Narrating the Self, Constructing Modernity: Female Subjectivity in the Life Writing of Mary Poonen Lukose

Abstract

Life writing has been a vibrant area of critical analysis since the 1980s, with the biographies of famous personalities garnering public attention for the candid exposure of their private selves, transcending the public/private divide that characterized much of the writings focusing on individual selves with the onset of modernity. Their documentary value in the micro annals of history began to be acknowledged as a result of the broad awareness that life stories of people do not happen in a vacuum but are socially situated and marked by cultural specificities. This article analyzes Trailblazer: The Legendary Life and Times of Mary Poonen Lukose, Surgeon General of Travancore (2019), a collection of unfinished memoirs and the reminiscences of Dr.Mary Poonen Lukose (1886-1976) against the backdrop of the notion of the medical subjectivity that was evolving in the late nineteenth-century Kerala. Life writing as a genre is brought under scrutiny with a view to unfolding the cultural frameworks offered by this category of literature in the articulation of modern female subjectivity.