New Essays on Life Writing and the Body 1443805009, 9781443805001

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New Essays on Life Writing and the Body

New Essays on Life Writing and the Body

Edited by

Christopher Stuart and Stephanie Todd

New Essays on Life Writing and the Body, Edited by Christopher Stuart and Stephanie Todd This book first published 2009 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2009 by Christopher Stuart and Stephanie Todd and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-0500-9, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-0500-1

TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements ................................................................................... vii Foreword .................................................................................................... ix Every Body’s Autobiography Timothy Dow Adams Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Gender, Race, and Disability: the Death and Resurrection of the Body in Life Writing Christopher Stuart Part I: The Body in the Literary Life Values Made Flesh: Edith Wharton and the Body Aesthetic..................... 24 Mary V. Marchand Control, Creativity and the Body in Virginia Woolf’s “A Sketch of the Past” ............................................................................... 38 Nóra Séllei Gertrude Stein’s “Emotional Autobiography”: A Body in Occupied France ...................................................................... 58 Jill Pruett Part II: The Body and Women’s Life Writing They Weren’t What They Ate: Memoirs by Judith Moore and Betsy Lerner........................................................................................ 72 Timothy Dow Adams The Fit and Athletic Body in New Women Autobiographies.................... 87 Tracy J. R. Collins

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Dressing the Part: The Body in/of the Diaries of Hannah Cullwick and Arthur Munby ................................................................................... 108 Cynthia Huff Part III: Adopted Selves: Life Writing and The Family/Ethnic Body Intimacy, Erasure and the Other: Frank Hamilton Cushing’s Disappearing Body .................................................................................. 132 Caroline C. Nichols The Embodiment of Memory: The Intellectual Body in Shirley Geok-lin Lim's Among the White Moon Faces........................................ 154 Katrina M. Powell Images of the Family Body in the Adoptee Search Narrative ................. 168 Emily Hipchen Part IV: Life Writing of Disability/Disease/ Disfigurement Refiguring the Masculine Body in the Autobiographies of Disabled American Men ......................................................................................... 192 Elizabeth Grubgeld The Broken Mirror of Identity in Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face.................................................................................................. 207 Stephanie Todd Memoir and (Lack of) Memory: Filial Narratives of Paternal Dementia... 223 G. Thomas Couser Side By Side: Life-writers on Disabled Siblings ..................................... 241 Susannah B. Mintz Contributors............................................................................................. 261 Index........................................................................................................ 265

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First of all, we would like to thank our loyal and enormously productive graduate assistant, Victoria Bryan, whose boundless energy and eye for detail has been invaluable; and, yes, that means we should have paid you more. Thanks also to the Cambridge University Library and the curators of the Hannah Cullwick collection for permission to publish the photographs included in Cynthia Huff’s contribution. Christopher Stuart would also like to express his gratitude to his friends and colleagues, Edgar “Mac” Shawen and Fran Bender, whose friendship and support over the last two years have helped this project along in more ways than they even know, as well as to Verbie L. Prevost, a dear friend and a model department head who has done as much as anyone to make the English Department at UTC an environment in which faculty can thrive. To his brother Matthew who has been there from the beginning and whose continual presence has been a profound and enduring consolation. And finally to Susie who has made work a guiltless pleasure while making everything else in his life sweeter. Stephanie Todd would like to thank her parents, brother, and all other family and friends whose support these past few years has been invaluable. Also to Cynthia Davis and Laura Walls for their academic guidance and without whom I would not be nearing the end… Finally to Jim who is continuously willing to read and edit my work and whose humor always keeps me grounded.

FOREWORD EVERY BODY’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY TIMOTHY DOW ADAMS

“It is so much more difficult to live with one's body than with one's soul. One's body is so much more exacting: what it won't have it won't have, and nothing can make bitter into sweet.” —D. H. Lawrence

New Essays on Life Writing and the Body is especially welcome at a time when both popular and academic interest in the human body have merged. The collection will serve as a scholarly companion to one of the most popular museum exhibitions in years, Bodies: The Exhibition, which provides a completely new way for the human body to be displayed. Making use of an innovative polymer preservation process which is applied to actual human bodies, the exhibit allows viewers to see a threedimensional version—from the inside and out—of the traditional multilayer transparencies once common to biology text books. Just as the popular exhibition allows viewers to see bodies in three dimensions, so this collection of scholarly essays, with its multiple perspectives, reveals body-centered life writing from new angles.1 Moving from the literary bodies of Wharton, Woolf, and Stein through such women’s body issues as food, class, colonization, and athleticism, the essays also take up both racialized bodies and those described as disabled or disfigured by a range of physical and mental diseases. In doing so the collection demonstrates some of the many ways that the human body can intersect with the three major components of the three Greek words from which we derive the term autobiography: autos, bios and graphe (self, life, and writing). Because our sense of self is so often connected to both body image and body function, many life writers have demonstrated that even the most abstract metaphorical representation of their selves is often rooted in their changing corporal bodies. As Oliver Sacks has noted, our body sense is controlled by “three things: vision, balance organs (the vestibular system), and proprioception,” or position sense.2 While some authors want

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to describe or create a consistent self, an inner sense of continuity from childhood through a lifetime, James Olney’s description of bios as the “course of a life seen as a process,” is a more accurate description of what most autobiography scholars call a sense of self.3 The course of our lives is naturally complicated by the fact that everyone’s body changes as we age,so that in effect all body-centered autobiographies can be characterized as attempts at reconciling one’s sense of self with one’s constantly changing body. Those whose physical situations become radically opposed to their long-term body image, often experience a severe loss of self, as John Kotre explains in his Outliving the Self. On the other hand, for people whose lives have been interrupted by life-threatening circumstances, the significant altering of the concept of bios may also have a positive effect. As Arthur W. Frank asserts in his The Wounded Storyteller, “Illness takes away parts of your life but in doing so it give you the opportunity to choose the life you will lead, as opposed to the one you have simply accumulated over the years.”4 The body is also constantly altered by the events of life itself–as evidenced by both the physical signs of life’s wear and tear, the changes in our appearance and health brought about by major life altering events, and also by our physical and mental health. As Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson have observed, “It is easy to think that autobiographical subjectivity and autobiographical texts have little to do with the material body. But the body is a site of autobiographical knowledge, as well as a textual surface upon which a person’s life is inscribed.”5 Not only are our embodied selves a kind of on-going textual narrative of the course of our lives, but they are also directly connected to graphe, our ability to produce life writing. Frank writes, “Stories are told not just about the body but through it.”6 Those for whom the act of writing is very difficult or not physically possible (because of their body’s physical or mental situation) have had to convey their personal narratives in other ways, the autobiographical act echoing the embodied self. An especially effective example can be seen in the chaotic, non-chronological, repetitive narrative structure of Terri Cheney’s Manic: A Memoir, which parallels the chemical imbalances that produced her swings between an almost joyful euphoria and a deadening depression, her loss of equilibrium while achieving stability through medication, and her difficulty in remembering the sequence of events of her life with bipolar affective disorder. Christina Middlebrook's Seeing the Crab: A Memoir of Dying Before I Do is even more radical in its use of temporal disruptions, disassociation between personal pronoun and subject. Narrating after the period in which the

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author lay recovering from peripheral stem cell replacement following breast cancer, she begins to write about her self in the third person: “"The zoo creature is very dopey. Its left eyelid sags. Its back is covered by a hideous, pussy rash that itches. . . . Worst of all, the zoo creature cannot think or remember. It says things in a language that makes no sense.”7 Often life writing with physical bodies at its center takes the form of collaboration, a relative or friend narrating or helping when the situation prevents telling the story. Examples include Bernard Bragg’s Lessons in Laughter: The Autobiography of a Deaf Actor, as signed to Eugene Bergman, and Jean-Dominique Bauby’s extraordinary effort in using his ability to blink his left eye to compose The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: A Memoir of Life in Death, following a debilitating stroke which left him with “locked-in syndrome.” Particularly useful in considering the ethics of collaborations such as these is Thomas Couser’s Vulnerable Subjects, which is concerned with the trust-based relationship between people who are unable to represent themselves in writing and often have ambiguous relationships with those who are presenting their story. While the human body has not always figured in an especially prominent way in life writing, in recent years many autobiographies with a strong component of body consciousness have begun to appear, matched by scholarly interest from a variety of disciplines. Leading the way among autobiography scholars is the work of Thomas Couser, especially his Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability, and Life Writing. Other important work has been done by Paul John Eakin (How Our Lives Become Stories and Living Autobiographically) and Sidonie Smith (Subjectivity, Identity, and the Body). Other scholars have written about such issues as feminism and body image, illness and disease, deafness, trauma and the body.8 One of the noteworthy strengths of New Essays on Life Writing and The Body is its range; in addition to studies of illness, disfigurement, and dis/ability, the life stories of those whose bodies differ from culturally determined normative standards, the collection includes essays that take up cases where the physical body might at first seem unremarkable, issues of aesthetics, control, size, class, colonization, fitness, athleticism, family, intellectuality, and intimacy. While numerous exceptionally strong autobiographies are directly connected to dis/ability or illness, many others of value do not fall into that category. Thomas Couser makes the point that “unmarked” bodies seldom seem to require a corresponding narrative: In everyday life, for example, the unmarked case—the "normal" body—can pass without narration; the marked case—the limp, the scar, the wheelchair, the missing limb—calls for a story. Thus, people with anomalous bodies are often required to account for themselves. This might

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Foreword be an opportunity rather than an obligation, but despite the request for impromptu narration, the answer to the question "What happened to you?" is expected to relieve the auditors' discomfort in the presence of difference.9

Central though stories of corporal dysfunction have been to the rise of life writing and the body, imagining that only “marked” examples are significant is problematic because of the assumption that the nonnormative aspects of anyone’s body are the only parts of a person’s story worth telling—that events in someone’s personal narrative which don’t relate directly to an abnormality are of little interest. Another problem with an exclusive concentration on bodies that deviate from the norm is that eventually everyone’s body fits into that category; we all age, get diseases, have break-downs and die. Whatever might make a body non-normative also falls into the broad category of illness or inferiority or unruliness. When, for example, a body-centered personal narrative focuses on skin color or sexual orientation or deafness the differences inherent in the narrative are not necessarily thought of by the writer to be in the same category as stories connected to major illness. While the human body was once notably absent from Western life writing for most of its history, in recent years the opposite situation has begun to prevail. An almost unlimited number of examples related to virtually every bodily situation have been published, in a wide variety of forms. Where body parts were once relegated to text books, the curious forced to read the long-running “autobiographical” series “I am Joe’s Body,” (articles told from the point of view of various body parts, culminating in the peculiarly title “I Am Joe’s Man Gland”), now we can read about the complete body from many different points of view.10 For the remainder of this foreword, I wish to provide a preliminary guide to the multiple ways that life writing about the body has been published, my examples arranged roughly from head to toe, with excursions into skin, circulation, major diseases and other body systems. While many personal stories have concentrated on a single body part, because the body is an organic system, even the most limited concentration always includes the whole body as well and there are many cases where a narrative includes multiple categories. Such a taxonomy naturally emphasizes “unruly” or “non-normative” cases.

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Head The most celebrated example of life writing in this category is The Autobiography of a Face (2003), Lucy Grealy’s devastating story of her changing sense of self as a result of her recurring surgeries and chemotherapy treatments for Ewing's sarcoma, a cancer that severely disfigured her face. That her facial features are connected to her entire body’s image is made clearer by the short essay she published “Autobiography of My Body,” and by the story of her friendship and ambiguous death as told in Ann Patchett’s Truth & Beauty (2004). Another compelling story related to the head is Howard Dully’s My Lobotomy (2007), in which he describes receiving a brutal and unnecessary transorbital lobotomy at the age of twelve, an experimental treatment caused primarily by his disturbed mother’s anxiety over his behavior. Other examples in this group include life writing about blindness and deafness, including Helen Keller’s classic The Story of My Life (2004), which of course discusses both, John M. Hull’s Touching the Rock (1992), and Ved Mehta’s eleven part autobiography series Continents of Exile (1972-2004), which tells the progressive story of his early blindness, coming to America to study at the Arkansas School for the Blind, and eventual years as a writer. An unusual book about blindness is Scattered Shadows: A Memoir of Blindness and Vision (2004) by John Howard Griffin. Griffin’s temporary blindness, a result of combat in World War II, is somewhat similar to his temporary “blackness,” as described in Black Like Me (2003), the odd story of his having dyed his skin black and traveled around the Southern United States. Deaf autobiographies range from those which make use of American Sign Language, signed or transcribed to others or delivered by video; those written by people with sufficient hearing or hearing loss after English acquisition to write in standard written English; and the personal stories of hearing children of deaf adults (CODA’s), who have tried to bridge the gap between the worlds. Strong entries of the first type, in addition to the already named Bernard Bragg’s Lessons in Laughter: The Autobiography of a Deaf Actor (1989), and the titles reprinted (accompanied with a DVD ) in the anthology Signing the Body Poetic: Essays in American Sign Language Literature (2006), edited by H-Dirksen L. Bauman. Deaf performance artists such as Terry Galloway, whose Out All Night and Lost My Shoes (1993) has received universal praise, have also used that form to tell the story of their lives. Examples in the second group include Henry Kisor’s What’s That Pig Outdoors? (1990), Hannah Merker’s Listening

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(1974), and Terry Galloway’s Mean little Deaf Queer (2009). Noteworthy examples of the third type include Leah Hager Cohen’s Train Go Sorry (1994), Ruth Sidransky’s In Silence (1990), and Lou Ann Walker’s A Loss for Words (1986). Because chemical imbalances within the brain are directly connected to mental illness, the substantial number of mental illness autobiographies also fall into this group, including such classics as Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl (schizophrenia) by Marguerite Sechehaye (1994), Darkness Visible (depression) by William Styron (1992), An Unquiet Mind (bipolar disorder) by Kay Redfield Jamison (1997), Nobody Nowhere (autism) by Donna Williams (1994), Girl, Interrupted (borderline personality disorder) by Susanna Kaysen (1994), John Elder Robison’s Look Me in the Eye (2007, Asperger’s Syndrome), and John J. Gunther’s Death Be Not Proud (1949, brain tumor).

Torso Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck (2006) provides a transition from the head to the torso, a category which includes books about heart disease such as William O’Rourke’s On Having a Heart Attack (2006), Paul West’s A Stroke of Genius (1995), as well as Matthew W. Sanford’s Waking: A Memoir of Trauma and Transcendence (2006), (paralysis), Fortunate Son by Lewis Puller (2000, Vietnam wounds), Anatoyle Broyard’s Intoxicated by My Illness (1993, prostate cancer), Tim Brookes’s, Catching My Breath (1995, asthma), Joan Weimer’s Back Talk (1996, herniated disk), and Reynolds Price’s A Whole New Life (2003) and Robert Murphy’s The Body Silent (2001)—both about spinal tumors. Of the many compelling breast cancer narratives, Betty Rolin’s First, You Cry (1996); Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals (1980) and A Burst of Light (1988); and Jo Spence’s Putting Myself in the Picture (1988), a photographic autobiography which she referred to as phototherapy, are especially important.

Feet /Legs Oliver Sacks’s many case studies of neurological conditions began with A Leg to Stand On (1987), his autobiographical account of a leg injury which eventually led to the necessity of his learning to walk and an odd sense of disembodiment in which he became alienated from his own limb. Other memoirs directly related to this category include Pang-Mei Chang’s Bound Feet and Western Dress (1999), Christy Brown’s My Left

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Foot (1990, cerebral palsy), Mary Felstiner’s Out of Joint (2008, arthritis) and Kenny Fries’s Body, Remember (2003, deformation of legs and feet).

Skin In addition to numerous autobiographies by persons of color in which skin color is central, dermatological life writing includes such books as John Updike’s Self-Consciousness (1989, psoriasis), Dorothy Allison’s Skin (2005, whiteness), Caroline Kettlewell’s Skin Game (2007, selfmutilation), and Lee Thomas’s Turning White 2007, (the story of an African-American with vitiligo).

Whole Body Besides the life writing examples I have provided within these smaller categories, there are of course others which concentrate on the whole body or on various body systems which affect more than a single area. Examples include the life stories of those who suffered severe damage from accidents: Andre Dubus’s Broken Vessels (1992) and Meditations from a Movable Chair (1999, car accident), Peggy Shumaker’s Just Breathe Normally (2008, near fatal cycling collision), as well as the memoirs of athletes: Samuel Wilson Fussell’s Muscle (1991, body building, bulimia), Leslie Haywood’s Pretty Good for a Girl (1999, track, body building), and many memoirs from dancers, including Martha Graham’s Blood Memory (1991), Allegra Kent‘s Once A Dancer (1997), and Suzanne Farrell’s Holding On to the Air (2002). In addition, since American Sign Language, which concentrating on the human hand, uses the entire body to convey subtleties, all deaf autobiography involves the entire body. As Galloway notes, “Deafness has left me acutely aware of both the duplicity that language is capable of and the many expressions the body cannot hide.”11 In many cases life writing about the whole body results from a particularly debilitating disease. Examples include Leonard Kriegel’s Falling into Life (1991) and Brenda Serotte’s The Fortune Teller’s Kiss (2008)—both about polio, Nancy Mairs’s Waist-High in the World (1996)and Plaintext: Essays (1992, multiple sclerosis), Tom Andrews’s Codeine Diary (1998, hemophilia), Jean Baréma’s The Test (2005) and Alice Wexler’s Mapping Fate (1995)—both about Huntington’s disease, and Joseph Heller and Speed Vogel's No Laughing Matter (2004. GuillainBarré syndrome).

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Sexual Orientation Books under this heading include autobiography and biography related to HIV/AIDS, such as Mark Doty’s Heaven’s Coast (1997), Arthur Ashe’s Days of Grace (1993), Paul Monette’s Borrowed Time (1988), Harold Brodkey’s This Wild Darkness (1996), Susan Bergman’s Anonymity (1994), and Mary Fisher’s My Name is Mary (1996). Authors of HIV/AIDS narratives range from those infected through transfusion and sexual activity, and those narrated by lovers or family members. Of course gay writers also write about their bodies without reference to disease, as in Mark Thompson’s Gay Body (1997), which discusses relationships between his physical body (including such topics as drugs and sadomasochism) and his spiritual life. Transsexual and trangsgendered narratives range from Jan Morris’s Conundrum (1974), Aaron Raz Link and Hilda Raz’s What Becomes You, (2008, which describes a daughter’s transformation into a son), Minnie Bruce Pratt’s S/he (1995, the story of a gay woman’s love for a woman born female but living as a male), and Norah Vincent’s Self-Made Man (2006), in which a gay woman passes as a male for a year. An unusual example of a partially transgendered life is Ken Baker’s Man Made (2001), the story of the author’s sexual dysfunction brought on by a brain tumor which produced an abundance of the female hormone prolactin for much of his early life. This brief catalogue of body-centered life writing is by necessity incomplete, the examples I’ve provided only a sampling of the rich body of work on the human body. Like any taxonomy, my categories are not air tight, many writers falling into more than one section. Terry Galloway, for instance, fits into both the deaf and gay categories. Paul West is both an autobiographer who wrote about his stroke—and subsequent aphasia—and a biographer of a deaf daughter. Lewis Puller was both a paraplegic and an alcoholic, this last a disease with so many life writing examples that I have not included it. While I’ve listed primarily written autobiography, numerous strong examples exist for each category in other formats, including photographic, graphic, drama and motion pictures.

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Works Cited Allison, Dorothy. Skin: Talking About Sex, Class and Literature. Ann Arbor, MI: Firebrand Books, 2005. Andrews, Tom. Codeine Diary: A Memoir. New York: Little, Brown, 1998. Ashe, Arthur and Arnold Rampersad. Days of Grace: A Memoir. New York: Knopf, 1993. Avrahami, Einat. The Invading Body: Illness Autobiographies. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 2007. Baker, Ken. Man Made: A Memoir. New York: Tarcher, 2001. Baréma, Jean. The Test: Living in the Shadow of Huntington’s Disease. New York: Franklin Square P, 2005. Bauby, Jean-Dominique. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: A Memoir of Life in Death. New York: Vintage, 1998. Bauman, H-Dirksen L., Heidi M. Rose, and Jennifer L. Nelson, eds. Signing the Body Poetic: Essays on American Sign Language Literature. Berkeley: U of California P, 2006. Bergman, Susan. Anonymity: The Secret Life of an American Family. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1994. Bodies: the Exhibition, produced by Premiere Exhibitions. http://www.bodiestheexhibition.com/ Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley: U of California P, 2004. Boston Women's Health Book Collective. Our Bodies, Ourselves: A New Edition for a New Era. New York: Touchstone, 2005. Bragg, Bernard. Lessons in Laughter: The Autobiography of a Deaf Actor. As signed to Eugene Bergman. Washington: Gallaudet UP, 1989. Brodkey, Harold. This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death. New York: Henry Holt, 1996. Brookes, Tim. Catching My Breath: An Asthmatic Explores His Illness. New York: Vintage, 1995. Brooks, Peter. Body Works: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993. Brown, Christy. My Left Foot. New York: Vintage, 1990. Broyard, Anatole. Intoxicated by My Illness: And Other Writings on Life and Death. New York: Ballantine, 1993. Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge, 1993. Chambers, Ross. Untimely Interventions: AIDS Writing, Testimonial, and the Rhetoric of Haunting. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2004.

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Chang, Pang-Mei Natasha. Bound Feet and Western Dress: A Memoir. Tandem Library, 1999. Cohen, Leah Hager. Train Go Sorry: Inside a Deaf World. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1994. Conboy, Katie, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury, eds. Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. Couser, G. Thomas. Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability, and Life Writing. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1997. —. “Paradigms' Cost: Representing Vulnerable Subjects.” Literature and Medicine 24.1 (2005): 19-30. —. Vulnerable Subjects: Ethics and Life Writing. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2004. Davis, Lennard J. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body. London: Verso, 1995. Doty, Mark. Heaven’s Coast. New York: Harper Perennial, 1997. Dubus, Andre. Broken Vessels. Boston: David Godine, 1992. —. Meditations from a Movable Chair. New York: Vintage, 1999. Dully, Howard and Charles Fleming. My Lobotomy. New York: Crown, 2007. Eakin, Paul John. How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1999. —. Living Autobiographically: How We Create Identity in Narrative. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2008. Ephron, Nora. I Feel Bad About My Neck. New York: Knopf, 2006. Farrell, Suzanne. Holding On to the Air: An Autobiography. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2002. Fisher, Mary. My Name is Mary: A Memoir. New York: Scribner’s, 1996. Frank, Arthur W. The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995. Felstiner, Mary. Out of Joint: A Private and Public Story of Arthritis. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2008. Fries, Kenny. Body, Remember: A Memoir. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2003. Fussell, Samuel Wilson. Muscle: Confessions of an Unlikely Bodybuilder. New York: Poseidon, 1991. Galloway, Terry. Out All Night and Lost My Shoes. Tallahassee, FL: Apalachee P, 1993. —. “I’m Listening as Hard as I Can.” In With Wings: An Anthology of Literature by and About Women With Disabilities, ed. Marsha Saxton and Florence Howe, 5-9. New York: Feminist P, 1993.

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—. Mean Little Deaf Queer. Boston: Beacon P, 2009. Gilman, Sander L. Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to AIDS. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988. Graham, Martha. Blood Memory: An Autobiography. New York: Doubleday, 1991. Gunther, John J. Death Be Not Proud: A Memoir. New York: Harper Perennial, 2007. Grealy, Lucy. Autobiography of a Face. New York: Harper Perennial, 2003. —. “Autobiography of a Body.” Nerve (October 1997). http://www.nerve.com/PersonalEssays/Grealy/body/ Griffin, John Howard. Black Like Me. New York: New American Library, 2003. —. Scattered Shadows: A Memoir of Blindness and Vision. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2004. Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994. Haywood, Leslie. Pretty Good for a Girl: An Athlete’s Story. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1999. —. Dedication to Hunger: The Anorexic Aesthetic in Modern Culture. Berkeley: U of California P, 1996. Hawkins, Anne Hunsaker. Reconstructing Illness: Studies in Pathography. West Lafayette: Purdue UP, 1999. Heller, Joseph and Speed Vogel. No Laughing Matter. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004. Herndl, Diane Price. Invalid Women: Figuring Feminine Illness in American Fiction. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1993. Henke, Suzette A. Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women’s Life-Writing. New York: St. Martin’s, 2000. Hull, John M. Touching the Rock: An Experience of Blindness. New York: Vintage, 1992. Jamison, Kay Redfield. An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness. New York: Vintage, 1997. Kaysen, Susanna. Girl, Interrupted. New York: Vintage, 1994. Keller, Helen. The Story of My Life: The Restored Edition. New York: Modern Library New Ed, 2004. Kent, Allegra. Once a Dancer: An Autobiography. New York: St. Martin’s, 1997. Kettlewell, Caroline. Skin Game: A Memoir. New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 2007.

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Kisor, Henry. What’s that Pig Outdoors?: A Memoir of Deafness. New York: Hill and Wang, 1990. Kleinman, Arthur. The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, and the Human Condition. New York: Basic Books, 1989. Kriegel, Leonard. Falling into Life. San Francisco: North Point, 1991. Lorde, Audre. The Cancer Journals. Argyle, NY: Spinsters Ink, 1980. —. A Burst of Light. Ithaca: Firebrand Books, 1988. Mairs, Nancy. Waist-High in the World: A Life among the Non-Disabled. Boston: Beacon, 1996. —. Plain Text: Essays. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1992. Mattingly, Cheryl and Linda C. Garro, eds. Narrative and the Cultural Construction of Illness and Healing. Berkeley: U of California P, 2000. Mehta, Ved. Daddyji. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1972. —. Mamaji. New York: Oxford UP, 1979. —. Vedi. New York: Oxford UP, 1982. —. The Ledge between the Streams. New York: Norton, 1984. —. Sound Shadows of the New World. New York: Norton, 1986. —. The Stolen Light. New York: Norton, 1989. —. Up at Oxford. New York: Norton, 1993. —. Remembering Mr. Shawn's New Yorker. New Haven: Yale UP, 1998. —. All for Love. London: Granta Books, 2001. —. Dark Harbor. New York: Avalon, 2007. —. The Red Letters. New York: Thunder's Mouth/Nation Books, 2004. Merker, Hannah. Listening. New York: HarperCollins, 1974. Middlebrook, Christina. Seeing the Crab: A Memoir of Dying. New York: Anchor, 1997. Mintz, Susannah. Unruly Bodies: Life Writing by Women with Disabilities. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2007. Monette, Paul. Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1988. Morris, Jan. Conundrum. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1974. Murphy, Robert E. The Body Silent. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001. Olney, James. “Some Versions of Memory/Some Versions of Bios: The Ontology of Autobiography.” In Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney, 236-267. Princeton: Princteon UP, 1980. O'Rourke, William. On Having a Heart Attack: A Medical Memoir. South Bend: U of Notre Dame P, 2006. Patchett, Ann. Truth & Beauty: A Friendship. New York: HarperCollins, 2004.

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Pratt, Minnie Bruce. S/he. Ann Arbor, MI: Firebrand, 1995. Price, Reynolds. A Whole New Life: An Illness and a Healing. New York: Scribner’s, 2003. Puller, Lewis B. Jr. Fortunate Son: The Healing of a Vietnam Vet. New York: Grove, 2000. Punday, Daniel. Narrative Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Narratology. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Raz, Aaron Link and Hilda Raz. What Becomes You. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2008. Robison, John Elder. Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's. New York: Crown, 2007. Rolin, Betty. First, You Cry. New York: New American Library, 1996. Sacks, Oliver. A Leg to Stand On. New York: Perennial, 1987. —. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales. New York: Summit, 1985. Sanford, Matthew W. Waking: A Memoir of Trauma and Transcendence. New York: Rodale Books, 2006. Sechehaye, Marguerite. Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl: The True Story of "Renee." New York: Plume, 1994. Serotte, Brenda. The Fortune Teller’s Kiss. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2008. Shumaker, Peggy. Just Breathe Normally. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2008. Sidransky, Ruth. In Silence: Growing up Hearing in a Deaf World. New York: St. Martin’s, 1990. Smith, Sidonie. Subjectivity, Identity, and the Body: Women's Autobiographical Practices in the Twentieth Century. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993. Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson, eds. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2001. Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. New York: Picador, 2001. Spence, Jo. Putting Myself in the Picture: A Political, Personal, and Photographic Autobiography. Seattle: Real Comet P, 1988. Styron, William. Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness. New York: Vintage, 1992. Thomas, Lee. Turning White: A Memoir of Change. Troy, MI: Momentum Books, 2007. Thompson, Mark. Gay Body: A Journey through Shadow To Self. New York: St. Martin’s, 1997.

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Thomson, Rosemarie Garland. Extraordinary Bodies. New York: Columbia UP, 1996. Updike, John. Self-Consciousness: Memoirs. New York: Knopf, 1989. Vincent, Norah. Self-Made Man: One Woman's Journey into Manhood and Back. New York: Penguin, 2006. Walker, Lou Ann. A Loss for Words: The Story of Deafness in a Family. New York: Harper, 1986. Weimer, Joan. Back Talk: Teaching Lost Selves to Speak. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996. West, Paul. Words for a Deaf Daughter. New York: Harper, 1970. —. A Stroke of Genius: Illness and Self-Discovery. New York: Viking, 1995. Wexler, Alice. Mapping Fate: A Memoir of Family, Risk, and Genetic Research. New York: Random House, 1995. Williams, Donna. Nobody Nowhere: The Extraordinary Autobiography of an Autistic. New York: Avon, 1994. Wood, Mary Elene. The Writing on the Wall: Women’s Autobiography and the Asylum. Champaign: U of Illinois P, 1994.

Notes 1 Bodies: the Exhibition, produced by Premiere Exhibitions. http://www.bodiestheexhibition.com/ 2 Oliver Sacks, A Leg to Stand On (New York: Perennial, 1987), 46-7. 3 James Olney, “Some Versions of Memory/Some Versions of Bios: The Ontology of Autobiography,” in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney (Princeton: Princteon UP, 1980), 241. 4 Arthur W. Frank, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995), 1. 5 Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, eds, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2001). 37. 6 Frank, 3. 7 Christina Middlebrook. Seeing the Crab: A Memoir of Dying (New York: Anchor, 1997), 55-6. 8 Scholars from many disciplines have begun to produce significant work related to the topic, including Rosemarie Garland Thomson (Extraordinary Bodies), Susan Bordo (Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body), Anne Hunsaker (Reconstructing Illness), Arthur Kleinman (The Illness Narratives), Sander Gilman (Disease and Representation), Susan Sontag (Illness as Metaphor), Judith Butler (Bodies that Matter), Ross Chambers (Untimely Interventions), Leslie Haywood (Dedication to Hunger), Mary Elene Wood (The Writing on the Wall), Diane Price Herndl (Invalid Women), Lennard J. Davis (Enforcing

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Normalcy), Elizabeth Grosz (Volatile Bodies), Peter Brooks (Body Work), Suzette Henke (Shattered Subjects), Katie Conboy (Writing on the Body), Einat Avrahami (The Invading Body), Cheryl Mattingly (Narrative and the Cultural Construction of Illness and Healing), Daniel Punday (Narrative Bodies), and an updated version of the classic Our Bodies, Ourselves. 9 G. Thomas. Couser, “Paradigms' Cost: Representing Vulnerable Subjects,” Literature and Medicine 24.1 (2005): 19. 10 The “I Am Joe Series,” which originally appeared in the Reader’s Digest, is now availableon CD Rom. See http://www.pyramidmedia.com/series.php?title_id=1698 11 Terry Galloway, “I’m Listening as Hard as I Can,” in With Wings: An Anthology of Literature by and About Women with Disabilities, ed. Marsha Saxton and Florence Howe (New York: Feminist P, 1993): 8.

INTRODUCTION GENDER, RACE, AND DISABILITY: THE DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF THE BODY IN LIFE WRITING CHRISTOPHER STUART

In a scene from her 1970 novel, The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison describes a painfully shy little black girl attempting to buy some candy in a shop owned by a white, middle-aged Polish immigrant: She pulls off her shoe and takes out the three pennies. The gray head of Mr. Yacobowski looms up over the counter. He urges his eyes out of his thoughts to encounter her. Blue eyes. Blear-dropped. Slowly, like Indian summer moving imperceptibly toward fall, he looks toward her. Somewhere between retina and object, between vision and view, his eyes draw back, hesitate and hover. At some fixed point in time and space he senses that he need not waste the effort of a glance. He does not see her, because for him there is nothing to see. How can a fifty-two-year old white immigrant store-keeper with the taste of potatoes and beer in his mouth, his mind honed on the doe-eyed Virgin Mary, his sensibilities blunted by a permanent awareness of loss, see a little black girl? Nothing in his life even suggested the feat was possible, not to say desirable or necessary.1

This instance of a white man failing to see an actual black girl standing right in front of him is also an instance of reading. In this case, the white man reads Pecola’s body as a text, one that requires merely a glance to tell him all that he needs to know. He perceives that she’s black and small and a girl, which means he need read no further. For the rest, as a subject, she’s invisible. Where Ralph Ellison describes the plight of the invisible man in America, Morrison reminds us in her novel that there are also invisible little girls. Morrison’s Polish grocer both reads and fails to read Pecola’s body as text. As soon as he perceives her, he recognizes from her female, racialized body that she is nothing more than a present absence, a body of

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Introduction

marginal significance. Reading her body, he relegates her to the merely material, the merely bodily, something he does not have to engage as a subject any more than he would engage a squeaky hinge or any other material annoyance that disturbs his peace. Paradoxically, only words can save Pecola, restoring to her a presence the white male denies her. Through her analysis of the dynamic between white, Catholic, Polish man and black, shy, little girl, Morrison thus makes Pecola present to the reader in a way she cannot be present to the grocer. Where in reality (despite the fact that the scene itself is a fiction) Pecola’s very body makes her invisible, Morrison’s textual (re)construction of the moment restores her subjectivity and agency. Where the grocer is confronted by Pecola’s bodily presence but can only see through her, Morrison’s fabric of mere signs makes Pecola realer and more present to the reader than she ever can be to the grocer. This little scene is, of course, drawn from a work of fiction and not from an autobiography, but it nevertheless illustrates why the extratextual, the outside, “real,” material world of bodies and objects has in recent years become central for many critics to the analysis of autobiographical texts, despite the arguments of earlier deconstructive critics who argued that the remains of our own histories can never amount to more than the disfiguring residue of language. Groundbreaking, interdisciplinary works by critics such as Sidonie Smith, Leigh Gilmore, Paul John Eakin, and G. Thomas Couser have reminded us that, however language might disfigure the self, the body is itself an inescapable signifier, one which marginalized individuals like Pecola Breedlove can rarely forget or even briefly imagine out of existence, and which thus play a crucial role in their written accounts of themselves. Inspired by the work of these writers and others, my co-editor and I organized a panel on “Autobiography and the Body” at the 2007 Northeastern Modern Language Association convention in Philadelphia. Given the overwhelming number of abstracts we received for what was merely a regional conference panel, we decided to issue a call for essay contributions to a possible anthology on the subject. The result is a collection that brings together new work from established authorities and from emerging scholars focusing on life writing in English over the last century and a half and reflecting the thoroughly interdisciplinary nature of the current field of life writing studies.

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The Death of the Body and the Life of the Mind In his forward to the present volume, Timothy Dow Adams rightly suggests that “the human body has not always figured in an especially prominent way in life writing.” Indeed, we might go further and suggest that in Western culture the body has never figured so prominently in life writing and in the critical analysis of life writing as it has in the last twenty years and that this development has everything to do with a Polish Catholic grocer’s inability to see a young, black girl. The medieval Christian tradition, of course, privileged the life of the spirit over and above the life of the body so that in medieval painting saints were typically represented in two dimensions with one saint hardly distinguishable from another in terms of their physical appearance. So it was also in their life writing. For example, the lives of the saints of the Aurea Legenda compiled by Jacobus de Voragine (1275), does not in any real sense relate the lives of actual individuals. Rather, they are truly formulaic legends, a monotony of martyrdom and resurrection where the life recorded, the only life that matters and thus worth preserving, is the life of the saint’s soul. Neither, however, is Augustine’s much earlier and much more influential Confessions (387) an autobiography in any modern, conventional sense. Tellingly, Augustine addresses God Himself, so that his work is ultimately a prayer in which, as James J. O’Donnell puts it, “the autobiographical narrative that takes up part of the work is incidental content.”2 If the facts of Augustine’s own life are merely incidental, the story of his body is only more surely marginalized as the story of a struggle with sensuality and temptation. In short, O’Donnell explains, “God and the soul are all Augustine wants to know.”3 Appropriately, the climax of Augustine’s conversion narrative is an ecstatic moment experienced with his mother a short time before her death in which “the very highest sense of the carnal pleasures…seemed by reason of the sweetness of that [spiritual] life not only not worthy of comparison, but not even of mention.” At that moment, Augustine writes, “we did gradually pass through all corporeal things...came to our own minds...and went beyond them.”4 In the seventeenth century, the Early Modern philosopher René Descartes adjusted Augustine’s terms but not the essential dynamic of his dualist Christian concept of the self. For the rationalist Descartes, the true, essential self is the “mind” or “soul,” terms which he employs interchangeably and which Descartes seems to imagine as stable, finite, and thus knowable. This mind, he argues, is “a substance the whole essence or nature of which is simply to think, and which, in order to exist,

4

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has no need of any place nor depends on any material thing.”5 The mind as Descartes conceived it is “entirely distinct from the body and is even easier to know than the body, and even if there were no body at all, it would not cease to be all that it is” (19). To record the life of the body, then, would be to record the life of an inessential, and even less-knowable, appendage. Therefore, the life worth recording is the life of the mind, or in other words, the career, as Descartes’ own autobiographical Discourse on Method reminds us. There he describes in “Part Two” how the application of his native ability to reason led to his success at the Jesuit school at La Fleche and to his rejection of Scholasticism. He further relates how his search for truth led him to join the army in order to travel and see more of the world. Finally he arrived at his discovery of the “method for discovering the truth through the sciences” which famously came to him, he claimed, during an instance of doing nothing but thinking while he was detained in the isolation of a small “stove-heated room” (7). Descartes’s autobiography focuses, then, not on the life of his white, male, European body, which in fact, he does not so much as mention, but on the life of his mind and the development of his education. In the work of later English philosophers, the mind, which is not to say the brain, remains the privileged “organ,” as in the work of John Locke which famously constructs the body as merely the conduit for sensory impressions that are then imprinted and organized on the “tabula rasa” of the mind. Where the new philosophy and the new science retained the traditional Christian bias against the body as a mere vessel containing the essential self, the seventeenth-century Puritans of England and America were, of course, in some respects throwbacks to a medieval tradition of life writing that imagined the central story of the Christian life is the conversion narrative, the life of the Augustinian spirit on its road to Christian redemption. For the Puritans, as it was for Augustine, the body was precisely what the Christian pilgrim must overcome, and its primary value lay in its capacity for suffering which can lead the wayward spirit back to God. John Winthrop’s Christian Experience (1637) tells of Winthrop’s repeated attempts to overcome the “the flesh” and “to bid farewell to all the world” until his “heart could answer, Lord what wilt thou have mee to doe.”6 In his oft-anthologized “Personal Narrative,” the early 18th-century Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards focuses from the first sentence on “a variety of concerns and exercises about my soul, from my childhood” and proceeds to narrate how in his youth he engaged “to fight with all my might, against the world, the flesh and the devil, to the end of my life.”7 Implicitly equating “the flesh” with the “world” and the “devil,” Edwards typically characterizes the body as either the source of his “wicked

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inclinations,” or as the site of a redemptive suffering, as when “it pleased god...to seize me with a pleurisy; in which he brought me nigh to the grave, and shook me over the pit of hell.”8 Other eighteenth-century thinkers such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson more thoroughly embraced the implications of seventeenth-century philosophy, and their life writing implicitly accepted Descartes’ rationalist, dualistic model of the self, imagining that the recordable life was the life of the mind and that of the public career. From printer’s apprentice to diplomat and scientist, the story Franklin famously tells is that of the figureless public figure, the man as known not by his countenance or bodily presence but by his intellectual and entrepreneurial accomplishments. For women and people of color, such accomplishments were by law or convention forbidden. Defined as body in a world where the body was un-narratable, they had no life story to tell. And as we should expect, the history of Franklin’s physical self—his growth of girth into middle and old age, his illnesses and recoveries, the history of his domestic comforts and discomforts, his relationship with his wife, his well-known sexual promiscuities, and the children who would have reflected his physical self in their very faces and gestures—all receive nary a mention in the unfinished work that has come to be known as his Autobiography. In certain respects English and American Romantics can be read as reacting to the rationalist attitudes of those like Franklin or Jefferson; throwbacks to the 17th-century Puritans, Romantics such as William Wordsworth and Ralph Waldo Emerson sought to restore the spirit or soul to prominence above and beyond the rational mind. In doing so, however, they perpetuated the relegation of the body to the domain of the unnarratable. Life for them took place not in the body but in the spirit that animates it. Like Augustine, they described the heights of selfactualization as an ecstatic moment in which the body is put to sleep while the spirit remains awake, “that serene and blessed mood,” Wordsworth writes, when: ...even the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul; While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things.9

The “life of things” is not for Wordsworth to be found in the “things” themselves but in the pervasive spirit that unifies them. Echoing

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Introduction

Wordsworth’s terms, Emerson famously describes the ecstatic, transcendental moment as one in which, freed from the body and “all mean egotism,” he becomes “the transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the current of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God.”10 If nature and the body are celebrated in the Romantic view, they nevertheless remain what they were for the Puritans: that which must be overcome, set aside, or seen through in order to achieve the highest states of being, the greatest reality. In the autobiographical works of Henry Adams and Henry James at the turn of the next century, we find that the terms have turned back once again from an emphasis on the essential self as spirit to the self as mind, as consciousness, and thus as career. In their texts, the body remains as elusive, invisible and un-narrated as ever. In A Small Boy and Others (1913) and Notes of a Son and Brother (1914), the story James tells, as F. W. Dupee describes it, is that of “his discovery of a vocation for writing, a true ‘calling.’” As in his art, in which James strived to be “one of the people on whom nothing is lost,”11 so it is in his autobiographies that the adventures which most fascinate him are the inner adventures of his own human mind, the cerebral twists and turns of an individual striving to record the development of his own consciousness. Like the typical hero of his novels, James describes himself as one “in whom contemplation takes so much the place of action.”12 He had ever and always been, he reflects in A Small Boy and Others, one of “those whose faculty for application is all and only in their imagination and their sensibility.”13 Where James the artist describes himself as all imagination and sensibility, his gloomier friend and peer Henry Adams imagines himself as all intellect, but a drifting and lifeless one at that. The Education of Henry Adams delivers precisely what the title promises, focusing narrowly on the history of Adams’ intellectual development throughout his career, as he rises from a childhood at the feet of his grandfather the former president John Adams, to becoming his father’s secretary in London during the Civil War, to his appointment teaching history at Harvard, and beyond. Expressing his utter alienation not only from his body but from his own life and times, Adams describes himself in his preface as a mere “manikin” who “must be treated as though it had life.”14 Since a manikin can hardly be expected to write his life story, Adams writes about his “manikin self” exclusively in the third person, imagining his narrator as the “tailor” who “adapts the manikin as well as the clothes to his patrons’ wants” (xxiv). In this, Adams’s manikin life, the central tragedy is not the suicide of his beloved wife, as one familiar with his biography might expect. Rather, it is the tragedy of the intellectual who feels he has been bypassed by history and

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by Western Civilization itself as it devolves into the chaos and infinity presaged by the modern reverence for the pure, amoral “force” of the dynamo. By the end of his story Adams characterizes himself as “the weary pilgrim” led “into such mountains of ignorance that he could no longer see any paths whatever, and could not even understand a signpost,” a pilgrim who “knew no tragedy so heartrending as introspection” (432433). If the white, male literary canon of autobiography in the West seems to make bodies disappear or turn into manikins by virtue of its narrow focus on the life of the spirit or the mind as self, Paul de Man’s landmark 1978 essay “Autobiography as De-facement,” performs an even more stunning act of prestidigitation in which the entire self, not to mention all of history, disappears behind a disfiguring veil of language and in which even death is no more than “a displaced name for a linguistic predicament.”15 According to de Man, autobiography amounts to nothing more substantive than “prosopopeia,” (930) a mask constructed in the absence of an actual face. Autobiography, whatever its ostensible focus, is always, de Man argues, “privative” (930) or “lack inducing” in that as a linguistic construction it inevitably points to the vacuum between the signs of which language is constructed, thus obscuring any actual personal or historical past whether of the mind or the body. With this sweeping pronouncement all of history, and thus all of the material world as it relates to autobiography, including bodies, appears to recede entirely into irretrievability, and thus invisibility. All that is left are signs, signs which point only to other signs and never to the things or bodies they ostensibly represent. Thus, the argument goes, autobiography only constructs a phantom reality, and thus a phantom self, one that never actually existed in life.

The Resurrection of the Body While de Man’s deconstructive critique and his concept of prosopopeia seemed at first devastating in their logic and sweep to those critics who continued to study autobiography, his arguments were eventually embraced and complicated, especially by those critics who sought to expand the canon of autobiography beyond the white male “masterworks” by examining the genre from gendered and raced perspectives. Although the historical, material world outside the text including the bodies that we inhabit (or are) seem to disappear entirely in the work of de Man, critics of autobiography employed the logic of deconstruction in order to liberate the bodies that had previously been oppressed or obscured in autobiography.

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Introduction

These critics demonstrated through de Man’s own logic that the disembodied self at the center of Western autobiographical masterworks depends for its centrality precisely on those bodies—gendered, racialized, disabled and disfigured bodies—that canonical autobiography had always relegated to the margins. If prosopopeia was the figure for the autobiographical act, then the white, male, “disembodied” self of Franklin or Adams, was itself merely a mask for an absence, was itself “privative,” and if the rest of the historical and material world disappears behind opacity of words, so also do the bodiless consciousnesses so often encountered in classic, Western autobiographies. Furthermore, recent critics remind us, the figure of prosopopeia implies a textual power that de Man never adequately acknowledges, for while he insists on the privative nature of autobiography, he understates its simultaneous restorative capacity: for women, for people of color, for the disfigured and the disabled, the linguistically constructed self may be their only recourse for restoring a sense of self and agency otherwise systematically and institutionally denied in their own life and times. I began this introduction with a consideration of Morrison’s Pecola Breedlove and the inability of a Catholic, Polish grocer to see her because the scene illustrates the dynamic at the heart of contemporary considerations of autobiography and the body; as many a philosopher has pointed out, the body is that intimate thing which both is and is not oneself, and we read the bodies of others as we do any other signs. In turn, others inevitably “read” us, and to that extent our material selves figure and disfigure both what is not there and what is. According to de Man, “prosopopeia is the trope of autobiography, by which one’s name becomes...as intelligible and memorable as one’s face,” but, as the scene of Pecola and the Polish grocer reminds us, within the social and political contexts in which we inevitably lead our lives not all faces and bodies are equally memorable or intelligible. Our faces, our skin color, and our body types themselves amount to masks, masks sometimes interpreted as absences that obscure the actual agents and subjectivities that inhabit them. At such moments, the only way to restore to the Pecola’s of history a sense of self and agency is through language. However inadequate, limited, and “disfiguring” such linguistic acts may be, they may also offer the only opportunity available to the autobiographer to express the experience of having been overlooked, looked through, or silenced due to the specific facts of his or her bodily existence within a political context. If autobiographers and critics have only recently restored the body to a central place in the study of autobiography, that resurrection has its roots in nascent political movements of the nineteenth century. In her recent

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study of the body’s significance to the 19th-century feminist and abolitionist movements, Karen Sanchez-Eppler argues that the pervasive acceptance of the Cartesian model of the self as essentially bodiless has had wide political implications that include, but extend far beyond, the traditions of autobiography: “The relation of the social and political structures of the ‘body politic’ to the fleshy specificity of embodied identities has generally been masked behind the constitutional language of abstracted and implicitly bodiless ‘persons.’”16 Sanchez-Eppler goes on to argue that nevertheless “the development of a political discourse and a concept of personhood that attests to the centrality of the body erupts throughout ante-bellum culture.”17 Catalyzed by the rise of a scientific naturalism that seemed to do away with the need for a God to explain creation and which re-imagined Descartes’s “mind’ as merely the ephemeral product of neural processes, such linguistic “eruptions” led to the more profound and pervasive tectonic political shifts of the twentieth century, so that the “fleshy specificity of embodied identities” have now become indispensible not only to our political rhetoric but to our conceptions of the self. In light of this history, it is not surprising that those most responsible for restoring the body to visibility in autobiography and autobiography studies are those—women, people of color, the disfigured and the disabled—who historically have been identified with their bodies and who were thus relegated to silence and invisibility in the context of a paradigm that privileged the disembodied mind. Feminist scholars of autobiography especially have been responsible for helping us to re-imagine the self as thoroughly embodied. They argue that for the white, Anglo-European male from Descartes to Adams the body no doubt seemed more escapable in part because his privileged position made him less consistently aware of its fetters on the mind or soul. As Judith Butler puts it “By defining women as ‘Other’ men are able through the shortcut of definition to dispose of their bodies, to make themselves other than their bodies.... From this belief that the body is Other, it is not a far leap to the conclusion that others are their bodies.”18 In her groundbreaking study of women’s autobiography, Sidonie Smith likewise argues that historically being a female subject has meant being relegated to mere anatomy. “If the topography of the universal subject locates man’s selfhood somewhere between his ears,” she writes, “it locates woman’s selfhood between her thighs.”19 Building on Smith’s work, Leigh Gilmore reminds us, however, that bodies, too, can know things, so that to re-imagine all selves as embodied means not only raising women from the pelvic region but also acknowledging what our bodies know and can tell us about who we are:

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Introduction

“Until feminist criticism,” she argues, “predominant ways of knowing defined the body’s knowledge as that which is unknowable. The self has functioned as a metaphor for soul, consciousness, intellect and imagination, but never for body.”20 Thus, the resurrection of the body in the study of women’s autobiography means both re-defining the female self as something more than mere body but it can also mean celebrating that body and discovering what our bodies have to tell us about ourselves—or what they have tried to tell us about ourselves while a patriarchal society was not listening. Gender and race criticism has always, of course, been linked by their pre-occupation with the figure of the body, so that ethnic writers and race critics have naturally also played a crucial role in elucidating the relationship of the body to the self as constructed in autobiographical texts. It has been almost twenty years since William L. Andrews argued that “autobiography holds a position of priority, many would say preeminence, among the narrative traditions of black America.”21 With its roots in the slave narrative, black corporeality has long been the trouble at the heart of black autobiography. Encouraged by white abolitionists to tell their stories for themselves, slave narratives such as that of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs can be read as precisely an attempt to surmount the interpretation of their bodies by their white readers, to demonstrate to a skeptical white audience, their intelligence, their powerful imaginations, in short, their agency, or what Barbara Rodriguez refers to as “personhood.”22 Asian-Americans and Native Americans have likewise produced their own substantial bodies of autobiographical texts and scholarship, and for them, too, the body has been a vexing and inescapable problem. In recent years studies of autobiography and race have become increasingly subtle, complex, comparative, and multi-racial. Writing on autobiography studies and race in 2001, Francoise Lionnet asserts with a striking optimism that “Overall, Americans are better at getting along than almost anywhere else in the world right now,” although she acknowledges that “the naturalization of skin color as a ‘fact’ of identity...continue[s] to dominate in our public spheres and to enforce the ruling ideology that positions each of us as an invisible ‘white’ citizen or as a visible and racially marked Other.”23 Lionnet praises, for example, Autobiographical Inscriptions (1999), Barbara Rodriguez’s study of autobiographies by the “American woman writer of color,” which reminds us that if writers such as Zora Neale Hurston and Maxine Hong Kingston can do no more than resort to prosopopeia, their work nevertheless “offers a revelation at the same that it offers a cover up,” that it simultaneously “narrates and masks the self” (202). Lionnet suggests that such studies as Rodriguez’s are

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headed in a fruitful direction, one “more comparative, truer to the ‘real’ experiences of many people today, and welcoming of theoretical paradigms that continue to yield fresh perspectives about subjectivity and corporeality ...” (390). While feminists and race critics have played a leading role in restoring the body to visibility in life writing, G. Thomas Couser points out in his influential contribution to the criticism of disability narratives, Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability, and Life Writing (1997) the irony that “few have studied the most widespread form of marginalization—illness and disability,”24 a kind “of marginalization to which we are all vulnerable” (4). Like women or people of color, the chronically ill, the disabled, and the disfigured have until lately been relegated to the invisible in autobiography because of the way in which they seemed exceptionally embodied. In 1997 Couser noted that the study of disability and illness narratives was young but “maturing quickly” (7), and it now consists of a strikingly large body of work. Cutting as it does across gender and racial lines,25 the life writing of the ill and the disabled, including especially the mentally disabled, brings to the fore the contradictions and paradoxes that vex poststructuralist attempts to describe the self in ways that undermine the traditional, Cartesian mind/body dualism. As Susannah B. Mintz points out in Unruly Bodies: Life Writing by Women with Disabilities (2006), the relatively recent feminist concern with the body in autobiography intersects in enriching if conflicted ways with the even newer and fastergrowing field of life writing and disability: A disability perspective contests feminism’s dismantling of the institutions of marriage and maternity on the grounds that this enterprise ignores the kinds of stereotypes disabled women confront—that they are asexual and unfit for motherhood, for example, ...and that the struggle for women with disabilities may thus be entrance into such relationships rather than freedom from them....Though women’s autobiography presents a significant challenge to the entanglement of narrative convention with patriarchal and/or racist cultural ideology when it puts embodiment at the forefront of the story of life development, that strategy often coincides with assumptions of an ableist society. Despite their ideological and textual defiance, texts by women may uncritically idealize an able—if also ‘othered’—body...in short, an independent body, able to control and care for itself.26

Where some feminist life writing seeks to escape from a patriarchal culture that limits them to being wives and mothers, another narrative strategy consists of celebrating the female body, transforming the prison into the site of liberation by valorizing the female body’s unique beauty,

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Introduction

strengths, and reproductive capacities. As Mintz makes clear, however both narrative strategies are problematic for disabled women, some of whom seek in their narratives precisely to overcome the sense of having been disqualified for marriage and motherhood, while others endeavor to remind us that the “normal” female body that some feminists celebrate is itself a cultural and ideological construction and not a biological or natural fact. Disabled men, of course, face many of the same problems of disabled women in their seeming invisibility to the dominant culture, and like the writing of disabled women, their narratives are also troubled and complicated by the intersection of gender issues, a subject which Elizabeth Grubgeld analyses more thoroughly in her contribution to the present volume than space permits here. The contributions of Couser and Mintz in the present volume represent what might be another cutting edge in autobiography studies, focusing as they do on mental disability. Narratives of the mentally disabled remind us that we are our bodies not only to the extent that our skin color, height, weight, etc. are read by others in social contexts but by virtue of the fact that our brains are also body, meaning that, perhaps to a disturbing extent, our conscious selves are determined by biological and inevitable processes. Seemingly always at the forefront of autobiography studies, Paul John Eakin has taken up this thread in two recent works. In How Our Lives Become Stories, Eakin writes that “The link between the neurobiologist’s concern [with how we experience] seeing a cat and the cultural theorist’s account of the individual’s relation to the world is precisely the interface between the organism and the environment.”27 Quoting the neurologist Gerald M. Edelman, Eakin writes that “Only with the development of higher consciousness comes awareness of awareness together with the concept of a center of awareness and intentions, ‘a socially constructed self.’”28 Most recently in Living Autobiographically (2008) Eakin concludes that “In the light of research in developmental psychology and neurobiology” there is “good reason to pursue the origins of self before and beneath language, for work in these fields teaches us that self is plural, and that some modes of self-experience are prelinguistic.”29 In this, however, Eakin admits that he can do no more than speculate since “the basis of neurobiological theory is itself already necessarily speculative.”30 Just how one’s higher consciousness emerges organically remains a mystery, and few besides Eakin have yet considered how our biology shapes the stories we tell about ourselves.

