Various interests of feminist theory – like the discussions about the fragmentary self; the relationship between personal and political, and between personal and textual; the significance of reading women’s personal narratives; and the position of women in post-modern societies – crystallize in the study of autobiographies. Women’s autobiographical practices have become a terrain for feminist analysis because they are “a fruitful ground in examining the recent theoretical debates concerning ‘the self,’ ‘the subject,’ and ‘the author’ (Stanley 3-4), and because they articulate both women’s life experiences and feminist theory (Smith and Watson, Women, Autobiography, Theory 5).

In the genre, discourses of truth and identity meet and produce the subject of autobiography (Gilmore 182). In her study of autobiography, Leigh Gilmore aims “to chart the … discourses of self-representation differently by looking to noncanonical texts in order to understand how and in what ways women’s self-representation occurs and in relation to what cultural institutions and forms it is written” (183). I will in this article, inspired by her mission, read an “amateur autobiography” as my case and study the self represented in it and the social formations and cultural modes of writing behind the personal narrative. Besides, I explore the practical implications of feminist and post-structuralist theoretical discussions that trouble the relationship between self, life, and writing in auto/bio/graphy. In reading actor and amateur writer Outi Nevanlinna’s autobiographical writings and presenting the dialogue between myself and Outi as my case, I experiment with fusing theoretical discussions about the autobiographical I with empirical analysis of autobiographies.

When writing her twenty-pages-long autobiography in 1995, Outi Nevanlinna was a professional actor in her late thirties. It was fourteen years since she started acting in theatre, and she still liked her job. At the beginning of her autobiography, she evaluates her life:

Outi’s story was written as a submission for a contest “Tracing art experiences,” organised by a research project at The Research Unit for Contemporary Culture, University of Jyväskylä, Finland, and by The Folklore Archives of Finnish Literature Society. Autobiography contests of this sort are quite common in Finland, and there have been various thematic writing competitions that helped collect data for research purposes.[2] This time, the autobiographies were not gathered only in order to get material for research – although 700 art autobiographies by people all over the country and of all ages and fields of life constitutes a valuable text corpus when studying the meanings of art in people’s lives – but also to acknowledge the autobiographers’ important contribution in projects like this.

The research project produced a volume of edited academic articles (see: Eskola) and an anthology by the “amateur autobiographers” (see: Eskola & Laaksonen), in which twenty-four of the total of 700 autobiographies were published as whole stories with the writers’ names attached. With this policy, we wanted to comment on and question the prevailing convention of protecting the writers’ anonymity and only fragmentarily citing their stories in research. The two books can be read also separately, but together they constitute a conversation of the meanings of art in various levels: both the experiential level of personal autobiographical narration and the more abstract level of the researchers’ interpretations of the autobiographies.

Outi’s autobiography, “Rikoksista suurin on, että näyttelee huonosti [The biggest crime is to act badly],” was one of the 24 stories published in the autobiography anthology (Nevanlinna). In my article in the academic volume (Saresma, “A dialogue with the women of art stories”), I presented my analysis as a conversation with three amateur autobiographers, one of them being Outi. After the books were published, I wanted to go on with the dialogue, and asked all the three women to share their thoughts about their autobiographies now being published and analysed. This request lead me to an interesting correspondence with Outi. She sent me a self-reflexive letter and an e-mail message discussing her feelings evoked in the process of writing and reading the original autobiography.

Before going to the detailed analysis of Outi’s autobiographical writings, let me place my approach within a brief survey of the discussions of autobiography’s subject in feminist theory.

Autobiographics and the many I’s

Here, I focus on the autobiographical subject, for “the major epistemological issues of our time are raised in connection with the nature of ‘selves,’ how to understand and how to study them under what kind of intellectual conditions and limitations” (Stanley 5). Many feminist scholars have noticed that autobiography can be a site for pondering both theoretical questions about the self or the subject, and the empirical issues regarding e.g. gender and working life. My challenge here is to combine these two approaches, theoretical and empirical, in the name of feminist politics. In doing that, I find Leigh Gilmore’s term autobiographics useful. Autobiographics is both “a description of self-representation” and a reading practice, and it is “concerned with interruptions and eruptions, with resistance and contradictions as strategies of self-representation” (Gilmore 184). When thinking about a text’s autobiographics, it becomes unavoidable to consider the autobiographical I, which is discursive and constituted in writing: “an exploration of a text’s autobiographics allows us to recognize that the I is multiply coded in a range of discourses: it is the site of multiple solicitations, multiple markings of ‘identity,’ multiple figurations of agency” (Gilmore 184).

