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Barbara Bodichon’s Epistolary Education pp 29–67Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Bodichon’s Epistolary Bildung: Learning, Narratives and Agency

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Abstract

This chapter presents the theoretical framework I develop in this book. Taking Bodichon’s Unitarian education as a point of departure, I develop my conceptualization of epistolary education. I first explain the intellectual dis/similarities between Bildung and the Unitarian philosophy of education, and I next move on to explain the narrative model of Bildung I propose. Drawing on narrative approaches to identity-formation, I suggest that Bodichon’s epistolary dialogues reflect the essence of Bildung: they acted as intersubjective platforms where she forged her gendered individuality. This explanation is intertwined with a discussion of how the ontology of the letter determines the carving out of the epistolary self and the exercise of narrative agency. Teasing out the distinct significance of the letters written by Bodichon, those addressed to her and those that refer to her in the third-person, I point up the methodological challenge of having to study Bodichon’s epistolary Bildung partially by means of how others understood her.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Ruth Watts, Gender, Power and the Unitarians in England, 1760–1860 (London: Longman, 1998).

  2. 2.

    Founded by Henry Brougham and James Mill among other Evangelicals and Dissenters.

  3. 3.

    D.A. Turner, ‘1870: The state and the infant school system’ British Journal of Educational Studies 18/2 (1970): 151–65; Phillip MacCann and Francis A. Young, Samuel Wilderspin and the Infant School Movement (Oxon: Routledge, 2017), 12, 23–4, 30–6, 38–9, 40–1, 44, 46, 48, 51–6, 63–5; William A. C. Stewart and William P. McCann, The Educational Innovators, 1750–1880 (London: Macmillan, 1967), 66–7, 242, 246–47, 252–53.

  4. 4.

    MacCann and Young, Samuel Wilderspin, 38–9.

  5. 5.

    Watts, Gender, Power and the Unitarians, 141, 213.

  6. 6.

    Watts, Gender, Power and the Unitarians, 131.

  7. 7.

    David Hartley put forward his theory of the mind, referred to as associationism, in his work Observations on Man (1749). According to his psychological theory, mental processes operate by the association of ideas—previously formed out of sensations generated from the impression of external objects upon our senses. Hartley’s associationist psychology had implications for education in that external stimuli determine the process of thought-production, Watts, Gender, Power and the Unitarians, ix, 35–6.

  8. 8.

    MacCann and Young, Samuel Wilderspin, 60.

  9. 9.

    MacCann and Young, Samuel Wilderspin, 54.

  10. 10.

    Watts, Gender, Power and the Unitarians, 8, 35–6.

  11. 11.

    Unless indicated, the biographical data on Bodichon’s education in this paragraph is drawn from Pam Hirsch, Barbara Bodichon: Feminist, Artist and Rebel (London: Chatto and Windus, 1998), Chapter 2.

  12. 12.

    Bodichon to Florence [Davenport-Hill?], 5 Blandford Square, 1 July [1850s], Barbara I. Buchanan (ed.), Buchanan Family Records: James Buchanan and his Descendants (Capetown: Townshend, Taylor and Snashall, 1923), 23.

  13. 13.

    Brian Dolan, Ladies of the Grand Tour (London: Flamingo, 2002), 11, 12, 25, 27, 32.

  14. 14.

    Hirsch, Barbara Bodichon, 32.

  15. 15.

    Years after she regularly wrote about him in praising terms. Joseph Parkes to Parkes, [December 1843], GCPP Parkes 2/42; Parkes to Bodichon, [August 1847], GCPP Parkes 5/13; Parkes to Bodichon, Leam, 10 June 1849, GCPP Parkes 5/31; Parkes to Mary Swainson, London, 5 June 1851, GCPP Parkes 3/23.

  16. 16.

    Parkes’ family moved to London following her father’s professional career as a lawyer and spent long periods in Hastings in the hope of offering her only brother, who suffered from tuberculosis, a better climate.

  17. 17.

