Remembered Rapture

by bell hooks

  In actuality, writers who make use of personal confession do not share a common style, standpoint, or intent. This is as true for women writers as men. Yet sexism tends to ensure that women’s writing is often approached as though it is all the same—every woman speaking through one voice. Concurrently, in some feminist circles there is both a tendency to ignore the differences in women’s writing as well as a desire to disregard aesthetic considerations that would lead the work of some writers to be valued more than others. While I was educated as a student of literature in my undergraduate years and in graduate school to believe that standards are important, that I should strive to attain literary excellence in my writing, there were other women coming to voice in places both inside and outside the academy who were learning to question the notion of standards. In the essay “Believing in Literature” Dorothy Allison recalls the confusion she felt when she was taught to question literary canons in ways that suggested there was no standard for aesthetic evaluation. In the particular feminist world she inhabited women were, to some extent, “making an ethical system that insists a lightweight romance has the same worth as a serious piece of fiction, that there is no good or bad, no ‘objective’ craft or standards of excellence.” Significantly, among women, those of us who were striving to be writers before we were actively engaged in contemporary feminist movement always insisted on the importance of craft and standards, resisting notions that all women’s voices were “equal.” We brought this insistence on the importance of standards into feminist writing even though such thinking was often at odds with the perspective that the only act that was important was women coming to voice in writing. Differences in perspective were also influenced by whether women came to writing outside the academy or inside. The emphasis on breaking silences in contemporary feminist movement led women to create journal-writing workshops and diverse conventional and unconventional creative-writing seminars that urged women to write. Certainly those of us who were working to earn doctorates in traditional English departments would not have been able to attain our degrees if we had not recognized the importance of aesthetic standards both in relation to our work and to evaluating the work of our peers and students. Whenever mainstream critics critique feminist influence on women’s writing they tend to ignore the differences and to act as though feminist movement can always be best understood by focusing on its most unproductive elements. In recent years, conservative antifeminist backlash has painted a portrait of women’s studies and feminist movement that suggests there is a total lack of concern among women writers for standards and literary excellence.

  Significantly, feminist questioning of the gender and race biases in established literary canons did lead to important rethinking of how we might create standards for literary excellence and/or use traditional modes of evaluation in ways that would not reinscribe existing structures of domination. These critical interventions were crucial for everyone. They were especially inspiring to women and men from marginal groups who were striving to become writers in a culture that had heretofore only valued the voices of privileged white male writers and the rare token white female or female and male of color. Concurrently, the fact that feminist emphasis on excavating the personal as a way to understand our political locations enabled many of us to break with traditional academic training, which had taught many of us to believe that work was objective and neutral if we did not overtly refer to the personal or even use the word I. We learned to critically interrogate the notion of objectivity. We learned to see that every work conveyed a political standpoint even if it was covertly embedded in the text. We learned to understand the ways language that was taught to us as “neutral” usually reflected the prevailing hierarchies of race and gender. All of these interventions helped many women let go of years of being taught that we could not be good writers and/or that writing from a clear politics of location wherein one did not attempt to appear neutral but rather overtly identified standpoint, perspective, agenda, and political concerns was as valuable as other types of writing.

  There is no doubt that in some case feminist thinkers overvalued the “personal” and made it seem that any confessional statement however trite or meaningless was important. Yet these errors of judgment, which may have led to an increase in “bad” confessional writing, were part of a constructive process wherein the field of creativity was expanded. More women than ever before could explore the terrain of writing. More voices could be heard. Many of us were inspired. Our confidence in ourselves was strengthened and our devotion to the craft of writing deepened. Addressing the power of this movement essayist Nancy Mairs exclaimed in Voice Lessons: “In fact, the autobiographical pitch and timbre distinguishing this voice that utters me developed unconsciously but not spontaneously during the years after finding community under the pear trees, when, as a doctoral student, I began at last to attend seriously to the words and intonations of women as women. I found my writing voice, and go on finding it, in precisely the same way that I came to my first utterances: by listening to the voices around me.…” To find a writing voice many women had to hear themselves through the act and art of confession.

  Unfortunately, as conflicts among feminist thinkers intensified, particularly debate over the nature and direction of feminist theory, the political and theoretical arguments underpinning the notion that the personal is political were forgotten. Within feminist circles individuals began to critique and ridicule any emphasis on personal confession. Ironically, despite the absence of a sustained mass-based feminist movement addressing a large body of women and men, feminist theory that was metalinguistic, abstract, and very difficult to comprehend was more valued than any work that endeavored to address a larger audience. Collective feminist failure to stand by the principle of exploring the personal while simultaneously upholding literary standards when it came to the craft of writing helped diminish the value and significance of the personal as a site for existential reflection. Even though women from all backgrounds continued to tell their stories, eventually there was little or no critical recognition of the ways writers deployed the confessional narrative with diverse intentionality. Writers who valued confession narratives whose work was most linked to feminist politics and feminist theory could not count on critical readers, especially reviewers, to take note of issues of style, content, or purpose. Indeed it was much more likely that such writing would be dismissed without careful literary evaluation.

