My reading of Rhys’s and Woolf’s texts points up the need to negotiate a position in between the liberal-feminist and the poststructuralist stance on autobiography. This article investigates different feminist positions on the contentious question of women’s autobiography through a critical reading of two key autobiographical texts from the interwar period, namely Jean Rhys’s novel Voyage in the Dark and Virginia Woolf’s memoir “A Sketch of the Past.” Whereas liberal-humanist feminists tend to regard autobiographical writing as an indispensable part of feminism’s emancipatory project, whose interests it allegedly furthers by inspiring a sense of female identification and solidarity, poststructuralist theorists accuse women’s autobiographies of harming the feminist cause by uncritically reiterating the patriarchal ideology of subjectivity-as-truth. In exposing the ravages wreaked by a determined evasion of a catastrophic history, The Sweet Shop Owner inaugurates Swift’s search for a way of coming to terms with trauma that would create the conditions for the invention of a more humane, just and less destructive future, a quest which is taken up and doggedly pursued in the author’s later novels. Envisaging the possibility of genuine renewal appears to be a deeply problematic undertaking. Tantalizing flashes of an alternative modus vivendi are offered through the rebellion of the protagonist’s daughter against the oppressive regime imposed by her parents, but the suggestion that there is no possibility of achieving real change is at least equally prominent in the text. The mechanisms of denial to which they take recourse prove inimical to life, and yet remain in place right until the end of the novel. In my reading, the impasse in the narrative present is accounted for by the characters’ failure seriously to engage with trauma. It diagnoses the demise of a way of life based on the principles of predictability, immobility and economic circularity.

Graham Swift’s debut novel The Sweet Shop Owner recounts the final day in the life of an ageing shopkeeper whose wife has died and who is estranged from his daughter.

Graham swift the sweet shop owner