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New Essays As Adams’ “Foreword” to this volume attests, the re-imagining of the self over the last two centuries has resulted in a recent explosion of autobiographies and in the rapid emergence of a field of scholarship predicated upon the idea that the body—the female body, the male body, the black, white or Asian body, the fat body, the skinny body, the diseased or disabled body—has become a central and inescapable part of the story of the self as told in traditional and contemporary autobiography. As I have tried to suggest above, the emergence of this scholarship has been contingent upon vast historical and political trends that have determined its shape and scope, trends which we have attempted to reflect in our organization of this collection of new and wide-ranging essays. Nevertheless, we recognize the contingency of the categories into which we have organized these essays, and we know that however we might have tried to arrange them, no scholarly category is impermeable. However we arranged them, one category will inevitably bleed into another, as an essay on the gendered self might well have everything to do with the racialized self, just as Pecola’s invisibility as a black American cannot be entirely separated from her femaleness. The first grouping of essays, “The Body and the Literary Life,” is at once more historically specific than the title lets on and perhaps the most idiosyncratic of the sections in this collection. It so happened that a number of scholars proposed to us essays focusing on the autobiographies of Modernist women writers. These essays seemed to group themselves more narrowly, all of them centering as they do on women who were white and who were from more or less the same generation. Furthermore, it seemed to us, that the essays might be best grouped separately because, unlike most of the autobiographers considered in this collection, each of these writers consciously identified herself as a literary artist by the time she began her autobiography. Thus, their works might be expected to reflect a preoccupation with the literary medium itself, a preoccupation that might demand, or at least repay, a special kind of attention from the literary critic. As Mary Marchand shows in her essay, “Values Made Flesh: Edith Wharton and the Body Aesthetic,” Wharton did indeed identify herself as a member of a literary and artistic elite in her autobiographies, “A Backward Glance” and “Life and I.” Wharton imagined her body from the time of her childhood as having a peculiarly visceral sensitivity to beauty and, especially, to ugliness. Marchand contextualizes Wharton’s claim within William James’s unusual theory that human emotion has a physical basis. The art connoisseurs Bernard

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Berenson and Vernon Lee, both close friends of Wharton, applied James’s theory so that, as Marchand explains it, “the [art] work’s success is gauged by how it alters and enhances the body,” thus refocusing the success or failure of the work of art on the bodily experience of the viewer. One must not only produce great art, then, one must also have the sensitive body to feel it. Wharton’s autobiography reflects this “corporeal turn in aesthetics” by emphasizing her innate sensitivity to beauty, a bodily sensitivity that allows her to imagine an “an aristocracy of the finer senses,” one that appears truly natural and which thus obscures the relation of aesthetic principles to the arbitrary circumstances of social class. Where Wharton’s body represents a site of elite power, Nora Sellei argues that Virginia Woolf’s unfinished late autobiography, “A Sketch of the Past,” can only construct a female body that emerges in the gaps of the text after being “fragmented, violated, and long repressed.” Employing a poststructuralist, Continental framework Sellei describes Woolf’s text as an escape attempt from the “iron maiden” of the matrix of Victorian discourses about the female body, an attempt that only marginally succeeds and which Woolf ultimately abandoned. More optimistically, Jill Pruett analyzes Gertrude Stein’s late, stylistically eccentric autobiography, Wars I Have Seen, revealing how Stein manipulated her public image as a large woman to advance her career and fame while living in Paris during the Nazi occupation, precisely the time when large, “masculine,” Jewish women were the most conspicuous and in the greatest danger. According to Pruett, Stein’s late work depicts a “body actively navigating a troubled relationship to a larger world” which ultimately succeeds in finding “comfort, safety, and logic in a world overcome by danger and irrationality.” In “The Body and Women’s Life Writing” we have placed essays on autobiographical texts written by women who did not necessarily conceive of themselves as literary figures and which represent a wider historical range. In “They Weren’t What They Ate” Timothy Dow Adams considers contemporary memoirs culled from the recent growth in works about the relationship of people to food. Analyzing Never Eat Your Heart Out and Fat Girl by Judith Moore and Food and Loathing by Betsy Lerner, Adams explores how for many women a vexed relationship with food has become central to the experience of having a female body. Where Lerner chronicles her discovery that “mood and food” are inextricable, that her struggle with starvation and binge eating is profoundly connected to her bi-polar disorder, Moore attempts to escape the narrative conventions of “a self-help book, a diet book, or a story of redemption,” and simply express what it feels like to be fat while not denying the aesthetic pleasures of

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food. In striking contrast to Adams’s analysis of works by women who struggled their entire lives against unrealistic images of the ideal female body, Tracy J.R. Collins surveys more than seventy never-before-studied “New Woman” autobiographies of the late-Victorian period, discovering in the process the centrality of the fit and athletic body to the New Woman’s identity. Focusing on four representative texts, she argues that for these women the fit female body was not an oppressive or unachievable model but the foundation of their self-confidence and authority. Re-affirming the narrative “I” as the “textual double of a real person,” Collins argues that these autobiographies demonstrate that the “physically fit and athletic New Woman was ...fully advertised as a powerful possibility for her time.” Furthermore, Collins contends, her study further contributes to the demise of the dualist notion of self as mind and body, which, she argues, even the work of recent gender theorists such as Luce Irigray and Judith Butler perpetuates. Where Collins brings our attention to a heretofore undiscovered subgenre of women’s autobiography, Cynthia Huff analyzes the diaries of what can only have been an entirely unique Victorian couple: the scullery maid Hannah Cullwick and her gentleman master, and eventual husband, Arthur J. Munby. Their singular relationship seemingly transgresses all of the usual boundaries of race, class and gender, as Munby commanded her to keep a diary for his perusal and posed her for photographs variously as a gentlewoman, in blackface, as Munby’s valet, and even while licking Munby’s boots. In her analysis, Huff expands on previous interpretations of the diaries by “privilege[ing] the diary as a textual body implicated in the production of meanings within a gendered, racialized, and class bound Victorian context.” In composing a textual “body,” Huff shows, Cullwick re-imagined her own body as well as her part in the body of the Victorian family and the Victorian society at large. The next group of essays, “Adopted Selves: Life Writing and The Family/Ethnic Body” may, like the first group of essays, seem at first rather arbitrary in its arrangement. In fact, this grouping emerged out of an error. Initially, we labored under the mistaken impression that Emily Hipchen’s proposed essay “Images of the Family Body in Adoption Search Narratives,” would focus on international, and thus inter-racial, adoption narratives. It seemed appropriate, then, to place her essay in our section devoted to autobiography and the racialized or ethnic body. In fact, however, a central point in Hipchen’s essay was that the complexities of intra-racial adoption memoirs need to be re-examined and that this study of “inconspicuous adoptions” clarifies “the subtle ways we manipulate the intersections of body and family in all our thinking about the way we

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make families.” Hipchen’s study of intraracial adoptee search memoirs by Florence Fisher, Debra Levy Holtz, and Betty Jean Lifton, reveals a pervasive bias privileging biological origins over relational ones as the solution to our profound, perhaps even universal, desire to know where we have “come from” and to rediscover a sense of “wholeness.” In their attempt to “go back” and reconstruct their original biological families, adoptees also construct those “original” families so that “the biological family and the adoptive family are equally ‘real.’” In this, Hipchen implicates the way we imagine ourselves as members of larger, racial families of biological origins, origins that are as much fiction as they are real, and the profound difficulty of giving up the notion “that blood makes kinship.” Hipchen’s concept of adoption as a metaphor for the way we imagine ourselves belonging to larger biological and culturally constructed families, which are inevitably as fictional as they are real, thus serves as Part III’s overall principle of inclusion. In “Intimacy, Erasure, and the Other: Frank Hamilton Cushing’s Disappearing Body,” Caroline C. Nichols analyzes the paradoxes involved in a late-nineteenth century white anthropologist’s autobiographical accounts of his uncomfortable assimilation into the Zuni Indian tribe. According to Nichols, Cushing’s narration of his Zuni “adoption” in the pages of the Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine reveals a writer “Keenly aware of his precarious position straddling the border between white and native, civilized and savage, sensation and scandal,” one who struggled to defend “his unconventional research method as a serious scientific.” What Nichols’ refers to as Cushing’s “Zunification” was reflected increasingly in his “spectacularized” body which was nourished on a Zuni diet, refreshed by Zuni sleeping habits, adorned by Zuni clothes, and literally pierced as he evolved into Tenatsali, nurse to the Zuni sick. This bodily transformation, writes Nichols, was ultimately “unnarratable,” as Cushing’s text ultimately obscures his exotic body behind the language of the detached, disembodied, civilized ethnographer. Addressing a similarly complex trans-cultural adoption, Katrina Powell examines Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s Among the Moon-White Faces, in which Lim recounts her journey from a Chinese-Malaysian girlhood to an Asian-American adulthood. Powell demonstrates how for Lim the memoir is a “fusing” of “body and memory,” in which “the recognition of memories as corporeal is crucial to their telling.” As Powell points out, for example, Lim can never entirely separate her love of English and English Literature from the “warm physical affection” she receives from a nun at the start of her colonial education. The body, however, is the source of pain as well as pleasure

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and Powell shows how Lim’s adoption by and of Anglo culture always remains uneasy; if it frees her from the misogynist strictures of traditional Malaysian culture, it nevertheless means that her brown body will be an alien among whites. The only home she can create for herself, Powell suggests, is within her text. Part IV of our anthology seemed to us obviated by the recent history of Life Writing Studies and the rapid growth of disability disfigurement narratives as an important subgenre of autobiography. In her meditation on “Refiguring the Masculine Body in the Autobiographies of Disabled American Men,” Elizabeth Grubgeld examines six texts by men who were once enjoyed fully “abled” bodies but who have, through disease or injury, since suffered mobility impairments. Perhaps surprisingly, Grubgeld concludes that their success in reconstituting a sense of masculinity depends less on “sexual function, earning power,” or “athletic prowess” than on a strikingly wide variety of strategies adopted in order to reconcile “embodiment with ethos.” She shows that while Reynolds Price maintains a sense of authority and masculine integrity despite his paralysis by remaining focused on his artistic and scholarly achievements, the wheelchair-bound, globe-trotting reporter, John Hockenberry constructs his disability as a constant affront to which he continually responds with defiant declarations of independence. Similarly, Grubgeld discovers that where one disabled veteran imagines military notions of masculinity as precisely the ideas he must deconstruct in order to accept his impairment, another fortifies himself by imagining the accident that left him in a wheelchair as the culmination of the “moral impulse to take action in service to others” which his stint in the Marines long ago taught him to revere. If physical disability strikes at the foundations of our notions of masculinity, Stephanie Todd’s analysis of Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face, shows how for a woman in a culture obsessed with feminine beauty, disfigurement can require psychical adjustments which are just as profound. According to Todd, Grealy’s title announces her attempt to create a new subgenre of autobiography: the autobiography of the body as separate from the self. Grealy, Todd argues, cannot accept her disfigured face as a part of her identity and so attempts to tell its story as separate from her own. Todd contends, however, that in this project Grealy ultimately fails so that her text remains a testament to the fact that our bodies are indissolubly ourselves, however much they may seem alien and counter-productive to the better, more perfect selves we struggle to create. We initially grouped the last two chapters of our anthology separately under the title, “The Mind as Brain as Body: Life Writing on the Mentally

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Disabled.” That title reflected our original hope of including essays that would point the reader to what may be a future focus in Life Writing Studies: the further exploration of the brain as the material, and thus bodily, basis of human consciousness. We had imagined that contributors to the volume might take up Paul John Eakins’ lead and further explore the chemical and perhaps evolutionary building blocks and their relation to consciousness and life narratives. Ultimately, however, we decided to group G. Thomas Couser and Susannah B. Mintz’s essays with other contributors on disability and disease. If their work does not exactly explore the territory surveyed by Eakin, it nevertheless reminds us of the fundamentally material basis of our conscious selves, while also bringing to our attention an emerging subgenre of autobiography: the narratives that relate the experience of living with those who are too mentally incapacitate to write for themselves. Like legs and jaw bones, brains can be broken, diseased and disfigured, but brain injuries and diseases frequently leave their victims unable to tell their own story. In “Memoir and (Lack of) Memory: Filial Narrative of Parental Dementia,” Couser examines the three most literary and “visible” of these narratives, revealing the way in which the adult child inevitably responds to the parent’s dementia as an absence which s/he attempts to reconstitute through narrative, “conjuring” the ghost of the parent’s past self in the hope of making meaning out of the experience. As Couser puts it, however much these works may seem focused on the parent, they inevitably “are largely a function of the emotional needs of the adult child.” According to Couser, only one, Sue Miller’s The Story of My Father: A Memoir, truly attempts imagining the experience from the patient’s perspective, reflecting as she does her realization that if her father seems increasingly alien to her, her new role as caregiver rather than daughter must also compound his own disorientation. And finally in “Side By Side: Lifewriters on Disabled Siblings” Susannah B. Mintz investigates the balancing acts performed by writers who attempt to narrate simultaneously their own lives and the lives of their mentally disabled siblings. Mintz focuses particularly on three texts that distinguish themselves “from others in the subgenre of sibling disability memoir” through their achievement of treading “that delicate line between co-opting their siblings’ ownership of life experiences and asserting their siblings’ personhood even in the absence of self-authoring.” If there is one thing I have learned in editing this volume, it is that the field of Life Writing Studies is as vast as the self and that within life writing the body remains an only partially mapped continent. Thus, this

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volume cannot hope to be comprehensive but only, Walt Whitman-like, to point readers toward their own further explorations.

Works Cited Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams. Andrews, William L. “Introduction: Special Issue on African American 20th-Century Autobiography.” Black American Literature Forum. 24 (1990):197-201. Augustine. The Confessions of St. Augustine. Trans. J.G. Pilkington. Cleveland: Fine Editions Press, 1960. Butler, Judith. “Variations on Sex and Gender: Beauvoir, Wittig, and Foucault.” In Feminism as Critique: On the Politics of Gender. Ed. Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P. 1987. Couser, G. Thomas. Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability, and Life Writing. Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin P. 1997. De Man, Paul. “Autobiography as De-facement.” MLN. 94 (1979): 919930. Descartes, René. Discourse on Method. 1636. Trans. Donald A. Cress. New York: Hackett. 1998. Dupee, Frederick Wilcox, ed. Henry James: Autobiography. New York: Criterion Books, 1956. Dupee, Frederick Wilcox. “Introduction.” In Henry James: Autobiography. New York: Criterion Books, 1956. Eakin, Paul John. How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves. Ithaca: Cornell UP. 1999. —. Living Autobiographically: How we Create Identity in Narrative. Ithaca: Cornell UP. 2008. Edwards, Jonathan. “Personal Narrative.” In A Jonathan Edwards Reader. Eds. John E. Smith, Harry S. Stout, and Kenneth P. Minkeman. New Haven: Yale UP, 2003. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Nature.” In Selected Essays. New York: Penguin, 1984. Gilmore, Leigh. Autobiographies: A Feminist Theory of Women’s SelfRepresentation. Ithaca: Cornell UP. 1994. Lionnet, Françoise. “A Politics of the ‘We’? Autobiography, Race, and Nation.” American Literary History. 13 (2001): 376-392. Mintz, Susannah B. Unruly Bodies: Life Writing by Women with Disabilities. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P. 2007. Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. 1970. New York: A.A. Knopf. 1994.

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O’Donnell, James J. Augustine. Boston: Twayne Publishers. 1985. Rodriguez, Barbara. Autobiographical Inscriptions: Form, Personhood, and the American Woman Writer of Color. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. Sanchez-Eppler, Karen. Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism, and the Politics of the Body. Berkeley: U of California P. 1993. Smith, Sidonie. Subjectivity, Identity, and the Body: Women’s Autobiographical Practices in the Twentieth Century. Bloomington: Indiana UP. 1993. Winthrop, John. John Winthrop’s Christian Experience. In The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Vol I. 3rd ed. Ed. Paul Lauter. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. Wordsworth, William. “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey.” In The Norton Anthology of English Literature Vol. II. 4th ed. Eds. M.H. Abrams, E. Talbot Donaldson. New York: W.W. Norton, 1979.

Notes 1

Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye, 1970 (New York: A.A. Knopf. 1994), 48. James J. O’Donnell, Augustine (Boston: Twayne Publishers. 1985), 83. 3 Ibid, 84. 4 Augustine. The Confessions of St. Augustine. Trans. J.G. Pilkington (Cleveland: Fine Editions Press, 1960), IX, X, 24. 5 René Descartes, Discourse on Method, 1636, trans. Donald A. Cress (New York: Hackett. 1998), 19. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 6 John Winthrop, John Winthrop’s Christian Experience, in The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Vol I. 3rd ed. ed. Paul Lauter (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998). 7 Jonathan Edwards, “Personal Narrative,” in A Jonathan Edwards Reader eds. John E. Smith, Harry S. Stout, and Kenneth P. Minkeman (New Haven: Yale UP, 2003), 281, 288. 8 Ibid, 282. 9 William Wordsworth, “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,” in The Norton Anthology of English Literature Vol. II. 4th ed. eds. M.H. Abrams, E. Talbot Donaldson (New York: W.W. Norton, 1979), 156, Lines 40, 44-49. 10 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature,” in Selected Essays (New York: Penguin, 1984), 39. 11 Frederick Wilcox Dupee, “Introduction,” in Henry James: Autobiography (New York: Criterion Books, 1956), 85. 12 Frederick Wilcox Dupree, ed., Henry James: Autobiography (New York: Criterion Books, 1956), xii. 13 Dupree, 8. 2

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21

Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams. xxiv. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 15 Paul De Man, “Autobiography as De-facement,” MLN 94 (1979), 930. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 16 Karen Sanchey-Eppler, Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism, and the Politics of the Body (Berekely: U of California P. 1993), 1. 17 Ibid, 2. 18 Judith Butler, “Variations on Sex and Gender: Beauvoir, Wittig, and Foucault,” in Feminism as Critique: On the Politics of Gender ed. Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P. 1987), 133. 19 Sidonie Smith, Subjectivity, Identity, and the Body: Women’s Autobiographical Practices in the Twentieth Century (Bloomington: Indiana UP. 1993), 12. 20 Leigh Gilmore, Autobiographies: a Feminist Theory of Women’s SelfRepresentation (Ithaca: Cornell UP. 1994), 83-4. 21 William L. Andrews, “Introduction: Special Issue on African American 20thCentury Autobiography.” Black American Literature Forum 24 (1990), 197. 22 Barbara Rodriguez, Autobiographical Inscriptions: Form, Personhood, and the American Woman Writer of Color (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999), 3. 23 Françoise Lionnet, “A Politics of the ‘We’? Autobiography, Race, and Nation,” American Literary History 13 (2001), 378. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 24 G. Thomas Couser, Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability, and Life Writing (Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin P. 1997), 13. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 25 I mean to suggest that in its theory disability studies intersect with the theory of feminism, race, and post colonialism in rich and contradictory ways, and not that authors of disability narratives come from all walks of life. In that regard, it is still largely as Couser noted in 1997 that “those who produce narratives of illness and disability are not diverse in terms of race and class. They tend to be white and upper middle class. Before they became ill or impaired, many were already professional writers” (4). 26 Susannah B. Mintz, Unruly Bodies: Life Writing by Women with Disabilities (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P. 2007), 5-6, 7. 27 Paul John Eakin, How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves. (Ithaca: Cornell UP. 1999), 15. 28 Ibid, 16. 29 Paul John Eakin, Living Autobiographically: How we Create Identity in Narrative (Ithaca: Cornell UP. 2008), 66. 30 Ibid, 68.

PART I: THE BODY IN THE LITERARY LIFE

VALUES MADE FLESH: EDITH WHARTON AND THE BODY AESTHETIC MARY V. MARCHAND

In both A Backward Glance and Life and I, Edith Wharton describes at length a “secret sensitiveness” that as a child left her “tremblingly and inarticulately awake to every detail.”1 This precociousness showed itself in an acutely visceral response to beauty, but especially to ugliness, and some of her earliest memories involve “suffering from ugliness”2 when she was only three or four. Throughout the autobiographies, she attributes the disquieting mixture of hatred and fear aroused in her by ugly things to an innate capacity distinct from the tastes imparted by her family and class. I want to suggest that Wharton’s conception of her own aesthetic body was informed by William James’s provocative theory of the physical basis of emotion, as well as theories advanced by the art connoisseurs Bernard Berenson and Vernon Lee. Both Berenson and Lee were close friends of Wharton, and both in turn were influenced by James’s theory.3 In their various accounts, aesthetics becomes something experienced through and by the body; art changes humans by touching and modifying the body. Wharton’s autobiographies, however, reveal how the aesthetic body develops in conjunction with social forces. With her own childhood body as a point of reference, Wharton posits a natural aristocracy whose apparent superiority proceeds from an innate disposition. But the very experiences that Wharton treats as evincing a naturally distinguished nature tell a different story. They offer a rare and illuminating glimpse of how the body comes to bear the imprint of social class. Thus, Wharton’s understanding of her own body belongs both to the world of latenineteenth-century aesthetics and contemporary accounts of the body as a form of physical capital.4 The link between the body and feelings rests at the core of a controversial theory of aesthetics that emerged at turn of the century. It drew its inspiration from William James’s provocative hypothesis regarding the physical basis of emotion, which challenges our intuitive grasp of emotions as first and foremost mental events. James’s well-

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known formulation in Principles of Psychology (1890) turns our conviction regarding the causal order of events—we cry because we’re sad—on its head: “The more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike.”5 In short, “emotion follows upon the bodily expression” (449). His theory of emotion builds on his account of how objects mobilize and modify the human body, which emerges from James’s writings as something exquisitely sensitive, alive, and attuned: “objects do excite bodily changes by a preorganized mechanism [and] the changes are so indefinitely numerous and subtle that the entire organism may be called a sounding-board, which every change of consciousness, however slight, may make reverberate” (450). “A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity” (452), James concludes, and this encompasses baser and more spiritual emotions alike. Although he distinguishes in his work between the nature of “coarser” and “subtler” emotions, he engages head-on the potentially unwelcome upshot of his hypothesis: “rapture, love, ambition, indignation, and pride, considered as feelings, are fruits of the same soil with the grossest bodily sensations of pleasure and of pain” (467). Critics still dispute the correct exegesis of James’s writings on the emotions, but the concept of all emotion as fundamentally a physiological phenomenon quickly escaped James’s efforts at definitional limitation.6 We see this in the writings of Bernard Berenson, the most famous art connoisseur of his day, who claimed he “owed everything to William James.”7 Berenson is best known for his science of connoisseurship, a method of attribution that used idiosyncrasies of form to determine who painted what picture. But attribution can’t settle disputes about quality. For this, Berenson observes on the last page of “Rudiments of Connoisseurship,” we must turn to the art of connoisseurship, an altogether different field that identified masterpieces through their intimate contact with and effects on the body. The end of art, for Berenson, is what he called “life enhancement”; contact with art should promote a sense of well-being. His analysis of a work’s ability to enhance life frequently turns on the question of its “tactile values.” Does the artist successfully generate that illusion of three-dimensionality that makes us feel we could reach out and touch the forms? For Berenson, the illusion of “touchability” is registered by more than our sense of sight; it stimulates the muscle memories that are constitutive of our sense of touch. As he observes of Giotto’s work in Florentine Painters: “I must have the illusion of varying muscular sensations inside my palm and fingers corresponding to the various projections of this figure.”8

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Values Made Flesh: Edith Wharton and the Body Aesthetic

This shift from the object to the viewer’s body, where the work’s success is gauged by how it alters and enhances the body, finds its fullest expression in the writings of Vernon Lee, whose Beauty and Ugliness (1912) is surely one of the most astonishing documents in modern aesthetics. Her larger project is to outline a science of aesthetics, where the data are viewers’ detailed and uncensored descriptions of what happens to their bodies when looking at specific works of art. The bodies include her own, as recorded in “Gallery Diaries” (chapter five of Beauty and Ugliness) and her collaborator’s, Kit Anstruther-Thomson’s, as well as those of friends and researchers in the field. Her argument is an evolutionary one: can we explain why humans gravitate towards certain forms and are repelled by others by their healthful or unhealthful effects on our bodies? For Lee, our connection to things begins with an act of empathy, where we attribute to things the feelings and movements we would have if we were inside them. She’s specifically interested in our identification with forms. When we perceive an object, “we are attributing to the lines and surfaces, to the spatial forms, those dynamic experiences which we should have were we to put our bodies into similar conditions.”9 In the case of a Doric column, for example, this means attributing to it “a condition akin to our own in keeping erect and defying the force of gravitation” (20-21). This projection entails the revival of our own past experiences—hence her phrase “anthropomorphic aesthetics.” If the experiences revived are favorable, we deem the form beautiful; unfavorable, we deem it ugly (21). But the question that animates and unsettles Beauty and Ugliness surrounds the body’s primacy in this process. Literally at the center of the text is the eponymous essay, which was first published in 1897. Here Lee and her co-author take as their challenge extending James’s theory to include an account of the bodily changes that constitute our perception of form. Just as James argued certain bodily sensations make up what we call sadness, “so can the subjective states indicated by the objective terms height, breadth, depth, by the more complex terms round, square, symmetrical, unsymmetrical, and all their kindred terms, be analyzed into more or less distinct knowledge of various and variously localized bodily movements.” (157-58)

Consider what happens to Kit’s body in the act of perceiving a chair: “The bilateralness of the object seems to have put both lungs into play”; “Recognition of the height of the chair…is accompanied by an upward stretch of the body. This stretch seems suddenly checked by the sight of

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the heavy clump of ornament on the chair’s two top corners” (165). And so on for five pages. Lee uses the term “mimicry” throughout to describe how the body closely imitates or reproduces forms. According to Lee, we mimic forms internally, through, for example, changes in breathing, as well as externally, in our movements, as happens when we unconsciously stretch or straighten in response to what we’re looking at. When we call a thing beautiful, this is a way of saying these alterations to the body benefit the organism, i.e., they “vitalize” and “regulate” vital processes. The prefatory note to the essay says it’s reprinted “without alteration,” (1) but this isn’t strictly accurate. It comes with a new scaffolding of footnotes that consist of Lee’s qualifications, retractions, and even apologies, an especially delicate editorial task because AnstrutherThomson stood by most of their original claims. (Her contributions are now enclosed between brackets and initialed.) Virtually every footnote modifies Lee’s earlier views on the body’s primacy in aesthetic emotions. As in the other essays in this volume, Lee argues that bodily phenomena, whether actual movements or “organic resonances,” almost invariably accompany and heighten aesthetic emotion, especially in “motor types” (135) like Lee’s co-author, but she concludes there’s no evidence that bodily participation causes or constitutes aesthetic perception. Because Lee and Anstruther-Thomson quote at length the scandalized criticism directed at their theories, there is some basis for suspecting that there’s more going on here than a simple change in views. It’s clear from their summaries of their critics’ views that they specifically object to Lee’s account of aesthetic experience as grounded in the materiality of bodies. Their most hostile critic is one Professor Lipps, “who treats as heretics and perverts” anyone making even the “faintest attempt at connecting the phenomenon of Beauty with organic states and feelings, silenc[ing] us with: ‘All that has nothing to do with aesthetics’ ” (68). Lee reasons, “One might almost believe that it is the dislike of admitting the participation of the body in the phenomenon of aesthetic Empathy which has impelled Lipps to make aesthetics more and more abstract” (60). But the clearest evidence of the threatening potential of an embodied aesthetics comes in the form of Lee’s own “Gallery Diaries.” These diaries, which appear in the appendix to Beauty and Ugliness, consist of intimate descriptions of her physical responses to specific works of art. Consider her r-rated response to Titian’s Flora, a painting she returns to three times in the course of the diaries: This picture gives a sense of this flood of life: heightening one’s own (this seems very unaesthetic, perhaps it is). I confess to a wish to kiss—not to touch with fingers—the Flora’s throat. The dreadful repainted flesh of

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Values Made Flesh: Edith Wharton and the Body Aesthetic the Duchess of Urbino gives me a horrid sense of touching cardboard. (270) Titian’s Flora takes me. Her glance, gesture, drapery, all drags one in. I have no desire to stroke, touch, or kiss, but there is delight of life, of clean, warm life, such as one wishes for oneself in her flesh. Somehow she is physically attractive—no, if her head were tilted she wouldn’t be. (289) I try to go in by pleasure—tactile, thermic—at her flesh and skin, and the vague likeness to a friend I am very fond of. I get to like her—the silky fur quality of her hair, and her brows….There is an interesting synthesis of form and subject; especially of the bodily cleanness, soundness, and healthy fresh warmth. Yet I do not feel any particular desire to touch or squeeze her; she is still a picture, a goddess, not a cat or baby. (309)

This intensely personal form of viewing renders seeing indistinguishable from touching and thus narrows the gap we typically presume between object and viewer in refined acts of aesthetic appreciation. As these passages suggest, Lee shares with Berenson a belief in tactile values, a theory she knew well.10 The work’s success is measured by how successfully it arouses the tactile sense—whether it’s Flora’s warm flesh inviting a kiss or the cardboard of the Duchess repelling one. Lee herself describes the feedback loop between eye and hand when she cites the research of Professor Groos, who maintained that the “close connections established in infancy between the exploring hand [and] the following eye” insure they proceed apace (134). Lee’s gallery diaries describe a body stimulated by what Lee, following James, designated “exciting objects” (95), and this stimulation depends in turn on acts of seeing that have the properties of tactile experiences. Given these twin developments, it’s not at all surprising to find Lee blurring aesthetic and sexual responsiveness. After all, as James recognized, the natural outcome of his theory was to treat all emotions, together with pain and pleasure, as “fruits of the same soil.” We can trace the erotic charge in the above passages to Flora’s body, but also Lee’s body, as it registers and explores Flora’s. In a striking passage, Lee argues that we can account for the differences between our aesthetic powers by differences in our familiarity with our own bodies: The localization of sensations of muscular strain, etc., depends partly upon a visualization of one’s own body which many people scarcely possess, partly upon some schematic sense of the relation of various sensitive tracts

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of the body, a probable sense of unvisualized geography of one’s body, which in most of us is extremely imperfect. (135)

It’s hard to imagine a greater challenge to the turn-of-the century fine arts establishment than this hypothesis that appreciating art can’t be separated from knowledge of one’s own body, especially its “sensitive tracts”. Even with Lee’s equivocations, and together with Berenson’s extensive writings, Beauty and Ugliness reveals a corporeal turn in aesthetics, at the center of which is a stimulated body, one “lit up” by beautiful objects. We can turn back now to Wharton’s account of her own body’s special sensitivity with a fresh appreciation of how this belongs to a developing discourse about art and the body. In Wharton’s account, however, the picture becomes much more complicated: it brings into nearer view the class implications that hover just beyond the margins of Berenson’s and Lee’s writings. Her description of the fineness of the objects that touched her body from infancy, and that she in turn touched, ingested, and smelled, reveal an aesthetic body in-the-making. This life lived among beautiful objects redirects our attention away from the human body to specific bodies shaped for particular kinds of experiences. What would it mean to take seriously the claim that our bodies are modified by contact with things, especially the things of childhood? In both her autobiographies, Wharton stresses the key role her body played in her developing sensibility. She opens them with accounts of her two earliest memories, and they are both memories specifically of “sensations,” a word that dominates the chapters describing her childhood. Notably, while one memory is linked to something obviously physical, namely the “extremely pleasant sensation” produced in her when she’s kissed by her young cousin, the second, which she considers so formative that she “dates the birth of her identity from that day” (Backward, 777) is less obviously so in that it is visual. She describes the aesthetic satisfaction she derived at the time from knowing that when she’s kissed she’s wearing an exceptionally pretty bonnet. She describes the bonnet in great detail, with special attention to its tactile qualities—the rich velvet, silky lace, and gossamer veil—but her memory is not of how the bonnet felt on her skin, but of how she looked in the bonnet, the pleasing awareness that she appeared “as harmoniously composed” as a picture.11 At the time, this awareness of the picture she presented gives her as sharp and enduring a sensation as does the kiss from the rosy boy. She feels both the picture and the kiss. They are both recalled as things that happened to her body. She goes on to clarify the strong physical component to her emerging visual sensibility, which she characterizes as already unusually intense at

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Values Made Flesh: Edith Wharton and the Body Aesthetic

the tender age of four. She responds especially strongly to ugliness. In A Backward Glance, she recalls how certain rooms and houses were “from my earliest years a source of inarticulate misery, for I was always vaguely frightened by ugliness” (805). She’s much more emphatic—indeed, remarkably so—in Life and I, where she recalls actually “suffering from ugliness” and “hating certain rooms in a London house of my aunt’s, & feeling for ugly people an abhorrence, a kind of cold cruel hate, that I have never been able to overcome” (1072; emphasis in original). She cites as an example her dancing teacher’s mother, “a small shriveled bearded [woman] whom I could not look at without disgust” (1072). And indeed disgust is what’s communicated most clearly in these descriptions of how ugly things affect her. Unlike its neighbors distaste or contempt, it’s almost impossible to imagine disgust without the body and the body’s seemingly instinctive cringe or recoil. Wharton describes her response to ugly people, rooms and, elsewhere, expensive but ugly mansions in terms of the intuitive and immediate visceral repugnance we commonly reserve to describe our reaction to an unflushed toilet or rotting food. For Wharton, ugly things are offending objects that inflict pain on the sensitive body. As she goes on to describe, her childhood experiences of beauty are just as visceral, with the sight of beautiful objects causing her to “tremble with a sensuous ecstasy” (1091). In sharp contrast to the more conventional view that judgments of taste develop over time, Wharton understands her own sensibility as something closer to an innate disposition—a higher order “gut reaction”—that is then further refined by the body’s exposure to objects. Moreover, in tracing her adult aesthetic back to these pre-lingual sensations, she introduces a theme that she sounds throughout the chapters devoted to her childhood: namely that her refined tastes were innate, a gift of nature. Despite a privileged childhood that included European travel, exposure to rare art, expensive books and food, Wharton insists that her tastes, as well as ethical code, are largely distinct from those imparted by either her family or her class. Throughout the autobiographies, she describes her desire to “revive the faint fragrance” of the exclusive world of her birth only to then relentlessly dissociate herself from it. And the distance she tacitly marks off between herself and various old New York circles is commensurate with their distance from artists and intellectuals. “No one in our set had any intellectual interests,” she states flatly, beginning with her parents, “who were far from intellectual, who read little and studied not at all” (Backward, 88, 62). Again, she’s even more candid about her circle’s shortcomings in Life and I: “But I never exchanged a word with a really intelligent human being until I was over

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twenty” (1083). And elsewhere: “My childhood & youth were an intellectual desert” (1089). Even if we take Wharton’s claim about her circle at face value, it’s clear that she was educated by the objects afforded her by membership in the upper class. There are many examples of this, including the bonnet that appears in the opening scene, but I want to examine her descriptions of learning to read, where her love of books proves indistinguishable from the physical properties of the expensive books she handles, as well as the luxurious library she read them in. There are several passages devoted to memories of reading in her father’s library: Oh, the rapture of my first explorations in that dear dear library! I can see now where almost every volume stood, from the beautiful old Swift & Fielding & Sterne in eighteenth century bindings (from my grandfather’s library) to the white vellum Macaulay, with gold tooling & red morocco labels! I can feel the rough shaggy surface of the Turkey rug on which I used to lie stretched by the hour, my chin in my hands, poring over one precious volume after the other…. (Life and I, 1083-84; emphasis in original) These shaggy volumes [of Irving’s “Alhambra”], printed in close black characters on rough-edged yellowish pages, and bound in coarse dark-blue paper covers (probably a production of the old Galignani Press in Paris) must have been a relic of our Spanish adventure….There was richness and mystery in the thick black type, a hint of bursting overflowing material in the serried lines and scant margins. (Backward, 809) Whenever I try to recall my childhood it is in my father’s library that it comes to life. I am squatting again on the thick Turkey rug, pulling open one after another glass doors of the low bookcases and dragging out book after book in a secret ecstasy of communion. (Backward, 837)

In these passages, it’s almost impossible to separate her passion for the ideas in these books from their pleasing physical properties, and more generally, her luxurious surroundings. The process of making sense of books involves an irreducible collaboration between her thoughts and her senses, between Irving’s tales, the thick black type they’re set in, the satisfying heft of vellum pages, and the thick Turkish rug. All of these recollections of reading bear the indelible trace of materiality. Even “rough,” “shaggy,” and “coarse” are transformed from evidence of inferior quality to indications of her intensely tactile pleasure. Wharton’s rapturous description of the books is unmistakably erotic, blurring the lines between

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the actual books, what’s in the books, and what’s happening to her body. The “hint of bursting overflowing material” she sees in the Galignani edition of The Alhambra applies equally well to these scenes of reading. On the one hand, these passages reveal the influence of what I’ve described as the corporeal turn in aesthetics. As was true of Berenson but especially Lee in her gallery diaries, Wharton’s autobiographies suggest how knowledge of one’s body, especially its sensitive tracts, becomes not only a legitimate but indispensable feature of aesthetic experience. The rarefied nature of Wharton’s childhood, however, also has the effect of situating the aesthetic body in its social context. Pierre Bourdieu’s work is especially useful in helping us grasp the subtle but profound social magic that inheres in living with and among inherited things—like Wharton’s inherited library. He uses the singularly apt phrase “object lessons” to capture the importance of the objects we move among, not just because they bear witness to our taste or wealth, but also because daily contact with things shapes us. In a tantalizingly brief section of Distinction, Bourdieu observes that this might be especially true of our early relationship to objects. He speculates that things “impress themselves through bodily experiences which may be as profoundly unconscious as the quiet caress of beige carpets or the thin clamminess of tattered, garish linoleum, the harsh smell of bleach, or perfumes as imperceptible as a negative scent.”12 He goes on to observe that “experiences of this sort would be the material of a social psychoanalysis which set out to grasp the logic whereby the social relations objectified in things…are insensibly internalized, taking their place in a lasting relation to the world and to others.”13 I want to suggest that in her autobiographies we find perfect material for just such a social psychoanalysis—or better, a corporeal sociology. What Bourdieu is describing here is the social education of the body through the quality of the things to which we are repeatedly exposed, starting with whether we learn to crawl on plush carpet or clammy linoleum. These experiences accrue in the form of physical capital, which can then be converted, as it is in the connoisseur’s sensitive body, into cultural capital. While physical capital is in many ways the most problematic form of capital (unlike an Old Master, there is no way to directly transmit it to one’s heirs), it remains indispensable for the reproduction of class differences precisely because we are most likely to accept the legitimacy of a hierarchy that appears to be grounded in natural differences.14 As we saw in Wharton’s description of her response to ugliness as “the deepest thing” in her, physical capital has the important distinction of

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appearing to be an innate form of capital. Wharton expounds on this theory in her pungent 1903 essay “The Vice of Reading.” Only six years before, she had delivered a lecture to Newport’s teachers advocating furnishing schoolrooms with the best artistic reproductions as the means for teaching students to love and reverence beauty. In this later essay, these very attempts at “diffusion of knowledge” are belittled. Cultural missionary work flies in the face of the reality that there are “born readers” and “mechanical readers,” and nature determines which side a person falls on: “The gift of reading is no exception to the rule that all natural gifts need to be cultivated by practice and discipline; but unless the innate aptitude exists the training will be wasted.”15 The essay goes on to contrast the lives of the “happy few” and their easy, unself-conscious relation to books, with the labored, awkward efforts of the unlucky majority.16 Central to this ideology of gifts is the assertion that nature has distributed them randomly, to anyone not everyone. Wharton underscores this in her autobiographies when she claims that her sensibility was so unlike that of her family and circle that it effectively rendered her an orphan, a “homeless waif” (Backward, 119). But this apparently random allocation of nature’s gifts effectively obscures their unequal class distribution. One of Bourdieu’s most important insights into the operations of class is that the gifts of the happy few are in fact the product of privileged conditions of existence. “A ‘gift,’” he argues, “is nothing other than the feel for the game socially constituted by early immersion in the game, that class racism turns into a nature.”17 The so-called gifts of nature are easy to misrecognize because they’re learned at such an early age that they have all the hallmarks of an innate reflex. The ideology of gifts is a particularly powerful example of what Bourdieu calls “misrecognition,” where real and objective differences are misattributed, in this case to nature. Wharton’s view of the origins of her own tastes as essentially mysterious is a classic case of misrecognition, as is her tendency to endow some of her poor and uneducated characters with an instinctive eye for the most refined pleasures.18 What’s crucial here is that nature’s aristocracy becomes an acceptable foundation for difference and the exercise of privilege. We see this in Jose Ortega y Gasset’s The Dehumanization of Art (1925), where his account of an “aristocracy of the finer senses” evinces important parallels to Wharton’s understanding of the nature and origin of her own and other rarefied sensibilities. As it does in Wharton’s work, this sensibility serves as the definitive social litmus test, separating “from the shapeless masses of the many two castes of men,” and compelling the average citizen to realize he is just this, “the average citizen, a creature

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incapable of receiving the sacrament of art,” and allowing these aristocrats “to recognize themselves and one another in the greyness of the multitude.”19 From this perspective, the ideology of gifts represents Wharton’s stake in the fierce struggles between the new industrialists and the old bourgeoisie. During this period, the colossal fortunes of the financiers had dramatically reduced the distance between the challengers and defenders. In the happy few and their distinctive responsiveness to culture, Wharton describes differences in "nature" that are inextricably tied to one's place in the social order. These are not necessarily differences in depth of knowledge—indeed, Bourdieu maintains that the ease and selfconfidence of the early learner can exist “amid (relative) ignorance” (Distinction, 66)—but differences in how this relation to culture was acquired that “live on” in the apparently instinctive “feel for the game.” That this instinctive feel for the game is in reality a product of a privileged childhood, Wharton tacitly acknowledges in her fond recollection of reading in her father’s library. Thus Wharton’s accounts of her childhood tell at least two stories. One opens a window onto the history of aesthetics, and a developing discourse regarding the centrality of the body in aesthetic experience. Following James’s theory of emotions, Berenson, Lee, as well as Wharton, envision the body as the “sounding board” of aesthetic emotions. They further assert that the quality of things can be distinguished by how they touch the body, whether it is felt in the reflexive twitch of muscle in the viewer’s hand, indicating a painting’s “tactile values,” the symmetrical breathing induced by a well-made chair, or the pain inflicted by an expensively decorated but ugly room. The other story belongs to corporeal sociology and the social formation of bodies. Wharton’s autobiographies offer an extraordinarily vivid picture of the processes involved in educating an upper-class body. The things she touched as a small child, touched her in turn, developing a sensitivity that showed itself in a seemingly natural instinct for beauty and a deep aversion to ugliness. In this sensitivity, shared with the “happy few,” she discovers the basis for an aristocracy of the finer senses. Ultimately, Wharton’s conception of her own body delivers the truth behind Bourdieu’s dictum that when values are made flesh they become integral to the maintenance of social inequalities.

Works Cited Benstock, Shari. No Gifts from Chance: A Biography of Edith Wharton. New York: Scribner’s, 1994.

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Berenson, Bernard. “The Rudiments of Connoisseurship (A Fragment).” 1894. In The Study and Criticism of Italian Art. Second Series. London: George Bell, 1902. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984. —. In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology. Trans. Matthew Adamson. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990. —. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1977. Ellsworth, P.C. “William James and Emotion: Is a Century of Fame Worth a Century of Misunderstanding” Psychological Review 101 (1994): 222-229. Gibson-Wood, Carol. Studies in the Theory of Connoisseurship from Vasari to Morelli. New York: Garland, 1988. Goodman, Susan. Edith Wharton’s Inner Circle. Austin: U of Texas P, 1994. James, William. Principles of Psychology. Vol 2. New York: Holt, 1890. Lee, Vernon, and Clementina Anstruther-Thomson. Beauty and Ugliness and Other Studies in Psychological Aesthetics. New York: John Lane Company, 1912. Ortega y Gasset, Jose. The Dehumanization of Art and Notes on the Novel. 1925. Trans. Helene Weyl. New York: Peter Smith, 1951. Reisenzein, Rainer, Wulf-Uwe Meyer, and Achim Schutzwohl. “James and the Physical Basis of Emotion: A Comment on Ellsworth.” Psychological Review 102 (1995): 757-761. Secrest, Meryl. Being Bernard Berenson: A Biography. New York: Penguin, 1979. Shilling, Chris. “Physical Capital and Situated Action: A New Direction for Corporeal Sociology British Journal of Sociology of Education 25.4 (2004): 474-487. Wharton, Edith. A Backward Glance. 1933. Rpt. in Novellas and Other Writings. Ed. Cynthia Griffin Wolff. New York: Library of America, 1990. 767-1068. —. Life and I. Unpublished Manuscript. Rpt. in Novellas and Other Writings. Ed. Cynthia Griffin Wolff. New York: Library of America, 1990. 1069-1096. —. “The Vice of Reading.” In Edith Wharton: The Uncollected Critical Writings. Ed. Frederick Wegner. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1996. 99106.

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Notes 1

Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance, 1933. Rpt. in Novellas and Other Writings, ed. Cynthia Griffin Wolff (New York: Library of America, 1990), 824. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. A Backward Glance was published by D. Appleton and Company in 1934. Life and I, a draft of the first chapters of A Backward Glance, wasn’t published until 1990. 2 Edith Wharton, Life and I, Unpublished Manuscript. Rpt. in Novellas and Other Writings, ed. Cynthia Griffin Wolff (New York: Library of America, 1990), 1972. 3 Berenson first met Wharton in 1903, but their friendship dates from 1909. According to Shari Benstock in No Gifts from Chance: A Biography of Edith Wharton. (New York: Scribner’s, 1994), they considered each other “as among the closest friends of a lifetime” (221-24). Wharton met Vernon Lee (the male pseudonym of Violet Page) in 1894 during a visit to Lee’s villa, Il Palmerino, just outside Florence (Benstock, 76-77). She wrote that Lee “was the first highly cultivated and brilliant woman I had ever known” (Backward, 884). 4 Pierre Bourdieu uses the concept of physical capital to describe physical attributes that can be converted into other forms of capital. While there are explicit forms of physical capital (e.g., in certain settings, a strong body can be converted into income), Bourdieu is primarily interested in less explicit forms of physical capital, as in the largely unconscious meanings assigned to certain ways of holding one’s body, gesturing, etc. As Bourdieu notes in Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1977), “The principles embodied in this way are placed beyond the grasp of consciousness and, hence cannot be touched by voluntary, deliberate transformation, cannot even be made explicit” (77). 5 William James, Principles of Psychology vol 2. (New York: Holt, 1890), 450. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 6 See Ellsworth and Reisenzein et al’s response to Ellsworth for two recent attempts to clarify James’s theory in regards to the link between emotion and the body. Shusterman addresses the specific case of the link between the body and aesthetic emotions. 7 Meryl Secrest, Being Bernard Berenson: A Biography (New York: Penguin, 1979), 188. 8 Bernard Berenson, “The Rudiments of Connoisseurship (A Fragment)” 1894. In The Study and Criticism of Italian Art. Second Series. (London: George Bell, 1902), 5. 9 Vernon Lee and Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, Beauty and Ugliness and Other Studies in Psychological Aesthetics (London: The Bodley Head; New York: John Lane Company, 1912), 20-1. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 10 In her biography of Berenson, Secrest describes the falling out between Berenson and Lee over Berenson’s accusations that Lee and Anstruther-Thomson had plagiarized his ideas (195-96).

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Edith Wharton, Life and I. Unpublished Manuscript. Rpt. in Novellas and Other Writings, ed. Cynthia Griffin Wolff (New York: Library of America, 1990), 1071. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 12 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984), 77. 13 Ibid. 14 See Chris Shilling, “Physical Capital and Situated Action: A New Direction for Corporeal Sociology” British Journal of Sociology of Education 25.4 (2004), 474487 for an analysis of role of physical capital, the “hidden form of privilege,” in the reproduction of social inequalities. He discusses some of the factors that that can interfere with the transmission of physical capital (668n4). 15 Edith Wharton, “The Vice of Reading,” in Edith Wharton: The Uncollected Critical Writings, ed. Frederick Wegner (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1996), 100. 16 In her recent study, Goodman suggests the significance of this image of “the happy few” for Wharton’s inner circle. 17 Pierre Bourdieu, In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology, trans. Matthew Adamson, (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990), 109. 18 In The Custom of the Country (1913), for example, Elmer Moffat repeatedly demonstrates an instinctive feel for the most exquisite and subtle forms of beauty, despite having no education, no discernible taste in other matters, and no language to describe what he’s feeling. And it only adds to the seeming arbitrariness of possession of this sensibility that his female “twin,” who surpasses Elmer in her grasp of most other subtleties—has no feel for these things. 19 Jose Ortega y Gasset, The Dehumanization of Art and Notes on the Novel, 1925, trans. Helene Weyl. (New York: Peter Smith, 1951), 6, 9.

CONTROL, CREATIVITY AND THE BODY IN VIRGINIA WOOLF’S “A SKETCH OF THE PAST” NÓRA SÉLLEI

Whereas Virginia Woolf was long considered as an intellectual (and, thus, disembodied) modernist writer, feminist criticism has discovered aspects of her ouvre that problematize the (female) body. Having a troubled relationship to her abused body, Woolf raises the question of the representation of the body in her 1931 public talk, “Professions for Women” (published posthumously), where she claims that as a professional writer she had two problems: “The first—killing the Angel in the House—I think I solved. She died. But the second, telling the truth about my own experiences as a body, I do not think I solved. I doubt that any woman has solved it yet. The obstacles against her are still immensely powerful […], she has still many ghosts to fight, many prejudices to overcome.”1 Woolf’s autobiographical text “A Sketch of the Past”2 (1939–41) written about her childhood and youth, and left unfinished at her death, can fruitfully be read as an attempt to tell the truth about her “own experiences as a body”, but, at the same time, the body figures in a more versatile way in the text. Although I agree with Louise deSalvo, who claims in Virginia Woolf and the Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work that the text was intended as a therapy regarding Woolf’s sexual abuse by her half-brothers,3 I will explore the textual gaps and silences that organize the text in relation to the experiences of the body. From this perspective, partly via its self-reflexive comments, partly via its textual structure, “A Sketch of the Past” oscillates between the possibility and the impossibility of the representation of the body. The self-reflexive remarks of the autobiographical narrator create a meta-text to “A Sketch of the Past” which can be approached theoretically in various ways: as “de-facement” (Paul de Man) and as “autobiographics” (Leigh Gilmore). On the one hand, Woolf’s meta-text can be described in Paul de Man’s rhetorical terms, when he calls autobiography a “defacement,” inasmuch as Woolf’s text seems to be aware of its own

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impossibility of bringing “herself” into text, a limitation of autobiography explained by de Man: Voice assumes mouth, eye and finally face, a chain that is manifest in the etymology of the trope’s name, prosopon poien, to confer a mask or a face (prosopon). Prosopopeia is the trope of autobiography, by which one’s name [. . .] is made as intelligible and memorable as a face. Our topic deals with the giving and taking away of faces, with face and deface, figure, figuration and disfiguration. [. . . Thus] the restoration of mortality by autobiography (the prosopopeia of the voice and the name) deprives and disfigures to the precise extent that it restores. Autobiography veils a defacement of the mind of which it is itself the cause.4

This complex passage by de Man articulates a problem that is inherent in our general use of language—or, rather, in all signifying systems—in that signs seem to stand for or express their referent, whereas they cannot be identified with what they supposedly stand for. Apart from this general insight, however, de Man here reveals the central irony of writing autobiography inasmuch as in the case of autobiography there is, perhaps, an even greater intention to tell the truth, to put oneself (one’s name and/or face) into text than in other genres; and the readers, indeed, take these texts at face value and as a final authority on the personal truth of the autobiographical subject, or the subject of the autobiography.5 If we, however, consider that even autobiography is a linguistic construct, and as such is based on tropes, instead of “giving faces” even autobiography can be read as a genre taking away faces in the sense that face-giving is an ultimately illusory rhetorical gesture: de-facement, in de Man’s term. In addition to de Man’s rhetorical–deconstructive approach to the central trope of autobiography relevant to the reading of Woolf’s late autobiographical text, I will also rely on Leigh Gilmore’s formulation of the broader generic context of the theory of autobiography. In her Autobiographics, she suggests that autobiography as a genre can be conceived as “the collection of rules offered by and produced in language that prefigures and even determines the historical modes of expression. In other words, in choosing autobiography, a writer is both enabled and constrained by the rhetoric of the style.”6 Similarly to de Man, Gilmore claims that “[a]utobiographics, as a description of self-representation and as a reading practice, is concerned with interruptions and eruptions, with resistance and contradiction as strategies of self-representation” (42) in the sense that not even an autobiography can be read as a seamless, unambiguous text, without any textual slips or contradictions. What is obviously common in these two approaches is their deconstructive element

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Control, Creativity and the Body in Virginia Woolf’s “A Sketch of the Past”

in the rhetorical–generic reading of autobiography and the emphasis on the gaps and the silences of autobiographical texts. On closer scrutiny, however, one discovers further shared details, by implication at least, in terms of the body as well. In this respect, one cannot but notice that de Man’s formulation of not putting “oneself” into text is metaphorised by the images of the body: the voice is supposed to be the metonymical substitution for the mouth, and by extension, of the face, whereas Gilmore’s aim is “to describe the elements of self-representation which are not bound by a philosophical definition of the self derived from Augustine, not content with literary history of autobiography, those elements that instead mark a location in the text where self-invention, selfdiscovery and self-representation emerge within the technologies of autobiography—namely those legalistic, literary, social and ecclesiastical discourses of truth and identity, through which the subject of autobiography is produced” (42; emphases added). This passage is potent from the perspective of the body since “the philosophical definition of the self derived from Augustine” (which was later reinforced by the concept of the autonomous—white, male—individual as defined by the Enlightenment) excludes the body. As we can see, traditionally, this genre prioritized the “mind” at the cost of the “body”, and thus both conforms to, and reconfirms, a structural principle in Western (philosophical) thinking: the binary opposition of the body and the mind, where the two elements are not simply situated oppositionally, but also entail hierarchical value judgments in that the mind is superior to the body. In this way, when Gilmore rejects the Augustine tradition of the self, what is implicitly drawn into the focus of discussion is the body, which is implied by the second, affirmative part of the quote because along Foucauldian lines of argumentation it is not an exaggeration to claim that “those legalistic, literary, social and ecclesiastical discourses of truth and identity through which the autobiography is produced” are, at the same time, the discourses that create the body as a discursive construction. The body, in this sense, haunts the genre of autobiography, either because of its exclusion, or because of the discursive parallels between the creation of the body and the subject of autobiography. This coincides with what, among others, Shirley Neuman claims about bodies and the historical evolution of the genre of autobiography. She traces back the repression of the body to Plato, and states that based on the superiority of transcendence (as opposed to the immanence of materiality), autobiographers intended to minimalise the presence of bodies: for a long time, bodies hardly ever figured in their texts, instead, the emphasis was on one’s mental and spiritual development.7

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Woolf’s “A Sketch of the Past” starts off with the supposed representation of the first, almost pre-Oedipal memory related to the body (materiality) and to the dyadic unity with the maternal, only to deconstruct the first memory’s validity by replacing it with other “first” memories. The narrator self-confidently sets out to describe the first memory, thus to authenticate the life-story with a proper beginning (as generic conventions: “autobiographics” dictate, or enable her to), emphatically located in the body: This was of red and purple flowers on a black ground—my mother’s dress; and she was sitting either on a train or in an omnibus, and I was on her lap. Perhaps we were going to St Ives; more probably, for from the light it must have been evening, we were coming back to London. But it is more convenient artistically to suppose that we were going to St Ives, for that will lead to my other memory, which also seems to be my first memory, and in fact it is the most important of all my memories. (72–73; emphasis added.)

At the very moment Woolf authenticates her life story by rendering a beginning to it, she simultaneously destabilizes it by fictionalising and dispersing it into other origins: the memory of St Ives, lying in the nursery and listening to the waves as they break on the shore. The two “first” memories, complemented by a third one, and all three described in detail, can be defined as memories recalled, reconstructed from the child’s dyadic unity with the mother, the primordial unity of being, from the pre-Oedipal and pre-linguistic phase: the memory of sitting in the mother’s lap close to her dress; then in St Ives lying in the nursery and listening to the waves “feeling the purest ecstasy I cannot describe” (73); and finally colour-and-sound memories [. . .]; it was highly sensual. [. . .] It still makes me warm; as if everything were ripe; humming, sunny, so many smells at once; and all making a whole that even now makes me stop, [. . .] all seemed to press voluptuously against some membrane; not to burst it; but to hum round one such a complete rapture of pleasure that I stopped, smelt; looked. (75)

These images suggest the unity and the totality of being, not in its separation and differentiation but in its primordial wholeness and oneness: on the verge of self-consciousness, on the verge of differentiation and egoformation, on the verge of entering the Symbolic and of falling into Oedipal sexuality, as in the images of high sensuality pressing but nor bursting the membrane and giving pleasure. This is the moment of jouissance, the kind of unlimited enjoyment verging on uncontainability

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Control, Creativity and the Body in Virginia Woolf’s “A Sketch of the Past”

(which is almost impossible within the framework of any culture because culture limits jouissance), on the edge of breaking boundaries and unlimitedness; this is also the moment of bodily contact when the body is not yet split into senses but is enwrapped in the totality of sensual pleasure, without any consciousness of the self (“half awake, half asleep”). Paradoxically, the self-conscious narrator attempts to evoke them, to reconstitute them in the Symbolic, in linguistic differentiation, and the failure is appropriately admitted at the end of both passages: “such ecstasy I cannot describe” (74); “But again I cannot describe that rapture” (75). In this way, the text originates in a bodily memory, which is immediately destabilized rhetorically. This oscillation gives the pattern to the problematized representation and construction of the autobiographical subject which emphatically also figures as a body, but as the narrator admits, the bodily figure of the autobiographical “I” can never fully be present in an autobiographical text. Partly, this is attributed to how linguistic signs—and autobiography as a genre—can (dis)function, partly, however, this is due to the not only problematical, but also problematized relationship of this late Victorian female autobiographical subject to the body. Yet at several points of the text, the narrating “I” reclaims her power as a writer and in a memorable passage she even states that it is her shockreceiving capacity that makes her a writer as each blow is followed by the desire to explain it: “I make it real by putting it into words. It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together” (81). However affirmative this claim may be, it inspires the reader’s skepticism if the “severed parts” can really be put together, and if pain loses its power to hurt indeed. Undeniably, writing in general, and “A Sketch of the Past” in particular, have a therapeutic function for Woolf. As she writes in “A Sketch”, she dealt with the traumatic memories related to her parents in her writings: It is perfectly true that [my mother] obsessed me, in spite of the fact that she died when I was thirteen, until I was forty-four. Then one day, walking round Tavistock Square I made up, as I sometimes make up my books, To the Lighthouse; in a great, apparently involuntary rush. [. . .] I wrote the book very quickly; and when it was written, I ceased to be obsessed by my mother. I no longer hear her voice; I do not see her. I suppose I did for myself what psycho-analysts do for their patients. I expressed some very long felt and deeply felt emotion. And in expressing it I explained it and then laid it to rest. (90)

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Not less traumatic was the memory of her father. In this case, too, it was the effect of writing as “making it whole” that helped alleviate the pain: “he too obsessed me for years. Until I wrote it out, I would find my lips moving; I would be arguing with him; raging against him; saying to myself all that I never said to him. How deep they drove themselves into me, the things it was impossible to say aloud” (119). But if we disregard the ambivalent self-reflexive comments of “A Sketch” in terms of the selfexpressive capacity of language, and consider the text as the putting together of the severed parts, the question can be asked whether this— admittedly personal—text achieved its therapeutic function, whether this text has a teleology leading into the direction of uttering certain experiences that used to be unsayable. There lurks yet another question here: why the text is left unfinished since it is not directly her suicide that put an end to it (and this might be a valid question even though it is known that she wrote the text rather intermittently over the last two years of her life). Furthermore, is there any correlation between the fact that “A Sketch” is left unfinished and the narrator’s doubts about linguistic selfexpression articulating the—also de Manian—problem of “putting oneself into text”? In her psychoanalytical biography of Woolf, Louise deSalvo considers “A Sketch” both as a therapeutic and at the same time as a verifiable text, one which offers an answer as to why the text is unfinished. In her view, because Woolf started reading Freud at a late stage of writing “A Sketch”, there was far too great a pressure on her in the light of Freud’s theory to reinterpret everything she had written up until that point, which she did not want to do; additionally, however, DeSalvo concludes that Woolf did not go on writing because it brought to the surface a traumatic childhood experience: that at the age of six she was sexually abused by her halfbrother, Gerald Duckworth, who, as a letter to Ethel Smyth suggests, perhaps even broke her hymen (100, 131-132). It is highly questionable, however (DeSalvo does not support this claim with any evidence), if Woolf really discovered this early, and for a long time “successfully” repressed the childhood memory at the time when she stopped writing “A Sketch” because the passage recalling Gerald’s exploring her body can be found on the first pages of the text, so most probably it was written in 1939, not in January 1941. The letter written to Ethel Smyth on 12 January 1941, nevertheless, deserves attention because a key sentence refers to the impossibility of verbalizing certain bodily experiences, and sexuality in particular. Woolf here congratulates Smyth on her ability to express what she herself cannot.

