominance, even as I assert it implicitly -- by writing a book, claiming a significance -- for the sake of my relation. I read not just my life but my relation to the reader. To the multitudes of readers. I encourage, and await, reciprocal narratives. In any order plotted gravely. I've shown you mine, now you show me yours. In this way my dearest reader manipulates me by teaching me.

Multitudes. Fits and starts. Structures must be built to handle the multitudes, "more than two of each" (Amato "Body"). My grammar will be quite busy loading several wagons. Over here, my grammar loads pain into a box -- this so as to distract my reader from my identity. Over there, my grammar engineers fallopian piping to my student-reader, able to handle the fluid-pressure of both of us coming and going. Over there, my grammar builds a roadblock to opposition. Over here, my grammar works to erect --no no, wait, not erect -- to sculpt? a duplication of that all-important curiosity, that bust of reality Miss Stein feels essential to the holding of attention, even as she denies its usefulness. My grammar invents a Roddenberry Device that transforms reality into identity, dissolves our mutual identities, the identities of my student-reader and me -- I am she, she is me, we are one entity now (and both of us are Trekkies). And right here, I work to reveal the blueprints of my grammar's architecture. It's a careful design, this need to duplicate reality even as the grammatical process of duplication is rendered real, and really inadequate; it's a careful design, this need to make her me without losing her, to kill the virus but not the invaded cell. Show and tell -- because. A becausal relation.

How else to make change?

Let me make this perfectly clear. I do not mean, as Roy Pascal wrote, the year I was born, in Design and Truth in Autobiography, that "true autobiographies of statesmen are possible where their political activity stands in an essential relationship to their personality, where it can appear as the efflux [god bless you!] of their personality" (6). No essential statesman be I.

Nuff said.

OK, so while I'm having my nervous breakdown, and wondering why the hell I can't seem to rise above my gendered aesthetics, I begin to wonder whether I should. I'm thinking, Hey, I should write a really assertive memoir where I shout that I am goddamn good and pissed off, and not care who answers my answering speech, and repeat any painful thing I want over and over and the hell with you if you've heard it before and you don't like pain -- why should I be concerned with whether my dear reader is going to want to have lunch with me after she reads this, or whether --worse luck -- her masters will forbid her to read my unbridled, unbrassiered enthusiasms.

But this would mean lecturing. This would mean joining the effluxing profess-ors.

For me to not profess dominance, she has to be able to recognize me as partly her. She and I must attach as members of an oppressed social group with ties and responsibilities. (Working classes, people of color, etc., are welcome to attach analogically.)
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7. "I said to my reflection, 'Get me out of this place.'"

To effect necessary social change, the post-structuralist-(s)elf must not be abandoned as oxymoron, but rather embraced, in infinite ways, as necessary contradiction. In what ways? Well, for one, I'm sure you realize that I lied to you when I told you that my education ended at Miss Stein's graveplot. The narrative of An Education, in particular, necessarily has no beginning and no end. Not even birth is the beginning, because your teachers were learning what to teach you before you got there, just as writing is writing the history of writing. And then there is your station in life, which precedes you, and likely determines your education. Out of the narrative disjunction and disorder emerges a determined education, necessary for your relation to society, an educated entity with no beginning and no end but a specific thing nonetheless with a curious reality which can be recognized, and which can effect change not least because of its telling of all there is to tell -- for the moment -- even as the idea of telling is subverted by --

Shut up! (she said, in a cute Dharma-like whine).

It could happen!
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1. "You're every sad song that I hear on the radio."

In her (own) requisite review of the literature (shall we dance?), Sidonie Smith points out that those critics who "assert that the self inscribed in autobiography is a rhetorical construct...attend to the multitudinous strategies autobiographers use as they manipulate and are in turn manipulated by an implied reader" ( Poetics 6).

"Given the very nature of language, embedded in the text lie alternative or deferred identities that constantly subvert any pretensions of truthfulness" (Poetics 5).

Regarding the (s)elf, a bit of tension exists within the community of critics of autobiography: "The contemporary debate on autobiography is frequently grounded in various post-structuralist theories that deconstruct texts and decenter subjects so as to deny or at least question the familiar concept of a mimetic relationship between literature and life. As editors of this collection, we, on the contrary, reclaim that relationship. Yes, we believe like Philippe Lejeune that the autobiographical 'I,' however fugitive, partial, and unreliable, is indeed the privileged textual double of a real person, as well as a self-evident textual construct" (Susan Groag Bell & Marilyn Yalom 2).

Regina Blackburn has said that black autobiography differs from white autobiography not least because "[t]he self is conceived as a member of an oppressed social group with ties and responsibilities to the other members" (in Jelinek 133).
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2. "She's walking around in my sleep."

"Unique, unitary, unencumbered, the self escapes all forms of embodiment.... With the body subordinated, the enlightenment self pursues, according to Jane Flax, 'a form of reason capable of privileged insight into its own processes and into the "laws of nature."' Reflecting on its own essential nature, abstracting its teleological motion, delineating and defining coherent boundaries of experience, the self thereby presumes the possibility of self-knowledge" (Subjectivity 6-7).

Lillian S. Robinson: "It is a fundamental precept of bourgeois aesthetics that good art...is art that celebrates what is unique and even eccentric in human experience or human personality. Individual achievement and subjective isolation are the norm.... It seems to me that this is a far from universal way for people to be or to be perceived, but one that is intimately connected to relationships and values perpetuated by capitalism. For this reason, I would seriously question any aesthetic that not only fails to call that individualism into question, but does so intentionally, in the name of feminism" (qtd. in Bell 93).

