12 thoughts on “Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman”
Though her book touches on a number of subjects, Landscape for a Good Woman is centrally concerned with a conflict between levels of analysis. More specifically, Steedman is concerned with how poorly her mother’s biography squares with literary conventions, “structures of class analysis and schools of cultural criticism” (6), all of which she argues work through “various models of imposition and transmission,” applying “fairy-tale” tropes about social, economic and cultural structures to the individuals ostensibly contained by those structures (76-77).
Steedman’s beef is not with abstract modes of thought or analysis per se, but rather with their use as history, as monoliths “that prevent our seeing the cracks in the system” (76). And if historians should be concerned with looking out for “cracks in the system,” they should also have an understanding of where they can find them. So although Steedman’s book is (auto)biographical, I think it’s important that it also be read as a history of structures from an innovative vantage point, namely from the inner life of the family. While I’d imagine this is somewhat commonplace with regards to the study of patriarchy, it represents a shift in the study of class, at least with regards to the E.P. Thompson-style approach to class-consciousness. The latter approach basically saw class-consciousness as a (usually left-wing) response to the historical circumstances, inputting the Industrial Revolution, enclosures, reactionary legal measures following the French Revolution etc. and getting a labour movement, Chartism, Owenism etc. on the other end. In looking at her own family history, Steedman’s intended contribution, I think, is to not allow us to take families for granted in the Thompsonite picture and to question how class-consciousness is filtered by things like familial social status, the aspirations of one’s parents, and so on.
I’m still uncertain about the value of this kind of approach to class, and how it could interact with a more “structural” approach in research. One of the questions, for example, is whether Steedman’s book either challenges or complements “structural” history. So I’d be interested in what others have to say about it.
On one level, Carolyn Steedman’s analysis of her and her mother’s lives reminds me of the novelist, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED talk, “The Danger of a Single Story.” Adichie explains that a single story about a people group or nation (or continent, as the case may be) robs individual people of their dignity (and, I add, robs them their unique representation in history). A single story, as she sees it, is a dominant narrative that fails to encompass multiple perspectives and the richness of a place. Adichie argues that stories matter – “stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that dignity.” Steedman’s piece pushes against conventional understandings of culture (7) and highlights the danger of a single theory – or dominant theories of class analysis and cultural criticism – which “denies its subjects a particular story, a personal history, except when that story illustrates a general thesis” (10). This interpretation fails to address stories like Steedman’s and her mother’s. Steedman writes: “The urgent need becomes to find a way of theorizing the result of such difference and particularity, not in order to find a description that can be universally applied…but so that people in exile, the inhabitants of the long streets may start to use the autobiographical ‘I’, and tell the stories of their life” (16). And so Steedman, answering Adichie’s call for more stories, presents her stories in the form of a psychoanalytic case-study through which the narrative reveals the “bits and pieces from which it is made up, in the way that history refuses to do, and that fiction can’t” (21). It was helpful for me to read Steedman explain in an interview that, when restored to the historical record in the 1960s, working class people were portrayed as “upright” and “one-dimensional and pious precursors of better future” because I could see her challenging that portrayal in this book (http://www.cambridgeblog.org/2013/11/carolyn-steedman-interview-everyday-life-of-english-working-class/).
However, I feel confused by Steedman’s use of the terms narrative, story, and history. What makes a story a history? Early on Steedman suggests that her work is not a history – explaining, “I simply do not know enough about many of the incidents described to explain the connections between them. I am unable to perform an act of historical explanation in this way” (21), but then in her later chapter, “Histories,” she focuses on the relationship between autobiographical history, case-history, and the constructing and writing of history (127). If Steedman is adding to the story – as she is, for example, when she argues that “two factors have been left out of the story so far,” (120) namely conclusions about the large number of women in the workforce and the impact of a political culture on growing children – how is she not writing a history? Is “the story” she is referring to here not the historical record? She explains that focusing on narrative sequences overlooks the “transactional nature of individual narratives… People may remember the past, and may verbalize their recollections, but to become a story what they say must ‘achieve a coherence and point which are the same for the hearer as the teller’” (132). By this definition, have Steedman’s individual narratives achieved the status of story? I think maybe yes, because she has already explained her work as a case-history, and later she explains that “the writing of a case-history takes on the dimensions of story-telling: it works by telling us that something is about to be revealed – that the story is already there to tell” (138). Finally, Steedman concludes: “once a story is told, it ceases to be a story: it becomes a piece of history, an interpretative device” (143). So why isn’t Steedman’s piece a history?
Steedman is very self-consciously weaving a narrative that is both literary and theoretical. Memory and the present inform each other providing an interpretive matrix for the two women’s lives. An interesting point to consider is how important the accuracy and selectivity of the memories on which she relies for the bulk of her narrative are for her analysis. In several places she honestly admits that her memory fails her. She cannot remember the exact way her trip to the wood with her father (50). In sections on her father, and the development of her resentment and distain for her father she admits that her mother provided the key memories and framing for her feels and understanding of her father (35-36), which are then somewhat reassessed in her recollection of their meeting at a bar later in life (51-52). He is a tangible person, and though a “sod”, she does wish she could have expressed her gratitude while he was alive. Certainly, the author is not writing fiction, but is the reliability and fallibility of memory at odds with the historian’s task of providing some sort of truth? There seems to be a certain tension here between memory as the text and impressions of the past determined by reflections situated in the present.
Thinking back to the essay on textuality and literary criticism, the importance of the historian being both bridge and filter for the interaction between the text and present was key, a delicate balancing act. However, the text there seemed to be something that began as physically external to the historian who then internalized it in the process of producing a narrative. In the case of this autobiography, the text is already internalized. It is part of the author as memory. She herself seems to admit this contradiction by claiming: “I simply do not know enough about many of the incidents described to explain the connections between them. I am unable to perform an act of historical explanation in this way” (21). Is what is produced still history, or literature? How does one differentiate the two? Does there need to be an outsider, so to speak, to add a level of objectivity and authorize it as “history”? Is (auto)biography then simply the stuff of which history is made, but not itself “History”?
Last, I think I would take Devin’s doubt further and venture to say that Steedman fails to remove herself completely from the very structuralist categories and their associated tropes with which she takes issue. She is still stuck within ossified social categories of class. The daughter herself has obviously made a transition between the working and middle classes, herself a teacher and academic. If we are to accept the author’s attempt to map the complicated and changing mental life of working class individuals, and how these were varied, learned and contingent (13), then why can we not reflect on the categories themselves as equally fungible and contingent? Are “working class” or “middle class” categories and terms useful in explaining the wealth of socially contextualized emotions, thoughts and interpretations? Whether we conceive of it as a woman situated in the mental landscape of the working class or the landscape of a woman in the working class, we are still employing the “working class” as our key organizational component. I feel the danger in this is that individual experiences and ways of interpreting the lives of mother and daughter could easily be explained and swallowed up as a new category of dissenting working class experiences and consciousness. To me, that seems to undermine her attempt to provide de-centering, divergent and liminal modes of interpretation for women.
