Cultural History and the Construction of Meaning

As social history was written to shed light on the common shared experiences of collective groups of people, the objective study of “societies in all their complexit[ies] and multifaceted realit[ies]” was ultimately brushed aside. From the birth of cultural history in the early 1970s historians have endeavoured to attach meaning and agency to the lives of their historical subjects, providing a broader representation by utilising different qualitative source materials and techniques of interpretation. Cultural history, therefore, has an endless scope, encapsulating emotional, cognitive and abstract explanations of the past and applying such methods to myriad theoretical concepts. Historians are able to compliment grand social narratives with “every kind of evidence that human beings have left of their past activities”, from written and oral histories to material and popular culture, in order to give voice to those who have thus far been forgotten or marginalised in the history books. Such attempts to humanise history does not come without issues; cultural historians have been criticised for their reliance on “oblique and ambiguous evidence of what went on in the minds of ordinary people” which provides “a minimalist position on the issue of historical truth”. The analysis of vague source material can allow historians to accidentally impose their own perspectives onto the history of others, resulting in a subjective historical account. However, in this essay I shall be exploring the ways in which cultural historians purposefully construct, contest, and alter history to provide diverse narratives of events through their use of fiction, imaginative reconstructions, and autobiography.

Autobiographical accounts warp the boundaries between history and testimony, and whilst subjective in nature they also allow us an insight into how specific individuals perceived and created meaning in their lives. The binaries between primary and secondary sources are complicated as the author’s personal testimony acts as their primary evidence, whilst they tackle theoretical concepts and write with hindsight in a secondary fashion. A challenge of using such complex juxtapositions of history as a tool to construct meaning is that the author may unknowingly “align their individual process of self-formation with the collective process of generational formation”. In this instance, the personal narrative could get lost in the “gravitational pull of powerful social master narratives”, and the author may unintentionally affiliate their history with that which has already been written.

Despite this, autobiographies can also present cultural historians with great opportunities as they have the ability to contradict and contest what has already been written as historical fact, providing alternative perspectives from those who lived outside of the typical social ‘norm’. It is these alternative perspectives that cultural historians are interested in; they are not simply concerned with discovering a linear objective history, but how specific historical events can inspire opposing testimonies and mould the subjectivities of individuals and historians alike. Notable historians who have dabbled in autobiographical writing include Geoff Eley, William H. Sewell, Sheila Fitzpatrick, and Natalie Zemon Davis. Jaume Aurell states that autobiographies written by historians should be treated as valid history, as he argues “both true narratives and legitimate historical interpretations” encompass their arguments. Historians often chronicle their personal history because elements of their lives have challenged historical principles and fall outside general categorisations like class or gender. They are thus “making history by historically contextualising” themselves and providing their readers with opposing testimonies to what they believe is fact. For example, historian Carolyn Steedman published her autobiography in 1986, titled Landscape for a Good Woman, in which she paints a “profoundly a-historical landscape” of her life growing up in the 1950s and her mother’s childhood in the 1920s. The grand historical narratives of class and gender in early-twentieth century England diverged from Steedman’s own memories of childhood, so she utilised her autobiography as a way to talk about the experiences of people like her that had been largely disregarded; the “lives lived out on the borderlands”.

Steedman argues that the historians she read painted a certain image of working-class life that depicted “endless streets of houses, where mothers who don’t go out to work order the domestic day, where men are masters, and children, when they grow older, express gratitude for the harsh discipline meted out to them”. However, Steedman grew up in a household without a prominent patriarch; her mother was a single parent and working woman who did not want to be a mother, instead craving for a life above her ‘lower’ social standing. The desire and envy that Steedman depicts spill “outside the acceptable frames of class and gender consciousness” and contest the usual narrative, which I believe is what makes her autobiography such an illustrative piece of writing that acts as a challenging and valuable historical source. Her sources range from her childhood memories and readings to the readings she undertook as an academic adult, and she utilises them to portray experience, memory and meaning as an evolving process. Her narrative is also “at the crossroads of memory, imagination and history” as shown by her use of dreams in her writing, a well-used literary strategy used by authors of fiction. Furthermore, Steedman’s writing shows us the paradoxical nature of autobiographies as sources through the way she draws parallels so easily between memory and academic discourse.

