UC San Diego

Women’s life narratives of the long nineteenth-century, encompassing the period from the early 1800s to the early 1900s, emerged against the backdrop of significant social, cultural, and political transformations in the United States. Despite their rich historical and cultural value, narratives that deviate from the Western canonical model of autobiography are often overlooked by literary and history scholars. This dissertation addresses this absence by focusing on the heterogenous terrain of autobiographical genres and the “outlaw” modes of self-(re)presentation that served Black, Indigenous, and women of color (BIWOC). Employing a deconstructionist approach that challenges the law of genre, as well as the authority and stability of genre classifications, I argue that classifications limit creativity, exclude marginalized voices, and reinforce power structures that are inevitably gendered, raced and classed. Adopting a more fluid, open approach to our understanding of life narration will allow new forms and possibilities to emerge. I analyze BIWOC stories within the geo-political moment and the positionality of the autobiographical/narrative “I.” I explore the African American slave narrative of Harriet Jacobs, Incident’s in the Life of a Slave Girl, alongside Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig: or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black. The authors employed and upended gothic conventions to emphasize the unique horror of captivity for Black women, both in the South and the free North. Destabilizing the image of the domestic sphere and who should be feared, they challenge the paternalistic notion that slavery was benign. I then examine the life-telling lectures of Indigenous activists Sarah Winnemucca (Paiute) and Zitkala-Ša (Sioux). Their narrative performances function as tools of survivance that contest the notion of the “vanishing Indian,” preserve oral traditions threatened by assimilation, and reimagine Native Americans as U.S. citizens and Indigenous tribal peoples. Also employing performance as strategy are Mexican Americans Josefa Carrillo de Fitch, Juana Machado de Wrightington, and Maria Inocenta Pico de Avila. Their testimonios (re)figure women as active participants in California history. The cultural work these stories perform underscore the importance of recovering and (re)reading unconventional modes of life narration that complicate a master narrative that privileges hegemonic voices and histories.