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Control, Creativity and the Body in Virginia Woolf’s “A Sketch of the Past” But as so much of life is sexual—or so they say—it rather limits autobiography if this is blacked out. It must be, I suspect, for many generations, for women; for its like breaking the hymen—if thats the membrane’s name—a painful operation, and I suppose connected with all sorts of subterranean instincts. I still shiver with shame at the memory of my half brother, standing me on a ledge, aged about 6, and so exploring my private parts. Why should I have felt shame, then?8

In the light of this passage, the “wholeness” and “truth” of autobiography— and let us add, Freudian psychoanalysis, which at that moment exerted a great influence on Woolf—would require the verbalization of bodily, sexual experiences, which can be considered the Woolfian reconceptualization of autobiography as against the tradition of the genre rooted in Plato, in Christianity (Augustine), and in the Enlightenment alike. What is more, if we take into consideration what kind of bodily experiences “A Sketch” wants to articulate (incest and child abuse), even if in a vague and unfinished way, then the conclusion can be drawn that the text is a major step in rewriting the genre because it not only erodes several Victorian taboos (such as birth and death, sexuality, childhood innocence, and negative feelings towards the parents), but also makes an attempt at revising the autobiographical subject of the Enlightenment. In this respect too, Woolf’s text oscillates between silence and articulation (or repression and expression): We [Vanessa and Virginia] both learnt the rules of the game of Victorian society so thoroughly that we have never forgotten them. We still play the game. It is useful. It has also its beauty, for it is founded upon restraint, sympathy, unselfishness—all civilized qualities. [. . .] But the Victorian manner is perhaps—I am not sure—a disadvantage in writing [. . .] On the other hand, the surface manner allows one, as I have found, to slip in things that would be inaudible if one marched straight up and spoke out loud. (164)

Articulating the bodily experiences is amongst those “slipped in” in spite of the fact that the text starts off with memories related to the (maternal) body, to pre-Oedipal wholeness; but these memories are directly followed by the recollection of the childhood abuse. In this way, what we have at the beginning of the text is the attempt at articulating both the positive and the negative bodily experiences, and on the basis of the narrative position, they play a central role, constituting the originary—or specular—moment of this autobiographical text, and as a result, the locus of the autobiographical subject. But the representation of the body is far from

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unproblematic, as can be seen from the narrator’s ponderings following the description of the abuse: this memory from the age of six is reflected upon by almost literally the same words as the early childhood memories suggesting wholeness are: “it is so difficult to describe a human being” (73); “why it is so difficult to give any account of the person to whom things happen” (78). Thus, according to Woolf, the body is an inevitable element of the autobiographical subject, but, in addition to the “normal” slippages of linguistics signs, in this case the autobiographer must also confront the problem that bodily experiences are replaced in autobiographies by metonymical substitutes: “They leave out the persons to whom things happened. [. . .] So they say: ‘This is what happened’; but they do not say what the person was like to whom it happened” (73); or, as an alternative, causal relationships are established to give explanations: Though I have done my best to explain why I was ashamed of looking at my own face I have only been able to discover some possible reasons; there may be others; I do not suppose that I have got at the truth; yet this is a simple incident, and it happened to me personally; and I have no motive for lying about it. (78)

Linguistic signs and the referent—bodily experiences, the feel of the body—are multiply removed from each other. It almost seems as if the narrator Woolf wanted to remove the body as the potential locus of autobiography so as to reinstitute the mind or spirit as in the traditional focus of the genre when a few pages later she suggests that: “one’s life is not confined to one’s body and what one says and does; one is living all the time in relation to certain background rods9 or conceptions” (81). The mind/body dichotomy is palpable throughout “A Sketch”, and this binary opposition—so characteristic of Western thinking, and so influential on women’s sense of the self as consisting of materiality/ maternity and the body—remains unresolved in the text, even if Woolf does attempt to shift emphases, and to rewrite these conventional value judgments. She characterizes her father, for example, as a type that for her lacks picturesqueness, oddity, romance. That type is like a steel engraving, without colour, or warmth, or body; but with an infinity of precise and clear lines. There are no crannies or corners to catch [her] imagination; nothing dangles a spray at [her]. It is all contained and complete, and already summed up. (120; emphasis added)

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Control, Creativity and the Body in Virginia Woolf’s “A Sketch of the Past”

The father, thus, has no body; it is erased (“blacked out”), replaced by pure intellect—but instead of being a genius (which he hopes to be) the father is described as a second-rate mind (similar to Mr. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse). The text, in this way, rewrites the relation of the body and the mind and their evaluation as this description attributes negative qualities not to the body, but to the lack of body, and the context connects the inhumanity (often cruelty: the lion-like ragings) of the father to this disembodied core of identity. Implicitly, thus, the body and the mind/spirit are not independent of each other, they do not exclude each other; quite the contrary: the lack of body consciousness seems consistent with a second-rate mind. Furthermore, as described by the emphatically female narrator, the denial of the body in the case of the father also correlates with his lack of creativity, lack of inspiration, which obviously rewrites the dyad patterned along the gendered—male—creator and the “obviously” female muse. This textual “revenge” on the male disembodied thinker, however, does not promise a fully and unproblematically embodied female autobiographical subject either: the autobiographical subject’s body cannot be taken for granted as a source of identity or creativity. In Woolf’s text, it is always already constructed by discourses, and cannot become the locus of any stable, let alone intellectual, identity because the female body is controlled by the male members of the family in the most diverse ways ranging from the penetrating gaze to incest and sexual abuse, and is mostly present as a debilitating core of the identity. The reason for this is that the narrator cannot resist the cultural discourses that “write” or inscribe “woman” and femininity. Woolf thus does not imagine either womanhood or femininity as essential qualities. When referring to the impact that education and property make on a person’s development, she proposes the following argument in her feminist essay Three Guineas, published in 1938, just before she started writing “A Sketch”: That such differences make for very considerable differences in mind and body, no psychologist or biologist would deny. It would seem to follow then as an indisputable fact that ‘we’ [the educated men’s daughters]— meaning by ‘we’ a whole made up of body, brain and spirit, influenced by memory and tradition—must still differ in some essential aspects from ‘you’ [the educated men], whose body, mind and spirit have been so differently trained and are so differently influenced by memory and tradition.10

This can be interpreted either as a Foucauldian or as a gender constructionist position in the sense that—as opposed to essentialism that

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supposes an inherent and unalienable link between maleness and masculinity, and femaleness and femininity, respectively—Woolf puts great emphasis on the power of social discourses that create the gendered subject. In her text, among the most influential social discourses are the disciplinary practices that play a crucial role in Foucault’s thinking as well: he calls them micropowers. Nevertheless, whereas in the Foucauldian concept the subject is never fully subjected to power as s/he can find their points of resistance in the gaps created by contradictory discourses,11 in Three Guineas the situation seems even bleaker as the narrator has difficulties in finding the points of resistance, and the reason is that the cultural inscription of gender seems so powerful as to disallow the (female) subject to create a position, a space—a room—of her own. Significantly, in “A Sketch”, the female autobiographical subject is also created by social discourses and disciplinary practices: she is divided between her intellectual aspirations and her late Victorian female body, and, ironically, the trope expressing this trite dichotomy is the very room of the narrator that she can apparently claim as her own as a result of her turning into an adult, after her half-sister Stella’s wedding. This room, however, is divided into the space of intellectual activity and the more “bodily” part that any male member of the family can enter any time, so it cannot become the space of creativity and the preservation of (female) integrity, that is, the Woolfian “room of one’s own”. What is more, the logic may work the other way round as the division rather originates in (and is an expression of) her turning into an adult as a young lady, so the division of the room exemplifies the split state of femininity in its ambivalent relation to the body and to the intellect as defined by our culture. Not inadvertently, after the childhood memories the body becomes a central trope of the text again, but this image (and experience) of the body—like the section of the room dominated by the mirror and the halfbrothers—is more emphatically written by cultural discourses. This consciousness of the body (as opposed to the pre-Oedipal oneness and wholeness of the body) cannot be, to use Sidonie Smith’s phrase, “the home of identity”; quite the contrary, it functions as “the most material place of potential homelessness.”12 In this room of her own, which is transformed from a nursery into a bed sitting room, “Virginia” ironically can never be at home because she can be called (upon) at any moment to leave the part representing her intellect (her place of resistance to traditional femininity where she can learn something that is the privilege of boys studying at prestigious boarding-schools: Greek grammar), and to

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join the company and fulfill her most conventional duties and obligations at the tea-table , such as serving tea and strawberries and cream. But not even the apparently more personal, more intimate bodily part of the room, the sleeping part, is hers: “The sleeping side was dominated by the long Chippendale (imitation) looking glass, given me by George in the hope that I would look into it and learn to do my hair and take general care of my appearance” (135). The fact that the room was refurbished from George’s money, and that in general, the property by definition belongs to the male members of the family, provides all the men in the family with free access to her room even in the middle of the night: Adrian, George, Gerald, Jack, and her father. Thus, in spite of its apparently being hers, the room is still controlled by the disciplining gaze of the male members of the family, so that George is not only the creator of the room itself, but he is also the creator of the (image of the) body in the mirror as it is more than evident that he and his late Victorian conventions (going into, and sensitive to, the most minute details of appearance) function as the primary standard (or measuring “rod”) for the reflected image in the mirror. The room thus ceases to be a nursery only apparently: the locus of the controlling gaze is shifted over from the parents to the men (and George primarily); but the basic discursive practice remains unaltered: the mother’s last sentence to Virginia on her deathbed “Hold yourself straight, my little Goat” (94) is replaced by the constitutive male gaze. The room (and, as a result, the body) of her own is still missing, although that could be the home and the locus of her subjectivity. The total control and power over the body, and the ruthlessness of retribution in the case of the most minute deviation from prescribed codes are amply exemplified by what I call the “green-dress revolt”. Due to lack of money for dresses (as finances were rigidly controlled by the men in the family), on one occasion “Virginia” has a dress made from an unusual green fabric, bought at a furniture shop, for dinners at home, where she “obviously” had to appear properly dressed. George’s reaction on seeing the dress perfectly expresses the non-naturalness of the body, of the dresses covering the body, and the multiple layers of cultural discourses creating the body image: He at once fixed on me that extraordinary observant scrutiny with which he always inspected our clothes. He looked me up and down for a moment as if I were a horse brought into the show ring. Then the sullen look came into his eyes; the look which expressed not simply aesthetic disapproval; but something that went deeper. It was the look of the moral, of social, disapproval, as if he scented some kind of insurrection, of defiance of his

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accepted standards. [. . .] He said at last: “Go and tear it up.” He spoke in a curiously tart, rasping, peevish voice; the voice of the enraged male; the voice which expressed his serious displeasure at this infringement of a code that meant more to him than he could admit. (165)

George’s reaction can be described perfectly in the terms how Smith characterizes the body deviating from “normalcy”: this body is associated with forces that threaten the stability of the cultural community, and is turned into a contaminating material (270). This revolting body, or just the dress (revolting in both senses of the word) interpreted in these terms are also related to Kristeva’s notions of the abject and abjection,13 and, in turn, can—even though just temporarily—become as the locus of resistance, and thus, of power for the autobiographical subject; furthermore, it has the implications of both creativity and the potential of gender as performativity (in Judith Butler’s sense of the word). 14 The text formulates the position of its autobiographical subject several times as standing on the margins of culture, which can be understood both as (self-)exclusion and as resistance. One of these metaphors is the almost cliché-like image of the gipsy or the child: “I felt as a gipsy or a child feels who stands at the flap of the tent and sees the circus going on inside” (167). This outsider’s position to the performative aspects of culture symbolized by the circus (and body image), however, cannot be maintained permanently; nevertheless, it can be interpreted as the locus of resistance on the basis of Foucault’s concept of power relations. In his view, if “at the heart of power relations and as a permanent condition of their existence there is an insubordination and a certain essential obstinacy on the part of the principles of freedom, then there is no relationship of power without the means of escape or possible flight.”15 Following Foucault, Teresa de Lauretis inserts the notion of gender, arguing that it is on the margins of hegemonic discourses that spaces (or rather: “spaceoffs”) come about that are left out of the masculine representational systems, and the relations between these two kinds of spaces are characterised by “contradiction, multiplicity and heteronomy”16—like the gipsy (or the child) standing at the door of the circus. Woolf’s text, thus, both reenacts and rewrites the dichotomy of the body and the mind, and at the same time faces the cultural inscription and embeddedness of the body, which, because of its performativity, is also a potential space of resistance. In this way, “A Sketch of the Past” can be considered an attempt at inscribing the body into the discourse of autobiography, to turn the body into the locus of the subject’s insubordination even if the matrix of cultural discourses leaves hardly any

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Control, Creativity and the Body in Virginia Woolf’s “A Sketch of the Past”

chance for that. The late Victorian period as represented by George, and as experienced by “Virginia”, is similar to the medieval Iron Maiden: “the machine into which our rebellious bodies were inserted in 1900 not only held us tight in its framework, but bit into us with innumerable sharp teeth” (166; emphasis added), and reduces the chance for resistance to a minimum. What could be the locus of insubordination in Woolf’s “A Sketch” is the textualisation of the body and bodily experience. Paradoxically, though, the kind of bodily experience that—according to the teleology of the text—needs writing is the most extreme form and manifestation of the masculine dominance and control over the female body in the late Victorian period: incest and abuse. The image of the body that is meant to be un- (or dis)covered, articulated and recalled stands opposed to the wholeness of the first memories. The severed, fragmented, victimised, violated body (see the key word in the letter to Ethel Smyth: “operation”), is for this very reason, potentially the bearer of a threatening and frightening knowledge and experience. After her abuse at the age of six, whenever “Virginia” looked into the mirror “a horrible face—the face of an animal—suddenly showed over [her] shoulder” (78) both in her dreams and in reality. As Thomas C. Caramagno interprets this motif, “the animalistic face belongs to Gerald (who is acting ‘beastly’), or perhaps even to Virginia (who desires this beastliness but, neurotically, cannot admit the fact).”17 This rather insensitive interpretation is not very far from Smith’s reading, which claims that the narrated “I” becomes frightened of her own abjected body and her own sexual desires. This is what she finds “horrible” because as a woman, the otherness and the inferiority of the female body exclude her from the circle of “superior” (or one could say: transcendental) subjects (275–276). Developing this idea, Smith draws the conclusion that by repressing her body, Woolf escapes from her own abjected and contaminating body, and by sublimation writes herself out of her body (281). Undeniably, the horrible face returns in various forms in the text and is related to the denial and sublimation of the body; or, as an alternative, the naked body or the lower part of the body exposed to the mirror (or mirrorlike puddle) utterly destabilizes the “I” from the locus of identity: There was the moment of the puddle in the path; when for no reason I could discover, everything suddenly became unreal; I was suspended; I could not step across the puddle; I tried to touch something . . . the whole world became unreal. Next, the other moment when the idiot boy sprang up with his hand outstretched mewing, slit-eyed, red-rimmed; and without saying a word, with a sense of the horror in me, I poured into his hand a

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bag of Russian toffee. But it was not over, for that night in the bath the dumb horror came over me. Again I had that hopeless sadness; that collapse I have described before; as if I were passive under some sledgehammer blow; exposed to a whole avalanche of meaning that had heaped itself up and discharged itself upon me, unprotected, with nothing to ward it off, so that I huddled up at my end of the bath, motionless. I could not explain it; I said nothing even to Nessa sponging herself at the other end. (87; emphases added.)

As it seems obvious from the passage, the naked (part of the) body revealed as a spectacle is not “natural”, it cannot be taken for granted, but is loaded with an “avalanche of meaning”; put differently, it is the object and result of discursive practices, and consequently the body cannot function as the home of identity. One of the “logical” consequences is that love in this text is disembodied: “bodiless; a light; an ecstasy” (117). It is both sublimated and separated from female sexuality as defined by men; or, turning the other way round, as could be seen above, the body inscribed by discursive practices is primarily rejected, and is resisted in exceptional moments only. On this basis, the interpretation of Caramagno or Smith, claiming that the narrated “I” discovers her own desired or repressed sexuality in the horrible face seems questionable because considering the context, the horrible face that appears either in the mirror or in the street can be understood as the other of herself only with difficulty; much rather, it can be the Other, figuring the face of a violent, penetrating sexuality breaking and fragmenting the body. The face appearing as whole in the mirror keeps recalling the “horrible face” causing the fragmentation that always needs facing, but that cannot, ultimately, be faced. There is a rhetorical inevitability in the process of discovery why the reason for the lookingglass shame is so difficult to bring to the surface: several cultural layers need to be removed until the narrator reaches the last—if not the ultimate—reason which she immediately “covers” with yet another, several-thousand year old cultural layer. First she mentions her being a tomboy, which is irreconcilable with looking into the mirror in the presence of others, or with wearing dresses nonchalantly (let us not forget how much the body and dresses are related in the text); then she attributes this feature to the “streak of the puritan” in her family; this is followed by “some ancestral dread”; and finally, “[a]nother memory, also of the hall, may help to explain” (76–77) her shame of the body: “[o]nce when I was very small Gerald Duckworth lifted me onto this [slab], and as I sat there he began to explore my body. [. . .] his hand explored my private parts too. I remember resenting, disliking it—what is the word for so dumb and

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mixed a feeling?” (77), and as the quote above shows, not even in the most intimate moment (while taking a joint bath), and not even to the closest sibling is it possible to speak about this experience. That “A Sketch of the Past” is left unfinished can also be understood as the admission of the impossibility of “telling the body” (as a precursor to, and as opposed to Hélène Cixous’s imperative of “writing the body”18). Woolf’s text makes an attempt at writing the body against all odds, but when the text ceases, and silence takes over, the narrator is struggling to utter an abuse lasting for nine or seven years, committed by the older halfbrother, George, supposedly between 1895 (the year of her mother’s death) or “just” 1897 (the year of her half-sister, Stella’s death)19 and 1904 (the year of Leslie Stephen’s death, when the siblings moved out of their Kensington home to Bloomsbury, and thus got rid of their half-brother’s oppressive and abusive presence). These years comprise the period when “a finger seemed laid on one’s lips [. . .] A finger was laid on our lips” (104), as the narrator compulsively repeats almost the same sentence, following each other closely, on the same page. What is remarkable, though, is that in this incremental repetition (typical of ballads), the changes indicate a rhetorical shift away from uncertainty to statement (“seemed” to “was”), and from a general rhetorical formula to a more personalized claim (“one’s” to “our”), which can be seen as a(n un)conscious attempt on behalf of the narrator to put herself into text, and to finally utter the unutterable, even if the self-reflexive metatextual remarks betray the awareness of the impossibility of “telling the truth”, particularly about the body. The last twenty pages of “A Sketch” can also be understood as the ambiguity relevant to the whole text: the narrator is struggling with uttering and with withholding the utterance at the same time, and reenacts the rhetorics of the memory of her abuse at the age of six. Although the logic and the telelology of the text would take her into the direction of the “dark years”, she would like to curb this process: Why do I shirk the task, not so very hard to a professional [. . .] like myself of wafting this boy [Thoby] from the boat to my bed sitting room at Hyde Park Gate? It is because I want to go on thinking about St Ives. [. . .] But it is true, I do not want to go into my room at Hyde Park Gate. I shrink from the years 1897–1904, the seven unhappy years. Not many lives were tortured and fretted and made numb with non-being as ours were then. [. . .] I am not thinking of mother and of Stella; I am thinking of the damage that their deaths inflicted. I will describe it more carefully later, I will illustrate with a scene or two. (149–50)

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The narrator’s comments constructing the text could be considered as a “natural” remark, a rhetorical gesture creating suspense. Conspicuous, though is that this self-reflexive comment of postponement is almost unparallelled in the text; more exactly, it has one parallel only, about twenty pages later, when, after describing George’s looks, the narrator starts analysing the character, and wonders why this half-brother insisted on pulling the sisters along from party to party each evening: “No, I puzzle; but I cannot find the true reason. Some crude wish to dominate there was; some jealousy, of Jack, no doubt; some desire to carry off the prize; and, as became obvious later, some sexual urge” (168; emphasis added). Rhetorically, the same structure is repeated here as in the case of the looking-glass shame: a series of reasons precede the most painful one, “the sexual urge.” But the text of “A Sketch of the Past” does not relieve the tension caused by the suspense: the text ceases to exist, only silence speaks. Woolf tried to do in this autobiographical text what in her essay “Professions for Women” she found missing from literature: to write her body; but what she found was the abused and fragmented female body. And whereas her attempt to write the body seems to coincide with Hélène Cixous’s feminist call to write the body in her “The Laugh of the Medusa”; the more Woolf writes the body, the less the cause for laughter is, and as such it cannot produce “more writing.”20 Giving up writing (or writing the body) can be understood in various ways. Based on Woolf’s diary entries DeSalvo argues that self-scrutiny became too painful, and the threat of the German invasion made Woolf feel that another bout of madness was approaching (133). We might also say, however, that in leaving the most painful and longest-lasting experience unuttered, Woolf’s exposure to Victorian self-discipline, taboos, and “the fingers on lips” took the upper hand. Beyond all this, the ensuing silence can be seen as the final conclusion of a narrator who, from the beginning of the text, is skeptical of her own authority, of textual representation, of the closure between the sign and referent, of the very process of signification. She nevertheless carries on with her game of writing, but gives it up at the moment when a new system of signs would be needed so that a not-yet signified referent should be conveyed, even though she is aware that it would be possible only with shifts and slippages: when she wants to tell the truth not just of her body, but of her abused body. The fragmented, violated, and long repressed body could be the new locus of the autobiographical subject, could be the moment of textual origin and teleology, and as such, the radical rewriting of autobiography. At this moment, however, all the pretences and games of linguistic representation are over. Once she experienced even life as “a

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strip of pavement over an abyss,”21 writing can only provide a temporary, fragile, instable and artificial crossover for abysmal existence.

Works Cited Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge, 1990. Caramagno, Thomas C. The Flight of the Mind: Virginia Woolf’s Art and Manic-Depressive Illness. Berkeley: U of California P, 1992. Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. In New French Feminisms: An Anthology. Ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, 245–64. New York: Schocken, 1981. De Man, Paul. “Autobiography as De-facement.” Modern Language Notes 94 (1979): 919–30. De Lauretis, Teresa. Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film and Fiction. London: Macmillan, 1989. DeSalvo, Louise. Virginia Woolf and the Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work. New York: Ballantine, 1989. Foucault, Michel. “The Subject and Power.” In Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. With an Afterword by and an Interview with Michel Foucault, ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983. 208-26. Gilmore, Leigh. Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women’s SelfRepresentation. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1994. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay On Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia, 1982. Lejeune, Philippe. “The Autobiographical Pact.” Trans. Katherine Leary. In On Autobiography, ed. Paul John Eakin. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989. 3-30. Neuman, Shirley. “‘An appearance walking in a forest the sexes burn’— Autobiography and the Construction of the Feminine Body.” In Autobiography and Postmodernism, ed. Kathleen Ashley, Leigh Gilmore and Gerald Peters. Boston: U of Massachusetts P, 1994. 293315. Smith, Sidonie. “Identity’s Body.” In Autobiography and Postmodernism, ed. Kathleen Ashley, Leigh Gilmore and Gerald Peters. Boston: U of Massachusetts P, 1994. 266-292. Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, I-V. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. London: Hogarth, 1977–1984.

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—. The Letters of Virginia Woolf, I-VI. Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautman. London: Hogarth, 1975–1980. —. “Professions for Women.” In The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, ed. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar. New York: Norton, 1985. 1383–1388. —. A Room of One’s Own. Three Guineas. Ed., intr. Morag Schiach. Oxford: OUP, 1992. —. “A Sketch of the Past.” Moments of Being. Ed., intr. Jeanne Schulkind. London: Grafton, 1976. 72–173.

Notes 1 Virginia Woolf, “Professions for Women,” in The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, ed. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (New York: Norton, 1985), 1387. Emphasis added. 2 Virginia Wolf, “A Sketch of the Past,” in Moments of Being, ed., intr. Jeanne Schulkind (London: Grafton, 1976), 72–173. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 3 Louise DeSalvo, Virginia Woolf and the Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work (New York: Ballantine, 1989), 99–113. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 4 Paul De Man, “Autobiography as De-facement,” Modern Language Notes 94 (1979): 926, 930. 5 This is a basic feature of autobiography that Philippe Lejeune calls the autobiographical pact: an assumed agreement between the writer and the reader that the writer, the narrator, and the narrated “I” of the text are identical, and this functions as the basis of verifiability and factuality—that is, truth. Cf. Philippe Lejeune, “The Autobiographical Pact,” trans. Katherine Leary, in On Autobiography, ed. Paul John Eakin (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989), 3–30. Paul de Man’s deconstructive notion of de-facement, however, destabilizes the assumed verifiability of autobiography. 6 Leigh Gilmore, Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women’s SelfRepresentation (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1994), 70. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 7 Shirley Neuman, “‘An appearance walking in a forest the sexes burn’: Autobiography and the Construction of the Feminine Body,” in Autobiography and Postmodernism, ed. Kathleen Ashley, Leigh Gilmore and Gerald Peters (Boston, U of Massachusetts P, 1994), 293. 8 Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. VI: 1936–41, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautman (London: Hogarth, 1980), 459–60. Emphasis added. 9 The “rod” is part of the metaphorical system created by Woolf in “A Sketch,” meaning a measuring rod or “standard” both in their original and abstract sense,

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that is something in the background, sometimes even invisible, against which we still tend to measure ourselves. 10 Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas, in A Room of One’s Own. Three Guineas, ed., intr. Morag Schiach (Oxford: OUP, 1992), 175. Emphasis added. 11 For the most concise theoretical formulation of this idea see Michel Foucault, “Afterword: The Subject and Power,” in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. With an Afterword by and an Interview with Michel Foucault (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983), 208–226. 12 Sidonie Smith, “Identity’s Body,” in Autobiography and Postmodernism, ed. Kathleen Ashley, Leigh Gilmore and Gerald Peters (Boston: U of Massachusetts P, 1994), 267. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 13 For abjection see Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay On Abjection., trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia, 1982), particularly chapter “From Filth to Defilement,” 56–89. Kristeva’s ideas on abjection comprise a psychoanalytical theory of the cultural construction of subjectivity in which a central claim seems to be that both cultures and human subjects come about defining what is “not me” in terms of “filth”, or cultural “defilement”. Yet, paradoxically, what is “not me” is not necessarily out of the boundaries of culture or the subject; on the contrary, it may be a part of oneself that we want to, but we cannot reject as “filth” (like semen, excrement, menstrual blood, shaven hair, etc.). They are turned into abject in the process of abjection: this is how concrete, very often tangible “filth” becomes conceptualized as “defilement” that evokes horror because it inevitably threatens the “clean” boundaries of culture/the subject since it is encoded in the very culture that wants to reject it. This is how, in my view, the dress that “Virginia” makes and puts on for the evening functions: as cultural defilement, encoded in the very same culture that it threatens, at least from George’s perspective because for him this is cultural pollution, cultural defilement. 14 In her Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990), Judith Butler develops the idea that gender, sex, and sexuality come about as a result of repetitive stylized bodily acts which, in turn, function as disciplinary or regulatory practices. This idea, however, does not lead either to utterly free voluntarism or to absolute subjection: gender as performativity both produces genders, and at the same time exposes the contradictions and instability inherent in gender constructions, providing a space for alternative—and often creative—gender performances (as in the case of the green dress), and thus for resistance. 15 Foucault, “Afterword: The Subject and Power,” 225. 16 Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film and Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1989), 26. 17 Thomas C. Caramagno, The Flight of the Mind: Virginia Woolf’s Art and Manic-Depressive Illness (Berkeley: U of California P, 1992 ), 144. 18 See Hélène Cixous, “Write yourself. Your body must be heard” from “The Laugh of the Medusa,” trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, in New French

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Feminisms: An Anthology, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (New York: Schocken, 1981), 250. 19 See the subsequent quote from “A Sketch”: whereas the years explicitly provided are 1897 (Stella’s death) and 1904, the following sentences claim that losing the mother was also a cause for the damage inflicted upon them, so the abuse may have started in 1895. 20 See Hélène Cixous, “More body, hence more writing” from “The Laugh of the Medusa,” 257. 21 Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Vol. II: 1920–1924., ed. Anne Olivier Bell, intr. Quentin Bell (London: Hogarth, 1978), 72.

GERTRUDE STEIN’S “EMOTIONAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY”: A BODY IN OCCUPIED FRANCE JILL PRUETT

In her essay examining the importance of the body in Stein’s career, Catharine Stimpson is careful to note that “Stein was, of course, far more than the fat lady of a Bohemian circus.”1 This may be so, but for the purpose of understanding Stein’s depictions of bodily life in Wars I Have Seen, it helps to start with the understanding that Stein’s success was always in part based on her utter willingness to perform the role. Although nature gave Stein a body of somewhat uncommon morphology, making a spectacle of it, at least to the international extent that she did, was optional. Just before one of Stein’s lecture tours of America, Janet Flanner, a writer for the New Yorker (and a close friend of Stein’s) helped pen the following attention-grabbing description of Stein for the magazine: Miss Stein has an outsize bathtub that was especially made for her… The lady wears astonishing clothes: sandals, woolen stockings fit for a footballplayer, a man's plush fedora hat perched high on her head, rough tweed suits over odd embroidered waistcoats and peasant tunics. She also wears extraordinary blue-and-white striped knickers for underdrawers.2

Remarkably, Catharine Stimpson and Janet Flanner have been consistent apologists for Stein. These are Stein’s admirers mentioning “circus,” “outsize bathtub,” and “football player” when they talk about her looks. Given Flanner’s long friendship with Stein, it is very likely that Stein took these descriptions in stride. Stein’s public image was strange enough to warrant comment—and therefore also explication. Stein herself offered several explanations in the form of interviews, speeches, and, of course, autobiographies. For Gertrude Stein, autobiography came almost as an addendum to the numerous public representations of her body that accompanied the early phase of her celebrity, which initially was an effect of her accomplishment as an art collector and salon hostess rather than as an author. In a sense, then, Stein initially entered public consciousness less as a writer than as a

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literal public figure; the renderings of her body in painting and sculpture— not to mention in the press—that ushered her image into public discourse insisted on the heft and import of her body,3 and for many years, these images, along with her vague association with the arts, were the sum total of Gertrude Stein’s celebrity. Perhaps not coincidentally, Stein’s first commercial success as a writer (though by no means her first autobiographical text) was the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which had among its merits a relatively conventional structure through which Stein’s public could interpret visual representations of her person. Kevin Dettmar and Steven Watt’s Marketing Modernisms points out that it is demonstrable that never before in Western literary history have marketing forces exerted so strong a force over artists in all media than during the first four decades of this century. Advertising is arguably the modern(ist) art form par excellence.4

Helga Lénárt-Cheng positions Stein within this dynamic in her “Autobiography As Advertisement,” which suggests that Stein understood, harnessed, and benefitted from the interconnection of public interest in her person and her autobiographical writing. Stein’s celebrity was always linked to her physicality; as soon as she began to be known, her public was at least as familiar with her eccentric looks as her writing style. In 1940, having chosen to stay after German forces began their occupation of France, Stein found herself in a delicate situation. She was very famous—in no small part for the way she looked; Nazi ideology deemed degenerate every aspect of the image she had worked so hard to promote. Yet Stein made no special efforts to present an image that would have been safer, given the political climate in Europe. Lénárt-Cheng notes that differences unlikely to endear Stein to her public were always an intrinsic part of Stein’s image. After the publication of the Autobiogaphy of Alice B. Toklas, Lénárt-Cheng notes: not only did her writings become popular overnight, but so did her eccentric person. In the years preceding the publication of the autobiography, the public image of Stein was quite scandalous, and her personality was surrounded by the distrust attributable to notorious eccentrics. It is enough to look at a picture of Gertrude Stein from that period to understand the reservations of the audience—a rich, eccentric, lesbian American Jew living in Paris who wore monk-style clothes and hairstyles—no wonder she gave to many of her contemporaries the impression of an unapproachable, rigid Sphinx.5

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Lénárt-Cheng captures the extent to which Stein’s celebrity overlapped with, as she puts it, the “notorious.” Although certainly known, it is by no means self-evident that she was liked. Misogyny and anti-Semitism had always been inextricable from Stein’s reception, but when these ideologies were increasingly codified during World War II, Stein found herself in a very uneasy position. One of the earliest, most fervent adopters when it came to combining autobiography with image via the media now found that the very physicality of her celebrity put her in special danger, given the Nazi obsession with the morphology of degeneracy. If Jews, mannish women uninterested in childbearing, and modern artists all looked a certain way, and if Nazis were using their morphologies to identify them, Stein was in real trouble. This essay presents an interpretation of Wars I Have Seen, Gertrude Stein’s last book-length autobiography that starts with two commonplaces in American Studies: first, that Gertrude Stein was a Jewish lesbian celebrity of modernism; and second, that during World War II in France, Jews (and to a lesser extent, lesbians and modernists) were singled out in dangerous ways. Perhaps surprisingly, these commonplaces point to a productive way of understanding Wars I Have Seen, which has been largely unread or dismissed as an inartistic diary obsessed with the domestic trivialities of life in occupied France. This essay adds to earlier assessments of the text’s domestic detail an observation that although the domestic detail is there, it is only part of a larger, unconventional representation of one human’s attempts to make sense of her difficult life during World War II. Since it was first published in 1945, readers have focused overwhelmingly on the domestic details that pervade the pages of Wars I Have Seen. Before Stein’s final autobiography was even published, Random House positioned the text as less creative than journalistic. The original advertisement in the New York Times called Wars “the first unbiased, full-length picture of the farmers, bakers, mayors, maquis and collaborationists.”6 As so often happens, readers did not receive the text in precisely the way its publisher hoped. If Random House had hoped to position the book as a sensational/historical document, it was likely disappointed by early reviews, which interpreted the text’s emphasis on physical detail as a disconnection with anything of significance. If the physical details of celebrity life in Paris were charming to readers of the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, the physical details of Stein’s survival in Nazi-occupied Paris seemed to bore them. Malcolm Cowley’s review for the New York Times dismissively mentions the text’s “trivial detail,” and “excessively personal style, with its flatness of statement, its

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repetitions.”7 John Malcolm Brinnin’s 1959 The Third Rose called it “a dull, long-winded book which does not outlive its topical interest.”8 Even recent critics seem focused on the text’s domesticity, citing it to imply that Stein was truly uninterested in politics. John Whittier-Ferguson, for example, reading Stein’s World War II writing, concludes that “no modernist more uncompromisingly asserts independence from and indifference to each of the politicized venues in which she finds herself.”9 In Whittier-Ferguson’s reading, the comforts of domesticity are Stein’s primary interest, signaling a corollary lack of interest in the “politicized venues” of race and gender. While I agree with Whittier-Ferguson that Stein was not invested in politics in quite the way so many of her readers seem to have hoped, I think the content of Wars I Have Seen suggests a more extroverted, more engaged World War II Stein than has previously been imagined. She certainly saw herself in a larger context, and the jerky, uncomfortable telescoping between immediate and broader contexts is arguably the primary narrative gesture of the book. As in other eras of her career, Stein insists on the importance of the body, but now, when the celebrity body cannot be displayed, she centralizes the body in a more primal way: as the basic site of individual existence, as a point of reference for thinking about and trying to make sense of an increasingly irrational world. The text is, as readers have always observed, concerned with domesticity and physical detail. What is important to notice, though, is that these details are rendered adjacent to their broader contexts. For example, it is true that Stein writes very often of going on walks and looking for food, but she does recognize the larger situation in which this scene of hunting-and-gathering takes place. One reason readers may have been overly-focused on domestic detail is that they simply found what they expected to find in an old woman’s autobiography of rural life. Everyone “knows” that old people like comforts and sweets. Every pre-war photo of Stein suggests that she had always liked these things, so perhaps it is not surprising that when readers look through the pages of Wars, their eyes focus primarily on the passages recounting daily efforts to find good things to eat. Certainly, the organization of the book, like Stein’s own physicality, is ponderous. Mabel Dodge Luhan, who had, at one point, been infatuated with Stein, wrote that “Pounds and pounds and pounds piled up on her skeleton—not the billowing kind, but massive, heavy fat.”10 Similarly, Wars I Have Seen has no section breaks and no chapter breaks. More than 250 pages are completely filled with type.11 As is perhaps to be expected in Stein, clauses are rarely separated by punctuation in the way readers

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expect, and if one insists on Stein’s exile from Paris and eventual liberation as the central plot, one will likely be made very, very impatient by the many passages that have only the loosest connection to it. Disoriented readers may have simply latched on to the first words that seemed familiar—walk, eggs, cake, bread, chicken, goat, etc. What is more difficult to make sense of is the other content, which is just as pervasively there. The sheer density of typeface makes it difficult to notice, but Stein is really talking about several things at once—not just cake. I quote a characteristic paragraph to show that Stein uses physical detail as a counterpoint to other, equally-significant refrains. In the following paragraph, an historical discussion gives way to a discussion of the concept of era, only then pulling back into Stein’s personal, domestic pursuits, and then finally to a story about women made pregnant by dogs who gave birth to puppies: I remember being always so interested in the émigrés after the French revolution going to England, and in spite of everything immensely enjoying the complete change in their lives, anything is better than nothing more than more of the same only nobody knows it, and that is what makes pioneering but then those are the adventurous people who would be doing something anyway, but a war that puts an end to a century that makes one century change to another century that kind of war always makes a considerable part of the population get moving and in a way they enjoy it, the Russians did after the Russian revolution, but now this is on a much larger scale, everybody is moving around, they are on the roads they are everywhere and nothing is as it was, in America and England and the few neutral nations but everybody else is moving around moving around. And now Hungary and Roumania are joining in and it goes on more and more, that is what makes the end of a century, nothing is as it used to be, nothing at all, and that does make an end of a century. I was walking this afternoon up to Ceyzerieu, it is quite a walk fourteen kilometers up and back and I get a little tired particularly as I have rheumatism in one knee, one is bound to have rheumatism somewhere in a world cataclysm, but anyway, we got some very good cake there and cake is a comfort, cake certainly is a comfort. I usually talk to somebody on the way, they even sometimes get off their bicycles to walk along a way with me and she did, she was an oldish woman and we compared family histories she was married and had no children, but she had a great-nephew staying with her and she wanted to know all about me and she told me all about herself and then she said her niece from Bourg had just been to see her, she was the mother of the greatnephew whom she had kept with her and she had a young baby and she brought the baby with her and she told her that a woman in the Maternity at Bourg had just been brought to bed that is she just been been delivered of six little puppy dogs, not possibly I said, but yes she said, not often but quite often, you see she said, in times like these women do console

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themselves with dogs and this does happen, of course the dogs dont survive they are kept in museums, but it does happen, not really I said, oh yes, she said, in Bourg they once had it happen to a nun, and when the doctor went to see her the dog would not let him come near her. Did it really happen oh yes, she said it does happen and it did happen. (167-8)

This paragraph is utterly representative of the text as a whole, which uses neither paragraph breaks nor punctuation to separate ideas. Rather, Stein juxtaposes discourses (most often historic, national, and personal with less pervasive depictions of the irrational) throughout the book. Patterns emerge, but in the process of trying to find patterns, readers are likely to notice that this very process is what Stein is depicting. The narrative is not as simplistically domestic as readers originally thought, but it does have a common thread, which is the depiction of a mind incessantly engaged in trying to make sense out of what it sees and hears. Only the domestic anecdotes bear any resemblance to traditional narrative structures—though they often depart from convention too. Because reading narrative means stringing together causally linked elements while discarding others in order to make meaning, it is perhaps not surprising that the elements of Wars I Have Seen that do not appear to relate directly and personally to Gertrude Stein’s day-to-day life have long gone unremarked upon, as though they are just some unimportant textual eccentricity. Certainly, the text is rife with eccentricity; but in light of Stein’s situation under the German occupation, I think we can make sense of those passages that seem to be nonsensical. By noticing the way that the most humorous, irrational passages work as a counterpoint to the most concrete-seeming, most traditionally narrated descriptions of “trivial” (as Malcolm Cowley put it) domestic life, it becomes possible to see that the gestalt of the discourses might reasonably be interpreted as a coded contestation of the irrational violence to the body that was intrinsic to Nazi ideology, and which, of course, was the occasion for the temporary retirement from public life that Wars I Have Seen describes. Understood this way, Wars can be seen to contest the privileged position that allows Cowley to cast domestic life as “trivial.” When one’s safety is threatened to the extent that one has to flee beloved friends and cultural life of Paris—not to mention an internationally renowned collection of art—in order to preserve some semblance of easy domesticity, this domesticity naturally is prized. Life itself, in all its small daily comforts, is the very thing that one values most, and depersonalized philosophical and political discourses are of very little significance compared to the loss of one’s bodily safety. Writing from post-war America, Cowley can hardly be blamed for thinking domestic life and comforts trivial matters. As a Jewish

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lesbian writing from occupied France, Stein can hardly be blamed for disagreeing. Attending to all the different discourses Stein juxtaposes suggests an author who was very aware of her situation in France. In this context, an otherwise incomprehensible fact from the Stein archives at Yale suddenly makes perfect sense. In her 1957 Gertrude Stein: Her Life and Work, Elizabeth Sprigge mentions—in direct opposition to the prevailing critical assessment—that she understood Wars I Have Seen as being primarily about interior life. In her research, Sprigge discovered that “On the cover of the first exercise book is written ‘An emotional autobiography.’ Crossed out and underneath [are the words,] ‘I am really writing my autobiography.’ The first page is headed: ‘Gertrude Stein’s War Autobiography.’”12 Perhaps as a result of her discovery, Sprigge was alert to the anxiety apparent in the text and noticed that Stein often interjected passages with “dear me.” In general, though, Sprigge shares other early critics’ tendency to feminize—that is, diminutize—the contents of Wars I Have Seen. Where other critics see only laundry lists, Sprigge sees primarily laundry lists plus overwrought emotionalism. Sprigge’s revelation that Stein thought of the piece—at least at some point in the drafting—as an emotional autobiography is very suggestive, though. Taking emotional life as the primary topic makes it possible to interpret the telescoping subject matter in new and productive ways. Perhaps the juxtaposition of exiles after the French revolution with her own situation of foraging and socializing in a foreign country reflects Stein’s sense that her emotional existence was as much an effect of physical comfort and safety as it was of broader concerns that during the Nazi occupation were, as it happens, directly related to the comfort and safety of people like Stein. Understanding what is rational and true is a central concern of Wars, and Stein would have had a number of reasons for focusing on questions of genetics and legitimacy: the government in France was widely considered illegitimate, for example. In a darker possibility, perhaps the French woman raised the question of women consoling themselves with dogs after having questioned Stein all about herself. Certainly women wanting to marry each other has been likened, in unnaturalness, to wanting to marry a dog, and the question of naturalness is another of Stein’s refrains in Wars. Many of Stein’s anecdotes—and their juxtapositions with other anecdotes—are like this: suggestive of simultaneously possible interpretations that in turn suggest other interpretations. This constant effort to follow the logic of the story that Stein forces on her readers mirrors her own efforts to understand the occupation.

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Stein often ostentatiously employs the language of cause and effect even as the content of her paragraphs actively undermines the logic her language seems to promise. Once we begin to look for them, we can find examples of undermined logical relationships in every paragraph. The first paragraph of the book begins by calling into question what is real versus what is remembered and simultaneously raises the question of what the proper subject (in both senses of the word) of an autobiography is. As always, the language holds a promise of logical order; “to begin with,” is perhaps a reference to conventional autobiography’s ordering of events— like Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography, beginning at the beginning. The passage also has an appeal to bodily life inasmuch as Stein refers immediately to her birth and her father. In this case, the apropos example of the autobiographical convention at work might be Booker T. Washington’s autobiography, which also uses the universal of childhood to welcome readers who might otherwise be inimical to his story. Stein begins Wars I Have Seen this way: I do not know whether to put in the things I do not remember as well as the things I do remember. To begin with I was born, that I do not remember but I was told about it quite often, I was not born during the night but about eight o’clock in the morning and my father whenever I had anything the matter with me always reproached me by telling me that I had been born a perfect baby. (3)

Should she include only firsthand experience, or also the testimony of others? Does the fact that both are in the distant past and must be remembered make a difference? The first sentence of the book makes it quite clear that the narrator in no way expects the story to be understood as an objective report. The second sentence (also quoted above) demonstrates that both firsthand experience and second hand testimony are suspect. Here, Stein establishes the pattern of dropping connective words and phrases that presuppose a serious logic. Where she uses conjunctions to convey logical structure, she is almost always joking; “To begin with” suggests that Stein will give a linear account of her youth, and indeed, the complete rendering is “To begin with, I was born,” a blatant pastiche of autobiography. Throughout the text, Stein eschews the conventional use of conjunctions and other kinds of logical linking phrases in favor of simply fused sentences, leaving readers to deduce for themselves how the units of meaning hang together. The second sentence begins the motif of fusing units together in ways that prompt readers to abandon their expectations of logical cause and effect relationships. In order to make sense of the second sentence of Wars I Have Seen, a reader would have to make not one but

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two departures from conventional cause and effect reasoning. “I was not born during the night but about eight o’clock in the morning” is offered— obliquely—as an explanation for her father’s belief that she was a “perfect baby.” The “explanation” is in fact an allusion to a superstition concerning the bad luck that afflicts babies born at night. A similar illogic links the idea of having been a perfect baby with reproach for the inevitable fall from perfection. In effect, the second sentence, much like the first, undermines any approach to the text that hopes to “make sense” of the story. While Wars I Have Seen starts with Stein’s childhood and ends in her adulthood, there is no sense of a bildungsroman. The confusions of perspective that characterize her childhood impressions of war repeat themselves in the middle and the end. The narrator, who we are told has seen or heard about any number of wars, has no clearer understanding at seventy than she did at three. The conspicuous markers of narrative pacing that mark the text turn out to lead nowhere, either as logical connectors or as signals of progress. Most often, they are red herrings, as when the narrator frames a shift in tone with an introduction that later turns out to be completely irrelevant to what follows: “this is my scientific history” opens a discussion of war that has little to no bearing on science (60). This passage is two sentences that link neither to each other nor to the surrounding sentences: “But to come back to what we all thought about Petain. Bernard Fay and the chocolate cake” (90). These red herring beginnings have in common an appearance of pushing a confusing narrative back on track, but since neither does, their effect is quite the opposite of what it first seems. By promising a familiarity that is withheld, the passages illuminate the empty space where we had hoped to find logical narration. If science offers a hypothesis and relevant observations, all Stein offers us is observation. Similarly, the promise to say “what we all thought” is followed only by evidence, not by conclusion. Although employing different voices, Stein’s narrator relies on a core vocabulary that works to highlight irrationality; words that appear throughout the text in unconventional—even irrational—ways include real, logical, natural, funny, strange, and the interjection oh dear me. Perhaps surprisingly, Wars I Have Seen contains a number of comedic passages, but the word “funny” applies most often to situations that are threatening and/or do not seem to make sense. For example, Stein explains early in the text what she means by funny: “It is funny funny in the sense of strange and peculiar and unrealizable, the fact that there are so many prisoners, prisoners, prisoners everywhere” (47). Later, Stein uses the word again to describe the sensation of having Nazis and Fascists billeted

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in her house: “So a few weeks ago we had here in the house first the German officers and then later on the Italians. It is funny to be Americans and to be here in France and to have that” (69). Often, however, these uses appear adjacent to anecdotes that are funny in the sense of comedic. Just following the passage describing the army occupation of her house, during which she and Alice Toklas were presumably taken for French (they masqueraded as French ladies often in public and during another instance of occupation), Stein mentions that her French poodle was often mistaken for a sheep. The juxtapositions highlight the differing impacts that failures of rationalism can have; sometimes the lapse is threatening, other times it is comedic. It’s worth noticing that whether the irrationalism is threatening or comedic, it is physical. Even in these passages that are not about cake, eggs, etc., the body is present, sometimes as a specter of bodily risk, other times as the subject of a Groucho Marx-style physical comedy. For example, mistaken apprehension is often the cause of comedy in Wars I Have Seen, but even more often it underlies a serious situation. Occasionally, the effects meet in a single anecdote, such as the following passage, which unites physical risk with physical comedy: In a bus in Paris, there were on the back platform a German soldier and some Frenchmen and the soldier accidentally stepped on the foot of the Frenchman and he having sensitive feet hit out and hit the German, before anything more could happen a very little Frenchman at the completely other end of the bus came rushing and he too hit the soldier…and then the second and little Frenchman was asked why he had rushed out and hit the soldier. Well he said it was like this, I suddenly saw a Frenchman hit out and strike a German soldier and I said hello the war must be over let me go to it…. (79)

The anecdote is one of only a few that follow a familiar expositional convention, nevertheless the story encapsulates both kinds of funniness: we recognize that both Frenchmen in the story are in a perilous situation, but we laugh anyway. Both effects have roots in irrationality—first of the Nazi philosophies that led to the occupation, and then of the little Frenchman who mistakenly assumes the war must have suddenly ended during his bus ride. Like Stein herself, Wars I Have Seen is a profoundly strange, unconventional text. Early critics rightly sensed that as a Steinian autobiography, the body was likely to play an important part in generating text’s meaning, but Wars depicts more than the mere life of a body. Rather, it depicts that body actively navigating a troubled relationship to a

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larger world. Not perhaps “properly” political, the book does reveal an author who is always, always trying to find comfort, safety, and logic in a setting overcome by danger and irrationality. The relation of the self to others is more conclusively the subject of Wars than simple domesticity. The celebrity Stein who deploys the physical differently, though, makes a few returns toward the end of the autobiography. Body as signifier of safety takes a celebratory turn as Stein’s own physical safety seems more certain. As soon as she is once again free to attract attention and be the famous “fat lady of the bohemian circus,” Stein meets two Spanish soldiers in a roadside café. She mentions her relationships to Hemingway and Picasso, and then reports “If said I you see the journalist again tell her that I want to see her, and I told them my name but they wont remember but anyway it was a pleasure to send word” (240).

Works Cited Brinnin, John Malcolm. The Third Rose. Boston: Little, Brown, 1959. Cowley, Malcolm. “Gertrude Stein for the Plain Reader.” New York Times, March 11, 1945, BR1. Dettmar, Kevin J.H. and Steven Watt, eds. Marketing Modernisms: SelfPromotion, Canonization, and Rereading. Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1996. Flanner, Janet, James Thurber, and Harold Ross. “Tender Buttons.” New Yorker, October 13, 1934, New Yorker Archive. January 23, 2009 . Lénárt-Cheng, Helga. “Autobiography as Advertisement: Why Do Gertrude Stein’s Sentences Get under Our Skin?” New Literary History: A Journal of Theory and Interpretation 34.1 (2003): 117-31. New York Times. Random House advertisement for Wars I Have Seen. March 14, 1945, BR6. Malcolm, Janet. “Gertrude Stein’s War.” New Yorker, June 2, 2003, 59. Sprigge, Elizabeth. Gertrude Stein: Her Life and Work. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957. Stein, Gertrude. Wars I Have Seen. New York: Random, 1945. Stendhal, Renate. Gertrude Stein in Words and Pictures. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 1994. Stimpson, Catharine R. “The Somagrams of Gertrude Stein.” Poetics Today 6:1/2 (1985): 67-80. Wagner-Martin, Linda. Favored Strangers: Gertrude Stein and Her Family. New Jersey: Rutgers, 1995.

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Whittier-Ferguson, John. “Stein in Time: History, Manuscripts, and Memory.” Modernism/Modernity 6.1 (1999): 115-151.

Notes 1

Catharine R. Stimpson, “The Somagrams of Gertrude Stein,” Poetics Today 6:1/2 (1985): 69. 2 Janet Flanner, James Thurber, and Harold Ross, “Tender Buttons,” New Yorker, October 13, 1934. 3 In 1994, Renate Stendhal published a book containing 360 of the most important images called Gertrude Stein in Words and Pictures. Stendhal reproduces portraits by Man Ray, Cecil Beaton, Carl van Vechten, Francis Picabia, and Pablo Picasso, among many others. 4 Kevin J. H. Dettmar and Steven Watt, eds, Marketing Modernisms: SelfPromotion, Canonization, and Rereading (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1996), 4-5. 5 Helga Lénárt-Cheng, “Autobiography as Advertisement: Why Do Gertrude Stein’s Sentences Get under Our Skin?” New Literary History: A Journal of Theory and Interpretation 34.1 (2003): 117. 6 New York Times, Random House advertisement for Wars I Have Seen, March 14, 1945, BR6. 7 Malcolm Cowley, “Gertrude Stein for the Plain Reader,” New York Times, March 11, 1945, BR1. 8 John Malcolm Brinnin, The Third Rose (Boston: Little, Brown, 1959), 375. 9 Gertrude Stein, Wars I Have Seen (New York: Random, 1945), 117. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 10 Stimpson, 68. 11 This is true of the first American edition. The British edition brought out by Bedford has a striking difference: the addition of a number of images of Stein’s body, including glossy photographs as well as a dust jacket design by Cecil Beaton depicting (in watercolor) Stein and Toklas in their garden, waving at parachutists falling from the sky. 12 Sprigge, Elizabeth. Gertrude Stein: Her Life and Work. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957, 243.

