Gendered Resistance: A Comparative Study of Four Twentieth-Century Women’s Autobiographies

Abstract

This thesis examines comparatively the first parts of four twentieth-century women's autobiographies that have never been studied together: Simone de Beauvoir's Memoires d' une jeune fille rangdee (1958), Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), Janet Frame's To the Is-Land (1982) and Marguerite Duras's L'Amant (1984). Its aim is to show how these women resisted or subverted the established order in their childhood and adolescence and how, through their autobiographical practice, they challenge some assumptions about women's creativity. For this purpose, this study involves a discussion of the reception of each autobiograph, a close analysis of their narrative techniques, and an examination of the institutions in which each protagonist grew up, mainly family, school and/or church. Among these institutions, I emphasise the role of interpersonal relationships within the family, and in particular the mother/daughter relationship. This thesis draws attention to various strategies used by these women to resist subjection: through their bodies, through language, or simply through an escape from the institution, with three of these protagonists choosing to grow up in the street rather than in the family or in the school. Similarly, the way the presence of the narrator is established in the text challenges the reader's perception of the woman writer. I conclude that for these women, the search for identity is not a search for a role or a position but for a place, though they find it in the margins of society.