Page 68 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

Narrating the self 61
but it depends what you mean by turning points. Because, did it
change things? No it didn’t. But it was a significant event.
BB: It didn’t change things in? It didn’t change your sense of your-
self or . . .?
Deborah: Not really because I don’t think. I think I’d always I expected
to be ... I’d never been anything other than independent,...I
think turning points for me would have been being restricted.
Rather than those things happening. I don’t mean by that that
I took it for granted, I mean it was all very exciting and I was
very pleased about it and I was worried about the mortgage all
that kind of thing. But it wasn’t the sort of be all and end all, I
didn’t think that ‘when I am such and such an age I will have a
mortgage, I will be doing this and this’ and ‘then I am going to
get married’ and all that kind of thing. Because I never ever felt
like that about it, I just wanted to do you know, what I wanted
to do really, and get a lot out of what I wanted to do, that was an
ambition for me. So yeah, it was exciting but I wouldn’t neces-
sarily say that it changed my sense of myself.
(Interview 40, emphasis added)

For Deborah, her subjectivity was something that she considered to be
autonomous from outside forces, her desires were not shaped or produced,
they just were: ‘I just wanted to do what I wanted to do’. This contained
circle of desire and action was also supported by the belief that she had, by
and large, achieved what she had wanted to do. Later in the interview, there
was again the suggestion that life for Deborah began at adulthood. She began
by saying ‘I’m sort of in touch with most of the people I have met during
various parts of my life really’. This again emphasised her sense of coher-
ence and completeness. But when I asked if this included school friends, she
realised that she was not thinking of them:

No. I don’t see anybody from school. I suppose I just think of my life as
starting when I went to college really, maybe it’s I’d rather forget school.
I think perhaps people are like that. I guess I didn’t have much in com-
mon with the others I went to school with. I mean we all got on fine at
sixth form, but she lived near me and she still lives where my mother
used to live, and I sort of hear of what she’s doing.
(Interview 40)

Here, we see that Deborah’s sense of self as totally whole and coherent
was constructed on some omissions and forgetting. It is not clear what Debo-
rah would rather forget and, in the interview, I took the cue not to ask more
about it. Some of what she was suggesting, though, was the wish to move
away from particular classed and gendered ways of being. In Deborah’s ac-