PART II THE BODY AND WOMEN’S LIFE WRITING

THEY WEREN’T WHAT THEY ATE: MEMOIRS BY JUDITH MOORE AND BETSY LERNER TIMOTHY DOW ADAMS

“Cooking is to our literature what sex was to the writing of the sixties and seventies, the thing worth stopping the story for to share, so to speak, with the reader.” —Adam Gopnik

In this essay I am concentrating on three recent autobiographies related to food and the body: Never Eat Your Heart Out and Fat Girl both by Judith Moore, and Betsy Lerner’s Food and Loathing.1 The emergence and growth of interdisciplinary scholarly work on food is becoming increasingly important in life writing about our bodies. Food Studies has recently become a burgeoning field for humanistic and literary study, as evidenced by the emergence of interdisciplinary conferences organized by the Association for the Study of Food and Society and the occasional Conference on Food Representation in Literature, Film, and The Other Arts, which is sponsored by the University of Texas at San Antonio. These conferences have led to such journals as Food, Culture, and Society; Appetite: Research on Eating and Drinking; Convivium Artium; The Journal of Gastronomy, Agriculture and Human Values; Food and History, and Gastronomica, to name only those more oriented toward the humanities, as well as occasional special issues of other journals, such as Mosaic’s “Diet and Discourse: Eating, Drinking and Literature.” Succulent creative writing related to food appears in the biannual journal Alimentum: The Literature of Food. In addition, colleges and universities have begun to offer degrees ranging from an undergraduate program at the new University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo, Italy and State University of New York at Stony Brook’s new Center for Wine, Food and Culture to a Master of Literal Arts in Gastronomy from Boston University, The University of Adelaide, and the University of Reims. Because eating is essential for survival, everyone has a stake in this emerging field. As Sara

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Suleri asks, “Who was it said that food was the only desire that renews itself three times a day?”2 Numerous literary or cultural studies scholars have written books about the relationships between food, eating, hunger, cooking, cookbooks, and related topics in literature, as can be seen from the following short list of some of the major scholarly books in this field: Avakian’s Through the Kitchen Window, Curtin and Heldke’s Cooking, Eating, Thinking, Lupton’s Food, the Body, and The Self, Inness’s Dinner Roles, Shapiro’s A Feast of Words for Lovers of Food and Fiction, Joan and John Digby’s Food For Thought, Winegardner’s We Are What We Ate, Stowell and Foster’s Appetite, Warnes’s Hunger Overcome?, Bower’s Recipes for Reading, Theophano’s Eat My Words, Schofield’s Cooking by the Book, Crick’s Kafka's Soup, Skubal’s Word of Mouth, and many more, including the wonderfully titled Voracious Children: Who Eats Whom in Children's Literature by Carolyn Daniel.3 In addition to these scholarly studies, many examples of life writing about food have been published creating an early canon in this category. From Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, Richard Wright’s American Hunger, and Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory to more recent examples such as Sara Suleri’s Meatless Days, Ruth Reichl’s Tender at the Bone, Elizabeth Ehrlich’s Miriam’s Kitchen, James Alan McPherson’s Crabcakes: A Memoir, Lori Gottlieb’s Stick Figure, Patricia Volk’s Stuffed, Betty Fussell’s My Kitchen Wars, Austin Clarke’s Pig Tails ‘n Breadfruit, William Leith’s The Hungry Years: Confessions of a Food Addict, Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, John Haney’s Fair Shares for All: A Memoir of Family and Food, Carmit Delman’s Burnt Bread and Chutney, Judith Jones’s The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food, Jonathan Reynolds’s Wrestling with Gravy: A Life, with Food, Marya Hornbacher’s Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia, and perhaps the most celebrated of all, M.F.K. Fisher’s The Gastronomical Me, examples of this subgenre appear weekly.4 For this essay, I would like to apply Kim Chernin’s assertion, from The Hungry Self: Women, Eating and Identity—“a troubled relation to food is one of the principal ways the problems of female being come to expression in women’s lives”5—first to Food and Loathing: A Lament, the recent memoir by Betsy Lerner, which is an especially effective entry in the particular literary sub-genre of life writing in which food, hunger (physical and intellectual), eating, craving and cooking are central. Food and Loathing demonstrates on every page the author’s constant battle with compulsive overeating, body image and self worth. Betsy Lerner’s book also falls into another subgenre of life-writing—the mental illness memoir

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as she slowly begins to connect her compulsive eating and her constant depressions, what she calls her swings between “food and mood” (286). Some readers have seen this combination (food and mental illness) as producing an insufficient level of harrowing difficulty for Lerner, who seems to some critics to be not really that overweight and to others as not really that mentally ill. My argument, however, is the opposite: the author’s lifelong membership in Overeaters Anonymous and a late diagnosis of bipolar disorder are interrelated, making her book an important and affecting entry in both genres. In an interview Lerner noted that she was “more comfortable talking about manic-depression than food consumption.”6 Despite the balance of its title, Lerner’s text is often more concerned with loathing than with actual food. In a recent essay in The New Yorker called “Cooked Books.”,” Adam Gopnik asserts that: there are four kinds of food in books: food that is served by an author to characters who are not expected to taste it; food that is served by an author to characters in order to show who they are; food that an author cooks for characters in order to eat it with them; and, last (and most recent), food that an author cooks for characters but actually serves to the reader.”7

Food and Loathing, however, contains none of these kinds of food because there is scarcely any actual food mentioned at all. Instead the book is filled with a steady diet of self-loathing related to eating rather than actual food consumed, a parallel to the common situation in which an overweight person refrains from eating in public. Where many of the books I’ve named are filled with gorgeous, lyrical descriptions of meals of distinction—either because of their exceptional preparation or their nostalgic evocations—the food in Lerner’s book is almost always some variation on ordinary snack foods: Yodels, a pot of noodles, McDonald’s hamburgers, hospital Jell-O, and other mundane examples which are seldom described in any detail. Where many literary authors tempt us with sumptuous and elaborate meals, Betsy Lerner, despite the fact that she is a former editor who holds an M.F.A. in poetry from Columbia University and has won national poetry prizes, describes actual food as little more than fuel for self-hatred. Unlike those memoirists who are unable to resist the fanciest of foods or whose sense of self is always connected to the need to produce elaborate meals for others, Lerner instead concentrates on her overwhelming compulsions to eat almost anything and the self hatred that results. Food and Loathing was originally subtitled “A Lament,” although in the paperback version the subtitle was changed to “A Life Measured Out

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in Calories.” A lament, in traditional literary terminology, is a lyrical expression of intense personal grief and regret. Unlike the case of many confessional memoirs of overeating, the grief and regret in Lerner’s book is less about her body image or her difficulties with accepting her weight and more about her constant round of self-loathing over allowing food to become such an all-consuming part of her life. One reason for the absence of food in a book called Food and Loathing is the author’s long-term relationship to Overeater’s Anonymous (OA,) an organization which she joined in 1975, a time period when, she notes, “Fat was not yet a feminist issue” (24). Just as OA’s meetings forbade “talk of actual food,” calling instead for heartfelt confessions, so her memoir replaces food with personal anguish. “Bingeing is about obliteration and escape,” she noted, adding “It just doesn’t have anything to do with eating as you know it, as a social form.”8 Following the strictest definition of OA’s regimen, Lerner lost eighteen pounds her first month, fifty within a half year. Rather than concentrating on exercise or healthier foods, she focused on the more abstract tenants of OA, which included at that time in the organization’s history an emphasis on abstinence. Attending an OA convention as a teenager, Lerner was drawn to sessions ranging from “‘What is Higher Power?’ to ‘HALT,’ an acronym for ‘Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired’” (34). Bent on achieving an almost spiritual perfection, she tried to follow such statements as “Nothing Tastes as Good as Abstinence Feels” (34). While the OA acronym refers to eating abstinence, the author is more concerned that her weight decreases her sexual attractiveness. Wanting to lose weight mainly as a first step toward avoiding sexual abstinence, Lerner is disappointed to realize while her weight loss did increase her ability to attract boys, her sexual experiences did not result in an equivalent sense of self-worth. Unfulfilled by her loss of sexual abstinence and unable to maintain her food abstinence for long, she soon reverted to compulsive eating and regained her lost weight. Describing her lack of will to avoid over eating, she begins to think of herself as addicted to eating, a hamburger slaking her pain: “fortunately the first bite of McDonalds was like heroin, the salt and grease combining in a hot explosion that traveled right to the pain center and wiped it out” (46). Although she begins to believe that her over-eating is less a question of food and more a problem about her compulsive tendency itself, she describes her constant need to eat through a food metaphor: “my own selfloathing was like a furnace; there was nothing that didn’t feed it. Everything was consumed in the flame” (167). Throughout her memoir, the author uses words related to eating even when she is not writing

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specifically about food. She writes of a heavy classmate who has “clotted cheeks” (11), and describes yet another attempt at following the rules of OA with the words “I had this thing licked” (35). Desperate to confide in her parents, especially her overweight father, she notes that “I knew I would be devoured, so I stayed alone in terror” (92). During the short time she spent at a summer camp in Israel experiencing her first real boyfriend, a time during which she was at her lightest, Lerner writes “That summer I was the girl whom the other girl hated. One cornered me in a restroom and warned that I’d be lonely when he dumped me. I didn’t care. I’d gladly take all the loneliness in the world for one slice of this cake” (39). Despite her success at lowering her food consumption, the acquisition of a boyfriend, and the envy of others for her slender body, Lerner is still willing to trade everything for a quick snack, so strong is her eating disorder. Because she seldom enjoys the actual food or the act of eating, she begins to sense that something else is at the heart of her recurring problems. Her struggles with what she begins to refer to as food addiction eventually lead her to a psychiatrist who tells her that she suffers from bipolar affective disorder, which was then called manic-depression. Ironically, her compulsive eating does not apply to her initial reaction to this diagnosis when she resists taking lithium, the standard medication for bipolar disorder. While she has previously tried to assuage her pain through secret consumption of almost any food available, she is not willing to consume her prescribed medication. Like many with bipolar disorder, she is somewhat reluctant to allow her medications to dampen the manic side of her condition while more than willing to alleviate the depressive pole. For most of her life compulsive eating has been a form of self-medication, despite the fact that it inevitably leads to depression over her inability to stop eating. When Lerner writes of herself, “I am powerless over Hostess cakes, and my life has become unmanageable” (33), she is referring both to her tendency to overeat and the effects of lithium, a usually effective medication with the unfortunate side effect of weight gain. “I knew I hated myself,” she writes, adding “but I also didn’t want to swallow anything that would change me” (47). Food and Loathing begins with an epigram from I. B. Singer: “Of course I believe in free will. What choice do I have?” This paradox takes on increased significance as the author moves from self-hatred over her inability to stop eating to an equivalent self-loathing over her lack of choices. According to her mother, Lerner’s weight condition is caused by a character flaw, “something you can change” (16). And yet when her psychiatrist suggests she chose either to overcome this perceived flaw or

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learn to accept it, she begins to believe that she still has no real options: “If I resisted, he was right. If I didn’t resist, he was right. I always appeared irrational and he supremely rational” (87). After a serious suicidal gesture, Betsy Lerner spends sometime in a psychiatric ward of the New York State Psychiatric Institute, where she continues to resist taking medication at the same time that she asks a fellow patient about overdosing, returning yet again to her life-long pattern of overeating: “I would stockpile my antidepressants. I would swallow enough to kill myself” (182). Remorseful over this plan, once it was revealed to her mother, Betsy Lerner reinforces the idea that her problems are as much about free will as about addiction when she thinks about her mother’s having coped with another daughter’s death by pneumonia: “water overwhelming the lungs of a little girl” (189). While her sister’s death was not of her own choice, the author’s acting on her suicidal impulses would be her own choice. Dealing with Betsy’s suicidal urges, her mother must now “face another: only it wasn’t the water choosing me; I was choosing the water” (189). Eventually Lerner comes to understand that her “addiction to food is a ritual” and that “the deeper addiction is to self-loathing” (285). Once she accepts the suggestion that her food compulsion is driven not so much by hunger but by mania, her depression caused as much by mental illness as by failure of will or lack of choice, Lerner begins to understand that all of her problems are not only interrelated but have to do as much with selfimage as actual physical appearance. Both the hard cover and paper versions of Food and Loathing feature a mirror on their covers, a mirror which allows reader to see their own blurred reflection. Completing the cycle, the same frame is reproduced on the book’s back flap, this time with a color photograph of the author, whose appearance falls well within the range of normal weight by any standard, an echo of Lerner’s statement “I didn’t look as bad as I felt” (Rehm Interview). When the author explains her own final diagnosis, in the book’s last pages, she is finally able to come to terms with her problems: “Intellectually, I’ve come to understand that struggling with weight and food is about love, sex, power, fear, control, father, mother, society. I get that” (285). Despite the fact that she is an intellectual, a literary agent and former editor, Lerner is also aware that the twin aspects of her problem—bipolar disorder and compulsive overeating—also involve emotional triggers which are inherently mutually reinforcing. Betsy Lerner doesn’t want to be considered heavy, doesn’t want to let body image dictate her happiness, doesn’t want to strive for an impossible perfection, doesn’t want to be driven by compulsions, and doesn’t want to let down her family, including her mother who never understood the complications described in the memoir, and especially her

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father, about whom she writes: “we were very similar: compulsive, capable, well-liked, overweight” (113). While her father’s eating problems seem to have produced only minor worries, for the daughter food and eating were always connected to self-hatred, no matter how or what she ate and despite success in other aspects of her life. Where Lerner’s “troubled relation to food” is characterized by personal self-loathing, Judith Moore’s first memoir, Never Eat Your Heart Out (1997) is far more relational, concentrating on cooking and eating in her role as a mother and wife. Fat Girl: A True Story, Moore’s 2005 followup, is a searing confession about her weight and body image problems as a girl. Moore’s memoirs take their place as especially lyrical entries in life writing about food. Never Eat Your Heart Out is filled with scene after scene in which Moore belies her title’s advice, beginning with the first chapter, “Pie,” in which the author celebrates pie over cake while demonstrating one of autobiography’s most salient features, the tendency to reveal and conceal simultaneously. “But it seems to me that mere chemistry can explain what makes a cake, while pie demands metaphysics…the opposition between a pie’s insides and out” (4), writes Moore, who in this case is actually referring to the mud pies of childhood, which she compares to the inside and outside of her own body, her positive sense of self compensating for her less than slender body. Where Betsy Lerner seldom describes actual meals, Moore’s Never Eat Your Heart Out includes descriptions of memorable dinners, recipes for disaster, sweet and sour memories, and reflections on the power of food. While the book begins in praise of pie and ends with a paean to picnics, the heart of the story is a strongly evocative section in which Moore describes the food she associates with an adulterous period of her life, an affair which eventually led to a physical separation from her husband, though they stayed married for many more years. In this section she describes her affair with gusto, celebrating both her sexual and her culinary awakening. As her sensuality is revived, Moore describes her transition from Fannie Farmer and Irma Rombauer, from pineapple-andclove-stuck hams and fat gilded gravy to soufflé dishes, mandolins, whisks and ginger root (182). Invoking Martin Buber in honor of her new lover, she writes “Beets and baking hens and butter lettuces, Dungeness crabs, plums all turned to Thous, to numinous, hallowed visible forms bestowing invisible grace” (196). While clearly chastened by her unfaithfulness, and its effects on her family, Moore interlaces her adultery narrative with lavish descriptions of food, a sort of 1950’s version of Desperate Housewives meet Tom Jones: “I concocted sandwiches from pork loin and slices of apple sautéed in

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butter. Early mornings, I baked chickens I’d marinated all night in lemon juice and garlic. I contrived huge composed salads from the garden, with red-jacketed new potatoes, with green beans, yellow crookneck squash, white pattypan squash, cherry tomatoes and Japanese eggplant. I made apricot ice cream and herb sherbets and blackberry cobbler and raspberry shortcake and strawberry cream pies (197).” During the time she refers to as “when I went out on my husband,” Moore turned to her cookbooks, devouring them as if they were novels: “I read these recipes as if my waiting Bartletts, Anjous, Boscs, Comices, or Seckles were heroes or heroines, eager to star in the complex narrative twists of a great novel. I wanted the plot of chutney, grainy rough butter or a pale honeyed preserve buoying up pear chunks. I wanted a cast of characters that would engage these Boscs or Bartletts in action thick with subtextual and mythic underpinnings. For pears, I wanted happy endings” (198). The juicy descriptions of these elaborate meals are a far cry from Moore’s depictions of typical recipes served at the company dinners and pot luck suppers of her early married life. Working hard not to appear to be showing off, Moore and her friends produced the kind of meals now celebrated in such books as The Gallery of Regrettable Food or Barbara Swell’s Mama’s in the Kitchen: Weird & Wonderful Home Cooking 19001950, which features such specialties as steak stuffed with canned spaghetti, macaroni and liver, and “foods that wiggle.” Foods that wiggle are prominent in Never Eat Your Heart Out, including “Golden Glow (chopped carrots, crushed pineapple, cream cheese molded in orange JellO)” (145), a fitting finish to such main dishes as Broccoli Loaf, Macaroni and Pimento Cheese, Tuna and Potato Chip Loaf, Pork-U-Pines, and Tater Tot Casserole, the latter made from meatballs, bread crumbs, dehydrated onion soup, cream of tomato and cream of mushroom soup, canned mushrooms, garlic salt, and tater tots. Just as most of the dishes prepared for public consumption are similarly bland in taste and originality, so Judith Moore’s descriptions of both her married and her adulterous sexual relationships are dry, ascetic, mannered, and formal, most of the physical descriptions being reserved for food and its preparation. While writing about her first dinner for guests as a newlywed, the same chili, coleslaw and gingerbread which she had eaten at a friend’s house, she writes “a constantly changing flavor river runs through my empty mouth” (92). Hungry for affection, she adds: ‘We tend to think sexual intercourse, momentarily joining two bodies, is the most physically intimate human act. Preparing meals for another person, in its own way is more intimate, so much so that I sometimes wonder that we dare eat what strangers feed us. Bare hands rub and finger the cabbage and

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carrots and raw meat. Sweat on your palms, so slight that not even you feel it, carries your body salts and other castoffs into everything you touch” (92). This emphasis on physicality and body image rendered in witty and scholarly terms in Never Eat Your Heart Out—with its mini-essays on such topics as canning, beets, rabbit, potatoes, rhubarb, and apple butter— turns bitter, angry, self-deprecating and cruel in Fat Girl. A nostalgic tone related to food in the first memoir can be expressed in a single sentence: “Memories come back to you in your mouth” (24), while in Fat Girl the author writes of her childhood, “My mouth is dangerous. My lips and my teeth and my tongue and the damp walls of my cheeks are always ready,” to which she adds “When I walk through the kitchen—when I walk through the world—my mouth is on the prowl” (12). In an interview on National Public Radio, Moore explains that one of the impulses which fueled her second book, Fat Girl, was reading in Lillian Hellman’s Maybe about Hellman’s obsession with what turned out to be a malicious rumor regarding her body’s odors while engaged in sexual activity.9 Returning in the second book to the adulterous affair of the first, Moore writes not so much that she regrets the actual betrayal, but that unlike Hellman, whose life long companion, Dashiell Hammett, wrote the “Thin Man” series, Moore will never again fall for a thin man, instead preferring men of weight. “Their mouths are moist, like muzzles. They are as talkative as they are hungry. Late at night, with a fat man curled in your bed, you can talk unashamedly about corned beef on rye and warted dill pickles” (193). Moore’s 2006 follow-up, Fat Girl is saturated with physical descriptions of Judith Moore’s young girl’s body, self-humiliating sentences about sweat and odor, the rubbing together of body parts her sense of feeling like a furred animal and smelling meaty. She refers to her arms as bratwurst, her thighs as clabber, and her breasts as “dinners.” She describes herself as living within a house of fat, peering “out of my yellow fatty acids into the world.” Asserting at the start of the book that she hates herself because she is fat, Moore goes on to provide this self-portrait: “I am a short, squat toad of a woman. My curly auburn hair is fading. Curls form a clown’s ruff about my round face. My shoulders are wide. My upper arms are as big as those maroon-skinned bolognas that hang from butchers’ ceilings” (7). In an autobiographical essay called “Why I Wrote Fat Girl,” Moore explains that she wanted to write the truth about being fat, rather than a self-help book, a diet book, or a story of redemption. She also described, in that essay, her motivation as including a desire to write about the aesthetics of food, a topic usually ignored by those who are

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considered to be obese. Where Never Eat Your Heart Out contains many lyrical descriptions of vegetables being canned, meals prepared, and hungers being satisfied, very few of the meals are especially appetizing. Fat Girl, on the other hand, is filled with evocative descriptions, not of food preparation, but of actual food being eaten, even if sometimes with regret or self-hatred. For example, Judith Moore describes a childhood meal at her grandmother’s house, writing with the excessiveness of Thomas Wolfe: “She fed us bacon and eggs, sausage patties, strawberry jam, butter-soaked hot biscuits, molasses-sopped flapjacks, fried chicken, baked hams, thick pork chops, puffy dumplings, potato pancakes, homemade egg noodles, mashed potatoes, apple and cherry pies and threelayer coconut cakes and huckleberry and peach and boysenberry cobblers, crisp gingerbread cookies, Kadota figs afloat in clotted cream, cows’ thick milk and the butter she churned from that milk” (77). Despite that caloric, cholesterol laden, and overwrought description, Moore’s second memoir is also filled with desperate images of the consequences of overeating, constant attempts at losing weight through starvation, frequent descriptions of a hunger for affection, and searing depictions of the ways in which the author as a young girl tried to assuage her hunger. “I began to chew my fingernails,” she writes, adding “I turned into a voracious eater whose meal was herself. I ripped and tore fat the flesh around my child nails; I licked delicately and hungrily, at the blood that popped up in bright droplets at my chubby fingers’ ends. I ate myself raw” (123). Explaining over and over that for many years she didn’t actually eat very much and that not eating for months on end made little difference in her body weight or shape, Moore repeatedly tries to balance on one hand her self-loathing, negative body image, and abusive mother, plus her childhood in a family she calls “hard American isolatos” (2) with, on the other, her equally strong love affair with both the smells and tastes of food and the physical and aesthetic nourishment it provided. Unlike diet books, or such revelations of eating disorders as Carrie Arnold’s Running on Empty: A Diary of Anorexia and Recovery or Morgan Menzie’s Diary of an Anorexic Girl,10 in which food is the enemy of the body, Moore’s memoirs celebrate food, their pages filled with tempting examples of the preparation and eating of elaborate and enticing meals, the literary equivalent of the Food Network’s most tempting programs. When in Moore’s NPR interview the interviewer suggested that she did not appear to be especially large, Moore replied that “everyone’s a fat girl sometimes, even if they’re skinny.”11 In her two memoirs of food and eating, Judith Moore conveys both sides of that statement, sometimes over emphasizing her weight, sometimes exaggerating her isolation. Although

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Judith Moore died last year, not of having eaten her heart out, but of colon cancer, her two memoirs live on. Written in what many reviewers called spare prose, the author never spares herself, though by the end readers who love both autobiography and food can appreciate Moore’s statement that when we see someone who is really overweight walking down the street, instead of thinking “how disgusting,” instead we might say to ourselves: “There goes someone to whom something bad happened, there goes someone wounded.”12 Adam Gopnik writes of Alain Ducasse’s recent Culinary Encyclopedia, in a piece called “Cooked Books.”: When we read a recipe for Colonna-bacon-barded thrush breasts, with giblet canapés, on a porcini-mushroom marmalade, we know that we are not seriously expected to cook this; rather, we are to admire, over and over, the literary skill, the metaphysical poetry, required to bring these improbable things together. You and I are not about to cook thrush breasts with a porcini-mushroom marmalade—Alain Ducasse is not about to cook them, either—any more than we are about to throw ourselves under the train with Anna or sleep with Madame Bovary.”13

Although both Betsy Lerner and Judith Moore have suffered because of their love of food, their memoirs are not meant as recipes, as excuses for their over indulgence, or to sooth our cravings. Rather these books are worth reading because of their author’s ability to write so well about food, despite the troubles that eating has caused them in terms of their bodies, their sense of selves.

Works Cited Arnold, Carrie. Running On Empty: A Diary of Anorexia and Recovery. Livonia, MI: First Page Publications, 2004. Avakian, Arlene, ed. Through the Kitchen Window: Women Writers Explore the Intimate Meanings of Food and Cooking. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2005. Bower, Anne. Recipes for Reading: Community Cookbooks. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997. Chernin, Kim. The Hungry Self: Women, Eating and Identity. New York: Harper, 1994. Clarke, Austin. Pig Tails ‘n Breadfruit: A Culinary Memoir. New York: The New Press, 2000. Curtin, Deane W. and Lisa M. Heldke, eds. Cooking, Eating, Thinking. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992.

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Crick, Mark. Kafka's Soup: A Complete History of World Literature in 14 Recipes. New York: Harcourt, 2006. Daniel, Carolyn. Voracious Children: Who Eats Whom in Children's Literature. New York: Routledge, 2006. Delman, Carmit. Burnt Bread and Chutney: Growing up Between Cultures—A Memoir of an Indian Jewish Childhood. New York: One World/Ballantine, 2002. Digby, Joan and John Digby, eds. Food For Thought. New York: Ecco Press, 1996. Ehrlich, Elizabeth. Miriam's Kitchen. New York: Penguin, 1998. Fisher, M.F.K. The Gastronomical Me. New York: North Point Press, 1998. Fussell, Betty. My Kitchen Wars. New York: North Point Press, 2000. Gopnik, Adam. “Cooked Books: Real Food from Fictional Recipes.” The New Yorker, April 9, 2007, 80-85. Gottlieb, Lori. Stick Figure. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. Haney, John. Fair Shares for All: A Memoir of Family and Food. New York: Random House, 2008. Hornbacher, Marya. Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia. New York: Harper Perennial, 2006. Inness, Sherrie A. Dinner Roles: American Women and Culinary Culture. Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2001. Jones, Judith. The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food. New York: Knopf, 2007. Kingsolver, Barbara. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. New York: Harper Collins, 2007. Leith, William. The Hungry Years: Confessions of a Food Addict. New York: Gotham Books, 2005. Lerner, Betsy. Food and Loathing: A Lament. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003. Lupton, Deborah. Food, the Body, and the Self. London: Sage, 1996. McPherson, James Alan. Crabcakes: A Memoir. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998. Menzie, Morgan. Diary of an Anorexic Girl. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2003. Moore, Judith. Never Eat Your Heart Out. New York: North Point Press, 1997. —. Fat Girl: A True Story. New York: Plume, 2006. Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature. Special Issue: “Diet and Discourse: Eating, Drinking and Literature.” 24.3-4 (1991).

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Rehm, Diane. Interview, WAMU Radio, April 2, 2003. http://wamu.org/programs/dr/03/04/02.php Reichl, Ruth. Tender at the Bone. New York: Random House, 1998. Reynolds, Jonathan. Wrestling with Gravy: A Life, with Food. New York: Random House, 2006, Skubal, Susanne. Word of Mouth: Food and Fiction after Freud. New York: Routledge, 2002. Shapiro, Anna. A Feast of Words for Lovers of Food and Fiction. New York: Norton, 1996. Schofield, Mary Anne, ed. Cooking by the Book: Food in Literature and Culture. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1989. Stowell, Phyllis and Jeanne Foster, eds. Appetite: Food as Metaphor: An Anthology of Women Poets. Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, 2002. Strainchamps, Anne. “Body Politics.” To The Best of Our Knowledge, Wisconsin Public Radio, June 6, 2004. http://www.wpr.org/book/030330b.html Suleri, Sara. Meatless Days. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. —. Boys Will Be Boys: A Daughter’s Elegy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Theophano, Janet. Eat My Words: Reading Women's Lives Through the Cookbooks They Wrote. New York: Palgrave, 2003. Volk, Patricia. Stuffed: Adventures of a Restaurant Family. New York: Random House, 2002. Warnes, Andrew. Hunger Overcome? Food and Resistance in TwentiethCentury African American Literature. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2003. Winegardner, Mark. We Are What We Ate. New York: Harvest Books, 2006.

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Notes 1

Judith Moore, Never Eat Your Heart Out (New York: North Point Press, 1997); Judith Moore, Fat Girl: A True Story (New York: Plume, 2006); Betsy Lerner Food and Loathing: A Lament (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003). Each text will hereafter be cited parenthetically. 2 Sara Suleri, Boys Will Be Boys: A Daughter’s Elegy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 3 Arlene Avakian, Through the Kitchen Window: Women Writers Explore the Intimate Meanings of Food and Cooking (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2005); Deane W. Curtin and Lisa M. Heldke, Cooking, Eating, Thinking, (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992); Deborah Lupton, Food, the Body, and The Self (London: Sage, 1996); Sherrie A. Inness, Dinner Roles: American Women and Culinary Culture (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2001); Anna Shapiro, A Feast of Words For Lovers of Food and Fiction (New York: Norton, 1996); Joan and John Digby, Food For Thought (New York: Ecco Press, 1996); Mark Winegardner, We Are What We Ate (New York: Harvest Books, 2006); Phyllis Stowell and Jean Foster, Appetite: Food as Metaphor: An Anthology of Women Poets. (Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, 2002); Andrew Warnes, Hunger Overcome? Food and Resistance in Twentieth-Century African American Literature (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2003); Anne Bower, Recipes for Reading: Community Cookbooks (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997); Janet Theophano, Eat My Words: Reading Women's Lives Through the Cookbooks They Wrote. (New York: Palgrave, 2003); Mary Anne Schofield, ed. Cooking by the Book: Food in Literature and Culture (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1989); Mark Crick, Kafka's Soup: A Complete History of World Literature in 14 Recipes (New York: Harcourt, 2006); Susanne Skubal, Word of Mouth: Food and Fiction after Freud (New York: Routledge, 2002); Carolyn Daniel, Voracious Children: Who Eats Whom in Children's Literature (New York: Routledge, 2006). 4 Sara Suleri, Meatless Days (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Ruth Reichl, Tender at the Bone (New York: Random House, 1998); Elizabeth Ehrlich, Miriam’s Kitchen (New York: Penguin, 1998); James Alan McPherson, Crabcakes: A Memoir (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998); Lori Gottlieb, Stick Figure (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000); Patricia Volk, Stuffed: Adventures of a Restaurant Family (New York: Random House, 2002); Betty Fussell, My Kitchen Wars (New York: North Point Press, 2000); Austin Clarke, Pig Tails ‘n Breadfruit: A Culinary Memoir. (New York: The New Press, 2000); William Leith, The Hungry Years: Confessions of a Food Addict (New York: Gotham Books, 2005); Barbara Kingslover, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (New York: Harper Collins, 2007); John Haney, Fair Shares for All: A Memoir of Family and Food (New York: Random House, 2008); Carmit Delman, Burnt Bread and Chutney: Growing up Between Cultures—A Memoir of an Indian Jewish Childhood (New York: One World/Ballantine, 2002); Judith Jones, The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food (New York: Knopf, 2007); Jonathan Reynolds,

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Wrestling with Gravy: A Life, with Food (New York: Random House, 2006); Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia (New York: Harper Perennial, 2006); M.F.K. Fisher, The Gastronomical Me (New York: North Point Press, 1998). 5 Kim Chernin, The Hungry Self: Women, Eating and Identity (New York: Harper, 1994). 6 Diane Rehm, interview, WAMU Radio, April 2, 2003. http://wamu.org/programs/dr/03/04/02.php 7 Adam Gopnik, “Cooked Books: Real Food from Fictional Recipes,” The New Yorker, April 9, 2007, 80. 8 Anne Strainchamps, “Body Politics,” To The Best of Our Knowledge, Wisconsin Public Radio, June 6, 2004. http://www.wpr.org/book/030330b.html 9 Karen Grigsby Bates, “'Fat Girl': Unsparing Look at Growing Up Large.” July 8, 2005. National Public Radio. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4711853 10 Carrie Arnold, Running On Empty: A Diary of Anorexia and Recovery (Livonia, MI: First Page Publications, 2004); Morgan Menzie, Diary of an Anorexic Girl (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2003). 11 Bates, NPR interview, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4711853 12 Ibid. 13 Gopnik, “Cooked Books,” 85.

THE FIT AND ATHLETIC BODY IN NEW WOMEN AUTOBIOGRAPHIES TRACY J. R. COLLINS

As post-modern autobiographies of disease and disability manifestly imply, memoirs concerning the body have become an interesting new focus in the already popular fields of biography and autobiography. Theorists, therefore, may also be interested in the corollary memoirs which focus on the fit and the healthy body. They will also be fascinated to know that autobiographies by women at the end of the 19th century were not without this positive emphasis upon the body. In fact, autobiographies at the turn of the century written by women clearly and deliberately do include discussions of their healthy, physically fit and athletic bodies. Phyllis Bottome, Mary Vivian Hughes, Gwen Raverat, and Muriel Parsloe to name a few, are examples of this type of author. These women, moreover, are also examples of the New Woman, a cultural phenomenon of the British Fin de Siècle.1 The New Woman was young, middle-class, and single (on principle). She was financially independent, or intended to be through earning her own living. She perhaps smoked, rode a bicycle, and took the bus or train unescorted. She belonged to all-female clubs and societies where the talk was of ideas; she sought freedom and equality with men, and was in general prepared to overturn virtually all conventions and accepted notions of femininity.2 Moreover, and crucially, these New Women were inspired by athletics and sports. To put it quite baldly, without the athleticism they report they would not have been New Women. All of these aspects of her personality were presented in novels, short stories and debates in the periodical press. The special personalities that emerge in the autobiographies of New Women demonstrate that fitness, physical education, and athletic games played a fundamental role in the formation of their ultimately revolutionary characters. That is, similar to prototypically politically elite males, the persons who became New Women almost always report for themselves these physiological assimilations. Specifically, the basis of the discursive construction of her

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emancipated self was her self-described body represented as desiring to be fit and engaged in activity that is athletic or para-athletic. Accepting the premise that there would not have been a New Woman without her interest in fitness and athletics, it is important to note that the evidence from late Victorian women’s autobiographies and memoirs in support of their interest in sporting activities has never before been assembled. The amount of critical attention women’s autobiographies from this period have attracted is impressive, but even more so is that only ten autobiographies, of over one hundred candidate works by New Women I have identified, are so much as mentioned by the historians and critics of women’s autobiographies. None are given analysis. I have read seventyfour of these works. When New Women wrote about their childhoods at any length, they virtually always reported that fit, sporting, and athletic bodies were fundamental elements of their emancipated lives. The four writers I shall discuss are illustrative. In light of the extensive critical theory of women’s life writing produced to date, the question becomes, what does the extraction and framing of examples of the sporting athletic body described in autobiographies and memoirs by New Women add to that existing scholarship? First, rediscovering and inventorying these texts complicates the theoretical discussion of women’s autobiography by adding a significant number of important but neglected women’s autobiographies. In short, these texts have never before been analyzed as a category. In The Autobiography: From Antiquity to the Present Estelle Jelinek attempts to add a historical context to the theories she presented in her earlier Women’s Autobiography: Essays in Criticism, but there is no mention of any one of the autobiographies analyzed for this study. Second, these autobiographies by New Women challenge the “tradition” of women’s autobiographical writing that earlier scholars such as Jelinek have established for women’s life writing. She claims that, “The emphasis remains on personal matters—not the professional, philosophical, or historical events.”3 Another goal of Jelinek’s was “to see whether the separate women’s autobiographical tradition that I had found was a phenomenon of the modern era or had also existed in earlier times” (ix). Yet, if she had continued to read for another thirty years of British women’s writing (she stops at mid-nineteenth century) she might have come across New Women’s autobiographies and realized that the “tradition” she theorizes is not as gender-specific as she claims. Other critics have more recently questioned the desire to define a tradition. Linda Peterson in her Traditions of Victorian Women’s Autobiography: The Poetics and Politics of Life Writing agrees that “the

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argument about a separate (and singular) tradition of women’s life writing is worth reexamining.”4 Peterson concludes by recommending traditions based not on gender but on “other allegiances religious, regional, political, or social” (2). Finally, her goal is to “begin not by proposing an alternate version of literary history but by looking closely at early attempts to identify women’s autobiography and by examining the assumptions that undergird them” (3). My study revises Peterson’s by asserting that one of the “allegiances” a woman could have while writing her autobiography was to her female body. In fact, New Woman self-narratives exhibit a significant redirection of her proposition. A third reason for discussing these works is to situate the revision they represent. The athletic self constructed by these writers is both a perceived self and an actuality despite the times in which they lived. In the case of the New Woman autobiographies that I will present, the active athletic “self” that they depict would be significant whether it was fictive or historical. Constructing an authentic self, however, was of paramount importance to these New Woman writers. As Susan Groag Bell and Marilyn Yalom note in their introduction to Revealing Lives: Autobiography, Biography, and Gender, debates on autobiography have recently been based on post-structuralist theories that “deconstruct texts and decenter subjects so as to deny or at least question the familiar concept of a mimetic relationship between literature and life.”5 Bell and Yalom, however, reclaim Lejeune’s famous “autobiographical pact,” which asserts “that the autobiographical ‘I,’ however fugitive, partial, and unreliable, is indeed the privileged textual double of a real person, as well as a selfevident construct” (2). In other words, regardless of how constructed a self seems to be, the “I” is axiomatically a real person. If the New Woman personality of her life writing is the textual double of a real person, then the physically fit and athletic New Woman was certainly fully advertised as a powerful possibility for her time. She constructed a self that is active, athletic, and physically fit. Again, and importantly for my study, the “self” that is reported, the active, athletic “self” that is revealed, would matter whether it was constructed or real. The allegation of the existence of the New Woman as athletic and sporting would be no less sensational than her actual existence. To use Domna Stanton’s phrase from The Female Autograph, these New Women were constructing a “new female subject.”6 The fourth and final use of studying the role of the body in New Women autobiographies must associate the description of the physical body of the New Woman and some current discourse of feminist body theory. Early feminist theorizing of the body underscores the polarization

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of body and mind prominent during the Enlightenment when a feeling and natural body was assigned to women and a thinking and rational body was assigned to men.7 Thus the value of the female body was dimmed by the philosophical proposition that rationality was disembodied and that therefore women were merely their bodies while men might be only their minds. Completely overwhelmed by a reputation for diminished humanity in the form of materiality, women also struggled to become bodiless as well.8 To engage the current discourse of feminist body theory, as summarized by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson in Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader, “theorists interested in the body seek to retrieve the body from its disembodied, denatured status and to relocate it to the subject.”9 To affect therefore a transgendered autobiographical discourse, theorists of female autobiography have worked on reclaiming the body from this desire for disembodiment and to relocate it in the position of the subject. Simply put, the body must not be ignored; rather it should be privileged. It is, indeed, the entirety of the autobiographical object— certainly in light of the non-dualist premise that currently characterizes the most reputable behavioral and scientific anthropologies and psychologies—that are appropriated to explain women’s autobiography. By focusing on the physically fit and active body in New Woman autobiographies the body becomes an active cognitive subject not an object and not disembodied. Therefore, reading the athletic and physically fit body in New Woman autobiographies corrects for a time in history when women’s bodies were essentialized, after which such bodies were literally compelled by society to disappear into the private. Instead, New Women chose to write life stories that not only brought attention to their physical bodies, but also explicitly named and predicted the ways that their bodies could and would be publicly used as agents of intellectual change and emancipation. The autobiographical texts of New Women repeat the narrative of the body in childhood and youth as an entity of subversive practice in pursuit of the political emancipation of its adult self. Shirley Castelnuovo and Sharon Guthrie in Feminism and the Female Body: Liberating the Amazon Within find, however, that most feminist theorists who have set out to reclaim the female body do not escape a crippling subjection to Cartesian dualism. The assumption held by these theorists “is that a focus on the body automatically results in a nondualistic analysis. If we look closely at their liberatory analyses, however, we find that they have not actually done what they claim to do: eliminate dualism.”10 That is what happens for these theorists when they emphasize cognitive activities without realizing that in order to empower and

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encourage women cognitively they must be enabled physically. “Transformation of the [cognitive] female self requires bodily transformation as well. . . . The mind and body must be conceived of as a unity in understanding the social construction of gender and sexuality and in developing and embodying feminist perspectives” (32, 35). The proposition of Castelnuovo and Guthrie has not been brought to the study of the nature of the New Woman. My examination of four autobiographies will address the repercussions of this crucial oversight and offer a repaired understanding. By extension, it will suggest the need for an assembly of a more cogent theoretical foundation thus far absent in the assessment of the New Woman.

The Athletic New Woman Explains Herself In order to determine what each woman might have thought about the influence of sports, games, athletics, and fitness on her later life, I began by looking for the prevalence of these elements in their childhoods. Of the seventy-four texts I read, virtually every one of them mentioned some incident or moment as a child in which the author was physically active or interested in her physical self. The accretion of this evidence is difficult to ignore. The only other details from childhood mentioned as often were parents and other family members (siblings, grandparents etc.). For example, women did not always choose to talk about their interaction with religion (even if it was to mention that religion was not important in their growing up). It is obvious in the details that are chosen and not chosen that being athletic in many manifestations was important to these writers. Of course, athletics and fitness are not given the same emphasis in all of these texts. To begin with, some women simply did not talk about their childhoods very much. One reason for a missing description of childhood in some of these narratives is that some wrote autobiographies mostly to discuss the family as a whole. A second explanation is that some women wrote their autobiographies almost as an appendage to a special topic. Mabel Stringer, for example, wrote Golfing Reminiscences not just as a story of her life but also as a history of women’s involvement in golf. A third explanation for an absent discussion of childhood directly relates to one of the issues of “female” autobiographies that earlier scholars such as Jelinek described. Jelinek noted that women wrote autobiography differently because they tended to write of their lives in relationship with others.11 Finally, and perhaps the most fascinating reason that some of these New Women did not discuss athletics during their childhoods is not because they do not discuss their childhoods, but because they were

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physically incapable of having an active athletic childhood. Several of these women had some sort of childhood disease or injury that made them temporarily invalid. When the women did not discuss fitness and sports in their childhoods at all, or when they were busy at work, on the stage, or were too sick to be active as children, these women still exhibited an understanding of or a personal desire for a physically fit life. Often they notice the importance of fitness and games in childhood by the simple fact that they are acutely conscious that it was missing in their childhoods. Many women, when talking about school, mention a lack of a gymnasium or a lack of space to play games. A girl from a working-class background would talk about not having time to be active in “amusements.” Four New Woman autobiographies represent the different ways the majority of the seventy-four narratives manifest their writers’ interest in sports, games, athletics, and physical fitness. Phyllis Bottome wrote Search for a Soul as a way to understand the complicated family personalities and relationships of her childhood. At the same time, sports and games are so fundamental to her understanding of her childhood personality that she used it as a metaphor to describe life in general: My reason for writing these memoirs only up to the age of eighteen is that after adolescence we enter a new region of living where we cease to be an object with whom life is still at play, and become subjects playing upon life. When we take a hand in this final game, we no longer want to show it to the other players.12

Bottome’s reference to the “final game” makes it clear that she is referring to an activity that is competitive and takes great concentration and stamina. Bottome is unusual in that her reflections end at age eighteen when she becomes a player in the contest of life, which is no longer a game. The agency changes for Bottome as she grows up, and as she becomes a grown woman she learns that the games have more serious consequences. Bottome had a very active and physical childhood, but, unlike many other New Women, she was never deliberately encouraged or taught to play games. Many women had the influence of an understanding father, a liberal mother, or sympathetic brothers who encouraged their physical activities. In Bottome’s case she laments, “It was a pity, for during those years, and those that were to come after, when I could so easily and happily have acquired useful and more social accomplishments such as music, dancing, sewing, cooking, any sort of craft or even sport, I was taught nothing at all but what was in books” (51; italics mine). Critics have

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talked about the importance of reading in the development of the New Woman, but Bottome recognized that the body and physical accomplishments are just as necessary. Implicitly, the mind and body are one. This concept was established for her when her family moved to America, and she described the school she attended. From the point of view of an English girl, her first American school was “a clean, spacious, sunny wooden house, and every hour was filled by quite extraordinarily amusing work which appeared to me purely in the light of play. Body and mind were developed simultaneously” (72). She goes on further to stress that “part of every child’s education should, and probably now to a great extent does, consist of knowing how to do things which enlarge the physical scope. The more a child can do with his body, the less trouble it will be for him throughout his life” (118). Bottome’s convictions are an epitome of New Woman sentiments. Even authors who did not discuss their childhoods noted that the early development of the body is important. The conviction for these women is that in order for a child to be a successful grown-up she must have a physical as well as a mental maturity. Proposing that women are their minds and bodies, recent theorists Castelnuovo and Guthrie set out to “cultivate and celebrate an Amazonian presence among women” (1). They choose to rehabilitate and return respect to a particular “Amazon” personality. An Amazon they define as “a warrior,” but not a warrior “with a blade or gun in hand.” Instead they define her warrior-like qualities: As stemming from the fact that she has developed her bodily and mental skills to their fullest capacity and she directs her energies toward achieving equality for women. Consequently, she has the power and commitment to equalize the fields on which hierarchical gender relations are played out. She is a woman who represents a significant challenge to patriarchal domination. (2)

For emphasis, they use the contemporary female body-builder as one example of this modern Amazon. They concur with some analyses that find that women’s competitive body-building is a singular site of female resistance to patriarchal constructions. The twenty-first century female body-builder/“Amazon,” however, has an ancestor. Phyllis Bottome understood 100 years earlier this same principle. In order to acquire mental fitness a girl must have physical fitness. Many more opportunities will be available for the girl who is smart and fit. Not only did Bottome find a physically fit lifestyle to be essential to a child’s success, she also had a sort of physical prowess of her own

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throughout childhood: “We were considered rather outstanding in our physical performances. We climbed higher, jumped farther, ran faster than any of the children round about our own age; and we were a good deal respected in consequence” (109). She might have had the talent of a world-class athlete. In describing her physical maturity she remembers, “I was able to jump my own height, over 5 feet 6 inches, and ran like a deer” (183). The one thing that was missing for Bottome was parents who would enable her to participate in sports or games such as golf, field hockey, or tennis so that she might have found a way to actualize her physical abilities and appetites: “This perpetual straining of myself to reach some hidden goal was, of course, excessive, but had I had any gymnastic or sport training I might well have learned something useful without doing myself any permanent physical damage” (183). Without the formal structure of teams and meaningful competitions, she did not gain the early special physical discipline she might have. Of course, in writing this autobiography Bottome has the advantage of hindsight. Unlike any of the other New Woman lives surveyed, she suffered physical setbacks as an adult. In looking back on her childhood, she blames the lack of focus that formal games and sports could have offered her for why she suffered so and ended up having major surgery: “In consequence, I suffered with exaggerated intensity and at seventeen had to have a serious operation” (183). While recovering from her operation, she contracted pneumonia, her body was weakened, and she never properly recovered. She was beset with tuberculosis for the remainder of her life. This physical disability actually motivated her throughout the rest of her career. She became a novelist and worked ceaselessly for higher education for women and for the vote. In looking back at her childhood she believed that not only was tendency to physical fitness essential to her success, but also that the physical discipline she might have gained from games and sports would have spared her from injuries and allowed her to maintain her fitness later in life. Bottome was a successful New Woman in spite of her disabilities as an adult. She was not an influential athlete or educator, but she believed that if she had participated in games and sports as a child she might not have had to undergo surgery. Moreover, if her parents had emphasized her physical development in the same way her intellectual development was nurtured, she might have been much more active in her later life. She ends her story at the age of eighteen. This physically gifted child grew up and became intensely interested in women’s education and emancipation. She became an empowered New Woman, but she also understood that her potential for

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even wider empowerment existed if only she had been able to cultivate her youthfully agile body. While some women told of games and sports as a source of the lives they were writing, or understood the significance of their absence in childhood, other women understood that their ability to play sports and their interest in fitness set them apart from other girls. In fact, these behaviors made their childhoods look to them like those of boys. This realization dramatized the differences between the potential futures of boys and girls. A final and main part of this analysis focuses upon three such autobiographies which elaborately express their interest in athletics and fitness especially in childhood. The first of these autobiographies is a trilogy by Mary Vivian Hughes who in the 1930s and 40s published her memories of her London Life. A London Child of the Seventies, A London Girl of the 1880s, and A London Family (1870-1900) were published in three volumes and then reissued by Oxford as a paperback that was reprinted as recently as 1977, making it the most easily accessible of all the New Woman autobiographies.13 Hughes begins the recollections of her childhood by stating that “a girl with four brothers older than herself is born under a lucky star.”14 There is little doubt that the influence of her brothers caused her to see the inequalities between the treatment of girls and boys when from the beginning their abilities or interests are similar. As a child she loved to play with toy soldiers, ninepins, and marbles. She “loved running about, and would often dash up and down stairs just to let off my spirits” (7). Hughes and her brothers had no nursemaid as children and were allowed to run around and play as much as they wanted: “When there was no outing possible, we played cricket in our back garden, and broke windows frequently. . . . We all hated ‘parties,” because it meant being fixed into best clothes and behaving properly instead of having a good romp” (14, 16). Whatever activity her brothers took up, Mary was sure to join them. This egalitarian childhood caused her trouble later on when she learned that there were different roles for women and men. Hughes proclaimed, “I had a boyish contempt for dolls, especially the flaxen-haired blue-eyed type, whose clothes wouldn’t take off” (49). It is not easy to tell if she disliked the doll because her brothers did or if it represented for her a future that she could not bring herself to desire. Dolls, especially ones whose clothes “wouldn’t take off” are especially imprisoned playthings, assuming one of the symbolic things that can be done with a doll is to change its clothes and therefore its identity and the fantasy of its destiny. Her equation of fun with the childhood she spent with her brothers and

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boredom with incarcerations with traditional girls’ toys, resulted in Hughes’ early decision that it would be far better to have been a boy. Hughes recalls two incidents early on in her childhood that, if nothing else had, confirmed her realization that girls were treated unacceptably differently. She had been playing with her brothers one afternoon and on one occasion joined “in an open-air smoking concert.” She was given “a jumble [a thin kind of gingerbread so crisp that it curled up], a front seat, and (bliss beyond words) a pipe to put in my mouth” (32). For most children, the “jumble” would have been a peak experience, but for a captured girl longing to follow the lead of four free boys, it was being furnished with a pipe, the symbol of successfully bonded males, that brought her the most happiness. Unfortunately for Hughes, her mother caught her and after a “storm of scolding” she was told that, “the crime had been omitted from the ten commandments because not even Moses could imagine that a little girl should so disgrace herself” (33). These “rules” for how girls were expected to act differently from boys were upsetting for Hughes. She wondered why there were different rules for her than for her brothers? She was allowed all the physical freedom they had been allowed, but the rest of her personality would not be allowed to follow. Hughes was so upset that one day her mother caught her saying “How I wish I was a boy.” Her mother explained “that this was a wicked thought. She did not go on to give a reason, but merely insisted that it was splendid to be a girl” (33). Hughes wished at an early age that she could become a boy. Yet her mother told her the wish was wicked. Unfortunately, all of her experiences had told her that there was nothing wicked at all in wanting to be a boy. Being a boy meant being free. “Becoming a boy” is a common theme in many New Woman autobiographies. In virtually every case it is invoked solely because the girls had experienced liberation like other boys in the form of physical activity and comfortable clothing. The lesson that the experience of games and athletic fitness taught these women during childhood was that boys’ activities would please them. Boys’ activities were fun, liberating, and exciting. They caused one to get out of breath, have her heart race, and feel free. These women then naturally believed they would be allowed the same freedoms as their brothers. Unfortunately, they grew up and learned that, in fact, no matter how good an athlete one was or how much physical strength a woman had, “polite” society would not allow women to have the same freedoms as their brothers. They longed for the liberty boys had and many spent their lives fighting for just such an equality.

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As children, they also could see nothing “wicked” in their desires. What they had yet to learn was that in order for patriarchy and heteronormativity to continue, girls must not become boys. They must remain private instead of public, and they must remain passive instead of active and aggressive. In Britain at the end of the century gender-shifting was thought a perverse and dangerous business. Most of these New Women to be would have the experience of going to school to learn what the “rules” for girls were and why it was “wicked” for them to desire to be boys. What they came to was a middle ground of sorts, the New Woman. In the form of a New Woman they could be female while living the free lives they did as children. As New Women, they liberated themselves. The paradigm of this revolutionary progress was acquisition of fitness and playing of sports. Gwen Raverat, Charles Darwin’s granddaughter, is a second example of a woman who not only reported a very physically active childhood but who also found what she preferred to do with her body to be at constant odds with the ladylike deportment that society prescribed for her. A preliminary telling detail in Raverat’s Period Piece: A Cambridge Childhood is in the way she organized her book. Her story is divided into fourteen chapters with titles such as “Education,” “Ladies,” “Propriety,” “Sport,” “Clothes,” and “Society.” Of all the topics she could have chosen to delineate a retrospect upon her childhood, she chose those that directly affect the outlook and personality of a female child who would eventually resist her potential future and its arbitrarily imposed limitations. “Sports” teach Gwen at a young age that she can be physically free and have nontraditional options. When she leaves the domestic sphere of her progressive and evolutionary minded family and goes off to school, “education” and “society” will eventually teach young Gwen about “propriety,” and “clothing” ultimately becomes the way society literally hems in the body of young women. The New Woman will break through this paradigm by choosing clothing that will allow her to be physically free in the way she was as a child. In the chapter, “Sport,” Raverat describes herself playing “pirates” in the river with her brother and two male cousins, as well as biking, climbing, running, and building forts with them. She was also able to swim: “We used to fish interesting things out of the river.”15 After mentioning her many physical adventures in childhood with her male playmates, she describes her experiences with games in school: “I managed to into [sic] the hockey team; not by skill, but by a kind of terrified ferocity; and because I could run rather fast. I even broke a strange girl’s nose in a match” (237-8). The roughness that Raverat acted out in her childhood games, and later in sports at school, surely translated

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into her comfort with aggressiveness later in life. Her “terrified ferocity” seems to be behind many of her later comments regarding “clothes,” “ladies,” and “propriety” as well. Her ferocity carried on into her later life also. Friend Virginia Woolf once described her manner as “hearty” and “direct.”16 Another incident from her time at school demonstrates not only her aggressive personality but also her physical abilities: “I won a race for a hundred yards at the school, and at last got my long-coveted book of Milton’s Poems as a prize. I was not showing off in asking for it; I really wanted it” (238). Raverat thus learned that being a fast runner, being physically fit, being aggressive, and having attributes that were normally associated with boys were not only a pleasurable, but they could also get her a particular sort of prize that she had learned to want. The Milton poetry was talismanic for the British male soul. For Raverat, its vision and intellectual resonance was as validating as winning a footrace. In this one story we see her physical strength literally encouraging her intellectual strength. The fit body that Raverat created as a child was a necessary foundation for the adult personality that she constructed. Raverat relates a stereotyping of herself that she distilled from her early-life athletic personality: “It took me some time to realize that it was considered queer to be interested in anything whatever except horses” (71). At home Raverat was taught throughout her childhood that an interest in all physical activities was acceptable. However, in going to school and being exposed to the lives of other girls, she was socialized to understand that the female body was not meant to be active. For late Victorian society, women’s bodies had a function. That function had little to do with sports, athletics or fitness (beyond what was necessary for procreation) and thanks to her socialization at school she learned the limits that society would impose upon her body. The only physical activity a girl could show an interest in was horses. It is not surprising, then, that there appears in her narrative almost a backlash against all that was considered feminine. Raverat recognized the difference between what was considered the culture of boys and what was proper for girls: “I never played with dolls at all, except when they were useful for acting—to be sailors in a shipwreck, or human sacrifices” (248). In spite of her typically childish blood-thirstiness quite common in boys, it did not take Raverat long to learn that women were supposed to be passive, while men could be active. So she avoided all that was inactive, not wanting her body to become the “human” sacrifice that her dolls became.

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Another example of Raverat’s general disdain and pity for girls who demonstrated traditionally female behaviors was often displayed when Raverat and her friends staged plays. Everyone had a part, but her friend Nora, who was considered the prettiest, “generally had to be the princess, which was very dull for her” (249). Being a princess, a doll, or a traditional lady was dull. Princesses and dolls tend to be iconic, static, and fit for any human sacrifice, and never active unless someone moved them. Raverat’s observations about dolls and princesses are especially telling as representations of her understanding of the traditional roles of a lady. To her, perhaps a lady’s ultimate function was to be dull and ultimately sacrificed to the interests of males. It is through these passages of gendered body analysis that Raverat learned and rejected the convention that female bodies were to be inactive and male bodies were to be active. One advantage of autobiography is that the author can look back and comment with the wisdom of hindsight. And, in this case, Raverat grieves the loss of freedom she experienced when she remembered how and when the athletic acts of her body were eventually limited: When all is said and done, our liberty was only relative; we were only just a little more free than some of our contemporaries. . . . As we grew towards adolescence the restrictions became steadily more painful, for they prevented us from growing in the natural way, just as the binding of the feet of a Chinese girl prevents growth. (52)

Raverat as a child was free as long as she stayed a child. She was free to run, swim, fish, climb, race, play cricket and other games, but as she grew towards womanhood this freedom was diminished and then stopped. Unlike the way in which the word “natural” is normally used to describe how a female child should expect to grow up, Raverat uses the word to mean something closer to “unrestricted.” Instead of an essential or natural femaleness, Raverat believes that the limitations placed on her female body and its activities were perverse and therefore not natural. It is no wonder that as a grown woman Raverat prized the personality of a New Woman. She writes: When my granddaughter Anne was about five she said to me one day: ‘Grandmamma, when I am grown up, I think I shall be a witch. There are too many ladies, don’t you think?’ Well, there are too many ladies; but there were many more too many when I was young. My whole life was surrounded by them; but from the very beginning I was determined, like Anne, never ever to be one. (75)

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Clearly Raverat did not mean that she did not wish to be a woman. Rather she did not wish to be the type of woman who was not allowed to vote, not allowed to work outside the home, not allowed to remain single, whose only physical activities could be childbearing and horse riding. Shaped by her positive physical experiences and having a healthy active body, she was not eager to restrict herself to the “doing nothing” of a lady: “Ladies were ladies in those days. They did not do things themselves” (75). But if Raverat consciously decided against the role of a “lady,” what role was left for her? If she had been born a little while later she might have read the lives of politically pioneering women like herself and understood that the role of a New Woman was available. If she had been born fifty or even a hundred years later Raverat might have taken a lesbian lover or even become a transgendered artist living in New York.17 Instead, she desired to possess the only acceptable visible social identity of her time, to be a man: Of course I wanted still more, more than anything in the world, to be a man. I wanted so much to be a boy that I did not dare to think about it at all, for it made me feel quite desperate to know that it was impossible to be one. But I always dreamt I was a boy. If truth must be told, still now, in my dreams at night, I am generally a young man. (129)

It is not surprising that a girl who was not only active in sports in school but also played games with her brothers and male cousins would have dreams and aspirations that boys had. This is not to say that the desire to be a boy is the same as being a New Woman, but what this desire does represent is an awareness of the difference between the attractive social possibilities that existed for boys and those dull ones that existed for girls. At the end of the century, Raverat would have only seen two models of existence, men and women. During her physically active childhood she saw these differences, and in her dream life she chose the body that matched her emancipated personality. A third and final example, and perhaps the most remarkable, is of Muriel Parsloe who demonstrated that sports, physical education, and athletic games played a fundamental role in the formation of her revolutionary personality, but her story also reveals the ways in which a New Woman could shape a different definition of what it meant to be a woman in the late Victorian and Edwardian period. Parsloe was not particularly famous during her lifetime. She was not the first female anything. Nevertheless, her autobiography reads like a New Woman novel. Reading A Parson’s Daughter is reminiscent of reading Sarah Grand’s The

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Heavenly Twins.18 Like the heroine in The Heavenly Twins, Parsloe’s interest in sports, physical fitness, and athletics came mostly from her brothers and Old Harry, her father’s valet and, after her father’s marriage, the family gardener. Her brothers were older than she was and Old Harry consistently treated her as if what she was interested in was not restricted by her gender. One of the first details Parsloe gives us about herself in the very first paragraph is that “I was always known as Tommy and have been all my life, though I was christened Muriel.”19 Her nickname is an important detail in that her interest in her body and fitness was captioned by this masculine nickname. This particular autobiography combines the elements of autobiography with the elements of a New Woman novel. In addition, her announcement of her nickname early in her narrative introduces a novelistically characterized hero. Parsloe not only narrates the story of her life, but in doing so introduces a personality that is a model for an emancipated future life for young women. An aspect of her childhood that was very influential was her relationship with Old Harry. She decided she wanted to be a jockey when she grew up. He suggested that she might be able to race a horse if her hands were a bit stronger. She said “I’ve got quite a lot of muscle, I think I could hold one well in hand.” He responded, “I tell you what, Miss, I’ll teach you boxing, that’ll harden you up and get you fit, but don’t you go and tell your ma!” (21). They practiced boxing every day and this was before she was eleven years old. Moreover, she maintained ever afterwards a high fitness level, and it made all of the difference in her adult life: “What I do know is that if it had not been for Harry, after my brother went away to school I should never have been the girl I was, nor perhaps the woman I am, nor had the time I have had” (22). Harry represents the physical liberation she had in her childhood. She easily recognizes that had it not been for her physical strength she would not have become the remarkable woman she did. About this same time in her life, she was sent to a private day school in the neighborhood. Significantly, the only incidents she discusses are of sports and fitness: “I tell you I had some good times there. I played cricket and football with the boys, we also had some fine swimming as there were good baths” (23). Of all the possible stories she could remember or retell from her time in school, the only ones she chooses have to do with sports. In her 300-page autobiography she does not mention one friend she met, one teacher who was influential, not one classroom lesson she learned, or what her favorite subject might have been. The only incident she recalls in all of that time spent at school is the time she literally assaulted a boy and

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tried to drown him. He was chasing other boys in the bath and bullying them: “I got behind him and pushed him off the deep end. I then dived in after him and got him by one leg and pulled him under” (24). Thus, she defended and revenged a group of smaller boys with her physical strength. She used her body as a means of fighting injustice. Instead of crying or telling the headmaster, Parsloe chose to punish the boy herself. Another familiar theme in the life writing of sporting New Women is a hatred, almost, of all things feminine, especially clothes. One summer, Parsloe was to stay at an elderly aunt’s house so she could act as a companion to her, but she did not have the appropriate feminine clothing to wear: “I had to have dresses and things made[,] as I had always worn boy’s things. When I was dressed like a nice little girl I felt rotten” (25). She could not tolerate that mode of dress after that summer. Throughout the rest of her life, she says, she wore only “breeches.” It was also just after this summer that she decided to have her hair cut off: “I found long hair an infernal business” (46). Her determination to wear what she wanted was mirrored in her choice to style her hair however she wanted. The most remarkable reference to Parsloe’s interest in an alternatively gendered future for herself closely mirrors the incident in The Heavenly Twins of “The Tenor and the Boy,” that wonderful episode in the novel wherein Angelica dresses up as a boy so she might spend time with the Tenor. In Parsloe’s case, however, she left home to get a job because she wanted to run away from a lover. She decided to “try and get away from home for a bit” (49), which is the impetus for her plan to take her brother John’s job in Ireland. Instead of John taking the job, “Tommy” Parsloe would go to work at the farm, dressed as a male youth. On her trip to the farm, Parsloe uses her strong and fit female body to pursue a male person’s future for herself. On the train ride, she also had the opportunity to try on the opposite gender identity in terms of sexual identity. Parsloe, at the time of her journey to Ireland, was nineteen years old. She met a girl on the train who was about thirteen or fourteen, and after having a long talk with her, “Tommy” decided, “by this time she was getting quite fond of me, I believe, and to myself I thought, ‘now I am going to have some fun with her’” (54). Parsloe then made overtures to her in the manner of seeking a heterosexual connection. She began flirting with her. She told the young girl that she was pretty and put her hand on her knee and squeezed it. Finally, Parsloe asked her for a kiss and “then she put up her snub nose and gave me a tremendous kiss. If I had been a lad, it would not have taken me long to have had all I wanted and more perhaps” (55). From this incident on the train Parsloe learned two significant lessons about the social freedoms in regards to sex men enjoyed that women could

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not. The first was that they could explore and sometimes satisfy their sexual interests and appetites without many repercussions. Disguised as “Tommy,” Parsloe did not have to worry about her own reputation or about the reputation of the young girl with whom she was flirting. Dressed in traditionally male clothing and appropriating an assertive personality, she was tacitly allowed the license to explore the body of her new friend. The second lesson is that, dressed in traditionally male clothing, Parsloe was able to experiment with a homosexual relationship in a way that she might not have otherwise found an opportunity to explore. Both of these lessons allowed her experience that she would not have known if it were not for key elements in her childhood—Old Harry, sports, and her choice of clothing—all clearly anchored in the practice of her fitness and athleticism. Finally, Parsloe arrived at the farm in Galway, Ireland, where she was to work. She had no trouble convincing all that she was a twenty-three year old young man prepared to spend a year working on the farm. She was dressed in traditionally male clothing, her hair was still short, and she was strong enough to do as much work as the other young men on the farm. She soon befriended one such young man (Tim) who “knew I was a girl” (63). Tim declared that “he felt it [her femaleness] in him” (64). She proceeded to tell him the story of why she decided to come to the farm to work. He in turn, swore he would not let her secret out and went a step further by declaring that he “would milk four of my cows, . . . then on Sundays he would milk them all and bring my breakfast up to my room” (64). By all of the other members of the community, Parsloe was perceived as male. Yet, when perceived as female by Tim, she learned that her physical strength might not be necessary or even useful. In fact, she learned that as a female person, inactive and passive bodies are not only desired by men but also are encouraged. Parsloe stayed on the farm for a year until she learned that her mother had taken ill. We hear no more of Tim. Parsloe eventually married and spent the rest of her life breaking horses and riding them for farmers. She rarely wore a skirt and smoked as often as she desired. She had many major accidents while riding and hunting but, even after breaking several bones, she never stopped. She was a public advocate of women’s suffrage as well as women’s rights to higher education. Parsloe, who spent her entire childhood and youth engaged in athletics and fitness activities, as an adult demonstrated the liberated life a woman could live. Her unconventional athletic childhood taught her that an alternative (male) future could be available for women.

