Associate Professor Cindy Brewer challenged a storyteller’s right to recount history as she explored the question “Whose story is this, anyway?”
History is shaped by storytellers—but how accurate are the narratives they tell? Associate Professor Cindy Brewer (19th-Century German Women’s Literature) explored this complexity in her Frieda Olga Wunderly Lecture on Thursday, February 19. By sharing stories from the lives of 18th- and 19th-century German missionary women, as well as stories from her own life, Brewer demonstrated that the stories we tell are unruly, and we never quite tell them right.
The Madonna Archetype
Knowing that storytellers often frame their narratives using symbols, Brewer introduced the symbol of the Madonna and Child, an archetype in art which originally depicted the Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus. This symbol, she explained, is often adopted by storytellers who use a mother-and-child figure to represent idealized Christian love. One example of this symbol’s use is found in the mission literature of Maria Theresa Ledóchowska, a countess-turned-nun who dedicated her life to missionary work in the 1890s and fought against slavery in Africa.
Ledóchowska is known as “Africa’s Mother,” and in artwork from her beatification in 1975, she is depicted as a tall, European madonna surrounded by her adopted African children. Looking at one particular image, Brewer said, “There is something a little condescending about this painting that makes my heart ache. This story is well meaning and yet somehow wrong.” She pointed out that, despite the good Ledóchowska did in her life, this artwork was self-aggrandizing, Eurocentric, and oversimplified.
The image represents the story that German missionary women told themselves about their identity and purpose. It may not, however, portray the most accurate retelling of the story; in this case, the image excludes the perspectives of the African communities Ledóchowska worked with and the truth about the consequences of her service, including an unintended boost in the slave trade. Imperfect as the image may be, it still serves an important purpose by preserving stories that would otherwise be lost to time.
The Rules of Narrative Authority
Brewer explained that, since most of history is recounted by people in positions of power, narratives easily become oversimplified and inaccurate. She has faced this challenge herself as she tells stories from her own life. Like Ledóchowska, Brewer is a mother of adopted African children, but she is wary of portraying herself as another madonna. She knows she may upset her children if she tells their adoption stories for them. Navigating the complexity of authorship in this situation, she said, “I’m left asking myself, whose story is this anyway? Does it belong to the child, or does it belong to the mother who remembers it? Would my child even know her story if I did not tell it?”
Despite the challenge, Brewer expressed that she is learning to share their family stories in a more inclusive way, considering her children’s perspectives and not just her own. The literature she studies made a similar shift later in the 19th century, as German missionaries got better at writing more inclusive narratives about global Christianity.
Displaying an illustration from an early 20th-century magazine, Brewer showed a multiracial group gathered around a Christmas tree. Another madonna and child features in the illustration, but this time with an African mother figure and a European child. The art is still Eurocentric, as the people in the room are all dressed in European clothes, but it shows important progress in telling a more accurate, inclusive story.
The Boundaries of Storytelling
No narrator will tell a story perfectly, but that doesn’t mean the story shouldn’t be told. Brewer said, “Society has all sorts of ever-changing rules about who’s allowed to tell what story, and when there are lines you should not cross or words you should not speak.” Regardless of how one tells a story, it will be wrong at some point—if not now, then in future years. Brewer’s advice is to “just be humble and do your best,” because even stories told wrong are worth telling.
Reflecting on her own lecture, Brewer admitted that her presentation, much like Ledóchowska’s madonna portrait, had been self-aggrandizing, Eurocentric, and oversimplified. Asking herself whether the story she’d told had been hers to tell, she said, “I really don’t know how to answer that question, so we’ll just skip it. In the meantime, I intend to continue fantasizing about well-behaved narratives, even while I relish the ones that break out in new and surprising ways.”
The annual Frieda Olga Wunderly Lecture honors College of Humanities faculty who exemplify a legacy of excellence and innovation in the classroom and a passion for lifelong learning. Find recordings of this and previous Wunderly lectures at hum.byu.edu/frieda-olga-wunderly-lecture.