“There once was a little girl called Genia. Her mother used to braid her hair, and she grew up and fell in love and tried to discover what life was about.” (pg. 167)

It is in our ability to express ourselves that we find essential release from that which seeks to destroy us. Repressed pain and emotions can wreak havoc on the mind and body, weakening it and making it less resilient. Throughout the memoirs of Eugenia Semyonovna Ginzburg, her ability to articulate her profound emotions and thoughts, and those of the women she spent so many years in captivity with, gives great insight into the incredulous oppression that the imprisoned people under Stalin’s reign endured. When we seek to explore the self through autobiography, so many sociological factors inevitably shape the story. This is especially true for women, which is brilliantly showcased in Journey into the Whirlwind.

In Susan Stanford Friedman’s “Women’s Autobiographical Selves”, she explores the work of Nancy Chodrow, a feminist theorist, who recognizes that there are “historically generated differences between men and women” (Friedman, pg. 35). These differences, developed from years of patriarchal societies oppressing women, limit a woman’s ability to feel separate from all else, as women are not privileged enough to experience the individualism that men are born with. Rather, they are born packaged with the stipulations and stigmata that accompany the female gender. Due to this inability to feel isolated individualism, the argument is made that a woman’s memoirs cannot qualify as autobiography. “The emphasis on individualism as the necessary precondition for autobiography is thus a reflection of privilege.” (Friedman, pg.39)

Contrary to this restriction, Friedman finds that “… the self constructed in women’s autobiographical writing is often based in, but not limited to, a group consciousness…” (Friedman, pg. 40-41). This recognition is what shapes the sense of self, especially with regard to the autobiographical self, in Ginzburg’s memoir, as it is proven that “she does not feel herself to exist outside of others, and still less against others, but very much with others in an interdependent existence that asserts its rhythms everywhere in the community…” (Friedman, pg. 38). It is in Ginzburg’s sapient insight that we are able to view the terrors of false imprisonment from a collective, yet personal, female perspective.

The years Ginzburg spent among women of various ethnicities and backgrounds instilled a deep understanding of what it meant to be an imprisoned female. Being bounced between solitary confinement, over-crowded cells, cramped transport vehicles, and finally, the small confinements of camp, had left Eugenia with a vast array of knowledge and insight into the effects that such terror had on people, and especially women. As she details several of the women from Car Number 7, she is recalling each woman for who they were as an individual. She doesn’t attempt to group them all into a simple categorization of women, or even imprisoned women, rather, she writes of their families, their dedication to their political beliefs, their positions of employment, their lives. This theme of rounding out each woman, and supporting her biography with the “collective identity” that Friedman refers to in her work, helps the story transcend beyond the basic memoir, and pushes the work into a more specific genre, Women’s Autobiography.

As Susan Stanford Friedman states in “Women’s Autobiographical Selves”, “The feminine capacity for empathy and identification can lead to a kind of selfless abnegation…” (Friedman, pg. 45) This very capacity for identification is what fuels Ginzburg’s survival, and later, her writing. “Many a time, my thoughts were taken off my own sufferings by the keen interest which I felt in the unusual aspects of life and of human nature which unfolded around me.” (Ginzburg, pg. 417) It is in this selflessness, this ability to quell one’s own identity in exchange of a deeper understanding of others, that Journey into the Whirlwind evolves from memoir into Women’s Autobiography.

 

Ginzburg, Eugenia Semyonovna. Journey into the Whirlwind. New York, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967.

Friedman, Susan Stanford. Women’s Autobiographical Selves. 1998.