In what follows, I apply autobiographics as a practice of reading Outi’s autobiographical fragments. In my reading, I will contemplate the possible interruptions and eruptions in Outi’s narrative in order to discover places of discontinuity in it, which I believe can reveal the ideological discourses lurking behind ‘personal’ writing. I also explore the autobiographics of Outi’s texts in order to study the multiply coded autobiographical I.

Not unlike Gilmore, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson emphasize the complexity of the autobiographical I in their ‘guide book’ Reading Autobiography. It is in the apparently simple act of “people writing about what they know best, their own lives” where the unity of the I disintegrates. In the act of writing the writer becomes split into “both the observing subject and the object of investigation, remembrance, and contemplation” (Smith & Watson 1). This emphasis on the many layers of the autobiographical subject has long been acknowledged but not soundly utilized in autobiography studies. This may have to do with the fact that autobiography as a genre claims that the narrator and the protagonist are one and the same: “The autobiographical contract affirms the ‘identity’ between the names of the author, narrator and protagonist” (Lejeune 27, qtd. in Marcus 47). Autobiography has been seen ”to secure, on one level at least, the much desired unity of the subject and object of knowledge – through the shared identity of the author and the autobiographical subject” (Marcus 42).

This alleged unity of the subject has been deconstructed in the post-structurally inspired discussions about the self. Simultaneously, the reading of the autobiographical I has become subtler; it has been acknowledged e. g. that telling one’s life story involves “a narrator here and now telling about a protagonist of the same name, there and then” (Bruner 167). Even so, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson claim that when the “critics analysing autobiographical acts distinguish between the I-now and the I-then, the narrating I who speaks and the narrated I who is spoken about,” the separation between the two of them is too limited and “cannot account for the complexities of self-narrating or the heterogenous array of autobiographical modes”; ”nor does it adequately capture the complexity of the I in even the most traditional of autobiographies” (58).

Smith and Watson suggest that “we need to think more critically about the producer of the life narrative” and propose “complicating this autobiographical I beyond the I-then and the I-now framework by attending to the multiple I-thens, to the ideology spoken through the I, to the multiple I-nows, and to the flesh-and-blood-author”(58–59). Thus, we are advised to talk about four layers of the autobiographical I. First, there is the ‘real’ or historical I. This is the authorial I that is assumed from the signature on the title page of the autobiography. The ‘real’ I is the historical person, the one producing the autobiographical I – but it has to be remembered that this person’s life is far more diverse and dispersed than the story that is being told of it. It is possible, as Smith and Watson have it, to “verify this I’s existence,” but this I is still “unknown and unknowable by readers and is not the I that we gain access to in an autobiographical narrative” (Smith & Watson 59).

Whereas this historical I is related to the self of the real life and moves in the simple writer-as-an-experiencer level of narration, the next I’s are purely textual categories. The narrating I is the one available to readers. It is the narrator, the I who tells the autobiographical narrative. It is “neither unified not stable” but “split, fragmented, provisional, multiple, a subject always in the process of coming together and of dispersing” (Smith & Watson 60). The third category of the autobiographical I is the narrated I or the Object I. It has to be distinguished from the narrating I. It is “the subject of history whereas the narrating I is the agent of discourse.” The narrated I is “the protagonist of the narrative, the version of the self that the narrating I chooses to constitute through recollection for the reader” (61).

The fourth category, the ideological I, reaches again out from the textual level and refers to broader societal and cultural contexts. It is “the concept of personhood culturally available to the narrator when she/he tells her/his story.” Smith and Watson point out that “every autobiographical narrator is historically and culturally situated” and “each is a product of her or his particular time.” Researchers of autobiographies thus “need to situate the narrator in the historical notion of personhood and the meaning of lives at the time of writing.” We are also reminded that “at any historical moment, there are heterogenous identities culturally available to the narrator” and that “the ground of the ideological I is only apparently stable and the possibilities for tension, adjustment, refixing, and unfixing are ever present” (Smith & Watson 62).

