Re-Imagined Identity: Construction of a "Usable Past" in the Works of Anne Finger

In this thesis I explore Anne Finger’s use of the past in personal and social identity through a close reading and literary analysis of four of her works. Historians have recently argued for the importance of re-appropriating disability history as an integral part of disability culture, highlighting the role of history in social identity and cultural and political change. Likewise, Finger uses her own definition of the past to re-imagine personal and social identity as shown through her memoirs: Past Due and Elegy for a Disease as well as her works of fiction: Bone Truth and Call me Ahab. In these works, Finger uses a multifaceted definition of the past, including historical events, social representations and narratives, family history, individual histories, and the physical and social past of the impaired body. Finger dismantles and reassembles these various parts of the past in order to to make is useful to her identity construction as a disabled woman. I first analyze Finger’s life writings, Past Due and Elegy for a Disease to show how Finger re-conceptualizes her own past in order to transform it into a positive building block of her identity. I then analyze two of Finger’s novel, Bone Truth, and collection of short stories, Call me Ahab, emphasizing the continuing effects of past social narratives and Finger’s perception of the malleability of such narratives. Finger demonstrates how a re-interpretation of the past can allow for a re-imagining of current and future identity. She shows how cultural and personal stories live on to shape the social psyche, but shows that these narratives are subjective, thus allowing the past to become usable.