Mary Kingsley: the Female Ethnographic Self in Writing

Francoise Lionnet, in her important study of race and gender in acts of ‘self-portraiture’, asserts that the ‘problematics of authorship’ for women autobiographers turns on the splitting of the ‘subject of discourse’ into a ‘narrating self and an experiencing self which can never coincide exactly’ (Lionnet, 1989: 92). For Lionnet: The female narrator gets caught in a duplicitous process: she exists in the text under circumstances of alienated communication because the text is the locus of her dialogue with a tradition she tacitly aims to subvert. (93)