Baby books and childhood narratives: Writing the self through material culture.

摘要

The life histories of most women and men are neither written in bestselling books nor portrayed on film; they are enacted through objects and spaces. People actively engage the material world to perform biographical work. Objects such as souvenirs, photographic albums, scrapbooks and trophies are mnemonic devices which serve to authenticate past events and personal achievements, and to create spaces for the performance of individual and family narratives. In this thesis, I examine an understudied category of such objects: the baby book, a genre of pre-printed memory album in which parents---usually mothers---record the development of their babies, from birth through the first year(s) of childhood. Focusing on one baby book within a wider sample of baby books from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, I examine how these objects construct narratives of childhood and of the self, in order to raise larger questions about the nature of self-fashioning and memory.