    Hirsch, Barbara Bodichon, 31–2, 101.

  18. 18.

    Hirsch, Barbara Bodichon, 39.

  19. 19.

    Parkes to Bodichon, 5 December 1847, GCPP Parkes 5/16; Parkes to Bodichon, 16 December 1847, GCPP Parkes 5/17.

  20. 20.

    Hirsch, Barbara Bodichon, Chapter 2.

  21. 21.

    Hirsch, Barbara Bodichon, 36. See also Chaps. 3 and 4.

  22. 22.

    See, for example, Camilla Leach, ‘Quaker Women and Education from Late Eighteenth to the Mid Nineteenth Century’ (PhD Thesis, University of Southampton, 2003).

  23. 23.

    Hirsch, Barbara Bodichon, 23.

  24. 24.

    Hirsch, Barbara Bodichon, 43–5.

  25. 25.

    Meritxell Simon-Martin, ‘Educational Place and Space: The Unconventional Education of Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon (1827–1891)’, History of Education Researcher 89 (May 2012): 7–17.

  26. 26.

    Rudolf Vierhaus, ‘Bildung’, in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, ed. by Otto von Brunner, Werner Conze and Reinhart Koselleck (eds.), Vol. 1, 508–9 (Stuttgart: Klett, 1972). I would like to thank Susanne Spieker for this reference.

  27. 27.

    See, for example, Walter Horace Bruford, The German Tradition of Self-Cultivation. ‘Bildung’ from Humboldt to Thomas Mann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975); Walter Bauer, ‘On the Relevance of Bildung for Democracy’, Educational Philosophy and Theory 35/2 (2003): 211–25.

  28. 28.

    Josef Bleicher, ‘Bildung’, Theory Culture Society 23 (2006): 364–5; Jan Masschelein and Norbert Ricken, ‘Do We (Still) Need the Concept of Bildung?’, Educational Philosophy and Theory 35/2 (2003): 139–54.

  29. 29.

    Wilhelm von Humboldt, Ideen zu einem Versuch, die Gränzen der Wirksamkeit des Staates zu bestimmen (c.1792) translated in John W. Burrow (ed.), The Limits of State Action (Indianapolis: Liverty Fund, 1993), 10. This paragraph was quoted by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty (London, 1859). I would like to thank Susanne Spieker for helping me trace all the German titles of Humboldt’s works referenced in this chapter.

  30. 30.

    Lars Løvlie and Paul Standish, ‘Introduction: Bildung and the Idea of a Liberal Education’, in Educating Humanity: Bildung in Postmodernity, ed. by Lars Løvlie, Klaus P. Mortensen and Sven E. Nordenbo, 7, Oxford: Blackwell, 2003.

  31. 31.

    The notion of Kultur in Humboldt’s work remains an elusive term. In an unpublished essay, he distinguishes between civilization and culture: ‘Civilization [Zivilisation] is the humanization of nations in their external institutions and customs and the inner sentiments referring to these. Culture [Kultur] adds to this the refinement of social conditions, science, and art’, Wilhelm von Humboldt, ‘On the Differences in Human Linguistic Structure and their Influence on the Spiritual Development of the Human Race’ [Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaus und ihren Einfluss auf die geistige Entwicklung des Menschengeschlechts] (1830–1835), 13–64, in Marianne Cowan (ed.), Humanist Without Portfolio: An Anthology of the Writings of Wilhelm von Humboldt (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1963), 266. Kultur seems to refer to the individual culture that a gebildet man acquires. It incorporates both individual cultural knowledge and a collective production of culture to which men contribute through Bildung.

  32. 32.

    Christoph Wulf, ‘Perfecting the Individual: Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Concept of Anthropology, Bildung and Mimesis’, Educational Philosophy and Theory 35/2 (2003): 241–9; Christoph Lüth, ‘On Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Theory of Bildung Dedicated to Wolfgang Klafki for his 70th Birthday’, Journal of Curriculum Studies 30/1 (1998): 43–60.