Through writing an autobiography Carolyn Steedman employs herself as an interventional historian, using her life experiences to “participate in, mediate, and intervene in theoretical debates by using the story of [her] own intellectual and academic itineraries as the source of historiography”. By historically analysing her own life Steedman is able to contest ideas of psychoanalysis, Marxism and Feminism through the simple remembrance of her mother. She does not disagree with the theoretical concepts but highlights certain issues within them. She complicates views of class consciousness by questioning how people used their class to give themselves a sense of purpose and self-awareness, as well as how historians use class as a tool to understand how people gave meaning to themselves. Steedman became more aware that she was from a lower class through her relationship with her mother, not because society told her so. She is able to demonstrate that grand theories of Marxism are often simplistic in nature; not everyone in the working class had the same experiences. This is also true of gender history where women are often portrayed as being subordinate in the household. Male experiences were seen as the ‘norm’, and females were compelled to fit within these male spheres, and Janice Haaken argues that “western cultural legacies offer women few illusions about their importance as agents in the larger order of things”. Thus, autobiographies give cultural historians the opportunity to use memory studies as a tool to “elicit ‘the foreign body, the buried city, the underworld’ of a person’s selfhood” when studied alongside myriad theoretical concepts like gender and class, allowing the examination of “both individual and collective pasts”.

One of the greatest challenges cultural historians undertake when using autobiographies to construct meaning is the author themselves, as we are unaware of their motivations, subjectivities, misinterpretations, and memory. It is difficult to discern whether an autobiography is a genuine reflection of a person’s life or a carefully constructed image tailored towards a public audience. The publication of any autobiography is the author’s “deliberate decision to share their stories with readers they do not know”, in comparison to sources like letters or diaries where the writer would presume that very few, if any people would read them. Publishing an autobiography invites the reader to “challenge their veracity, even on highly personal matters: to publish one’s life story is to make it public property”, and the author would be highly aware of this audience and able to adapt their story to avoid criticism. Therefore, autobiographies run the risk of being subjective whether the author intended it or actively tried to avoid it. René Rémond, as quoted by Jeremy Popkin, argues that historians find the act of writing autobiographies difficult for this reason as “a long tradition has taught [historians] to be on their guard against subjectivity, their own as much as others”.

Aside from subjectivity, autobiographies have been contested as sources due to the unreliability of human memory. Personal recollection is susceptible to “all the illusions and self-deceptions, conscious and unconscious, that constitutes our mental life, as well as our inherently unstable, selective, always imperfect, conscious cognitive processes of recall”. Even when the autobiography is written by a historian they are cautious, as “they have no reason to think that they have any better chance to avoid the tricks of memory that they have learned to spy out in others”. However, despite the challenges that autobiographies and memory present cultural historians, they also provide an opportunity to upset the ‘hierarchy’ of typically reliable sources and offer a more comprehensive image than ambiguous quantitative sources provide. Using Carolyn Steedman again as an example, she claims in Landscape for a Good Woman that official documents, which historians typically trust as fact, were falsified when she was born. Whilst her mother gave birth out of wedlock, Steedman’s birth certificate incorrectly shows that her mother was married, which demonstrates that even official records were not necessarily verified and may well have been falsified. James B. Mitchell argues that “Steedman’s autobiography calls into question the veracity of archives, and thereby implicitly privileges memory over documents—or at the very least argues for placing them on an equivalent plane”. Nevertheless, sources involving personal memory should be used to supplement material evidence, as it is the combination of the two that produces “a newly realized ‘historical’ truth”. Ultimately, autobiographies are beneficial sources for cultural historians in their endeavour to understand how meaning has been constructed and contested, as they “confirm the principle that our approaches to historiography are inevitably personal, governed by the particular contexts of our own histories”. Instead of supplanting traditional historical sources they allow historians to tackle the nuanced complications of grand historical narratives and focus on the individual. Carolyn Steedman concludes that “history and autobiography work in the same way as narrative: they use the same linguistic structure, and they are both fictions, in that they present variations and manipulations of current time to the reader”. Furthermore they both rely on interpretations; both the historian’s perception of an event, and the autobiographical writer’s rendering of their own life.

