Aunting as Family Shadow-Work

Prologue

In Tove Jansson's short story, The Listener, the unlikely villain Aunt Gerda is fifty-five and experiencing what appears to be the early onset of dementia. Relatives gradually notice she is ‘not herself’. Her famously warm letters grow impersonal. Her punctual visits become tardy. She begins ‘dropping names, forgetting birthdays, faces, promises’. ¹ Most worrying of all, however, is the risk that Aunt Gerda could lose a grip over her prodigious knowledge of the family's secrets.

Jansson describes Aunt Gerda as a natural confidant. For decades family and friends turned to her, she listened attentively to their quiet tragedies and squabbles and remembered every detail. ‘They [..] let themselves be misled by her peculiar air of innocence and neutrality. It was like telling secrets to a tree or a devoted pet and never having afterwards that queasy feeling that you’d given yourself away’. ²

Once steadfast, Aunt Gerda's now erratic behaviour begins to irritate the family, who are absorbed in their own woes. She spends the spring and winter alone in her apartment. No one calls or visits. Aunt Gerda is somewhat relieved. But still, she feels spurned that no-one reciprocates her loyal attention to life's rhythms. Aunt Gerda also finds herself afloat, increasingly confused and lost in time. She spends months gazing out her window. Then, one day, she has an urge to test her memory.

Aunt Gerda rolls out a large sheet of paper and begins to make a map. On it she draws a circle for each family member, and fills it with their profile, name, and date of birth. She swirls different coloured lines around and between the circles to signify connections. She puts ‘all romantic relationships in pink—double lines for unconventional and forbidden alliances’. ³ ‘Divorces in violet, hate in crimson, loyalty lines in bright cerulean’. ⁴ Night after thrilling night, Aunt Gerda maps the secrets of the family onto the page; thefts of money, love, and ideas, estrangements, betrayals, affairs, even an attempted murder, the latter circled in purple. Last in shimmering gold, she writes down the barest of truths, exposing hurtful secrets, bogus deaths, and false paternities. ‘For the first time in her life, Aunt Gerda had the sweet and bitter experience of power’. ⁵ Finished, she rolls up the map, secures it with two elastic bands and affixes a label, ‘to be burned unread after my death’. ⁶ The reader is left to imagine the unlikeliness of such a request being fulfilled when a curious descendant stumbles upon the rolled-up map, tilts it to the light, and peers in at a crisscross of coloured lines.

The moral of the story: never underestimate an aunt. With her macabre humour, Jansson draws our attention to the quiet labours of Aunt Gerda as a kin-keeper, the power of knowledge she possesses, and her unstated responsibility for holding the line between the family's outward face and its shadows. The story offers a sociological insight into this family role—while not all aunts make such maps (one hopes), many aunts perform the unseen yet crucial labours of receiving and keeping family secrets. It is not a coincidence that perhaps many of us can name an aunt who would be the Aunt Gerda in our own families. But what is it about ‘the aunt’ that calls her to manage sensitive and/or hidden knowledge about the family, and to do so in tacit ways?

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Introduction

This paper explores the role of aunts as kin-keepers. I was inspired to write about aunts when I noticed across two datasets that they were very often mentioned as the person in the family who held and/or disclosed a family secret. Aunts were sometimes enablers—they bequeathed family archives, passed on untold stories, or planted clues to family mysteries. Other times they guarded or withheld family information, or at least made it known they were displeased with my survey respondents’ historical enquiries. Either way, aunts played a key role in managing information about the family. They also frequently served as a bridge or dam between generations, where parents, for example, did not know or otherwise could not (or would not) transmit information about previous generations to their children. Given the ubiquity of the aunt I was puzzled to find that very little has been written on them, even within the sociology of the family.