  33. 33.

    Burrow (ed.), The Limits of State Action, xxvii.

  34. 34.

    Wulf, ‘Perfecting the Individual’, 246.

  35. 35.

    Paul Standish, ‘Preface’, in Løvlie, Mortensen and Nordenbo (eds.), Educating Humanity, vii; Øivind Varkøy, ‘The Concept of Bildung’, Philosophy of Music Education Review 18/1 (2010): 85–96; Wulf, ‘Perfecting the Individual’, 246–7.

  36. 36.

    Christiane Thompson, ‘Adorno and the Borders of Experience: The Significance of the Nonidentical for a ‘Different’ Theory of Bildung’, Educational Theory 56/1 (2006): 69–87.

  37. 37.

    Wilhelm von Humboldt, Ideen zu einem Versuch, die Gränzen der Wirksamkeit des Staates zu bestimmen (c.1792), reprinted in Wilhelm von Humboldt, Werke in Fünf Bänden, ed. by Andreas Flitner and Klaus Giel (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1960–1981), Vol. 1, 64–5, quoted in Lüth, ‘On Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Theory’, 52.

  38. 38.

    Wilhelm von Humboldt, [‘Theorie der Bildung des Menschen’ (written in c.1793–1794, published in 1903)], quoted in Ian Westbury, Stefan Hopmann and Kurt Riquarts (eds.), Teaching as a Reflective Practice. The German Didaktik Tradition (Mahwah and London: L. Erlbaum Associates, 2000), 58.

  39. 39.

    Wilhelm von Humboldt, [‘Plan einer vergleichenden Anthropologie’ (1797)], reprinted in Humboldt, Werke in Fünf Bänden, Vol. 1, 347, quoted in Lüth, ‘On Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Theory’, 52–3. Also in ‘Das achtzehnte Jahrhundert’ (1797), reprinted in Humboldt, Werke in Fünf Bänden, Vol. 1, 384.

  40. 40.

    Wilhelm von Humboldt, [‘Plan einer vergleichenden Anthropologie’ (1797)], reprinted in Humboldt, Werke in Fünf Bänden, Vol. 1, 346, quoted in Lüth, ‘On Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Theory’, 53.

  41. 41.

    Wilhelm von Humboldt, in Burrow (ed.), The Limits of State Action, 27–8.

  42. 42.

    Wilhelm von Humboldt, Ideen zu einem Versuch, die Gränzen der Wirksamkeit des Staates zu bestimmen (c.1792), reprinted in Humboldt, Werke in Fünf Bänden, Vol. 1, 82, quoted in Lüth, ‘On Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Theory’, 52.

  43. 43.

    Lüth, ‘On Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Theory’, 57. Masschelein and Ricken, ‘Do We (Still) Need the Concept of Bildung?’, 140.

  44. 44.

    Wilhelm von Humboldt, [‘Theorie der Bildung des Menschen’ (c.1793–1794)], reprinted in Humboldt, Werke in Fünf Bänden, Vol. 1, 239, in Lüth, ‘On Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Theory’, 48.

  45. 45.

    Burrow (ed.), The Limits of State Action, xxvii.

  46. 46.

    Wilhelm von Humboldt, [‘Theorie der Bildung des Menschen’ (c.1793–1794)], explained in Westbury, Hopmann and Riquarts (eds.), Teaching as a Reflective Practice, 59.

  47. 47.

    Wilhelm von Humboldt, [‘Theorie der Bildung des Menschen’ (c.1793–1794)], reprinted in Humboldt, Werke in Fünf Bänden, Vol. 1, 238, quoted in Lüth, ‘On Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Theory’, 47.

  48. 48.

    Wilhelm von Humboldt, [‘Das achtzehnte Jahrhundert’ (1797)], reprinted in Humboldt, Werke in Fünf Bänden, Vol. 1, 390, quoted in Lüth, ‘On Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Theory’, 53.

  49. 49.