  When I first began writing feminist theory I did not include personal confession. I began to use confessional anecdotes as a strategy to engage diverse readers. Coming from a black working-class background, I was especially concerned with the importance of creating liberatory feminist theory that would speak to as many folks as possible. Through lectures and conversations I found that audiences across race and class were quite willing to engage complex theoretical issues if they were presented in ways that were accessible. Using an anecdotal story to illustrate an idea was one way to bridge the gap between feminist thinking emerging from university settings and the more common discourses of gender taking place in everyday life.

  As my academic writing received public attention, I was not represented in published discussions of my work as a writer who also did feminist theory. My public reputation was based solely on academic writing. While I had not wished it to be so, my writing had become more compartmentalized. Those individuals who were familiar with my work prior to my engagement in feminism saw me as an aspiring creative writer, working mostly to write poetry and fiction. They knew that I was committed to writing as a craft. The critical standards that I brought initially to creative writing served me well when I began writing literary criticism, feminist theory, and cultural criticism. I had been so well socialized by graduate school that I was torn between which writing path to pursue, agonizing over whether or not I could write from various standpoints in various genres. In part, my conventional academic training had encouraged me to believe that no writer could write well in various genres.


  Within academic settings finding one’s voice was often made synonymous with choosing a specific style and genre. As I began to write successfully in various genres I interrogated this notion of voice, embracing the reality that we can approach a subject from multiple standpoints using a variety of writing styles. Feminist thinking not only urged women to break traditional allegiance to genres; it also legitimized interdisciplinary work as well. However, my desire to bring to bear the standards I had learned in creative-writing classes to the writing of a dissertation and later to scholarly work was consistently seen as suspect by professors. It seemed as though one’s intellectual ability was perceived as lacking if one remained concerned about writing style, about communicating in language in ways that were compelling. Eventually I let go of conventional thinking about genres, no longer accepting the idea that critical writing could not be creative, even though I had to continually confront a literary world that did not consider writing style that important when it came to academic work, particularly feminist writing. Academics who write both scholarly and non-scholarly work often find it difficult to receive recognition for “creative” writing. I wholeheartedly embrace Nancy Mairs’s declaration that we recognize writing to be a more inclusive terrain when she declares: “I believe in the reality of work. Period. I do not distinguish between creative and critical writing because all writing is creative.… Whatever the product—poem, story, essay, letter to lover, technical report—the problem is the same: the page is empty and will have to be filled. Out of nothing, something. And all writing is critical, requiring the same sifting, selection, scrutiny, and judgment of the material at hand. The distinctions are not useful.…” Contemporary feminist movement enabled many of us to let go these distinctions and do all our writing work more creatively.

  Feminist insistence that “the personal is political” certainly paved the way for all readers, not just women, to explore and value the confessional narrative. Oftentimes women tell their personal stories solely as an act of resistance, to break silences. At times these stories may be simply narcissistic, providing the reader with no complex understanding of the significance of a particular confession. The writer may show no interest in craft. Interviewed in The Power to Dream, a collection about women writers and their work, Maxine Hong Kingston shares her belief that “there are writers who give you life whether or not they write well.” This has not been my experience. In my English classes I encourage all my students to appreciate writing that is well crafted and to seek to be skillful writers who worship at the throne of language. When writing personal narratives I urge them not to be self-indulgent, to refuse to be exhibitionist—to consider ways that they can best use language to convey various truths.

  I am most interested in confessional writing when it allows us to move into the personal as a way to go beyond it. In all my work I evoke the personal as a prelude. It functions as a welcoming gesture, offering the reader a sense of who I am, a sense of location. Reader response to my theoretical work, the feminist theory and/or cultural criticism, lets me know how much this strategy empowers them. They respond to open, honest personal revelations and to the clarity of writing style. In writing memoirs, journals, and letters I also endeavor to make use of the personal for purposes that extend beyond mere description of self-indulgent revelation. For example: I wrote about my girlhood as a way to chart my development as an intellectual. As I have become more well-known as a thinker and a writer I am often asked about the path that led me from a small-town working-class background into the academy. At a time when so many young folks, particularly African-Americans, from poor and working-class backgrounds feel ambivalent about reading and studying, I felt it would be useful for me to share in print how much books were a force enabling me to realize my dreams. To me the writing of this memoir was like drawing a map. The journey it charts may serve as inspiration and affirmation to aspiring writers coming from backgrounds where their desire to write is discouraged or not affirmed.

