Writing modern women's lives

Abstract

Writing Modern Women’s Lives Carol Kolmerten (bio) Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography. By Peter Conn. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 468 pages. $35.00. Ruth Crawford Seeger: A Composer’s Search for American Music. By Judith Tick. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. 457 pages. $35.00. Elsie Clews Parsons: Inventing Modern Life. By Desley Deacon. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997. 520 pages. $29.95. To Do and To Be: Portraits of Four Women Activists, 1893–1986. By Ann Schofield. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997. 183 pages. $42.50 (cloth). $15.95 (paper). About a year ago I received a packet of two dozen letters from my eighty-year-old aunt, letters that I had written to her and my grandmother during 1965 and 1966 as I struggled with an early marriage, a newborn baby, and a full load of college courses. The letters, as I read them again with growing horror, were complete fabrications—I had constructed a fictional narrative of my life that I perceived my female relatives wanted to hear. More than twenty years later, as I grimace at my fictional accounts, I am reminded that even the “untainted” primary documents that I and other biographers so cherish are written according to prescribed cultural codes: as a nineteen-year-old, I could not admit (to myself and certainly not to my aunt and grandmother) that I yearned [End Page 849] to be unmarried, childless, able to work long hours in the stacks of the college library. I knew no way of describing my “real” life; thus, I constructed an epistolary fantasy that embodied one perky marriage-plot cliché after another. The feminist biographies under review here have made me remember the lesson of my own fictional letters. These biographers, like me, have benefited from the explosion of feminist and biographical theory that allows writers the freedom to begin where they want, to tell a story how they want, to escape the confines of the marriage plot as the only way to shape the story of a woman’s life. They are hypersensitive to issues such as “author,” “subject,” and “audience.” They have also been freed from the trap of contrived coherence by the understanding that biography is inherently a series of inconsistencies and contradictions, in the same way that our subjects’ lives and our own lives as the tellers of the story are often contradictory. If nothing else, current theory has allowed us to shed the heavy mantle of consistency—for ourselves as writers and for our subjects. These authors of four fascinating and compelling biographies know that they are shaping their stories and that their subjects surely fashioned themselves through their letters as they wished to be seen. These authors understand that biography is a type of fiction and that biographers are not distanced or objective. In their introductions and prefaces, they place themselves in relation to their subjects. Their biographies are, as Schofield explains, about subjectivity, about “the point where the individual and history intersect” (7). Suspicious of linear, chronological, unified narratives—of “essential selves”—they are all aware that authors, subjects, and even readers occupy contested ground. Deacon, for example, writes that she is “presenting multiple narratives where they are available, not presenting any one of them as truth” (xiv); Tick writes about her subject’s “multiple and divided selves” (x) and worries about which “side” she is “on.” These biographies also illustrate that the intersection of the public and the private is crucial to understanding a life story. None of the women portrayed in these four books led lives that followed a typical pattern of a male biographical hero—a pattern that includes, more than anything else, a rise “up” to riches and public power. Rather than tracing a simple and inevitable rise, these biographies unravel the complex web of cultural and social forces that work upon the lives of even the most talented of women. These biographies, in fact, read at [End Page 850] times like captivity narratives turned into cautionary tales. The message for our daughters and students is clear—marry the wrong man and your life becomes a prison from which you will have to...