    That is, education understood as a means to train into a career and to achieve some political or social end.

  50. 50.

    Wilhelm von Humboldt, [‘Theorie der Bildung des Menschen’ (c.1793–1794)], reprinted in Humboldt, Werke in Fünf Bänden, Vol. 1, 234, quoted in Lüth, ‘On Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Theory’, 45.

  51. 51.

    Bleicher, ‘Bildung’, 364.

  52. 52.

    Wilhelm von Humboldt, reprinted in Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (eds.), Wilhelm von Humboldts Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: B. Behr, 1903–1920) Vol. 1, 75, quoted and translated in David Sorkin, ‘Wilhelm von Humboldt: The Theory and Practice of Self-Formation (Bildung), 1791–1810’, Journal of the History of Ideas 44/1 (1983): 55–73.

  53. 53.

    John Roberts, Wilhelm von Humboldt and German Liberalism (Oakville and Niagara Falls, 2009), v, xi, 3–4, 9, 14, 52, 58.

  54. 54.

    Løvlie and Standish, ‘Introduction’, 3.

  55. 55.

    Watts, Gender, Power and the Unitarians, 35.

  56. 56.

    Kathryn Gleadle, The Early Feminists. Radical Unitarians and the Emergence of the Women’s Movement, 1831–1851 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1995), 6–7.

  57. 57.

    Gleadle, The Early Feminists, 16–8.

  58. 58.

    Hirsch, Barbara Bodichon, 59–60.

  59. 59.

    Masschelein and Ricken, ‘Do We (Still) Need the Concept of Bildung?’, 140.

  60. 60.

    Thompson, ‘Adorno and the Borders of Experience’, 71.

  61. 61.

    Masschelein and Ricken, ‘Do We (Still) Need the Concept of Bildung?’, 140.

  62. 62.

    See, for example, Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (trans. Kathleen Mclaughlin and David Pellauer, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another (trans. Kathleen Blamey, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Marya Schechtman, The Constitution of Selves (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996); James David Velleman, Self to self: Selected Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Kim Atkins and Catriona Mackenzie (eds.), Practical Identity and Narrative Agency (New York and London: Routledge, 2008). See also Donald E. Polkinghorne, Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences (Albany: State University of New York, 1988); Jerome Bruner, Acts of Meaning (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990); Dan P. McAdams, The Stories We Live By: Personal Myths and the Making of the Self (New York: William Morrow, 1993).

  63. 63.

    Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another.

  64. 64.

    By epistolary ‘I’ I mean the author who, adopting an epistolary persona, tells the autobiographical narrative in letters.

  65. 65.

    I discuss the question of embodiment in narrative identity in a forthcoming article: ‘The American Travel Diary of Barbara Bodichon (1827–1891): self-development at the interface of emotions and embodiment.’

  66. 66.

    Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 59.

  67. 67.

    Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York and London: Routledge, 1990).

  68. 68.

    Sidonie Smith, ‘Performativity, autobiographical practice, resistance’, a/b: auto/biography studies 10/1 (1995): 17–31.

  69. 69.

    Meritxell Simon-Martin, ‘“More Beautiful than Words & Pencil Can Express”: Barbara Bodichon’s Artistic Career at the Interface of her Epistolary and Visual Self-Projections’, Gender & History 24/3 (2012): 581–99; Meritxell Simon-Martin, ‘Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon’s Travel Letters: Performative Self-Formation in Epistolary Narratives’, Women’s History Review 22/2 (2013): 225–38.

  70. 70.

    Joan W. Scott, ‘The Evidence of Experience’, Critical Inquiry 17/Summer (1991): 773–97.

  71. 71.

    Psychoanalysis argues that important aspects of human experience escape narrative and cannot be storied into sense, let alone into consciousness. Notwithstanding, Wendy Hollway and Tony Jefferson claim that there is an emotional sequencing to stories that offers a route into the logic of the unconscious, Wendy Hollway and Tony Jefferson, Doing Qualitative Research Differently: Free Association, Narrative and the Interview Method (London: Sage, 2000), mentioned in Ann Phoenix, ‘Analysing narrative contexts’, in Doing Narrative Research, ed. by Molly Andrews, Corinne Squire and Maria Tamboukou, 73, London: Sage, 2008.

