Becoming Oneself: Separation Tales and Vocabularies of Self

Abstract

In this thesis I analyse "separation tales" drawn from interviews that I conducted with separated people about the process of ending an intimate personal relationship. Although this study ostensibly follows in the tradition of symbolic interactionist studies of status passages, it is not about the process of identity transformation that may ensue when intimate unions dissolve. Instead, aligned with interactionist treatments of talk which focus on what speakers can do with language, I investigate how interviewees used the symbolic category of self to fashion identities in their "uncoupling" narratives. I begin by locating this approach in relation to existing interactionist work on talk and identity and develop the idea that, in general, interactionists have neglected the actual symbolic content of the materials used in the meaning generation process. From here, I examine recent work by social psychologists who use a discourse analysis approach to investigate commonsense notions of self and their rhetorical properties and I appraise what this body of work has to offer interactionist analyses of symbolic materials. I follow this theoretical assessment with an account of the development of my research problem and how I conducted the research. I draw out the implications the socially situated character of my respondents' accounts has for my analysis of their separation tales, and I evaluate the interview context as an interactional setting for identifications of self. In the analysis chapters, I isolate distinctive commonsense notions of self which interviewees used in their narratives; I call these vocabularies of self. I show how these vocabularies constitute a rhetoric of identity which reflects the socially situated character of the interviewees' narratives. Caught at a junction between opposing social requirements for biographical plausibility, they are broadly linked to an ethos of self-fulfilment. I explore what these accounts of self as affected by separation indicate about a general folk theory of self. Examining how this language of self is implicated in the process of revising self-meanings, I also analyse its role as an interpretative tool which people can draw on to make sense of the real changes which separation occasions in their lives. Vocabularies of self may enable separated people to fashion situational identities for others but their rhetorical properties extend beyond self-presentation. While this analysis indicates new research directions, it also crystallizes issues central to the re-invigorated interactionist study of symbolic materials, especially the language of self. Recognising the linkage between public and private accounts underscores how grounding interactionist analyses of the symbolic in the interactional realm avoids the elision of experience and talk about experience. Analysing how identities can be fashioned using commonsense notions of self also highlights how the immediate interactional setting and the broader locus of social space and time affect who we can say we are and how (indeed, whether) experiences like separation are relevant to us. This, in turn, illuminates the dangers of conflating folk ideas about self with the process of self and, therefore, the importance of acknowledging the way self and the process of self are symbolically mediated by their social setting.