American Women's Autobiography: Fea(s)ts of Memory (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 415 canee. I would suggest that historical biographers, if they wish to move away from "heroic" to "humbler" lives, need to take a look at their own values as to what is significant in peoples lives, so readers like myself won't be left yearning for the missing representation of the lived lives of actual human beings. Helen M. Buss University of Calgary MARGO CULLEY, ED. American Women's Autobiography: Fea(s)ts of Memory. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992. 348 pp. At the beginning of one of the essays in this volume, Arlyn Diamond summarizes the range of materials from which she draws to discuss women's autobiographies from the Civil Rights Movement: "The women's autobiographies brought together for this essay are as various in form as the personalities and backgrounds of the women who wrote them." One might replace the word "essay" for "anthology," and this statement becomes an apt summary of American Women's Autobiography: Fea (s)ts of Memory, as a whole. The backgrounds of the women whose autobiographies are discussed in the volume represent substantial differences in class, ethnicities, and socio-historical worlds, from those of seventeenth -century Puritan societies to nineteenth-century antebellum slave life to twentieth-century white Westchester suburbanism. While the specific details describing various women's lives in this collection are often gripping, the problematic of the collection itself is never solved. To paraphrase editor Margo CuIley 's opening essay, What "piece of work" is "woman," at least in the terms of the American woman "selfhood" depicted in autobiography? As a reader of this anthology, I was haunted by the irritating interrogatory irony of Jacques Lacan: does "woman" exist (in the anthology) —at all? That question, perhaps for fear of its controversial results, is never really attended to, or asked. What is stunning about American Women's Autobiography are the stories of the women themselves. The historical scholarship in several of the essays is salient in detail, offering sympathetic and/or voyeuristic readers an intelligent entrance into the lives of women who wrote about themselves, women whose experiences make them both representative of and unique to their particular societies. Fascinating to me, for example, are the histories of several Puritan American women as relayed through their conversion narratives and memoirs, as discussed by Kathleen M. Swaim and Ann Taves. In '"Come and Hear': Women's Puritan Evidences," Swaim offers a convincing if somewhat predictable analysis of the difference between the confessional discourse of Puritan women and men; since subjective identities for women were constrained by familial religious ideologies, Swaim suggests, their narratives were more abbreviated, more concerned with "others"—with children and husbands — than the men's, which were typified by descriptions of acts of moral debauchery. And in "Self and God in the Early Published Memoirs of New England Women," Taves details the struggle of eighteenth - and nineteenth-century Puritan women and their descendants against wife battering and child incest, exemplified in The Memoirs of Mrs. Abigail Bailey (1815). The discussion of this work illuminates the dominance and submission that structured women's lives under Puritan spirituality, as Abigail Bailey leaves 416 biography Vol. 17, No. 4 an abusive husband only "as the result of her increasing dependence on God." At the other end of the historical spectrum, Janis Grève relates the complex psycho-familial drama of a young orphan who grew into a major twentieth-century cultural critic, in "Orphanhood and 'Photo'-Portraiture in Mary McCarthy 's Memories of a Catholic Girlhood." Grève analyzes the inner conflicts suffered by McCarthy through a Kleinian reading of subject-object relations, suggesting McCarthy's inner conflict can be examined vis a vis an ironic perception of family photographs. Still other chapters detail the alcoholic torments of prescient suburban social critic Margaret Halsey, the spiritual conversion of socialist Dorothy Day, and the effects of cultural "otherness" and immigrant racial oppression commented upon by Maxine Hong Kingston and Jade Snow Wong. As individual essays, many of these pieces are informative in their analyses of the various women's construction of "selfhood" and female experience. As a collection , their unity seems contrived. What does constitute woman's "selfhood" and "experience...