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Archetypical
Life Scripts in Memoirs of Childhood: Heaven, Hell and Purgatory
SAGE Publications, Inc.200410.1191/0967550704ab017oa
RogerNeustadter
Northwest Missouri State University, Rogern@mail.nwmissouri.edu
Address
for correspondence: Roger Neustadter, Sociology, Northwest Missouri State
Univer- sity, Maryville, MO 64468, USA; Email: Rogern@mail.nwmissouri.edu
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.
Mary
Gordon (1996: xiv) wrote in her memoir of her father that `I am primarily
a writer of fiction, but I knew I couldn't present him as a fictional character
because the details of his life, presented as fiction, would be too bizarre
to be believed.' Years ago people who thought they had a story to tell sat
down to write a novel: but today many people with a story to tell about their
lives sit down to write a mem- oir, a story told directly from life, rather
than a story fashioned by the imagination out of life. Many contemporary memoirs
are written by novelists, who no longer find it necessary to shroud the events
of their lives in supposedly purely imaginative works (Gordon, 1996; Harrison,
1997). Fiction demands that the writer invent; memoir exploits the gift of
lived experience. Where once the novel, based
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on the
author's lived and remembered experience was the form cho- sen, the memoir
has become the form for conveying that experience. One of the attractions
of contemporary memoirs is that they not only `show' and `tell', but they
reflect on the very process of telling itself. In many contemporary memoirs,
the author successfully com- bines the techniques of fiction with essay writing,
the personal with public dimensions of experience, and the documentary account
with poetic and evocative recreations of experience. For many writers today,
the memoir is the format of first, not last, resort. American publishing is,
in the words of Vivian Gornick (1996) experiencing a `memoir boom'. The current
age seems to be characterized by a need to testify about the meaning and significance
of one's life. Today, particularly in American culture, the memoir has become
a popular choice for telling a story. `Alice B. Toklas did hers and now everybody
will do theirs', Gertrude Stein observed in Everybody's autobiography (1973),
referring to her companion, whom she imper- sonated in The autobiography of
Alice B. Toklas (1933). Contempor- ary times, it has frequently been noted
(Atlas, 1996; Blais, 1997; Gornick, 1996), are characterized by a deluge of
memoirs. Memoir seems to have become the fin-de-siècle literary form. The
literary genre of the memoir has become a particularly robust trend in con-
temporary American publishing. There has been a proliferation of titles, a
noticeable presence on best-seller lists, special sections in book reviews
and special sections in bookstores. No doubt commer- cial interests are involved
in the proliferation of memoirs; many mem- oirs have been huge successes that
authors and publishing houses would wish to repeat. Not only are people moved
to write their life stories, but there is a ready audience for the stories.
Readers crave to know the life experi- ences of others. The popularity of
memoirs for the book-buying pub- lic has been noted by numerous cultural observers.
Blais (1997: 80) notes that `You would have to be living in a cultural vacuum
not to have noticed that memoir as a genre is hot.' James Atlas observed in
The New York Times Magazine (1996) that the triumph of memoir is `now established
fact'. The memoir, Patricia Hampl asserts (1997), `has become the signature
genre of the age'. Since the publication of Augustine's and Rousseau's confessions,
the memoir has been a staple of a written form that involves the wri- ter
as self-publicist, discloser and author of personal history as against public
history. Memoirs were once written by famous people, eminences basking in
the twilight of their fame. They were the pre- serves of ex-presidents, public
officials and celebrities. That has now changed. Today it seems that ordinary
women and men are
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rising
up to tell their story of how an individual life has meaning. Autobiographical
writing, as Richard Coe (1984: 41) has observed, `is an assertion of uniqueness'.
The writer, by fixing his or her experi- ence on the printed page, is making
the claim that his or her life experience is of significance. The uniqueness
of this experience man- dates the telling of that experience. In recent decades,
there has been a notable flowering of narratives about the remembrance of
personal pasts. A growing number of authors (some of whom are professional
writers and novelists, others ordinary people), have a story to tell, a lesson
to teach, a life to be made public. This new trend in confessional writing
has produced a library of historical, sociological, psychological and cultural
revel- ation. Memoirists witness their traumatic illnesses, racial experiences,
sexual identities and family dysfunctions. It seems that there is no topic
that is taboo, or not written about. The contemporary memoir has opened up
a new kind of narrative authority for ethnic subcul- tures, for different
sexual persuasions; for anyone, in short, whose experiences fall outside the
themes of worldly success, power and moral or spiritual growth, which were
once prominent in American autobiography. This essay is an attempt to identify
and analyse a specific segment of this popular form of autobiographical writing — the memoir of childhood, which given the volume of such works, could well
be con- sidered a distinctive literary genre in itself. In Mystery and manners,
Flannery O'Connor (1969) wrote that `Anybody who has survived his childhood
has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.' The sheer
volume of contemporary memoirs on child- hoods would seem to verify Flannery
O'Connor's claim. The child has attracted a great deal of scholarly attention
in the last few decades. Studies have been devoted to the historical status
of childhood (Aries, 1962; de Mause, 1974; Postman, 1982), the status of childhood
in literature (Kuhn, 1982), the autobiography of child- hood and adolescence
(Coe, 1984), the status of childhood in social theory (Neustadter, 1989) and
the psychology of the child (Erikson, 1950). The purpose of this essay is
to examine the descriptions and patterns of childhood in recent memoirs. The
task set here is to illuminate the memories of childhood in the contemporary
memoir and cast some light on the kind of childhood that is remembered. This
essay asks: `what are the common and recurrent characteristics of childhood,
as interpreted in the perspec- tive of contemporary memoirs?' The ideas and
images concerning the child emerge from their representations and coalesce
into a dynamic pattern. By looking at these representations not individually,
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but
as a coherent corpus, we can discern a system with its own images and landscape.
The multiplicity of contemporary memoirs in which childhood is represented,
varied as they are, forms a complex system with various levels of significance.