Whilst there are certain linguistic similarities between autobiographical writing and fiction, fictional narratives present cultural historians with different opportunities and challenges as they endeavour to understand how meaning has been constructed and contested. Fiction has fast become an acceptable source for historians to explore since the ‘cultural’ turn of the late-twentieth century, as they are able to read between the lines of the novel to uncover the author’s social commentary on the context in which it was produced. For example, George Orwell was inspired to create his dystopian world in Nineteen Eighty-Four because he witnessed the realities of dictatorships in Germany and Soviet Russia in the early twentieth century. His novel was a commentary on governmental control, propaganda, and intellectual repression which both revealed the realities of life under totalitarianism and acted as a warning to humanity of the possible future he anticipated. However, not all novelists critique society as openly as Orwell. In Herland, Charlotte Perkins Gilman presented her feminist critique of women’s position in society at the turn of the twentieth century by creating an idealised vision of a society - without men - that is realistically unobtainable. Cultural historians are thus able to analyse the contents of fictional novels to gauge the socio-political context in which they were written.

Matt Houlbrook and Chris Waters are examples of historians who utilised novels as historical sources, as shown in their article ‘The Heart in Exile: Detachment and Desire in 1950s London’. The Heart in Exile was originally published by Rodney Garland in 1953 and one of the first books to portray an openly homosexual man as its protagonist. Historically, The Heart in Exile paints an extensive image of London’s underground gay culture in the 1950s, from “the urban spaces inhabited by the post-war queer, the signs of homosexuality known only to men like that, [and] the operations of class in the queer world”. Houlbrook and Waters aim not to literarily criticise but to historicise Garland’s novel in order to “explore the complex ways in which it constituted diverse queer subjects at a particular historical moment”, distancing it from modern perceptions of queer culture. This allows them to reveal the deeper psychological impact of the validation, identification and alienation shown through the protagonist in The Heart in Exile as opposed to viewing it from a modern perspective. The protagonist, presented as masculine and discreet, would not fit into modern tropes of queer culture; however, in the 1950s he was “the quintessential mid-century homosexual, beset by a number of nagging doubts and desires”. They conclude that as the novel was written during a period of instability following the Second World War, when high profile men were being arrested as homosexuality had not yet been made legal, The Heart in Exile was “both framed by those debates and a signal intervention in them […] the novel’s unfamiliarity is clearly a product of a particular historical time”.

Whilst Houlbrook and Waters show that fiction can indeed be historicised, there have been many debates over whether or not fiction should be a valid historical source. The main challenge of using fiction to analyse historic events is obvious; literature is primarily based on the imagination of its authors. Fiction has long been relegated to the side-lines by historians as there is a firm belief that fantasy and the empiricism of history should not be intertwined. Furthermore, it is difficult to distinguish what an author’s intention is within their novel. In certain instances this is not the case; Garland’s intentions seem clear in The Heart in Exile, with Houlbrook and Waters claiming he was attempting to “establish an image of the respectable homosexual for whom tolerance should be extended and legal recognition granted” at a time when homosexuality was illegal. This shows that fiction should be read within its historical context, and “considered with discretion, knowingly interrogated by a well-trained critic who keeps its function, tradition and genre firmly in mind”. However, historians should be wary of identifying themes within texts that the author did not intend, ignoring the importance of certain sections and ascribing too much to others. Similar to Carolyn Steedman’s notions in her autobiography, analysing fiction as a historical source is down to the analyst’s own interpretations, and thus they are at risk of imposing their own contemporary society and subjectivities onto literary texts. Houlbrook and Waters note in their article how Neil Bartlett and Colin Spencer drew parallels from The Heart in Exile between homosexuality in the 1950s and their modern day, looking “into the queer past to find moments of connection and identification”. However, this presumed similarity negates the stark difference “between the meanings of lives lived in very different historical periods”. Literary works inevitably do not provide hard facts about historical events; we may learn little about specific wars, speeches made by politicians or laws passed through society. However, what we do get from literature is an “insight into common opinions and attitudes, everyday life in the streets, in houses, apartments and hovels”.

