Identity @ The Wellcome Collection

After talking to postgraduate students at the University of Westminster the other week, I happened to notice that the Wellcome Collection is very close to Euston station, handy because I had an hour to kill and needed something to do other than attempt to read Proust in a heaving London terminus.

So I went it in, lured by a mention on We Make Money Not Art, and found an exhibition called Identity: 8 Rooms, 9 Lives, a look at ideas of "the self" throughout history. (Actually a rather compact and Euro- if not Anglo-centric history). The introductory remarks did not give me hope: "We all have a working idea of the self: we know 'who we are', or think we do. We understand that we possess an individual identity..." Hmm. It continues: "Some aspects of our identity are essentially permanent, others are subject to change." Hmm again.

But as it happened, the exhibition itself managed to squirm away from these rather out-dated and conservative ideas about identity. The most exciting and interesting room for me was the Samuel Pepys room, although not because of Samuel Pepys. They had some of his actual diaries and various transcriptions of them and they were all very interesting - the handwriting particularly - but it was some prison diaries by some suffragettes that really fascinated me.

Written whilst in Holloway Prison in 1912, Mary Ann Rawle and Kate Gliddon describe their 6 x 9 foot cells, compose accounts of day-to-day prison life and record political hopes and fears. One minute there is an indignant "today I have supper at 4 o'clock for some unearthly reason" (my italics), and next, on hearing of the release of some fellow suffragettes, "so many suffragettes have gone during these last days that it has become a possible thing in my mind for us all to go".

I was amazed to see such similarities between their handwriting and the sketches they did of their cells. (Obviously the cells themselves would have looked fairly similar, but their artistic styles are very, very similar too). I started wondering whether this is a common phenomenon, whether groups of people imprisoned together (especially political prisoners) begin to share characteristics, turns of phrase, handwriting, and whether in these similarities one can read a story of camaraderie or harsh authority. Are these apparently superficial similarities a form of almost subconscious resistance, a sign that even when imprisoned under the state's authority, a group cannot be dismantled and their ideas surpressed, or is it more that the uniformity of prison life, the similarity of environment, day-to-day events, speech and so-forth contributes to a sort of uniformity of thought (and its expression) that is like something out of 1984?

(In a post-script, this room also held various "diaries of ordinary people" including one of a girl growin up in the States in the 30s, in which in the 1936 election, she had written "Democrats Won" which reminded me of the sort of casual, team-based response to political events that me and my brother had as children).