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The female personalities that emerge in the New Woman life writing of Bottome, Hughes, Raverat, and Parsloe demonstrate that fitness, physical education, and athletic games played a fundamental role in the formation of their ultimately revolutionary characters. These women experienced first-hand what the modern sporting goods corporation Nike announced in its 1995 commercial: In it the young girl personalities declare, “If you let me play sports, I will like myself more; I will have more self-confidence. I will be 60 percent less likely to get breast cancer, or suffer depression. I will be more likely to leave a man who beats me. I will be less likely to get pregnant before I want to.” This might have been received as revolutionary inspiration embraced in 1972 with the passing in the United States of Title IX, but in fact this fundamental knowledge existed at the end of the 19th Century. The restoration to the cultural canon of these long-neglected autobiographies by women, New Women, is indispensible in charting the history of the emancipation of the modern woman. Newly recognized and validated, they are a proclamation by their authors that women who were private and domestic would become public and empowered in their generations. Even more sensationally, the self presented in an athletic female body and personality was not fictive or grotesque. It was essentially real, and it was embraced with an enduring self-esteem by the women imbued by it. Finally, the woman as athlete, the woman as intellectual, and the woman as politically assertive were unified, an undivided self certainly, in the person and citizenship of the New Woman.

Works Cited Bacon, Gertrude. Memories of Land and Sky. London: Methuen, 1928. de Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Self. Trans. H. M. Parshley. New York: Knopf, 1952. Bell, Susan Groag and Marilyn Yalom, eds. Revealing Lives: Autobiography, Biography, and Gender New York: State Univ. of New York Press, 1990. Bottome, Phyllis. Search for a Soul. New York: Cornwall Press, 1948. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Castelnuovo, Shirley and Sharon Guthrie. Feminism and the Female Body: Liberating the Amazon Within. Boulder, CO: L. Rienner Publishers, 1998. Chorley, Katharine. Manchester Made Them. London: Faber and Faber, 1950.

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Faithfull, Lillian M. In the House of My Pilgrimage. London: Chatto and Windus, 1925. Gagnier, Regenia. Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain, 1832-1920. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991. Grand, Sarah. The Heavenly Twins. London: Heinemann, 1893. Hamilton, Mary Agnes. Remembering My Good Friends. London: Jonathan Cape, 1944. Hughes, Mary Vivian. A London Child of the Seventies. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1934. —. A London Girl of the 1880s. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1936. —. A London Family (1870-1900). Oxford: Oxford UP, 1946. Jacob, Naomi. Me: A Chronicle About Other People. London: Hutchinson, 1972. Jelinek, Estelle C. The Tradition of Women’s Autobiography: From Antiquity to the Present. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1986. —. ed. Women’s Autobiography: Essays in Criticism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1980. Keynes, Florence. Gathering Up the Threads: A Study in Family Biography. Cambridge: W. Heffer and Sons, 1950. Lejeune, Philippe. Le Pacte Autobiographique. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1975. Marcus, Laura. Auto/biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice. Manchester, Manchester UP, 1994. McCrum, Robert. Review of Gwen Raverat: Friends, Family, & Affectations by Frances Spalding. The Observer, June 24, 2001. Parsloe, Muriel Jardine. A Parson’s Daughter. London: Faber and Faber, 1935. Peterson, Linda. Traditions of Victorian Women’s Autobiography: The Poetics and Politics of Life Writing Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1999. Raverat, Gwen. Period Piece: A Cambridge Childhood. London: Faber and Faber, 1952. Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson, eds. De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1992. Stanton, Domna. “Is the Subject Different?” In The Female Autograph: Theory and Practice of Autobiography from the Tenth to the Twentieth Century, ed. Domna Stanton, 3-20. New York: New York Literary Forum, 1984. Stringer, Mabel. Golfing Reminiscences. London: Mills and Boon, 1924.

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Notes 1

The New Woman cousins in Europe and America almost certainly wrote similar autobiographies. However, the investigation of that more extensive body of works remains to be undertaken. 2 See Literature and Culture at the Fin de Siècle edited by Talia Schaefer (New York: Longman, 2007) and Ellen Jordan’s “The Christening of the New Woman: May 1894,” The Victorian Newsletter Spring (1983): 19-21 for more detailed definitions of the New Woman. 3 Estelle C. Jelinek, The Tradition of Women’s Autobiography: From Antiquity to the Present (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1986), xiii. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 4 Linda Peterson, Traditions of Victorian Women’s Autobiography: The Poetics and Politics of Life Writing (Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1999), 2. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. Other critics have also resisted this disposition to define a tradition based solely on gender. Regenia Gagnier in Subjectivities focuses on the texts of working-class women and men by analyzing “how subjects see themselves in response to the material and cultural ‘facts’ of their lives” (11). Also Laura Marcus in Auto/biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice (Manchester, Manchester UP, 1994) questions a women’s tradition by charting the diversity of discourse in autobiographical genres in the nineteenth century. Peterson and Marcus are both more interested in noticing the ways in which a literary history for autobiography was constructed in the Victorian period. 5 Susan Groag Bell and Marilyn Yalom, eds, Revealing Lives: Autobiography, Biography, and Gender (New York: State Univ. of New York Press, 1990), 2. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 6 Domna Stanton, “Is the Subject Different?” in The Female Autograph: Theory and Practice of Autobiography from the Tenth to the Twentieth Century, ed. Domna Stanton (New York: New York Literary Forum, 1984), 15. 7 For a history of “bodies and desire” see the introduction to Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1992), and it is to that introduction that I am indebted for the immediately following commentary. 8 More on the naming of the female body as “other” is in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (New York: Knopf, 1952) and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990). 9 Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, eds., De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1992), 35. 10 Shirley Castelnuovo and Sharon Guthrie, Feminism and the Female Body: Liberating the Amazon Within (Boulder, CO: L. Rienner Publishers, 1998), 32. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 11 Yet from the seventy-four New Woman texts, I found only four in which the authors wrote about themselves in reference to significant relationships: Remembering My Good Friends by Mary Agnes Hamilton (London: Jonathan

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Cape, 1944), Gathering Up the Threads: A Study in Family Biography by Florence Keynes (Cambridge: W. Heffer and Sons, 1950), Manchester Made Them by Katharine Chorley (London: Faber and Faber, 1950), and Me: A Chronicle About Other People by Naomi Jacob (London: Hutchinson, 1972). 12 Phyllis Bottome, Search for a Soul (New York: Cornwall Press, 1948), xi. Italics mine. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 13 This makes one wonder why none of the major scholars of women’s autobiography have analyzed it. 14 Mary Vivian Hughes, A London Child of the Seventies (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1934), 3. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 15 Gwen Raverat, Period Piece (London: Faber and Faber, 1952), 232. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 16 Robert McCrum, review of Gwen Raverat: Friends, Family, & Affectations, by Frances Spalding, The Observer, June 24, 2001, 1. 17 Instead, she married the French painter Jacques Raverat in 1911, whom many thought to be a homosexual, and they lived in the south of France, until his death in 1925. They had two daughters. She was famous during her day as a wood engraver and founded the Society of Wood Engravers in England. She was an art critic, and during World War II she served as a draughtswoman in Naval Intelligence. She was certainly an exceptional woman—a New Woman in every respect. 18 The Heavenly Twins, published by Heinemann in 1893, immediately became a controversial bestseller in England and the United States. The novel and its author became synonymous with the New Woman. It was reprinted six times in its first year. In deploring sexual ignorance and hypocrisy in marriage it gave a disturbing depiction of a syphilitic wife and baby. The eponymous “twins,” Angelica and Diablo, served to question gender roles; 'The Tenor and the Boy' is a crossdressing episode in which Angelica tells the tenor that as “the Boy” she has enjoyed, “free intercourse with your masculine mind undiluted by your masculine prejudices and proclivities with regard to my sex”. 19 Muriel Jardine Parsloe, A Parson’s Daughter (London: Faber and Faber, 1935), 13. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically.

DRESSING THE PART: THE BODY IN/OF THE DIARIES OF HANNAH CULLWICK AND ARTHUR MUNBY CYNTHIA HUFF

In January of 1860, the gentleman-scholar Arthur Munby visited working-class Hannah Cullwick in Kilburn while her master and mistress were away, so that she could “show me her work… the kitchen she had to scour, the big kitchen grate that she blacked, and the chimney she had swept….” Recalling the day some thirty years later, Munby wrote that during a tour of the Jackson’s house he spied A ball dress of black gauze and lace with crimson garniture; and this made me wish to see for once how Hannah would look in a lady’s condition. I told her to put on the ball dress… she took off her own servant’s dress and put on that of her mistress. It was too short and too narrow for her and it would not meet around her healthy rustic waist; still she was able to wear it…. I gazed at her in a kind of rapture; so lovely a figure she was, so ladylike, so sweet, that I longed to take her away from her slaving and make of her a lady indeed…. She tore off that strange… finery… and hurried me down to her kitchen where she could feel properly clad and at home. And it was this incident more than any other thing, that made me wholly and for ever hers. 1

In this tête-a-tête played out on a dangerous stage where their taboo class/sexual relationship might be discovered at any moment, the body assumes central importance: not only the class and gender roles which Hannah’s body is forced into, but the central role of this scene in the body of the text of Munby’s diaries; it is, he says, “the incident… that made me wholly and for ever hers.” In the Munby-Cullwick liaison, this is a critical moment. Even a glance at the Oxford English Dictionary entry for body suggests that any sustained analysis of the intricacies of the Hannah CullwickArthur Munby relationship and our reading of it needs to take into account the multiple meanings and uses of body.2 The major definitions of “body” are the material frame of man (and animals); the main portion or trunk;

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personal being or individual; and a corporate body or aggregate of individuals, a collective mass. Within each of these major definitions are usages and connotations leading us to consider just how much the complicated and bizarre relationship of these two Victorians was anchored in the body in every sense. The first definition emphasizes the materiality of the body itself but also situates the ways bodies are materially located in contrast to the soul; and in our modern critical lexicon materiality can be read as short-hand for discussing the production of texts, the historical and social conditions under which people live and work, a gesture toward class analysis. The second definition suggests several viewpoints for reading the Munby-Cullwick relationship: religious connotations, as in the body of Christ; women’s dress as in bodice; “the main portion of a document”; and “of the main portion of a collection.” Christian connotations and denotations envelope the Munby-Cullwick relationship as does play, in multiple senses of the word, as it pertains to the meaning and performance of dress. Focusing on documentation and collection leads us to consider not only the Victorian penchant for both these phenomena but also their part in the idea of making texts, including those detailing both the Cullwick-Munby relationship and our reading of it through theoretical and textual constructions. The third definition of body emphasizes the individual, including his/her legal status or lack of it, while the fourth stresses the aggregate, the body politic and the collective. “Body” also connotes the idea of substance as opposed to representation. The individual body interplays with the body of society, and that interplay is significant when considering the legal, class, gendered and raced status of Cullwick and Munby within Victorian ideology. The body of the text, the substance of the passage: those metaphors suggest Cullwick’s workingclass physique and, by contrast, Munby’s slight, “gentlemanly” body, and the contrast between the substance of Cullwick’s working life and Munby’s imagined representation of it: the contest between fiction and truth played out in the body of their life writings.3 The almost two-decade relationship and then marriage of Arthur J. Munby, Victorian gentleman and man of letters, and Hannah Cullwick, his servant and wife, illuminate body dynamics that are inflected by ideological and material constructions of class, race, and gender as these interact with the personal. Munby’s request that Cullwick keep a diary for his perusal and that she pose for photographs depicting her in conflicting class, gender and racial roles suggests how her body as visual and written life narrative enacts hegemonies of power and colonization. Yet Cullwick’s collaboration with and resistance to Munby’s scripts evince a complicated dynamic between the two, a textual/personal hybridity mediated

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by their respective conceptions of how bodies do and don’t reenact Victorian ideologies of race, class, gender and sexuality, by their conceptions of the body politic, the legal and social status of the individual, the influence of religion and the role of collecting, among others. Reading Cullwick and Munby’s diaries, as well as the photographs of Cullwick that he commissioned, through the lens of autobiography theory, feminist theories, postcolonial theory, and cultural studies helps us understand gendered and class-inflected conceptions of life-writing and racial and class privileging in postcolonial theories. This theoretical amalgamation also foregrounds gender, the everyday and non-canonical writing in feminisms and cultural studies, respectively. My point here, in keeping with the fourth major definition of body which stresses the aggregate, is that our critical frameworks can over determine how we read the stories of individuals and their texts, even if we consider ourselves thoroughly aware of our own critical practice. Finally, life-narrative theory, by focusing on the complex constructions of subjectivities, functions as a means by which men, women, and members of diverse classes might somatically “read” each other and how they might use the texts they create as part of this process. The relationship of Cullwick and Munby is so fraught with contradiction, so enshrouded in secrecy that the critics who have been fascinated by its complexity and suggestiveness have interpreted it in various ways that may say as much about the bodies of knowledge they use as lenses as the liaison itself. Leonore Davidoff’s brilliant analysis of how their relationship embeds Victorian tropes and contradictions such as black/white, dirty/clean, middle/working class, man/woman, animal/human and natural/civilized is firmly placed within Victorian historical contexts and assigns Munby power over Cullwick.4 On the other hand, Liz Stanley, who has edited Cullwick’s diaries as well as written elsewhere about her, uses a feminist approach to emphasize her writing as one of the few extant examples of Victorian working class women’s voice and contends that, although Cullwick referred to herself as Munby’s slave and drudge, she had a mind of her own.5 Julia Swindells challenges Stanley’s reading, especially her contention that Cullwick’s voice is authentic, and argues that it is Munby who finds a voice in Cullwick’s diaries since he orchestrated their writings and they were produced for him to read.6 Focusing on cross dressing, fetishism and sado-masochism, other critics have used psychoanalytic and/or postcolonial approaches. Martin A. Danahay sees Munby as one of several Victorian men, including Thomas Carlyle and J.S. Mill, whose male identity derives from masochism and

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whose fetishizing of working class women relates directly to their performance of labor and its effect on the body.7 Barry Reay reads Munby’s extensive collection of photographs of Cullwick alongside his others of working women to argue that Munby’s fantasies are historically emblematic of Victorian men’s preoccupation with and fetishization of deformity and gender bending as exemplified by women’s bodies and photographs of them. Martha Dana Rust uses an avowedly postcolonial lens to emphasize Munby’s objectifying gaze on Cullwick’s colonized body and the colonizing power of her acceptance of the doctrine of humility yet finds that Cullwick uses her diaries to rewrite the colonizer’s agenda.8 By far the most provocative and extensive analysis of Cullwick and Munby, their relationship, its ideological contexts, and its place within histories of representation is in Anne McClintock’s Imperial Leather. McClintock reads psychoanalysis, Marxism and postcolonial theory in relation to social history to triangulate race, class and gender and characterizes the Munby-Cullwick relationship as sadomasochism and fetishism, and illustrative of Victorian culture’s domestic imperialism derived from Enlightenment liberalism. Like Davidoff she emphasizes the importance of Munby’s childhood relationship with his nanny, Hannah Carter, as a common denominator for middle and upper class Victorian men to set into motion their fascination with, yet distancing from, working class women, and like Liz Stanley McClintock affords Cullwick agency. In various ways, all of the above critics talk about the body physically, materially, socially, legally, ideologically and to some extent textually. My reading includes these foci, yet privileges the diary as a textual body implicated in the production of meanings within a gendered, racialized, and classbound Victorian context, and argues that Munby and Cullwick play at fictionalizing the family, a shibboleth of Victorian public and personal life. Arthur J. Munby was a well-known Victorian gentleman and man of letters, a friend of eminent Victorians such as D.G. Rossetti, Ruskin and Swinburne, a proponent of education for the working class, a teacher at the Working Man’s College, and, according to his biographer Derek Hudson, a champion of women’s rights.9 By contrast, Hannah Cullwick was a potgirl, an under housemaid, a maid of all work, in short the lowest type of servant. Socially and physically, Munby and Cullwick represented different strata of Victorian society. Munby’s class position reinforced his feminized appearance just as Cullwick’s did her masculinized one. Munby’s hands were smooth and uncalloused and he lacked upper body strength. Cullwick’s almost thirteen –inch biceps, a badge of honor both to herself and Munby, were a byproduct of drudgery and incessant physical

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labor, which, although not slavery in the strictly legal sense, circumscribed her life socially and culturally. But Cullwick’s physical endurance, masculine appearance, and lower class status attracted her to Munby and allowed her to walk around London undisturbed by unwanted suitors. Her physical prowess and stamina contrasted with the weakness and neurasthenia of privileged “ladies,” women who by definition didn’t work and who Munby would presumably find attractive. Always fascinated by working class women, Munby commanded Cullwick to write down the details of her everyday life for his perusal—thus the inception of her diaries and a significant step toward Cullwick acquiring authority or confirming her slavery, depending on one’s interpretation. Cullwick dressed up and posed for Munby, too. Cullwick willingly blackened herself, describing how, when cleaning one of her employer’s homes she crawled into a dark hole “lay curl’d up in the dirt” and “The cobwebs & dust fell all over me & I had to poke my nose out o’ the door to get breath, like a dog’s out of a kennel” (7 March 1863, reel 18, vol. 98.l). Photographs show her scrubbing the front steps, drawing water from a pump, cleaning and licking Munby’s boots, wearing the blackened skin of a slave, dressing as his valet and posing as a country wench as well as a lady. Although her diary indicates that Cullwick did not object to the photography sessions and exerted some control over the composition of the images, writing the diary was a chore. Between 1854 and 1873 Cullwick wrote seventeen diaries whose composition was instigated by Munby as a way for the two of them to communicate and as text that gave him a first-hand account of the daily life of a working woman. Always intrigued by women’s work, Munby insisted that Cullwick catalog her daily labors and routinely send her diary pages to him. He collected these, just as he used his own diary to collect in words and drawings pictures of working women in Great Britain and on the continent. Munby’s diary is more varied than Cullwick’s , and the life work of a flâneur who captured the throbbing diversity of the second half of the nineteenth-century and the very beginning of the twentieth. But he realized that its contents were too shocking for Edwardian sensibilities and wrote on the back of an envelope containing three keys that his deed boxes were not to be opened before the first of January, 1950. The secrecy of his life joined with Cullwick’s as represented in their diaries, literally kept under lock and key for almost half a century, dovetails with the usual view of the diary as a closed document intended only for the eyes of the writer, a baring of the soul and an intimate look into the secret life of another. As such it joins the ranks of works written

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about the underside of Victorian life such as the diary My Secret Life,10 and causes us to assume incorrectly that the Victorians shared our current assumption that the diary reveals all instead of being a text most often constructed as a way to communicate with others. Obviously Munby did think of the diary in this way since Cullwick communicated with him via her diary; by doing so she joins a tradition of diarists who wrote with an audience in mind, often their family, who wrote to tell significant others about their lives and who very frequently used their diaries to laud family achievements. Being the family chronicler was one of the duties of Victorian women whatever their class, though they also used diaries, often different volumes simultaneously, to keep track of different aspects of their busy lives. Cullwick’s summary end-of-the-year entries and her incessant detailing of the number of boots cleaned and chores done place her diary keeping within the tradition of this focus on particularity. Instead of seeing her diary keeping as an aberration because of its content, I would argue that we consider the body of her text within the historical context of other Victorian women’s diaries, including the familial relationships they detail.11 Munby’s conception of Cullwick was familial but not at all simple as the following passage demonstrates. For, on the 26th of May, 1854, she was brought to me, a surprise of all surprises, by Him who brought Eve to Adam. A country girl, she was, a scullion at the Squire’s: and to her and her mother, that was a great distinction; for she had worked in the fields, and had been pot girl at a village inn. A tall erect creature, with light firm step and noble bearing: her face had the features and expression of a high born lady, though the complexion was rosy & rustic, & the blue eyes innocent and childlike: her bare arms and hands were large and strong, and ruddy from the shoulder to the finger tips; but they were beautifully formed…. A robust hardworking peasant lass, with the marks of labour and servitude upon her everywhere: yet endowed with a grace and beauty, an obvious intelligence, that would have become a lady of the highest. Such a combination I had dreamt of and sought for; but I have never seen it, save in her. And from that day to this, my love for her, and hers for me, has been in each of us a passion and a power that has simulated and ennobled Life, even through the very contrast of our lives. But I did not know till after long, that she had seen Sardanapalus acted, and had been charmed by the character of Myrrha. “If I ever have a sweetheart,” she thought, “he shall be some one much above me; and I will be his slave, like Myrrha….” (26 May 1854. reel 16, vol. 92)

At first glance this reads as an originary myth complete with references to biblical and fictional characters, the latter in Sardanapulus.12 By

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implication Munby casts himself as Adam, Cullwick as Eve, the two of them the founding pair of a prototypical human family sanctioned by God’s will. That Munby considers himself the new Adam establishes him as the founding father of a set of relationships that doesn’t accord with the concept of the Victorian paterfamilias bound as this was by assumptions of class and race. The head of the bourgeois Victorian family, the paterfamilias was ideologically, politically and socially charged with insuring family members’ adherence to middle-class Victorian values of duty, earnestness, righteousness and sobriety, since one of the ways the middle class carved out a position in the nineteenth century was to distinguish itself from the profligacy of the classes above and below it. This charge translated into strict adherence to family values that inculcated the special destiny of the bourgeois family as upholders of progress, imperialism and the body politic; and central to this mission was not to marry or associate intimately with anyone below one’s class. In Family Fortunes, Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall point out the many public and private rituals the Victorian family performed to maintain its class status and emphasize that clothing reinforced gender distinctions: “The contrast between the straight lines, practical materials and business-like images of men’s clothes and the soft, flowing, curved lines, the rich colours and textures, elaborate detail and constricting shape of women’s clothes was becoming a powerful part of gender segregation.”13 Munby clearly counteracts segregated gender and class performance through the rituals of dress and culture by consorting with working class Hannah Cullwick, even if he romanticizes her as natural and an exemplar of the Victorian adage of the importance of work. What is fascinating is the extent to which Munby’s description of Cullwick clarifies his concept of her dichotomous physical and mental character and shows that for him she functioned as a contradictory prototype. On one hand, she is a peasant; on the other, a lady. Her class, her strength, and parts of her physique cast her as working class, a slave, and a rustic; and Munby’s minute description of Cullwick’s physical characteristics indicate how much Victorians assessed others according to bodily characteristics and dress. The ruddiness of Cullwick’s complexion, her uncovered, large, powerful arms and hands mark her as off limits to any Victorian patriarch who properly plays his role as the propagator of values and children designed to uphold Victorian virtues, underpin the social and political structures of nineteenth century bourgeois Britain, and expand the empire. Yet, Cullwick’s mien, her beautifully formed hands, and her intelligence suggest she is a lady and these characteristics make her a suitable companion for Munby. Her erect bearing, light step and

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features are somatic hallmarks of ladyhood and Munby’s preoccupation with Cullwick’s hands as the body part confirming a contradictory reading of her body is in keeping with what Davidoff characterizes as a Victorian obsession with hands: “Small, dainty feet and hands, of course, were the pride of middle-class Victorian women and figure widely in descriptions of feminine attractiveness.”14

Cullwick’s calloused but beautifully formed hands

Because hands were the body part most equated with physical work, Victorians could easily read class status by looking at a person’s hands and members of the working class were commonly referred to as hands, reducing them to the physical labor they performed. Munby’s mention of

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Cullwick’s arms and hands as bare denotes her class for a Victorian lady would be dressed so that these body parts were covered; significantly, when Cullwick transformed into a lady her hands and arms were enshrouded. Munby may have been titillated by the sight of Cullwick’s bare flesh as some critics have argued, but this passage can also be read as Munby envisioning Cullwick as an Eve whose gendered body combines class attributes. In his version of the originary myth Cullwick is the prototypical Eve brought to the Adamic Munby by a munificent God, thus surely proving that under certain circumstances sharply demarcated Victorian class, race, and gender roles could be combined and/or transgressed in one body, thus ennobling life and creating a new hybrid family, and suggesting, as does the reference to Sardanapalus, that Munby thought he and Cullwick were part of a new order, which also preserved the old in its confirmation of properly gendered roles, and whose existence had been played out in fiction. Munby’s diaries and the ones he insisted that Cullwick write for him can fruitfully be read as continual displays of the performing body, not only because of their emphasis on the enactment of tableau, a favorite Victorian pastime, but also because of Munby’s penchant for photography, itself a form of tableau. Photography began in the Victorian era and fast became a way to collect and catalogue, in short to circumscribe and make sense of a confusing and rapidly expanding world as well as a form of life narrative. Recent critics, such as Timothy Dow Adams, have argued that photography is “light writing” and a form of somatic self representation that expands the boundaries of life writing and causes us to reexamine the intricacies of different media interacting with each other. 15 The photographs Munby collected of Cullwick are part of his larger collection of images of working class women just as his diaries entries about her are a portion of his verbal descriptions of many types of working woman such as the Wigan pit brow lasses, female mudlarks, London milk maids and female acrobats, all of whom he found intriguing. Like other Victorian middle class men such as Henry Mayhew, author of London Labour and the London Poor published in 1851, Munby considered himself a collector and social observer and in this sense his predilections fit the OED meaning of “body” as a collection as well as a performance. Munby has Cullwick perform for him in two ways: first, through having her photographed assuming different roles and second, by commanding that she write her diaries with him as her audience. The variety of poses Munby insists Cullwick assume for the commissioned photographs of her suggest how the two of them performed class, gender, and race vis-à-vis ideologies that maintained but also bridged the gulf between them in a

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new, yet bizarre, construction of family. Photographs of Cullwick show her performing daily chores expected of a maid of all work, such as scrubbing the front steps, drawing water, and cleaning boots. But they also depict her play acting: dressed as Magdalen, Una, and a Shropshire peasant girl, suited as Munby’s valet, and posed as a slave sporting the chain and padlock that marked her as Munby’s. Other photographs show her as a lady and after their marriage Munby’s diary descriptions indicate his glee over Cullwick’s chameleon ability to perform hybridity daily while still creating the conventional Victorian family scene: “Thursday, 3 April…. Home to Hannah…sitting in her red frock & white apron and neat cap, sewing; with the cat asleep on the hearthrug, and the kettle singing… I sat down and looked thankfully on this sweet homelike picture, and on her the central figure” (3 April 1873, reel 8, vol. 41). Munby’s homely description of Cullwick waiting patiently for him surrounded by the paraphernalia of domesticity reads like a page from a conduct book describing a wife’s proper role. This supplements other passages where Munby gleefully tells of Cullwick transforming from servant to lady and back again. “Monday, 5 May …. For, is she not a servant during the day, and a lady in the evening? And fulfills either part so well, that for the time she seems incapable of the other” (5 May 1873, reel 8, vol. 41). Munby’s obsession with Cullwick constantly performing her parts, but performing each one so well that no one could penetrate the secret of her guise or their relationship, was aided by the new science of photography, which adds an additional medium of analysis and representation of the Munby- Cullwick relationship. The racial overtones, as well as their connection to the binary ideologies that substantiate and sustain symbolic and literal associations among race, class, and gender and its historical situatedness, are apparent in the photographs just as they are in the diaries. England’s working class women were often classified with non-Caucasian racial groups, such as the colonized Africans in England’s empire. According to Ania Loomba, “it is clear that for the British upper classes class was increasingly thought of in terms of race.”16 The assumption that a certain “race” of people made up the “natural” working class justified placing whole groups into a servitude barely displaced, if at all, from slavery. Munby “festished” his love for Cullwick by depicting her in words and photographs licking his boots and willingly blackening her face and body for his enjoyment. The leather wrist strap that she wore as a sign of her ownership by Massa, as she called Munby, cost her well paying situations because her employers wondered if the strap signified questionable moral character and because its appearance clashed with

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Cullwick dressed as a slave and wearing the lock and chain given her by Munby

accepted dress for house servants. As the logical extension of a Victorian wife’s legal enslavement to her husband, the strap can be read as a stand-in for a wedding ring in the domestic playacting ritual of this socially mismatched couple. Since legally a wife’s political and civil interests were considered identical to her husband’s in Victorian England, her body was intentionally subsumed by his. But it is a mistake, I think, to consider Cullwick’s body as merely a blank slate written on by Munby, for if body carries with it the meaning of collective it also denotes individuality, and Cullwick was certainly aware of her power over Munby. She understood the symbolic as well as the material layers of their master-slave relationship and its connection to his professed love for her. Describing a particularly grimy episode of chimney cleaning, she writes:” Stripp’d myself quite naked…& then I got up into the chimney with a brush…I swept lots of soot down & it came all over me…& I wish’d rather that Massa could see me” (16 October 1863, reel 18, vol. 98.1). Munby’s desire was scopophilic as well as textual, since repeatedly seeing Cullwick

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in her dirt as well as reading about it sustained their family relationship in contrast to the more tenuous relationships he had with the numerous other working class women whose stories and photographs he collected. If Cullwick molded herself for Munby by assuming the guise of a slave and participating in a family tableau he originally conceived and orchestrated, she was a chameleon in individually productive ways as well. She took advantage of the Victorian watchword, “removable inequalities,” by taking French lessons at the Working Women’s College, jointly founded by Munby, and improving her speech, writing, and reading through conversation with the highly articulate Munby and through his comments on the diary she wrote expressly for him. Cullwick’s willing participation in the approved channels of class advancement, while remaining materially and figuratively in servitude, show the mimicry, code-switching, and double consciousness characteristic of colonial subjects, according to post-colonial theorists, as they achieve cultural capital and with it, authority. But to read Cullwick merely through a reductive post-colonial lens is to rob her of agency and deprive her of the part she willingly played in their family tableau. She, like Munby, enjoyed duping all but the very few people they let into the secret of their lives, at least until the pantomime became too irksome. Cullwick valued Munby because he was a gentleman and declared that she preferred giving herself to him rather than a working man. “Sunday 14 September ….it was best & safest to be a slave to a gentleman, nor wife and equal to any vulgar man” (14 September 1873, reel 19, vol. 98.7). Still, given the arguably “foreign” literary subjectivity of Cullwick, it makes sense to use a mode of life writing analysis that does not derive from the perspective of a privileged subject such as Munby whose life is buttressed by humanist assumptions and the individualistic selfreferentiality of autobiography in its exclusion of all but representative men. In “The Literary Standard, Working Class Autobiography, and Gender,” Regenia Gagnier argues for a materialist and class bound analysis of autobiography, saying that members of the working class write functionally, that is with a distinct purpose in mind. This contrasts to the aesthetic of detached individualism that is the hallmark of bourgeois empowerment in the res gestae form traditionally considered autobiography. The res gestae form, as Martin Danahay notes in A Community of One: Masculine Autobiography and Autonomy in Nineteenth-Century Britain, implies a withdrawal from the world of labor into the hermetic subjectivity of the masculine ego. Such a move is characteristic of men like Ruskin, Tennyson, Mill, and Arnold, who have been considered the great

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autobiographers of Victorian England, men who Munby brushed shoulders with in his daily life. Cullwick’s life writing does not fit this procrustean bed any more than the strength of her body conforms to the definition of a lady. Her writing is not a means to a withdrawn and sealed off subjectivity or a way to become representative of her age, but a chore and duty that she performs to please Munby, at least initially. Cullwick privileges physical production over textual production, the work of her hands over the labor of thought. As she writes on Monday 13 April 1863, “I like sewing but I’ve not much time for it, ‘cause my diary takes all my spare time up at nights” (13 April 1863, reel 18, vol. 98.1). What’s more, Cullwick’s usual entries typify both the dailiness and ethic of caring that Gagnier claims are standard for working class women life writers, whose purpose in writing is to show care for their families. The care Cullwick exhibits is unremitting in its physicality. She not only sustains the extended “family” of her employers, but also the smaller family unit she forms with Munby, by doing the incessant daily work of care, such as cooking and cleaning and fostering emotional and physical health. Her diary entries and letters always written for him after a long, hard day succoring her employer and his family, feature household chores as part of the second shift Munby expected of Cullwick, as well as personal service such as reading to him or washing his feet which was expressly performed to show her love and commitment and provide constant mental and emotional sustenance. In short, Cullwick’s unremitting labor creates domestic harmony. Typical for Cullwick is the Sunday 18 January 1863 entry. I lit the fires and did the hearths up. Clean’d 3 pairs o’ boots (with Massa’s in the evening). Swept & dusted the room. Laid the cloth & took breakfast up by nine – but the children had theirs in the parlour, so Sarah waited on ‘em all, & I clean’d away when they was gone into the drawing room & wash’d up the things. Sarah help’d me to wipe up. I clean’d the knives & wash’d up in the scullery. There was only roast beef for dinner & that I put down at ten, so I wasn’t busy with cooking. Massa sent me a note to say he should go away if he didn’t get my diary a Saturday night, & I had only written a letter to him so I didn’t know about going to his place or to Mrs Smith’s. But at 4 o’clock I thought I’d go & see if he was at home so I started off when I’d put the supper ready & put away all the dinner things. I thought he’d sure to be there & so I found him. Confidence is a great thing, & I felt he’d stop for me & I thought he would feel I should be sure to go – so we had a very nice evening & we added the boots up. I got the dinner & wash’d up after. Wash’d Massa’s feet & clean’d his boots, put coal on & then made cigars & had a little reading. At

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nine I came away – promising to send the diary soon as possible. I got home by ten, & then I had supper & went to bed at 11. (13 April 1863, reel 18, vol. 98.1)

As this entry shows, Cullwick constantly used her body to work for others and the body of her diary text to detail how her daily chores served first the family where she was employed as a servant and then the family she and Munby formed. Cullwick conceded to Munby’s whims, at least sometimes, in demanding the stimulation and reassurance reading her diary gave him and, like the ideologically ideal wife, she ranked his desires and demands above her own. The above entry shows that Cullwick put her body and its labor at Munby’s disposal after she’d fetched and carried for pay and extended her working day late into the night. But she also found meaning in serving Munby, for Cullwick positively characterizes their evening together. Elsewhere in her diary she describes licking his boots and proudly proclaims her lowly station, writing “he has taught me … the beauty in being nothing but a common drudge… but I wouldn’t get out of it if I could, nor change from being Massa’s slave… I’ve bin a slave now 9 years & worn the chains & padlocks 6 years- I don’t hide ‘em now from Mary [her fellow servant]” (31 May 1863, reel 18, vol. 98.1). Cullwick contrasts her acceptance and pride in doing the dirtiest work with servants who, in wanting to better themselves, obviously refused to accept the gulf between rich and poor that was exemplified in a gendered, racially, and religiously sanctioned ethic of service in Victorian England. The religious associations of the humble body with the sanctified body of Christ and the Christian dictum that the meek shall inherit the earth were not lost on Cullwick who saw class acceptance as a badge of honor and proof of meekness. Cullwick pointed out that unlike aspiring servants she was content to remain a maid of all work, the lowliest position in domestic service, a Myrrah to Munby’s Sardanapulus. Of course she was also forced into doing the most menial labor since only by remaining a maid of all work could she continue to see Munby. Because Cullwick labored so diligently and accepted such demeaning work, employers were sometimes willing to overlook any alliance they might suspect. But if Cullwick were emotionally vital for Munby, he was for her too. Virtually every entry in Cullwick’s diary shows her solicitude toward Munby, who functioned as her closest embodiment of “family,” a term that was emotionally and culturally laden in Victorian England and focuses the conflicted and complex nature of the Cullwick-Munby relationship. After visiting blood relatives in Shifnal, her birthplace, the orphaned Cullwick writes: “thinking such deep thoughts about it, & still glad to get away, for no place seems home but London now. Sisters nor

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brothers nor any relations are like a mother or father to anyone, & Massa is all to me now” (7 August 1863, reel 18, vol. 98.1). Cullwick’s intense commitment to Munby is evidenced by her moving to London in 1856 to be close to him and by her always taking positions that he approved of and which allowed the relationship to continue. Yet it was difficult for them to maintain a relationship and the secrecy it inevitably involved, as Cullwick realizes when she writes of her problems with finding and keeping a suitable situation. I couldn’t have gone on again away from him and especially as an upper servant, for they is so opposite to anything he ever loved me for. I was got so tired of changing places, & also of that continual fear lest anybody shd know who I wrote to, & yet finding it so hard to keep the secret, that I really began to feel so long loving was irksome & tiresome, especially us not being equals. (reel 19, vol. 98.17)

The reason for maintaining their “secret” relationship was the social and cultural gulf between them which their physical and legal bodies exemplified; although, as is apparent from Cullwick’s comment, maintaining an unequal secret relationship chafes her, for she wants more authority over her daily labor and life. But Munby resisted marrying Cullwick, because he knew his family would adamantly oppose their union, because he was interested in maintaining the status quo and because his idea of the proper Victorian family was rooted in his idealized birth family, as his panegyric after his mother’s death shows: “My mother … believed as devoutly in my father as he believed in God… and he showed his love, not only in all greater matters, but in a thousand little fantasies of affection and courtesy” (6 July 1879, reel 8, vol. 47). Cullwick, bodily situated within the matrices of social, cultural and legal ideologies that contradicted Munby’s family romance, could not live as part of the secret family she and Munby had created. It became increasingly clear that she would have extreme difficulty in keeping even the lowliest position while still visiting Munby in the evening. Thus, Cullwick and Munby were forced into a marriage that neither of them wanted. What seems unusual in this scenario is that Cullwick did not want to marry Munby. Conditioned as we are by the marriage plot of Victorian novels and the romance of the Cinderella story, we assume that Cullwick would want to marry Munby and become a lady. But the textual and daily scripts Cullwick created were more complex than either of these fictional ones. Linda H. Peterson points out in Traditions of Victorian Women’s Autobiography: The Poetics and Politics of Life Writing that the domestic memoir, which emphasized family service, functioned as “a literary

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manifestation of the doctrine of separate spheres,” and it was through this form that the Victorians felt they were creating a women’s tradition of autobiography.17 It is easy to argue that Cullwick’s diaries are intensely domestic in their excessive detailing of every aspect of daily labor and maintained a caring, familial relationship between herself and Munby; as such, they would adhere to the Victorian paradigm Peterson suggests. But that neither Cullwick writing in her diaries, nor her depiction of the relationship between herself and Munby in them, reinforce the removal of established class and gender divisions through the approved channel of separate spheres within the bonds of marriage, is curious. In short, why didn’t Cullwick want to become Munby’s wife, and a lady, if that was what her “Massa” decided was best? At least a partial answer seems to lie in the self -assertion and self -definition Cullwick derived from the act of writing her diary and from her views about her position as a lowly servant. Cullwick did not want to become Munby’s wife and a lady for several reasons, which her diary writing helps her articulate. She sees strength in humility, realizes that it is more lasting to be a servant than a lady, and eschews marriage because “it’s too much like being a woman” (28 June 1871, reel 19, vol. 98.5). Cullwick’s trenchant analysis of the power differential manifested in the doctrine of separate spheres reinforced by marriage is obvious. Elsewhere in her diary she contrasts her physical strength with the weakness of her invalid, lady employer, a contrast highlighted by color imagery with its concomitant overtones of racial and gendered difference. [Her] been so delicate, as white as a lily & her face too, from been in bed so many years, & I suppose never soil’d her fingers ever… & the white coverlet & all standing out against my dirty black hands, & my big red & black arms, & my face red too& sweating till the drops tumbled off, or stood on little drops o’ crystal again the greasy black. (reel 19, vol. 98.17)

The cluster of contrasting images and ideologies, which reinforce and support reading an individual’s body as an historical sign system where physical and social bodies collide, is obvious here and throughout Cullwick’s diary. Masculine, strength, and dark are opposed to feminine, weak, and light; and Cullwick knows which set she’d rather be associated with, even if her choice marks her as outside the Victorian social structure of upward mobility as envisioned by and propagated in the bourgeois family. Cullwick realizes there is both physical and ethical strength in being in the borderlands. She grudgingly agreed to marry Munby in 1873, but they

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only lived together four years. Why they ceased doing so, yet continued to see each other until Cullwick died on 9 July 1910 at the age of seventy-six, is, of course, conjecture, though Cullwick’s diary provides us with clues. The supposition of Derek Hudson, who edited Munby’s diaries, is that the relationship between Cullwick and Munby was the familiar one of the master molding the servant, as illustrated by the Pygmalion myth. Certainly, both spoken and written language has historically been one of the tools the colonizer has used to keep the colonized in line, by convincing the latter that his beliefs are natural and right. But as postcolonial critics argue, discourse can be double-edged. According to postcolonial critic Elleke Boehmer, “resistance to imperial domination … frequently assumed textual form.”18 Cullwick may have begun her diary at Munby’s insistence but writing it gave her authority and helped her form a subjectivity that resisted his efforts to turn her into a lady and resisted the form and content of the bourgeois family myth of upward advancement through marriage. By refashioning her diary as a textual body where caring means caring for herself, not just others, Cullwick can express and thus bring to consciousness her feelings about freedom in being dressed rough—“looking ‘nobody’ – you can go any where & not be wonder’d at,” (16 September 1873, reel 19, vol. 98.7) and her consternation at having to be in disguise when she acts as Munby’s wife on their wedding trip to France: “When I’m with M. & have to remember I’m in disguise it would be no wonder if I felt conscious & ashamed of myself as being unfit, & knowing I was a servant myself all the while the chambermaids or waiters bow’d to me & call’d me ‘Madame’” (26 September 1873, reel 19, vol. 98.7). Cullwick’s using her diary to subvert its appointed use by the man or family who commissioned it has precedent. Although diaries functioned in Victorian England as repositories of family stories as least as much as individual tales, writing them allowed women, the working class, in fact members of any disenfranchised group, to develop the voice they had been denied by the culture at large.19 Munby may have been convinced that Cullwick refused to live with him for more than a few years after their marriage and thus play out his dream of the drudge transformed into the proper Victorian lady because he had instructed her too well in subservience; but what Munby failed to realize is that by using the diary as a means of instruction he had unwittingly given Cullwick an alternative way to envision caring and family, a way for her to understand her own psychic and bodily strength through creating a textual body. What reading the diaries of Munby and Cullwick in concert as well as in opposition to each other shows is that the meanings of body constantly play off one

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another much as these mismatched Victorians’ ritualized performances did. Material, ideal, collective, individual, inflected by class, race, gender, religion, text, history and society, body suggests but denies the reenvisioned family romance of this Victorian couple.

Works Cited Adams, Timothy Dow. Light Writing and Life Writing: Photography in Autobiography. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Amigoni, David, ed. Life Writing and Victorian Culture. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2006. Atkinson, Diane. The Marriage of Arthur Munby and Hannah Cullwick. London: Macmillan, 2003. Boehmer, Elleke. Colonial and Postcolonial Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Cullwick, Hannah. The Diaries of Hannah Cullwick, Victorian Maidservant. Ed. Liz Stanley. London: Virago, 1984. Danahay, Martin A. A Community of One: Masculine Autobiography and Autonomy in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993. —. “Male Masochism: A Model of Victorian Identity Formation.” In Life Writing and Victorian Culture, ed. David Amigoni, 87-104. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. Davidoff, Leonore. “Class and Gender in Victorian England: The Diaries of Arthur J. Munby and Hannah Cullwick.” Feminist Studies 5 (1979): 87-141. Davidoff, Leonore, and Catherine Hall. Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780-1850. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Eakin, Paul John. Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of SelfInvention. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986. Gagnier, Regenia. “The Literary Standard, Working-Class Autobiography, and Gender.” In Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader, ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, 264-275. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998. Garofalo, Daniela. “Political Seductions: The Show of War in Byron’s Sardanapalus.” Criticism 44 (2002): 43-65. Hewitt, Martin. “Diary, Autobiography and the Practice of Life History.” In Life Writing and Victorian Culture, ed. David Amigoni, 21-40. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006.

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Hirsch, Marianne. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. Huff, Cynthia. British Women’s Diaries: A Descriptive Bibliography of Selected Nineteenth-Century Women’s Manuscript Diaries. New York: AMS, 1985. —. “From Faceless Chronicler to Self-Creator: The Diary of Louisa Galton, 1830-1896.” Biography 10 (1987): 95-106. Hudson, Derek. Munby: Man of Two Worlds. London: John Murray, 1972. Loomba, Ania. Colonialism/Postcolonialism. New York: Routledge, 1998. McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge, 1995. Miller, Nancy K. “The Entangled Self: Genre Bondage in the Age of the Memoir.” PMLA 122 (2007): 537-48. Munby, Arthur J. and Hannah Cullwick. Working Women in Victorian Britain, 1850-1910: The Diaries and Letters of Arthur J. Munby (18281910) and Hannah Cullwick (1833-1909) from Trinity College, Cambridge. Marlborough, England: Adam Matthews, 1993. Microfilm. 11 January 1890, reel 10, vol. 58. My Secret Life. 1894. Reprint, New York: Grove Press, 1966. Neuman, Shirley. “Autobiography: From Different Poetics to a Poetics of Difference.” In Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice, ed. Marlene Kadar, 213-30. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992. Peterson, Linda H. Traditions of Victorian Women’s Autobiography: The Poetics and Politics of Life Writing. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999. Reay, Barry. Watching Hannah: Sexuality, Horror and Body De-formation in Victorican England. London: Reaktion Books, 2002. Rugg, Linda Haverty. Picturing Ourselves: Photography and Autobiography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Rust, Martha Dana. “In the Humble Service of Her Emancipation: Hannah Cullwick’s Maid-of-all-Work Diaries.” Pacific Coast Philology 29 (1994): 95-108. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Stanley, Liz. “Biography as Microscope or Kaleidoscope: The Case of ‘Power’ in Hannah Cullwick’s Relationship to Arthur Munby.” Women’s Studies International Forum 10 (1987): 19-31. Swindells, Julia. “Liberating the Subject? Autobiography and ‘Women’s History’: A Reading of The Diaries of Hannah Cullwick.” In

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Interpreting Women’s Lives: Feminist Theory and Personal Narratives, ed. The Personal Narratives Group, 24-38. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. Wolfson, Susan J. “‘A Problem Few Dare Imitate’: Sardanapalus and ‘Effeminate Character.’” ELH 58 (1991): 867-902.

Notes 1

Diane Atkinson, The Marriage of Arthur Munby and Hannah Cullwick (London: Macmillan, 2003): 70; Arthur J. Munby and Hannah Cullwick, Working Women in Victorian Britain, 1850-1910: The Diaries and Letters of Arthur J. Munby (18281910) and Hannah Cullwick (1833-1909) from Trinity College, Cambridge (Marlborough, England: Adam Matthews, 1993): Microfilm, 11 January 1890, reel 10, vol. 58. Munby and Cullwick to be cited parenthetically hereafter using date, reel number, and volume number. 2 I refer to both Arthur Munby and Hannah Cullwick by their surnames so that her status will not be diminished, as was the status of Victorian servants who were frequently referred to by generic names. Similarly, when I refer to both Cullwick and Munby I try to place her name first as much as his. 3 As Nancy K. Miller pointed out recently in “The Entangled Self: Genre Bondage in the Age of the Memoir,” PMLA 122 (2007): 538, the assumption of truth value in contemporary life writing theory was well-defined by Philippe Lejeune’s “autobiographical pact” between reader and author that the latter narrates her life “in a spirit of truth.” The “truthfulness” and the “fictionality” of life writing has been contested in critical theory for over two decades; certainly Paul John Eakin’s Fictions in Autobiography was a central text in de-constructing the generic parameter of referentiality and narrative reliability. The concomitant questioning of the truth-referentiality of life writing and the unity of the autobiographical narrator, pointed out by Shirley Neuman in “Autobiography: From Different Poetics to a Poetics of Difference,” (in Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice, ed. Marlene Kadar, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992, 215) and Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson in Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001, 123), highlight the interplay between fantasy and reality, between imagined role and social position, between play and work, that permeate the Munby and Cullwick diaries. 4 Leonore Davidoff, “Class and Gender in Victorian England: The Diaries of Arthur J. Munby and Hannah Cullwick,” Feminist Studies 5 (1979). 5 Liz Stanley, “Biography as Microscope or Kaleidoscope: The Case of ‘Power’ in Hannah Cullwick’s Relationship to Arthur Munby,” Women’s Studies International Forum 10 (1987); Hannah Cullwick, The Diaries of Hannah Cullwick, Victorian Maidservant, ed. Liz Stanley. (London: Virago, 1984). 6 Julia Swindells, “Liberating the Subject? Autobiography and ‘Women’s History’: A Reading of The Diaries of Hannah Cullwick,” in Interpreting Women’s Lives:

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Feminist Theory and Personal Narratives, ed The Personal Narratives Group (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). 7 Martin A. Danahay, “Male Masochism: A Model of Victorian Identity Formation,” in Life Writing and Victorian Culture, ed. David Amigoni (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing, 2006). 8 Martha Dana Rust, “In the Humble Service of Her Emancipation: Hannah Cullwick’s Maid-of-all-Work Diaries,” Pacific Coast Philology 29 (1994). 9 Derek Hudson, Munby: Man of Two Worlds (London: John Murray, 1972). 10 The most famous example of Victorian erotic autobiography, My Secret Life, first published in Amsterdam in 1894, was anonymously composed by a well-to-do Victorian gentleman from his diary notes. 11 For references to how nineteenth-century women from all classes used their diaries to detail daily living and as family documents see my British Women’s Diaries; and for a discussion of how Louisa Galton, the wife of eminent scientist and Victorian man of genius, Francis Galton, subverted what began as the family record lauding her husband’s achievements see my “From Faceless Chronicler to Self-Creator: The Diary of Louisa Galton, 1830-1896,” Biography 10 (1987). In “Diary, Autobiography and the Practice of Life History,” (In Amigoni ed., Life Writing and Victorian Culture, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006) Martin Hewitt contends that the Victorian diary was a public document and that “ it was impossible for a diarist to write …without being fully aware of the ambiguous status of the diary’s claim to privacy” (25), even though publishers such as Lett’s urged Victorians to keep a private diary. Hewitt cites Munby’s diary-keeping as a process of revision and synthesis over several volumes and as evidence of our need to pay more attention to the “deployment” of the diary. 12 Lord Byron’s play Sardanapulus that depicted the Assyrian king Sardanapulus living a lavish, voluptuous life style reminiscent of the dandyism of the Prince Regent, George IV, was a favorite of Victorian audiences. The female foils to Sardanaplus are Myrrha, his devoted Greek concubine, and Semiramis, his manly grand dam whose excesses in love and war make her a monster within the play’s unexamined gender economy. Byron’s fantasy of women’s proper role climaxes in orientalist fashion when Myrra willingly sacrifices herself on a pyre to prove her love for Sardanapulus. The theatricality of this act with its Christian overtones and reinforcement of conservative English values of women’s proper sphere surely appealed to Munby when he relates that Cullwick desired to sacrifice herself to her lover just as Myrrah did. See Susan J. Wolfson “‘A Problem Few Dare Imitate’: Sardanapalus and ‘Effeminate Character,’” ELH 58 (1991) and Daniela Garofalo, “Political Seductions: The Show of War in Byron’s Sardanapalus,” Criticism 44 (2002). 13 Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780-1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987): 414. 14 Leonore Davidoff, “Class and Gender in Victorian England: The Diaries of Arthur J. Munby and Hannah Cullwick,” Feminist Studies 5 (1979): 112.

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15 As part of the expanding theoretical interest in multimedia life narrative, several theorists read photographs in conjunction and/or disjunction with written texts. See Timothy Dow Adams, Light Writing and Life Writing: Photography in Autobiography (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); and Linda Haverty Rugg, Picturing Ourselves: Photography and Autobiography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 16 Derek Hudson, Munby: Man of Two Worlds (London: John Murray, 1972): 124. 17 Linda H. Peterson, Traditions of Victorian Women’s Autobiography: The Poetics and Politics of Life Writing (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999): 19. 18 Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995): 14. 19 Cynthia Huff, “From Faceless Chronicler to Self-Creator: The Diary of Louisa Galton, 1830-1896,” Biography 10.2 (1987): 95-106.

PART III: ADOPTED SELVES: LIFE WRITING AND THE FAMILY/ETHNIC BODY

INTIMACY, ERASURE AND THE OTHER: FRANK HAMILTON CUSHING’S DISAPPEARING BODY CAROLINE C. NICHOLS

Cushing, indeed, was epidemic in the culture-circles of New England, that year of 1882. . . . His personal magnetism, his witchcraft of speech, his ardor, his wisdom in the unknowabilities, the undoubted romance of his life of research among “wild Indians of the frontier” (for New Mexico was a good deal further from Boston then than it is now), and the impressive dignity and poise of his Indian comrades—all were contagious. —Charles F. Lummis, “The White Indian”

Looking back on the extraordinary career of Frank Hamilton Cushing, southwestern travel writer Charles Lummis captured the uneasy excitement the charismatic anthropologist incited among Eastern elites in the last decades of the nineteenth century. In 1879, Cushing had left his office inside the Smithsonian Castle to begin fieldwork at the Zuni pueblo in present-day New Mexico. By the time he returned to the East in 1882 as part of a publicity tour, the young ethnographer, now known to the pueblo as Tenatsali, had been visibly transformed by his immersion in Zuni culture. As a blond-haired white man dressed in full Zuni regalia, conversing in the native tongue, and intimately familiar with the tribe’s public and private rituals, Cushing’s body confirmed his success in penetrating the “inner life” of the pueblo and guaranteed his authority as a Zuni scholar.1 Yet Cushing’s fantastic appearance also marked his estrangement from “civilized ways” and fueled suspicions about his moral standing. To the “culture-circles of New England,” the “contagious” Cushing promised an encounter that was both thrilling and slightly dangerous.2 Keenly aware of his precarious position straddling the border between white and native, civilized and savage, sensation and scandal, Cushing struggled to frame his unconventional research method as a serious scientific endeavor rather than an elaborate indulgence in “playing

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Indian.” “My Adventures in Zuni,” Cushing’s most comprehensive account of his life at the pueblo, demonstrates the difficulties inherent in that task. Although Cushing’s developing relationship with the Zuni unifies the three-part series, which originally appeared in The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine between December 1882 and May 1883, his depiction of that relationship is anything but consistent. As his adoption of Zuni habits progresses, Cushing abruptly shifts between three distinct narrative personae, each more disembodied than the last. From a brash imperialist adventurer to a passive child and, finally, a detached ethnographic observer, Cushing’s physical presence diminishes with his escalating participation in Zuni ritual life. This bodily erasure, combined with the volatile fluctuation in his narrative personae, suggests that Cushing’s evolution from respectable Smithsonian protégé to Tenatsali, First War Chief of the Zuni, was deeply disruptive to his identity. Cushing’s Zunification, which jeopardized the self-Other binary that anthropology—and American culture more broadly—sought to inculcate, renders a cohesive performance of self all but impossible. Collapsing the fundamental distinctions of Victorian identity, Cushing’s spectacular body becomes unnarratable, and so disappears. Cushing’s attempt to manage his ambivalent celebrity must be understood in the context of two contemporary developments: anthropology’s emergence as a professional discipline, which would not embrace his participant-observer method until the early twentieth century, and the institutionalization of the tourist gaze. During the closing decades of the nineteenth century, a disparate group of institutions, practices, and literary genres offered a broad spectrum of Americans the opportunity to come into contact with the exotic, usually in vicarious and highly spectacularized ways. Despite the diversity of forms, the crux of that experience—encountering those deemed racially, ethnically, culturally, or physically Other in a controlled setting designed to reaffirm the viewer’s or reader’s sense of identity—remained fundamentally the same. From world’s fairs, museum displays, and freak shows, to local color literature, dime novels, and slum tours, Americans obsessively revisited the boundary between accepted and disavowed. Framed by notions of progress, evolution and racial hierarchy, these highly narrativized settings staged implicit comparisons which instilled in the viewer a sense of mastery over the Other. Anthropology, whose racialized science imbued the self-Other dichotomy with scholarly legitimacy, was an important component in this ideological network. By the 1850s the races of the world were seen as forming a natural but static chain of being.3 Since every race passed

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through the same stages of development, Anglo-Saxon encounters with “primitive” peoples were understood as an opportunity to step backward in time, glimpse one’s past and measure the progress made. Anthropology’s ordering of space and time, argues Ellen Strain, “thus carved out a secure position” from which the Western spectator could “perceive the world’s diversity.”4 This privileged perspective, combined with the spectacle of racial and cultural Others presented by contemporary media, museums, and entertainment venues, enabled Americans at every socioeconomic level to derive touristic pleasure from the modernizing nation’s increasingly diverse population. Cushing’s account of his Zuni experiment tapped into many of these conventions. However, in moving from narrating a story about the exotic to becoming its star, Cushing/Tenatsali blurred the seemingly stark divide between self and Other, disrupting the usual dynamics of the tourist gaze and challenging America’s developing relationship to the exotic.