Despite the obvious challenge that comes with analysing fiction, it is an exemplary tool that cultural historians can use to uncover how people constructed and contested meaning in the past, especially when analysed alongside more traditional historical source types. Literature becomes even more useful when there is a lack of personal archival material from the time period that a historian is researching; what better way is there to gain an insight into the “mind[s], conscious and unconscious assumptions, attitudes, opinions, prejudices and emotions of the people that lived then?”. Alastair MacDonald Taylor further argues that in order “to gain a true perspective of the social values that underlie the mere factual aspects of the historical problem, one has to turn to the literature of the period under examination”. Before the historical discipline took a more scientific turn, literature and history were extensions of each other, with writers of romanticism chronicling events not critically but in a way that was “dramatic, ‘interesting’ and lively at all cost[s]”. It is the imagination embedded in fiction that is its most appealing quality, and historians can tap into this imagination to “’breathe back’ in some measure the life forces that motivated our ancestors”. Whilst historians are constantly aware of their own subjectivities and run the risk of masking what they think to avoid criticism, novelists are able to disguise their controversial opinions and taboo comments by the fact that they are writing fiction – it is ‘only a story’. Novelists present their audiences with shrewd social commentaries on their contemporary lives, which encompasses an endless plethora of themes; Garland’s exposé on homosexuality, Gilman’s feminist critiques and Orwell’s warnings of a dystopian future only represent a drop in the ocean in terms of scope. Furthermore, such commentaries reveal things about society that may not often have been discussed and thus may not have shown up on the historiographical radar. In addition to this, fiction acts as a way to reinforce ideas to its readers, shedding light on cultural constructs, societal ideals, and author aspirations. For example, Nancy Rosoff and Stephanie Spencer analysed separate ‘schoolgirl’ book series from both Britain and America in order to explore “how we can identify gendered norms that underlie the expectations of femininity within two capitalist societies”. The series acted as model literature for you girls, and exemplified the importance of female friendships and feminine qualities.

Not only do novels reinforce ideas to their readers, but they also give us the opportunity to see how audiences reacted to the content of the books. Novels have a great emotive impact on their readers, creating cultural legacies and mentally transporting audiences anywhere from a different planet to their own childhood. Readers interpret and imaginatively internalise fiction in different ways, and through the study of reader response a cultural historian is able to understand even more about how their historical subjects created meaning for themselves. The general public read and respond to an author’s social commentary based on their own personal backgrounds and experiences, and “different readers at the same time, the same reader at different times, […] will understand apparently the ‘same’ text differently”. An analysis on discourse and reception reveals how people consumed and understood material, responded to certain characterisations, and conformed – or contested – what the author was implying. The legacy of this is shown through stereotypes that readers internalised in the past and still exist today – for example, Charles Dickens’ ‘artful dodger’ character trope has been embedded in the public consciousness and is still used in relation to criminal activity. Furthermore, such stereotypes created in novels held real-life consequences, and were able to stimulate social panics. For example, the criminality of the artful dodger may have influenced readers of Dickens to be more aware of Victorian pick-pocketers. This shows that whether analysing the author’s social commentary or its reader’s reactions, literature “can provide a reliable window on the past […] [and] bring fresh light to our perception of history” when used as a supplement to traditional historical sources.

In conclusion, the different sources that cultural historians utilise in their attempt to understand how meaning has been constructed and contested in the past enable them to rethink history in ways other than the grand narratives allow. Whether they are autobiographical, fictional or reconstructed through their imagination, different types of source material have been employed to try and give a voice to those who have been abandoned or marginalised in the history books. Sources are ultimately down to the interpretation of those who are analysing them, and historians endeavour to find alternative ways to discover what is irretrievable. In the words of Vivienne Little, “the past is irrecoverable […] those men and women cannot be brought back to life”, so, in order to uncover the significance and meanings that individuals applied to their lives, historians must resort to any means possible.

Not only have cultural historians turned to literature when material sources are limited, they have also resorted to reconstructing the past using the literary techniques of fictional writers. Through their imaginations historians are able to push the boundaries of traditional history, further exploring those voices that have been lost by dramatising the limited sources they may have, creating fully formed characters out of their historical subjects. Historians like Stephen Berry and Mark Peel are examples of historians who explored the imaginative reconstruction of historic events; Peel through the study of transnational social work case files in the 1920s and 1930s, and Berry through an edited book that contained stories from the American Civil War’s “ragged edges”, one of which is a fictitious reimagining written by Daniel E. Sutherland. Both accounts introduce the reader to different historical dynamics than they may have experienced, making possible the discovery of irretrievable history but also presenting further challenges of subjectivity and interpretation.

