Archetypical Life Scripts in Memoirs of Childhood: Heaven, Hell and Purgatory

Roger Neustadter (Northwest Missouri State University, Rogern at mail.nwmissouri.edu)

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DOI: 10.1191/0967550704ab017oa

Abstract

Today the memoir has become a robust trend in American publishing. If the memoir was once the preserve of eminent people and celebrities, now ordinary women and men are telling their life stories as well. This article is an attempt to identify and analyse a particular genre of this popular form of autobiographical writing — the memoir of childhood. The article examines the patterns and distinctions that can be discerned in contemporary narratives of childhood. In many memoirs of childhood, elemental motifs are discernible. In many narratives of childhood, the child inhabits either a hell (a period of remembered suffering and misery), a heaven (a period of a remembered paradise), or a purgatory (a period of a transitional social space lived between two social worlds). The article looks at examples of each of these three motifs in memoirs of childhood.

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