With the help of the concept of autobiographics and the idea of the multilayered subject, I present a reading of Outi’s autobiographical texts where the interruptions and contradictions of the autobiographical I are taken seriously. I do not strive for extensive and lucid analysis about a coherent self in Outi’s autobiographical writings, but instead want to show the complicated processes of telling the I and to catch the points of discontinuity of her told identity. In what follows, I demonstrate by reading Outi’s autobiographical writings how the understanding of the various layers of the autobiographical I and the processual nature of the self represented in autobiography can serve as tools for empirical analysis.

Writing the self of a female actor

I first became interested in Outi’s autobiography and selected it for my close reading for two reasons. First, it is extremely captivating. Outi discusses the problems of being a woman in theatre, and the pros and cons of being a professional actor. The issue of feminism is explicitly referred to, unlike in almost every other art autobiography by amateur writers that took part to the writing contest. Secondly, Outi’s autobiography is fascinating in its self-reflexivity and in the way it problematizes the autobiographical subject.

After the evaluative opening words I cited at the first pages of this article, Outi starts telling about her life: about her well-balanced childhood, the happy school years, getting married and starting a career as an actor. The most permeable theme of her autobiography is the discussion about being an actor, the up- and downhills of the profession, the talent she has or lacks. Outi discusses her character as follows:

The autobiography focuses on the professional career the way that has been said to be characteristic to male autobiographers. At the same time the narration is strikingly self-reflexive – a trait commonly associated with female autobiographers. Outi ponders a lot on the process of acting, for example in the next fragment:

Being an actor is a central part of Outi’s self-representation and of constructing her identity. In her letter to me, dated 9th October, 1998, she evaluates her original autobiography: “[…] I thought: this does not sound like it is written by an actor. Nothing suggests artistic desire or chaotic behaviour which is thought to be a part of the nature of an artist – and yet, I am not a chaotic person.” Thus, she sees herself as a systematic person and not as an artistic being. This can be interpreted as the place of discontinuity of the story of her self, of an identity crisis indeed: she interprets herself as being something different than she should be: she is a professional actor, yet she does not possess the characteristic features of an actor – an artist.

There are other problematic aspects in being an actor as well. No matter how deeply Outi loves acting, she has problems in adapting to the gendered space of institutional theatre. In the following ironical excerpt from her autobiography, she notices the stereotypical approach to women in theatre:

It is true that Finnish women are nowadays better educated than men; that we are well settled in the labor market; that we do earn our own money; that we can combine career and family due to long maternity (and paternity) leaves and well organized municipal day care. Still women do earn less that men, do most of the housework, and have to encounter domestic violence, inter alia. The illusion about gender equality intertwines with the stereotype of the strong Finnish – or, in the context of the Scandinavian welfare state, Nordic – woman. This myth dominates the representations of Finnish women in literature, film, and so on, but it also affects the discussion about gender equality in Finland. The stereotype highlights the individual strength of each woman and leaves no room for being weak. It does not agree with the slogan “the personal is political,” but instead teaches that everything is up to oneself.

Even though she acknowledges the inequalities of gender and writes critically about mistreatment of women in theatre, there are traces of the ideological discourse of the strong Nordic woman in Outi’s autobiography. At the beginning of her autobiography, Outi tells how her first marriage ended up in divorce. She also mentions being unemployed for a while. Both of these episodes that she only laconically refers to are against the all-enduring and all-tolerating character of the strong woman: she has failed with her marriage, and she has failed in being the breadwinner. Luckily for her, these are only short episodes, and these dissonances in the otherwise harmonical story of the strong woman can be set aside after a laconic mention. Another point of discord with the myth is Outi’s lack of talent on the stage: she is not perfect in what she does, and she feels guilty about it. This is far more difficult to fit in the story of the strong Finnish female actor, and Outi keeps reworking this throughout her autobiographical writing.

