Department of English Concordia University Montreal (Quebec) In this article author studies two works -- Agnes Smedley's Daughter of Earth and Carolyn Kay Steedman's Landscape for Good -- to address issues of working-class women's autobiographies, and how representations of working-class experiences can be foregrounded within parameters dominated by privileged classes. The writings of Smedley and Steedman demonstrate that though individual subjectivities are shaped by social, social can itself be challenged and reshaped. Dans cet article, l'auteure etudie deux ouvrages - Daughter of Earth par Agnes Smedley et Landscape for Good par Carolyn Kay -afin d'examiner les questions concernant les autobiographies de femmes de classe ouvriere, et comment lesrepresentations des experiences des femmes de classe ouvriere peuvent etre mises au premier plan l'interieur des parametres domines par les classes favorisees. Les ecrits de Smedley et de Steedman revelent que l'element social peut etre defie et remodele malgre le fait que celui-ci influence les subjectivities individuelles. enter arena of subjectivity does not mean abandoning political. (Steedman, Landscape for Good Woman, p. 114) Narratives of Life, Loss and Longing Autobiographies, by their discursive nature, are inescapably elegiac. A life narrative, after all, is an account of that part of mortal's finite lifetime that has already been spent, used up, irrevocably lost. Two compelling working-class autobiographies (one American, other British) -- Agnes Smedley's Daughter of Earth (1929) and Carolyn Kay Steedman's Landscape for Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (1987) -- literally open in shadow of death. For Smedley, is contemplated death of self: What I have written is...the story of life, written in desperation. There have been days when seemed that my path would better lead into sea (pp. 7-8). For Steedman, death at her narrative's origin, as title of her first chapter announces, is Death of Good Woman -- her mother's: died like this. I didn't it (p. 1; emphasis added). Life, then, out of death, and life writing arising from ashes of loss and despair. But these are no metaphysical miracles. Smedley and Steedman choose auto/biographical writing (the second life in Steedman's title is her mother's) as means of defiance and resistance: so that they can tell of struggles shaped by particular class experience, and, by telling, further cause. Smedley writes: To die would have been beautiful. But I belong to those who do not die for sake of beauty. I belong to those who die from other causes -- exhausted by poverty, victims of wealth and power, fighters in great cause. A few of us die, desperate from pain and disillusionment of love, but for most of us the earthquake but discloseth new fountains. For we are of earth and our struggle is struggle of earth (p. 8). The pain and shame of poverty, defiance and struggle born of it, also mark inception of Steedman's narrative. One might understand Steedman's absence at her mother's death-bed as refusal to witness her death because daughter had already witnessed -- a long time ago, in that same house -- another kind of dispossession. She had seen her mother crying, standing on bare floorboards in front bedroom just after we moved to this house in Streatham Hill in 1951, my baby sister in her carrycot. We both watched dumpy retreating figure of health visitor through curtainless windows. The woman had said: This house isn't fit for baby. And then she stopped crying, my mother, got by, phrase that picks up after all difficulty (it says: it's like this; shouldn't be like this; it's unfair; I'll manage): Hard lines, eh, Kay?....And I? I will do everything and anything until end of my days to stop anyone ever talking to me like that woman talked to my mother. …
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