Existing research on aunts responds to an absence in the literature so stark that aunts, along with uncles, are described as ‘forgotten kin’. ⁷ These studies—from sociology and communications—argue that ‘aunting’ is an important family practice and map its general dimensions. ⁸ More studies are needed to bring detail and nuance to our understanding of this complex yet understudied family role. Here I am most interested in the relationship between aunts and family secrets. Existing works briefly mention that aunts often know and talk about the family history and speak in confidence about things that may not be shared in the nuclear unit. Building on this, I offer a closer analysis of these practices as ‘family shadow-work’ and track how aunts actively reproduce the family whether through collecting, guarding, or sharing such stories. Given that the paper does not report on a dedicated study of aunts it is intended as a primarily conceptual contribution, illuminating shadow-work within the family—an idea that could also be applied to other familial roles and practices. This paves the way for further empirical studies that can more fully uncover the variable role of aunts in families across specific historical contexts, beyond my focus on intergenerational memory in nineteenth and twentieth century settler colonial Australia. Foremost, this research helps to flesh out our understanding of aunts as kin-keepers. It also contributes to work on family secrets, particularly the family practices involved in the management of sensitive histories within families ⁹ , and adds to literature on the work of women more generally as historical kin-keepers, be it of lineages, heirlooms, or traditions. ¹⁰

Shadow-Work

To develop a term for aunts’ labours, I explore the aunting practices around family secrets as shadow-work, work that, as I will explain, is unseen yet essential. I delineate three select practices of aunts’ shadow-work within the family—keeping; intimating; and bolstering. I argue that while these acts of diagonal transmission are less recognised as ‘genealogical’ than lines of begetting family members, they are absolutely crucial to creating a continuity of family lore, structure, and identity. This line of argument allows us to consider questions such as, how do we understand reproduction within the family—beyond the generation of more family members? And how are the ‘untold’ secrets of the family passed on? Attention to the intergenerational nature of aunting practices also challenges narratives about the decline of the family unit and ‘family values’ by drawing attention to the shadow-work that has long been vital to constructing an idyllic view of families as untroubled.

The term shadow-work is used in two contexts, in political economy, to describe unremunerated labour, and in psychology, as a technique of Jungian psychoanalysis. In both arenas, shadow-work is labour that constitutes the whole but is kept out of sight. For Ivan Illich shadow-work was exemplified by women's labour in the home, which motored the wage economy even if cast as private. ¹¹ For Jung, the analysand's shadow-work attends to vital parts of the self that are troubling and difficult to assimilate and therefore kept out of consciousness. ¹²

It is not too much of a stretch then to think about shadow-work within the family as labour that is essential to the operations of the family yet not necessarily acknowledged. Further, we might think of shadow-work as labour that enables but also reveals fantasies of ease and security in social forms, be it the capitalist economy, the enlightened self, or the nuclear family. In each case shadow-work goes on outside the frame, but it is never actually cut because it is needed to generate what is in the frame. I posit that aunting can be read as shadow-work, because the aunt acts as a kin-keeper and transmits knowledge about the family that is secret or unspoken yet vital to the family's reproduction. As Annette Kuhn writes, ‘family secrets are the other side of the family's public face, of the stories families tell themselves and of the world about themselves’. ¹³ Aunts work to maintain the integrity of this ‘other side’ as well as its dividing line. This can include drawing things out of or keeping them in the shadows for reasons of censorship and/or protection.

Aunts’ shadow-work is therefore constitutive, but not always positive or altruistic in how it navigates and exercises power. Practices of keeping secrets can steady or tilt the dynamics within families. There can be an immense power in holding potentially ‘damaging’ knowledge, choosing how it will be narrated, and when and to whom it may be disclosed. As with Aunt Gerda, there can be feelings of resentment and other factors that shape the desire to tell. The truthfulness of such disclosures may also be uncertain or complex. As Georg Simmel writes on secrets, sometimes people actually cling to and rely on secrets, if at unconscious levels, to make life work. He observes: ‘in view of our accidental and defective adaptations to our life-conditions, there is no doubt that we cherish not only so much truth, but also so much nescience, and attain to so much error as is useful for our practical purposes’. ¹⁴ A secret-keeper, or ‘truth-teller’, can be equally invested in this bind. To reveal a secret then, is not always a help or a relief, but can cause great pain and disruption. Aunts may assume this power over knowledge, or at least reveal the structural workings of secrets (if not the secret itself) to their kin. In these intricacies, they both provide and model family shadow-work, transmitting knowledge and imparting the skills needed to manage sensitive information and family members.

