twenty years at hull house

Twenty Years at Hull-House is a vivid illustration of a point that recent

critics of autobiography have made repeatedly, that autobiography is

never a simple recording of facts about oneself hut rather an act of selfcreation, a retrospective selection of facts about one's life that give it a

coherence that it lacked—that in the nature of things it had to lack

in the actual living. If auto-bio-graphy is "self-life-writing," then to

write the life is to write the self, to bring it into being. (For an overview of current theories of autobiography, see the useful collection of

essays edited by James Olney, Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and

Critical.

)

The first five chapters of Twenty Years at Hull-House make no

pretense of giving a full history of the young Jane Addams; from biographical fact they weave a narrative that establishes the person for

whom Hull-House was a "subjective necessity."

Chapter 6, "The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements," is

the pivot upon which Twenty Years at Hull-House turns. Addamss accretive method of writing books, her practice of producing a book by

pulling together a number of short pieces written at different times,

contributes to the rather loose, serial structure of her books, including

Twenty Years at Hull-House. But it also means that we sometimes get

two voices considering the same subject, each illuminating the other.

This is the case with "The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements," which is largely made up of an essay written in 1892, just after the founding of Hull-House described in the preceding chapter. It is

thus in the voice of the young Jane Addams, breaking in, as it were,

upon the mature, retrospective voice of the rest of the narrative. "The

Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements" treats discursively the

themes which have been developed narratively in the preceding five

chapters: the need to seek reality behind the veils of idealizing culture,

the plight of the first generation of American college women, educated for work and yet barred from doing it, and the benefits accruing

to those who work with the poor as well as to the poor themselves.

The Addams of the preceding chapters is obviously the young girl of

the essay who "suffers and grows sensibly lowered in vitality in the first

years after [she] leaves school," and the preceding autobiographical

narrative gives concreteness and poignancy to the essay, as the ideas in

the essay focus and draw conclusions from the narrative.

From this point on in the book, Addams herself largely vanishes,

absorbed into the Hull-House project to which the remaining twelve