By analysing certain specific themes and images in the memoir, it may be possible
to make visible some of the themes of a composite language that is the retrospective
creation of adults who have written about their childhoods, a childhood they
try to make sense of and bear wit- ness to. In general, memoirs that deal
with childhood may be divided into two broad categories. In one are those
works whose central purpose is to recapture the essence of a lost past. The
means of achieving this end are diverse and various memoirists employ differing
techniques to reach it. Frank McCourt and Mary Karr attempt a rigorous use
of memory, whereas Mary Gordon's reconstruction is based at least partially
on documentation of family and personal records. The second category contains
those works in which the construction of a childhood world is not an end in
itself but a pretext. Such recollec- tions may serve as an outlet for the
nostalgia of the adult for a long lost paradise that is believed to have once
existed. The child in his or her own Garden of Eden is the vision offered
by Jill Kerr Conway, Doris Kearns Goodwin and Elizabeth Spencer. Whatever
the tools employed, these practitioners of memoir subscribe to the proposition
that childhood is a central element in existence. In both of these per- spectives,
the childhood universe is usually portrayed as an extreme one. This paper
is intended as an examination of the kinds of child- hoods that are remembered,
and of the types of childhood experi- ences that are recreated in literary
form by contemporary men and women describing and examining the existence
of their former selves. Memories and recollections of childhood may look at
many facets of childhood, psychological and self-development, personality,
religious faith, philosophical quests and political ideologies. There are,
no doubt, many possibilities for dividing, organizing and classifying an inquiry
into the myriad of memoirs that focus on and describe child- hoods. There
are many archetypical life scripts in memoirs of childhood. The structure
of this paper is simple and topological in classifying and describing these
archetypical life scripts. In many recent mem- oirs, there are elemental motifs
of childhood that are discernible. The memoirs considered here conjure up,
by way of symbols, images and impressions, a picture of childhood with a pattern
and signifi- cance that can be retrospectively interpreted. The recollections
and
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descriptions
of the unique landscape of childhood are myriad, comprising both a heaven
and hell and in some cases a transitional space — a sort of purgatory
that is neither a hell nor a heaven, but a transitional landscape betwixt
and between. The archetypes of hea- ven and hell have been used by Kuhn (1982)
to analyse depictions of childhood in fiction, and by Coe (1984) to examine
childhood in autobiographical writing. In this paper, this typology is applied
to contemporary memoirs. The category of a purgatory, of childhood lived betwixt
and between cultural borders, reflects the experience of childhoods in multicultural
societies. They reflect neither experi- ence of a hell or a heaven, but a
childhood lived in an often ambigu- ous and confusing space. This paper will
examine examples of each of these three depictions of childhood in the memoir.
It is presented neither as a comprehensive study, nor a representative study.
The memoirs discussed here are presented as samples of the many contem- porary
memoirists who have written about what happened to them in their childhoods.
THE HELL OF CHILDHOOD IN MEMOIR Children in the novels of Dickens and Zola
are often the subjects of unbearable conditions and exploitation. The vision
of childhood as a period of unmitigated suffering is by no means any longer
unique to fiction. The aspects of life experience now appearing in memoir
would in the past be addressed only in fiction. The social taboos on discussing
violence, parental cruelty and incest no longer censor what appears in the
memoir. In recent memoirs, the source of suffer- ing is not social and political
turmoil, but sources closer to home. The story of inadequate and dysfunctional
families has become one of the central motifs of the late twentieth century.
Many children experience family break-up, fatherlessness, a parent's alcoholism,
and physical and sexual abuse. For many adults, an unhappy childhood leaves
an indelible imprint in memory. There is a plethora of narratives of unhappy
childhoods. As Richard Coe (1984: 68) has noted, in his study of over 600
examples of autobiographical writing on childhood, there is a `high proportion
of unhappiness' in childhood autobiogra- phy. Memoirists of unhappy childhoods
fill books with descriptions of remembered miseries. The catalogue of writers
whose childhoods were miserable and intolerable is large and growing. The
vision of childhood as a period of unmitigated suffering appears frequently
in a number of contem- porary memoirs. Every happening, every relationship
and every event is framed by remembered unhappiness. The theme of the child
as the
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victim
of intrafamily conflicts, whose home life is transformed into a domestic hell
by the cruelty or neglect of parents, is a recurrent one. The essence of a
childhood perverted by the indifferent malice of authoritarian and capricious
parents has been distilled in several con- temporary memoirs. These memoirs
describe children who experience terrible childhoods, which involve dysfunctional
families, troubled parents, poverty and abuse. Lack of love, the interdiction
of com- munication and physical cruelty are the elements that make up the
infernos to which they are condemned. There are numerous accounts of bad childhoods.
Frank McCourt makes a case that his was particularly `miserable'. In Angela's
ashes (1996), the story of his Limerick childhood in the 1930s and 1940s,
McCourt begins his memoir by wondering how he survived such a `miserable childhood':
When I look back on my childhood, I wonder how I survived at all. It was,
of course a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your
while. Worse than the miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood,
and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic child- hood. People everywhere
brag and whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare
to the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless, loquacious alcoholic father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying schoolmasters; the Eng- lish, and the terrible things they did to us for eight hundred long
years. (1996: 11) The major tragedies of his `miserable childhood' were his
father's alcoholism, myriad childhood deaths and his family's poverty. Frank's
father, Malachy, drank the family into semi-starvation and his wife into beggardom.
Frank describes forays into the pub to try to bring his father home before
he drank up all his weekly wages: When the farm money is gone he rolls home
singing and crying over Ireland and his dead children, mostly about Ireland.
If he sings Roddy McCorley, it means he had only the price of a pint or two.
If he sings Kevin Barry, it means he had good day, that he is now falling
down drunk and ready to get us out of bed, line us up and make us promise
to die for Ireland. (1996: 95) Malachy drinks not only the dole money, but
a relative's `telegram money' for a new baby. `It's bad enough to drink the
dole or the wages', Frank writes (1996: 186), `but a man that drinks the money
for a new baby is gone beyond the beyond as my mother would say'.
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Almost
as relentless as the father's drinking is the list of childhood deaths. Three
of Frank's siblings die. The twins Eugene and Oliver die. A sister, Margaret,
dies when she is seven weeks old. Later on Angela had a stillbirth, and then
later still bore two more sons who did not survive. Frank became ill with
typhoid fever and was hospitalized on a fever ward for several months. The
ward was empty, except for a young girl, Patricia, with diphtheria and `something
else', who haemorrhaged to death. They are forbidden to talk to one another,
laugh, or sing. But she loans him a book with the first works of Shakespeare
he has ever heard. When the nurses learn that Patricia is teaching Frank poetry,
they transfer him upstairs to the end of a large empty ward. Soon after the
separation, she dies. Two of Frank's boyhood friends, Mickey Spellacy and
`Quasimodo', die of consumption. McCourt describes his first sexual experience
with a consumptive young girl and describes how he was terrified that this
had hastened her death. The book is full of detailed descriptions of poverty.