Importantly, there are gendered dimensions to shadow-work in the family, which link it to the notion of emotional labour. ¹⁵ Hochschild found that women are more likely to occupy roles and jobs that require ‘emotion work’ and though such work takes a huge toll on energy and intrudes into personal life, these roles are also likely to be underpaid. ¹⁶ Indeed, the emotion-work involved in service roles, such as the flight attendant's plastered smile and ever-polite accommodation, is considered a requisite feminine trait, and is thus rendered invisible and unrecognised as part of job performance. ¹⁷ Such socialised aspects of women's labours need to be taken into account when we hear the reasons why nieces and nephews build confidence with their aunts—because they are approachable, understanding, make time to listen, and so on. In his original formulation of the concept, Illich warns against sentimentalism and nostalgia for women's shadow-work. ¹⁸ He argues that this lens masks the inequalities sustained in gendered divisions of labour, where women's work, however appreciated by their familiars, remains under- or un- paid. The importance of this caution is renewed in the context of family, where the care-work of aunts, even when bristling or disruptive, can be romanticised. In looking at aunting as family shadow-work, it is vital to recognise the value that this work has to nieces and nephews personally, and in sustaining the family overall, both as a unit and as an idea. Yet we must also keep in mind the gendered dynamics that assign this work to aunts, or task women largely with managing the emotionally laborious aspects of family life. Such dynamics may not be so visible at the level of personal family narratives but remain an important sociological driver and consideration.

Facet Methodology

This paper uses Jennifer Mason's facet methodology to draw together snippets of material on aunts. ¹⁹ Facet methodology's design derives from the metaphor of a gemstone, where facets of the gem refract and cast light onto a research question. This orientation allows researchers to collect small pieces of data together to illuminate aspects of a problem. ²⁰ This approach is apt for studying aunthood because it was developed to capture how ‘personal relationships and relationalities are lived’. ²¹ But acts of ‘aunting’ also often sit at the periphery (of the family and of family research) and are therefore well-served by a methodology that does not privilege what is most central and fulsome, but rather attends to ‘flashes of insight’, and even shadows. My aunting facets are drawn from a qualitative survey (2016) and interviews with people who are researching their family history (2020); (my prologue also works as an opening facet, or first glimmer). Neither of my data collection methods were geared toward studying aunts. But using this methodology it is possible to gather less deliberate or central findings into focus. My aim therefore is not to gauge what either dataset reveals overall but to gather and explore even brief mentions of aunts as a way to trace the dimensions of aunts’ secret-keeping and to develop the concept of family shadow-work.

Mason describes facet methodology as both deductive and creative. ²² She argues that it makes plain the inventive and intuitive choices that underpin all research processes, but which often go undocumented due to assumptions about what constitutes scientific rigour. ²³ This approach resonates with Maggie MacLure's interest in data that ‘glows’. ²⁴ MacLure attributes agency to data itself observing that it can steer the researcher off their planned course:

This potentiality can be felt on occasions where something—perhaps a comment in an interview, a fragment of a field note […] —seems to reach out […] to grasp us. These moments confound the industrious, mechanical search for meanings, patterns, codes, or themes; but at the same time, they exert a kind of fascination, and have a capacity to animate further thought. ²⁵

The knowledge facet methodology generates does not seek to be representative and is necessarily exploratory, but in illuminating the contours of a phenomenon it creates the ‘first glimpse’ we need to develop new ways of describing aspects of social life that can sit at the edges or get overlooked. I find the methodology to be particularly well-suited to the study of secrets, which are spoken about in what is ‘not said’, and can often only be glimpsed in passing or in hindsight. Even when my participants speak about family secrets they make remarks like, ‘Oh I knew something was there but there wasn’t enough to go off or to call it out’. The study of secrets faces this same challenge. Following data that ‘glows’ in the study of secrets can introduce a set of ethical questions, about the researcher's potential attraction to the hidden or salacious, and the responsibility to sometimes be sensitive or graceful about what is (unintentionally) revealed in qualitative research. Allowing for the aleatory or agentic nature of data during coding and analysis does not preclude the careful consideration of such ethical and reflexive needs. With this in mind, facet methodology provides one way to generate meaning when one's topic of focus may in other ways slip under the radar or evade the spotlight for various reasons.

