Travelling towards Selfhood: Victorian Religion and the Process of Female Identity

Abstract

In her essay on ‘Culture, Cultural Studies and Historians’, Carolyn Steedman reminds us that ‘history is the most impermanent of written forms: it is only ever an account that will last for a while’ (1992: 614). She refers then to the ways in which new excavations in the practice of historical research of different facts and further information work to challenge, change and question ‘the historian’s map of the past’ (1992: 614). This act of what Steedman calls ‘narrative destabilization’ signifies that ‘the written history is a story that can only be told by the implicit understanding that things are not over, that the story isn’t finished, can never be finished, for some new item of information may alter the account that has been given’ (1992: 614; emphasis original). This has particular resonance for feminist scholars, teachers and readers because, of course, the practices of feminist research and interpretation has consistently meant the retelling of stories or, as Adrienne Rich suggests (1980), at least the adoption of the processes of ‘re-vision’ when working with narratives historical and or literary from the past.¹