Her face looking back at me: reflections on New Zealand women's autobiography

Abstract

In the autobiographical writings of women in New Zealand, the image recurs of a woman absorbed in private recollection, a face of female experience which pictures woman as intimately arrested by questions of subjectivity and story, memory and desire. "Her Face Looking Back At Me : Reflections on New Zealand Women's Autobiography" looks to decipher this recurrent vision of the woman rapt in retrospective longing, finding in her reverie a peculiarly female preoccupation with the past and its personal significance, yet also locating her nostalgic gaze as an icon of wistful female alienation from the scriptive and subjective tools necessary to translate private reflection into autobiographical text. This face of female retrospect also recurs as a maternal image, and "Her Face Looking Back At Me" makes a close study of the mother's face as vision of woman's self-reflective desire and discursive stasis. The face of maternal reverie depicted in female autobiographies in New Zealand inscribes the mother as central to issues of subjectivity and embodiment, language and authority, the remembered and the real, her signature act of looking back mirroring crucial textual issues of women's self-relation. Reading New Zealand women's autobiographies for their reflections of female subjectivity and the significance of gender to modes of remembrance and self-expression, this thesis also explores the phenomenon of the feminine pre-face, the prevalent tendency of female autobiographical writers in New Zealand to initial their subjective representations with marks of authorial self-effacement.