Page 75 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

68 Narrating the self
Not only did Rosemary lack agency in this narrative, but other agents
were left undefined. The major force in some of her accounts was unspeci-
fied and represented only by ‘they’. This imparts a sense of powerlessness.
In the following extract, Rosemary vividly presented a life that was not in
control, which provided a contrast with those of Deborah and also Sally.
Rosemary did not just lack the freedom to do what she wanted, she lacked
the material means to control her physical environment:

But there does seem more crime round here. I mean what they’re doing
round here, I mean they’re putting cameras up round. I mean it’s a good
thing but why are they having to put cameras in?
[...]
And they moved quite a few of them in here. And the last place I was
living, they moved a child molester in. You know, and like the tenants
found out about this and ended up burning him out and burning his
car out. And that’s only just across the road from here. I mean, I was
nothing to do with it. It weren’t till they had like the car going up in
flames and the fire engines arrive, but I didn’t know anything about it.
But it’s frightening, you don’t know what’s going on out there.
(Interview 14)

Rosemary’s life had not been uneventful. She had grown up, left school,
found a partner, married him, had children, left work (she was made redun-
dant ‘but I didn’t blame them’), established her children in schools, taken up
part-time work, etc. But these events did not provide the hooks for Rosemary
to produce a narrative of her life. Rosemary did not feel that she had much
power and agency over her life, nor had she changed – except in the way she
has mothered. The events in her life had followed a pattern of inevitability
that, she felt, left little to tell. There were few highs and lows. In the account
of her life in the interview, only one event was described in terms of her
feelings, but here too it was one over which she had little control: Rosemary
described her first pregnancy:

But I had a lot of problems with the pregnancy, [. . .] So, I went through
a lot with her, it was really emotional. But that was from about 20 weeks
of pregnancy. That was an emotional time. When she was born, that was
emotional, because she had to have an operation done. But it’s all gone
well, touch wood, since then.
(Interview 32)

Here, we get a sense of emotional trauma, but little sense of how it
affected Rosemary’s sense of herself, except perhaps an understanding of the
worry and vulnerability of being a mother: ‘it’s all gone well, touch wood,
since then’. Indeed, in the earlier interview, Rosemary had said that the way
in which she had changed on becoming a mother was to become ‘more of