A New Historical Approach To Private Life

Jane Smiley is one of the most innovative and prolific contemporary womenwriters in the United States. Her thirteenth novel Private Life chronicles a woman’slife from her early childhood in the1880s to the Second World War in the1940s andis hailed as her best novel since her Pulitzer Prize-winning book A Thousand Acres.Published in2010, there have been so far a number of reviews interpreting the themeof the novel. Some claim that the book is a heartbreaking portrait of marriage betweena diffident woman and a pompous man, while others regard it as a persuasive paean tothe importance of divorce. There are also certain critics identifying Private Life as atale of loss and a parable of American life. Besides the analyses of the novel’s theme,some articles also interpret the novel from a feminist perspective. However, there isno thesis with high academic value which provides a comprehensive analysis of thebook.This paper tries to fill the academic gap by adopting the New Historicalperspective to analyze this enthralling novel. New Historicism emerged in the early1980s in the United States and gained widespread influence in the1990s. It opposesthe formalism of New Criticism and conceives of a literary text as situated withinnon-literary texts of the institutions, social practices and discourses that constitute theculture of a particular time and place. The textuality of history and the historicity ofthe text are one important pair of concepts of New Historicism. New Historicism canbe simply defined as a parallel reading of literary texts and non-literary texts. For itsexponents history is actually a text or historical narrative instead of a series of facts,while the literary text to some degree is part of history rather than a mere product ofthe pure imagination of the author. This unique understanding of the relationshipbetween history and the text is defined by the guru of this literary theory LouisMontrose as the textuality of history and the historicity of the text. Private Life isconsidered by many as a historical fiction which gives detailed descriptions of the half-century American history from the late19^thcentury to the middle20^thcentury.Therefore, the textuality of history and the historicity of the text are explicitlyembodied in this novel. In Chapter One, the novel will be interpreted through thetextual nature and subjectivity of history as well as the historicity of the text reflectedby culture and historical events and figures. Power and discourse are anotherimportant pair of concepts of New Historicism. For the practitioners of this criticismpower is an omnipresent dynamic energy circulating in all directions. Discourse hasroughly the same meaning as ideology except for its emphasis on the role of languageas a vehicle of ideology. No discourse can adequately represent the history by itself.Therefore, various versions of history are constructed by different discourses, butNew Historicism mainly concentrates on the discourse of marginalized people. A richcast of characters are introduced in Private Life by Smiley. Many of them belong tothe marginalized groups which are under the control of the dominant power. InChapter Two, the novel will be analyzed through power in both society and family aswell as the discourses of marginalized people such as women and Japanese Americans.Through reading Private Life from a New Historical perspective, this paper aims toprovide an innovative interpretation of Private Life and at the same time enhancepeople’s understanding of the interplay of history and the text in a specific novel.