Performing Scholarly Authority: Cushing’s Eastern Tour Cushing’s method of submersing himself—both body and mind—in the culture of his subjects was a radical departure from the evolving conventions of anthropological research. Earlier anthropologists (or their disciplinary precursors) encountered native peoples in a far more limited fashion, attending ceremonies and councils, trading to gather collections, and witnessing an array of mundane activities. While some of these men delved into deeper social structures, the field as a whole focused on acquiring and understanding objects rather than life ways, collecting the material remnants of cultures presumed to be on the verge of extinction.5 Cushing’s decision to devote nearly five years of study to a single group— and his willingness to be transformed by that experience—flouted the widespread assumption that primitive people created correspondingly simplistic societies which could be understood relatively quickly. Beyond being out of step with his peers, Cushing’s deeply embodied research method could not be easily packaged for a broader public trained to see “savage” and “civilized” as mutually exclusive categories. In a culture where exceptional bodies signaled multiple registers of difference, the disconnect between Cushing’s status as a white, middle-class professional and his outward appearance as Tenatsali raised uncomfortable questions about the true extent of the anthropologist’s transformation. To quell such speculation, Cushing soon began seeking public appearances, lectures, and publications that cast his work in a favorable light.

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The first prong of this campaign was a triumphant return to the East with several prominent members of the pueblo, which Cushing hoped would redirect curiosity about his Zuni experiment toward the proper subjects of his study.6 In addition to garnering recognition for the Smithsonian Institution and elevating his status among the Zuni, Cushing acknowledged that the trip would also address some “personal considerations.” Noting that “my moral character and earnestness have been often questioned and slandered, and the most undreampt of and frivolous things have been imputed and assigned as my motives,” Cushing described the venture as an opportunity to defend his work, “its purity of purpose and singleness of aim.”7 In place of a man reputed to have embraced degeneracy, Cushing strove to position himself as a uniquely gifted mediator bringing two distinct cultures together. The ethnographer appeared in western dress for much of the tour and had shorn his long blond hair. His scholarly lectures and appearances with the Zuni attested to the success of his pioneering method. Having crossed into the Zunis’ world temporarily, Cushing returned with his hard-won expertise to translate Zuni words and actions for white audiences, delivering the spiritual knowledge that Eastern elites struggling to cope with the homogenizing forces of modernization craved.8 The Zunis’ obvious respect for Cushing and reverence for all things American also allayed fears that the boyish ethnographer had lost control of his native encounter, helping to silence critics who were “anxious to insinuate moral lapse by the ethnographer” (Hinsley, 180). Finally, the spectacle of six Zuni interacting with the cultural and technological wonders of modern America—from a locomotive engine to a blackface minstrel act—provided an effective visual contrast with their more subdued guide. To the extent that such events encouraged observers to focus on their own reactions to these native Others, while relegating Cushing to the role of a privileged interpreter, the tour upheld the self-Other binary inculcated by anthropology and the emerging touristic world view. In these moments, Cushing’s temporary release from civilization’s restraints seemed to be a tolerable indiscretion.9 However, the charismatic ethnographer was not always able to maintain that delicate balance, and the trip East also included unsettling scenes which once again foregrounded Cushing’s potential to undermine anthropology’s cultural work fortifying this crucial boundary. The group’s pilgrimage to Deer Island, where they collected water from the Ocean of Sunrise for the pueblo in an elaborate ceremony, was one such occasion. More than 100 esteemed guests invited by Boston’s mayor, as well as a bevy of journalists, observed the Zunis spreading sacred meal, smoking special cigarettes, filling ritual vessels

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with saltwater, singing, and praying fervently. Accompanying them, clad in Zuni attire complete with “war-paint,” “buckskin badges of rank,” and “plume-sticks,” was Cushing (Baxter, 534). In fact, the outing ended with a baptismal rite that began Cushing’s initiation into the Order of the KâKâ, a further step in his assimilation into the tribe. Bridging the divide between subject and object on the shores of Deer Island, Cushing prompted his audiences to turn the potent gaze developed for exotic bodies upon a supposedly civilized white man. Shedding his role as authoritative scholar to become a full participant, whose appearance and bodily practice testified to a prior intimacy with native ways, effectively re-enacted Cushing’s transformation into Tenatsali and reminded those in attendance that the primitive might not be utterly distinct from the civilized as scientific and popular notions asserted. Instead, Cushing opened the possibility that the primitive lay within the civilized—that the progress narrative articulated by evolutionary theory was not an inevitable linear movement but a fragile construct. Cushing’s stance as a cultural mediator, while often successful during the Eastern tour, ultimately could not contain the questions raised by his curious method. Even those who appreciated the value of Cushing’s research were well aware of the risk he took appearing before skeptical white audiences in the guise of Tenatsali. For instance, when Cushing attended a Washington reception of scientific notables in Zuni regalia, his Smithsonian supervisor objected to the flamboyant display, ordering him to “go home and get dressed.”10 Cushing himself realized that whatever ground he gained through the tour could not entirely supplant the suggestive images that accompanied popular articles about his life among the “wild Indians.” His body remained a cipher which could be read as a measure of his scholarly authority or his susceptibility to primitive influences. Narrating his Zuni experiences for The Century’s middlebrow readership, recounting the “self-inflicted degradation to the daily life of savages” that underlay his expertise, thus represented a perilous opportunity for the ethnographer.11 Although some might be convinced of the logic of his course, making that case meant confronting titillating suspicions about his work and character. How could Cushing tout his ability to cross into the world of the Other while insisting that such intimacy had no effect upon his character? If he looked and acted like a Zuni, what distinguished the anthropologist from his native subjects? In short, was it possible to live as a primitive and remain civilized? The way in which Cushing navigated this terrain would influence whether he was treated as a scientific pioneer or a national embarrassment.

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“My Adventures in Zuni” and the Unnarratable Body Cushing’s first article for The Century, which appeared in December 1882, recounts the party’s arrival at Zuni and his decision to remain at the pueblo alone after his Smithsonian companions depart. Wielding only his authority as a representative of the Great Father, the boyish newcomer nonetheless takes on the role of an ethnographic adventurer, beginning with his attempt to tame the Zuni rhetorically. From the reader’s perspective, he quickly establishes a hierarchical relationship with his hosts/subjects through careful use of an imperial gaze. He repeatedly seeks an elevated vantage point from which he can survey the pueblo in its entirety, preferably without being seen himself. This God-like perspective, as the work of Mary Louise Pratt has shown, instills the viewer with a sense of control over the landscape and individuals s/he oversees.12 Cushing reinforces this dynamic through miniaturizing descriptions of the Zuni, which link the pueblo and its inhabitants to small, natural objects that can be easily observed and manipulated. The pueblo’s architecture is compared to a honeycomb, while its windows and doorways are likened to the holes in an anthill. The Zuni themselves alternately appear childlike, in keeping with the notion that primitive cultures were immature versions of western civilization, or else spectacularized. Upon first encountering the pueblo’s residents at a dance, Cushing focuses on the un-individuated, nearly nude, elaborately costumed bodies—a dizzying display of bare limbs and fantastic masks that obscure the wearers’ identities. Most importantly, Cushing organizes his account of the first weeks at Zuni around a contest of wills between the young ethnographer and his native hosts.13 The conflict, which centers on the Zunis’ resistance to his sketching their dances and ceremonies, positions Cushing as a heroic scientist fiercely determined to advance his research. As the quarrel escalates, the Zunis move from passive distractions to more aggressive means of persuasion. They finally decide to perform the Homatchi or Knife Dance, which culminates in an enemy being killed and eaten, to frighten Cushing into compliance. Cushing, however, wins the day with a display of cool detachment. Surrounded by the entire pueblo as a group of menacing dancers advances crying, “Kill him!,” Cushing laughs and flourishes his hunting knife before the crowd.14 He then calmly puts down his still-open sketch book and partly rises as if to join the dance—or the fray. His response convinces the dancers that he is no Navajo, the Zunis’ longstanding enemy, but a friend, and they sacrifice a yellow dog in his stead. The daring gesture wins the newcomer widespread praise, cements his friendship with Palowahtiwa, the influential pueblo governor, and, in

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Cushing’s words, “decided the fate of my mission among the Zuni Indians” (MAZ, I, 207). Closing his initial article with the Knife Dance as a decisive, dramatic climax implies that Cushing’s relationship to the Zuni is mediated through manly daring and violence. 15 In fact, for all Cushing’s bluster, the Century series as a whole suggests the Zunis are swayed by an entirely different tactic, one whose importance Cushing explicitly acknowledged in his letters and awkwardly incorporated into “My Adventures in Zuni.” Only nine days after the fateful dance, Cushing penned his supervisor, Spencer Baird, this telling description of his method: Because I will unhesitatingly plunge my hand in common with their dusty ones . . . into a great kind of hot, miscellaneous food; will sit close to [those] having neither vermin nor disease, will fondle and talk sweet Indian to their bright eyed little babies; will wear the blanket and tie the pania around my long hair; will look with unfeigned reverence on their beautiful and ancient ceremonies, never laughing at any absurd observance, they love me, and I learn.16

While registering disgust at the Zunis’ domestic habits, and thereby confirming his allegiance to “civilized ways,” Cushing reveals himself to be a willing and outwardly gracious participant in their daily life. Far from the relation of dominance implied by the sketching conflict, Cushing here attributes his success to treating the Zunis as near equals. As much as he disdained the pueblo’s dirt, which contributed to his frequent ailments, Cushing’s continued suffering demonstrates his belief that the Zuni are a valuable object of scientific study. His determination to learn the group’s language, spiritual beliefs, foodways, and sacred rituals, at considerable cost to his own health, insists that these supposedly primitive people possess a complex and distinctive culture worthy of that sacrifice. As a closer looks at the Century series make clear, it is this willingness to submit to Zuni ways which earns Cushing entrée to their “inner life.” In the context of “My Adventures in Zuni,” these moments of deepening intimacy complicate the overarching narrative of conquest that structures the first article. To juggle the disjuncture between the parallel plots, Cushing creates two distinct personae. He justifies his initial decision to “try living with the Indians” as a bold but necessary step in his campaign to sketch freely (MAZ, I, 199). Yet once he has settled into the governor’s home—much to Palowahtiwa’s dismay—Cushing’s demeanor abruptly changes. In recounting his gradual adoption of Zuni habits, and the personal relationships that develop in tandem with this process, Cushing’s bravado evaporates; he depicts himself as passive, childlike,

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and desperately helpless. Moreover, he attributes almost every stage in his transformation to the governor’s ardent wish to make him into a Zuni. On his first night in the governor’s house, Cushing attempts to make his own dinner and fails miserably. Palowahtiwa, lured by the noxious odors, gruffly removes the spoiled food and prepares a palatable Zuni meal for his uninvited guest. According to Cushing’s account in The Century, this was to be the pattern for the duration of his residence at Zuni as the governor never willingly allowed him to prepare his own meal again. Cushing’s Zuni diet emerges from a combination of necessity and good politics; it is the concession of a gracious houseguest rather than evidence of a desire to “go native.” The governor’s begrudging hospitality does not resolve the sketching conflict, however, and the Zunis continue to watch the ethnographer both day and night. Determined to overcome their suspicion, Cushing opts to remain at the pueblo while his group moves on to another settlement. As soon as he has made the decision, Cushing bemoans his self-imposed status as a “doomed exile.” The realization that the party has left him few provisions only deepens his gloom. Once again, the governor finds Cushing in a pathetic state and takes pity on him. Calling him “our little brother” for the first time, the governor offers an exchange: “If only you do as we tell you, and will only make up your mind to be a Zuni, you shall be rich, for you shall have fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, and the best food in the world.” In response to what would seem a momentous question, Cushing offers a rhetorical evasion. “In despair,” he replies, “Why should I not be a Zuni?,” then quickly turns his attention back to the sketching conflict without commenting upon the bargain he has (apparently) struck (MAZ, I, 204). A few paragraphs later, Cushing’s ethnographic adventurer persona reappears, taunting the governor that he will witness the upcoming dance despite Palowahtiwa’s wishes. Cushing’s equivocal response, which implies acceptance without articulating a commitment, and his speedy retreat epitomize the ambiguity and instability at the heart of “My Adventures in Zuni.” What appeared in the opening article as competing narrative personae becomes an internal contradiction in the next installment, which is dominated by the passive, childlike persona. In February 1883, Cushing described for Century readers the most dramatic aspects of his transformation: the adoption of traditional dress, décor, and sleeping habits. Much of this process follows the same pattern as Cushing’s new diet; the Zunis initiate a change that Cushing reluctantly accepts out of political and material necessity. What is curious about this portion of the narrative is Cushing’s inability to stick to his own story. After trumpeting his passivity at each stage, he abandons

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this rationale by insisting that he remains very much in control of his encounter with the native. The second article is driven by Palowahtiwa’s determination to make a man of Cushing, to “harden [his] meat” (MAZ, II, 509). Instead of objecting to this evident insult, Cushing generally acquiesces to the governor’s escalating demands, extending the parent-child dynamic begun in the first article. 17 Soon after Cushing announces that he will prolong his stay at the pueblo, the governor begins his campaign. Approaching the ethnographer “with a designing look in his eyes,” Palowahtiwa “snatche[s]” Cushing’s “helmet hat” off his head. It is quickly replaced with a long black silken scarf, which the governor happily wraps around Cushing’s head, pronouncing it “Good! good!” Adorned with the scarf and a new pair of moccasins, an embarrassed Cushing is sent out to show the other Zunis and the Smithsonian party. “Heartily ashamed of [his] mongrel costume” and “thoroughly disgusted” by the teasing he receives from his colleagues, he vows never to wear the “head-band” again. The governor, however, prevents his return to “civilized ways” by withholding his clothes. If there is any doubt that Cushing is reluctant to take up Zuni attire, he then notes that the governor dresses him in the black scarf every morning (MAZ, II, 502-3). In this exchange and others, Cushing carefully absolves himself of any responsibility for his altered appearance by creating a situation in which he has no way—other than endangering his increasingly profitable friendship with the governor—of reversing his Zuni immersion.18 He voices his objections to readers, but does not press the point with his hosts.19 Instead, he is entirely passive in the process of Zunification, to the point of being dressed each day like a child. When Cushing is later outfitted with the rest of his Zuni costume by the governor and his wife, even his grammar becomes submissive. He only participates in his fitting “under her instructions” and describes putting on the new outfit—a passage punctuated with the governor’s sharp orders—in the passive voice (MAZ, II, 510). The final stage in turning this American boy into a Zuni man (with sufficiently hard meat) is the ear-piercing and naming ceremony that closes the second article. Although Cushing does agree beforehand to this particular step, which the pueblo’s “principal men” have advocated for some time, his consent is far from forceful. Convinced that “there must be some meaning in their urgency,” Cushing declares, “I determined to yield to their request” (MAZ, II, 511). This statement, a fascinating blend of haughty authority and total resignation, echoes earlier comments about his imposed wardrobe. After going to such lengths to demonstrate his

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powerlessness in each transaction, Cushing concludes these episodes by announcing that he will allow the Zunis to have their way, saying, “I decided to permit them thenceforth to do with me as they pleased” and “I...permitted the old Governor to have his way” (MAZ, II, 503, 510). In an interesting twist to his pattern of submission, Cushing gives a last gasp of agency, purporting to be master of his fate while simultaneously relinquishing all control to the Zunis. Thus by the close of the second article, the once bold ethnographic adventurer is reborn as Tenatsali or “Medicine Flower,” a name reflecting Cushing’s role as a gentle caretaker of the pueblo’s sick. His pristine white body has become permanently marked—punctured—by his Zuni experience. Adopted into a family and clan, Cushing has achieved a new level of intimacy with his hosts and greater influence within the pueblo. While a boon to his research, Cushing’s rebirth as Tenatsali further complicates the already difficult task of narrating his Zuni experiment to a mainstream audience. Unlike the initial decision to “try living with the Indians,” which he unabashedly pursued as essential to his research, Cushing cannot accept responsibility for these further steps in his transformation. At the risk of undercutting his scholarly authority before Century readers, Cushing depicts himself as a scientist at the mercy of his subjects. That Cushing proclaims his own passivity in ceding control of his body to the Zunis suggests that the alternative—deliberately deviating from the codes of civilized behavior—posed an even greater hazard. 20 For Cushing to engage willingly in his Zunification would mean abandoning white domesticity and, by extension, civilization itself. As the work of scholars such as Laura Wexler, Amy Kaplan, and Anne McClintock amply demonstrates, domesticity came to be regarded as the cornerstone of civilization over the course of the nineteenth century.21 The values enshrined in the middle-class home were considered the driving force behind society’s progress toward human perfection. Domesticity’s reign was premised, in part, on a perceived correspondence between control of the physical world and cultivation of the self. Banishing dirt and disorder was far more than a matter of housekeeping; these externalities reflected the inner state of a home, a family or an individual, a connection also evident in the emphasis placed on bodily control in bourgeois etiquette. The ability to manage one’s physicality—ranging from odors and noises to hair and facial expressions—was an outward manifestation of well-disciplined desires and urges. Those who failed to live up to these tenets, whether through poverty, ignorance, cultural difference, or choice, were consequently judged inferior, even inhuman. Such was the power attributed to white domesticity that numerous institutions sought to

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harness its benevolent influence to elevate more “primitive” races. Indian boarding schools, to take an example from Wexler’s work, documented the progress of their students with before and after photographs that celebrated the obvious cosmetic changes as well as the implied moral and intellectual advancement. Cushing, in submitting himself to Zuni domestication, appeared to be playing the progress narrative backward. Rather than tutoring his subjects in the rigors of manly self-mastery, with its strict expectations for physical and moral restraint, the eccentric ethnographer seemed to embrace their excess. Bedecked in necklaces, countless buttons and other decorative trappings, the sketches and descriptions of Cushing that were a standard feature of popular articles about his work exemplified indulgence. Although not evident in these images, blisters and pockmarks covered his face, spurring rumors of venereal disease that lent further credence to suspicions of a moral lapse.22 Having forfeited control over his surroundings and personal appearance, Cushing could easily be imagined succumbing to his basest sexual urges as well. For, as Amy Kaplan rightly argues, “Domesticity not only monitors the borders between the civilized and the savage but also regulates traces of the savage within” (582). Cushing seems to have recognized the sexual implications of his deviant domesticity, anxiously confessing to a colleague that he feared the “gossip and conjectural representations” his transformation provoked would lead friends to class him “in desires and motives” . . . “with drunken sailors and enlisted soldiers.”23 Cushing’s marriage to Emily Magill in July 1882 promised to assuage some of these doubts, and friends of the ethnographer eagerly sought to highlight his new domestic arrangements. Calling attention to Mrs. Cushing’s presence at the pueblo subtly addressed some of the more salacious questions about her husband’s intimacy with the Zuni, implying that any wayward habits had been corrected. Both Sylvester Baxter and William E. Curtis, reporters active in promoting and protecting Cushing, took a keen interest in the numerous improvements wrought by “the refining touch of a woman’s hand.” With the addition of a “negro cook” who had been “trained in an old Virginia family” and “an abundance of nice crockery,” the family could now enjoy “the nicest dishes.” The ethnographer’s once spartan residence was “filled with civilized furniture” and decorated according to his wife’s “charming artistic taste,” complete with “excellent oil paintings,” “rich scarfs [sic] and draperies,” books, magazines, and even “Japanese screens.”24 Mrs. Cushing also instituted a new measure of privacy, insisting that their neighbors knock before entering the home, contrary to local custom.25 Descriptions such as this

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provided reassurance that Cushing’s topsy-turvy home life had been set aright; in place of Cushing’s capitulation to Zuni ways there was now a legitimate white couple in control of the household, whose wishes were carried out by a subordinate racial Other, possibly a former slave. Mrs. Cushing’s “refining touch” may have burnished her spouse’s claims to respectability, but it could not fully insulate him against the ongoing criticisms his unusual method provoked. As Cushing became more involved in negotiating the Zunis’ relations with outsiders, including conflicts with the Navajo and their Indian agent, a nearby Presbyterian missionary, and powerful ranching interests, his allegiance to Zuni interests made him more susceptible to such allegations. Indeed, as he was preparing the third installment of “My Adventures in Zuni” for publication, Cushing’s ever-fluctuating personal and professional reputation was increasingly under attack.26 The Editor of the Topeka Capital accused Cushing of being a “sensationalist” and “glaring fictionalist” whose work held only the “pretense of serving the cause of science.”27 At the national level, Cushing was vilified by Senator John A. Logan of Illinois, igniting a scandal that likely contributed to his eventual recall to Washington. The dispute centered on Logan’s son-in-law’s efforts to take advantage of an error in the Zuni reservation’s boundaries. The powerful Senator held Cushing responsible for an article exposing the attempted land-grab, which threatened his Presidential aspirations, and urged his removal from Zuni. Logan’s attacks, such as this tirade in the Chicago Tribune, pinpointed Cushing’s vulnerabilities as a domestic deviant. Any white man who will live in the midst of those Zuni Indians with his wife, disrobing himself of citizen’s clothes, putting on leggings and moccasins, tying a handkerchief around his head, eating the vilest food ever known to a human being, and living in the midst of the most nauseating and offensive stench, and signing himself officially “War Chief of the Zuni Indians” . . . has my contempt.28

Logan’s scathing remarks underscore the high stakes of Cushing’s bodily politics. For his final appearance in The Century, the besieged ethnographer retreated into a new persona, the scholar/expert, whose body is all but invisible. With his immersion in Zuni habits and ritual life reaching its zenith, Cushing foregrounds his scholarly project to reassert control over the Zuni encounter, calling attention to his ethnographic mind rather than his increasingly spectacular body. Although Cushing’s earlier articles contained vivid descriptions of the spaces and events he observed during his first weeks at Zuni, it is clear

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that the English-speaking newcomer does not fully grasp their significance. Ethnographic information is relegated to footnotes so that the reader can experience the disorientation and excitement of Cushing’s initial months at the pueblo when his relationship with the Zuni was still ambiguous and potentially dangerous. A few key details are provided to make the scenes legible, while still retaining an overall sense of the exotic. In the final article, the balance between description and explanation noticeably shifts as Cushing’s scholarly persona becomes dominant. He provides numerous translations, including a lengthy passage from the Zunis’ creation myth, extended ethnographic discourses on such topics as the Zunis’ system of justice, and explicit references to the progress of his research.29 As an objective observer, Cushing reports brutal customs, such as the interrogation of a suspected sorcerer that includes torture, with scientific detachment. Most importantly, Cushing demonstrates how valuable his new knowledge can be. Striking a balance between the physical aggression of the opening piece and the utter passivity of the second, the expert persona instead relies on clever manipulation of people and knowledge to advance his goals. This savvy display of expertise provides implicit proof of Cushing’s familiarity with Zuni ways while glossing over his acquisition of such knowledge, the prior acts of submission by which he earned their trust. In fact, Cushing pointedly omits a crucial transition in his life as a Zuni: his initiation into the Priesthood of the Bow, which takes place in the chronological gap between the second and third articles. Gaining admission to the Bow Priesthood began a new phase of Cushing’s research since members of this most exclusive and powerful sect were also allowed entrance to the other eleven secret orders. Despite the event’s ethnographic importance and obvious interest for his readers, Cushing makes only a brief reference to it. Even with his newfound professional distance, Cushing refused to describe his willing participation in the “weird and impressive” ritual, one that included the ethnographer procuring a scalp.30 His initiation, and particularly the scalp’s provenance, is one of the slipperiest episodes in Cushing’s Zuni experience, whose contours and details shifted according to his audience. While a few supportive colleagues and like-minded friends might be trusted with precisely calibrated (and often contradictory) accounts of the event, The Century’s wide readership apparently could not. When Cushing does depict private Zuni ceremonies in the final article, he is careful to mark the limits of his involvement by specifying what he does not do. Whatever protection the scholar/expert’s commanding tone and scientific detachment provided, Cushing clearly felt this buffer was

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insufficient. In addition to excluding his initiation into the Bow Priesthood, he twice interrupts the narrative to directly address the reader, excusing seemingly out of place passages with references to his tarnished reputation. Before enumerating the Zunis’ various secret orders and their relative functions, he breaks from his usual conversational style rooted in the seasonal flow of events at the pueblo to ask the reader’s pardon. The digression is necessary, he contends, since “their existence is a fact of ethnologic importance, and moreover my statements relative to them have been most acrimoniously criticised and persistently disputed” (MAZ, III 28). With this oblique rebuttal to the Topeka Capital’s article, which contended that the Zuni pueblo was an utterly open society with no secret rituals, Cushing launches into the first of many methodical ethnographic lessons. The second, more emphatic, interruption concludes Cushing’s account of his so-called “marriage dilemma,” where the once pliable Tenatsali decisively draws the line in his Zunification. Following his initiation into the Priesthood of the Bow, the Zunis expected their adopted brother to take a native woman as his wife. After deftly avoiding several suitors, Cushing finally seized upon the publicity tour as a possible substitute for the marriage. The Zunis, who had long desired to be officially received by “Washington” and refurbish their supply of water from the Ocean of Sunrise, which was considered critical to a fruitful harvest, accepted this exchange, thus providing an amusing “hook” for press coverage of Cushing’s return to the East. In the Century account, Cushing uses avoidance, feigned ignorance, and gentle diplomacy to dispatch the threat of an interracial union. Moreover, he turns the potentially embarrassing situation into an opportunity to display his knowledge of Zuni courtship rituals, affirming both his expertise and scholarly detachment from his adopted culture. In spite of his skillful maneuvers and the fact that the marriage dilemma’s resolution had been well publicized more than a year before, Cushing finds it necessary to disrupt the narrative yet again to explain himself. In a parenthetical aside, he concedes that the account of his marriage prospects may seem “out of place,” but argues it is in fact “essential to the narrative” and “characteristic of the Zunis, and of their early attitude toward me.” More tellingly, Cushing expresses his hope that these statements “may disarm charges and criticisms which are as narrow, unrefined, and malicious, as they are false” (MAZ, III, 41). 31 That Cushing felt compelled to acknowledge these charges in his final Century article suggests just how tainted his reputation had become. Solidifying his scholarly standing and status as a civilized gentleman remained an urgent task.

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Conclusion Frank Hamilton Cushing’s vacillating narrative personae and receding physical presence in “My Adventures in Zuni” reveal much about the concerns and anxieties driving the eccentric ethnographer. Yet the series also reflects—albeit obliquely and with a slightly paranoid cast—the outlook of The Century’s middlebrow readership. While Cushing may have been hyper-sensitive to slights against his character, he rightly recognized that his Zunification was deeply transgressive. Cushing’s apparent slide down the evolutionary scale roused deeply held fears that Anglo-Saxon America’s progress, far from being inevitable, was precarious. Insisting that his “degradation” was an external condition which could be easily reversed, that he could live as a Zuni while retaining a civilized character, did little to quell such anxieties. Indeed, the possibility that Cushing could be both ethnographer and First War Chief was even more disquieting. Cushing and Tenatsali’s coexistence— simultaneously civilized and savage—represents what Marjorie Garber calls a “category crisis.” His unique brand of primitive drag points to a “failure of definitional distinction” in that the border between the seemingly exclusive categories of “savage” and “civilized” has become permeable.32 Moreover, by detaching the signs understood to signal one’s status as “civilized” or “savage” from the raced bodies to which they typically belonged, Cushing demonstrated that these markers were not immutable, but socially constructed. The spectacular figure of Cushing/Tenatsali thus threatened a crucial component of his white, middle-class audience’s identity: utter certainty of their own difference from the exotic Other. At a time when the nation’s culture brokers were busy building an extensive ideological and institutional infrastructure devoted to differentiating the exotic from implicitly “normal” Americans, Cushing’s Zunification challenged the logic of that project. The nodes of this network—educational display spaces, entertainment venues, certain elements of visual culture, and a variety of literary and journalistic genres—also dealt in contradiction, but worked toward conservative ends. Their staging of opposition between self and Other in a tightly controlled environment served to shore up the viewer’s or reader’s identity. Cushing, in contrast, collapsed these distinctions on to a single white body. His ability to penetrate “the inner life” of the Zuni may have made Cushing an anthropological pioneer and a national celebrity, but his dual identity proved to be a deeply dangerous form of Indian play.

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Works Cited Baxter, Sylvester F. “An Aboriginal Pilgrimage.” The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine 24.4 (1882): 526-36, http://cdl.library.cornell.edu.proxy.wm.edu/cgi-bin/moa/sgml/moaidx?notisid=ABP2287-0024-150. —. “Solved at Last: Mysteries of Ancient Aztec History Unveiled By an Explorer from the Smithsonian Institution.” Boston Herald, 16 June 1881. In The Southwest in the American Imagination: The Writings of Sylvester Baxter, 1881-1889, eds. Curtis M. Hinsley and David R. Wilcox. Tucson: University of Arizona, 1996: 45-54. —. “Zuni Revisited.” American Architect and Building News 13.377 (1883):124-26. In The Southwest in the American Imagination: The Writings of Sylvester Baxter, 1881-1889, eds. Curtis M. Hinsley and David R. Wilcox. Tucson: University of Arizona, 1996: 97-105. Bederman, Gail. Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995. Blake, David Haven. Walt Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. Brantlinger, Patrick. “Victorians and Africans: The Genealogy of the Myth of the Dark Continent.” Critical Inquiry 12 (1985): 166-203. Conn, Steven. Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876-1926. Chicago: U Chicago P, 1998. Curtis, William E. Children of the Sun. Chicago: Inter-Ocean Publishing, 1883. Cushing, Frank Hamilton. Cushing at Zuni: The Correspondence and Journals of Frank Hamilton Cushing, 1879-1884. Ed. Jesse Green. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990. —. “My Adventures in Zuni I.” The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine 25.2 (1882): 191-207, http://cdl.library.cornell.edu.proxy.wm.edu/cgi-bin/moa/moacgi?notisid=ABP2287-0025-49. —. “My Adventures in Zuni II.” The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine 25.4 (1883): 500-11, http://cdl.library.cornell.edu.proxy.wm.edu/cgi-bin/moa/moacgi?notisid=ABP2287-0025-153. —. “My Adventures in Zuni III.” The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine 26.1 (1883): 28-47, http://cdl.library.cornell.edu.proxy.wm.edu/cgi-bin/moa/moacgi?notisid=ABP2287-0026-7.

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—. “The Nation of the Willows I.” The Atlantic Monthly 50.299 (1882): 362-74, http://cdl.library.cornell.edu.proxy.wm.edu/cgi-bin/moa/sgml/moaidx?noisid=ABK2934-0050-70. —. “The Nation of the Willows II.” The Atlantic Monthly 50.300 (1882): 541-59, http://cdl.library.cornell.edu.proxy.wm.edu/cgi-bin/moa/sgml/moaidx?noisid=ABK2934-0050-98. Deloria, Philip J. Playing Indian. New Haven: Yale UP, 1999. Fuller, Clarissa Parsons. “Frank Hamilton Cushing’s Relations to Zuni and the Hemenway Southwestern Expedition, 1879-1889.” Masters Thesis, University of New Mexico, 1943. Garber, Marjorie. Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. New York: Routledge, 1992. Hinsley, Curtis M. “Zunis and Brahmins: Cultural Ambivalence in the Gilded Age.” In Romantic Motives: Essays on Anthropological Sensibility, ed. George W. Stocking, Jr. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989: 169-207. Kaplan, Amy. “Manifest Domesticity.” American Literature 70.3 (1998): 581-606. Lears, T.J. Jackson. No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920. New York: Pantheon Books, 1981. Lummis, Charles F. “The White Indian.” Land of Sunshine 13 (June 1900): 8-17. McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge, 1995. Parezo, Nancy J. “Matilda Coxe Stevenson: Pioneer Ethnologist.” In Hidden Scholars: Women Anthropologists and the Native American Southwest, ed. Nancy Parezo J. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993: 38-62. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992. Strain, Ellen. “Exotic Bodies, Distant Landscapes: Touristic Viewing and Popularized Anthropology in the Nineteenth Century.” Wide Angle 18.2 (April 1996): 70-100. Thompson, Rosemarie Garland. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Truettner, William. “Dressing the Part: Thomas Eakins’s Portrait of Frank Hamilton Cushing.” American Art Journal 17.2 (1985): 48-72.

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Wexler, Laura. Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2000.

Notes 1

Frank Hamilton Cushing to Spencer F. Baird, 12 March 1881, Spencer F. Baird Papers, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Washington, D.C.; quoted in Jesse Greene, ed., Cushing at Zuni: The Correspondence and Journals of Frank Hamilton Cushing, 1897-1884 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990), 151. 2 Charles F. Lummis, “The White Indian,” Land of Sunshine 13 (June 1900): 11. 3 Darwin’s theories of evolution, as Americans interpreted them, appeared to validate the long-held view that there were higher and lower races. Few initially grasped natural selection’s utter indifference to progress and instead took it as confirmation that the higher races were meant to govern the less advanced. Patrick Brantlinger, “Victorians and Africans: The Genealogy of the Myth of the Dark Continent,” Critical Inquiry 12 (Autumn 1985): 186-7. 4 Ellen Strain, “Exotic Bodies, Distant Landscapes: Touristic Viewing and Popularized Anthropology in the Nineteenth Century,” Wide Angle 18.2 (1996): 80. 5 Anthropology, like most of the scholarly disciplines, was dominated by men until the early twentieth century. Although there were several notable women in the field, including Matilda Stevenson, a member of the Smithsonian party at Zuni, few were able to find a place in the burgeoning institutions supporting anthropological research. On the central role of objects in early anthropology, see Steven Conn’s “Museums and the Late Victorian World” in Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876-1926 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 3-31. For further information on Stevenson’s path-breaking career, see Nancy J. Parezo, “Matilda Coxe Stevenson: Pioneer Ethnologist,” in Hidden Scholars: Women Anthropologists and the Native American Southwest, ed. Nancy J. Parezo (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993), 38-62. 6 Cushing’s publicity tour in some respects followed the examples of Charles Dickens’ American tour, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s British tour, and Jenny Lind’s tour under the auspices of P.T. Barnum. They, too, were toasted at special dinners, met dignitaries, and received ample attention from a variety of newspapers, including mentions of both official events and more mundane comings and goings. What seems to be new about Cushing’s tour with the Zuni was that he was not promoting any scholarly or cultural product which could be purchased. His purpose (though he would argue otherwise) is more plainly to promote himself, or rather a vision of himself as a civilized scientist and translator of a soon-to-be lost culture. On the preceding tours, see David Haven Blake, Walt Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 30. 7 Frank Hamilton Cushing to James Pilling, 25 December 1881, National Anthropological Archives, Suitland, M.D.; quoted in Green, 214.

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Curtis M. Hinsley discusses the Zunis’ appeal to eastern elites in “Zunis and Brahmins: Cultural Ambivalence in the Gilded Age” in Romantic Motives: Essays on Anthropological Sensibility, ed. George W. Stocking, Jr. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 169-207. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. For a broader discussion of the cultural dislocations associated with modernity and the accompanying search for authenticity, see T.J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981) and Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). 9 One of the six was Nanahe, a Hopi who had been adopted into the little fire order in Zuni (Hinsley 170). Hinsley discusses the Zunis’ attendance at theatrical performances and the way in which these performative settings influenced Americans’ responses to the group (192-8). Sylvester Baxter’s account of the tour, “An Aboriginal Pilgrimage,” includes descriptions of the Zunis’ reactions to a variety of new sights, from the locomotive to a group of sea lions in Chicago. It is also the source for the subsequent description of the Deer Island ceremonies. Sylvester Baxter, “An Aboriginal Pilgrimage,” Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine 24.4 (1882): 526-36. http://cdl.library.cornell.edu.proxy.wm.edu/ cgibin/moa/sgml/moa-idx?notisid=ABP2287-0024-150. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 10 William H. Truettner, “Dressing the Part: Thomas Eakins’s Portrait of Frank Hamilton Cushing,” American Art Journal 17.2 (Spring 1985): 65. 11 Frank Hamilton Cushing to Spencer F. Baird, 14 December 1879, Spencer F. Baird Papers, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Washington, D.C.; quoted in Green, 83. 12 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992). See especially chapters two and three. 13 A similar contest of wills begins Cushing’s “The Nation of the Willows,” a twopart series in The Atlantic Monthly recounting his harrowing journey to visit the Havasupai, an even more elusive group considered the “little brothers” of the Zuni. While the Havasupai hold considerable ethnological interest, the trip is precipitated by Cushing’s determination to disprove the Zunis’ assertions that Americans are a “soft people” not fit to survive such a difficult trek. Smugly noting, “But I did go, and this came to be the way of it,” Cushing assures his readers that he will prove not only his own tenacity and endurance, but that of all American men. Not surprisingly, the rest of the article is a series of comparisons between Cushing and his guides in which the natives are always found lacking. Narrated by a more audacious version of the ethnographic adventurer seen in “My Adventures in Zuni,” who brandishes his pistol and mockingly admonishes his Indian guides to “be men” during the long march through the desert, “The Nation of the Willows” lacks the volatility that characterizes The Century series. This discrepancy may be partly explained by Cushing’s narrower focus in The Atlantic piece. Although his Zuni connections earn him the invitation, the limited scope of the Havasupai narrative does not require him to justify his participatory research method, allowing him to maintain the ethnographic adventurer persona that would become

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untenable in the second installment of “My Adventures in Zuni.” Frank Hamilton Cushing, “The Nation of the Willows I,” The Atlantic Monthly 50.299 (1882): 362, 370, http://cdl.library.cornell.edu.proxy. wm.edu/cgi-bin/moa/sgml/moa-idx?noisid =ABK2934-0050-70. 14 Frank Hamilton Cushing, “My Adventures in Zuni I,” The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine 25.2 (1882): 206, http://cdl.library.cornell.edu.proxy.wm.edu/cgi-bin/moa/moa-cgi?notisid=ABP22 87-0025-49. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically, abbreviating the title as MAZ followed by a roman numeral indicating the first, second, or third installment of the series and the page number. 15 There is some discrepancy between Cushing’s various accounts of the Knife Dance. He attributed little significance to the event in his journal, perhaps because he did not yet realize the dance had been staged in an effort to frighten him. Frank Hamilton Cushing Daily Journal, 21 July 1880, Cushing Papers, Southwest Museum of the American Indian, Autry National Center, Los Angeles, C.A.; quoted in Green, 117. The dance’s placement in “My Adventures in Zuni” also violates the actual chronology of events as recorded in Cushing’s journals. However, it quickly became a convenient turning point in his oft-repeated narrative of becoming a Zuni. By the time he recounted the incident to Baird seven months later it had become critical to his authority in Zuni. Cushing offers the story as an illustration of his reputation, “very valuable among Indians,” for “absolute fearlessness.” Since defying the “naked painted devils called Newekew,” Cushing declares, “I have been pretty much master of my situations.” He then goes on to brag that he “pounded the War Captain the other day in a crowd of fifty opposers; settled in the same way the Governor, who attempted to interfere, and since then I’ve had no trouble with the Zunis.” This letter, like the Century version, attributes Cushing’s increasing influence to a heady mixture of intimidation and aggression. Frank Hamilton Cushing to Spencer F. Baird, 18 July 1880, Spencer F. Baird Papers, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Washington, D.C.; quoted in Green, 116-7. 16 Frank Hamilton Cushing to Spencer F. Baird, 29 October 1879, Spencer F. Baird Papers, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Washington, D.C.; quoted in Green, 60. 17 Becoming a Zuni is associated with manliness or becoming a man throughout the Century articles. This link underscores Cushing’s position as a child with limited agency, but it is a sharp deviation from Cushing’s ethnographic adventurer persona in the first installment of “My Adventures in Zuni.” 18 Cushing gains entrance to the kiva, a space for preparing and performing rituals accessible only to members of the secret orders, first through the invitation of a friend and then via an invitation from the governor. Keeping the governor and other Zunis happy was clearly advantageous for his work. 19 Cushing’s quarters in the governor’s house are altered twice in this article, with no objections from Cushing. Cushing is first moved into a more private room, which the governor calls his “little house” (MAZ, II, 509). While not displeased with the new space, he protests the removal of his hammock since it means he will have to sleep on the floor. Later, while Cushing is away from the pueblo for

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several days, the governor and his wife decorate his space “in Indian style more luxurious than any other room in Zuni” (MAZ, II, 510). This improvement, together with the warm greetings he receives on his return, convinces Cushing that the Zunis’ intentions toward him are good. 20 Such passivity also raises the specter of a body out of the self’s control. The physically able body, as Rosemarie Garland Thompson asserts, is critical to Americans’ concept of themselves as individuals and as a nation. The values of self-determination, self-government, autonomy, and progress, which structure the American Ideal posited by liberal individualism, all depend upon a notion of the body “as a compliant instrument of limitless will.” Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 43. 21 For insight into the complex links between domesticity, progress, evolution, and imperialism, see Amy Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity,” American Literature 70.3 (September 1998): 581-606, hereafter to be cited parenthetically; Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995); and Laura Wexler, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). Wexler analyzes a set of before and after photographs of three Native American girls at Virginia’s Hampton Institute in chapter three of Tender Violence. Such images demonstrated the school’s ability not only to prepare students for “civilized” life but its promise to imprint them with the class and gender constructions of the future sentimental reader (112). 22 William E. Curtis, “General Logan’s Ranch,” Chicago Inter-Ocean, 2 May 1883; quoted in Green, 282-3. Curtis defended Cushing against a variety of charges related to the Logan scandal, which is discussed later in this section, including the insinuation that his facial blisters were the result of venereal disease. Curtis attributed the scars to the harsh Zuni diet. 23 Frank Hamilton Cushing to Spencer F. Baird, 14 December 1879, Spencer F. Baird Papers, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Washington, D.C.; quoted in Green, 83. Cushing’s comment followed an unsettling incident at nearby Fort Wingate in which army officers refused to provide adequate shelter for the peculiarly attired ethnographer and his Zuni companions. 24 Sylvester Baxter, “Zuni Revisited.” American Architect and Building News 13.377 (17 March 1883): 124-26; reprinted in The Southwest in the American Imagination: The Writings of Sylvester Baxter, 1881-1889, eds. Curtis M. Hinsley and David R. Wilcox (Tucson: University of Arizona, 1996), 101. 25 William E. Curtis, Children of the Sun (Chicago: The Inter-Ocean Publishing Company, 1883), 17. 26 Cushing even took the time to write an “interview” with himself, probably in the hopes of anonymously publishing a defense of his work. He might have planned to attribute the article to the “always unscrupulous” newspapermen who, Cushing said, wrote notices about him “quite without my authority.” Frank Hamilton Cushing to Spencer F. Baird, 4 December 1881, Spencer F. Baird Papers, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Washington, D.C.; quoted in Green, 201. For

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reassurances from friends, see the following letters from Sylvester Baxter (19 February 1883, 30 March 1883, 9 May 1883) and Washington Matthews (28 February 1883) in Green’s collection of correspondence. 27 Topeka [Kansas] Capital, 18 January 1883; quoted in Green, 266. Washington Matthews, a colleague and admirer, offered a rebuttal to these charges in the same newspaper the following month. See Green, 272. 28 “General Logan and a Critic: A Vigorous Denial of Charges Recently Made,” Chicago Tribune, 22 May 1883; quoted in Green, 295. Green combines the Tribune article and another piece in the New York Times reporting on it. 29 This shift makes the Zunis’ culture appear more complex and “advanced.” Cushing is quite impressed by the intricacies of their language, time keeping, secret orders and games. His poetic translations of Zuni prayers and other ritual language confer a certain beauty to their culture that was largely absent in the earlier installments. However, Cushing also includes more incidents of violence in the final article. This blend of savage brutality and cultural complexity creates a very ambiguous portrait of the Zunis. 30 Frank Hamilton Cushing to Washington Matthews, 30 September 1881, HodgeCushing Collection (72), Southwest Museum of the American Indian, Autry National Center, Los Angeles, C.A.; quoted in Green, 179. 31 That the marriage issue arises suddenly and seemingly out of nowhere supports my argument that Cushing felt compelled to address it. 32 Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1992), 16.

THE EMBODIMENT OF MEMORY: THE INTELLECTUAL BODY IN SHIRLEY GEOK-LIN LIM'S AMONG THE WHITE MOON FACES KATRINA M. POWELL

In 1980, Shirley Geok-lin Lim won the Commonwealth Prize for Crossing the Peninsula and Other Poems. She has published several books of poetry, several collections of stories, and two books of literary criticism, and has edited several special volumes and journals. She earned the American Book Award for the co-edited collection The Forbidden Stitch: An Asian American Women's Anthology in 1989, and again for her memoir, Among The White Moon Faces in 1996. Joss and Gold, her recent (2001) semi-autobiographical novel, addresses the politically charged atmosphere of Kuala Lumpur in 1969. Born in Malaysia, much of Lim's poetry, literary criticism, essays, and stories reflect her Chinese-Malaysian heritage and the social and literary landscape of the United States. While she is well known for her poetry and her feminist commitment to Asian American literature, it is her memoir, through its self-reflexivity and calls to action, that uniquely contributes to her activist agenda. Labeled as a "scholarly memoir" by literary and rhetorical critic Margaret Willard-Traub, Lim establishes "relationships between writers and readers" where there is a "forging of material connections…[and] consequences" (511-512; emphasis in original).1 The material in Lim's autobiography, specifically the corporeal, is examined in this chapter as Lim's contribution to feminist and performative memoir, and the ways that Lim's embodied memories question notions of intellect, immigrants, and women of color. For Lim, the body and corporal experience is inextricably linked to the act of writing autobiography.2 After finishing her memoir she noted, "I felt as if a water blister had been pricked, and the fluid of that life leaked out,"3 suggesting a duality where neither appears first; rather, the body in inscribed as a life story and the telling of a life is marked by the material body. As she explains, the act of writing her memories of the past created

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visceral experiences in the present. Composing her memories, she says, changed them yet forever bound them to her "newly shaped self."4 In Among the White Moon Faces she describes several painful memories of childhood and concludes, "Before there is a memory of speech, there is memory of the senses."5 In recounting the painful past, she states how the re-remembering and the re-writing are themselves painful. Fusing her body and memory through writing, Lim's memoir suggests that the recognition of memories as corporeal is crucial to their telling. Lim further explores this notion of embodied memory in a recent essay: The relation between living and writing has never been clear to me. Having written a memoir, autobiographical poems, and personal essays, critical and reflective, I do not dismiss the notion that I have often turned my lived experiences, the people I have met and the what of these encounters, into writing; made stories out of the inchoate, confused, contingent, painted, provisional, temporal, and shifting; the unfaithful and faintly visible; the unsaid, said, unheard, heard, overheard, and uncertainly heard presences, hauntings, absences, and poverties; the regimes and revolutions witnessed, turned to or away from, as a lurker, a bit player, or a willfully placed central figure.6 ("Im/Possibility," 39).

Her experiences, that is, the moments her body encounters, she recognizes as lived and therefore subject to the imperfections of memory. As a writing strategy, then, Lim places her body and her memories in a tenuous yet central relationship, one that is divulged in the telling of those memories. In her memoir, part of Lim's treatment of body and memory occurs in the form of the colonized body, where she comments on the ways that Malaysians were colonized by the British. Her body therefore, is written as a colonized body, one that has been subject to the colonizer's definitions and expectations of a native body, under colonial rule. Obviously she resists those definitions of her body, yet she recognizes the effects on her body (and the way it is seen by others) nonetheless. She discusses the colonized body at home in Malaysia and in the United States once she moves to pursue graduate study. The body and her intellectual pursuits are intertwined, as she reveals tensions between the language of the oppressor and her language of freedom. Lim's first connection of intellect with the body is in her descriptions of her early British colonial education with nuns. She says of her first teacher, "I have no memory as a child of the kind of warm physical affection with my mother that I felt with my Primary One teacher, Sister Josie" (30). Here she makes the connection of physical affection with learning. While her mother cannot offer her

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physical affection, her first teacher does, linking her first learning experiences with the pleasure of physical closeness. As a girl, she was fiercely aware of the privileges of boys, and when her older brothers went to school, she says, "I felt my chest tighten with the desire to possess what was in their mouths and heads" (32). Lim physically ached for knowledge, and when she gains some of it in Primary School, she is intellectually and physically delighted. Throughout her descriptions of her education— whether studying for exams or writing poetry—Lim connects pleasure with learning. Her love of learning, however, often conflicted with her position as a girl and as a British subject so that she was often in trouble at school. Lim becomes "voluntarily displaced" (169) so as to pursue her intellectual desires in advanced literary study in the United States. In graduate school at Brandeis, Lim becomes physically ill in her isolation and loneliness. While she escaped oppressions she faced in Malacca, she faced new ones in the Unites States as her brown figure navigated the educational system. Lim felt she must leave "home" in part because of the limits of British colonial education. She criticizes British colonial education saying, "the elite [colonial education] trained was irrelevant to the new and contingent circumstances of independence, in which race, religion, language, and gender—four glaring sites totally ignored in British colonial education— shaped the emergence of the Malaysian nation-state" (88). She saw herself aspiring to knowledge, yet recognized the ways that her education prepared her for a limited role in a British controlled nation. While on the one hand she critiques colonial education, at the same time she has a "love of the English language" (121). She ached for learning, for memorizing British poetry, and for excelling at exams. While Lim addresses the body in resistance to colonialization,7 she also stresses its importance to her intellectual freedom, especially as a girl in a traditional Malaysian society where girls are expected to behave and think in certain ways. This seeming contradiction in Lim's identity—that of critic of colonial rule and lover of the English language—is part of what leads her to immigrate to the United States. Much of Lim's work addresses the immigrant experience in America, and the ways in which she strives to reconcile her criticism of American politics with her increasingly American identity. When Lim immigrated to the United States in 1969 to study literature at Brandeis, she thought she was running away from the aspects of Chinese culture that stifled her, yet she faced further tensions within the American educational system, particularly as she began her teaching career. As she negotiates American higher education, her small, quiet, brown figure moves among white Americans in her courses as a

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student and then later as a teacher among Puerto Rican and African American students. Her browness is doubly problematic among her minority students as she negotiates issues of class and race. The multiple dimensions of her physical self, in conjunction with her intellectual self, resist cultural definitions of immigrant women and Asian literature scholars, especially as her body signifies the other in the American academy.8 As she puts it, "The irony about a certain kind of immigrant is how little she can enjoy of the very things she chases. Even as she runs away from her first life, this other life that begins to accrue around her remains oddly secondary, unrooted in the sensuality of infancy and the intensities of first memory" (10). While searching for an identity in America, Lim continued to experience extreme "tensions of my identity" (180). On the one hand, she was an expert in English literature and grammar, with credentials she fought hard for. On the other hand, "Over and over again I wondered if my hours of intense teaching were helping or actively harming my students…Were we setting up obstacles to lengthen their social dependency and lowly economic status and to justify our salaries and professional rank?...Why were we counting errors…Why five errors and not ten?" (180). In this series of questions to the readers, Lim challenges the ways that traditional education could help those not from the white middle classes. Her teaching experiences continued to reveal tensions between her British-ness (insomuch as she was a colonial subject) and the simultaneous liberation and constraint qualities of the English language. Indeed, it is her bodily experience among her teachers and peers and family that cause her to turn to the English language to understand (or escape) her material experience. She continued to struggle with her sense of loving the English language yet understanding herself as a "colonized subject" (183) and in turn its affect on her teaching. In describing leaving one of her first teaching positions she says: The very integrity of the decolonizing intellectual must drive her to critique her own ideological formation and so to jilt her first loves [of English literature]….I left [Hostos] because I could not reconcile English literature and the deprivations of black and brown students. I believe that Hostos students deserved better and more, and I did not believe that teaching them English grammar was what they deserved" (183).

As a new teacher teaching rules of language and literary analysis, she failed to see their usefulness for the material, bodily struggles that her students faced daily as minority students in the American education system. Her resistance to curriculum echoed her experience in grammar

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school when she questioned authority: "My badness, evident at every turn, seem to be produced by my intelligence" (73). Similarly, Lim faced resentment because of her "badness," that is, her proclivity to speak her mind, when she questioned the very curriculum she was teaching her students. Her colleagues resented her questioning, further alienating Lim from the language and profession she loved. Her body, as it encountered education, profoundly impacted her negotiation of traditional curricula. Therefore, her resistance was met with racialized resentment, by colleagues unaware of the race and class implications of their particular curriculum and pedagogy. Lim's examination of the tensions of the English language as oppressive yet liberating have continued since the publication of her memoir. She explores where these tensions might have originated in the essay, "Im/Possibility of Life Writing." She says: My mother's abandonment has shut the doors to Malay everyday speech on us; it has also shut me away from Hokkien, the home language in which her story is narrated repeatedly and which I am not permitted to hear…no wonder I choose the one that does not refuse me: those sentences, the words and babbling in the pages of English-language books that open compliantly hour after hour to my lonely forays…My life between languages cannot be reified as between colonized and indigenous elements or reduced to collusion and complicity with global power. (45)

Lim writes of a colonized subject not merely acted upon by language. Rather, she loves the English language and it does not exclude her in the ways that many colonized or diaspora writers describe. Instead, it is the language of her freedom. This tension is not lost on Lim; indeed, she complicates her relation to the English language, drawing attention to its libratory qualities, despite what has been "commodified" as diaspora stories. Her diasporic experience, that is, a dislocated body, though subject to commodification, highlights her body learning language with agency, with a sense of power despite this diasporic. Each of these instances, learning, immigration, and teaching attend to the ways Lim's Malaysian self interacts with her nascent American self. As Lim discusses her British education, she recognizes the criticisms of such, yet also says: I have seen myself not so much sucking at the teat of British colonial culture as actively appropriating those aspects of it that I needed to escape that other familial/gender/native culture that violently hammered out only

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one shape for self. I actively sought corruption to break out of the pomegranate shell of being Chinese and girl." (65)

In America she is thus signified as the other and made to confront the ways her education and her opportunities in America are necessarily fraught with conflict. On becoming a citizen in 1980, she reflects, "I felt alien in a different way, as if my ambivalence toward the United States must now extend inward to an ambivalence toward myself. No longer a traveler, I was included in my accusations of America" (196). Her accusations centered on how U.S. education was not adequately helping immigrants or people of color in general. At the same time, her desire to be American, to fit in, and to make a space for her body and her sense of self as an intellect tugged at her sensibilities. Lim's life as a graduate student and English professor would seemingly tell a success story of immigration, a daughter who made good on educational promise. Yet as the stories she tells reveal, her body is in contrast to white middle class bodies, contributing to her isolation, depression, and extreme loneliness. In describing her times of despair in graduate school Lim emphasizes the affectionate friendship of women. Again, Lim connects her body to the emotional and intellectual ties that see her through difficult moments as a student and professor: I felt how sweet it was to be in a community of women, where one's laughter was laughter and not flirtation, where someone combed your hair to adorn you, not to penetrate, where a palpable affection in the moment, requiring no commitment, possession, or competition, was good enough for the moment…The felt insight that there were others who would help, so contrary to my childhood experience of society as indifferent if not actually hostile, came to me through the affectionate companionship of women friends (156).