The overall impression of Limerick is dampness and misery: From October to
April the walls of Limerick glistened with the damp. Clothes never dried:
tweed and woolen coats housed living things, sometimes sprouted mysterious
vegetations. In pubs, steam rose from damp bodies and garments to be inhaled
with cigarette and pipe smoke laced with the stale fumes of stout and whiskey
and tinged with the odor of piss wafting in from the outdoor jakes where many
a man puked up his week's wages. (1996: 12) The family home is next to the
public toilet where residents of the entire lane disposed of their waste.
A sadistic teacher peels an apple in front of his starving pupils, occasionally
throwing them pieces. Frank steals food from drunks. As the family becomes
poorer Frank licks greasy newspapers for substance: ... I take the greasy
newspaper from the floor. I lick the front page, which is all advertisements
for films and dances in the city. I lick the headlines. I lick the great attacks
of Patton and Montgomery in France and Germany. I lick the war in the Pacific.
I lick the obituaries and the sad memorial poems, the sports pages, the market
prices of eggs, butter and bacon. I suck the paper till there isn't a smidgen
of grease. (1996: 296) Frank (1996: 250) spots his mother in a crowd outside
a priest's house begging for any food left over from the priest's dinner:
`This is my
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own
mother, begging. This is worse than the dole.... It's the worst kind of shame,
almost as bad as begging on the streets where the tinkers hold up their scabby
children.' Frank becomes further alie- nated from his mother when he realizes
that she is sleeping with their landlord to survive. In The liar's club (1995),
Mary Karr locates herself in the centre of a chaotic world of alcoholic parents,
a mother with a nervous con- dition, divorce, step-parents and their lovers,
whose relations to one another are constantly changing. Karr narrates with
great force and wit the story of needy children and wayward parents and the
awfulness of Leechfield, the town in which she grew up. Karr describes how
she and her elder sister Leicia grew up during the 1960s in `a swamphole,
a suckhole, and the anus of the planet', Leechfield in east Texas. `The oil
refineries and chemical plants', Karr writes: ... gave the whole place a rotten-egg
smell.... Plus the place was in a swamp, so whatever industrial poisons got
pumped into the sky just seemed to sink down and thicken in the heat. I later
learned that Leechfield at the time was the manufacturing site for Agent Orange,
which surprised me not one bit. That morning, when I woke up lying under the
back slant of the windshield, the world smelled not unlike a wicked fart in
a closed room. (1995: 34—35) Children play by chasing the DDT truck
to see who will upchuck first. The beach is covered with grunge, rotting shrimps
and man o' war jellyfish. Karr's mother, Charlie, is stranded in this hell
hole with two kids, a crazy mother dying of cancer and an alcoholic husband.
Karr describes a southern gothic horror story of a dysfunc- tional family.
The book is replete with violence and alcoholism — both parents drank
heavily and fought bitterly, moving from verbal abuse to physical combat with
their daughters as witnesses. There are stories of neglect and the tragic
stories of her mother who lost the children of an early marriage, stolen from
her by a mother-in- law who thought she was incapable of raising them, her
father's stroke, an aunt dying of cancer, and an episode of rape at age seven:
`Think of two good-sized Smithfield hams — that's roughly how big I
was. Then think of a newly erect teenaged boy on top of that and pumping between
my legs' (1995: 68). The central problem that haunts her life is her mother's
`nervous- ness', an east Texas euphemism for bouts of insanity. Her mother
becomes increasingly psychotic, making a confused attempt on her daughters'
lives, is adjudged `nervous' and removed to an institution.
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Karr
describes her mother's breakdown in the voice of a lonely child observer watching
her world fall apart: Maybe drinking caused Mother to go crazy, or maybe the
craziness was just sort of standing in line to happen and the drinking actually
staved it off a while. All I know is that first Mother was drinking, then
she and Daddy were fighting worse than ever, and finally they were hauling
her away in leather four point restraints. (1995: 125) The essence of a childhood
perverted by the malice of authori- tarian and abusive parents has been distilled
in the memoirs of Ruthie Bolton and Richard Rhoades. The story of Ruthie Bolton
(a pseudonym) in gal (1994) is told to the novelist Josephine Hum- phreys
`the way that Southern stories are best told: out loud teller to the listener'.
The resulting memoir the reader is told describes growing up in a troubled
`unloved childhood' in a `no love family'. Ruthie Bolton was born in 1961
to a 13-year-old mother in an unpaved section of Charleston called Hungry
Neck. She recalls that `They called me gal, because of one time I wandered
past the yard and my grandfather hollered ``Get that gal out of the street''.'
After Ruthie's vituperative step-grandfather, Clovis Fleetwood, beat her young
mother for her promiscuity, she ran away, abandoning Ruthie to him and his
wife. The mother that Ruthie never knew would be murdered by a lover who tied
her to a bed and set her afire. Suspected of infidelity, her grandmother was
bludgeoned beyond recovery in front of the children. After his wife's death
Fleetwood subjects Ruthie and her sisters to a life of drudgery, intimidation,
humiliation and enslavement. Fleet- wood commanded them to scrub the house
`spick and span' and to serve him as if they were his handmaidens. After his
nightly bath he would order gal to scrape the dead skin off the soles of his
feet with a knife. Later, describing the insect collection of her son, Bolton
(1994: 164) notes `I never had anything like that, no hobby. Hobby! Your hobby
was to get your ass up, get your work done, that's what your hobby was!' While
Fleetwood spent his money on girlfriends and drink, the girls wore socks on
their hands instead of gloves and ate scraps. The girls, especially Ruthie
are tyrannized and beaten. Bolton (1994: 267) describes how `I wasn't getting
nothing but beaten. I was beaten for socks. Shoes. Hair. Bump. Any little
thing'. After the principal of her school tells Fleetwood that gal has been
stealing lunch money, he brutally beats her with a tree limb:
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He
started beating me and beating me and beating me. I was jumping up all over
the table. I was screaming. I was screaming, I was scream- ing, screaming
and screaming. And he beat me. He beat me. He beat me, he beat me, he beat
me. He hit me so much that he happened to hit his own self, and when he did
that he went berserk. Then he took off his belt. He took off his belt. I'm
going to make water come out of your eyes he said. He didn't chop me with
the leather end of the belt. He hit me with the buckle part. He had just chop
and chop me and chop me. I was scream- ing and yelling but I never did cry.
