| In this dissertation I examine the ways in which space and place directly contribute to the shape and content of self-representation in life-writing narratives by 20th Century American women writes. I argue that critical approaches to autobiography that view the genre solely as a temporal practice are insufficient and that the genre must also be considered a spatial practice. Using Audre Lorde's Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, Terry Tempest Williams' Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, Gretel Ehrlich's The Solace of Open Spaces, and Nancy Mairs' Remembering the Bone House, I show that a dialogical relationship exists between experiences of place and experiences of subjectivity and that the writers' attentions to location emphasizes the displacement, transformation, and reconstruction of identities.;Using a range of theorists and critics, including poststructuralists Michel Foucault, Henri Lefebvre, Edward Soja, phenomenlogist Gaston Bachelard, feminist geographers Doreen Massey and Gillian Rose, and literary theorists such as Sidonie Smith, Julia Watson, and Diana Fuss, I examine the intersections of place, space, and identity and foreground the significance of location to discourses of identity and power. Spatial self-representation answers William Spengemann's question, how can the self know itself, by grounding identity in specific socio-spatial and geographic sites. This then allows the writer to appropriate, reconfigure, and redefine space and place in the processes of representing herself.;Dividing my discussion into three kinds of spaces---urban, natural, and built---I address the relationship between one's view of space and one's lived experience in space. Linking the "I" to the "eye," I further argue that place and space have become that "other" element against which autobiographers define themselves. In other words, subjectivity is mapped out spatially. Across the spatial categories I posit, the writers ultimately turn to the corporeal materiality of their bodies and the spaces their bodies occupy. My argument fosters a more supple reading of life-writing texts by looking to the way racialized, classed, gendered, and sexualized identities are fluid and constituted in place. |
