Traditions of Victorian Women's Autobiography: The Poetics and Politics of Life Writing by Linda H. Peterson (review)

Abstract

in the limitationsof language, and his recognition that 'only through tryingto state the truth do we realize the impossibilityof doing so' (p. 39). The problem of the nature of language indeed is in many ways central, both in relation to Coleridge's prose style, his preference for winding sentences and obscurities,and in relation to his quest to 'isolate the pre-linguisticessence of subjectiveconsciousness' (p. I42). In his prose he seeksto evoke a sense of the sublime, but 'what he pursuesis in fact the verbalization of an intuition which is always beyond the grasp of language' (p. I65). His anxieties about language are reflected in his sustained interest in desynonymizing termsoften treatedas equivalent, and he has much to say about a number of these, includingenthusiasmand fanaticism,positivenessas distinguished from certainty, thinkingversus thought, and spontaneity, happiness, and pleasure. He also considers Coleridge's wrestlingswith topics such as mysticism, optimism, evolution, and individuality, and writes discriminatinglyon his negotiations with the ideas of Hartley, Priestley,Berkeley,and Schelling. The argumentof the book is entirelyabstract,but, if Coleridgepersistentlyvalues 'thinkingover thoughts', this is, in part at least, related to his continuing concern with practical issues. The book does not touch on such matters. Yet Coleridge's concern with religion begins in his I795 Lectures by discussingthe problem of evil and sin, and he was troubledby hisvivid senseof man as a 'viciousand discontented Animal'(The Collected Works of SamuelTaylorColeridge, Vol. 2. TheWatchman, ed. by Lewis Patton (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, I970), p. I32) in the context of the horrors of war, such as occurred in the barbarities of the suppression of the Royalist uprising in the Vendee, and of the slave trade. His reflections on the theories of evolution and on the possibility of the progression of human nature turned on his desire to establish a fundamental distinction between humans and animals, and this led him to attempt to constructa theory of life. Vallinsdeals with Coleridge'stheoriesin isolationfromthepracticalconcernsthatcontinuallyaffected his thinking, and thus tends to substantiate an image of the poet as a cloudy metaphysician,pursuingintuitionsbeyond the graspof language. UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, Los ANGELES R. A. FOAKES Traditions of Victorian Ifomen's Autobiography. ThePoetics andPoliticsofLifeWriting.By LINDAH. PETERSON. (Victorian Literature and Culture) Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia. I999. xiii + 256 pp. $38.50. It is apt indeed that Linda H. Peterson, in this cogent and lucidly written study, should quote Elizabeth BarrettBrowning's famous phrase, 'I look everywhere for grandmothersand see none', since her own book is so cruciallyconcerned with the searchfor literaryancestry.Appropriately,Petersonbegins by paying tributeto the pioneering work of the feminist critics who, over the last twenty years, have establishedlife writing by women as a new and vibrant field of study, while at the same time taking issue with Mary G. Mason's categorical statement, in 'Other Voice: Autobiographies of Women Writers'in Autobiography. EssaysTheoretical and Critical, ed. byJames Olney (Princeton,NJ:PrincetonUniversity Press, I980), that 'Nowhere in women's autobiographies do we find the patterns establishedby the two prototypicalmale autobiographers,Augustineand Rousseau'. Augustine'suse of a dramaticstructureof conversion,where the 'selfis presentedas the stage for a battle of opposing forces and where a climactic victory for one force - spiritdefeating flesh- completes the dramaof the self,'is, accordingto Mason, essentiallyalien to women's self-conception; so, too, is Rousseau's 'unfolding self-discoverywhere the characters and events are little more than aspects of the author's evolving consciousness.' (p. 5). in the limitationsof language, and his recognition that 'only through tryingto state the truth do we realize the impossibilityof doing so' (p. 39). The problem of the nature of language indeed is in many ways central, both in relation to Coleridge's prose style, his preference for winding sentences and obscurities,and in relation to his quest to 'isolate the pre-linguisticessence of subjectiveconsciousness' (p. I42). In his prose he seeksto evoke a sense of the sublime, but 'what he pursuesis in fact the verbalization of an intuition which is always beyond the grasp of language' (p. I65). His anxieties about language are reflected in his sustained interest in desynonymizing termsoften treatedas equivalent, and he has much to say about a number of these, includingenthusiasmand fanaticism,positivenessas distinguished from certainty, thinkingversus thought, and...