Never did cry. Never did cry. (1994: 49) After she escapes Fleetwood's brutality
by moving out, she embarks on a course of promiscuity and drug abuse, endures
a violent marriage, loses custody of her first child before finding transcendence
and sanctuary with a tender man and his family: `That family changed my life.
I came out of a no-love family, and fell into a love family' (1994: 201).
The first sentence sets the stage and tone of Richard Rhodes's childhood memoir
A hole in the world: `When I was thirteen months old my mother killed herself.'
This awful fact is the `hole in the world' that defined and destroyed the
author's childhood. After several itin- erant years, his father finally landed
Rhodes and his brother Stanley in the house of a woman who became their stepmother.
Rhodes describes his stepmother unambiguously as a ghastly, sadistic monster
and his father as a `cowardly' man, who allowed the stepmother's abuse to
go on until the children were removed by the juvenile court. Rhodes uses political
terms to describe what hap- pened to him during the two years he lived with
his stepmother. Rhodes (1990: 88) describes his `victimization' `in the concentration
camp of our stepmother years'. `She tinkered sadistically', he wrote, `with
control worked out on the surface and the interior of our bodies'. Rhodes
(1990: 117) described a tortured existence in which the stepmother imposed
a rigid system of rules regarding how toilet paper was to be installed. This
was enforced `with violence' that included `slapping us, kicking us, bashing
our heads with a broom handle or a mop or the stiletto heel of a shoe, slashing
our backs and the backs of our legs with the buckle of a belt'. `Our stepmother',
Rhodes (1990: 117) writes, `tinkered more rad- ically with manipulating what
we took into our bodies and what we expelled'. Rhodes describes a tortured
existence in which he and his brother were systematically starved. Rhodes
describes how he
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and
his brother ate black-eyed peas and hard boiled eggs `while she and Dad dined
on pork chops and even steak, the meaty sear of their frying drifting back
onto the sleeping porch to tantalize us ... our cheeks gushed saliva'. Both
brothers are significantly under weight for their years and turn to scavenging.
In a horrific passage, Rhodes describes how his stepmother attempted not only
to control his behaviour and diet but his bodily functions as well. Since
the bathroom was near her bedroom she forbade the brothers to use the bathroom
at night. Rhodes graphically describes his struggle to retain urine: Dutifully
I went to the bathroom just before climbing to my upper bunk on the north
wall of the sleeping porch, but as soon as Stanley turned out the light and
we settled down to sleep I felt my bladder fill. I lay awake then for hours.
I tried to redirect my thoughts, tell myself stories, recite numbers, count
sheep. I clamped my sphincters until they cramped and burned. Lying on my
back, hurting and urgent, I cried silently to the ceiling low overhead tears
running down my face without consolation, only reminding me of the other flow
of body fluid that my commandant had blocked. When clamping my sphincters
no longer worked I pinched my penis to red pain. (1990: 119) Rhodes urinates
into a jar at night and surreptitiously empties it to avoid the wrath of his
stepmother. The boy becomes an object to be used, misused and abused when
his cost outweighs his usefulness. Physical cruelty and lack of love are the
elements that make up the domestic hell to which Bolton and Rhodes are condemned.
Richard Berendzen, the former President of American University in Washington,
DC, tells the story of a male incest survivor in his mem- oir Come here (1993).
In the first episode of the book, Berendzen describes how when he was eight
the `sexual abuse of my childhood began' when his mother summoned him into
the bedroom while she was having sex with his father. The abuse will become
a recurrent one. Although sex with both parents never recurred, Berendzen
describes how his mother became obsessed with him: his clothes, his academic
achievement and his discipline. The incest resumed when he was twelve. During
the next three years, he (1993: 7) became the `passion and her prey' of a
woman whose mental instability took the form of repeated incestuous assaults
on a child who was power- less to resist. If we look at these memoirs as a
group, some archetypal fairy-tale qualities are present in them. These are
bleak tales of needy children. Each narrative recounts memories of inadequate
nurturing, the fear
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of
an evil parent or step-parent. Every happening, every event, is seen through
the prism of remembered misery. And yet despite the abuses they endure, each
of these memoirists displays an inner toughness that enables them to survive
mental manipulation and torture. In general, the narrators not only lived
to tell about their unhappy child- hoods, they prospered. They are redemptive
children. Their voices are purer than the voices in the world and the adults
they encounter. The children in these memoirs are resurrected as adults. These
memoirists emerge from their childhood hell, if not unscathed, intact into
a world of mature satisfaction. THE HEAVEN OF CHILDHOOD IN MEMOIR At the other
end of the scale are childhoods that are visions of a para- dise lost. Memories
of an idyllic childhood are not as numerous as those of miserable childhoods.
In his study of autobiographical writ- ing on what he called `the Childhood',
Richard Coe (1984: 62) noted that of the 600-odd examples in his study a sentimental
`nostalgia is rare'. Perhaps because of the focus on abuse and dysfunctionality
in memoirs, some memoirists are inspired by the desire to recapture something
of a paradise that has been lost, or partially lost, forever. As counterparts
to the depictions of infernal horrors of childhood, there are the descriptions
of its more joyful aspects. Bliss is harder to communicate than suffering,
and the many attempts to recreate a childhood paradise all too often result
in uncomfortably sentimen- tal effusions characterized by a mawkish enthusiasm
for nature. Jill Kerr Conway probably comes closest to capturing the eternal
awe and wonderment of a childhood Eden. In her memoir The road from Coorain
(1990), Conway tells her story of growing up on an iso- lated sheep farm in
the Australian outback. Joyful scenes of children frolicking in Edenic landscapes
are lyrically described. In Conway's (1990: 51) description of a recollected
morning, `Magpies used to perch on the windmill's stand and sing every morning
at first light. This sound would mingle in waking with the early morning smell
of flowers in the garden. It was an idyllic world.' Conway's description of
her childhood is literally a childhood in the garden. Her Coorain (1990: 31)
was a `delightful place to live', a terrestrial paradise. Conway describes
her childhood in a tropical garden of Eden as beautiful and `magical'. After
a storm: The transformation of the countryside was magical. As far as the
eye could see wild flowers exploded into bloom. Each breeze would waft their
pollen round the house, making it seem as though we lived in
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an
enormous garden. Bulrushes shot up beside the watercourses, and suddenly there
were waterfowl round about, erupting into flight as one approached. Evidences
of the fertility of the soil were all about us. (1990: 33) Soon I would drift
off to sleep in the evening bathed in the perfume of stocks, wallflowers,
and heliotrope in the summer, the crisp aroma of chrysanthemums in autumn.