About the Data

I conducted the online qualitative survey in 2016. The survey was aimed at family historians—non-professionals researching their own families who had discovered a family secret. I asked seven free-text questions relating to how people discovered, understood, and managed secrets found in past generations. There were 400 responses of varying lengths. I recruited via family history societies and Trove. Respondents are anonymised and I indicate their gender and age in brackets. Ages give some indication of the historical specificity of the aunting practices discussed, with the youngest respondent cited being 47 and the oldest 76. Almost all respondents were born in Australia and were of English, Scottish, and/or Irish heritage, which limits the findings to a particular cultural lens. Two of the questions I asked were—‘how did you get into researching your family history?’ and ‘how did you discover the family secret/s?’ Aunts were frequently mentioned in answers to these questions, as a starting point for curiosity about the family's past and as a source of information. These comments are often brief but identified aunts as the family member who held a family secret and/or shared it.

It is important to note that the term ‘aunt’ can hold varying cultural or family-specific meanings and the data is open on how aunts are defined—we do not always know if ‘aunt’ refers to the sibling of a parent, a great-aunt, a cousin, a close friend of the family, or a respected older woman more broadly defined. Similarly aunts do not necessarily conform to the ‘spinster’ stereotype, as some aunts were also married with their own children. Survey responses made no mention of uncles engaged in these practices. The only exception was a case where a respondent learned a secret via an uncle in the course of him reassigning this task to his sister: ‘Over 30 years ago my Uncle passed on a letter to me from someone researching who had a query and he wasn't interested in answering it and asked me to give it to my mother. It got me interested’ (F 60). The responses most often reference aunt to niece transmission. This is in keeping with evidence that both men and women prefer to confide in women overall. ²⁶ The disparity is also unsurprising given my self-selecting sample was more than 80% female, although the most tender survey response about aunts came from a male respondent. A more balanced sample is therefore needed to make comparative claims around the gendered aspects of knowledge transfer within families overall. I did not require the respondents to divulge the content of the secret, however around 85% percent did so and secrets included illegitimacy; bigamy; adultery; convict ancestry; mixed-race ancestry; mental illness; adoption; and criminal activities.

While the survey covers a breadth of family secrets, the interviews are more focused. They are for my project about family histories in settler colonial Australia which investigates how family historians navigate finding hidden stories about Indigenous-settler relations in their own ancestry. It is speculated that family secrets were plentiful within Australia's settler colonial context because free settlers sought to lose the past by coming to the colonies, and because stigma around the convict origins of the colonies, as well as silences around the violent dispossession of Indigenous nations, meant that proprieties were showily performed and pasts carefully guarded. ²⁷ While an in-depth explanation of the Australian context is not vital to my general conceptualisation of aunts’ shadow-work, attention to context can carry indications of what is at stake in shadow-work, such as the varying social consequences of disclosure beyond the family. Data collection for this project is ongoing (currently n = 32), and the interviews I cite here were conducted in 2020 mostly via zoom due to the coronavirus pandemic. The participants are family historians as well as academic historians and artists who have written about their own families. I recruited participants via the survey, genealogical societies, or after reading their published family histories. Where participants are not referring to a published work of history meaning their authorship is already in the public domain, I have used pseudonyms.

For both surveys and interviews it is important to note that the vision of aunts comes from nieces and nephews, rather than aunts themselves. What we see then is how people remember their aunts and how aunts have figured in their efforts to learn more about the family history. It is hard, from this vantage, to see the direct motivations for aunts’ shadow-work as well as the internal ambivalences of aunting. The view of aunts that comes across is perhaps ‘positive’ for this reason, as we get a portrait of those specific aunts who have influenced the participants. My aim therefore is not to give a full account of aunting. We don’t, for example, hear about aunts that take very little interest in the family's history, or indeed, in their nieces and nephews. In keeping with facet methodology, the following exploration is a partial yet hopefully illuminating study to seed further work. I preface my analysis with a review of existing literature to distill what we know about aunts so far.

Who is the Aunt?

