“The Very House of Difference”: Audre Lorde’s Autobiographies

Abstract

Whereas Hellman’s facing her own mortality leads to her reminiscences of Helen and Sophronia as she tries to construct a meaningful past, Lorde, in The Cancer Journals (1980), uses her illness, which forces her to confront her mortality, as a transformative experience through which she can construct a meaningful politics. She uses racial and gender analysis to understand her experience as a cancer patient; conversely, she uses that experience to develop her politics. In An Unfinished Woman, Hellman states that “by the time I grew up the fight for the emancipation of women, their rights under the law, in the office, in bed, was stale stuff. My generation didn’t think much about the place or the problems of women, were not conscious that the designs we saw around us had so recently been formed that we were still part of the formation” (45). However, her account of her experiences proceeds to emphasize gender politics; likewise, her concerns with race and civil rights develop out of her need to understand her relationships with Sophronia and Helen. Whereas race and gender issues arise in Hellman’s autobiographies as by-products of her experience, Lorde’s emphasis on gender and race stems from the primacy of her commitment to feminist and antiracist politics. In both The Cancer Journals and Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982), she confronts race as one of many differences that divide women and forestall political activism.