If I had skipped the first and last chapter (especially the first) I would likely have a much more positive impression of this book. Childhood autobiographies are as worthy a genre of literature as any other in their own right, and even if Steadmen herself insists this book is not intended to be history in the sense of “telling how things really happened,” or serve as evidence to broad theoretical narratives of any kind (as she says in the conclusion), I do think her book is ripe with insights in regards to child psychology, parenting, patriarchy and gender. It is her presumption that what she has created here somehow topples the sacred cows of Marxism, labour history and especially her arch-nemesis Seabrook that I find uncompelling, an impression intensified by her own vague and puzzling comments as to the value (or lack thereof) of her own work.
I get it: you and your mother’s childhood does not conform to the somewhat more noble or wholesome picture of working-class life painted by people like Seabrook. So what? Does that render Seabrook’s claims false? Does it not go without saying that there are always exceptions to generalities, that Seabrook was not claiming that every single solitary working-class life in England conformed neatly to the broad strokes he painted with his book?
That being said, how much does her/her mother’s childhood clash with the working-class folks of Seabrook’s Working-class Childhood anyway? While, yes, a major theme of Seabrook’s book is the spirit of community, solidarity and “hope for a better tomorrow” that was part of pre-war English working-class life, he also says, quite clearly, illustrated with examples, that selfishness and insensitivity and abuse were also a part of that world. There are people in his book quite like Steadmen’s mother, in fact. So how is she shattering some myopically rosy picture he as painted?
I also get her point that scholarship which focuses on broad economic and political forces overlooks the more internal, secret, micro-world of individual psychology, relationships, etc.. Well, of course it does. So then what? Who could else could know her mother as intimately as she does? Who else could she know as intimately as she knows her mother? Obviously, the answer to both questions is: no one. So how such a method in any way could began to replace looking at the broad economic economic/political forces that shape people’s lives and that shape history? She seems to acknowledge in the final chapter that it cannot. Moreover, I do not believe she is the first person to be interested in the hidden, internal, psychological world that goes on beyond the bigger narratives of history – so again I struggle with the relevance of her point in this regard.
I thought her attempt to trash Marxism throughout the introduction only proves what a shallow understand of it she has (there’s too many examples to go through here). Her thoughts on “envy” seem to miss the point that it is not envy itself that separates her mother from the working-class folks of Seabrook’s book, but rather how it translated: not into spirit or practise of community or solidarity or empathy, but rather into spite, bitterness, introversion. Related to this, I think one of the great potentials of this book would have been an exploration of the fascinating subject of working-class conservatism, and the “politics of spite” as some have turned it….but she avoids doing this.
I also found it interesting that, given her dislike of narrowly economic models, she doesn’t for a moment consider the issue of culture (that some of the behaviours of her mother and father have culturally specific roots).
So, in the end (and as she apparently wants?)…I’m left saying, “so what?” And maybe, also, “I’m sorry you had such a rough relationship with your parents.” And maybe also, “why are you so obsessed with Seabrook???”
My feelings about this book are ambivalent, but maybe I had just to high expectations on it. On the one hand it is quite interesting to read and Steedman is able to paint a vital picture of her childhood. Also her way to use many different types of methodological approaches and theories like psychoanalysis as well as classical social history is quite interesting.
One the other hand I have to give the question Steedman raises in the end back to her: So what? Well, she formulates on page 7 that her book “points finally to a consideration of what people – particularly working-class children of the recent past – come to understand of themselves when all they possess is their labour, and what becomes of the notion of class-consciousness when it is seen as a structure of feeling that can be learned at childhood”. So then, class-consciousness is a structure of feeling and after reading her book I have some insights how Steedman reconstructs her own class-consciousness. And by doing this, she shows us how little her and especially her mother’s class-consciousness fits in some Marxist class-analyses. But does she offer an alternative to analyse class-consciousness?
Steedman’s work seemed to arise from the unsatisfactory study of working class life that Steedman and her mother were a part of. To me, it seems as though Steedman can see that her life represents a far more complicated reality than what has previously been asserted about class consciousness, particularly in relation to feminist and childhood studies. The complication of historical actors is essential for Steedman’s work to display a more accurate portrayal of her own family over an extremely short span. As Avery Gordon writes as her opening statement, “that life is complicated may seem a banal expression of the obvious, but it is nonetheless a profound theoretical statement–perhaps the most important theoretical statement of our time” (Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 3). The desire to complicate history may be difficult to accomplish, but is easier when a person has more accessible historical sources. Steedman relies on her own experience to show a discontent with the simplification of historical agents.
I think Steedman does a very good job at this, and that the use of herself as a source is both beautifully simple and frighteningly complex. It is simple because it allows her to flow through a historical moment that is already researched and lived, making her both the primary producer and the secondary consumer. This complicates things because it displays how there are methodological issues in studying history that arise from thinking things can be “known.” Steedman has the benefit of being her own source, but others do not. In her 2010 article “Getting Personal,” Sheila Fitzpatrick attempts to construct a historical narrative about her late husband’s life. As she is doing this she realizes that she cannot construct the accurate image that she had wanted to; without her own personal memories guiding her work there are major gaps which leave out events Fitzpatrick thinks are necessary in understanding her husband’s life. This may seem a bit tangential, but I think it shows that getting personal in history can benefit a work. Steedman successfully produces a narrative based on her own experience, which is fine because she is a historical agent as much as anyone else is. I find personal reflection compelling because it deviates so much from traditional histories which value distance. I think Steedman’s methodologies should be embraces and further pursued by others.
I am fascinated by her use of the word “landscape.” I think it is such an interesting word. I think the word has very powerful implications. I am also curious to know if this work should be considered an autobiography? Is it beneficial to differentiate between autobiography and history? Does calling this an autobiography ignore the broader historical analysis Steedman produces? Does calling it an autobiography erase Steedman’s mother?
As a side note, I tried really hard to find that picture of the witch from Hansel and Gretel who looks like Steedman’s mother, but I couldn’t. I shall keep looking.
Steedmen argues against the conventional cultural criticism and theory about the “working-class” as a whole; she provides that “specificity of place and politics has to be reckoned with in making an account of anybody’s life and their use of their own past” (6). She used her life and her mother’s life to provide a case-study of the “working-class” consciousness, which instead of being somewhat upright, self-conscious about their role as precursors for a better life, actually includes “components of a proper envy, the desire of people for the things of the earth” (7). She talks about her mother’s resentment, her longing to marry a prince, all of which are contrast to the conventional cultural criticism of the “working-class”. Also, she stresses that her childhood was not “so bad” as conventional theory would always depict.