  72. 72.

    Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogical Imagination: Four Essays (trans. Carl Emerson and Michael Holquist, ed. Michael Holquist, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981).

  73. 73.

    Wilhelm von Humboldt, [‘Theorie der Bildung des Menschen’ (c.1793–1794)], reprinted in Humboldt, Werke in Fünf Bänden, Vol. 1, 64, quoted in Sven E. Nordenbo, ‘Bildung and the Thinking of Bildung’, in Løvlie, Mortensen and Nordenbo (eds.), Educating Humanity, 32.

  74. 74.

    Roberts, Wilhelm von Humboldt, 61–2.

  75. 75.

    Nordenbo, ‘Bildung and the Thinking of Bildung’, 32.

  76. 76.

    Bleicher, ‘Bildung’, 365.

  77. 77.

    Wilhelm von Humboldt, [‘Theorie der Bildung des Menschen’ (c.1793–1794)], reprinted in Humboldt, Werke in Fünf Bänden, Vol. 1, 235, quoted in Lüth, ‘On Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Theory’, 46.

  78. 78.

    This is the case especially in the field of psychology and medical therapy, where the link between narrative coherence and mental health is most often argued for. For a revision of this approach see Matti Hyvärinen, Lars- Christer Hydén, Marja Saarenheimo, and Maria Tamboukou (eds.), Beyond Narrative Coherence (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Pub., 2010).

  79. 79.

    Kathleen Wallace, The Network Self: Relation, Process and Personal Identity (New York: Routledge, 2019).

  80. 80.

    Wallace, The Network Self, 1–18. See also Chap. 2.

  81. 81.

    Wallace, The Network Self, 69.

  82. 82.

    Wallace, The Network Self, 12.

  83. 83.

    Wallace, The Network Self, 7.

  84. 84.

    Wallace, The Network Self, 56.

  85. 85.

    Wallace, The Network Self, 52.

  86. 86.

    Ibid.

  87. 87.

    Wallace, The Network Self, 36.

  88. 88.

    Some subset of traits ‘may be sufficient for preserving the integrity of the network of traits’ but ‘There is no one subset of traits that by itself is constitutive of’ the self’, Wallace, The Network Self, 33, 38, 41.

  89. 89.

    Wallace, The Network Self, 24.

  90. 90.

    Wallace, The Network Self, 25, 27.

  91. 91.

    Wallace, The Network Self, 29.

  92. 92.

    Wallace, The Network Self, 48, 53.

  93. 93.

    Wallace, The Network Self, 48.

  94. 94.

    Ibid.

  95. 95.

    ‘If a self is psychologically “conflicted,” or “disintegrated” or “dissociated” in ways characteristic of some types of mental illness, it is still that self (that network) experiencing conflict and constituted as conflicted. Its traits are still relevant to one another qua being in conflict or tension, or being disintegrated rather than harmonious,’ Wallace, The Network Self, 31.

  96. 96.

    Wallace, The Network Self, 31.

  97. 97.

    Wallace, The Network Self, 74–6.

  98. 98.

    Wallace, The Network Self, 129.

  99. 99.

    Wallace, The Network Self, 119, 115.

  100. 100.

    Wallace, The Network Self, 129.

  101. 101.

    Wallace, The Network Self, 125.

  102. 102.

    Wallace, The Network Self, 130.

  103. 103.

    Wallace, The Network Self, 138.

  104. 104.

    Wallace, The Network Self, 116.

  105. 105.

    Wallace, The Network Self, 27.

  106. 106.

    Wallace, The Network Self, 114–5.

  107. 107.

    Ibid.

  108. 108.

    Wallace, The Network Self, 9.

  109. 109.