A whole bed was given over to Parma violets, and great fistfuls of them would
sit in the middle of the round table on which we dined in summer on the southern
screened veranda. (1990: 41) Perhaps the account is tinted in brighter colours
than reality might justify. Yet, this Edenic garden in the outback provides
a refuge in which Conway and her two brothers grow up in an uncorrupted state
of nature. Conway's joyful existence is based on an acceptance of her family's
interdependence with a bountiful nature. Her social world is as bountiful
as the natural world that she describes. Her parents are `jubilant' with their
lives, full of plans for the future. She (1990: 34) `worships' her brothers,
who are gentle and generous, and her mother, who `encouraged a strict equality
between us'. Even after the brothers go off to boarding school, Conway's loneliness
is mod- erated by a `fascinating new companion', a kindly hired hand who was
a source of knowledge and friendship. Coorain is the perfect set- ting for
conversation, security and happiness. Parents, siblings and friends make for
a harmonious, prospering community. The advent of a radiant future promised
in earlier passages is threa- tened by the intrusion of events. After an eight-year
drought, her father's death and her older brother's death, the family moves
to the city where Conway prospers. Her strength and success in later life
are attributed to her bucolic beginnings. What was planted and grew in the
plains of New South Wales she optimistically and metaphori- cally notes `hugs
the earth firmly with its extended system of roots about which the plant life
is delicate but determined' (1990: 23). In Doris Kearns Goodwin's Wait till
next year (1997), the 1949—57 Brooklyn Dodgers are the gateway through
which Goodwin recol- lects memories not only of baseball, but of family, neighbourhood,
community, and the sensibilities of her girlhood. Her early years are happily
governed by family, neighbourhood and the baseball cal- endar. Wait till next
year is an old-fashioned reminiscence, an elegant, endlessly affectionate
evocation of a vanished way of life. The childhood paradise regained through
the memory of baseball is a sublime one, a rich lode from which the most precious
metals can
249
be
extracted. Baseball has been very good to the young Doris Kearns. Baseball
is her tie to many relationships. She notes that `a lasting bond had been
forged among my father, baseball, and me' (1997: 13). The neighbourhood too
is both divided and united by their love of baseball. At the centre of her
childhood is the `invisible community of base- ball', a community which reached
across generations and social class. The butchers at the Bryn Mawr Meat Market
were Giant fans: `They would mock my Dodgers, I would pretend to be angry,
but the truth was I loved going into their shop' (1997: 63). The Lubars and
Barthas were fervent followers of the Yankees: `We carried on our arguments
on the street, in the corner stores, and in each other's homes. If no minds
were changed, we took great pleasure in our endless debates and our shared
love of the sport'. Even her first confession is received by `a baseball loving
priest', who commends her to `say a special prayer for the Dodgers' (1997:
64). Doris's childhood has its own Dodgers and Doris highlight: a film compilation
of her meeting Dodger star players. After Roy Campanella addresses a church
meeting, Doris (1997: 96) meets the Dodger catcher, noting that `The warmth
of that broad smile was all I needed to know that this was a night I would
never forget.' Gil Hodges eloquently accepts her St Christopher medal as a
gift, and her (1997: 202) autograph encounter with Jackie Robinson gives her
`an unexpected moment I would treasure for the rest of my life'. The Dodgers
shine so brightly that her childhood glows. Tele- vision, she (1997: 120)
observes, `was only another wonder in a world of constantly unfolding wonders,
like the stories my mother told me, the first book I read, or my first trip
to Ebbets Field'. Through her mother, Goodwin came to worship the world of
books. Every night her mother comes to read to her. She loved listening to
her voice, so much softer and less piercing than her own. The block is an
`extended family': Unlike more affluent modern suburbs, whose fenced homes
are encircled by large ornamental lawns, the houses on my block were clus-
tered so close to one another that they function almost as a single home.