I think this week’s reading is very closely related to what we have been reading and discussing through these weeks. For example, the author states that “she[her mother] shaped my childhood by the stories she carried from her own, and from an earlier family history”. This raised the interesting question of relationship between memory, story and history. Her memories and stories are definitely shaped by her mother’s, even by earlier family’s memories and stories. As she argues later, “this is not to say that this book involves a search for a past, or for what really happened. It is about how people use the past to tell the stories of their life” (8). So I would argue that this book does not seek about the “real history” of the “working-class” during her and her mother’s lifetime; rather, it seeks about the story of it, the story shaped by their memories through time, and what meant by it. This is a very unique and interesting way to understand history, and I would argue that even though the author somewhat does not consider it as a “real history”, it is part of history.
Also, as I was reading the book, I was a little bit confused by the author’s use of “story” and “history”. As in the beginning, the author argues that the case-study is not a history: “the narrative form of case-study shows what went into its writing, shows the bits and pieces from which it is made up, in the way that history refuses to do, and that fiction can’t” (21). I would say, I am confused by her use of word. I wonder if her use of “fiction” here differs from her use of “story” in other place, or they are actually referring to the same thing. Moreover, in the end, Steedmen provides that “once a story is told, it ceases to be a story; it becomes a piece of history, an interpretative device” (143). So I have been wondering what does she mean by that. My answer would be, as she was constructing this “story” — her memory and her mother’s memory, it is not a “history” per se, but more like a case-study of her memory and the meaning of it in present time. However, once she finished recalling, it became a history in the sense that even though being a case-study, itself cannot constitute history, it is nonetheless part of history. And I would like to hear what other people think of it.
Out of all the readings we’ve done so far for this course I enjoyed Landscape for a Good Woman the most. While Steedman’s arguably questionable use of her personal life and whether her book actually constitutes a history, which other posts have already brought up, are central issues that may structurally undermine her narrative in certain ways, I still found the strategies she used to be extremely compelling.
One thing I found refreshing about Steedman’s work is that the “paradigm busting” that it does is in service of a greater “narrative busting” mission. One of Steedman’s main concerns is challenging how working class people have classically been portrayed in a homogenized way that does not allow us to talk about them as individuals. Through telling her story and the story of her mother, Steedman presents us with a picture of a particular “literal accent of class” (page 113) in which her mother’s envy played a role both in how she approached the world and how she raised Steedman which is not allowed in traditional conceptions of the working class. This singling out of the power of envy is particularly compelling not only because it shows how historians’ moral biases can shape how they describe the past—envy has traditionally been a sin in western culture: not something we’d like to assign as an essential component of the working class (page 111) —but because instead of dismissing the grand social narrative it challenges, Steedman’s account simply demands that we soften its edges, showing that while material conditions do have a role in shaping the individual as she claims they did with her mother, they cannot be used to describe all members of a class in a clear cut fashion. I was very intrigued by this interplay between individual and grand narratives. My questions for this week stem from that:
1. What role should grand narratives play in historical analysis? Can we really get away from them? Even if we are simply responding to their faults, the fact that we are responding to them still structures our analysis in some ways.
2. At the end of her book Steedman says, she “must ask for a structure of political thought that will take all of this, all these secrets and impossible stories, recognize what has been made out on the margin; and then recognizing it, refuse to celebrate it.” This seems to provide an answer to my first question. What does Steedman mean here? What would a Steedmanist version of the historical establishment look like? Would it be an effective way to deal with the problems that grand narratives present?
As I waded through the previous comments, all of which were very compelling, I had a few thoughts:
I wondered if some would take issue with Aaron’s statement: “Certainly, the author is not writing fiction.” Maybe some would say that is precisely what Steedman has done – among them, possibly her mother, if she could have read it.
I think Moe raised a question which goes to the heart of this book’s relevance: Is not there always a tension between micro- and macro-history? So is it so surprising that macro understandings, descriptions, and portrayals of the working class do not adequately describe Steedman’s mother, despite her nominal membership of that class? Is that such a deep point? Does that really do damage to more general statements about working-class attitudes, lives, and experiences?
I might also extend Moe’s “So what?” to ask: Can’t we all do a book like this? We all have a family – we could all write personal histories and assess our parents’ lives, experiences, and outlooks against dominant class and gender paradigms. I am sure we would find a lot of discrepancies, as we always do when we contrast the local and the global, the micro and the macro. Of course, I wonder if Steedman’s reply would be yes, we should all contribute our personal histories to the historiographical patchwork quilt. What historians need are more records of lived experiences to draw on when assessing eras, classes, and ideologies. Her book was one effort to describe a working-class life (or lives) that deviated from the norm – to give voice to “the people in exile”, so that they might “start to use the autobiographical ‘I’, and tell the stories of their life. (16)” In that, I cannot fault her project. In fact, I think she was addressing a serious historiographical void. She states on page 123 that “it will not do” to only produce case-studies of upper-class childhoods, as if only the children of the upper classes had significantly unique and differentiated experiences to warrant the attention. Perhaps that is this book’s ultimate contribution – it is an attempt to complicate the larger narratives of working class childhood but also to enrich and deepen them. Of course, hers is only one experience, though I do think she is aware of the limits of her particular contribution.
Landscape has enjoyed such prominence and continued relevance in our field since its publication, but I can sort of see why it has not connected with many of you. Maybe it is just that the novelty has worn off after 30 years and we forget that historians just did not do this sort of thing. Write your own personal history? Become your own source? What, too lazy to go do some real work in an archive somewhere? I can easily see how this would have been a pretty bold stroke that upset the conventions of the discipline.
Lastly, I want to pose a few different questions that have not come up yet. When we consider authorial intent, what is this book if not Steedman’s revenge against her cold, selfish, and petty mother? The impression I had from the book is that she is deeply bitter about her childhood. I mean, we can have a great conversation about Steedman’s historiographical purposes for writing this, and I expect to. But do her emotional/personal reasons for writing this also matter? Do they affect the portrayal, or make you wonder about the accuracy of it, or perhaps just make you feel slightly uneasy about bearing witness to the unseemly details of someone’s personal life?
On a smaller note, what did you make of Steedman’s anecdote that her and her sister’s birth certificates are “proper” only because her mother lied to the registrar about their illegitimacy (39-40)? Steedman said that it “worries” her as a historian to consider that supposedly authoritative and reliable documents could be wrong, and also, presumably, that the process of producing a false yet official document was so simple for her mother to carry out (a “simple lie to the registrar” – page 40). Indeed, it is something to consider when we think of the faith (and maybe that is all it is) that we want to invest in various documents for our own research.
Landscape for a Good Woman can be seen a primary source in at least two ways: as Steedman’s own autobiography – how her family’s past informs who she is – and as a window into political debates on some of the things leftists most love to discuss: materialism and class consciousness. In short, Steedman appears frustrated by what she perceives as the limited ways in which Marxist analyses have dealt with the psychic realms of memories, dreams, envy, desire and want – for things, status, children – not to mention how gender and age intersected with and influenced these.
