Pillar of Salt

Description

Pillar of Salt introduces the controversy over recollections of childhood sexual abuse as the window onto a much broader field of ideas concerning memory, storytelling, and the psychology of women. The book moves beyond the poles of "true" and "false" memories to show how women's stories reveal layers of gendered and ambiguous meanings, spanning a wide historical, cultural, literary, and clinical landscape. Pillar of Salt cuts a wide swath through modern Western history, extending the concept of transformative remembering into stories about the female self that have emerged historically in discourses on sexual abuse, hypnosis, and hysteria. As a constellation of topics, these writings portray a female subject in flux and a cultural situation where gender identity is unstable and thereby open to varying, sometimes conflicting, interpretations. Haaken shows how ideas within psychology about "concealed knowledge" are influenced by larger social and historical dynamics that shape the storytelling conventions available for creating an internally coherent narrative.

First Sentence

IN HER 1991 NOVEL, A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley places a recovered memory of childhood sexual abuse at the center of her heroine's awakening capacity for self-knowledge.

Excerpt

IN HER 1991 NOVEL, A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley places a recovered memory of childhood sexual abuse at the center of her heroine's awakening capacity for self-knowledge.

Subjects

Other Editions

• Pillar of salt: gender, memory, and the perils of looking backRutgers University Press1998-01-01
• Pillar of SaltPaperbackRutgers University Press2000-07-01