We felt free to dash in to any house for a snack from the mother-in-residence,
race through the side door in search of playmates. (1997: 57) The family vacationed
at Jones Beach, `which remains the finest beach I have ever seen.... A parade
for children and grown ups alike'
250
(1997:
40). The nuclear family, with the idyllic setting of Brooklyn, constitutes
the framework of an undisturbed paradise. Goodwin portrays a state that is
the essence of simplicity, but at the same time extraordinarily complex. The
Eden of childhood gives way to a more mature realization of the fifties. Her
narrative is a romantic tabulation within a realistic framework. Goodwin describes
a time when her life seemed idyllic, but also remembered are fears of polio,
air raid drills, the Rosenberg executions and McCarthy. If there were, as
she (1997: 10) observes, such worries they `hung over our childhood days like
low-lying clouds'. The weather is hardly severe enough to disturb play in
her field of dreams in Flatbush. Elizabeth Spencer's Landscapes of the heart
(1996) is a loving evocation of another beloved lost world. The Carrollton
Mississippi into which she is born is a comfortable, well-to-do island of
relative prosperity set on green hills above the Mississippi Delta. Spencer's
childhood seems to have been an enchanted Eden of watermelon cut- tings, swimming
holes, the lengthening shadows of pecan trees, and long horseback rides along
sleepy, dusty roads with magnolia-scented air. Spencer evokes affectionate
reminiscences of a past way of life: The cook would have left dozens of biscuits
in long pans ready for the oven, and there would be ham or a mountain of cold
fried chicken, with potato salad, sliced tomatoes and cucumbers, a wealth
of peach pre- serves and blackberry jam, and tremendous appetites, much laughing
and joking and good feelings, everybody cleaned up, the boys' hair slicked
down with water. This was as good as it got. (1996: 54) Spencer's memories
have more in common with the country life of the mythic Lake Wobegon, as described
by Garrison Keillor, than with the America of that time described by Theodore
Dreiser or Sinclair Lewis. The two sides of her family, the Spencers and the
McCains were of the genteel merchant class. `In my growing up time', Spencer
(1996: 8) writes, `I thought of our two families, my mother's (the McCains)
and my father's (the Spencers) as part of one, which was mine, and believed
we were happy. I think that back then we mostly were.' Her world is populated
by loving kin. Grandfather Gan was `the lov- ing companion of days that would
never be repeated'. Uncle Sidney fixed `affectionate attentions' on his niece
and was `ready to praise whatever good he could observe'. Even the racial
system looks benign in retrospect. The South's code of apartheid was `an ugly
system', she (1996: 32) comments. `But in that childhood time of enchantment
and love, it never seemed to be
251
anything
but part of the eternal. Might as well question why the live oaks were there,
or the flowers in Aunt Ester's garden, or the stars in the sky.' `As best
I can recall', she writes about the relations of blacks to a beloved uncle,
`they were exceptionally good-humored around him in a way that seemed to make
their dependency a reassurance to them rather than a burden. I can't to this
day believe I would not have noticed any deep-seated animosity.' Later, the
Eden of childhood gives way to a more mature realization of what the polite
South was really about, but the nostalgic images remain: `Enlightened as to
its ills, as one would have to come to be, I could never deny that I loved
it, or cease to look back on it with the greatest affection. I still claim
joy as a good portion of its quality, and I love it still' (1996: 33). As
Coe notes, these reveries of a lost paradise are also realizations that modernity
and progress have annihilated the pleasure and possi- bilities of the past.
`This is more than nostalgia', he (1984: 64) writes, `it is nostalgia shot
through with bitterness, resentment, and disgust. Not merely — once
upon a time — did the grass seem taller, the flow- ers and butterflies
brighter, the birds noisier; it is a fact that there was once more grass and
less concrete, that wildflowers and the butterflies had not yet been reduced
to rarity by weedkillers and insecticides.' In these memoirs, the outback
is still pristine, major league baseball unsullied by free agency and corporate
ownership, and the South beautiful and race relations harmonious. Basically,
the message is the same in these memoirs. Something good that once existed
has been destroyed. What emerges from the memoirs considered here are the
stories of childhoods that are the incarnation of simplicity and innocence.
These narratives describe happy, untroubled childhoods. The rep- resentation
of an idyllic domestic world as the natural habitat of the child presents
the family as a perfect social unit. The child in para- dise experiences a
pure bliss that is not allowed to grown ups. One reason for this heightened
sense of happiness is that the child has an undeveloped sense of time. These
children who live in an earthly paradise are oblivious to time. These childhoods,
which never know the miseries described by McCourt and Karr, are privileged
because they represent the hope of adults who see in the child the possibility
for the fulfilment of their own dreams. NARRATIVES OF CHILDHOOD ON RACIAL
AND GENDER BORDERS The new circumstances of childhoods lived in multicultural
societies gives rise to a new type of childhood memoir. Aronowitz and Giroux
(1991: 118—19) use the concept `border pedagogy', which sees
252
cultural
differences as enhancing public life and encouraging readers `to engage the
multiple references that constitute different cultural codes, experiences,
and languages including their own.' There is a subgenre of memoir by biracial
authors and gays about living on the borders of a race-obsessed and gender-obsessed
society that allows readers to enter such a world of multiple references.
A number of recent memoirs describe a childhood lived in a purgatory of sorts,
a borderland — a social landscape in which children grow up on racial
and gender borders, experiencing childhood in and between two social worlds.
In these memoirs, identity is not established but in flux. In The color of
water (1996), James McBride's moving narrative of his white mother's childhood
as the daughter of a cruel itinerant Orthodox rabbi, and her efforts to put
her dozen children through college, McBride recounts the multiple confusions
of his own child- hood with a white mother and 12 mixed race children in a
black hous- ing project surrounded by black people. Since conflict about racial
identity was part of their lives `written into our very faces, hands and arms',
McBride (1996: 94) writes: `The question of race was like the power of the
moon in my house. It's what made the river flow, the ocean swell, and the
tide rise, but it was a silent power, intractable, indomitable, indisputable,
and thus completely ignorable.' But the question of race will not go away.
`Is God black or white?', he asked his mother in frustration. In the answer
(1996: 39) that gives the book its title, she said: `God's not black. He's
not white ... God is the color of water. Water doesn't have a color.' McBride's
early childhood, in addition to containing all the ordi- nary joys and pangs
and struggles of life in large family, was touched by the confusions of living
on the racial border — a black child with a white mother. At school,
on the subway and at camp, his mother was often `the only white face in a
sea of black faces.' His mother's white- ness often embarrassed and sometime
alarmed him, for he perceived her to be in imminent danger from blacks and
from whites who disliked her for being a white person in a black world. I
could see it in the faces of the white people who stared at me and Mommy and
my siblings when we rode the subway, sometimes laugh- ing at us, pointing,
muttering things like, `Look at her with those little niggers'.... I remember
two black women pointing at us, saying, `Look at that white bitch,' and a
white man screaming at Mommy somewhere in Manhattan, calling her a `nigger
lover.' (1996: 23) Such incidents confirmed his childhood fears `that Mommy
was always in danger.' McBride describes other childhood moments of
253
living
on a racial border, living between two worlds: shopping with her black children
and bargaining heatedly in Hasidic stores, his mother would suddenly shout
in Yiddish, `I know what is happening here', when the merchants lapsed into
Yiddish. As a young adult, McBride was torn between being a musician and a
journalist, which he saw as a conflict between his blackness and his whiteness.
That uncertainty set him tracing his Baptist minister father's heritage and
learning about his mother's Jewish heritage. Although his mother is rejected
by her Jewish family (they sit shiva, the Jewish ritual mourning for the dead,
for his mother when she takes up with a black man) and she rejects them, she
kept the Jewish passion for education and took advantage of the window of
opport- unity the education authorities granted to parents to have their chil-
dren attend different school districts if they wanted. Consequently, his (1996:
68) mother `invariably chose predominantly Jewish public schools.' His experiences
left him with a unique sensibility of life on a racial border. McBride describes
himself as living on a border, a black man with a Jewish soul: Now as a grown
man, I feel privileged to have come from two worlds. My view of the world
is not merely that of a black man but that of a black man with something of
a Jewish soul. I don't consider myself Jewish, but when I look at Holocaust
photographs of Jewish women whose children have been wrenched from them by
Nazi soldiers, the women look like my mother and I think to myself, There
but for the grace of God goes my own mother — and by extension myself.