At first I thought to myself that perhaps historical materialist social theory did not ask so many questions about those issues because the answers to them were so glaringly self-evident. Haven’t we all experienced want? Does Freud really need to be brought into studies to explain this? Besides, I’ve always seen historians as amateur psychoanalysts (doing history demands, after all, a tremendous amount of empathic labor) so I couldn’t help but feel a little defensive of past historians of class accused of “den[ying] its subjects a particular history, a personal history” (10) – denying being the key word.
But here is a woman who is no mere amateur psychoanalyst. Indeed, Steedman’s expert knowledge of psychoanalytic theory – oedipal triangles and all – is what lends credibility to her assertion that a move from “the social” to “the psychoanalytical” may further our understanding of class consciousness. And I believe that Landscape succeeds in complicating earlier Marxist explanations for class consciousness by bringing desire and longing to the surface instead of implicitly taking them for granted. From our vantage point, we can quite safely say that Steedman has been on the “winning side” of this (much broader) debate: we have all come to see identities as something much more complex than the monolithic version of working class consciousness we get in Seabrook and Thompson.
At best, however, Steedman may take us even further than that. So far, in fact, to hint at the very core of a timeless problem facing Marxism, not only as a way of theorizing about the past but as a practical socio-political mechanism openly seeking to defy and dismantle the ruling ideology of consumer capitalism.
Steedman serves up a society wherein, to put it a bit crudely, human beings are unable to rid themselves of want because it originates in psychic experiences had as little girls and boys, in their relations to their parents, etc. Crucially, Steedman’s historical figures exemplify people who were only “doing a limited best with what life handed out to them: trying to have a modestly good time” (89). They were not in the grips of a malady, as Thompson characterizes material desire; they were only exhibiting human traits, reacting to “a world that has produced in them states of unfulfilled desire” (123).
The hardest thing I’m grappling with as I write this is the profound problematization underlying Steedman’s disillusionment with “old school” Marxist class politics, namely the question of why people should want to rid themselves of want in the first place. Here Steedman undoubtedly shows much more understanding of and sympathy to our “flaws”, so to say, than people like Slavoj Zizek who laments that communism was only ever able to destroy capitalistic social and economic structures but not dreams of marrying princes and the desire to have stuff. I wonder, however, whether Steedman’s stance may be understood as representative of the beginning of a softening – if not a surrender – on the Left towards the moral goodness of pursuing worldly goods. This is a softening we now know has had some quite grave consequences, most dramatically in Britain (which became one of the West’s most unequal and warmongering societies while ruled by a “Labour” government) but also outside of it. My question, then, is to what extent can we analyze the rebellion against “old school” Marxism – exemplified in Steedman’s work – as a reaction to the Left’s denounciation of wanting as wrong? Is it wrong?
I think we must remain cognizant of the literary and intellectual climate in which Steedman wrote this book. This was an explicitly feminist piece of scholarship. Steedman had various competing motives in writing this book, but I think above all she was concerned with challenging traditional narratives of class consciousness that were bereft of a feminist standpoint. Precisely because Steedman’s childhood lacked the assumed British, working-class experience of patriarchy, she was able to subvert traditional understandings of how the working-class family was constituted. She also critiqued other aspects of these traditional understandings, namely that working-class lives were defined by hardship, relative simplicity, and a lack of certain desires. Scholarship about the working class had, for example, by and large failed to comprehend the possibility that working-class people might not fit into a monolithic narrative of heterosexuality. Steedman was concerned with exposing and countering these hypocrisies, but she did so by straddling a line between anecdote and theory. Because of the temporal and spatial disconnect that we have with this scholarship, I think it might be hard for us to appreciate just how novel and important this book would have been in the 1980s. I don’t think her argument was that her and her mother’s stories prove to be exceptions to the rule of working-class experience. Rather, I think she convincingly demonstrated that the traditional rule of the working-class experience failed even to approach a reflection of the complexity of that experience. To her credit, she refused to simply complicate or problematize those narratives with which she took issue. Instead, she attempted to incorporate readings of Freud and Marx and her feminist colleagues into her (auto)biography.
And yet, I remain unconvinced that Landscape effectively confronted the issues of sexuality that Steedman raised throughout. It is clear that her childhood, in her view, was unlike that which she would have traditionally been expected to experience, mainly because her father didn’t matter (19). But are we not missing a lot from this narrative about male sexuality? The father’s assumedly sexual experiences, such as his conceiving Steedman, or his leaving Edna for another woman, are narrativized in a rather asexual fashion. Where is the consideration of desire in this context? Surely her father’s life, even if he was a poor representation of the patriarchy Steedman critiqued, could have equally subverted the traditional understanding of class consciousness that she was hell-bent on undoing. One response to this suggestion might be that to have focussed on the father would have detracted from the project’s core concern, i.e., women. That counterpoint, in my opinion, carries considerably more weight because this book was published in the 1980s. I have to concede that the book was not only a response to contemporary historical formulations, but also historiographical ones—I have to be cognizant of the history of feminist historiography. Even my acknowledgement of this counterpoint, though, would not nullify the fact that Steedman’s considerations of female sexuality were also lacking. There’s a really good review of Landscape from The Women’s Review of Books by Julie Abraham that noted that Steedman’s female sexuality was concerned solely with the desires and processes of marriage, reproduction, and motherhood. Abraham implied that Steedman didn’t really push the boundaries of contemporary mainstream feminism in this book. To be fair, I don’t think Steedman was aiming to push those boundaries, but was rather working within them, but Abraham nonetheless raised a valid point: did Steedman’s life story and Landscape operate outside of the patriarchal system; is it even possible to do so?
A side question that I thought we might be able to talk about this week: Do we see anything problematic in the way that Steedman’s mother is robbed of her autobiographical ‘I’ in Landscape?
I think I’m with Moe on this one — hammer, sickle and the rest of it.
On one hand, I found the autobiographical content rich with insight and deeply moving —even impassioning on occasion. On the other, I found her framing of the content puzzling and, at times, prattling.
Her attempt to undermine the heavy-hitting intellectual forces of the day (Marxism, Labour History, Freudianism etcetc) seemed to me quite thin and I still fail to fully understand her preoccupation with them.
Neither her mother’s experience, nor her own, can be absorbed by these narratives. I’m not particularly troubled, but nor am I convinced. I consider it a great triumph that I can’t place myself cleanly in Freud’s musings, while for Steedman this is the core of her grievance. She pits the particularity of her personal experience against the generalities of these mythic social forces. I just don’t see the tension. Perhaps someone will make this clearer to me.
It appears worthy of a discussion, nonetheless: How does the particular fit into the general, and how should it? But why does personal experience have to be co-opted into these broader social/economic narratives to be of value? And why must these tools of understanding, which is what they are, consume the totality of perspective and experience in order to be of worth? How are myths created anyhow, by authors or by communities? And to whom then should the excluded direct their grievances? Maybe it would be more productive to ask why the source is so concerned with justifying itself in relation to these things. I’d sincerely like to know.