Existing scholarly literature on aunthood is limited but seeks to refigure how we view the aunt. The few available studies offer significant insight into the underacknowledged work that aunts do in families—termed ‘aunting’—and particularly how they negotiate, confirm, and/or challenge familial norms. ²⁸

Vanessa May and Kinneret Lahad examine posts from an advice forum, SavvyAunty.com, where women seek help to deal with the dilemmas of being an aunt. Drawing from Georg Simmel's idea of the ‘outsider’, May and Lahad usefully conceptualise aunts as ‘involved observers’ at once outsiders and insiders operating at the borderline between the nuclear family unit and extended kin. With a focus on practices, they suggest that aunts do ‘boundary-work’ in a family context where boundaries are dynamic and can shift to either include or exclude them from being involved in their nieces and nephews’ lives. In their analysis of posts, May and Lahad found that the most reported dilemma for aunts was ‘Can I interfere?’, a question that they argue makes ‘visible the boundaries that surround the family unit, boundaries that are usually invisible because they are taken for granted’. ²⁹ As a result, a lot of the aunts’ work is in adjudicating what input will be welcome and what will be considered overstepping. ³⁰ Regina Davis Sowers study of Black aunts’ decisions about whether to take on primary care for their nieces and nephews highlights that there are important cultural variabilities in how much expectation there is on aunts to participate in parenting. But Davis Sowers also found that aunts ‘are relegated as the keepers of family traditions’. ³¹

Of particular interest to my inquiry, May and Lahad note that one of the issues aunts reported was the politics of disclosing family knowledge. A forum user called Distressed Aunt complains that she can only see her niece and nephew in the presence of their grandparents because her brother/their father is afraid she will ‘tell the children the truth’ about past traumas, mental health, and drug addiction within the family. ³² Other aunts noted that parents were attempting to soften things, protect children's innocence, or keep their ‘head-in-the-sand’. ³³ In each case aunts had to weigh truth-telling with the risk of being excluded from the family unit.

In line with this idea of the aunt as insider and outsider, Laura L. Ellingson and Patricia J. Sotirin's study of aunting found that both closeness and distance were crucial to aunts’ perceived role as good confidantes. Nieces and nephews reported turning to aunts ‘when a mistake had been made, or a tough decision needed to be faced and advice was needed’. In some cases, aunts were considered closer than parents. One nephew said, ‘My mom's other sister is the youngest and has a bond with me as a close friend… We hold a connection like no other, but I can confide secrets with her’. ³⁴ Whereas others explained that it was because aunts were less close than parents, they could be ‘open-minded’, ‘reasonable’, and therefore more approachable. ³⁵ Robert M. Milardo similarly found that young people came to aunts and uncles to discuss topics they feared would be met with judgment or discipline from their parents, ranging from ‘seeking spiritual advice’ to ‘reporting nefarious activities’. ³⁶ He notes that nieces and nephews also found these tricky conversations more appealing with aunts or uncles because they were felt to be reciprocal. Whereas parents would perform being ‘together’ or ‘straight’ with their children, aunts and uncles were more likely to disclose their own ennui and vices. The boundary and in-between status of aunts in these studies provides important context for why aunts are positioned to do shadow-work within families.

Of particular relevance here, the latter two studies note that aunts held and shared stories about family history or traditions. Ellingson and Sotirin refer to aunts as ‘family memory-keepers’ who create a ‘community of memory’. ³⁷ They explain that in their study, ‘[s]tories by and about aunts contribute[d] to the continuity of family life and kin relations across generations’. ³⁸ Milardo also found aunts ‘encourage a sense of family togetherness’ and ‘do so through the practice of creating and participating in family traditions, rituals, and storytelling—activities that maintain a family's unique biography and each individual's sense of self’. ³⁹ Ellingson and Sotirin noticed such transmission in the stories nieces and nephews told about their aunts, which often linked generations and allowed them to ‘feel connections with ancestors they had known barely, if at all’. ⁴⁰ This fits with May and Lahad's suggestion that aunts are the connective tissue between the nuclear family unit and extended kin. Where the Freudian/Theban family drama that underpins modern psychology cloisters the child into its formation within the parent-child relationship, the aunt plots in ancestors and extended kin widening the parameters for identity.