The self in process

In writing and reading an autobiography there is the danger of freezing the life into a monolith: “autobiography […] always risks becoming self-sealing in the sense that it may tempt the teller into a ‘life’ that suits circumstances so comfortably that it even conceals the possibilities of choice” (Bruner 162). In Outi’s case, however, there is no fear of that: her autobiography is just a starting point for the reflections of the self. Her later autobiographical writings demonstrate effectively how the self is never ready, never fixed, but in a constant process of becoming.

bell hooks (44), among others, has claimed that there is a huge gap between the thinking of the contemporary theorists that emphasize the fragmentary nature and hybridity of the subject, and of the ordinary folks who see their identity as fixed and more or less stable. This common polarisation of the academics versus the others becomes questionable when reading Outi’s autobiographical fragments. Outi comments on reading her autobiography published in the anthology in her letter of 9th October, 1998:

The autobiographical subject is never ‘individual’ in the sense of isolation or autonomy, but it is always socially constructed in a particular situation, for someone. Writing autobiographically is always a self-reflexive and dialogic process where the story is addressed to others. Autobiography seldom (never) is “a story separate from the significant others – parents, lovers – with whom we continually make and remake ourselves” (Miller 123). The different layers of the I in Outi’s autobiographical writings have not emerged in isolation, but the self is constituted “through [her] writing and in relation to various and different communities” (cf. Barbour 181–182), e. g. to other actors, to feminists, to her beloved, and of course to the jury of the writing competition and to me as a researcher.

Outi continues discussing the self that I as a researcher construct out of her autobiography in the research article and how well it ‘fits’ her:

The starting point of Outi’s self-reflection here is not her own text but my interpretation of her autobiography. Thus, another layer is added to the temporal and relational construction of the autobiographical subject. First, there was the in some sense innocent self of the original autobiography – innocent or transparent, even though it in Outi’s case was actually quite self-reflexive from the beginning. After a while, Outi reflected on her own previous writing in a letter, finding discrepancies between the past self and her present self image. Still, at the same time, there is enough continuity between the selves in order to keep Outi’s identity coherent. But in my reading of the autobiographical I, she does not find anything familiar, anything true, and this understandably causes her anxiety.

Researchers’ interpretations of the stories often differ from those of the narrating I: disagreement may be caused by the fact that the researcher finds or highlights different aspects of the story than those the writer sees as important (see e. g. Josselson). Outi does not, however, really deny my reading of the autobiographical I, but starts to reflect on her own writing process as the cause for the possible misinterpretation. She ponders on whether she has, unconsciously, tried to write herself as something else than she actually is – and feels awkward for not reaching the “truth about herself.” Outi has again mixed feelings about the autobiographical I she reads retrospectively. On the one hand, she acknowledges that the self in the text is a construction, but on the other, she still partly believes in the final truth about herself that could be captured in the autobiography, and feels that she failed in her effort to write as truthful a depiction of herself as possible.

When the temporal distance from the moment of writing the original autobiography increases, Outi’s reading of the autobiographical I and relating it to her present self becomes ever more complicated. Outi’s concerns about her honesty and success in writing a ‘true’ story of her self are revealed in an e-mail letter, dated 5th April, 2001, which I received from her after sending her an article about the ethics of reading women’s autobiographies, in which I analysed some of the comments Outi had sent me earlier (see Saresma, “A monologue on dialogue”). In the e-mail she continued re-evaluating the autobiographical I of her original autobiography, written as long as six years previously.

The notion of the ‘real me’ “suggests the fictive unity of the self and the essentialism entailed in the search for such a person” (McRobbie 129). However, the possibility of ever finding this ‘real me’ is being questioned in feminist theoretical debates, and instead what will be explored is

In Excitable Speech, Butler indeed suggests that becoming a subject is a linguistic and a social act (29), and as becoming a subject depends on the others addressing the subject, there is no such thing as a sovereign subject (27). This does not however mean that there is no room for agency or resistance or that the time of feminist politics is over. On the contrary, for Butler the potential for agency and even resistance is possible only through subjects being not sovereign but addressed by others linguistically. However, Butler’s political goals are not clearly formulated, and what she says about resistance is somewhat elusive (Mills 269).