Though her book touches on a number of subjects, Landscape for a Good Woman is centrally concerned with a conflict between levels of analysis. More specifically, Steedman is concerned with how poorly her mother’s biography squares with literary conventions, “structures of class analysis and schools of cultural criticism” (6), all of which she argues work through “various models of imposition and transmission,” applying “fairy-tale” tropes about social, economic and cultural structures to the individuals ostensibly contained by those structures (76-77).
Steedman’s beef is not with abstract modes of thought or analysis per se, but rather with their use as history, as monoliths “that prevent our seeing the cracks in the system” (76). And if historians should be concerned with looking out for “cracks in the system,” they should also have an understanding of where they can find them. So although Steedman’s book is (auto)biographical, I think it’s important that it also be read as a history of structures from an innovative vantage point, namely from the inner life of the family. While I’d imagine this is somewhat commonplace with regards to the study of patriarchy, it represents a shift in the study of class, at least with regards to the E.P. Thompson-style approach to class-consciousness. The latter approach basically saw class-consciousness as a (usually left-wing) response to the historical circumstances, inputting the Industrial Revolution, enclosures, reactionary legal measures following the French Revolution etc. and getting a labour movement, Chartism, Owenism etc. on the other end. In looking at her own family history, Steedman’s intended contribution, I think, is to not allow us to take families for granted in the Thompsonite picture and to question how class-consciousness is filtered by things like familial social status, the aspirations of one’s parents, and so on.
I’m still uncertain about the value of this kind of approach to class, and how it could interact with a more “structural” approach in research. One of the questions, for example, is whether Steedman’s book either challenges or complements “structural” history. So I’d be interested in what others have to say about it.
On one level, Carolyn Steedman’s analysis of her and her mother’s lives reminds me of the novelist, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED talk, “The Danger of a Single Story.” Adichie explains that a single story about a people group or nation (or continent, as the case may be) robs individual people of their dignity (and, I add, robs them their unique representation in history). A single story, as she sees it, is a dominant narrative that fails to encompass multiple perspectives and the richness of a place. Adichie argues that stories matter – “stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that dignity.” Steedman’s piece pushes against conventional understandings of culture (7) and highlights the danger of a single theory – or dominant theories of class analysis and cultural criticism – which “denies its subjects a particular story, a personal history, except when that story illustrates a general thesis” (10). This interpretation fails to address stories like Steedman’s and her mother’s. Steedman writes: “The urgent need becomes to find a way of theorizing the result of such difference and particularity, not in order to find a description that can be universally applied…but so that people in exile, the inhabitants of the long streets may start to use the autobiographical ‘I’, and tell the stories of their life” (16). And so Steedman, answering Adichie’s call for more stories, presents her stories in the form of a psychoanalytic case-study through which the narrative reveals the “bits and pieces from which it is made up, in the way that history refuses to do, and that fiction can’t” (21). It was helpful for me to read Steedman explain in an interview that, when restored to the historical record in the 1960s, working class people were portrayed as “upright” and “one-dimensional and pious precursors of better future” because I could see her challenging that portrayal in this book (http://www.cambridgeblog.org/2013/11/carolyn-steedman-interview-everyday-life-of-english-working-class/).
However, I feel confused by Steedman’s use of the terms narrative, story, and history. What makes a story a history? Early on Steedman suggests that her work is not a history – explaining, “I simply do not know enough about many of the incidents described to explain the connections between them. I am unable to perform an act of historical explanation in this way” (21), but then in her later chapter, “Histories,” she focuses on the relationship between autobiographical history, case-history, and the constructing and writing of history (127). If Steedman is adding to the story – as she is, for example, when she argues that “two factors have been left out of the story so far,” (120) namely conclusions about the large number of women in the workforce and the impact of a political culture on growing children – how is she not writing a history? Is “the story” she is referring to here not the historical record? She explains that focusing on narrative sequences overlooks the “transactional nature of individual narratives… People may remember the past, and may verbalize their recollections, but to become a story what they say must ‘achieve a coherence and point which are the same for the hearer as the teller’” (132). By this definition, have Steedman’s individual narratives achieved the status of story? I think maybe yes, because she has already explained her work as a case-history, and later she explains that “the writing of a case-history takes on the dimensions of story-telling: it works by telling us that something is about to be revealed – that the story is already there to tell” (138). Finally, Steedman concludes: “once a story is told, it ceases to be a story: it becomes a piece of history, an interpretative device” (143). So why isn’t Steedman’s piece a history?
Steedman is very self-consciously weaving a narrative that is both literary and theoretical. Memory and the present inform each other providing an interpretive matrix for the two women’s lives. An interesting point to consider is how important the accuracy and selectivity of the memories on which she relies for the bulk of her narrative are for her analysis. In several places she honestly admits that her memory fails her. She cannot remember the exact way her trip to the wood with her father (50). In sections on her father, and the development of her resentment and distain for her father she admits that her mother provided the key memories and framing for her feels and understanding of her father (35-36), which are then somewhat reassessed in her recollection of their meeting at a bar later in life (51-52). He is a tangible person, and though a “sod”, she does wish she could have expressed her gratitude while he was alive. Certainly, the author is not writing fiction, but is the reliability and fallibility of memory at odds with the historian’s task of providing some sort of truth? There seems to be a certain tension here between memory as the text and impressions of the past determined by reflections situated in the present.
Thinking back to the essay on textuality and literary criticism, the importance of the historian being both bridge and filter for the interaction between the text and present was key, a delicate balancing act. However, the text there seemed to be something that began as physically external to the historian who then internalized it in the process of producing a narrative. In the case of this autobiography, the text is already internalized. It is part of the author as memory. She herself seems to admit this contradiction by claiming: “I simply do not know enough about many of the incidents described to explain the connections between them. I am unable to perform an act of historical explanation in this way” (21). Is what is produced still history, or literature? How does one differentiate the two? Does there need to be an outsider, so to speak, to add a level of objectivity and authorize it as “history”? Is (auto)biography then simply the stuff of which history is made, but not itself “History”?
Last, I think I would take Devin’s doubt further and venture to say that Steedman fails to remove herself completely from the very structuralist categories and their associated tropes with which she takes issue. She is still stuck within ossified social categories of class. The daughter herself has obviously made a transition between the working and middle classes, herself a teacher and academic. If we are to accept the author’s attempt to map the complicated and changing mental life of working class individuals, and how these were varied, learned and contingent (13), then why can we not reflect on the categories themselves as equally fungible and contingent? Are “working class” or “middle class” categories and terms useful in explaining the wealth of socially contextualized emotions, thoughts and interpretations? Whether we conceive of it as a woman situated in the mental landscape of the working class or the landscape of a woman in the working class, we are still employing the “working class” as our key organizational component. I feel the danger in this is that individual experiences and ways of interpreting the lives of mother and daughter could easily be explained and swallowed up as a new category of dissenting working class experiences and consciousness. To me, that seems to undermine her attempt to provide de-centering, divergent and liminal modes of interpretation for women.
