The Power of Testimony: How narrative displaced invention

• Published in: The Yale review 2021-12, Vol.109 (4), p.176-182
• Main Author: Gornick, Vivian
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Abolitionists; Autobiographical literature; Black people; Equal rights; Equality; Essays; Feminism; Narratives; Novels; Poetry; Testimony; Women; Womens rights movements
• ISSN: 0044-0124; 1467-9736; 1467-9736
• DOI: 10.1353/tyr.2021.0086

In 1848 Stanton, along with Lucretia Mott and three other progressive-minded women, held a two-day convention in Seneca Falls (the town in upstate New York where Stanton lived) calling for social and political equality for women. The thing she wanted her audience to consider, she said, was the individuality of a human being: that which Protestant American culture held as a first value. In one sense, the idea of the individual is a declaration of proud independence; in another, it is the recognition that we are, in fact, a world of Robinson Crusoes, all of us alone on the island of life, but none more so than women: [...]while the women's movement has not produced many distinguished novels or poems or plays (these are mainly works of dogma and didacticism), it has produced a considerable number of exceptional memoirs and meditations and personal narratives, many of them achieving literature simply by bearing unadorned witness to the shocking inequity under which women have lived for centuries. In our own time, and with our own movements, it was practically foreordained that naked testimony would carry the day for women and Blacks and gays, as ours is a cultural moment when the authority of words like "based on a true story" have edged out the authority of works that originate in the imagination.