When I see two little Jewish old ladies giggling over coffee at a Manhattan
diner, it makes me smile because I hear my own mother's laughter beneath theirs.
(1996: 79) McBride explores his early confusion about race, but never mentions
feeling deprived or unhappy. He finds love and respect for both black and
white worlds in his mixed race experience. In Life on the color line (1995),
subtitled `the true story of a white boy who discovered he was black', Gregory
Howard Williams tells his painful story of being brought up in Virginia believing
that he was white and then moving to Indiana where he becomes `a colored boy.'
When his parents' marriage failed, Williams discovers that his father, who
had been passing for Italian, is black. As the family split up, Gregory and
his younger brother Mike return to Muncie, to live not with the white side
of the family, which lived in a sparkling new two-storey home that they had
visited previously, but with the black
254
side
of the family, which had no indoor plumbing and used a slop jar on the porch.
Williams literally lives on the border between the white and black world.
`This is the projects', their father explained (1995: 38). `Colored families
live on this side of Madison, and crackers on the other. Stay outta there.
If the crackers learn you're colored, they'll beat the hell out of you. You
gotta be careful here, too. Colored don't like half breeds either.' White
relatives live only two miles away yet `not one of them had come for us.'
Yet on the playground, the black kids pick fights because he looks like a
cracker. Williams is able to explore issues of race and identity living on
what he calls `the color line.' The memoir balances the voice of the displaced
boy with the calm voice of an adult which allows movement past the personal
to the abstract. `Balancing on Muncie's racial tightrope', Williams describes
his experiences in school, sports and dating. `Muncie would not permit me
to date white girls', he (1995: 166) notes, `and appar- ently couldn't tolerate
seeing me with black girls either.' When Williams associates with white girls,
he is admonished by coaches, counsellors and teachers. When he is with black
girls on the street and at school, he is called `a nigger lover.' Williams
describes how, growing up as a mixed race child, he was often constrained
by the `color line.' In the aptly titled Black, white and Jewish: the autobiograpy
of a shifting self (2001), Rebecca Walker describes a childhood in a cul-
tural trifecta. Walker examines the events and the fragments of her childhood
in the context of race and religion. The daughter of the novelist Alice Walker
and the lawyer Mel Leventhal, Walker describes herself as a `Movement Child' — the offspring of a liberal white Jew who believed that equality and freedom
could be achieved through law and an African American mother who believed
that equality and freedom could be cultivated through the magic ability of
words to redefine reality. Walker describes (2001: 12—13) her birth
in Jackson Mississippi as: `A mulatta baby swaddled and held in lov- ing arms,
two brown, two white, in the middle of the segregated South.... That makes
me the tragic mulatta caught between both worlds like the proverbial deer
in the headlights.' However, as she grew up, she notes, she never felt `contained',
either by walls, parents, or cultures. She lived in and moved back and forth
between black, white and Jewish communities. After her parents divorced, she
was raised by her parents in two-year shifts shuttling between coasts, her
mother's San Francisco and her father's upper-middle-class New York suburb.
Ferrying between several worlds, she (2001: 117) grapples with where she fits
255
in:
`Now as I move from place to place, from Jewish to black, from D.C. to San
Francisco, from status quo middle class to radical artist bohemia, it is less
like jumping from station to station on the radio dial and more like moving
from planet to planet between universes that never overlap.' As an inquisitive
child, a highly sensitive teen and a young woman, she is confronted with the
colour assumptions of friends, teachers and family. She describes how she
is too white for blacks, and too black for whites. In elementary school, Bryan
Katon tells her that he does not like black girls. She (2001: 93) takes ballet
classes from a woman ``who tells me I will never be a great ballerina because
black women's bodies aren't suited for ballet''. There have never been any
famous black ballerinas. Visiting her mother's relatives in Atlanta an uncle
(2001: 85) uses the word `cracker' `again and again to describe me or one
of my mannerisms.' In junior high school, black girls threaten to beat her
up for `acting like a white girl.' In Larchmont, she attends a school where
the black kids are `scruffy, unkempt and ashy', not mixing with `a sea of
rich Jewish Kids.' During the year she attended high school in Larchmont,
not one black student says a word to her. At Fire Lake, a gauche Jewish camp
where the campers obsessively listen to `Fiddler on the roof', she is told
she is too `intimidating.' `It doesn't occur to me', she notes, `that intimidating
might be another word for black' (2001: 180). Later, after she is voted to
be the captain of a sing- ing programme by the girls, the counsellors take
away the honour because she is `too bossy, too tough.' In high school, a boyfriend
criticizes her for being `too white.' Ultimately, Walker makes a choice between
her shifting identities, choosing to `be on the right side of issues involving
social justice.' `In the twelfth grade', she (2001: 312) writes, `I decide
to move Leventhal to the more obscure middle position in my name and add Walker
to the end, privileging my blackness and downplaying what I think of as my
whiteness.' In American chica: two worlds, one childhood (2001: 301), Marie
Arana describes a childhood in which she is also shuttled between two deeply
separate cultures for years. However, she comes to understand that she is
a hybrid American — `a New World fusion, an American Chica.' Arana focuses
on the way culture not only divides and defines, but enriches. Arana's memoir
of growing up in Peru and America centres on her parents' tumultuous marriage.