If I had skipped the first and last chapter (especially the first) I would likely have a much more positive impression of this book. Childhood autobiographies are as worthy a genre of literature as any other in their own right, and even if Steadmen herself insists this book is not intended to be history in the sense of “telling how things really happened,” or serve as evidence to broad theoretical narratives of any kind (as she says in the conclusion), I do think her book is ripe with insights in regards to child psychology, parenting, patriarchy and gender. It is her presumption that what she has created here somehow topples the sacred cows of Marxism, labour history and especially her arch-nemesis Seabrook that I find uncompelling, an impression intensified by her own vague and puzzling comments as to the value (or lack thereof) of her own work.
I get it: you and your mother’s childhood does not conform to the somewhat more noble or wholesome picture of working-class life painted by people like Seabrook. So what? Does that render Seabrook’s claims false? Does it not go without saying that there are always exceptions to generalities, that Seabrook was not claiming that every single solitary working-class life in England conformed neatly to the broad strokes he painted with his book?
That being said, how much does her/her mother’s childhood clash with the working-class folks of Seabrook’s Working-class Childhood anyway? While, yes, a major theme of Seabrook’s book is the spirit of community, solidarity and “hope for a better tomorrow” that was part of pre-war English working-class life, he also says, quite clearly, illustrated with examples, that selfishness and insensitivity and abuse were also a part of that world. There are people in his book quite like Steadmen’s mother, in fact. So how is she shattering some myopically rosy picture he as painted?
I also get her point that scholarship which focuses on broad economic and political forces overlooks the more internal, secret, micro-world of individual psychology, relationships, etc.. Well, of course it does. So then what? Who could else could know her mother as intimately as she does? Who else could she know as intimately as she knows her mother? Obviously, the answer to both questions is: no one. So how such a method in any way could began to replace looking at the broad economic economic/political forces that shape people’s lives and that shape history? She seems to acknowledge in the final chapter that it cannot. Moreover, I do not believe she is the first person to be interested in the hidden, internal, psychological world that goes on beyond the bigger narratives of history – so again I struggle with the relevance of her point in this regard.
I thought her attempt to trash Marxism throughout the introduction only proves what a shallow understand of it she has (there’s too many examples to go through here). Her thoughts on “envy” seem to miss the point that it is not envy itself that separates her mother from the working-class folks of Seabrook’s book, but rather how it translated: not into spirit or practise of community or solidarity or empathy, but rather into spite, bitterness, introversion. Related to this, I think one of the great potentials of this book would have been an exploration of the fascinating subject of working-class conservatism, and the “politics of spite” as some have turned it….but she avoids doing this.
I also found it interesting that, given her dislike of narrowly economic models, she doesn’t for a moment consider the issue of culture (that some of the behaviours of her mother and father have culturally specific roots).
So, in the end (and as she apparently wants?)…I’m left saying, “so what?” And maybe, also, “I’m sorry you had such a rough relationship with your parents.” And maybe also, “why are you so obsessed with Seabrook???”
My feelings about this book are ambivalent, but maybe I had just to high expectations on it. On the one hand it is quite interesting to read and Steedman is able to paint a vital picture of her childhood. Also her way to use many different types of methodological approaches and theories like psychoanalysis as well as classical social history is quite interesting.
One the other hand I have to give the question Steedman raises in the end back to her: So what? Well, she formulates on page 7 that her book “points finally to a consideration of what people – particularly working-class children of the recent past – come to understand of themselves when all they possess is their labour, and what becomes of the notion of class-consciousness when it is seen as a structure of feeling that can be learned at childhood”. So then, class-consciousness is a structure of feeling and after reading her book I have some insights how Steedman reconstructs her own class-consciousness. And by doing this, she shows us how little her and especially her mother’s class-consciousness fits in some Marxist class-analyses. But does she offer an alternative to analyse class-consciousness?
Steedman’s work seemed to arise from the unsatisfactory study of working class life that Steedman and her mother were a part of. To me, it seems as though Steedman can see that her life represents a far more complicated reality than what has previously been asserted about class consciousness, particularly in relation to feminist and childhood studies. The complication of historical actors is essential for Steedman’s work to display a more accurate portrayal of her own family over an extremely short span. As Avery Gordon writes as her opening statement, “that life is complicated may seem a banal expression of the obvious, but it is nonetheless a profound theoretical statement–perhaps the most important theoretical statement of our time” (Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 3). The desire to complicate history may be difficult to accomplish, but is easier when a person has more accessible historical sources. Steedman relies on her own experience to show a discontent with the simplification of historical agents.
I think Steedman does a very good job at this, and that the use of herself as a source is both beautifully simple and frighteningly complex. It is simple because it allows her to flow through a historical moment that is already researched and lived, making her both the primary producer and the secondary consumer. This complicates things because it displays how there are methodological issues in studying history that arise from thinking things can be “known.” Steedman has the benefit of being her own source, but others do not. In her 2010 article “Getting Personal,” Sheila Fitzpatrick attempts to construct a historical narrative about her late husband’s life. As she is doing this she realizes that she cannot construct the accurate image that she had wanted to; without her own personal memories guiding her work there are major gaps which leave out events Fitzpatrick thinks are necessary in understanding her husband’s life. This may seem a bit tangential, but I think it shows that getting personal in history can benefit a work. Steedman successfully produces a narrative based on her own experience, which is fine because she is a historical agent as much as anyone else is. I find personal reflection compelling because it deviates so much from traditional histories which value distance. I think Steedman’s methodologies should be embraces and further pursued by others.
I am fascinated by her use of the word “landscape.” I think it is such an interesting word. I think the word has very powerful implications. I am also curious to know if this work should be considered an autobiography? Is it beneficial to differentiate between autobiography and history? Does calling this an autobiography ignore the broader historical analysis Steedman produces? Does calling it an autobiography erase Steedman’s mother?
As a side note, I tried really hard to find that picture of the witch from Hansel and Gretel who looks like Steedman’s mother, but I couldn’t. I shall keep looking.
Steedmen argues against the conventional cultural criticism and theory about the “working-class” as a whole; she provides that “specificity of place and politics has to be reckoned with in making an account of anybody’s life and their use of their own past” (6). She used her life and her mother’s life to provide a case-study of the “working-class” consciousness, which instead of being somewhat upright, self-conscious about their role as precursors for a better life, actually includes “components of a proper envy, the desire of people for the things of the earth” (7). She talks about her mother’s resentment, her longing to marry a prince, all of which are contrast to the conventional cultural criticism of the “working-class”. Also, she stresses that her childhood was not “so bad” as conventional theory would always depict.