The physical companionship of women friends sees her through difficult times during graduate school as she struggled with her conflicting identities. The bodily connection with women friends becomes essential in her sense of knowing and of negotiating spaces where her body was otherwise dismissed. Lim's growing feminist consciousness is intricately tied to her identity formation as an American intellect in U.S. education. This complex interrelation is further deepened when she becomes a mother. Her responsibilities and role as a mother are sometimes at odds with her growing success as an academic and poet. She says of missing the

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ceremony in London for the Commonwealth Prize, "At the back of my mind I felt a faint pressure of regret. Fame, if only for a day, was passing me by, and also the possibility of another audience…There was no choosing" (187). While Lim implies that there was no alternative to choosing her son, she expresses the conflict of many women who feel they are forced to choose between their children and professional success or advancement. Yet it is her motherhood and her experience of her body as specifically female, that furthers her commitment to reconciling her conflicting identities. In her poem, "Learning to Love America," for instance, she says, "because I have nursed my son at my breast/because he is a strong American boy/because I have seen his eyes redden when he is asked who he is/because he answers I don't know."9 Here Lim stresses the importance of reconciling her body in her emerging identities. Her role as a mother, specifically her physical connectedness to him as she nurses him and cares for his bodily needs, urges her to understand her conflicted identities for his sake. As she says, the birth of her son further exacerbates the contradictions of her identity: "I wanted for him to have a pride of belonging, the sense of identity with a homeland, that which I had possessed as a Chinese Malaysian for a brief time in my youth" (Among, 197). After he is born and she interacts with other parents, she says, "A grievance gnawed in me, perhaps the displaced desires for assimilation, a growing anger that, despite his birth here in the United States, his childhood was still marked by the perception of my foreignness" (199). Lim addresses home, space, mother, poet, racist, immigrant: all conflicting identities. What Lim does brilliantly here is set these identities together in all their contradictions and leaves them there for inspection, mulling, and ultimately change as she struggles with specific ways to break the cycle of parental physical punishment. In addition to psychological violence faced as a foreigner, Lim must also attend to the violence that plagues her past as a child and her present as a mother. As she assesses the body's reaction to violence and hunger she says, "There is this access to violence in my body, that I have inherited, like an alcoholic gene, that I have to keep in sight of, vigilant, never to let loose" (192). She examines her own struggle as a mother with the cycle of violence: "Only the consciousness of one's own precarious position in the cycle can contain the violence. To change the blow to a caress, the sharp and ugly words to careful explanation, the helpless choking rage to empathy, that is my struggle as a mother: to form a different love" (203). Here she demonstrates the constant fight to change the cycle of her past. Yet the first sentence is written in the third person, as if the "I" may not

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have actually arrived at these changes, that she must continually battle her past. In addition, she recognizes her consciousness of this cycle and the connection of violence and love as a "feminist consciousness." According to Lim, she: could only unravel the repetitions of fear and rage by understanding myself as a woman: a girl-child seizing autonomy rather than suffering damage, but damaged still by that premature forced growth, a young woman fearing independence but fearing dependency more. For women breaking out of closed societies, the break itself is traumatic. Liberation hurts. Feminism must prepare women for struggle, not comfort. (203)

Lim's struggle as a mother, the violence of her past, and her intellectual and American identities are all undertaken through her feminist consciousness. When Lim's colleagues "see" her as weird and strange, it is because she questions the status quo—something she thought she would be able to do in the United States. She describes the "violence of the dialogue" where her department chair was furious that she questioned being passed over for a promotion. Lim had hoped to "pass as an ordinary citizen" to be part of the academy as it was, through her work, and through her worth as a scholar and teacher and colleague (224-225). The exchange with her department chair and the discrimination she faced culminated in her question to the reader, "Do wild feminists live in universities? Can they?" (226). For Lim, "wild feminists" are those who speak their minds, who recognize the constant battle with assimilation and with making change. This explicit questioning, with its consequent call to change, sets Lim's memoir apart from the typical literary memoir. Not only does she address this question to herself but she also asks the reader to examine the question as well, making the memoir a dialogue. Lim does discuss political action explicitly in her memoir, particularly in the ways she examines coming to terms with her neighbors in Brooklyn. While she saw herself as an advocate for her Puerto Rican students, she became "uneasy" with the physical presence and closeness and what she called her "hypocrisy" (176) with her neighbors. This unease leads Lim to examine her physical and emotional discomforts and to examine the class struggles between her, her neighbors, and her students. She must come to terms with what she and her husband must have represented in their neighborhood as owners of property. She concludes that she and her husband "could not live safely in our homes until the tenants were safe in theirs" (177). They therefore used their resources to advocate for the tenements around them, modeling socially active questioning with tangible results. This explicit political

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action, however, is not the only way this memoir functions as an activist text. Lim's memoir functions as more than a description of her body in the U.S. and the academy. Her constructions of self, body, and memory also serve to challenge generic boundaries of memoir and scholarly writing, and she does this through what Della Pollock describes as performative writing: "Writing as doing displaces writing as meaning; writing becomes meaningful in the material, dis/continuous act of writing. Effacing itself twice over—once as meaning and reference, twice as deferral and erasure—writing becomes itself, becomes its own means and ends, recovering to itself the force of action" (75). Lim's memoir asks readers to consider their own place, in particular their corporal experience in the academy, to question the validity of certain approaches to education in relation to race, class, and gender issues and the ways that actual bodies come in contact with each other, not just the abstract ideas that constitute a Malaysian, an African American, a Puerto Rican. In her series of questions to the reader she engages in “a performative perspective [which] tends to favor the generative and the ludic capacities of language and language encounters—the interplay of reader and writer in the joint production of meaning…[it] uses language like paint to create what is self-evidently a version of what was, what is, and/or what might be.”10 Throughout the memoir, Lim poses questions to the audience about the strictures of colonialism, higher education institutions, and definitions of immigrants and women. She uses the example of her life to illustrate the “tensions within her identity” to construct a self-conscious and interactive performance space, encouraging readers to experience her reflexivity about herself and about education. By doing so, Lim’s memoir serves as "performative autobiography" where she uses a "very self-conscious approach to accepted forms and narratives, examining how that very form is limited in adequately representing a life" critiquing "hegemonic discourse through its self-conscious treatment of the genre."11 Lim's narrative construction is self-consciously interactive and engages readers’ senses of civic, academic, and intellectual justice, while simultaneously examining traditional education and reflecting on her identity. In the middle of her seemingly traditional narrative describing her childhood and her father's affinity for Western cinema and the family's experiences of movie-going, Lim describes a flash memory, beginning, "A vivid memory at ages five and six is of being wakened by my mother who wraps me in a blanket" (Among, 22). This construction occurs within traditional narrative, evoking a sense of memories occurring even as she writes the story of her life. The telling of stories has produced additional

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memories, suggesting the power of the telling as she highlights the connection between body, memory, and image. In another instance, Lim describes her experience teaching at Hostos Community College in the Bronx: Campuses promise verdant spaces in which the tranquil spirit may track paths of inquiry, to produce social beings calibrated to degrees of civilized society. How to satisfy the demand from black and brown Americans for a share of this promise?...I was conscious that my position was earned on the backs of black, brown, and working-class activists…the distance between my townhouse and the college was more than miles—it was the distance between an already secured middle class and a dispossessed class, between someone already marked with entry, no matter how tenuous, into U.S. privilege and those who were still denied entry (Among, 170).

Lim's intertwining of her thoughts about identity formation and the role of that identity within a broader institutional system serves to challenge readers' knowledge of race and class issues in American education. Later in the same section of the memoir, Lim questions the very curriculum she was teaching: If not Shakespeare, who should be read? If not English, what language should be taught? Puerto Ricans and African Americans had compelled the City University of New York to open its doors to them, but the doors opened onto bleak cinder-block walls. The results of their struggle for equal opportunities were programs in English as a Second Language, entry exams, remedial writing, introductory courses in composition and English literature, and exit exams. (141)

Mixed in with her descriptions of her encounters with colleagues, Lim's critique of curriculum not only challenges race and class issues, it also challenges the notion of autobiography and scholarly writing, creating a performative blend of the two. Finally, it is Lim's construction of memories that call for action that suggests an additional unique element to the notion of performative autobiography. Lim's call to readers is to reconcile conflicting identities, as they are experienced by the body, for the express purpose of reconciling the various tensions in America. She says in her memoir, “I needed to find another, more welcoming America in which poetry, Asia, and woman could be accepted in the same body” (225). In the final pages of her memoir, Lim asks her readers to continue to create this kind of space for women of color and immigrant women and to value it within the

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institutional structures of the academy. Her own activist work as an AsianAmerican literary and feminist scholar is an example of this kind of space making. By using her own life as an example, specifically in the way she writes about that life, she illustrates how that space making can occur, by scrutinizing and articulating our relationship to language and literature. Lim's strategies of memory narration ultimately dismantle the power structures that serve to reify dominant narratives of self and the body in the academy. Lim states that there is a "misunderstanding that writing a life reproduces that life as storied memory in a definitive text and that an individual's store of experiences is recoverable in language" ("Im/Possibility," 40). Despite that misunderstanding, Lim, like others who write the stories of their lives, attempts to write a life to show the ways that body, memory, identity, and story are inextricably linked, and furthermore to call others to write their own stories so that change might occur. Lim says: Everywhere I have lived in the United States—Boston, Brooklyn, Westchester—I felt an absence of place, myself absent in America…In California, I am beginning to write stories about America, as well as about Malaysia. Listening, and telling my own stories, I am moving home. (231-232)

This absence, according to Willard-Traub, is challenged through "language—the stories of her self and the stories of others whom she holds close—that bond, cause pain, pass on history, and convey one 'home'" (525). We can examine Lim's notion of home in light of cultural theorist Homi Bhabha's concept of nation. He says: As an apparatus of symbolic power, [nation] produces a continual slippage of categories, like sexuality, class affiliation, territorial paranoia, or ‘cultural difference’ in the act of writing the nation. What is displayed in this displacement and repetition of terms is the nation as the measure of the liminality of cultural modernity.12

A sense of belonging, her mastery of the English language, forming professional and personal relationships with women, all these are written by Lim to find some semblance of home in the United States where there is a fraught history of racism and a continuance of discrimination both explicit and subtle. Lim highlights that liminality when she says, "home is the place where our stories are told" (Among, 232). That is, the body's placement in a home, space, or nation may be temporary or changing, but the act of storytelling, of placing the body from the memory to the page is

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what defines home. In this way, her "narrative and performative production of 'home' as a work of collective memory and as a safe place, focusing on the discursive creative of home in the text."13 Lim asks the reader during the height of her depression in graduate school, "How does one make oneself at home?" (155). Lim's autobiography, in addition to her poetry, literary criticism, and essays, depict the "necessity to create 'homes' for ourselves, however problematic and provisional, figuring home not as an essentialized space of identity but as a historically and culturally specific construct inseparable from power relations."14 Lim's Among the White Moon Faces, as a story of multiple physical and linguistic dislocations, refigures the story of immigrant, mother, and academic, and draws attention to the constructed nature of identity. She highlights the connection of the body to life writing, and furthermore, the ways that Lim challenges readers to act on their own identity conflicts. She describes the life of a writer, in particular, the intellectual pursuit of ideas and poetry as that which gives her pleasure. When she wrote her first short story as a child, she said that the "pleasure in writing the story, which flowed unforced, confirmed my belief in the vital connections between the English language and the breathing emotions that ran through my body" (Among, 121). This can be taken as intellectual pleasure as Barthes describes it, but in the same sentence Lim associates that pleasure with the body. Her "closeted" love of English as a language brought her close both in terms of corporal experience and in terms of intellectual freedom to her desires, poetry, and living the life of the woman she wanted to be.

Works Cited Bhabha, Homi. “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation.” In Nation and Narration, ed. Homi Bhabha. London: Routledge, 1990. 291-322. Revised version in The Location of Culture, 1994, 139-170. Gunew, Sneja. "Technologies of the Self: Corporeal Affects of English." The South Atlantic Quarterly 100.3 (September 2001): 729-747. Kondo, Dorinne. “The Narrative Production of ‘Home,’ Community, and Political Identity in Asian American Theater.” In Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity, eds. Smadar Lavie and Ted Swedenburg. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. 97-117. Lim, Shirley Geok-lin. Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian-American Memoir of Homelands. New York: The Feminist Press, 1996. —. "Embodied Memory and Memoir." Biography 26.3 (Summer 2003): 442-443.

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—. Joss and Gold. Singapore: Times Books International, 2001. —. "Learning to love America." In What the Fortune Teller Didn’t Say. Albuquerque, New Mexico: West End Press, 1998. —. "The Im/Possibility of Life-Writing in Two Languages." In Lives in Translation: Bilingual Writers on Identity and Creativity, ed. Isabelle de Courtivron. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. 39-47. Olney, James. Memory and Narrative: The Weave of Life Writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Pollock, Della. "Performing Writing." In The Ends of Performance, ed. Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane. New York: New York University Press, 1998. 73-103. Powell, Katrina M. "Performative Autobiography." In Encyclopedia of Women's Autobiography, ed. Victoria Boynton and Jo Malin. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2007. 456-458. Wagner, Tamara S. "Victims of Boutique Multiculturalism: Malaysian Chinese and Peranakan Women Writers and the Dangers of SelfExoticisation." School of Humanities and Social Sciences, NTU, Singapore. http://www.inst.at/trans/16Nr/02_02/Wagner16.htm. February 2007. Willard-Traub, Margaret K. "Rhetorics of Gender and Ethnicity in Scholarly Memoir: Notes on a Material Genre." College English 65.5 (May 2003): 511-525.

Notes 1

Margaret K. Willard-Traub, "Rhetorics of Gender and Ethnicity in Scholarly Memoir: Notes on a Material Genre College English 65.5 (May 2003): 511-525. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. In this essay, Willard-Traub discusses the rhetorics of gender and ethnicity in the scholarly memoirs of Ruth Behar (anthropology), Patricia Williams (law), Alice Kaplan (French studies), and Shirley Geok-lin Lim (English studies). She argues that these writers' memoirs illustrate the contingency of the self through a "transaction" with audiences (512). While Willard-Traub thoroughly examines the work of Behar, Williams, and Kaplan, her discussion of Lim is quite slim compared to the others. 2 Lim's memoir was simultaneously released through Singapore's Times Books International as Among the White Moon Faces: Memoirs of a Nyonya Feminist. 3 Shirley Geok-lin Lim, "Embodied Memory and Memoir," Biography 26.3 (Summer 2003): 442-443. 442. See also Shirley Geok-lin Lim, "Not an Academic Memoir," in The Scholar and Feminist Online. 4.2 (Spring 2006). www.barnard.edu/sfonline and Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Caroline Kyungah Hong. "Introduction: The Postmodern Dilemma for Life Writing" Life Writing 4.1 (2007): 1751-2964.

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James Olney, Memory and Narrative: The Weave of Life Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 20. 5 Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian-American Memoir of Homelands (New York: The Feminist Press, 1996), 10. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 6 Shirley Goek-lin Lim, "The Im/Possibility of Life-Writing in Two Languages," in Lives in Translation: Bilingual Writers on Identity and Creativity, ed. Isabelle de Courtivron (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 39. 7 See Sneja Gunew's work—"Technologies of the Self: Corporeal Affects of English." The South Atlantic Quarterly 100.3 (September 2001): 729-747—where she discusses how forced English education resides in the body of the colonized individual like a "virus." 8 Lim's semi-autobiographical novel Joss and Gold (Singapore: Times Books International, 2001, hereafter to be cited parenthetically) and her memoir have been criticized as narratives that "tremble on self-exoticisation" (Tamara S. Wagner, "Victims of Boutique Multiculturalism: Malaysian Chinese and Peranakan Women Writers and the Dangers of Self-Exoticisation," School of Humanities and Social Sciences, NTU, Singapore. http://www.inst.at/trans/16Nr/02_02/Wagner16.htm. February 2007). This critique, based on theories of commodification of linguistic multiplicity, suggests that Lim engenders a "consumable spectacle" through her use of food and fashion of the Nyonya culture in her work. I would argue, however, that locating experience in the material, Lim highlights the embodiment of experience, which therefore leads to the recognition and critique of the consumerizing of the body and its narratives. 9 Shirley Goek-lin Lim, "Learning to Love America," in What the Fortune Teller Didn’t Say (Albuquerque, New Mexico: West End Press, 1998). 10 Della Pollock, "Performing Writing," in The Ends of Performance,ed. Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 80. 11 Katrina M. Powell, "Performative Autobiography," in Encyclopedia of Women's Autobiography, ed. Victoria Boynton and Jo Malin (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2007), 457. 12 Homi Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990). 291-322. Revised version in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 140. 13 Dorinne Kondo, “The Narrative Production of ‘Home,’ Community, and Political Identity in Asian American Theater,” in Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity, ed. Smadar Lavie and Ted Swedenburg (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 98. 14 Kondo, 115. Kondo's discussion centers around her analysis of the Perry Miyake play, Doughball.

IMAGES OF THE FAMILY BODY IN THE ADOPTEE SEARCH NARRATIVE EMILY HIPCHEN

In one episode of Star Trek: The New Generation, a young woman discovers she’s not human like the parents who raised her: her “real parents” were members of the Q continuum, and this at last explains her extraordinary physical powers. In an early episode of House, M.D., Dr. House confronts parents of a sick boy, saying he “doesn’t care who loves [the child] most,” he just needs to know who the boy’s “real father” is in order to cure him.1 Chase, Foreman, and House place bets on the boy’s paternity, making decisions about the authenticity of his parents based on whether or not parts of his body match theirs. In the denouement, the boy confesses he knew he was adopted since early childhood: he had learned in a lesson on genetics that because he has a cleft chin and neither of his parents did, they must not be his “real parents.” At the sixth biennial meeting of the International Autobiography and Biography Association in June, 2008, I sat on a panel with a scholar who wrote that Strom Thurmond was Essie Mae Washington-Williams’ “real father,” though she was a product of socially sanctioned rape, and he’d never owned or enacted his paternity publicly. As Thurmond’s “real” daughter, and not the real daughter of her African-American mother and stepfather, Washington-Williams’ race and any claims she might make to being black are available for discussion. Three weeks later, at a State Department dinner in Washington DC, a woman talking about my book asked me what it felt like finally to know my “real parents.” “You know,” she said, “the people who look like you. They do, right?” Cultural moments like these recur more times than I am able even to notice, and they serve here as an entry into a conversation about adoption and the body that in adoption studies is now largely contained to a debate about transracial placements. In such discussions, the body of the adoptee (in particular) is usually read to authenticate the parenthood of those claiming the adoptee as a family member, or a member of that extension of family we designate as race. I think, however, that it will be fruitful to expand the conversation to include intraracial adoptions simply because I

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believe if we do, we can begin to notice the global, endemic nature of our preoccupation with the body in all of our discussions about adoption, and not merely about those in which the adoption is conspicuous. In fact, I think it’s necessary to look at inconspicuous2 adoptions in order to see clearly the subtle ways we manipulate the intersections of body and family in all our thinking about the way we make families. Therefore, in this essay, I want to focus on life writing by American adoptees in closedrecords, matched, stranger adoptions who describe their search for and/or reunions with same-race biological parents3 in order to show how their texts deploy an extended sense of the self grounded in the physical—“the family body”—to reproduce metonymically the difficulties of forming an identity in the context of adoption as these authors experienced it. These writers reflect what Elizabeth Bartholet calls “the biologic bias”; that is, that biological family construction is culturally normative and is privileged over every other sort, including adoptive family construction, or put more simply, for most people “biologic parenting is the ideal and adoption a poor second best.”4 The family body in these search narratives is thus privileged, constructed by biogenesis, and visible in resemblance (on the body of the adoptee and her biological family). In these texts, the complexities of adoption identity can be seen in the way that, in the context of reunion, the process of relinquishment and adoption are constructed as disrupting that family body. Specifically, Florence Fisher’s The Search for Anna Fisher, Debra Levy Holtz’s Of Unknown Origin: A Memoir, and Betty Jean Lifton’s Twice Born: Memoirs of an Adopted Daughter are populated with images of unidentified and sometimes unidentifiable arms, legs, chins, eyes, and faces—with dismembered bodies whose origins are ambiguous or absolutely unknown. In the end, these fragments emblematize the way these narratives complicate identity as it is formed in relation to the family body. My contact with the family body began with my own reunion with my biological family where it was the subject of constant discussion, and in my noticing the way most adoptees used bodies in their life writing about their adoptions. But my interest became focused when I encountered by chance a photograph that seemed to be the image of what happens to representations of the family body in adoptee-written search narratives, 5 where adoption is usually interpreted as disruption, loss, or trauma. This photograph appears not in the context of adoption life writing, but in Timothy Dow Adams’ Light Writing and Life Writing: Photography in Autobiography, which reproduces the image from the frontispiece to Paul Auster’s The Invention of Solitude. At first glance, there’s nothing about the picture that seems unusual. It shows a family scene from rural

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nineteenth-century America. A woman with dark hair and a solemn expression sits outdoors for the photograph with her children clustered around her; there’s a curiously shaped tree overhead and a dark-painted house in the background. The children range in age from about a year for the boy in her lap to advanced childhood or early adolescence for the girl posed behind her. In the lower center foreground stands a child of perhaps two looking sullenly up at the photographer. The older boy on the right edge of the photograph seems to be leaning with his hand in this child’s hair. Only there’s a problem with the picture, one I should have seen immediately. It’s impossible that the boy could rest his weight on the small child’s head, and in fact, when you look more closely at the picture, what I took to be part of the tree in the background is actually the edge of a chair. In this chair, in the original photograph, sat Auster’s grandfather (Auster’s father is the baby on the woman’s lap). But the chair is missing now, along with the man who sat in it: Adams tells us the picture “has been torn apart and awkwardly mended so that Auster’s grandfather’s 6 image is no longer present.” The photograph thus emblematizes a profound trauma in the Auster family: his grandfather had been murdered by his wife, Auster’s grandmother, the woman pictured here holding Auster’s father. No one in Auster’s family told this story to him—it “had been suppressed in family history as awkwardly as the photograph had been mended,” (34) Adams reports. This awkwardness shows itself in what remains in the picture—not just the edge of the chair, but the grandfather’s hands. These appear as dismembered fingers, the tips just visible against the white shirt the toddler wears, as if the grandfather were helping him to stand. In The Invention of Solitude, Auster writes that he sees the fingertips as his grandfather’s attempt to “crawl back into the picture from some hole deep in time, as if he had been exiled to another dimension”; Adams adds that Auster’s “description of the grandfather living inside the photograph [is] one of many images of Austers living in dark, enclosed spaces . . . . In this case, the author is imagining his grandfather coming back into the picture,” (33) freeing himself from an incomplete imprisonment, an unsuccessful banishment from the family. When I look at this picture, I think about how this photograph treats the family as a body and how this resembles the way in which adoption narratives treat it—how trauma in the family’s narrative is represented by a single body that’s both missing and present in pieces. But I also think about Paul John Eakin’s theorizing of the self in How our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves and how his revision of our notion of self and subject starts with the body.

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One of Eakin’s projects in How our Lives Become Stories is to rescue “self” as a viable term for describing the “I” of autobiography (and of experience). Eakin also wants to rethink the traditional theorizing of masculine and feminine life writing that categorizes the former as questing and the latter as relational. Both of these projects are central to reading adoption life writing, and in particular, to reading its treatment of the body—in fact, Eakin’s strategies collapse into a single way to read (images of) the (adopted) self: through the family body. Eakin’s position is that the body is the primary, the fundamental, necessity of self-hood. It’s the basis from which all understanding of ourselves as “I” derives, on which all of it is based. Eakin positions his discussion of the body (and thus the body itself) early in his text: the body is the subject of the book’s first substantive chapter and his discussion there provides much of the philosophical grounding for the rest of his argument. Like the body that it discusses, this chapter and its focus are primary, rooted, and foundational. For Eakin, as for the writers he discusses, “the existence of the self and the existence of the body are inseparable”—a statement that, as Eakin shows us, many theoreticians and 7 philosophers find too politically charged and reductive to accept. Eakin avoids the obvious philosophical problems here by building a body that is emphatically a body (flesh and its functions), but is also one sculpted by circumstance, by cultural pressures and interpersonal relationships. It is a fleshly body, but also a body understood and “imaged” by a mind. The proprioception Eakin discusses, the interplay between sensory messages and the mind’s idea of the body’s interaction with the exterior world, is the fundamental interface that creates “self.” Thus he incorporates essentialism (we are born X) with constructivism (we are made X, can become X). Eakin’s description and understanding of the physical itself is frankly commonsensical. A body is flesh and delimited by the skin; it’s linked to our brains via nerves that have contact with all parts of the body and make reports that in turn constantly recreate the body’s image in the mind’s eye; the body stops where and when the nerve endings stop. A body can die, does die, and the “self” dies with it. Though perpetually in flux (changing, moving, adapting), the body as Eakin describes it is carnal, corporeal, finite in time and space. As I think about this body, I begin thinking about ways in which the corporeal self can be said to be larger than this, more extended than its nerve endings, bigger or more complex than the edges of a single body we call self, but more flesh-bound than the relational self Eakin describes as important to identity in later chapters of his work. In reading texts that

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represent adoption identity, the selves created out of the experience of being relinquished and adopted in a culture that reads adoption as abnormal, it is clear that the physical self is conceived as part of a larger body, a family body. This body has members, individuals in relation to each other, but is itself an image and has a single “look.” To be part of a family as most people are is to share a body, to look like someone else (not always someone living) in part or in whole: this awareness of a family body stretches the borders of the corporeal self both in space and in time (I am the picture of my dead great-grandmother, in certain lights have my father’s face, in others my aunt’s, my skin is my mother’s, my eyebrows belong to my deceased grandfather). The body Eakin calls a register of the self is an amalgam of physical resemblances which bind families into 8 single selves and single bodies. In Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory, Marianne Hirsch argues that the family photograph creates the family as we understand it in modern America: “more than one hundred years [after the invention of the camera], photography’s social functions are integrally tied to the ideology of the modern family. The family photo both displays the cohesion of the family and is an instrument of its togetherness.”9 It does so, her argument implies, by preserving and emphasizing resemblance, by picturing and preserving corruptible flesh. Pictures of the family construct individuals as well as the family as a group that pre-dates the individuals looking at the photos or each other. Family images work to construct the family, Hirsch argues, through the “familial look,” which constitutes the individual in the space of the family. The familial look “is not the look of a subject looking at an object, but a mutual look of a subject looking at an object who is a subject looking (back) at an object,” that subject/object being the body.10 In biogenetically created families, looking at bodies, at others, generates connection through resemblance, generates individuals through bodily difference. The trouble in reading images of the family in adoption life writing is that we believe family naturally shares both a history and a body.11 However, for the adoptee writing about search and reunion, both these categories are disrupted, and that disruption is reflected in imagery of the body that fragments it and obscures its identity. In search narratives by adoptees, Hirsch’s familial look (which is both an action—looking—and a descriptor of biological resemblance—the family look) comes undone. In these texts, the family is pictured by dismemberment and collage—by images of shared pieces of bodies, and by images obviously constructed of pieces. The adoptees in these texts attempt to picture themselves (or look for images of themselves in vain) by dismembering images of the family body, of other bodies

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whose relationship to their own because relinquishment and adoption in a culture with a biologic bias have made that relationship unclear. In adoption life writing, as often elsewhere, pictures of bodies mean bodies: this is, they stand in directly for the bodies they represent (they become the bodies they picture). This is particularly clear in the handling of the baby photograph—a rare object indeed for adoptees—by the biological mother in the two untitled poems that bracket the first half of Jackie Kay’s monograph poetry collection, entitled The Adoption Papers.12 In Kay’s volume, the adoptee, the birth mother, and the adoptive mother are each assigned a voice represented by different fonts and presented as interrupting—sometimes after only a few words, sometimes after several stanzas—the others. The voices move back and forth in time, are confused and confusing. Kay’s two serif fonts look very alike; the adoptive mother’s and the adoptee’s dialect is often similarly rendered. The effect, particularly in the absence of names, is fragmentation and ambiguous identification. The three-stanza, untitled poem that ends of the first half of The Adoption Papers imagines these three voices’ response to the search, discovery, and reunion of Kay and her biological mother. In the prefatory stanzas to the volume, the biological mother’s voice, the last we hear before the titled verses begin, reports that she “still ha[s] the baby 13 photograph/. . . in [her] bottom drawer.” As she looks at it, it becomes a mirror, the “she” in the photograph who “is twenty-six today” imagining her mother at forty-five, with a wrinkling neck and gray hair, two women looking simultaneously at images of each other in their minds.14 This photograph disappears until the final three stanzas in which the biological mother disposes of it in an act of “symbolic infanticide” by wrapping it up and tossing it in a nearby well.15 But understanding the biological mother’s actions requires understanding that in these texts, pictures are bodies, they function as incorporate selves, not just representations. What the woman tells us she does is precisely this: “I wrapped her up in purple wrapping paper/ And threw her down the old well near here./ There was no sound, it’s no longer/ in use—years—she’s been in my drawer.”16 The photograph she calls a photograph in the prefatory verse; here it’s simply her and she. The daughter is gone, not the picture. The transference from body to picture, picture to body is particularly fraught in Florence Fisher’s case. Her parents never told her she was adopted. As a child she believed herself to be the biological child of her parents, yet could not find the kind of family body that she sees when she visits the Italian neighbors whose “every ear, nose, and profile were

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exactly the same” (36) Anxious about her difference, she examines her body and the bodies of her kin for relationship without finding it: I would come from [the Italian family’s] apartment back into my own. I would look at my mother and my grandmother, and even at Uncle Abe. I looked like none of them. My hair was auburn; there was no auburn in our family. I had ears with a certain curve, a nose of a certain shape; I was small, my mouth was large, my cheekbones were high. I looked for this in those around me and found no correspondences. Sometimes, at my mother’s vanity table, I’d take out the big boxes of photographs of the entire family and go through them one by one— looking at cousins and uncles and aunts and old grandparents in foreign clothes and young nieces and nephews. There were three mirrors on the table and when I arranged them properly I could look at myself—and the pictures—from all angles at once. At least one person in my mother’s, or one in my father’s, family had to look like me. I could see their similarities to each other. I could tell that these two were brothers; yes, this could well be my father’s father, and this my mother’s sister. It was there. You could see it. Some place there must be a nose, a cheek, or eyes or ears like mine. . . Yes, this man’s nose, I’d think excitedly—and then I’d block off the face in sections and look only at the nose, three times, in the three mirrors, from all angles. . . . I’d look at the photographs over and over, holding them up and turning them to the side—looking at them in the mirror next to my face, trying to find one relative who by some facial feature would assure me that this was my family, that I was not an outsider. (36-7)

To discover family, Fisher dissects her family’s bodies, the flesh she can see and the flesh pictured in photographs. She does not look for the “family look” as a holistic concept—hers is a very specific quest for a nose, an ear, an eye, a cheekbone. Not finding a matching part, she is convinced she is not-family, “an outsider.” When after twenty years of searching she finally meets the woman who gave birth to her, Fisher recognizes her biological mother in the very same language, in a wave of physical dissection that begins with her mother’s legs (“they were plump”) and ends with her face: “In an instant I took in every feature of her face: her eyes, her high cheekbones, a certain curve of her ears, the precise shape of her nose, her expression. Only her mouth was different, and she was heavier; we might have been sisters” (201) Her biological mother, after the shock of the reunion wears off some, goes through the same process as Fisher does in order to confirm relationship— “Your mouth,” she tells Fisher, “is just like my brother’s but the rest of your face is mine” (221); her biological father, Fisher reports, has eyes colored “navy blue

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and gray, and spotted with little yellow flecks—exactly like [her] son’s” (266). For his part, he notes that in “one of the pictures [you sent] you bear a striking resemblance to your mother. . . .[and yet] I see a lot of myself in your face” (262). This anatomizing of the body that occurs in the text itself also occurs in the images that accompany (and market) it.17 The cover of Fisher’s book is particularly interesting not for dissection so much as for complicated rhetorical strategies that highlight misdirection and bodily absence. On the front of the vibrant yellow dust jacket of the hardback first edition, the title in black script surrounds and impinges on a drawing of a Kodachrome photograph pasted to the cover with black mounting corners. But the photograph shows no bodies, and nobody. Against the empty gray space that we would normally expect to see filled with figures, to at least show a single figure, is written a name, “Anna Fisher,” which forms part of the book’s title. Unlike the black letters of the rest of the title, “Anna Fisher” appears in white, tonally in reverse. As Jill Deans observes, the name and the “picture” are misleading: “Anna Fisher, it turns out, is not Florence Fisher’s birth mother. Anna Fisher is a name that a seven-year-old Florence reads on a mysterious photostat in her adoptive parents’ 18 house.” The search for Anna Fisher is not the search for a mother, but a search for a self, the self prior to the adoption, yet even this is problematic, since “her birth mother had never named her Anna”(244); “‘Anna Fisher’ . . . [is] a name that never materializes,” (246) is a body that never materializes. Anna is nobody, unimaged and unimaginable. “Florence” appears on the back of the dust jacket in a snapshot, mounted as if we had simply turned the front picture over to reveal this one—it appears on the “reverse” of the cover’s photo (if the book were transparent, the picture’s edges would match up) and has the same drawn-in mounting corners as the “empty” photograph on the front.19 This picture is captioned “END OF THE SEARCH: Florence with her father, Fred Fisher.” Neither of the two bodies in the picture, however, is Anna’s, and the caveat at the beginning of the book—“Everything in this book is true and happened exactly as written. However to insure privacy, most of the names have been changed and any resemblance to any living person is coincidental”—points out potential and real indeterminacy in the identity of the pictured bodies. “Fred Fisher” may or may not be his real name. Florence Fisher’s name, however, is just one of several she’s been given or chosen. She assumes her “real name” once she starts fighting for adoption rights—“I’ve dropped my adoptive name,” she tells her mother, “. . . It’s not me. I can’t 20 use my married name because of the hate mail” (250).

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What haunts this picture, however, are not the bodies it shows, but those it excludes. It focuses the viewer on a part of the family body that has been amputated, that can’t be shown but in fact is shown in the way the faces in the picture don’t resemble each other: Florence Fisher’s biological mother. Too overcome by guilt, and violently opposed to exposure, she ended her contact with her daughter when Fisher began vigorously and publicly politicking to open birth records to adoptees. Fisher’s biological mother is literally pictured nowhere in the text; she appears, ghostly and dismembered, in those parts of Florence Fisher’s body that we can see do not match her father’s, and in the way in which the text directs us to specific body parts (eyes, cheekbones, ears, nose) that connect her to her mother or her mother’s family (her mouth) instead. It is Florence Fisher’s mother’s name, and her family’s name, which Fisher gestures at protecting by changing it and insisting that “resemblance” is “coincidental.” In this photograph, in this book, by what seems to be her own wish, Fisher’s mother is to have no physical presence and no identity, is to be made what one vituperative adoptive parent who writes to Fisher wants every birth mother to be: “My baby is my baby . . . Her natural or 21 birth mother is nonexistent” (244). Thus the picture that proclaims the END OF THE SEARCH is really a partial one. Fisher’s mother is still rendered missing. Book covers reiterate the text’s disruption of the family body, illustrating the trauma in the family narrative that the text communicates. These particular covers show how well the book designers have both read the text and understand the biologic bias. Images they choose for the covers repeat and support each author’s written representation of the adoption experience as a dismemberment of the biologically constructed family (body). Specifically, the covers show these particular texts’ insistence that adoption in a cultural context that privileges biogenetic family construction is a dismembering experience, something that leaves the adoptee with an uncomfortable sense of difference, a sense of living in pieces, without a completed or integrated identity. In creating the dust jacket of the hardback first edition of Debra Levy Holtz’s Of Unknown Origin: A Memoir, Holtz’s publishers make visual her representation of her adoption identity as broken, having missing pieces, of being connected to the unknown and unknowable and disconnected from the known. This jacket shows unknown and unknowable bodies or body parts, jammed into a mass that suggests connection while asserting absolute separation, and it supports and repeats the way in which the text itself treats bodies. On the cover of Of Unknown Origin, thick black lines separate each of the photographs. On the left as the reader holds the book, book designers

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divided the cover into three unequal parts, putting a large square photo in black and white at the top, a photo in the middle cropped like a wedge and tinted green, and an orange-tinted photo on the bottom. The vertical line on the right edge of these photographs is off-center, squeezing the photograph on the right into less than a third of the cover’s space. The effect is to make it seem like everyone and everything on the cover wants to push into someone else’s space, or fall off into a space beyond the cover. Two photos on the cover depict a child: one, a black and white photograph on the cover’s left top corner, shows a child with wide-set dark eyes, bangs, and a page-boy haircut sitting on a table in front of a pale curtain. Next to her stands a man in a dark tuxedo, heavy-set, whose arm supports the child’s back; she is holding the hand of an unpictured person, who has been cropped out of the photo at her wrist. Both subjects look into the camera, smiling and apparently happy. The other, tinted bright orange and in the bottom left corner, is of a young girl a year or so older, standing or sitting dressed in a white fur jacket in front of yet another curtain. The picture is cropped at her armpits, and is focused on the child’s expression. She seems if not unhappy, at least reluctant, her mouth resolutely closed, her chin tilted down, her eyes wide as she looks up through her lashes at the photographer. Her head tips to her left, serendipitously fitting into the narrowest corner of the triangle formed by the photo above her. The lines in the drapes behind her push her to the edge of the foreground; the black lines around her, including the one that slants down over her right shoulder, wedge her into the smallest space in the picture. If not for the black line that separates them, her shoulder would press against the woman’s to her left, on the right-hand edge of the cover. This woman, in what appears to be a black and white photograph from the fifties, wears gloves, heavy eye make-up, and a dream-like expression. The photograph has been placed so that she looks toward the opposite side of the cover, and though it’s possible she’s looking at the child, she seems instead to be looking out to our left, at an angle that makes both the reader and the child invisible to her. Her fashionably gloved hand rests on her neck, one finger nearly supporting her chin. This hand closes off the bottom of the picture, cutting her face off at the neck, repeating the cropping that has cut off everything below this hand, the entire left side of her body and nearly everything to the right of her. Behind her, in shadow, is a rectangle that looks like a door, but it’s resolutely closed and the lines of its jamb simply fill up the small space left in the photo. The effect is to enlarge her (she’s three times bigger than the other adult on the cover), to confine her, and to destabilize her photograph, which looks as if it could

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slide neatly off the right edge of the book—the only side of the photograph open to its subject. Hers is the picture most closely controlled by the design of the cover: except for this right edge, all four sides are hemmed in either by black lines or by her own hand and the author’s name printed in bright white, which is superimposed under the woman’s glove and closes off the bottom edge of the picture. This cover emphasizes disconnection and ambiguity. None of the pictures is captioned, of course, so we can’t know if the woman is Holtz’s birth mother, if the man is her dead father, or if the child is herself. But even their provenance is suspect: they may not be pictures of family at all. The jacket attributes the photos indiscriminately to “Les Miller / Hulton 22 Getty” and “author collection.” We have no idea who these people are, or what their relationship is to one another, and the text, when it describes Holtz ritually returning to her biological mother all the photographs she has of her, renders positive identification of the young woman impossible (or undermines the truth of Holtz’s text by undermining the truth of this scene). The cover, by its exclusion of every other candidate, insists that this is Holtz’s birth mother: she is the only woman depicted here who could reasonably be a mother. Yet she isn’t identified as a mother and seems neither stereotypically maternal, nor shares space or even her gaze with the child from whom she is separated emphatically by the thick lines and her expression. The cover insists on the young woman’s relationship to its other figures, however, and not just by proximity. Chronology connects these pictures: all of them were taken at roughly the same point in history, in the 1950s during Holtz’s childhood. Then there’s the matter of resemblances, which here seem less complicated than in other texts and are certainly uncomplicated by the presence of any other candidate for “mother.” The child’s expression, her large eyes, and the shape of her face and nose look like the young woman’s. In fact, it’s a resemblance the written text of the memoir both insists on and undercuts. Holtz’s biological aunt Sylvia, when first seeing photographs of Holtz, confirms her identity as family by discussing her face: “After I saw the pictures,” the aunt says, “Good God, your nose, chin, cheeks—they’re all Dunne [her maternal family’s name]. But it’s that bump on your nose, that’s a distinctive Dunne characteristic. Helen [her biological mother] has it, so does Michael [her uncle]” (134). In person, Sylvia is equally certain: “Even if it wasn’t for your unfamiliar car,” she tells Holtz, “I would know it was you. . . . She looks just like Helen, doesn’t she, Mike?” (157) Sylvia is not alone in noticing the resemblance—strangers to the situation also read Holtz’s body to discover to whom she belongs. A family great-aunt in her dotage sees Holtz

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walking with Sylvia and immediately asks, “Whatever happened to Mike’s sister?” When told that Helen is Sylvia’s niece, the great-aunt denies it: “She’s not your niece, she’s Mike’s niece” (169). But both Mike and Holtz are less certain of the physical likenesses. Mike never answers Sylvia’s question; and after looking through old photo albums with her aunt, Holtz both accepts and rejects the evidence of her body. She “could see a resemblance in the pictures of Helen as a child” to herself, but “as an adult,” she continues, Helen “seemed nothing like Sarah [Holtz’s daughter] or me” (164). Holtz’s rejection of Helen’s connection to her is both supported in the text (“she seemed nothing like . . .me”) and denied by it. The facts in the case seem particularly clear. Unlike most adoptees, Holtz has a copy of her original birth certificate which not only lists Helen as her mother, but is signed by her in handwriting that matches other documents signed by the adult woman—Holtz goes so far as to call in an expert in handwriting analysis to confirm her impression of the signatures. In addition, she has a letter written by her biological mother from about the time of Holtz’s birth, confirming that the writer had had a child, that she was aware she had given it up for adoption to a Jewish family, and that the adoptive parents ought to raise the child in the Jewish faith if that was what they wished. The handwriting in this letter matches Helen’s, too. However, Helen’s reception of facts that indicate Holtz is her biological daughter throws every fact into question: she says simply and repeatedly, “You must have the wrong person” (119). Unlike Fisher’s birth mother, for instance, whose first response to being confronted with her adult daughter is to say virtually the same words, Holtz’s birth mother never relents, never admits even to having a child, let alone that Holtz could be that child. Helen ignores letters that ask simply for information rather than contact; she stonewalls and threatens during the few telephone calls Holtz initiates. When Holtz tries to see her without disrupting her life—Holtz sits in a car outside Helen’s house, waiting for her to come out—Helen looks “right at [her] with an icy glance” (124). When Holtz confronts Helen in person, she refuses to look at the birth certificate and the other documents Holtz offers her as proof, shuts the car door in her face, and drives away. Pleas from other members of Helen’s family don’t move her; ambushes at her workplace don’t either. Holtz’s book closes without Helen’s acknowledgment of their kinship, with her refusing absolutely to talk to Holtz about it or look at the evidence she has. We discover that Mike has the same doubts about Holtz’s parentage too, though he has seen the documentary evidence himself. When his daughter Patty contacts Holtz, Patty tells her that Mike “hasn’t always believed

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you”; but her revelation is undercut by her mother who tells Holtz that Patty is a habitual liar, and by Patty’s own erratic behavior—she contacts Holtz, treats her as family, has Holtz buy tickets to visit, then abruptly drops her, hanging up on her, refusing to answer calls or letters, and finally brushing her off entirely. (247) After the shock of Helen’s initial reaction wears off, Holtz herself never questions that she’s found the right woman; Helen is her mother. But Helen doesn’t want her, and by all accounts Helen is, has always been, emotionally unstable and perhaps mentally ill. Helen’s emotional difficulties pose a profound threat to Holtz’s identity as a good mother, an intelligent writer, and a stable human being in touch with reality because they may be located in Helen’s body and therefore may be inheritable, just as much as the bump on her nose. To resemble Helen physically is to be really or potentially mentally ill; to be her biological daughter is to be both repulsed and repulsive, in the worst possible way for a writer and mother of young children—a congenitally impaired capacity to empathize or grasp reality could sabotage her understanding of herself entirely. Holtz refuses to be like Helen, strives to show that she is empathic, warm, and sane. In her text, she points constantly to verifiable fact (usually documents) that she has confirmed as authentic by experts; she records her careful attention to her children and husband, and describes her final reconciliation with her adoptive mother: these are all ways her text creates separation between her and the legacy of Helen’s body. The memoir is itself evidence that Holtz has not inherited Helen’s instability. Helen’s refusal to acknowledge Holtz is a result of her superb capacity to repress and forget. She can’t, won’t, remember she gave birth to a child and so has to deny Holtz’s relationship to her. Holtz, on the other hand, remembers everything. But for Holtz in this text, separation from Helen is incomplete and ultimately undesirable. To be refused confirmation of connection knowing that the connection exists is untenable for Holtz: it results in palpable dismay and depression, and the disintegration of the biogenetically constructed family she has made: Holtz’s marriage ends at the end of the memoir, a conjunction that implies that Holtz’s response to Helen’s rejection has created serious disturbances. The dust jacket of the text emblematizes just this sort of emotional tangle. It pictures the distant mother who may be, but doesn’t want to be, the mother; it shows separation and connection, and anxiety about both, in the composition of 23 the cover with its black lines and its threatening-to-slip-away woman. The jacket gives us “Holtz” as a child, perpetually a child (the designers put a head shot of Holtz as an adult on the back flap, not visible from the front). She is boxed in left and right by the seen—by this woman who may

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leave or alternately may press forward and shove her out of the picture and off the cover of her own book; by the man in the top corner who smiles and holds her hand but also blocks off her exit to her right; by the curtained wall or window behind her; by the edges of her photographs themselves. But she’s also trammeled by the unseen, the missing bodies: the person whose hand she’s holding in the topmost picture, and (what may be the same thing) the adoptive mother who (probably) does not appear on the cover but who is alive and constantly in communication with her daughter throughout the time the memoir covers.24 As they do Holtz, missing bodies also bind Betty Jean Lifton in Twice Born: Memoirs of an Adopted Daughter. Her birth mother doesn’t want to participate in her life and Lifton never reunites with her father, who has died just seven months before she discovers his name. Images of the body in Lifton’s text are thus images of absence and loss. The photographs she finds of both her parents are distorted and miniaturized: “The snapshots [of her mother] were the smallest size, the miniature figures in them almost indistinguishable. . . . There was a woman hiding in those pictures. But hiding from whom?” (130) Her father’s photograph is actually a stamp (infinitely reproducible) made from a snapshot taken at a night-club. Lifton reports that she “saw the miniature features of [her] father on a miniature stamp beside his signature. . . there was no shock of recognition. . . . [Her] father’s sandy hair had come out black, and there was no way of knowing if the same distortion accounted for the pudginess of his face, the smallness of his eyes. . . although Sammy [her father’s best friend] had said [Lifton] was the image of him, [she] was not there either” (220-1). So, though she has photographs of them both, on the dust jacket of the first edition of Twice Born, there are pictures of herself instead, the only evidence she’s allowed of her genetic origins. The cover gives us an extreme close-up of Lifton’s face in profile in grainy black and white, tinted rosy. The edges of the photograph cut off the tip of her nose, her chin, much of her forehead. Her title is superimposed over her temple, the white letters standing out against the dark of her hair. Inset into the “O” of “Born” is part of a photograph showing the head and shoulders of a young child whom we presume is the author—the expression of studied seriousness is the same, the hair falling over the forehead is the same, the age of the photograph seems appropriate. What strikes us, comparatively speaking, is what isn’t here: not just pictures of Lifton’s biological family, but of her adoptive family, and of her own family—she’s married and has two children at the time the book is published. Instead, the cover underscores what adoptee-written search narratives suggest they lack: a sense of connection and rootedness in the

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family body. Lifton’s first birth, the birth of her body, is unpictured as is fitting historically and politically; her second birth, as a two-year-old adopted daughter, is pictured by the disembodied bust of the child. This latter is really a legal and intellectual birth, the generation of the identity superimposed on the adult face in the form of the author’s name—“Betty Jean Lifton.” And so (the photograph of) the toddler emerges from (the photograph of) Lifton’s head, from the yonic “O” that appears to give us access to it, rather than from her womb. Given the decidedly mythographic bent of her autobiography, which begins with Oedipus and includes much Eastern folklore as well, the arrangement looks self-replicating and allusive, as if Lifton becomes both Zeus and Athena simultaneously, parent and daughter, adult and child all in one. As if, more importantly, there were no parents or family attending the births at all. The effect of these images is curious if we consider, again, the way in which these texts “notice” the body. Lifton has her mother’s “forehead . . . And the nose too” according to Lifton’s biological aunt: her biological uncle tells Lifton she has her mother’s “high cheekbones, and the two of them [aunt and uncle] agree on the shape of the face and the mouth” (124). Her father’s best friend tells Lifton that he could “see as [she] crossed the street that it was Boots’ [her father’s nickname] daughter . . . there is no mistaking who you are” (214). In effect, then, pictures of Lifton are images of her family, of her mother and father, but in a fragmented and partial sense: the photograph, to borrow Barthes’ phraseology, becomes a certificate of absence, a note emphasizing what can’t be seen, what must 25 be imagined from pieces instead. For Jackie Kay, “The [adopted] self is multitudes . . .is complex and often contradictory. . . . The past is unknown . . . [and] constantly open to dreams, imagination, fantasy, and interpretation. It’s something that can be re-invented: the possibilities for the adopted person to constantly re-invent themselves [sic] are endless. You could just go on and on.”26 In the family body, one does go on and on, but in pieces shared with others who are living, dead, or not yet born. In life writing like Fisher’s, Holtz’s and Lifton’s, when adoption disconnects and disrupts that body, one goes on in pieces one can’t recognize very well and the impact on identity is to fragment that, too. The difficulty is two-fold for writers like these: if, as in E. Wayne Carp’s words, “when it comes to family matters, most Americans view blood ties as naturally superior to artificially constructed ones,” then relinquishment and adoption will often be experienced as abnormal and traumatic, specifically as a rupture and an “artificial construction.”27 The second difficulty is that search and reunion are never reconstructive and always involve active “making,” even

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“making-up.” As Margaret Homans tells us in examining precisely the sort of nostalgia for “original” wholeness these texts represent, we cannot avoid fictionalizing the past, constructing our origins, and so we “could be better off accepting the fictiveness, the artificiality, of what [story] represents or replaces [biologic] origins” (23). If there’s no going back, then the biological family and the adoptive family are equally “real,” connections to them are equally fictional, and the family body is infinitely destructible, without consequences. Except of course, that as Homans herself admits, “adoption stories can be so urgent in their desire to retrieve literal origins [that] it [is] difficult simply to dismiss the idea of origins as an epistemological error” (23). When I first encountered Eakin’s corporeal understanding of the self, I saw how it slipped into essentialism, the very essentialism Homans combats here and elsewhere. But I also saw how it negotiated the paradoxes of forming an identity in the context of adoption for some adoptees describing their searches and reunions. Eakin’s focus on the body’s role in identity formation makes sense of the imagery of texts like Lifton’s, Holtz’s and Fisher’s. It shows us a way to understand their focus on parts of bodies to get to the whole, and reveals how their public, steeped in the biologic bias, reads their books. Eakin’s understanding of the body, expanded so as to include those bodies that resemble the self, allows us to see how difficult it is to give up our sense that blood makes kinship, that resemblance makes family, that finding the people who are like you, who share a body with you, tells you something about who you are.

Works Cited Adams, Timothy Dow. Light Writing and Life Writing: Photography in Autobiography. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. Bartholet, Elizabeth. Family Bonds: Adoption, Infertility, and the New World of Child Production. Boston: Beacon, 1999. Carp, E. Wayne. Family Matters: Secrecy and Disclosure in the History of Adoption. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. Churchwell, Sarah. “‘The Naked Truth’: Pathography and the Case (No. 81128) of Marilyn Monroe.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 14.2 (1999): 161–85.

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Cockin, Katharine. “Rethinking Transracial Adoption: Reading Jackie Kay’s The Adoption Papers (1991).” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 18.2 (2003): 276–91. Dean, Amy. Letters to My Birthmother: An Adoptee’s Diary of Her Search for her Identity. New York: Pharos, 1991. Deans, Jill. “The Birth of Contemporary Adoption Autobiography: Florence Fisher and Betty Jean Lifton.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 18.2 (2003): 239–58. Fisher, Florence. The Search for Anna Fisher. New York: Arthur Fields, 1973. Gish, Nancy K. “Adoption, Identity, and Voice: Jackie Kay’s Inventions of Self.” In Imagining Adoption: Essays on Literature and Culture, ed. Marianne Novy. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. 171– 91. Haslanger, Sally. “You Mixed? Racial Identity without Racial Biology.” In Adoption Matters: Philosophical and Feminist Essays, ed. Sally Haslanger and Charlotte Witt. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005. 265-89. Herman, Ellen. “The Paradoxical Rationalization of Modern Adoption.” Journal of Social History 36.2 (Winter 2002): 339–85. Hipchen, Emily. Coming Apart Together: Fragments from an Adoption. Teaneck, NJ: The Literate Chigger, 2005. Hirsch, Marianne. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. Holtz, Debra Levy. Of Unknown Origin: A Memoir. San Francisco: Council Oak, 2001. Homans, Margaret. “Adoption Narratives, Trauma, and Origins.” Narrative 14.1 (January 2006): 4–26. House, M.D.: The Complete First Season. “Paternity.” DVD. Disc. 1, Side A. Prod. and Dir. David Shore. Perf. Hugh Laurie, Lisa Edelstein, Jesse Spencer, Omar Epps. Universal, 2005. Kay, Jackie. Untitled preface. The Adoption Papers: “The Adoption Papers.” Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK: Bloodaxe, 1991. 10. —. Untitled afterward, The Adoption Papers: “The Adoption Papers.” Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK: Bloodaxe, 1991. 34. Lifton, Betty Jean. Journey of the Adopted Self: A Quest for Wholeness. New York: Basic, 1994. —. Twice Born: Memoirs of an Adopted Daughter. New York: McGrawHill, 1975. Melosh, Barbara. Strangers and Kin: The American Way of Adoption. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006.

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Novy, Marianne. “Introduction.” Imagining Adoption: Essays on Literature and Culture, ed. Marianne Novy, 1-16. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. —. Reading Adoption: Family and Difference in Fiction and Drama. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. Satz, Martha. “Should Whites Adopt African American Children?: One Family’s Phenomenological Response.” In Imagining Adoption: Essays on Literature and Culture, ed. Marianne Novy, 267-276. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. Strong-Boag, Veronica. “Judging Men: Assessments of Fathers in Canadian Adoption Circles.” Adoption & Culture 1.1 (2007): 69-100. Verrier, Nancy. The Primal Wound: Understanding the Adopted Child. Baltimore: Gateway, 1993. Witt, Charlotte. “Family Resemblances: Adoption, Personal Identity, and Genetic Essentialism.” In Adoption Matters: Philosophical and Feminist Essays, ed. Sally Haslanger and Charlotte Witt. Ithaka: Cornell University Press, 2005. 135-45.

Notes 1 House, M. D.: The Complete First Season (DVD), “Paternity,” Prod. and Dir. David Shore (Universal, 2005): Disc 1A, Episode 2. 2 “Inconspicuous” and “conspicuous” adoption are terms used by many adoptive parents to describe the way in which their family construction is read in public. Inconspicuous adoptions are not immediately visible to outsiders (whites adopting northern European, Slavic, or Russian children, or African-Americans adopting black African children, for example); conspicuous adoptions are usually immediately visible when both parents are present (white parents with a Chinese or African-American child, for example). Sometimes, as Martha Satz writes in “Should Whites Adopt African American Children?: One Family’s Phenomenological Response” in Imagining Adoption: Essays on Literature and Culture, ed. Marianne Novy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), in the absence of the second parent, conspicuous adoption may be misread and rendered invisible: diners at a rural restaurant in Arkansas where she and her transracially adopted daughter stopped to eat “fixed [her with] hostile stares for [she is] perceived as a white woman who has slept with a black man” (271). Thank you to Steve Wade for alerting me to this terminology. 3 By closed-records, matched, stranger adoptions, I mean those adoptions characterized by having sealed records that do not allow any member of the adoption triad (birth parents, adoptive parents, or adoptee) access to original birth records. In this kind of adoption, it is uncommon for adoptees and birth families to have contact until there’s a reunion. Such adoptions are usually stranger adoptions

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managed by adoption lawyers or social service organizations who place children whose birth identity is unknown to their adoptive parents; this is in contrast to kinship adoption, where a parentless child is taken in, formally or not, by its extended biological family. By matched, I mean that social services in a formal way, or other intermediary agencies in a more or less formal way, attempt to match children to their adoptive family so that the adoption is virtually inconspicuous: the adopted child thus could, and often has been, understood by those unaware of the adoption to be the biological child of its adoptive parents. For an excellent short history of matching policies, see Ellen Herman, “The Paradoxical Rationalization of Modern Adoption,” Journal of Social History 36.2 (Winter 2002): 339–85. 4 Elizabeth Bartholet, Family Bonds: Adoption, Infertility, and the New World of Child Production (Boston: Beacon, 1999), 24ff. and 34. For more on the biologic bias, see E. Wayne Carp, Family Matters: Secrecy and Disclosure in the History of Adoption (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); Barbara Melosh, Strangers and Kin: The American Way of Adoption (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006); and Veronica Strong-Boag, “Judging Men: Assessments of Fathers in Canadian Adoption Circles,” Adoption & Culture 1.1 (2007): 69-100, among others. 5 The literature that describes adoption as a traumatic experience for the adoptee is plentiful and complex. Amy Dean’s preface to her Letters to My Birthmother: An Adoptee’s Diary of Her Search for her Identity (New York: Pharos, 1991) is typical: in it she describes how “identity difficulties [occur] as a result of various concerns; the conflict of the dual identity of being a birth child and an adopted child; not matching or being similar in appearance to members of the adoptive family; a low self-image from being ‘unwanted’ or feeling like ‘damaged goods’; and the feeling of being viewed forever as a child not an adult” (xi). Her book, she argues, exists “to help those who interact with and/or care for adoptees understand the profound influence adoption has had on them[, since according to one source,] ...‘Adoptees represent 2% of the U.S. population, yet by some estimates they account for one-quarter of the patients in U.S. psychological treatment facilities’” (viii). But see also the more influential analysis of adoption trauma in Nancy Verrier, The Primal Wound: Understanding the Adopted Child (Baltimore: Gateway, 1993) and Betty Jean Lifton, Twice Born: Memoirs of an Adopted Daughter (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975)—hereafter to be cited parenthetically—and especially Journey of the Adopted Self: A Quest for Wholeness (New York: Basic, 1994). Rebuttals to their positions occur in, among others, Bartholet, Margaret Homans, “Adoption Narratives, Trauma, and Origins” Narrative 14.1 (January 2006), 4–26—hereafter to be cited parenthetically—and Marianne Novy, Reading Adoption: Family and Difference in Fiction and Drama (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005); and to a lesser degree in Satz and Sally Haslanger, “You Mixed? Racial Identity without Racial Biology,” in Adoption Matters: Philosophical and Feminist Essays, ed. Sally Haslanger and Charlotte Witt (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 265-89.

