By: Marcia A. Newton
University at Albany
Abstract
British writer Antonia White sought to find a balance between writing a personal testimony of traumatic experiences she had suffered in her life and appealing to literary aesthetic values. From a literary scholar’s perspective, this is a challenging undertaking. How much stock can readers place in autobiographical novels being true reflections of lived traumatic experiences? This paper is driven by three primary intertwining threads of inquiry with regard to White’s life and autobiographical fiction: 1) the relationship between author and protagonist; 2) questions of ambiguity and how to resolve these questions in metaphorical descriptions of psychotic episodes; and 3) how to gain some kind of agency within the confines of a Freudian (pre)Oedipal narrative that led to mental illness. I explore the knotted areas of authenticity, memory, and identity, including a discussion of Phillipe Lejeune’s ideas on form and theory of the autobiographical novel and psychoanalytic interpretations of creative writing through a Freudian lens.
Keywords: Antonia White, autobiographical novel, ambiguity, authenticity, memory, identity, (pre)Oedipal desires, psychosis, agency
To cite as: Newton, Marcia. 2024, “Blurring the Lines of Reality and Fiction: A Crisis of Authenticity, Memory, and Identity in Antonia White’s Autobiographical Fiction.” PsyArt 28: 124-151.