Regenia Gagnier: "Discursive production must be understood in terms of the multifarious purposes and projects of specific individuals or groups in specific material circumstances.... All autobiographical 'moves'...are 'interested,' whether or not they are...intentionally political.... All display the features of two contexts, as cultural projects in circulation with other cultural products...and as articulations of participatory and antagonistic social relations.... I read autobiography rhetorically, taking language as realist, not in the sense of metaphysical realism, direct isomorphism with reality...but realist in the sense of projecting objectively real articulations of power in particular communities. Like reading itself, writing is a function of specific and community interactions" (in Bell 101-2).
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3. "I'm in love with you baby, and I don't even know your name."

Elizabeth Winston observes, among women autobiographers publishing before 1920, a tendency to "establish a conciliatory relationship to their readers, by this means attempting to [among other things...] gain the audience's sympathy and acceptance." Women writing after 1920 were more assertive regarding their successes, but "still showed signs of uneasiness at having violated cultural expectations for women" (in Jelinek 93).

"It may be that woman's relationship to representation itself is radically different from her brother's since, to the degree that she is closer to the mother and the mother's pre-Oedipal language, she is closer to the experience of language as presence rather than as absence" (Poetics 13).

Nancy Chodorow says, "[F]eminine personality...comes to be based less on repression of inner objects, and fixed and firm splits in the ego, and more on retention and continuity of external relationships" (qtd. in Poetics 12).

Some women's autobiographies lack closure; these "intentionally open-ended narratives seek to duplicate for readers the process of relationship experienced by their writers by inviting them to share in that process through active interaction with the text" (Anna K. Kuhn in Bell 15).
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4. "If I'm not in love I'm on the verge."

The autobiographer's "doubled subjectivity -- the autobiographer as protagonist of her story and the autobiographer as narrator. Through that doubled subjectivity she pursues her fictions of selfhood in fits and starts" (Poetics 17-8).

Barbara Ann Schapiro summarizes the possible application of psychoanalytic relational-model theories to literary criticism this way: "Because [these theories] locate psychological meaning in the intermediate, interactive space between self and other, they are also particularly applicable to reader-response criticism. Meanings, as Norman Holland has argued, are constructed out of the interaction of reader and author relating through the text" (24).

"The multidimensionality of women's socially conditioned roles seems to have established a pattern of diffusion and diversity when they write their autobiographies..." (Jelinek 17). This "discontinuity" in structure is "analogous to the fragmented, interrupted, and formless nature of their lives" (19).

"[T]he identity of public performance may cause its female possessor to experience intensely, or at any rate to reveal emphatically, pre-existent uncertainties of personal identity" (Patricia Meyer Spacks in Jelinek 113). Women's autobiographies often "exploit a rhetoric of uncertainty" (131).
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5. "She'd give half of Texas just to change the way he feels."

Spacks says that although men's biographies typically involve the aggrandizement of self (see Pascal by unintended example), a woman writer will often "implicitly den[y], for purposes of the autobiography, all emotional response to her own public importance and accomplishment" (in Jelinek 116). "Transcendence of the personal...may represent a triumphant, a truly heroic, achievement" (129). Autobiography is used "partly as a mode of self-denial" (132).
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6. "Baby, I still believe in you and me."

James E. Breslin asks: "But if we now find it problematic to think of even a lyric poem as autotelic, how can we imagine an autotelic autobiography? Can Stein create an autobiography without identity, memory, linear time? And if she did, could we bear to read it?" (in Jelinek 151).

"This sifting of the past through the sieve of the present is an epistemological act -- an intentional search for knowledge" (Marcus K. Billson and Sidonie Smith in Jelinek 171).
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7. "I said to my reflection, 'Get me out of this place.'"

"Autobiographies, almost by definition, make the public private.... Commitment to formal autobiography, a story of the self written with the intent of dissemination, implies also a claim of significance.... Women, for obvious social reasons, have traditionally had more difficulty than men about making public claims of their own importance. They have excelled in the writing of diaries and journals, which require no such claims, more than in the production of total works offering a coherent interpretation of their experience" (Spacks in Jelinek 112).

H. Kassia Fleisher received her M.A. degree at the University of North Dakota.

Copyright H. Kassia Fleisher 1998.

Comments to Kassia Fleisher.

Amato, Joe. Bookend: Anatomies of a Virtual Self. Albany: SUNY UP, 1997.

Bell, Susan Groag and Marilyn Yalom, eds. Revealing Lives: Autobiography, Biography, and Gender. Albany: SUNY UP, 1990.

Bernstein, Charles. A Poetics. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992.

Jelinek, Estelle C., ed. Women's Autobiography: Essays in Criticism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1980.

Pascal, Roy. Design and Truth in Autobiography. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1960.

Schapiro, Barbara Ann. Literature and the Relational Self. New York: New York UP, 1994.

Smith, Sidonie. A Poetics of Women's Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions of Self-Representation. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987.

____. Subjectivity, Identity, and the Body: Women's Autobiographical Practices in the Twentieth Century. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993.

Stein, Gertrude. How to Write. 1931. Los Angeles: Sun and Moon, 1995.

____. "What Are Master-pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them." What Are Masterpieces. New York: Pitman, 1940.

White-boy country music quotes sampled from Trace Atkins, Garth Brooks, Vince Gill, Alan Jackson. Lone rock lyric squeezed from Squeeze.