It is, at any rate, encouraging for feminist politics to notice that “postmodernism does not mean that we have to do away with the subject but rather that we ask after the process of its construction” (McRobbie 137). My effort in reading Outi’s autobiographical I is post-structurally inspired, emphasizing the gaps and breaks of the story of the I instead of construing the subject as coherent by means of analysis is exactly this: not to eliminate the subject or the self altogether, but instead to concentrate on the subject in process, focus on, with Stuart Hall’s words, “the idea of becoming rather than being” (qtd. in McRobbie 138). But what could the concrete implications of post-structurally inspired reading of the autobiographical I’s for feminist politics be?

The politics of many I’s

When reflecting her life story, Outi draws attention to all the three aspects of auto/bio/graphy: to the self or the autobiographical I construed in the story, to the style of the autobiography, or the writing, and – to a lesser extent – to the life she is depicting. In evaluating her style of writing, Outi takes a critical stance. In her first response letter, she is quite content with her writing skills: “the text is fluent, clear, and clever,” as she has it. But in her e-mail response, after a few more years, she thinks that her writing “stinks.” When reflecting back to her life, she acknowledges that writing is about selecting, highlighting, even censoring; and that “the text was a description about my way of seeing and experiencing things at that moment,” as she puts it. She states clearly that her autobiography was written from a certain point of time, and would, if written now, be very different.

In addition to reflecting her writing skills and her ability to capture the essentials about her life, Outi repeatedly evaluates the self she has been construing in her autobiography. The I construed in the autobiography is neither solid nor final. The four I’s that were distinguished above can be sorted out in the citations. The historical I is the Outi Nevanlinna that wrote the original autobiography and the response letters to me. The narrating I is trying make sense of the fragmentary nature of the narrated I. And the ideological I seems to be striving for continuity, or, rather, is caught in struggles between the powers of continuity and of fragmentation that are in constant struggle in autobiographical writing. I revise the four layers of the autobiographical I in Outi’s autobiography and the letters presented above from the point of view of politics of feminist reading. Separating the different layers of the autobiographical I for the purposes of analysis is not a process of dispersal. Instead, its purpose is to demonstrate that there is potential for change for the subject both on the textual level and on the societal level. In order to gain a deeper understanding of the gender system, in my example, the distinguishing of these levels of the autobiographical I proves to be a usable tool.

First, there is the historical gendered subject, Outi, as a female actor and the writer of the story. She explicitly tells about the gendered, repressive practices of theatre in her autobiography. Even if the analysis was performed only on the surface level, the unequal aspects of the seemingly equal Finnish society would have been revealed. But with more subtle instruments of analysis, like the distinguishing more layers of the autobiographical I, the exploration of the text produces something more. The narrating I – the one producing the style of narration – can be brought under close scrutiny. Earlier, I threw in a notion of the modes of writing that Outi has used, that is, whether the style of narration is masculine or feminine, or, what the ‘typical’ themes in feminine or masculine writing are. This examination of feminine and masculine style of writing used to be quite popular in feminist autobiography research some decades ago, and it had political implications, like the increased appreciation of women’s autobiographical writing, that was formerly excluded from the masculine canon of autobiographical writing. However, as I wrote in my analysis of Outi’s autobiography earlier (Saresma, “A dialogue with the women of art stories,” 244–245), there are both masculine and feminine features in it, and analysing them is not very fruitful, because it is difficult to say anything profound about these differences or their societal relevance.

If the analysis is focused on the narrated I, it will become evident that it is produced in certain discourses that are available or forbidden, predominant or suppressed, in a certain socio-cultural context. The narrated I is the product of the choices that the writer makes. Outi has chosen to present the I of her autobiography as having a certain character – and, as was seen above, this character does not please her any more when she is reading the autobiography after some years. When thinking about feminist research, it is interesting that Outi’s narrated I is depicted as a feminist in theatre, in a sphere that seems to be very gendered, but unconcerned about this. To depict the narrated I as a feminist is a courageous move even nowadays, but it would have been almost impossible some decades earlier.

