| Derived from the Latin secernere, meaning "to separate, divide off," secrecy comprises a process of drawing relational distinctions---a spectrum of communicative strategies to connect and separate. What secret keepers guard is not just the hidden content of a story, but its boundaries: where the private and the public intersect. This dissertation links family secrets in autobiography to contemporary political and cultural contexts, including the ethics of state secrecy, the relational stakes of genetic research, and shifting identity discourse in families, communities, and nations. It centers on the structuring effects of secrecy, for a secret's effects depend more upon its form---how it is concealed and revealed---than its content. I suggest that identity is comprised of what we don't know as much as what we know, and what we can't or won't tell about our loved ones as much as what we reveal. And secrecy is a form of communication that calibrates intimacy and distance in families and communities---including communities of readers. Readers are drawn into a narrative of family secrets by what I term its "mechanics of disclosure": the formal and relational strategies through which a memoirist reveals secrets. This study tracks the textual properties of secrecy through comparisons of memoirs by eight contemporary writers: Susan Cheever, Linda Gray Sexton, Bliss Broyard, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alison Bechdel, J. R. Ackerley, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Richard Rodriguez.;Studying how families keep and share secrets sheds light on how other institutions consolidate power through practices of selective knowledge, secrecy, and disclosure. Just as a second generation can inherit a family secret---through the hereditary properties of nescience, or unknown knowledge---secrets can also be passed down from governments to citizens. Attention to the mechanics of revelation in autobiography provides a formal language to interpret how state secrets are concealed and revealed. A currency of power in any institution, secrets delineate a spectrum of control over not just information, but structures of communication. It is the craft of disclosure that makes secrets legible, and that paves the way for public acknowledgment of open secrets. |
