Workshops: Goods

Workshop 15: Telling Women's Lives:
the Representation of Intimate Space

Conveners:

• Carrie Faye Klaus (F), University of Illinois, Urbana
• Erika Laquer, Ada Comstock Program, Smith College
• Sharon Cadman Seelig (E), Smith College
• Andrea Sununu (E), DePauw University

The intimate spaces of women's lives are sometimes physical (court, country house, convent, or even letter), sometimes spiritual (the record of devotional observance or challenge to sacred space), sometimes social (the struggle over property, custody, or personal liberty); they may be generous, satisfying, harshly restrictive, or threatened. Considering Jeanne de Jussie's Petite Chronique,Lady Ann Fanshawe's Memoirs, diary entries by Lady Margaret Hoby and Lady Anne Clifford, and letters by Katherine Philips and Lady Arbella Stuart, we analyzed the negotiation and representation of such spaces, the means of marking significance within them, and the definition of self in relation to authority. Our readings offered suggestive pairings, some generic (diaries, letters), some thematic (the resistance of authority or the imagery of isolation). We asked participants for a one-page response to a question about one or two texts: How is the space created, affirmed, or threatened? What gets included or excluded? What is the author's paradigm or model? her sense of herself, her relation to others or to an institution? What is the purpose of this text--to record, persuade, justify, reflect? What information (historical, social, religious) is necessary for accurate readings? What anachronisms must we avoid?