‘Passionate Uncertainty’: Locating Autobiography in the Poems of Lauris Edmond

Abstract

This thesis explores the possibility of reading a selective body of poems by Lauris Edmond as autobiography. Though poetry and autobiography have long been considered to possess conflicting impulses, this thesis argues that such impulses are not necessarily diametrically opposed. Through examining the expectations that underpin traditional autobiography I suggest that normative forms of the genre have become problematic. In particular I argue that current ideas of ‘identity’ and ‘self’ as ongoing narrative construction have meant that traditional autobiography can no longer be considered to embody the authorial self or the life save in an extremely limited way. I demonstrate these limitations of traditional autobiography with reference to the autobiography of Lauris Edmond. In particular, I argue that the monumental nature of autobiography runs contrary to the typically more truncated forms of life narrative that we now understand to constitute identity. In this regard, I offer Lauris Edmond's poems on her daughter Rachel as a relational autobiography that illustrates the complex workings of ongoing identity construction. How far such a reading might apply to the rest of Edmond's poetic oeuvre is addressed in the conclusion of this thesis. Here I suggest that, although some bodies of Edmond's work clearly demonstrate the autobiographical operations that I locate in the Rachel poems, the Rachel poems nevertheless remain the most dramatic example of ongoing self-narration in Edmond's poetry.