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History as Narrative: The Possibility of Writing Gender into History This chapter argues that just as Hayden White sees narrative nature of history and just as Joan Scott finds social formation in gender, Wertenbaker also believes that both history and gender are constructed and should be reread to offer new visions.
Wertenbaker’s plays are characterized by rewriting history to highlight gender issues;
therefore, this chapter first analyzes White’s metahistory to justify Wertenbaker’s writing history in her history plays and then Scott’s gender theory to re-examine history from the perspective of gender. In this chapter, Credible Witness (2001), Three Birds Alighting on a Field (1991) and The Break of Day (1995) are the illustrations to explain Wertenbaker’s concepts of history as narrative and multiplicity and gender as a constitutive element of world relations.
A. History as a Literary Artifact
Hayden White’s theory of history as a form of literature blurs the relation between history and literature, but their distinction did not appear until the 19th century. In the very beginning, there were only tales of the legendary past. Not until the invention of writing and calendar did history become written stories that dated events (Korhonen 9). In ancient Greece, Aristotle put down a well-known distinction between history and literature in Poetics, claiming, “The poet and the historian differ not by writing in verse or in prose. [. . .] The true difference is that one relates what has happened, the other what may happen” (55). History and literature were both rhetorical arts, but history described the events that actually happened while literature the imaginative events that might possibly happen. Due to the larger and more
complicated dimension that poets deal with, Aristotle asserted, “Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the
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universal, history the particular” (55). Nevertheless, even though history and literature dealt with different events, they both belonged to the rhetorical tradition (Korhonen 10; White, “Historical Discourse” 25).
Raymond Williams also explains that history contained both real and imaginary events in the earliest uses of the term. History was “a narrative account of events”
(146), and in the early English usage, “history and story (the alternative English form derived ultimately from the same root) were both applied to an account either of imaginary events or of events supposed to be true” (Williams 146). However, from the 15th century, history meant “an account of past real event” while story referred to “less formal accounts of past events and accounts of imagined events” (146). Especially, in the 19th century, historians started to emphasize the scientific accuracy of historical events, so they disregarded the rhetorical elements of historical writing (Korhonen 10);
in other words, from then on, history, opposite to rhetoric and fiction, has been regarded as an objective and scientific discourse.
Because of the emphasis of the events that actually happened and the documents that were proved scientifically, historians prefer to describe wars,
diplomacy or great men, who are usually kings or warriors. In this way, many human experiences, such as the dreams and life of minority people, are neglected in historical writing (Korhonen 10). Joan Scott points out a contradiction in historiography,
asserting,
History is a chronology that makes experience visible, but in which categories appear as nonetheless ahistorical: desire, homosexuality, heterosexuality, femininity, masculinity, sex, and even sexual practices become so many fixed entities being played out over time, but not themselves historicized. (“The Evidence of Experience” 778)
In order to describe and emphasize what actually happened, many other important
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issues in history have been overlooked.
Due to the limitation of traditional historiography, people then start to challenge scientific-motivated historians and to break the boundary between history and
literature in the 20th century. Nevertheless, it is not until Hayden White’s Metahistory was published in 1973 that the relation between the two is shattered again, and his theory causes an overwhelming influence in many academic areas (Korhonen 10-11).
He develops a theory called “metahistory” in order to affirm history as literary artifact.
In his book, White “treat[s] the historical work as what it most manifestly is: a verbal structure in the form of a narrative prose discourse” (Metahistory ix). Understanding history is to understand a narrative structure for the reason that we know history through narrative since we cannot encounter the past directly. Therefore, in order to expose the poetic nature of historical works, White highlights principal modes of historical consciousness based on four tropes: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony (x-xi). These dominant tropes control the metahistorical basis of every historical work.1
From this standpoint, White proposes that a good historian is a good storyteller, who has an ability of narrating a story with several historical facts (Tropics 83).