I think this week’s reading is very closely related to what we have been reading and discussing through these weeks. For example, the author states that “she[her mother] shaped my childhood by the stories she carried from her own, and from an earlier family history”. This raised the interesting question of relationship between memory, story and history. Her memories and stories are definitely shaped by her mother’s, even by earlier family’s memories and stories. As she argues later, “this is not to say that this book involves a search for a past, or for what really happened. It is about how people use the past to tell the stories of their life” (8). So I would argue that this book does not seek about the “real history” of the “working-class” during her and her mother’s lifetime; rather, it seeks about the story of it, the story shaped by their memories through time, and what meant by it. This is a very unique and interesting way to understand history, and I would argue that even though the author somewhat does not consider it as a “real history”, it is part of history.
Also, as I was reading the book, I was a little bit confused by the author’s use of “story” and “history”. As in the beginning, the author argues that the case-study is not a history: “the narrative form of case-study shows what went into its writing, shows the bits and pieces from which it is made up, in the way that history refuses to do, and that fiction can’t” (21). I would say, I am confused by her use of word. I wonder if her use of “fiction” here differs from her use of “story” in other place, or they are actually referring to the same thing. Moreover, in the end, Steedmen provides that “once a story is told, it ceases to be a story; it becomes a piece of history, an interpretative device” (143). So I have been wondering what does she mean by that. My answer would be, as she was constructing this “story” — her memory and her mother’s memory, it is not a “history” per se, but more like a case-study of her memory and the meaning of it in present time. However, once she finished recalling, it became a history in the sense that even though being a case-study, itself cannot constitute history, it is nonetheless part of history. And I would like to hear what other people think of it.
Out of all the readings we’ve done so far for this course I enjoyed Landscape for a Good Woman the most. While Steedman’s arguably questionable use of her personal life and whether her book actually constitutes a history, which other posts have already brought up, are central issues that may structurally undermine her narrative in certain ways, I still found the strategies she used to be extremely compelling.
One thing I found refreshing about Steedman’s work is that the “paradigm busting” that it does is in service of a greater “narrative busting” mission. One of Steedman’s main concerns is challenging how working class people have classically been portrayed in a homogenized way that does not allow us to talk about them as individuals. Through telling her story and the story of her mother, Steedman presents us with a picture of a particular “literal accent of class” (page 113) in which her mother’s envy played a role both in how she approached the world and how she raised Steedman which is not allowed in traditional conceptions of the working class. This singling out of the power of envy is particularly compelling not only because it shows how historians’ moral biases can shape how they describe the past—envy has traditionally been a sin in western culture: not something we’d like to assign as an essential component of the working class (page 111) —but because instead of dismissing the grand social narrative it challenges, Steedman’s account simply demands that we soften its edges, showing that while material conditions do have a role in shaping the individual as she claims they did with her mother, they cannot be used to describe all members of a class in a clear cut fashion. I was very intrigued by this interplay between individual and grand narratives. My questions for this week stem from that:
1. What role should grand narratives play in historical analysis? Can we really get away from them? Even if we are simply responding to their faults, the fact that we are responding to them still structures our analysis in some ways.
2. At the end of her book Steedman says, she “must ask for a structure of political thought that will take all of this, all these secrets and impossible stories, recognize what has been made out on the margin; and then recognizing it, refuse to celebrate it.” This seems to provide an answer to my first question. What does Steedman mean here? What would a Steedmanist version of the historical establishment look like? Would it be an effective way to deal with the problems that grand narratives present?
As I waded through the previous comments, all of which were very compelling, I had a few thoughts:
I wondered if some would take issue with Aaron’s statement: “Certainly, the author is not writing fiction.” Maybe some would say that is precisely what Steedman has done – among them, possibly her mother, if she could have read it.
I think Moe raised a question which goes to the heart of this book’s relevance: Is not there always a tension between micro- and macro-history? So is it so surprising that macro understandings, descriptions, and portrayals of the working class do not adequately describe Steedman’s mother, despite her nominal membership of that class? Is that such a deep point? Does that really do damage to more general statements about working-class attitudes, lives, and experiences?
I might also extend Moe’s “So what?” to ask: Can’t we all do a book like this? We all have a family – we could all write personal histories and assess our parents’ lives, experiences, and outlooks against dominant class and gender paradigms. I am sure we would find a lot of discrepancies, as we always do when we contrast the local and the global, the micro and the macro. Of course, I wonder if Steedman’s reply would be yes, we should all contribute our personal histories to the historiographical patchwork quilt. What historians need are more records of lived experiences to draw on when assessing eras, classes, and ideologies. Her book was one effort to describe a working-class life (or lives) that deviated from the norm – to give voice to “the people in exile”, so that they might “start to use the autobiographical ‘I’, and tell the stories of their life. (16)” In that, I cannot fault her project. In fact, I think she was addressing a serious historiographical void. She states on page 123 that “it will not do” to only produce case-studies of upper-class childhoods, as if only the children of the upper classes had significantly unique and differentiated experiences to warrant the attention. Perhaps that is this book’s ultimate contribution – it is an attempt to complicate the larger narratives of working class childhood but also to enrich and deepen them. Of course, hers is only one experience, though I do think she is aware of the limits of her particular contribution.
Landscape has enjoyed such prominence and continued relevance in our field since its publication, but I can sort of see why it has not connected with many of you. Maybe it is just that the novelty has worn off after 30 years and we forget that historians just did not do this sort of thing. Write your own personal history? Become your own source? What, too lazy to go do some real work in an archive somewhere? I can easily see how this would have been a pretty bold stroke that upset the conventions of the discipline.
Lastly, I want to pose a few different questions that have not come up yet. When we consider authorial intent, what is this book if not Steedman’s revenge against her cold, selfish, and petty mother? The impression I had from the book is that she is deeply bitter about her childhood. I mean, we can have a great conversation about Steedman’s historiographical purposes for writing this, and I expect to. But do her emotional/personal reasons for writing this also matter? Do they affect the portrayal, or make you wonder about the accuracy of it, or perhaps just make you feel slightly uneasy about bearing witness to the unseemly details of someone’s personal life?
On a smaller note, what did you make of Steedman’s anecdote that her and her sister’s birth certificates are “proper” only because her mother lied to the registrar about their illegitimacy (39-40)? Steedman said that it “worries” her as a historian to consider that supposedly authoritative and reliable documents could be wrong, and also, presumably, that the process of producing a false yet official document was so simple for her mother to carry out (a “simple lie to the registrar” – page 40). Indeed, it is something to consider when we think of the faith (and maybe that is all it is) that we want to invest in various documents for our own research.
Landscape for a Good Woman can be seen a primary source in at least two ways: as Steedman’s own autobiography – how her family’s past informs who she is – and as a window into political debates on some of the things leftists most love to discuss: materialism and class consciousness. In short, Steedman appears frustrated by what she perceives as the limited ways in which Marxist analyses have dealt with the psychic realms of memories, dreams, envy, desire and want – for things, status, children – not to mention how gender and age intersected with and influenced these.