    Wallace, The Network Self, 24.

  110. 110.

    Wallace, The Network Self, 115.

  111. 111.

    Wallace, The Network Self, 129.

  112. 112.

    Wallace, The Network Self, 9.

  113. 113.

    The ‘I’ not being ‘a single executive “I”,’ reflexivity is ‘multi-faceted’—hence ‘the self’s capacity for multiple ways of acting and being,’ Wallace, The Network Self, 10.

  114. 114.

    Wallace, The Network Self, 133.

  115. 115.

    Wallace, The Network Self, 46.

  116. 116.

    Wallace, The Network Self, 45.

  117. 117.

    Wallace, The Network Self, 8, 53.

  118. 118.

    Wallace, The Network Self, 46.

  119. 119.

    Wallace, The Network Self, 47.

  120. 120.

    Ibid.

  121. 121.

    According to her, ‘Experiences such as self-criticism, self-identification, self-discipline, self-representation, self- conflict, self-deception, are all species of reflexive communication.’ Wallace, The Network Self, 125.

  122. 122.

    ‘Communication is not always felicitous or orderly’ either, Wallace, The Network Self, 135. As noted, ‘an I or a first-person perspective is not a distinct observer or evaluator,’ it is not ‘something that stands outside or above the network as an independent, executive self module or entity, an I that stands apart from and decides between first-order and second order desires or interests’, Wallace, Ibid, 121. Rather, the ‘I’ is ‘a reflexive function by which the self as a network of traits evaluates or mediates from or between its location(s),’ Wallace, Ibid, 129. Wallace models the subjective experience that the ‘I’ facilitates ‘as communicative relations of the network, as a community of perspectives,’ Wallace, Ibid, 124. Within these perspectives there is signifying activity. That is, the reflexive process of the ‘I’—the first-person perspective—is a communication among self-perspectives.

  123. 123.

    My ‘experience-centred narrative research’ rests on and moves away from the ‘phenomenological assumption that experience can, through stories, become part of consciousness,’ Corinne Squire, ‘From Experience-Centred to Socioculturally-Oriented Approaches to Narrative’, in Andrews, Squire and Tamboukou (eds.), Doing Narrative Research, 48. In other words, I attribute an agency to Bodichon she might not have been aware of. I attribute agency a posteriori. I actually don’t know the level of consciousness Bodichon had as for her acts of letter-writing. I imagine a certain degree of consciousness when she makes strong feminist statements; but in other statements, the feminist consciousness and the female agency I attribute to her are my own interpretation.

  124. 124.

    My narrative analysis approach echoes those ‘contradictory’ approaches that bring together the humanist and the poststructuralist traditions of narrative research to treat narratives as modes of resistance to existing structures of power and I build upon these two ‘logically incommesurable’ notions of selfhood: ‘syntheses of the two involve maintenance of a humanist conception of a singular, unified subject, at the same time as the promotion of an idea of narrative as always multiple, socially constructed and constructing, reinterpreted and reinterpretable,’ Molly Andrews, Corinne Squire and Maria Tamboukou, ‘Introduction. What is Narrative Research?’, in Andrews, Squire and Tamboukou (eds.), Doing Narrative Research, 4–5.

  125. 125.

    Gerrit Loots, Kathleen Coppens and Jasmina Sermijn, ‘Practising a Rhizomatic Perspective in Narrative Research’, in Andrews, Squire and Tamboukou (eds.), Doing Narrative Research, 112.

  126. 126.

    Loots, Coppens and Sermijn, ‘Practising a Rhizomatic Perspective’, 111–2.

  127. 127.

    Liz Stanley, ‘The Epistolarium: On Theorizing Letters and Correspondences’, Auto/Biography 12 (2004): 201–35.

  128. 128.

    Loots, Coppens and Sermijn, ‘Practising a Rhizomatic Perspective’, 116.

  129. 129.

    Andrews, Squire and Tamboukou, ‘Introduction’, 15.

  130. 130.