Without historians’ storytelling, facts do not have any meaning. Historical facts are always fragmentary and incomplete, but historians have to tell stories to make those senseless facts sensible. “Constructive imagination” facilitates historians to answer what indeed happened and what the facts mean (Tropics 83-84). These historians’
In other words, the works of history are rhetorical constructions with forms of literature; hence, the value or the meaning of history depends on narrative, rather than on historical data.
1 Following these four tropes are three kinds of “explanatory affect”: the explanation by formal argument, by emplotment and by ideological implication (x). Each is associated with four possible modes of articulation: for emplotment, there are Romance, Comedy, Tragedy, and Satire; for argument, there are Formism, Organicism, Mechanism, and Contextualism; for ideological implication, there are Anarchism, Conservatism, Radicalism, and Liberalism (x).
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special ability is like the keen observation of detectives because historians and
detectives both find meanings beyond the surface structure. As long as historians with their constructive imagination successfully tell a reasonable story which is hidden from senseless historical facts, then they can offer plausible explanations for events (84). History, in this way, is able to be understood and facts are comprehensible. In other words, neither objective nor innocent, facts essentially are meaningless.
Historians provide them meanings by storytelling, and any historical event is just a story element. The ways that make those elements become a story are “the techniques that we would normally expect to find in the emplotment of a novel or a play” (84).
That is to say, history is a literary artifact that needs historians’ imagination and narrative techniques.
The statement of the fictional element in historical narratives establishes White as an important historian as well as literary critic. Owing to the fact that historical events are “value-neutral” (Tropic 84) per se, different historians write different versions of the same historical events. According to historians’ arrangement of historical events and their ability of storytelling, which White calls “emplotment,”
meaning “the encodation of the facts contained in the chronicle as components of specific kinds of plot structures” (83 emphasis in original), the same set of events can be described both as tragedy and comedy. To put it in another way, no event is
inherently comic or tragic, but emplotment makes them comic or tragic. White asserts,
“The term ‘tragic’ describes or refers to a structure of meaning, not a factual situation.
Lives may be described as tragic, but it is the description that makes or makes them appear to be tragic, but the lives that justify the description” (“Historical Discourse”
31).
However, while White asserts history is a literary artifact, his statement does not mean that history then is not real or history is a lie. Moreover, the distinction
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between “rhetoric versus history” or “fiction versus history” is improper. It is often seen that “rhetoric” and “fiction” are the opposite of history for the reason that rhetoric cannot provide evidence and fiction is imaginary and illusory (White,
“Historical Discourse” 25). White, nevertheless, points out the rhetorical nature of history by asserting history as a form of literature. Also, fiction does not mean deception; rather, it refers to creative literary works no matter whether they are based on real or imaginary events (Korhonen 16).2
Besides, there are several approaches, for White, to make the fragmentary historical events reasonable, and historians tend to “familiarize the unfamiliar”
(Tropics 86). While historians deal with facts that at first are incomplete and illogical, they arrange all facts to tell a sensible story so as to be accepted by the reader.
Therefore, facts, through emplotment, are no longer strange but they become familiar to people. White further explains, “They [facts] are familiarized, not only because the reader now has more information about the events, but also because he has been shown how the data conform to an icon of a comprehensible finished process, a plot structure with which he is familiar as a part of his cultural endowment” (86 emphasis in original).
The opposite pair is neither “history versus rhetoric” nor “history versus fiction”; instead, for White, the contrast is between “the imaginable and the actual” (Tropics 98). History is supposed to be understood through the differences and similarities between imagination and reality because history manifests its value by two modes: “one of which is encoded as ‘real,’
the other of which is ‘revealed’ to have been illusory in the course of the narrative”
(98).
2 The Latin word of fiction is fictio, which means “molding and shaping pre-existing material” without a meaning of lies (Korhonen 16). By the meaning of molding and shaping, fiction refers to literary techniques that are used in literature and historiography. Fictio, during the Roman times, refers to “lies and inventions” (16), standing for the things or events that never exist in the physical world or cannot be proven. In modern time, it refers to novels and short stories (16).
