Making Stories of Our Lives: Rewriting the Mother-Daughter Plot
dnorris10 March 28th, 2006
Joanne Frye, professor of English and women’s studies at The College of Wooster, will present “Making Stories of Our Lives: Rewriting the Mother-Daughter Plot” at the second Faculty at Large lecture of the spring semester on Tuesday, March 28, at 11 a.m. in Room 009 of Severance (Chemistry) Hall (943 College Mall). Admission is free and open to the public.
Frye, who recently completed a memoir of her own experiences as a mother, will discuss the power of stories in our cultural thinking about mothers and the urgency of developing new stories about the relationship between mothers and daughters. Historically, the experiences of mothers have often been silenced or distorted, in part because most stories give primary voice to sons and daughters, rarely to mothers themselves, according to Frye. Even feminist perspectives on mothers have been largely through the eyes of daughters, again denying the distinctive agency and subjectivity involved in motherhood. The result, says Frye, is that mothers have rarely told stories of selfhood or been seen as engaged in thought and active in their own self-definition. And they have been portrayed as selfish or “bad” if not focused exclusively on their children’s needs. These expectations are often played out again in daughters’ subsequent lives.
“Much of my work in writing a memoir of my life as a single mother of two daughters has been a struggle of self-definition in resistance to cultural norms and available story forms,” said Frye. “Because stories are so important to culture and to ideas of self, I could not simply abandon the idea of story. But neither could I fall into the trap of traditional plotting of women’s lives. In my talk, I will discuss some of the features of narrative that I embraced in this work, as well as the problems I encountered in developing an honest approach to difficult personal material.
“Like the memoir, my discussion of it will draw on my work in my first book - Living Stories, Telling Lives: Women and the Novel in Contemporary Experience - as well as my personal experience as a mother resisting cultural norms, for myself and for my daughters,” added Frye. “The discussion also connects to a course I have taught periodically since 1986 and am currently teaching again: Feminist Perspectives on Motherhood.”
Frye has been a member of Wooster’s faculty since 1976. She is a graduate of Bluffton College (1966) and earned her Ph.D. at Indiana University (1974). She specializes in 20th century British and American Literature, feminist literary criticism, and women’s studies, with particular attention to interdisciplinary analysis of motherhood and narrative forms for women’s experiences. She is the author of two books, and recently completed a book-length manuscript, tentatively titled, Biting The Moon: A Single Mother’s Memoir. She also continues her scholarly interest in the novels of Virginia Woolf. Her honors and awards include the Luce Distinguished Scholar-Teacher Award and the Alice and Edith Hamilton Prize, a manuscript award from The University of Michigan Press, Women and Culture Series.