    Loots, Coppens and Sermijn, ‘Practising a Rhizomatic Perspective’, 119.

  131. 131.

    Andrews, Squire and Tamboukou, ‘Introduction’, 7.

  132. 132.

    Ian Buchanan, Michel de Certeau: Cultural Theorist (London: Sage, 2000), 94.

  133. 133.

    The epistolary ‘you’ in turn becomes the epistolary ‘I’ in the following letter, ‘for the writer and reader roles are interchangeable’, Stanley, ‘The Epistolarium’, 212.

  134. 134.

    Simon-Martin, ‘Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon’s Travel Letters.’

  135. 135.

    Jolly , Margaretta, In Love and Struggle. Letters in Contemporary Feminism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).

  136. 136.

    That is, ‘The importance of context, not only in terms of understanding the narrative, but also in terms of the interpretive community,’ Andrews, Squire and Tamboukou, ‘Introduction’, 21. That is, what Georgakopoulou refers to as the ‘“second wave of narrative analysis” that has “moved from the study of narrative as text (first wave) to the study of narrative-in-context”’, Alexandra Georgakopoulou, ‘Thinking Big with Small Stories in Narrative and Identity Analysis’, Narrative Inquiry 16/1 (2006), 122–130, quoted in Ann Phenix, ‘Analysing narrative contexts’, in Andrews, Squire and Tamboukou (eds.), Doing Narrative Research, 72.

  137. 137.

    Andrews, Squire and Tamboukou, ‘Introduction’, 6.

  138. 138.

    Phillida Salmon and Catherine Kohler Riessman, ‘Looking Back on Narrative Research: An Exchange’, in Andrews, Squire and Tamboukou (eds.), Doing Narrative Research, 199.

  139. 139.

    Simon Dentith, Bakhtinian Thought. An Introductory Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 39.

  140. 140.

    Diana T. Meyers, ‘Decentralizing Autonomy: Five Faces of Selfhood’, in Autonomy and the Challenges of Liberalism: New Essays, ed. by John Christman and John Anderson, 29–30, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

  141. 141.

    Wallace , The Network Self, 1, 7. In this study, I have only focused on Bodichon’s psychological, emotional, relational and social constitutive traits. I discuss in-depth the question of embodiment in narrative identity in a forthcoming article. See note 65.

  142. 142.

    Dentith, Bakhtinian Thought, 39.

  143. 143.

    Ibid.

  144. 144.

    Janet G. Altman, Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1982), 4.

  145. 145.

    Andrew Robinson, ‘In Theory Bakhtin: Dialogism, Polyphony and Heteroglossia’, 29 July 2011, https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-bakhtin-1/ [accessed 13/11/2019].

  146. 146.

    Alain Badiou, ‘The Event in Deleuze’, Parrhesia 2 (2017) 37–44. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense (trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, London: Continuum: 2001, original 1969).

  147. 147.

    Maria Tamboukou, ‘Broken Narratives, Visual Forces. Letters, Paintings and the Event’, in Hyvärinen, Hydén, Saarenheimo, and Tamboukou (eds.), Beyond Narrative Coherence, 70.

  148. 148.

    Tamboukou, ‘Broken Narratives’, 70.

  149. 149.

    Tamboukou, Nomadic Narratives, 71.

  150. 150.

    Tamboukou, Nomadic Narratives, 18.

  151. 151.

    Ibid.

  152. 152.

    Tamboukou, Nomadic Narratives, 22.

  153. 153.

    Tamboukou, Nomadic Narratives,19.

  154. 154.

    Ibid.

  155. 155.

    Robinson, ‘In Theory Bakhtin.’

  156. 156.

    As Kathleen Wallace explains, ‘On Schechtman’s view, to be a person is dependent on being recognised as such, and therefore appears to be dependent on the social, narrative construction by others.’ Marya Schechtman, Staying Alive: Personal Identity, Practical Concerns and the Unity of a Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), explained in Wallace, The Network Self, 26.

