'Memory, Subjectivity and Intimacy: the Historical Formation of the Modern Self and the Writing of Female Autobiography'

This chapter deals about the relationship between the historical formation of modern subjectivity and the place we give to memory in the intersection between the individual and culture. Sexual subjectivity— the framing of characteristics and attributes, ways of feeling and behaving, according to a system of sexual differences — is also a historical, rather than solely a personal, achievement. In particular, those cultural motifs of the private self which are denoted by 'the individual' — as opposed to the public persona of the citizen — are more firmly associated with femininity and lead them to become more easily aligned with the female subject. The foregrounding of perspective, towards the end of the nineteenth century, brings the relation of the self and the social world to the centre of subjectivity, marking it with an unresolved and fluid status.