At first I thought to myself that perhaps historical materialist social theory did not ask so many questions about those issues because the answers to them were so glaringly self-evident. Haven’t we all experienced want? Does Freud really need to be brought into studies to explain this? Besides, I’ve always seen historians as amateur psychoanalysts (doing history demands, after all, a tremendous amount of empathic labor) so I couldn’t help but feel a little defensive of past historians of class accused of “den[ying] its subjects a particular history, a personal history” (10) – denying being the key word.
But here is a woman who is no mere amateur psychoanalyst. Indeed, Steedman’s expert knowledge of psychoanalytic theory – oedipal triangles and all – is what lends credibility to her assertion that a move from “the social” to “the psychoanalytical” may further our understanding of class consciousness. And I believe that Landscape succeeds in complicating earlier Marxist explanations for class consciousness by bringing desire and longing to the surface instead of implicitly taking them for granted. From our vantage point, we can quite safely say that Steedman has been on the “winning side” of this (much broader) debate: we have all come to see identities as something much more complex than the monolithic version of working class consciousness we get in Seabrook and Thompson.
At best, however, Steedman may take us even further than that. So far, in fact, to hint at the very core of a timeless problem facing Marxism, not only as a way of theorizing about the past but as a practical socio-political mechanism openly seeking to defy and dismantle the ruling ideology of consumer capitalism.
Steedman serves up a society wherein, to put it a bit crudely, human beings are unable to rid themselves of want because it originates in psychic experiences had as little girls and boys, in their relations to their parents, etc. Crucially, Steedman’s historical figures exemplify people who were only “doing a limited best with what life handed out to them: trying to have a modestly good time” (89). They were not in the grips of a malady, as Thompson characterizes material desire; they were only exhibiting human traits, reacting to “a world that has produced in them states of unfulfilled desire” (123).
The hardest thing I’m grappling with as I write this is the profound problematization underlying Steedman’s disillusionment with “old school” Marxist class politics, namely the question of why people should want to rid themselves of want in the first place. Here Steedman undoubtedly shows much more understanding of and sympathy to our “flaws”, so to say, than people like Slavoj Zizek who laments that communism was only ever able to destroy capitalistic social and economic structures but not dreams of marrying princes and the desire to have stuff. I wonder, however, whether Steedman’s stance may be understood as representative of the beginning of a softening – if not a surrender – on the Left towards the moral goodness of pursuing worldly goods. This is a softening we now know has had some quite grave consequences, most dramatically in Britain (which became one of the West’s most unequal and warmongering societies while ruled by a “Labour” government) but also outside of it. My question, then, is to what extent can we analyze the rebellion against “old school” Marxism – exemplified in Steedman’s work – as a reaction to the Left’s denounciation of wanting as wrong? Is it wrong?
I think we must remain cognizant of the literary and intellectual climate in which Steedman wrote this book. This was an explicitly feminist piece of scholarship. Steedman had various competing motives in writing this book, but I think above all she was concerned with challenging traditional narratives of class consciousness that were bereft of a feminist standpoint. Precisely because Steedman’s childhood lacked the assumed British, working-class experience of patriarchy, she was able to subvert traditional understandings of how the working-class family was constituted. She also critiqued other aspects of these traditional understandings, namely that working-class lives were defined by hardship, relative simplicity, and a lack of certain desires. Scholarship about the working class had, for example, by and large failed to comprehend the possibility that working-class people might not fit into a monolithic narrative of heterosexuality. Steedman was concerned with exposing and countering these hypocrisies, but she did so by straddling a line between anecdote and theory. Because of the temporal and spatial disconnect that we have with this scholarship, I think it might be hard for us to appreciate just how novel and important this book would have been in the 1980s. I don’t think her argument was that her and her mother’s stories prove to be exceptions to the rule of working-class experience. Rather, I think she convincingly demonstrated that the traditional rule of the working-class experience failed even to approach a reflection of the complexity of that experience. To her credit, she refused to simply complicate or problematize those narratives with which she took issue. Instead, she attempted to incorporate readings of Freud and Marx and her feminist colleagues into her (auto)biography.
And yet, I remain unconvinced that Landscape effectively confronted the issues of sexuality that Steedman raised throughout. It is clear that her childhood, in her view, was unlike that which she would have traditionally been expected to experience, mainly because her father didn’t matter (19). But are we not missing a lot from this narrative about male sexuality? The father’s assumedly sexual experiences, such as his conceiving Steedman, or his leaving Edna for another woman, are narrativized in a rather asexual fashion. Where is the consideration of desire in this context? Surely her father’s life, even if he was a poor representation of the patriarchy Steedman critiqued, could have equally subverted the traditional understanding of class consciousness that she was hell-bent on undoing. One response to this suggestion might be that to have focussed on the father would have detracted from the project’s core concern, i.e., women. That counterpoint, in my opinion, carries considerably more weight because this book was published in the 1980s. I have to concede that the book was not only a response to contemporary historical formulations, but also historiographical ones—I have to be cognizant of the history of feminist historiography. Even my acknowledgement of this counterpoint, though, would not nullify the fact that Steedman’s considerations of female sexuality were also lacking. There’s a really good review of Landscape from The Women’s Review of Books by Julie Abraham that noted that Steedman’s female sexuality was concerned solely with the desires and processes of marriage, reproduction, and motherhood. Abraham implied that Steedman didn’t really push the boundaries of contemporary mainstream feminism in this book. To be fair, I don’t think Steedman was aiming to push those boundaries, but was rather working within them, but Abraham nonetheless raised a valid point: did Steedman’s life story and Landscape operate outside of the patriarchal system; is it even possible to do so?
A side question that I thought we might be able to talk about this week: Do we see anything problematic in the way that Steedman’s mother is robbed of her autobiographical ‘I’ in Landscape?
I think I’m with Moe on this one — hammer, sickle and the rest of it.
On one hand, I found the autobiographical content rich with insight and deeply moving —even impassioning on occasion. On the other, I found her framing of the content puzzling and, at times, prattling.
Her attempt to undermine the heavy-hitting intellectual forces of the day (Marxism, Labour History, Freudianism etcetc) seemed to me quite thin and I still fail to fully understand her preoccupation with them.
Neither her mother’s experience, nor her own, can be absorbed by these narratives. I’m not particularly troubled, but nor am I convinced. I consider it a great triumph that I can’t place myself cleanly in Freud’s musings, while for Steedman this is the core of her grievance. She pits the particularity of her personal experience against the generalities of these mythic social forces. I just don’t see the tension. Perhaps someone will make this clearer to me.
It appears worthy of a discussion, nonetheless: How does the particular fit into the general, and how should it? But why does personal experience have to be co-opted into these broader social/economic narratives to be of value? And why must these tools of understanding, which is what they are, consume the totality of perspective and experience in order to be of worth? How are myths created anyhow, by authors or by communities? And to whom then should the excluded direct their grievances? Maybe it would be more productive to ask why the source is so concerned with justifying itself in relation to these things. I’d sincerely like to know.