Minäkuvat, arvot ja mentaliteetit : tutkimus 1900-luvun alussa syntyneiden toimihenkilönaisten omaelämäkerroista

Abstract

Heli Valtonen tutki väitöskirjatyössään kuinka arvomaailma vaikutti tapoihin, joilla 1900-luvun alussa syntyneet toimihenkilönaiset kirjoittivat omasta elämästään 1980-luvulla. Omaelämäkertojen suuriksi teemoiksi nousivat minuuden, naiseuden, kansalaisuuden ja suomalaisuuden muotoutuminen omaelämäkerran kerronnassa.Ihminen tulkitsee omaa elämäänsä samanaikaisesti monista eri lähtökohdista. Tämä näkyy omaelämäkertojen puhetavoissa yhteisinä piirteinä ja samankaltaisina tapoina tulkita omaa elämää. Toisaalta yhteisistä piirteistä huolimatta omaelämäkertoja leimaa moniarvoisuus ja -äänisyys sekä ainutkertaisuus. Minäkuvat rakentuvat monista erilaisista ja toisinaan keskenään ristiriitaisistakin identiteeteistä, Valtonen havaitsi.

The thesis at hand is an endeavour to deconstruct the discursive realities of the twentieth-century Finnish women who worked in white-collar occupations, such as teaching, office work and nursing, from their autobiographies. Autobiographical writing is always a dialogue between the writer and her/his past experiences and reality, the present day, and the expected future, as well as the reader. The underlying assumption in this study is that values and mentalities have a great impact on the writer’s self-image and the identities it consists of. All of these cultural and individual phenomena are mediated through life experiences. In autobiographies self-images, values and mentalities are manifested discursively. Methods applied here to interpret autobiographies and the ways writers narrate their lives, identities and self-images are, therefore, mainly applications of discourse analysis methods, while narrative and rhetorical analysis are also employed.The ways writers narrate themselves offer the historian an interesting window through which to view the writers’ lives and minds. The self-images of the eight women studied (Aune’s, Edith’s, Aino’s, Kerttu’s, Inkeri’s, Kaarina’s, Liisa’s and Maria’s) carry the legacy of twentieth-century Finland. War, poverty, hardships, humble living conditions and all the toil which was required to cope with them shaped their ideas about themselves. While writers’ worlds and self-images are, in many respects, unique and polyphonic, they also have much in common. This shared part indicates mentalities and common values. As such, autobiographies are constructed within the frames of individual and polyphonic, as well as collective ways of thinking. Nevertheless, despite these common aspects in the autobiographies interpreted, the salient feature is polyphony. They are unique narratives by unique subjects about themselves, their lives and the world they have lived in. This polyphony extends inside a single autobiography where self-images are made up of different and sometimes conflicting identities. These polyphonic self-images also open a window to a polyphonic past and history which is narrated over and over again from different perspectives and in different ways.