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Comparing the therapeutic process in psychotherapy to writing history, White emphasizes the importance of familiarizing the unfamiliar. Patients suffer from their past which is strange, unfamiliar and mysterious for them. Unable to make all their past events sensible-connected, they are threatened and haunted by their past, or they may arrange a certain form of their horrible past by themselves. White believes that helping patients to re-arrange their past events familiarizes the unfamiliar in their memory, and further eases their illness. Says White, “The problem is to get the patient to ‘reemplot’ his whole life history in such a way as to change the meaning of those events for him and their significance for the economy of the whole set of events that make up his life” (Tropic 87 emphasis in original). Hence, in this light, White reveals the significance of the narrative structure of history for people for the reason that how to narrate history represents how to create subjectivities and identities, and
understanding the narrative element in history comforts and eases the strangeness of personal past events.
This process of familiarizing the unfamiliar, nevertheless, is male-centered for two reasons. First, before the rise of feminism, history writing has been dominated by men; as Deirdre Beddoe observes, “[H]istory has been, and continues to be, as male dominated as our society” (9). White emphasizes that historians arrange facts, which means to edit facts, to leave some and abandon some, and we observe that those facts that are discarded outside history, however, are usually references about women.
Consequently, even though phallocentric historians have the ability of storytelling to familiarize historical events, which White describes as “strange, enigmatic or
mysterious” (86), those familiarized events are still male-centered. Historical events about women are not “strange, enigmatic or mysterious,” but what is worse is that they simply disappear in history. Following this, what phallocentric historians familiarize is not familiar to women, so the familiarized historical events still make
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women feel “strange, enigmatic or mysterious.” No matter how good the storytellers are, it is difficult for these male-centered historians to escape the patriarchal ideology to familiarize the unfamiliar for women.
From this point of view, White’s theory of metahistory provides a fundamental ground for scholars, especially feminists, to rewrite history. History, under White’s interpretation, is a literary artifact with a narrative form, and it is no longer a fixed monolith that conveys the only truth without other interpretations. Based on the value-neutral historical events, feminists may rewrite history to provide different versions of the same historical events. In addition, the interpretations of historical events, instead of historical events per se, are the meaning of history, so a feminist perspective of historical events is legitimate and necessary. In this way, the realization of history as literary artifact “liberates” our construction of the past by accepting different interpretations of historical events, rather than limit our perception toward the past (Munslow 163).
White’s insistence on history as a literary artifact opens a possibility of rewriting women into history although his metahistory does not take women into serious consideration. If history is narrated by storytellers as White suggests, then history could be re-narrated by other storytellers. Her-story, consequently, is not impossible to achieve. Some male-centered historians use value-neutral historical events to tell stories to familiarize the unfamiliar facts and to use them to control women by editing some facts. With the same strategy of familiarization, writing women into history may help women to eliminate the strangeness of the historical events for them and to recreate their perception toward history and toward themselves.
As White mentions, the narrative form of history does not mean history is a lie; by the same token, her-story, with the same historical facts but without the same narration and interpretation, is not a lie, either.
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History, in this way, has several different versions due to different ways of storytelling, but the historical facts are not changed. White explains, “The events themselves are not substantially changed from one account to another. That is to say, the data that are to be analyzed are not significantly different in the different accounts.
What is different are the modalities of their relationships” (97). White emphasizes the multiple interpretations to the same historical event, but he, as a historian, does not assert that history is totally equal to literature because history after all needs to take into concern events that actually happen. A classic historical work will not be denied by any new explanation or data discovered by the next generation (97). What White intends to propose is that the overemphasis of scientific dimension of history limits our perception of history and the knowledge of history as a literary artifact liberates us to create and accept different interpretations of history. Hence, White’s theory indeed provides a significant theoretical background for re-writing history for historians, literary authors, and readers.