She uses the metaphor of her parents' marriage to join North and South — chica and gringa. Her father, `a South American man', is an engineer. Her
mother, `a North American woman', is a musician: `They were so different from
each
256
other,
so obverse in every way.' Yet their marriage survives 40 years, family difficulties,
the politics of two continents and long separations. Their marriage overcomes
bicultural tensions. In her father's Peruvian family, Arana was taught to
be a proper lady, yet in her mother's family she learned to shoot a gun and
break a horse. Her childhood is filled with the experience of living on cul-
tural borders. In Peru, she learns about `Peruvian racism' when she is ostracized
in a classroom for being too white: `I saw that Peru has its sediments too,
and that its lines are drawn in color' (2001: 117). In the United States,
she is seen as too black. When she visits her mother's family in Wyoming,
an old man suggests that she and her brother are on the wrong side of town:
`Suppose-ta be across those tracks over there on the niggah side, ain'tcha,
now?' (2001: 192). As a child, Arana is obsessed with the features of her
physical com- position. She contemplates the meaning of skin colour in Peru
and the United States. But after immigrating to the United States, she comes
to understand, accept and appreciate that she is a hybrid. `I'm not any one
thing', she (2001: 301) writes, `The reality is I am a mongrel. I live on
bridges; I've earned my place on them, stand comfortably when I'm on one,
content with betwixt and between.' She counts both cultures as her own, and
yet is caught between the two, celebrating being `a New World fusion. An American
chica.' Another type of border narrative in childhood memoirs involves gender.
How do men whose erotic focus is other men shape the nar- rative of their
childhood? How do women whose erotic interest is other women shape the narratives
of their childhood? In Becoming a man (1992), Paul Monette describes the otherness
of the conflicted life of a closeted gay childhood. Monette (1992: 228) instructs
readers about his anguish as a gay boy who tried to be straight — to
`pass', and about `the process of ``de-selfing'' my own world for the craziness
that's turned my life into a minefield, this wanting to be somebody else instead
of me.' Monette (1992: 57) con- fesses on the first page of his book that
he grew up without a story of (gay) manhood that he could live by: `I was
the only man I knew who had no story at all. I'd long since accepted the fact
that nothing had ever happened to me and nothing ever would.' Monette describes
how he grew up in a `twilight world', a `hidden world', `turning invis- ible',
having to come `up with the right mask' in order to be able to navigate through
family and school. He describes hiding being gay in the role of the clown
and the sophisticate. He also describes the safety zone of the courtiers'
role: `I came so close to being a eunuch escort full time.'
257
Monette
overtly uses literary language — images and analogies of being in the
closet, of feeling oppression and suffocation, imagery of anguish about the
conflict between his private and the public self. Monette (1992: 25) uses
aggressive rhetoric to describe the closet. He describes how at nine and a
half he had a physical relation with a male friend but is able to deny its
meaning: `That as long as I kept them apart, love would be sexless and sex
loveless, endlessly repeating its cycle of self-denial and self-abuse. The
process by which we become our own jailers, swallowing the key.' He lives
a life of emotional solitude. Thus, by inexorable degrees does the love that
dares not speak its name build walls, until a house is nothing but clo- sets.
This he contends leads to his sexualy arrested development: `that's where
my sexuality stayed for the next twelve years, locked in the locker room of
my brain'. He led a life of emotional isolation, `consoling myself by means
of connoisseurship for the bitter solitude of my life' (1992: 86). In Zami,
a new spelling of my name (1982), the poet Audre Lorde tells the story of
an African-American lesbian life. Lorde says in the prologue to Zami that
as a child she felt on the border between man and woman, that she had always
wanted to be man and woman: `to incorporate the strongest and richest parts
of my mother and father within to share valleys and mountains upon my body
the way the earth does in hills and peaks.' In Greenwich Village she again
stakes out a life on the border: `Downtown in the gay bars I was a closet
student and an invisible black. Uptown at Hunter I was a closet dyke and general
intruder.' Clearly, the sense of aloneness and separation felt by these authors
is related to their search for individual identity. In these memoirs, the
authors convey their consciousness of being alien, of being different, of
being somehow wrong when they were children. Their narratives are self-examinations
of growing up between two worlds, with attempts to retrace the steps that
led from one world to another. Theirs is the search to explain the forging
of an identity, for an under- standing of the present self in relation to
the experience of having grown up betwixt and between and having crossed the
borders of two social worlds. CONCLUSION In the closing decades of the twentieth
century, there has been an out- pouring of autobiographical writing by women
and men focused on the urgent questions of identity and the significance and
relevance of their childhoods. This essay has attempted to examine some
258
significant
types of childhood that have been described in contempor- ary memoirs. If
we look at this crop of memoirs as a group, some existential archetype attaches
to each of them. The vision of child- hood as a period of unmitigated suffering
and abuse is most common. The depiction of the child as the victim of intrafamily
conflicts and whose home life is transformed into a domestic hell by the cruelty
of parents is a recurrent one. There are those memoirs that attempt to capture
something of a paradise that has been lost, the once idyllic past where the
child was happy and encapsulated in a protective cocoon, living in a loving
and nurturing environment. The third exis- tential archetype is of the child
who does not fit in, a childhood with- out either disconnection or connection,
but a search for connection. The narratives of biracial and gay childhoods
describe a childhood between two worlds — white and black, Chica and
American, gay and straight — where identity is not established, but
in flux. These childhood realms are resuscitated through memory. Con- stantly
at work within the dynamics of these narratives depicting the state of childhood,
there is a dialectical relationship between the present of adulthood and the
past of childhood. The construction of these childhood worlds is not just
an end in itself, but a pretext in ser- vice of a broader purpose. Those who
recollect childhoods of misery use it as a framework for their own concerns
with inadequate nurtur- ing, the victimization of children and family breakup.
Idyllic recrea- tions may serve as an outlet for the nostalgia of the adult
yearning after a long-lost paradise that may never have existed. Still another
purpose that is served by the memoir is that of providing a convenient allegorical
framework for the expression of certain political and philo- sophical viewpoints.
The memoirs by biracial authors often use their childhood experience to make
some statement on race and culture, as they see their lives testifying to
the issue of race in America. The story of childhood is one of the central
themes in the current crop of memoirs. Among the many themes that writers
have taken up in the recent memoir boom is the recollection of the experience
of their childhoods. Each memoir is unique and each story is meant to stand
alone. However, when memoirists speak of their childhoods, they do so through
literary forms that seem to capture the universal archetypical forms of hell,
heaven and a purgatory, a transitional stage of an ambiguous and conflicted
social existence.
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NOTE
ON CONTRIBUTOR ROGER NEUSTADTER is a Professor of Sociology at Northwest Missouri
State University in Maryville, MO. His current research involves the use of
memoirs in teaching sociology courses, parental rela- tions in memoir, the
memoir of career, and technological pessimism.