The meanings of a life: the construction of self and the group in the materiality of an autobiography

Abstract

This article is an analysis of the book 8:28, the autobiography of Eva Yarwood Mills published in 1976, in Lancaster, United States. Eva Mills lived and worked in Brazil as a Protestant missionary from 1928 to 1959 and she retired to the United States. From the book's materiality, identifying the author's senses in the representations of both himself and the religious group to which he belongs. We explore the elements of the autobiographical pact and discuss the strategies with which they are triggered from the relationship between publisher, author-character and readership. We identified in this research a book rich in analyses paths, capable of raising important questions such as the strategies used in the representation of a life, the uses of autobiography in the identity construction of a subject and the group to which he belongs and the roles which education assumes in the life of this character from his place of belonging. Although Eva Mills is a teacher and building herself through education, it is in the relationship with the religious group of her old age that she reelaborates as a missionary and legitimizes herself as an educator who has been in the service of a mission European-American Protestant (self)defined as a civilizer.