Gesturing to a broader sociological value, existing literature affirms that studying aunting practices can question family normativity and reveal the scaffolding that holds families together. Ellingson and Sotirin claim that one of the most important impacts of studying aunts is to face the reality of how families have always survived. As they caution,

We keep repeating the story of the nuclear family as our only hope for a healthy and productive society that embodies “family values.” Yet this idealistic obsession serves to obscure far more pragmatic alternatives […]. Flexibility is how families have always survived, and it is how they continue to survive now. We propose that the aunt embodies a uniquely valuable way to tell an alternative, sustainable story of family life […], one that many more of us can live in than can fit within the romantic fantasy of the heterosexual nuclear family. ⁴¹

Queer analyses of the family likewise champion the role of aunts and uncles in challenging heteronormative kinship and a narrow idea of reproduction. ⁴² As Edelman notes, childless aunt and uncle characters are often cast as villains in children's stories, but when read against the grain these characters offer alternative futures based on less normative modes of relation. Building on these studies, I explore how aunts can refigure family norms, but in a way that often preserves the family's public face as well as its shadows. Aunts who lead less conventional lives model different life paths. However, as noted, my data does not indicate that only aunts without their own children or nuclear families are kin-keepers. Aunts who are mothers in their own nuclear family also disclosed secrets to nieces or nephews. This suggests that it is something about the specific relation or proxemics of aunting (rather than not being a parent) that facilitates this diagonal transmission and can open up alternative modes of familial reproduction. In this way, aunting can challenge the nuclear unit even when there is not an overtly counter-normative ethos, or when the aim is to preserve a family ideal.

Aunts and Shadow-Work

Concluding Thoughts

One of the aims of this paper has been to make more visible the work that aunts do in families, particularly in creating and passing on knowledge about ancestry and history. Traditional notions of inheritance and genealogy privilege vertical lines of who begets who and can obscure crucial modes of diagonal transmission. Through developing the concept of family shadow-work, I have offered a way to explore how aunts transmit secret or sensitive family knowledge and model the practices around how to manage it. Though perhaps unseen, these experiences are an essential part of the family's legacy, and aunts’ shadow-work ensures that they are preserved and protected. The transmission of family secrets can be mysterious: how does information that is ostensibly unspoken nonetheless get shared within and across generations? Looking more closely at family historians’ relations with their aunts we get a glimpse into how secrets are transmitted as secrets, and the crucial role aunts play in this. These glimpses illuminate some contours of aunting practices and make space for more dedicated studies into how aunts navigate the politics of family secrecy. As we see in several of the examples, secrets might be written down, pointed to, or noted in their absence, rather than openly discussed, yet they are still kept and intimated as a way to protect the ‘public’ face of the family. This shadow-work preserves the shadow of the family, the parts that make it whole and yet operate as a blindspot. As aunts take on this work they also bolster the family unit linking descendants to extended kin. As part of their unique diagonal transmission, aunts actually take their nieces and nephews ‘aside’ to share knowledge or steep them in family lore that might otherwise be lost or pose a risk to the family unit. More research is needed to map and understand the mechanics of this, but my analysis hopefully creates a useful lens and opens paths for further investigations.

Looking at aunts’ family shadow-work, and specifically diagonal modes of transmission within families, also allows us to pursue questions about how we understand familial reproduction or what it takes to sustain family bonds. While aunts may not be involved in parenting (though sometimes they are), what they pass down to the next generation in the form of family stories and secrets is essential to the creation of collective memory and thus to the very continuation of the family as family. Returning to Aunt Gerda's map-making, and throughout my analysis, we see the quiet but potent power that aunts wield via knowing the hidden structures and links that underpin family lives. Aunts’ shadow-work practices actively reveal to members the dynamics of how a family character is constructed, by including and excluding particular aspects of its members’ experiences in the face it shows society. This forges the insider culture of a family, a culture that in part derives from shared intimate knowledge.

Building on this broader sociological insight, more research is needed to explore the historicity of aunting practices as well as their cultural specificities. How and why might aunting practices change across time, and are they more or less clandestine in nature? The facets I have gathered here point to the intergenerational nature of aunting practices—running generations back, great-aunts have long performed shadow-work vital to constructing a continuous view of the family as untroubled. By making this labour visible we can challenge powerful political narratives about the decline of the family unit and an arguably misplaced nostalgia for ‘family values’. As with wider work on family secrets, we see how families of the past were fragile, fractious, and fell apart; their members were desirous, ambivalent, wayward, and conflictual—but in ways that usually veiled these relational experiences from the views of society. Attention to the shadow-work of aunts offers another window into the work that families do to shape themselves into the forms that are socially recognised as familial. Above all, it underscores the deftness and skill of women's kin-keeping that often, perhaps intentionally, goes unseen.