The fourth layer of the autobiographical I, the ideological I, is very much a product of the surrounding society and its values. The ideological I of Outi’s autobiography is clearly formed by the constraints of the stereotype of the strong Nordic woman. The myth is so strong and internalized that the discourses supporting it creep through Outi’s writing and become an essential part of the autobiographical subject without her even noticing it. This is how ideology works: it becomes so internalized that it seems natural (Smith & Watson, Reading Autobiography 62). It was not while writing the autobiography but only when reading my interpretations when Outi started paying attention to the fact that the I of her autobiography was not equivalent to the image she has about herself, and this caused substantial anxiety for her, probably partly because of the ideological tension of being one coherent subject. This tension is intertwined with the act of writing autobiography as an example of the demand of constructing a fixed identity, and with the discourse of knowing and stocktaking oneself, so dominant in the contemporary society as a Foucauldian formation of confession and control (Kaskisaari 2000, 6).

The analysis thus separates the many layers of the autobiographical I in Outi’s texts. But instead of the I being totally dispersed, denying of any ‘truth’ about the self, it is comprised of overlapping truths. The life as lived and the experiences of the writer are connected with the strategies of narrating and with the broader socio-cultural context. The formation of the autobiographical I is not something that starts from a certain point and finishes up in another, but a process, constantly in change. In Outi’s case it is the temporal dimension that allows the many versions of truth: the fact that the temporal distance and the perspective change makes it possible for Outi to accept the different versions of the ‘truth about herself.’

By distinguishing the different layers of the autobiographical I the analysis can be directed to many layers of life: the personal, the narrated, the cultural, and the social. It may also prove to be an ethical solution for autobiography research to make this distinction: when the various levels of the autobiographical I are analysed, it becomes clear that the analysis is not directed to the real writers as persons. Critical observations can be made about the text, because they are clearly not aimed against the writer, but more generally to the society that enables, for example, certain forms of oppression of women that are carried to all the levels of life, from the sphere of the society to the (seemingly) most personal – that is, autobiographical writing.

The autobiographics of the actor’s story

In conclusion, I’ll come back to the question of autobiographics. “If autobiography provokes fantasies of the real, then autobiographics explores the constrained ‘real’ for the reworking of identity in the discourses of women’s self-representation” (Gilmore 189). In analysing the autobiographics of Outi’s texts, I have, instead of searching for the ‘real’ Outi, focused on the analysis of reworking her identity, or on the transitions of the autobiographical subject: how it is negotiated as truthful as possible, but how it at the same time escapes definition, slips away from analysis.

I have used Gilmore’s notion of autobiographics as a reading practice emphasizing the interruptions and eruptions of Outi’s identity, resistance to certain discourses and contradictions of her personal narrative as her strategies of self-representation. I have tried to recognize the I as multiply coded in a range of discourses, like the discourse of a strong Nordic woman, of a skeptical feminist, of an insecure divorced woman, of a self-assured mother, of a fragile professional actor. I have tried to distinguish the multiple markings of identity, multiple figurations of identity in Outi’s autobiographical fragments (Gilmore 184). The notion emphasizes the complexity and stratification of the autobiographical I which resists static identity categories, like a wanton actress, or an all-capable professional, or an even-tempered wife-mother.

Theatre is for Outi the very discourse of self-representation. Acting, playing roles, is a suitable and commonly used metaphor for identity, because it acknowledges that the I is not permanent. In writing about her changing views about being an actor, Outi crystallizes the process of writing the autobiographical self: it is always performed, again and again, and it changes a little every time it is performed. It is context – where and to whom one performs – that defines how the self emerges each time.

Outi perceives being an actor as “a sort of self-exposure.” This notion implicates a core identity behind the changing roles on stage. More than acting, autobiography is a place for representing a ‘real’ or ‘true’ identity. It is a prerequisite of the genre that the truth about the self be sincerely revealed. In reading Outi’s autobiographical fragments, the impossibility of this endeavour, and the anxiety this causes, becomes evident. The quotes from her autobiographical writings show that it is an illusion to be able to find or present the authentic self, either on stage or in real life. Still, in acting she sees the possibility – the fantasy – of creating a coherent life: