Workshops: Stories

Workshop 6: The Power of Story:
Women's Narrative and the Lived Experience of Violence

Conveners:

• RL Widmann, English, University of Colorado
• Sylvia Bowerbank, English, McMaster University
• Sara Mendelson, History, McMaster University
• Mary O'Connor, English, McMaster University

In this workshop we explored theoretical and practical questions about our interpretive strategies--literary, historical, psychological, and feminist--of narrative elements in four different types of document by 17th-century women, all concerned with descriptions of violence and coercion:

1) Mary Sidney's translations of two Davidian psalms filled with images of violence
2) a daughter's account of her mother's struggles under religious persecution
3) women's testimony in matrimonial disputes
4) an abused wife's letters to her sister

Our discussion focused on two interrelated questions: first, what sort of power is story-telling for women; and secondly, what was the purpose of using a particular narrative approach to 'take control of the story' in the context of the gender dynamics of coercion and violence? Read as narrative, these texts reveal a diversity of strategies women used in articulating their lived experience and in taking control of that experience. Yet can we discern common threads in women's narratives of violence, despite the disparate social and economic backgrounds of those women who told their stories?

MARY SIDNEY: Mary Sidney's translations of Psalms 58 and 97 show her as author/authority of violence as she relates well-known religious stories. As Sidney "speaks" the voice of God, calling upon the deity to mete out justice through physical and psychic violence, does she establish a divine utterance that is gender-neutral? Or is the voice of a powerful and vengeful deity in fact constituted in women's lived experience in the material and physical world? Does Sidney use the figure of God to write women's authority as narrators of their own experience?

ELIZABETH CARY: Composed by one or more of Elizabeth Cary's daughters, *Elizabeth Cary, Lady Falkland: Her Life* depicts Cary's conversion to Catholicism as an epic struggle in which her obedience to God's will is met with violence by those men--whether king, father, or husband--who would have Cary submit to their will. Cary suffered many humiliations and punishments: she was confined within a Protestant household, disinherited by her parents, her household allowance cut off, her children removed from her care, servants and all moveables taken from her home. What were Cary's strategies for asserting her version of reality over that of her husband and other adversaries? What sort of historical subject emerges as a woman attempts self-definition in a hostile environment? To what extent does the daughter's memorializing of her mother's resistance to systemic violence mark the emergence of a distinctive form of biography?

WOMEN'S COURT TESTIMONIES: In early modern England, women from all sectors of society testified in disputes brought before the church courts, revealing intimate details about marriage and family life. Were these testimonies mere summaries of 'the facts', or can we interrogate their status as constructed narratives shaped much like fictional tales? What function did stories of coercion and violence have in the lived experience of ordinary women? Was a well-constructed narrative necessary in order for a woman to be heard at all (in the courts, among neighbours or friends or relatives)? Can we characterize women's depositions as a kind of literary genre? To what extent were they framed for the purpose of 'getting control of the story'?

ANNE DORMER: From 1685 to 1691 Anne Dormer wrote a series of letters to her sister, Elizabeth Trumbull, in which she described the daily events of her life. Above all, she chronicled her abusive marriage, recording in detail many verbal battles with her husband. Do Dormer's letters provide her with an alternative subjectivity--one related to her love for her sister--in their sometimes pathological revisiting of the daily oppression? What are the dynamics of storytelling within the family and within a marriage? In constructing herself sometimes as a victim, sometimes as superior, and in making herself the narrator of victimhood, does Dormer take pleasure in the story telling? How does Dormer create a separate and oppositional self in her writing, while daily negotiating space and voice in her domestic sphere?

Preliminary List of Readings

1. Mary Sidney's translation of Psalms 58 and 97 (2 pp.)
2. Selections from Elizabeth Cary, Lady Falkland: Her Life (c.1655)
3. Transcripts of 17th-century depositions by women (2-3 pp.)
4. Transcripts of selected letters by Anne Dormer (2-3 pp.)