The Oprah Phenomenon

Oprah Winfrey and Women’s Autobiography: A Televisual Performance of the Therapeutic Self

 Oprah Winfrey and Women’s Autobiography A Televisual Performance of the Therapeutic Self Eva Illouz and Nik John It has become somewhat commonplace to suggest that the genre of talk shows has blurred the private and public spheres by exposing to public view secrets hitherto confined to the bedroom (or whispered into the ear of a professional). However, the process by which the private is made public is still largely unclear.To become a public form of speech, a private utterance must undergo a transformation, that is, be recoded as a public performance. In this essay, we suggest that Oprah Winfrey’s construction of her biography on television is exemplary of the kind of cultural transformation that the private must undergo in order to become public.Winfrey’s performance of her private self is paradigmatic of the mechanism by which the private is recoded for public consumption as a spectacle. Because of the importance of autobiographical speech in making the private self into a public site, we focus on women’s traditional relationship with autobiographical discourse, examining the conditions under which autobiography passes from private to public. First, we introduce the field of autobiographical studies and present four issues that have been raised by the feminist critique in that discipline. We then show how Winfrey’s own autobiography reverberates with these four characteristics of feminist autobiography.  Eva Illouz and Nik John Autobiography: Background and the Feminist Critique As a genre,autobiography inherently problematizes the relationship between private and public selves and involves the issue of which elements of the former should be selected to produce a coherent picture of the latter. How is the distinction between private and public selves articulated in the case of OprahWinfrey?To what extent does such an articulation point to a singularly feminine way of authoring autobiography or, more generally, a feminine approach to the public sphere? How do women navigate the passage from private to public self, and how does it differ from purportedly masculine ways of authoring autobiography and dealing with the public-private distinction? An interesting subfield of feminist writing has developed around these questions, challenging mainstream assumptions about the life worth documenting and how one should write one’s own history.With an approach similar to that of feminist historians, feminists in this field have critiqued “malestream” research for ignoring women’s autobiographies, disvaluing the issues women write about, and rejecting stylistic innovations in the structure of the autobiographical text. In particular, they have highlighted four distinct characteristics of women’s autobiography: its content, the fluid and disjunctive nature of the self and its narrative, its interdependence, and the extent to which the story is still evolving. Given these characteristics , which we expand on presently, does Oprah Winfrey conform to the genre of women’s autobiography? And how does she manipulate the private-public distinction? The first critique of mainstream research concerns content. The genre of autobiography was long dominated by men; it was seen as the description of a great man’s trajectory to his position of public prominence and importance. It is the “systematic account of a whole existence ”—one that is worth accounting for.1 In Georg Misch’s seminal work,for instance,because they are written by the very men who shape it, autobiographies are seen as a way of understanding the Zeitgeist.2 In this sense, autobiography is a record of public achievement.According to such a model, there is room in an autobiography for the story of one’s education and career milestones, but much less so for descriptions of personal relationships with one’s parents, siblings, spouse, and other private matters.This helps explain women’s relative marginality in the Oprah Winfrey and Women’s Autobiography  field, in terms of both the number of famous women autobiographers and the research interest in women who wrote autobiographies—at least until the 1980s and the advent of the subgenre of women’s autobiographical studies. Women’s relative confinement to the domestic sphere, especially prior to the twentieth century, and the concurrent devaluation of that sphere meant that women’s lives were deemed inherently less interesting and valuable than those of most men. If what made an autobiography interesting was how a great man reached his position of greatness, it is obvious why women’s autobiographies were on the sideline for so long. It was widely felt that autobiographies need not go into “certain personal...