  Throughout time confessional writing by white men has resonated with male and female readers of all races. I began this essay talking about the impact of Rilke’s letters on my consciousness precisely because it is the primary example from my girlhood of a work that transformed my thinking about writing even as it affirmed my will to write. In The Last Generation, Cherrie Moraga urges us to celebrate confession. “All writing is confession. Confession masked and revealed in the voices and faces of our characters. All is hunger. The longing to be known fully and still loved. The admission of our own inherent vulnerability, our weakness, our tenderness of skin, fragility of heart, our overwhelming desire to be relieved of the burden of ourselves in the body of another, to be forgiven of our ultimate aloneness in the mystical body of a god or the common work of a revolution. These are human considerations that the best of writers presses her fingers upon.” Feminist focus on confessional narratives forged a cultural context in which women’s autobiographical writing both past and present could be given sustained acknowledgment and recognition. It would be a tremendous loss for contemporary writing if the misuses of confessional narratives led to ongoing devaluation of the form itself.

  Every woman’s confessional narrative has more meaningful power of voice when it is well crafted. Women should not be afraid to critique a lack of standards in writing by women. To indulge in praising writing that is not compelling, that has no literary merit, means that critics collude in setting a stage for the devaluation of women’s words, for future silences. Women will continue to confess, to tell our stories with wild abandon and recklessness. Yet the proliferation of published confessional writing may not mean that we permanently establish our place as serious writers within this canon. To be serious we must dare to be critical of our urge to tell our stories, of the ways we tell them.

  telling all

  the politics of confession

  Memoirs have always intrigued me. Contrary to those who mock it, confession is good for the soul. The confessional narrative can function in many different ways. Therapeutically it can be a way to recover a lost sense of self or a way to release the past. It can be purely documentary. It can be an inspirational guide for life’s journey. And it can also be a gesture of unadulterated exhibitionism.

  Long before Kathryn Harrison appeared on the scene, Anaïs Nin was the great high priestess of the latter. Girlfriend loved looking at herself in the mirror both in “real life” and in the images she created in her books. I have always been especially fond of the title A Spy in the House of Love. The most memorable line in the book is when the heroine exclaims: “I have never found a way to get what I wanted except by lies.” Like Nin, Harrison writes romantically about her consensual incestuous romantic liaison with her dad. Yet ultimately she lacks Nin’s courage. For when confronted with public interrogation of her work, Harrison engages in a pretty sensational form of gaslighting—only it is not another person she betrays but her own narrative. While the book is in no way written as the story of an incest survivor, in her public discussions of the book, especially when she is answering critics, Harrison often suggests that this is the essence of her text.

  Anyone who has actually read the compelling, intense memoir The Kiss and finds the book satisfying on its own terms (many of the people who talked about the book did not read it) knows a significant aspect of the work is the story it tells of the young adult Harrison’s consensual seduction by and love affair with her father. This is not the only story Harrison narrates, even though it is the primary one she and everyone else talks about. In the book words like incest and abuse (which are constantly evoked in interviews and reviews) never appear. The language Harrison uses to describe this dangerous liaison comes straight out of conventional well-crafted romantic sexual thrillers. Yet if one listens to what the author says in mass media you might come away thinking this is a book that tells the true story of a female surviving coercive father/daughter incest. However, this book is not written as a survivor’s confession nor is it a
record of coercive abuse.

  Harrison wants to have it all. She has chosen to write a sensational book that suggests that it is possible to have a consensual tortuous love affair as an adult woman with one’s father and live to triumphantly tell the tale, yet simultaneously she seeks to gain recognition for being yet another abused female victim of a male oppressor. At times in the book, she blurs the line between defenseless girlhood and adult female agency. To escape censure from readers, at difficult moments in the narrative Harrison relies on representing herself as the little girl who just could not say no to daddy.

  When daddy first sticks his tongue in his grown daughter’s mouth she not only has a clue that this ain’t right, she has the good sense to talk about it with her boyfriend. How she moves from this mature healthy response to the position of little Lolita who just can’t say no is not made evident, for suddenly she retreats back into psychic girlhood. She may be an adult traveling by car and plane to get to that motel where she’s doing it for daddy, but when she arrives on the scene she’s just a little girl frightened yet fascinated. Intimate terrorism is happening here on both sides; this is the truth the book tells.