Workshop 39

39.
Truth in the Telling: Gendering Structures
of Authenticity in Early Modern and Academic Contexts

Organizers:

Kathryn Burns, History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Megan Matchinske, English, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Description:
Truth, perhaps the preeminent epistemological category in the early modern thinking, gets surprisingly little airtime these days, especially if and when we consider it as generic byproduct, an effect of the very discourses in which it is uttered. In the following workshop we hope to interrogate truth’s formal structures as they are represented in the early modern women’s texts that we teach and in the methods that we employ to authorize our own versions of the authentic. We will follow an open-discussion format, dividing our session into two interrelated conversations, the first focusing of the materials that we study, the second on the critical practices that we employ as we teach and learn the early modern world.

In the first portion of our workshop we envision two 20-minute discussions each focusing on the authentic as it is constructed in the 17th century. In opening we will turn to the private writing of early modern women and that most seemingly familiar and naturalized of all English writings—the diary. Often lauded as a prototype to modern notions of interiority and personal revelation, the early modern diary ostensibly professes its truths in promises of authentic self-disclosure. While scholars have been correct to question that formulation, to recognize diurnal structure as narrative fabrication, our critical proclivities have led us away from the concept of truth itself. In the first segment of our workshop then we hope to retrieve and recalibrate notions of truth as they are reflected in early modern diary writing. It is our contention that the early modern autobiographical form created a gender-based relationship to truth—a relationship that enabled, in the case of many women writers, a unique and sometimes revolutionary rethinking of early modern meaning-systems. Of the many 17th-century English women’s diaries available to us, Lady Anne Clifford’s extensive musings, collected in triplicate in the Clifford “Great Books,” will provide an early focus.

In the next portion of our workshop, also focused on the early modern past, participants will turn to a second and more apparently public kind of “structured” truth, the Peruvian exclamación—a formalized outburst in the notarial record that literally voiced protest or refusal. Commissioned mainly though not exclusively by women, these mediated exclamations were produced by a small coterie of official male scribes according to standardized protocols. It is here, facilitators would like to suggest, that the formulaic language of contractual obligation begins to break down. One of the most textually disruptive documents in the notarial repertoire—the exclamación gave women access to a form of public protest against patriarchal male violence and coercion—a semi-formal restraining order that spoke the truth of institutional imbalance within one of its most sympathetic forums. While we may be tempted on the one hand to discount the highly mediated exclamación as less “truthful” than the diary in what it can tell us about early modern women, a public artifact institutionally distanced from the women that it purports to represent, and on the other to dismiss the diary as historically unreliable, a private and biased account, workshop facilitators would like to suggest instead the importance of seeing beyond those binaries, both historically and structurally. We ask participants to consider how the very structures of authenticity that both forms employ (confession, notarial protocol) shape the kinds of truths that they are able to tell and the purposes to which they can be put.

We plan to spend the last 50 minutes of our workshop, the bulk of our time, exploring categories of truth and form as they reflect on and in our own critical work. Obviously there will be a good deal of overlap here as it is impossible to talk about current practice without thinking about the materials that it engages. In this discussion questions of pedagogy will take precedence as we begin to think through the ways that we learn and teach early modern “truths.” We will consider as well the way that we as literary critics and historians depend on different standards of authenticity to evaluate and frame the materials that we study. Gender as a category of authenticity should once again come to the fore, as a means to talk about why this work continues to matter for us as women academics. Avenues that we may wish to pursue in this discussion might include the following:

How does mediation shape the “truths” that we read and study?
What are the relationships, past and future, between narrative truth, critical practice, and historical meaning?
How are the uses to which various forms are put gendered, and how does that gendering shape the kinds of meaning making that will occur?
What should writing and naming women’s “truths” mean to and in our work, and how might those projects reflect on the matter of contemporary feminist knowledge claims?

Thinking about truth in structural terms, as the unique production of a series of formal and gendered patterns of disclosure, underscores the very real connection between subjective authority and the shape and direction of narrative—theirs and ours. It reveals what’s paramount to our task as teachers and educators—our testimonial relationship to and with the historical “truths” we are telling.

While the seventeenth century has often been lauded as for its introspective turn a, fewer diaries have been published across the period than have memoirs, roughly one-third of the total sample. The ratios, though, are markedly lower for women. This imbalance may have something to do with survival rates. As diary-writers ostensibly identified no audience beyond the self, so too, their works would be less secure for posterity, more easily disposable. This ephemeral quality was no doubt exacerbated in women’s writings where reasons of modesty and perceptions of historical insignificance kept numbers down. We hear of second-hand accounts of women who destroyed manuscripts when they feared discovery or asked that they be burnt upon death. In his eulogy to Lady Anne Clifford, Bishop Rainbow apologized for her literary presumption. Pepys’s tells us that his wife wrote an account of their lives too accurate to be comfortable. Still, the disproportionately small number of seventeenth-century women’s diaries that survives is worth contemplating. Of the twenty-eight autobiographies written by women that we have encountered, only three could be said to privilege a diurnal form, and even here the narrative is not uniformly serial in composition. In this workshop we want to examine that imbalance, exploring the reasons why early modern women found it difficult to write diaries and why when they did write diaries their narratives took exceptional shape.

Albeit that Sainct Augustine, attributed much to histories, yet doth he adde, that hee can not see how all that which is written by the witte of man can bee in everie point true, consideringe that all men are lyers, and that it commeth to passe often tymes, that they which follow the reason of man in anye historie, builde uppon the brutes of the vulgar sorte, and are abused by the passions of sundrie men, which report nothinge of certayn.” (Matthieu Coignet, Politique Discourses upon trueth and Lying, trans. Sir Edward Hoby [London 1586], 72).

Preliminary Readings (total 10 pages):

Excerpts from The Diaries of Lady Anne Clifford (Ed. D. J. H. Clifford. Wolfeboro Falls, NH: Alan Sutton Publishing Inc., 1990).
Excerpts from Notarial Records (translated and transcribed from the Cuzco Regional Archives—late 17th-century notaries)

Secondary Sources (total 10 pages):

Excerpt from “Forms of Authority: Women’s Legal Representations in Mid-Colonial Cuzco” (Kathryn Burns, in Marta Vicente and Chris Cortequera, eds., Women and Textual Authority in the Early Modern Spanish World, Routledge, forthcoming).
Excerpt from “Truth in the Telling: Moral, Method, and History in Anne Dowriche’s The French Historie” (Megan Matchinske, ELR, forthcoming).
Excerpt from What Happens to History: The Renewal of Ethics in Contemporary Thought (Howard Marchitello ed., New York: Routledge, 2001).