  157. 157.

    Wendy Patterson, ‘Narratives of Events: Labovian Narrative Analysis and its Limitations’, in Andrews, Squire and Tamboukou (eds.), Doing Narrative Research, 40.

  158. 158.

    Tickner, ‘“Augustus’s Sister”: Gwen John: Wholeness, Harmony and Radiance’, in David Fraser Jenkins and Chris Stephens (eds.), Gwen John and Augustus John, 29, London: Tate Publishing 2004, quoted in Tamboukou, Nomadic Narratives, 78.

  159. 159.

    Tickner, ‘“Augustus’s Sister”’, 29, quoted in Ibid.

  160. 160.

    Squire, ‘From Experience-Centred’, 62.

  161. 161.

    Squire, ‘From Experience-Centred’, 58.

  162. 162.

    Paul Ricoeur, ‘Life in Quest of Narrative’, in On Paul Ricoeur: Narrative and Interpretation, ed. by David Wood, 26, London: Routledge, 1991, quoted in Ibid.

  163. 163.

    For example, letters exchanged between Elizabeth Blackwell and her sister Emily Blackwell, or Marian Evans and her friend Sara Hennell.

  164. 164.

    Robinson, ‘In Theory Bakhtin.’

  165. 165.

    Tamboukou, Nomadic Narratives, 37–40.

  166. 166.

    Referring to published autobiographies, Smith and Watson classify five different kinds of textual others through which an ‘I’ narrates herself: historical others (‘the identifiable figures of a collective past’ which ‘often serve as generic models of identity culturally available to the narrator’); contingent others (‘actors in the narrator’s script … but … not deeply reflected upon’); significant others (‘those whose stories are deeply implicated in the narrator’s and through whom the narrator understands her own self-formation’); idealized absent others (the abstract addressee the narrative is addressed to); and subject others (the otherness of one’s identity), Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography, 64–7.

  167. 167.

    David A. Gerber, ‘Acts of Deceiving and Withholding in Immigrant Letters: Personal Identity and Self-Presentation in Personal Correspondence’, Journal of Social History 39/2 (2005): 315–30.

  168. 168.

    Stanley, ‘The Epistolarium’, 203.

  169. 169.

    According to Philippe Lejeune, in each autobiography there is ‘autobiographical pact’ between the narrating ‘I’ and the reader that validates the ‘truth’ constructed in the act of self-narrating, Philip Lejeune, Le pacte autobiographique (Paris: Seuil, 1975).

  170. 170.

    According to Smith and Watson, ‘narrator and addressees are engaged in a communicative action’ that constructs intersubjective ‘truth,’ Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography, 69.

  171. 171.

    Mark Freeman, ‘Identity and difference in narrative inquiry. Psychoanalytic narratives: Writing the self into contemporary cultural phenomena’, Narrative Inquiry 13(2), 331–46, 2003, quoted in Squire, ‘From Experience- Centred’, 57.

  172. 172.

    Ruth Behar, Translated Woman. Crossing the Border with Esperanza’s Story (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), 235, emphasis in original, quoted in Mary Jo Maines, Jennifer L. Pierce and Barbara Laslett, Telling Stories. The Use of Personal Narrative in the Social Sciences and History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), 148.

  173. 173.

    Maria Tamboukou, ‘A Foucauldian Approach to Narratives’, in Andrews, Squire and Tamboukou (eds.), Doing Narrative Research, 102.

  174. 174.

    Salmon and Kohler Riessman, ‘Looking Back’, quoted in Andrews, Squire and Tamboukou, ‘Introduction’, 18.

  175. 175.

    Squire, ‘From Experience-Centred’, 61.

  176. 176.

    Squire, ‘From Experience-Centred’, 62.

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    Meritxell Simon-Martin

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Simon-Martin, M. (2020). Bodichon’s Epistolary Bildung: Learning, Narratives and Agency. In: Barbara Bodichon’s Epistolary Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41441-2_2

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