In Miss Cutler and the Case of the Resurrected Horse, Mark Peel investigates the origins of social issues like poverty in England, America, and Australia by reconstructing the limited notes of social workers into fully formed stories with dialogue and characterisations. By utilising literary tropes he is able to give agency and meaning to the records, giving a voice to those who have long been buried in the archives. He contends that “case workers presumed that the people seeking relief whom they interviewed lied or were dissembling, thus biasing diagnoses and attempts to mitigate poverty”, and this argument is shown in his fictional scripts based on the case notes of social workers visiting poorer households. As Peel had very little to work from in terms of evidence, his book shows how malleable sources can be and how historians are able to push the disciplinary boundaries in their quest to understand meaning and fill the gaps in their research. He states that some histories we know, but those that are ambiguous “we can – and must – imagine”.

Stephen Berry’s collection of essays attempt to move away from the romanticised grand narratives of war, accepting that people had myriad experiences that are not considered ‘heroic’. He claims that a common feature of the essays is their “fondness for narrative”, and act “not as an assaying of evidence, but as a rendering of experience”. Daniel E. Sutherland’s essay uses literary techniques in ‘The Civil War Career of General James Abbott Whistler’, where he creates a fictional ‘alternate’ history portraying the famous artist as a war general. The essay fits well with the aims of the book; to “reimagine subjects living lives full of paradox, happenstance, and chaos, rather than trying to shoehorn them into histories purporting to uncover the one ‘real war’”. Both historians delve into the limited historical sources available to reimagine the full narrative, giving agency to those on the edges of history from members of the poorest households to “the cowards, the coxcombs, […] the deserters and the scavengers” of the American Civil War.

Imaginative reconstructions present numerous opportunities to cultural historians as they endeavour to understand how meaning has been constructed and contested in the past. Traditional historical sources, like the case work notes that Mark Peel used to construct his stories, can often be ambiguous and impossible to gain a cultural insight into the mentalities and emotions of its subjects. By dramatising and filling in the gaps in their research historians are able to create fully rounded characters and personalities, breathing life into the forgotten subjects of the past. While grand narratives present a ‘bird’s eye’ view of events, fictitious reconstructions make the characters the focal point, and in Peel’s case this demonstrates how poorer people interpreted life instead of how others interpreted the poor. Therefore, turning sources into dramatic scripts can be an enlightening way to understand history, as to fully understand social issues like poverty you must see the world from their perspective; Paul Guyer argues that “to reproduce the original thought of another, one will […] have to rethink some of what the other must have been thinking on the basis of one’s own judgement rather than on the basis of adequate evidence”. Furthermore, Daniel E. Sutherland’s imaginative reconstruction of James Abbott Whistler’s life serves as a “useful reminder of the importance of chance in how the Civil War developed”, which re-establishes for us that historical subjects have more uniquely personal qualities than are often presented. This is the ultimate aim of imaginative reconstructions; to recreate the past and humanise its inhabitants so we can envision them as they were – real people.

Nevertheless, there are many challenges that cultural historians face when using imaginative tools to understand connotations and context in the past. As with autobiographies and fiction, imaginative reconstructions stir up questions over truth and meaning and demonstrate the limits of writing history when there are scant sources available. Historians are able to manipulate notions of truth and stretch their imaginations in their writing, which brings into question creative license and the ethics involved when reimagining people’s lives. In Peel’s case he is altering the names and ages of his ‘characters’ and mixing together different cases for privacy purposes, which gives him full creative license to sensationalise the events as much as he wants. Furthermore, any agency that the characters possess are given to them by the historian and is fully dependent on what information is available about them in the archives. It is also possible for a historian’s own subjectivities to cloud the source material; different individuals may interpret quantitative data in different ways, which could result in a plethora of stories presenting varied accounts of a person’s life. Peel is proactive in this sense, as he lists the case notes he used in his appendix which allows the reader to see the basis of his dramatisations and thus draw their own conclusions. Despite the many challenges that come from using imagination as a source, and whilst many believe that reconstructions are not an appropriate way to present historical sources, in some instances it is the only way possible to uncover the interior lives, emotions and mentalities of individuals throughout history. The stories created are inevitably formed from the historian’s own assumptions and interpretations of the facts, as “the past is non-existent, and the physical and mental elements of past events can only be constructed in imagination by the operation of the historian's mind”.

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