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6 Timothy Dow Adams, Light Writing, Life Writing: Photography in Autobiography, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000): 33. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 7 Paul John Eakin, How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 34. 8 One way to think about this expanded, family body is to envision the self-hood of conjoined twins. They are selves, by all definitions, yet they share bodies—as do unconjoined identical twins, whose bodies not only look alike, but share the same DNA (the same “self” at the biological foundation). At the purely corporeal level, twin bodies extend the self beyond the edges of a single individual’s life and death. Family resemblance is simply one step farther away from absolute likeness. 9 Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 7. Hirsch refines Susan Sontag’s assertion in On Photography that the family photograph is “a portrait chronicle of itself—a portable kit of images that bears witness to its connectedness....As that claustrophobic unit, the nuclear family, was being carved out of a much larger family aggregate, photography came along to memorialize, to restate symbolically, the imperiled continuity and vanishing extendedness of family life” (New York: Doubleday, 1977): 8-9. 10 Hirsch, 9. 11 According to Charlotte Witt, “[a]dopted children puzzle over who they look like in a way that non-adopted children normally do not ... they appear to ... connect personal identity to genetic inheritance”: in other words, adopted children seek their family in resemblances, often (in adoption life writing by adoptees) by examining the family body as it’s preserved in photographs. Witt’s essay is “Family Resemblances: Adoption, Personal Identity, and Genetic Essentialism,” in Adoption Matters: Philosophical and Feminist Essays, ed. Sally Haslanger and Charlotte Witt (Ithaka: Cornell University Press, 2005): 9. For passages where adoptees search for connection through resemblance, see for example Florence Fisher, The Search for Anna Fisher (New York: Arthur Fields, 1973), 35-37, hereafter to be cited parenthetically; Betty Jean Lifton, Twice Born: Memoirs of an Adopted Daughter (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975), 95; and Debra Levy Holtz, Of Unknown Origin: A Memoir (San Francisco: Council Oak, 2001), passim. 12 There is an extensive tradition of work on the relationship between the pictured and that which it pictures, the real and the photograph, but see in particular Sontag and Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981). Sarah Churchwell’s masterful handling of the (absence of) photographs of Marilyn Monroe is particularly interesting in this long conversation since it vividly shows how photographs act like/become bodies: to look at a photograph of Monroe is to look at Monroe herself. In a footnote, Churchwell hedges the substitution of picture for body, but her essay actually explores that very process. See Sarah Churchwell, “‘The Naked Truth’: Pathography and the Case (No. 81128) of Marilyn Monroe,” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 14.2 (1999): 162, nn.1.

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Jackie Kay, Untitled preface, The Adoption Papers: “The Adoption Papers.” (Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK: Bloodaxe, 1991), ll. 21-22. 14 Kay, l. 23. 15 Katharine Cockin, “Rethinking Transracial Adoption: Reading Jackie Kay’s The Adoption Papers (1991).” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies (2004): 283. 16 Jackie Kay, Untitled afterword, The Adoption Papers: “The Adoption Papers.” (Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK: Bloodaxe, 1991): ll. 21–23, emphasis added. 17 In general, publishers, editors, book designers, marketing teams, and readers, as part of Western culture and as sensitive readers of the kind of text they’re handling, participate in (buy into, expect) the biologic bias in the narrative. Thus the presentation of the text reiterates and emblematizes its treatment of adoption. 18 Jill Deans, “The Birth of Contemporary Adoption Autobiography: Florence Fisher and Betty Jean Lifton,” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 18.2 (2003): 244. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 19 The reversing of tone and of the physical photograph highlights what Deans has pointed out is a central metaphor and visual obsession in many adoption autobiographies: the mirror. 20 Adoption reformers in the 1970s, like Fisher and Lifton, were the object of personal threats because they searched for their biological parents and publicly supported (and in Fisher’s case, agitated for) open records legislation. Though intimidation largely ended with the era of open adoption, see Marley Griner (“The Daily Bastardette,” Blog, home and passim, http://bastardette.blogspot.com) for contemporary examples of this response to calls for open records. For a description of the resentment of and obfuscation practiced against searching adoptees in the early period of reform, see Lifton, Twice (108 and passim, particularly chapters “Into the Maze” and “The Heart of the Maze”) and Fisher (section entitled “The Search,” particularly chaps. 4-7). 21 In her introduction to Imagining Adoption: Essays on Literature and Culture, Marianne Novy notes the disappearing birth parent as a cultural/intellectual trope and the result of adoption politics—the lack of attention to birth parents in her volume “is symptomatic of a problem in the field [of adoption studies]—birth parents are invisible when adoption works as it was long expected to work.” See Novy, “Introduction.” Imagining Adoption: Essays on Literature and Culture. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 8. 22 As it does with Fisher’s and Lifton’s texts, which also use family snapshots on their jackets, this suggests that book designers worked with the authors to produce covers for their texts. Debra Levy Holtz, Of Unknown Origin: A Memoir (San Francisco: Council Oak, 2001): inside fold, back dust jacket. It reads, fully: “Jacket design: Matt Seng / Cover photo: ©2001 Les Miller / Hulton Getty; author collection / Author photo by Risë Justman Cohen.” Holtz will hereafter be cited parenthetically. 23 One of the more curious effects of putting these pictures on the dust jacket is the continuation of the design inside the front cover, into which the jacket is folded. On my copy, the crease for the inside flap occurs at the edge of the adult woman’s eyebrow, which means the picture intrudes into the text, an effect emphasized by

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the continuation onto the flap of the background color and the horizontal black line underlining the book’s title, and by its using the white text and font of the author’s name for a teaser above that line on the flap. If we fold out the whole dust jacket, another interesting compositional detail supports our reading of the rest of the cover: the picture of the woman is literally surrounded by, hemmed in by, the text her daughter or her daughter’s book designer has written. Far from sliding away, she can go nowhere; even the creasing suggests control of the book over the image of the mother (she’s caught between its edges). But this is overdetermined by the text, and deconstructs nicely, since the obtruding edge—where she enters the text—also tells us about her dominance in Holtz’s story. At the very beginning, before we see or read anything, we see this woman, this “mother-not-mother.” Her image’s size, especially relative to the size of the child and the other (male) adult figure on the cover, supports this reading of her power over Holtz’s words and the silences, regardless of who the photograph “really” depicts. 24 Holtz has a rather ambivalent attitude towards her adoptive mother, whom she depicts as shallow, money- and status-obsessed, and intermittent (Holtz was sent to the Midwest after her first adoptive father’s murder, to live with her grandparents for a few days that turned into two years during which her mother in Chicago remarried, divorced, and got engaged, again without telling Holtz). Her contention—on virtually the last page of her memoir—that she was lucky in her adoptive parents, and that her relationship with her adoptive mother has mended seems too sudden and insincere, given the weight of the portrait she’s drawn of that relationship over the preceding 287 pages, and the fact that one of her fathers was murdered when Holtz was a child, that she didn’t know the second at all, and that the third entered her life when she was an adolescent. 25 In Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (trans. Richard Howard, New York: Hill & Wang, 1981), Roland Barthes writes that “[p]hotography never lies; or rather, it can lie as to the meaning of a thing ... never as to its existence....Every photograph is [thus] a certificate of presence” (87). 26 Nancy K. Gish, “Adoption, Identity, and Voice: Jackie Kay’s Inventions of Self,” in Imagining Adoption: Essays on Literature and Culture, ed. Marianne Novy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 173–4. 27 Carp, 1.

PART IV: LIFE WRITING OF DISABILITY/DISEASE/DISFIGUREMENT

REFIGURING THE MASCULINE BODY IN THE AUTOBIOGRAPHIES OF DISABLED AMERICAN MEN ELIZABETH GRUBGELD

At the beginning of his autobiography, The Body Silent (1986), disabled anthropologist Robert Murphy alerts his readers that his will be a different sort of autobiography, given his new recognition that the “organs, and the body itself, are among the foundations upon which we build our sense of who and what we are, and they are the instruments through which we grapple with and create reality.”1 Of the many autobiographies written by men who became disabled during their adult lives, nearly all address as a foremost concern the radical change in the body's ability to perform certain kinds of actions associated with the creation and sustenance of masculine identities. As these autobiographers grapple with what it will take to remain, in the words of writer Andre Dubus, “a man among men,” the question of “who we are and what we are” takes on a somatic foundation that becomes the focus of the autobiographical act. My inquiry proceeds from a necessarily limited selection of autobiographies by men who underwent significant mobility impairments in mid-life or young adulthood.2 Robert Murphy and novelist Reynolds Price developed paralysis slowly as a result of spinal tumors of likely congenital origin that became symptomatic when both men were in their early fifties; fiction writer and former Marine captain Andre Dubus and Vietnam veteran Lewis Puller Jr. suffered sudden trauma resulting in radical amputation. Poet Carl Launius and journalist John Hockenberry became paralyzed as the result of sports and car accidents when still young men. Because all are accomplished writers who at some point earned a living by writing or teaching, each brings a high level of craft to the task of recreating textually the relation between body and identity.3 Although their stories differ in circumstance and as narratives, each man confronts the common condition of physical dependency, a state traditionally associated with the feminine and running counter to ideals of strength, mobility, and agency. And all must find new ways of negotiating conventional American

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concepts of a masculine self. As narrative structure, metaphor, and the autobiographical voice interact with the specific conditions of a disability and its history, the life story may reveal fissures between narrative expectations and the body’s demands, prompting us to observe not only, in the words of Arthur Frank, “what stories say about the body” but how “stories [are] told through the body,”4 Robert Murphy’s 1986 The Body Silent is a foundational text of disability literature. One of the first autobiographies to present disability as a socially constructed category rather than an individual experience of physical impairment, Murphy’s record of the fourteen years following the manifestation of a spinal tumor draws from his anthropological training to set his own experiences within the context of broad social attitudes toward the body. His familiarity with bodily taboos, concepts of mortality, and gender roles as cultural products allows him a remarkable degree of selfawareness as to how his encroaching quadriplegia affects his masculine identity. Murphy defines manhood as the capacity to work, exercise command of the physical body, and take a leadership role in the nuclear family. Although frustrated by the loss of sabbatical leave time to various surgeries and rehabilitation procedures and no longer able to conduct the Amazonian expeditions on which he had built his career, Murphy focuses instead on writing a textbook in his specialization, a task that requires little field or library work. An updated preface in the second edition (1990) of The Body Silent also speaks of his and his wife Yolanda’s new research into the lives of quadriplegic persons, an arena where his paralysis proves an asset instead of a hindrance. Other roles prove more difficult because Murphy understands them to be more body-dependent. “For the male,” he notes, “the weakening and atrophy of the body threatens all the cultural values of masculinity: strength, activeness, speed, virility, stamina, and fortitude….And so it is that the loss of one’s legs, or any other vital function, is an infringement also on the integrity of the mind, an assault on character, a vitiation of power” (94-95, 98). “Of medium height, rather scrawny, and militantly nonathletic” (101) even in youth, Murphy associates with a masculine identity not the body’s prowess but its autonomy. Giving over the body—particularly its meals, bathing, and toileting—to another’s scheduling and handling produces a somatic disassociation, or sense of disembodiment: “My thoughts and sense of being alive,” he observes, “have been driven back into my brain, where I now reside. More than ever before, it is the base from which I reach out and grasp the world” (102). Although his body dictates his interaction with the world and serves as impetus for his new research and the writing of his

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autobiography, Murphy nevertheless describes his body as little more than “a faulty life-support system, the only function of which is to sustain my head” (101). In 1974 Robert and Yolanda Murphy co-authored a pioneering study of gender roles among the Mundurucu people of the Amazon; The Body Silent offers a similarly experiential and analytical approach to the changes in Murphy’s role as husband and father wrought by his ever-increasing physical dependence on Yolanda and their son. Immobile and frequently isolated from their casual conversation, he has also “become transformed from active father and husband, the source of help and support for Yolanda and the children, to passive recipient of services” (212), observing that his son’s disinclination to ask his father’s advice (the one service he could provide) is part of the younger man’s need to protect his own masculine autonomy. He remarks that “disability, dependence, and unequal reciprocity have eroded my leadership role in the family, and the life of the household now centers less on my strengths as a person and more on the weaknesses of my body” (215). Characterizing marriage in general as a struggle between the need for autonomy and the desire for a fused identity, Murphy argues that his physical dependency has eroded his sense of a separate self; however, as a student of human behavior and social interaction he understands that Yolanda, too, has “her own forms of dependency” and despite their long intimacy, retains a distinct and private selfhood. Seeing his body’s experience within the context of anthropological theory thus allows him to understand his dependency as a fundamental human trait and to speak from what Arthur Frank calls a “communicative” and “dyadic” body, one that ”lives in recognition of inter-dependency with others, and desires to tell its story” (48-9). “The communicative body communes its story with others; the story invites others to recognize themselves in it” (Frank, 50). As a summation of Murphy’s auto-anthropological achievement, The Body Silent’s title proves an ironic misnomer. Novelist Reynolds Price also began to manifest symptoms of a spinal tumor in his mid-fifties. Unlike Robert Murphy or any of the other autobiographers here considered, Price’s masculine identity seems untroubled by paralysis, and his alternative reading of the gendered body offers new possibilities for representing disabled masculinity.5 Having lived alone throughout his adult life and steadfastly taciturn about his love affairs except to acknowledge a significantly lowered libido after the onset of paralysis that allowed him to direct his energies more fully toward writing, he also disclaims interest in sports or in demonstrating manhood through physical courage or strength. As he acknowledges, his privileged

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circumstances as an acclaimed novelist and holder of an endowed chair at Duke University allow his professional prestige and earning power as author and professor to remain unaffected by his impairment. If he is at all disturbed by the necessary ministrations of the paid student assistants who live at the other end of his large house, he makes no mention of it in A Whole New Life; in a 2001 radio essay he refers to his employment of such young men as “a training school for husbands,” ironically retaining his own position as teacher rather than invoking the body’s dependency.6 He describes the difficulties of establishing a dependable bowel program and catheterization process in frank, practical, and even humorous terms, and although admitting to feeling at times like “a butchered steer,”7 insists that his professional, relational, and ontological selfhood has not been compromised. Such a stance may result in part from what Thomas Couser finds to be Price’s excessive emphasis on the “ascendancy of the mind over the body” (194). Couser refers particularly to Price’s successful deployment of mental imaging and hypnosis to control pain, but the emphasis emerges even more broadly, as, for example, Price notes the differences between his present handwriting and that of a decade before: “Cranky as it is, it's taller, more legible, with more air and stride” (Whole, 193). His metaphor grants ambulation and height to his handwriting, regardless of his seated position, and the body in its stillness enables new creative and emotional energy. As Price writes his new body, it metaphorically stands to receive the kindness of his friends and relatives; the retention of function in the arms and hands that produce this “taller” writing testifies to the skill and dedication of those who invented the ultrasonic laser scalpel that enabled his medical team to remove his remaining tumor before the paralysis crawled above his waist. While Murphy struggles with having become a “passive recipient of services” (212), Price affirms his acceptance of a body that is more passive than active, a site where other human beings and God, specifically represented as the Jesus of the Gospels, perform acts of healing and love. Other questions of gender arise in Price’s personification of the tumor itself. In the prose text and accompanying poems of A Whole New Life, Price imagines the tumor as an eel entwined around his spine and as a “secret twin” that “came in the first two cells of me,” a “first wombmate” (36, 200, 201). It is both an invasive creature and an integral part of his genesis. “I often felt,” he recalls, “that the tumor was as much a part of me as my liver or lungs and could call for its needs of space and food. I only hoped that it wouldn’t need all of me” (36). Kristin Lindgren has argued that Price’s metaphor of “harbor[ing] another living being” within a single

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body invokes the state of pregnancy, and concludes that he may thus comprehend “illness as a feminine modality of experience.”8 However, as Price himself notes, the sensation of another being inhabiting one’s own body is common in the literature of cancer, wherein the ill frequently characterize the tumor as an invasive and alien being that must be fought and rooted out. The expression does not appear to be specific to women, and the sense of it as a hostile force would not generally be part of a pregnant woman’s perception, unless the child were unwanted. Both physiologically and psychologically the pregnant state may be closer to the paradoxical experience of being two inextricable and in many ways indistinguishable persons at once. Price’s metaphor of his bodily state is perhaps less femininized than one which defies the binaries of gender, containing both a scene of combat between a man and the alien and masculine-identified eel that winds around his spine, and at the same time, a gestatory state in which the body is one with its guest. Short story writer and essayist Andre Dubus was also in middle age at the time of his impairment. His autobiographical writings echo some of Robert Murphy’s difficulties adjusting to physical dependency, as well as Price’s emphasis on a religious interpretation of the body. He, too, develops metaphors to explain his experience. But because he comes to his work with a different set of notions regarding the nature of masculinity and because his injury is significantly unlike theirs, his exploration of the problem takes a different turn. As a former Marine Corps captain who grew up in French-Catholic Louisiana, Dubus held conservative notions of masculinity as leadership, sexual prowess, fatherhood, autonomy, and physical strength.9 Although he learned to adapt his old ideas and interests to the condition of a new body, that condition never became normalized as it might to a man with congenital differences or a gradually accruing paralysis. Late at night during the summer of 1986, he observed a car stranded in the middle of a freeway near Boston and its driver standing by the door with a bleeding forehead, crying; he stopped to help, and seeing another car speeding toward them, threw her out of its way and was himself hit. One of his legs required amputation, while the other became rigid and unable to bear weight. After his accident, he began to explore in short nonfictional pieces the immense gulf between his newly injured body and his need to be “a man among men” and “among women.”10 Phenomenologically, amputation also differs significantly from paralysis or congenital conditions in that it generally results from one event or the rapid progress of a disease, and involves the absence, rather than disfunction, of a body part: empty space replaces the flesh one has known

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since the emergence of infant self-consciousness. Accordingly, Dubus’ autobiographical essays most often speak of that which is now absent: “Digging,” recalls the joyous emergence of physical strength and male camaraderie when as a small, underweight sixteen-year old boy, he endured a summer’s hard labor on a construction crew; “A Country Road Song” balances his gratitude for his body’s remaining strength against his acute regret for the pleasures of more than thirty years as a runner. Other pieces acknowledge the difficulty of making love when one’s own body feels alien and repulsive, the awkwardness of negotiating a cocktail party from a seated position, and the indignities afforded by inadequate access on trains and airplanes. The centerpiece of his autobiographical writing, “Broken Vessels” recounts among many other struggles the cost to his already weakened spirit exacted by the weeks following his return from the hospital in which he could neither predict nor control the onset of diarrhea. Even what should be a simple task of making sandwiches for his daughters becomes what he calls “a spiritual trial” despite his efforts “to move slowly, with concentration, with precision, with peace”: “The memory of having legs that held me upright at this counter,” he writes, “and the image of simply turning from the counter and stepping to the drawer are the demons I must keep at bay, or I will rage and grieve because of space, and time, and this wheeled thing that has replaced my legs” (Meditations, 89). How then, can a sense of body integrity be remade? As Dubus remarks in a interview, “If you’ve been an active man for fifty years, trying to be Gary Cooper, Cary Grant and Sean Connery all at the same time, and a father too, and then you’re in a wheelchair, you certainly do have to find a new you” (Broken Vessels, 194). For Dubus, the answers lie in a specifically Catholic interpretation of physical suffering as a spiritual labor and the body as a site of sacramental incarnation. To this theological understanding, he joins the ethic of communitarianism and sacrifice he found within the Marine Corps, where he served between 1955 and 1964, retiring at the rank of Captain. Such beliefs appear throughout his nonfiction, but nowhere more explicitly than in “Broken Vessels.” “Our bodies,” he writes, “exist to perform the condition of our sprits,” and his spirit, he says, was honed at Quantico and in the years following (Broken Vessels, 194). He considers “those times in my life when I had instinctively moved toward action, to stop fights, to help the injured or stricken, and I saw myself on the highway that night, and I said: Yes. It makes sense. It started as a Marine, when I was eighteen; and it ended on a highway when I was almost fifty years old” (Broken Vessels, 172). In his experience, the Marine Corps developed a bond among men akin to agapic

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love, as well as the moral impulse to take action in service to others. Although, as he recounts in the essay, the new experience of being unable to rise to defend others results in a disturbing sense of emasculation, he takes immense pride in knowing that the actions that cost him his legs were the outcome of his Marine training and very likely responsible for saving the life of the woman he stopped to help. Dubus’ memoirs relate in unabashedly explicit terms the anguish of sudden and drastic body impairment, as well as his interpretation of what he calls his “crippling” as a spiritual labor commensurate with his Catholicism and military values. In contrast, Lewis Puller Jr., did not come easily to self-revelation as a writer. As the only son of the most decorated Marine in history, the legendary General “Chesty” Puller, he grew up within “the fortress,” saturated in a military culture of hypermasculine performance, secrecy, and emotional reticence.11 Shortly before his departure for Vietnam, he married a military daughter whom he portrays with admiration as a stoic, self-sacrificing, and above all—tight-lipped— product of that world. Like Dubus, Puller was an amputee whose injuries came about as he attempted to lead his soldiers in accordance with values of manhood learned from his father and reinforced through Marine training. But whereas Dubus’ interpretation of military ethos provided an ethical and spiritual framework for his self-reconstruction, Fortunate Son (1991) portrays a man trapped by its ideological and emotional structure. At the age of twenty-three, Lew Puller left most of his body in Vietnam: a booby-trapped howitzer round destroyed both his legs below the pelvis, his right buttock, two-thirds of his stomach, and six fingers. Shrapnel permeated what was left of him. Against all odds, he survived, fathered two children, earned a law degree, ran unsuccessfully for congress, joined the legal staff of the Pentagon, and, at the point at which his autobiography concludes, seemed to have successfully overcome depression, alcoholism, and addictions to painkillers. However, two years after Fortunate Son received the Pulitzer Prize and after he had traveled to Vietnam to initiate the work of his foundation, The Vietnam Children’s Fund, he began to drink again and his marriage faltered; in May, 1994, he shot himself to death at his home in Virginia. The shadow of Puller’s last months and his terrible death colors any reading of his autobiography, but within the text itself lies a fundamental tension between the upward movement toward a narrative of quest and rebirth, and the gravitational pull of the language of the body, which threatens to return the quest to the agony of chaos. The arc of the quest narrative peaks in the early 1980s when Puller acknowledged his depression and the severity of his alcoholism; having committed himself to

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recovery, he also became a moving force behind the drive for a Vietnam Veteran’s memorial. His story reads as an exodus from hell, but the circumstances of hell are not restricted to Vietnam, and the exodus is ongoing and incomplete at the story’s last lines. Counterpoint to the progressive narrative of reconstruction is his sense of failure as the son of his father—and consequently his failure as a man—because his body prohibits the kinds of achievement on which he believes his manhood could be earned and because his injuries diminish the manhood of his father, who was in many ways broken by grief. The words “pride” and “shame,” as well as their equivalents reappear time and again in the context of maintaining or losing self-control and the capability for heroic action. As one who had absorbed the legend of “battlefield glory,” his injuries lead him toward a collapse of identity: “a virile young platoon leader” came back “a shattered war casualty who had as yet no frame of reference for a life without legs.”12 “I felt guilty for years,” he writes, “that I had abandoned [my men] before our work was finished…I came to feel that I had failed to prove myself worthy of my father’s name” (158). Although Puller does not himself make the connection, the lesson his father taught him in his boyhood—that a man never cries in front of other men—underlies his humiliation when in the process of withdrawing from a psychological and physical dependence on morphine, he cannot discipline his feelings and screams and begs for the drug that will numb him: “it was a period during which I lost all self-respect for not having the strength to carry myself with dignity and I loathed my country and the Marine Corps for having brought me to such depths” (166). An ethic of self-sacrifice and self-restraint taught and practiced by his father allows Puller no leeway. Like Dubus, he recreates in detail, as if in slow motion, the circumstances of his wounding. But rather than confirm his faithfulness to the Marine code, the details tell the story of a panicked young lieutenant who backed away from approaching Viet Cong without sufficient attention to the path he was taking and, still conscious when he realized he had been wounded, thought only of going home. And most difficult of all, Puller finds himself to blame for his father’s inability to control the signs of emotional distress. Renowned for his extraordinary physical and mental endurance, General Puller is “unable to maintain his stoic demeanor” when faced with “the wreckage of his only son”: “He moved to my side and grasped my shoulder as if that simple act of communion would stay the convulsions that now racked his stooped frame, and I in my helpless state was unable to reach out or otherwise console him” (162). He holds himself responsible for his father’s unthinkable and horrifying tears, as well as the pathos and ignominy of the

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once so formidable soldier’s mental and physical decline following a series of strokes, brought on, in part, by the stress of his son’s condition. Although Lew Puller became critical of the Vietnam War, the government that sent men to that war, and the Marine Corps’ treatment of its own men, he could never repudiate the values by which he assessed his body and consequently judged himself so relentlessly. Carl Launius was born only a year later than Lew Puller, but he and John Hockenberry (born a decade later in 1956) occupy a different universe. Neither writer speaks to a military ethos or a religious interpretation of the body. Nor must they adjust to a changed body after a half century spent upright and ambulatory. Launius and Hockenberry sustained spinal cord injuries as a result of activities that were not inherently dangerous; their injuries were sudden and complete, and perhaps most important, both were young men at the time. Yet they wrestle with the same essential question as do Murphy, Dubus, and Puller, a question echoed throughout the testimony of men with significant mobility impairments: how does a man in a newly dependent body reclaim the autonomy and agency that in American culture are the arks of a masculine self? The urgent need to demonstrate their autonomy thrusts both Launius and Hockenberry into a path of significant accomplishments. In the case of Carl Launius, this meant travel, the completion of a doctoral degree, and— with hired personal care attendants—independent living; for Hockenberry, an exceptionally varied and adventurous life as an investigative journalist for major radio and television networks. Both men represent their paralysis as such a set constituent of theirs lives that to wish it away would be to repudiate the people they came to be. Considering what might have been had he not decided to hitchhike along a highway on February 29, 1976, Hockenberry muses, “I would have missed the moment of my accident. The thought introduces a harrowing twinge, as though it was a close all, a cliffhanger rather than a fact. I might have missed what my life has become.”13 At that very moment, he writes in an earlier chapter, “my life was bisected between its end points. It contains two beginnings, and when death finally comes it will have two pairs of ends” (28). Much as Lew Puller believes that he has been spared two deaths—one in Vietnam and one from alcoholism—Launius and Hockenberry perceive themselves as having experienced double lives, the second having been initiated and marked by a traumatic injury to the spine. Each starts the chronology of his narrative at the point of his second beginning.14 As a quadriplegic with limited arm and hand function, Carl Launius could not have gone the route of Hockenberry, whose powerful arms and

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chest muscles allow him to propel himself into the most unlikely spots on the globe. Yet Launius’ autobiography reads as quest for autonomy. As a teenager, he damaged the vertebrae at the base of his neck during a high school football game, where what he describes as his unfocused anger and adolescent sexual frustration led him to play recklessly and selfdestructively. Launius offers little direct commentary concerning an embodied masculine identity, and his search for love, independence, and a satisfying career might be that of any educated young middle-class American, male or female. In many ways, It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time is a tale of triumph: by the end of the story, he has published a book of poetry and the evidence of his second book is in our hands. He has also completed a Ph.D. and found a permanent teaching position in California, although the development of new physical problems forced him to resign the position and live through the generosity of a wealthy relative. The web blog he maintained until his death in 2003 speaks of his ongoing financial difficulties but also suggests that his role as surrogate father to the young son of his female live-in attendant accorded him great satisfaction and a modified version of the nuclear family he desired. This comic and often bitingly satiric story of education and adventure is, however, punctuated by the continual interruptions of his body, making his quest narrative, in Arthur Frank’s terms, a tale told through rather than about the body. Repeatedly, his efforts are altered or stymied by inadequate attendants, architectural barriers, or a wide variety of physical problems as his quadriplegia and the effects of excessive drinking lead to infections, organ failures, diminished function, and exhaustion. Much as the body’s shame exerts a gravitational force over the progressive design of Fortunate Son, so the interruptions of the body cause Launius’ tale to stammer, caught in the gap between desire and fulfillment. John Hockenberry’s witty and exuberant Moving Violations (1995) also contradicts its own arc of narrative development, but Hockenberry deliberately transforms the contradiction into the most forceful thematic element of his book. On one hand, the articulate, strong, and exceedingly brash young man recounted in this autobiography reflects that after the car accident that leaves him paraplegic at nineteen, “my entire existence had become a mission of never saying no to the physical challenges the world presented to a wheelchair. It was this that had gotten me through a fiery accident and would provide me with a mission upon which I could hang the rest of my life. I…would never allow the world to push me. I would pull it instead” (12). Much of his life as he tells it was bent to that design. Others may ascribe various meanings to his body – often insulting, sometimes humorous, and occasionally appalling – but he presents his

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own body in partnership with his wheelchair as an intriguing mechanical and logistical problem to be solved, a source of pleasure to his lovers, an extension of his creative imagination capable of making designs of great beauty, and even as a force of such rhythm and speed that the nondisabled, if for only a moment, envy its graceful motion. On the other hand, this freedom comes at a cost. The restless urge to prove his autonomy renders him unable to sustain the teamwork of a marriage and drives him into scenes of cataclysmic suffering: Iraqi Kurdistan, the occupied territories of Palestine, famine-stricken Somalia. In the mountains of Northern Iraq, he is forced to acknowledge that “if the Kurds had truly left me alone and gone about the business of only saving themselves, I would just have died there, holding my tape recorder. They did not…There on the mountains between Turkey and Iraq I had lost my way. It was up to Mehment, the donkey, and me to find my way back” (12). In the book’s final paragraphs, he discovers what he has been looking for since the accident many years before—a set of eyes that do not see his wheelchair. These eyes, however, belong to a dying Somalian child who asks and expects nothing except death. He concludes without comment, leaving the reader to interpret the significance of the scene. Having moved beyond fear, desire, and the struggle for life, this child may parallel Hockenberry’s Uncle Charlie as a force in his emerging consciousness. His mentally impaired uncle, who has haunted the pages of Moving Violations since its dedicatory page and whom its author visits at last in the penultimate chapter, has lived his life in an institution, abandoned and never mentioned in the family. His visit convinces Hockenberry that while the surrounding world may have deigned Charles Peter Slagle a figure of shame, within the narrow world of the institution, Uncle Charlie has achieved the freedom of “nothing more to prove.” Hockenberry, on the other hand, has been “a slave to every one of those tests. Every line drawn for me to cross, I would cross. Every lowered expectation I would raise. In a life of breaking chains and surmounting obstacles I had only bound myself more tightly to the idea of fighting for my freedom” (350). Fighting for freedom, he observes, is “America’s national ritual,” and “just as America can’t stop insisting that it’s still number one, I sit in my wheelchair and dare someone to say the wrong things” (350, 351). This practice of fighting, he asserts, locks nations and individuals in “a brutal free-for-all” in which there are clear winners and losers, with the winners staring out at the damaged lives of the losers of history: I may miss walking, running or tree climbing from time to time, but I do not miss being a spectator. The forces that tore the vertebrae from my ribs

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and the spinal nerves from the protected flesh in my back also parted a curtain for me. Looking at Uncle Charlie sitting there in his chair I can see for the first time who he is, separate from the forces that kept him from me, from his family, and locked up here in this place. The impulses that put my uncle Charlie away know not race or religion, and they are alive for me now as though history has awakened from its own dream. Uncle Charlie is the last plank of a bridge that as a white man in America I believe I could only have crossed in a wheelchair. It has been a long time coming. (352)

A life shaped as a rebuttal against those who would keep him dependent brings him to a swarm of terrified refugees in mud and snow of Northern Iraq, down the filthy steps of a subway station in New York, across sand-choked roads in the Gaza strip, and finally to the ruins of Mogadishu. Having come so far, Hockenberry discovers again and again that it is not enough to carry one’s own weight: that the ethical life requires carrying the weight of others as well. This obligation is by no means the sole responsibility of the male, but it is a condition of manhood. The reconstruction of identity after such drastic changes in the body’s shape and functionality as these six men experienced is unquestionably tied to their ability to work, form relationships, and assume roles of responsibility and leadership. This in turn depends upon accessible transportation and buildings, an end to discrimination in employment and educational opportunity, adequate equipment and competent attendants when necessary, and a change in the attitudes and practices of the nondisabled world. Yet these autobiographies also demonstrate that sustaining sense of a masculine self turns out to be much less a matter of sexual function, earning power, athletic prowess, or even standing upright than of reconciling embodiment with ethos, and in so doing, expressing the integrity of a self rendered whole.

Works Cited Couser, G. Thomas. Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability, and Life Writing. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1997. Dubus, Andre, Broken Vessels. Boston: David R. Godine, 1991. —. Meditations from a Moveable Chair. New York: Vintage, 1998. Frank, Arthur. The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995. Henderson, Charles. “Personal Reflections: Life, Authorship, and Inspiration.” http://www.charleshenderson.net/insights.htm

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Hockenberry, John. Moving Violations: War Zones, Wheelchairs, and Declarations of Independence. New York: Hyperion, 1995. Launius, Carl Judson. It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time. Fayetteville: U of Arkansas P, 1995. Lindgren, Kristin. “Bodies in Trouble: Identity, Embodiment, and Disability.” In Gendering Disability, ed. Bonnie G. Smith and Beth Hutchison. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2004, 145-65. Miner, Madonne. “‘Making up the Stories as We Go Along': Men, Women, and Narratives of Disability.” In The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability, ed. David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1997, 283-95. Murphy, Robert. The Body Silent. New York: W.W. Norton, 1990, 1987. Price, Reynolds. A Whole New Life. New York: Athenaeum, 1994, 1982. —. “School for Husbands.” All Things Considered. Feb. 16, 2001. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1118711 Puller, Lewis B. Jr. Fortunate Son: The Autobiography of Lewis B. Puller, Jr. New York: Grove, 1991. Talbot, John E. “Soldiers, Psychiatrists, and Combat Trauma.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 27.3 (1997): 437-54. Wachtel, Eleanor. Writers & Company. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1994. Wertsch, Mary. Military Brats: Legacies of Childhood Inside the Fortress. New York: Harmony, 1991.

Notes 1

Robert Murphy, The Body Silent (New York: W.W. Norton, 1990), 12. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 2 For much of the American public, the figure of a paraplegic man constitutes the foremost—if not the sole—image of physical disability. G. Thomas Couser notes that “Paralysis bids to become the paradigmatic form of physical disability…because of its obviousness, extremity, and apparent intractability.” He also suggests “gender-related reasons”: “The prominence of male accounts of paralysis…may have much to do with the associations of paralysis with emasculation, even feminization. The story of the disabled male is privileged because of the semiotic clash between the modifier and the noun, whereas the story of the disabled woman is ignored because of its apparent redundancy.” G. Thomas Couser, Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability, and Life Writing (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1997), 184, 185. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 3 Their writings represent only a small sampling of the books, personal essays, and oral histories of mobility-impaired men that have appeared since the Vietnam War and the advent of the internet as a public space. As well-educated middle-class

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white men, primarily academicians and professional writers, each of these six autobiographers belongs to a privileged class. A longer study might situate their work within a wider range of lifewriting, particularly that of disabled soldiers and athletes, whose professional concern with the physical strength and engagement with the established forms of the war story and the sports autobiography give their writings particular relevance to the primary question of how men rewrite their masculinity from a different body. Additional testimony from the personal essays of those living with spinal cord injuries such as that collected in Gary Karp and Stanley Klein’s From There to Here: Stories of Adjustment to Spinal Cord Injury (Horsham, Pa.: No Limits Communications, 2004) could illuminate the ways culturally familiar forms of narrative shape not only literary nonfiction but the oral self-narratives of those less directly influenced by the writings of others. Although the group in this country proportionally most likely to sustain a spinal cord injury is African American men under forty—constituting, according to the National Spinal Cord Injury Statistical Center, about 22.7% of all such injuries—to my knowledge there exist only a handful of essays and no book-length autobiographies beyond hip-hop performer M. F. Grimm’s graphic (comic book) memoir that speak to this experience. Similarly, impoverished and imprisoned disabled men are unrepresented within autobiographical literature. 4 Arthur Frank, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995), 2. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 5 With the exception of Reynolds Price, the writers analyzed here define themselves as heterosexual, and Price’s acknowledgement of his sexual orientation is not included within any of his memoirs but is briefly mentioned in one of his later books on spirituality. I am unaware of a full-length autobiography by a man who underwent paralysis or amputation of the lower body who identifies himself as other than heterosexual, but the webzine Bent Voices is a significant source of shorter personal essays by gay men with a wide variety of disabilities. In contrast to Price, many of these essayists do express doubts concerning their masculine identity and a keen sense of alienation from the body following a radical change in its shape or mobility. 6 Reynolds Price, “School for Husbands.” All Things Considered. Feb. 16, 2001. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1118711. 7 Reynolds Price, A Whole New Life (New York: Athenaeum, 1994), 32. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 8 Kristin Lindgrin, “Bodies in Trouble: Identity, Embodiment, and Disability” in Gendering Disability, ed. Bonnie G. Smith and Beth Hutchinson (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2004), 145-65. 9 See Madonne Miner, “Making up the Stories as We Go Along': Men, Women, and Narratives of Disability” .” in The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability, ed. David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1997), 283-95 for her argument that Dubus reifies traditional masculine values at the expense of self-growth. Miner criticizes his nostalgia for his undamaged legs, his attraction to ambulatory women, and his sense of his wheelchair as a place from which he can maintain control over women. It should

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be noted that in the essay she critiques, he is being pushed and lifted over streets without curb cuts and although first attracted to a passing woman’s legs—which would be more readily visible from his seated position—affirms that “a woman’s face is what I love” (Broken Vessels, 142). Miner also doubts the wisdom of his decisions during the events leading to the accident and suggests that his repetition of the story exposes underlying doubts about his heroic interpretation of his actions. She is correct that he seems preoccupied with judging his actions as efficacious but disregards the fact that each of his essays was first published separately in a periodical and necessarily had to repeat the circumstances of the accident. Additionally, studies of trauma narrative identify repetition as one of its primary structural features. As an example of this work, see John E. Talbot, “Soldiers, Psychiatrists, and Combat Trauma,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 27 (1997): 437-54, as well as the discussion of “chaos narrative” in Frank, 97-114. 10 Andre Dubus, Broken Vessels (Boston: David R. Godine, 1991), 171; Meditations from a Moveable Chair (New York: Vintage, 1998), 132. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 11 Fortunate Son was Puller’s only book, and after he accepted a position as writerin-residence at James Madison University, he found himself with no desire to write again. Charles Henderson, a Marine combat veteran and author of popular fiction about the Vietnam War, recalls receiving unsolicited the first draft of Fortunate Son and urging Puller to be much more direct about private matters and emotions that were difficult for him to acknowledge as a man steeped in military notions of masculine reserve. Charles Henderson, “Personal Reflections: Life, Authorship, and Inspiration http://www.charleshenderson.net/insights.htm 1+). For an extensive study of the relationship between the military’s institutional structures and the dynamics of family life, with particular attention to gender roles, see Mary Wertsch, Military Brats: Legacies of Childhood Inside the Fortress (New York: Harmony, 1991). 12 Lewis B. Puller, Jr. Fortunate Son: The Autobiography of Lewis B. Puller, Jr. (New York: Grove, 1991), 160. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 13 John Hockenberry, Moving Violations: War Zones, Wheelchairs, and Declarations of Independence (New York: Hyperion, 1995), 69. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 14 Reynolds Price also describes his life as having two distinct incarnations and speaks to the necessity of “your eventual decision to abandon the deathwatch by the corpse of your old self” (Whole, 188). Price relates little about his life before the onset of paralysis, mentioning only the pleasure he had once felt in sex and his lifelong lack of interest in athletics or exercise. His autobiography of childhood, Clear Pictures (1989), makes no direct reference to its author’s paraplegia.

THE BROKEN MIRROR OF IDENTITY IN LUCY GREALY’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A FACE STEPHANIE TODD

As a young girl Lucy Grealy was diagnosed with cancer and subsequently underwent an operation that would remove a substantial portion of her jaw, leaving her forever disfigured. Although the disfigurement was initially “worn as a badge of honor,” later teasing and humiliation throughout her teenage years would cause Grealy to resent her own face and ultimately herself. Because people often conflate physical appearance with identity, she was treated differently from classmates and siblings, resulting in her belief that she was outside “normal” society. Long after the teasing had stopped and people began to recognize her as friend, writer, and lover, Grealy’s face still represented a barrier to “normal” life in her own mind. Her face was so much the source of this “otherness” to her that Grealy would spend the rest of her life trying to “fix” it, believing that this would finally reveal the whole, feminine self that she has been searching for throughout her life. By fragmenting her face as “other” Grealy attempted to separate herself from the disabled woman that she believed others saw, but this inability to reconcile her face as part of the woman who was successful and loved damaged Lucy Grealy both psychologically and emotionally. While Grealy attempts a kind of Cartesian duality, claiming through her text that body and consciousness are separate, she is unable to really convince either herself or her readers that this is the case. Her inability to really sever her identity from her disfigurement, her imperfect body, results in a disgust, even hatred, of herself that manifests itself in her drug abuse. By attempting and failing to show that the body is a separate, inferior aspect of one’s self, Grealy reinforces what many feminist and disability scholars have been arguing: we cannot write a story of our bodies that is separate from ourselves. The major ramification of Grealy’s attempt is the certain knowledge that we are our bodies.

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Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face, is, as indicated by the title, an account of her disease and resulting disfigurement. In it Grealy presents herself as a girl and woman who spent most of her life struggling with acceptance, both from others and from herself, and the book ends with a woman who has, Grealy leads us to believe, come to terms with her physical appearance. However, several years after the publication of the autobiography Grealy died of a drug overdose. Her close friend and fellow author, Ann Patchett, reveals in the “Afterword” of Grealy’s text as well as in her own memoir of her friendship with Grealy, Truth and Beauty, a very different version of her friend. She exposes Grealy’s extended battle with drugs as a coping mechanism for her insecurities and suggests that, contrary to the ending of Grealy’s autobiography, she was never able to either accept her disfigurement as part of the identity she desired for herself or entirely see herself apart from the identity it created for her.1 That is, Lucy Grealy’s lifelong search for an unblemished, feminine identity was forever unsuccessful because of her facial disfigurement, and her internalization of the self she saw in the mirror as her true self, resulted in a fragmented understanding of who she was.2 Thus, while Lucy attempted to identify herself as distinctive from her face, Patchett reveals her inability to do so, and the result is two different accounts of the same person. The recent exposure of James Frey’s partially fabricated autobiography A Million Little Pieces has incited continued questioning about the genre and its dependability. What is the “truth?” Is intentional lying worse than accidental misremembering? Autobiographical theory has long inquired into the reliability of a “non-fiction” narrative, and my investigation of both Grealy’s and Patchett’s texts will support what theorists such as Paul de Man have suggested, that autobiography is untrustworthy. However, I do not argue that Grealy was intentionally misleading in her narrative in the way that Frey was, merely that she was attempting to tell a different type of story, one that would allow her to separate herself from her body as a coping mechanism for her disfigurement. Thus, intent becomes crucial in identifying the truthfulness of autobiography. By attempting to open up the genre to include narratives from an individual about bodily, but not necessarily entirely personal, accounts Grealy reinforces de Man’s assertion that “the line between fiction and autobiography is not an either/or polarity but that it is undecidable.”3 Grealy’s sister, Suellen has said in interviews, “…much of the book was careless. It was the first time I had experienced reading about my family and parts of my own life, and I realized how easy it was for Lucy simply to select her vantage point. I learned, too, how easily readers would accept it as the only true vantage

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point.”4 Perhaps the book was not entirely “careless” as Grealy’s sister suggests, but a book from the “vantage point” not of her sister Lucy, but the Lucy that only existed as a by-product of her face. This would skew the perception of all life events, but not necessarily make them “careless” or fictionalized. But Grealy does more than simply blur “the distinction between fiction and autobiography,” she contributes to an entirely new genre of non-fiction, autobiography of the body (de Man, 920). Like Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography, Grealy has a clear goal in mind when writing her narrative; thus, she, like Franklin, omits aspects of her life that are irrelevant to her purpose. Grealy wants to present readers with a new genre of writing that implies that the body, or certain parts of it such as the face, can have a story that is distinct from the person to whom it belongs. Thus, Grealy attempts to provide the reader with the “autobiography of a face” (emphasis mine) not the autobiography of herself. Sadly, because Grealy’s identity at such a young age became so inextricably tied to her face, the reader finds that the story of her face is, in fact, the only story of her life that Grealy can imagine. In other words, while Grealy attempts to present the story of a face as distinct from the story of the person, her negative portrayal of the face as well as Patchett’s account of her trouble life reveal that Grealy was never really able to separate own identity from the negative persona she formed from her disfigured face. Her countless attempts to normalize herself through surgery and her long battle with drug addiction imply a dissatisfaction with both her face and herself. My comparison of Grealy’s autobiography and Patchett’s memoirs clarifies that Grealy’s memories are not lies, but that her reality has been altered by psychological trauma. Grealy’s inability to combine her internal and external identities into one positive self identity clouds her life experiences, resulting in a perception of herself that is vastly different than that of her close friend. Thus, the account of her disease becomes an accurate account of the life she experienced because she is unable to recognize any aspect of her life apart from it. Paul de Man’s “Autobiography as De-facement” raises interesting questions about the reliability of autobiography, exploring the idea of the ‘authorial contract’ of autobiography (922). He asserts that the author, through her “signature,” has a contract with her reader to “depend on actual and potentially verifiable events” when re-telling her life story (920). For Grealy’s text, this produces several questions that can alter the way we think of the genre altogether. Can an individual’s body or part of that body have a story that is separate and unique from the story of the individual? As Lucy Grealy demonstrates, it cannot. Grealy’s hope in the final pages of the book was to show readers that she had accepted her face

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and was no longer allowing the negative stigmas associated with its disfigurement to define her, but Patchett’s revelations about her continued surgeries and drug addiction demonstrates her lack of success in doing so. Her endeavor to fragment her identity, that is to separate herself from her face, was ultimately unsuccessful, but Grealy’s believed division of body and self allows her to write a life story of the face that she believed was different from the story Lucy Grealy may have told of herself, and different from the one Ann Patchett tells of their friendship. Thus, for Grealy, the account was not an untruthful account of her life because she believed it to be an account, not of her life, of her face. Her intent in writing the narrative complicates de Man’s argument concerning the “authorial contract” because she was not, in her mind, writing her own story. De Man also posits: We assume that life produces the autobiography as an act produces its consequences, but can we not suggest, with equal justice, that the autobiographical project may itself produce and determine the life and that whatever the writer does is in fact governed by the technical demands of self-portraiture and thus determined, in all its aspects by the resources of his medium… does the referent determine the figure, or is it the other way around: is the illusion of reference not a correlation of the structure of the figure, that is to say no longer clearly and simply a referent at all but something more akin to a fiction which then…acquires a degree of referential productivity? (920)

Here, de Man’s argument becomes particularly relevant to Grealy’s project. That is, he argues that the very knowledge or action of writing an autobiography will shape the actions of one’s life or, at least, the events one remembers from that life. For Grealy’s text this is absolutely true, not because she was intentionally altering her life, but because she was trying to re-tell only the story of her face. Thus, she includes only the memories that she believes are pertinent to this story. Additionally, the young age at which Grealy wrote her text implies that, while Grealy’s life story was not finished, the story of her face was, suggesting that she was able to accept her face as part of her self, and no longer saw a fragmented self in need of a separate story. Unfortunately for Grealy, she had never truly been able to fragment her self in the way she wanted to believe, leading her life to end less than a decade after the publication of the narrative. Grealy explains that her dissatisfaction with her physical appearance began when she was teased and rejected by the children at school after the surgery to remove her jaw, and long after the cancer was gone and she was healthy again, Grealy continued having surgeries to “fix” her face. As

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Kathryn Pauly Morgan points out in her essay “Women and the Knife: Cosmetic Surgery and the Colonization of Women’s Bodies,” “rather than aspiring to self-determined and woman-centered ideals of health or integrity, women’s attractiveness is defined as attractive-to-men” and this is the reason that so many women, like Grealy, have plastic surgery.5 For Grealy, all life experiences were marred by the belief that she would never be “beautiful.” This knowledge damaged her psychologically inducing, at minimum, depression and feelings of inferiority and insecurity which, in addition to the resulting drug abuse, altered her perception of events, people, and relationships. For Grealy, life did not and could not exist outside of her disfigurement. While others referred to her as quite attractive and Patchett described her as popular and talented, Grealy saw herself as ugly and only briefly touches on her successes in college before returning to the ever present preoccupation with the next surgery to “fix” her face. Morgan also argues that “women are reduced and reduce themselves to ‘potential women’,” that is the women they could be after plastic surgery.6 It is exactly this aspiration that prevents Grealy from ever really accepting her disfigurement or her identity as friend, lover, sister, scholar, or poet as so many others saw her. She is in a perpetual state of anticipation, waiting for her face to be “fixed” and her life to begin. This prevents her from ever really experiencing a life that does not center around her disfigurement. Misunderstanding of her disease seemed to mark the early years of Grealy’s battle with cancer and resulting operations, and this misunderstanding made it difficult for Grealy to accept the resulting disfigurement as part of herself. Instead, it became something foreign to be “fixed” rather than a part of herself to be accepted. Not only was Grealy unable to grasp the life-long damage done by the procedure to remove the cancer and her jaw, she did not even understand what type of disease she had. She recalls that “some years later” she found an event marked by the phrase “before Lucy had cancer” and she looked at her mother “shocked” and asked “I had cancer?”7 She says that, despite the seeming incredulity of this question, “not one person had ever said the word cancer to me, at least not in a way that registered as pertaining to me” (43). The implication is that while the disease was mentioned around her, others either chose or perhaps she herself chose not to directly link the disease to her name, which indicates again a misunderstanding, not just of the disease’s outcomes but of its very identity. The fact that she never heard cancer “in a way that registered as pertaining to [her]” marks her first disengagement with the disease as part of her. In her article “Living in Prognosis: Toward an Elegiac Politics” Sarah Lochlann Jain notes the “eeriness” of having a

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foreign disease living in one’s body: “The prognostic subject and the cancer object live with each other’s ghostly presence- threatening to absent one another, haunted by the possibilities of the future self.”8 The cancer’s and its host’s lives are intertwined, yet each is attempting to destroy the other; one result that would logically follow would be the patient psychologically distancing herself from the body that holds the disease trying to kill her. Even when faced with a direct address about the disease, Grealy separates herself from others with cancer. Her friend’s father lost his wife to cancer, but when he addresses Grealy about the effects of chemotherapy, she makes a joke to change the subjects and admits, “This was the second time an adult had tried to approach me directly and seriously about my situation, and it was the second time I had turned it around” (63). Grealy was unwilling to admit that the effects of the cancer did not end with the operation, nor would they end with the chemotherapy; they would haunt her for the rest of her life and would forever shape her identity. For Grealy though, the scarring, like the disease, was not a permanent part of herself to be reconciled with; like the cancer, it was something she sought to get rid of. Grealy was initially unaware of the destruction cancer would cause to her life, and perhaps enjoyed and even required the ignorance that allowed her to prolong the rejection of her physical appearance. She recalls her initial excitement when her operation was announced: “I remember being thrilled…I had to explain that it wasn’t the operation I was excited about. I knew that if I went home for the weekend I’d get special treatment, and I did” (42). Grealy’s explanation that her “thrill” was not about the operation but about the “special treatment” indicates her childish belief that this treatment was a positive side effect of having the operation. Although she would later detest the negative “special treatment” that she would receive as a result of her deformity, her nine year old self did not fully understand the later ramifications of that operation. Lucy the young girl was still pre-pubescent and not yet concerned with physical appearance; she recalls that although “I had looked at the scar running down the side of my still swollen face, it hadn’t occurred to me to scrutinize how I looked” (62). Grealy merely notes the first “looked” because it was something done out of mere curiosity without any dramatic effects, but the emphasis (hers) on the second “looked” demonstrates the importance her appearance would come to have. The action of ‘looking’ at this stage in her life is insignificant, but the object that is ‘looked’ upon, her face, will become the central focus of her life. At this point, however, she did not understand the implications of the scar on her identity beyond the excitement to be different: “On the day I finally went home, I felt only

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proud of my new, dramatic scar and eager to show it off” (62). This desire to be different, and the resulting eagerness at having physical proof that she was so, would quickly fade as Grealy entered puberty. At nine, however, she had not yet internalized the American standard for beauty and was still unaware that the psychological damage that would later be inflicted by the scar was much worse than the physical pain of the cancer it represented at the time. Despite the pitiful looks from others Grealy had still not realized the drastic physical difference between herself and other girls her age, marking further ignorance of her condition: “Involved as I was with the physical process of losing my hair, I somehow ignored the change in my appearance…I was still keeping myself ignorant of the details of my appearance, of the specific logic of it” (104). This repeated unawareness of her disease and physical distinctiveness seems to be a psychological attempt to prevent her mind from rejecting her body; if there is no acute knowledge that something is ‘wrong’ with her body, then she does not have to address a way to ‘fix’ it. She was able to maintain this ignorance during adolescence, before she was seeking physical, sexual attention from men. While Grealy was still fairly young and “sex appeal [still] belonged to toothpaste commercials,” she could ignore the occasional taunts from children in public places and retreat to her world of “hospitals and animals and fantasy” where she had “no sense of [herself] in relation to the ‘normal’ people” (104-105). She did not understand herself as a sexual being, and, therefore, still saw her body as only needed for functional purposes; thus, she allowed herself feelings of superiority for overcoming disease. However, as Morgan pointed out in the essay referenced above, the rejection of her physical self would become heightened when Grealy began to equate “attractiveness” with “attractiveto-men.” While still a young girl, Grealy continued attempting to create an understanding of her identity, but the disease prevented her from ever connecting the face she saw in the mirror to the “ideal” image of herself that she, like most young girls, wanted to become. Jacques Lacan explains that a baby’s initial encounter with herself is hostile because the mirror image represents a whole self that the baby wants to become but the body, still lacking total control of its movements, is the fragmented self which is envious of its whole, mirror image. The “Ego” is the attempt at resolution of the fragmented self and the whole self as one and the same; thus, creating a singular identity. Grealy, however, experiences another fragmentation of self at an early developmental stage- when her body is marked by cancer. The dissatisfaction with her physical appearance is blamed, not on the disease, but on the deformity of the face, causing a rift

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between the internal and mirror selves. In this case, however, the internalized image of her former self and her imaged future self without the disfigurement is the ideal, so the mirror self becomes the fragmented, partial self. While Grealy is initially fascinated by her deformity and the “special treatment” it affords her at school and at home, she later becomes troubled when she discovers the negative identity associated with the “other.” The fascination with difference becomes a hatred of feeling like an outsider, both in the public life of school and her private family life, furthering the rift she believes exists between herself and her face. Cancer forced Grealy into an intimate knowledge of her body, and this new understanding of the physical/emotional dichotomy allowed her psyche to begin an attempted fragmentation of the two. During treatments, her mother repeatedly plead with Grealy not to cry in front of the doctor and warned of how disappointed she would be if Grealy did. Despite her later recognition that her mother’s attempts to keep her from crying stemmed from her own pain at having to watch her daughter suffer, Grealy felt that crying meant that she “didn’t have what it took [and]…didn’t deserve to be comforted” (87). Her inability to stop herself from crying produced further resentment toward her rebellious body: “my feelings of shame and guilt for failing not to suffer became more unbearable” (90). Because she suffered both intense emotional and physical strain she “became aware that she was experiencing [her] body, and the world, differently from other people” (91). Most other children never consider what is happening inside their bodies from minute to minute, nor do they know the feeling of “being trapped” in their own bodies (91). Grealy is forced into a conscious, cognitive awareness of her body at an unusually early age. Children free from disease do not question the dynamics of prolonged pain; they do not lie in bed attempting to let pain fully envelop them, hoping to get rid of it sooner. They do not try to disassociate from their bodies in an attempt to keep the physical pain from reaching the emotional/intellectual awareness. For Grealy, however, detachment of the psyche from the body was an essential coping mechanism, and one that continued into adulthood allowing her to write the account of her face that she believed was not the account of herself. However, while attempting to reject her face as an “other,” Grealy is actually, and likely unconsciously, internalizing the identity American culture creates for her based on the disfigurement of that face. This begins her realization of two separate selves: the self she wanted to be and the self she believed she was, the one that was formed from other’s identification of her as not normal. As it passes from childhood into adolescence, her face ceases to have the appeal of being “dramatic” and becomes

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problematic. Before Grealy notices disgust, she notices pity. She sees the expressions of the neighbors watching her and reads them correctly, “Though I knew I’d lost weight and was a bit pale, I never considered myself all that sick. I thought of myself as separate from them because of what I’d gone through, but it didn’t occur to me until then that people might actually pity me” (101). Again, she is not fully aware of the disease’s effects on her, never knowing that she was “all that sick,” until she learns this from other people. Just as her parents taught her to feel shame at home, onlookers teach her to feel shame in public. The young Grealy originally finds this idea appealing, because pity offers a certain amount of power, but she soon understands the full ramifications of being “separate from them.” Through separation she begins to identify herself as ‘other’ and sees “being different,” no longer as a something “special,” but as a “cross to bear” (101). Ironically, the scar on her face did not first cause Grealy’s initial rejection of an aspect of her physical self, her baldness did. The scar could still be explained as a battle scar of sorts; unfortunately, the baldness did not represent pride, but shame. Grealy wore a hat for the years she was undergoing chemotherapy, and it became an “inseparable element” of who she thought she was (106). However, despite the hat’s ability to cover her head, it could not hide the baldness nor the shame she experienced from the teasing. This shame was unlike the private chastising she inflicted on herself for burdening her family, this was public and more tangible. Her baldness was the source of her ‘otherness’ and had to be rejected and fixed: As the teasing continued, both from strangers and from the very boys whom I’d once regarded as friends, I began to suspect that something was wrong. I identified the problem as my baldness, as this thing that wasn’t really me but some digression from me, some outside force beyond my control. I assumed that once the problem was solved, once the hair grew back in, I would be complete again, whole, and all of this would be over, like a bad dream. I still saw everything as fixable. (106)

Her identification of the “problem” as her “baldness” instead of the intolerance of a group of boys, reveals the cause of the self-loathing. Grealy believed that it was her duty to conform to the boys, rather than asserting that it was their responsibility to accept her as she is. By placing the blame on herself, as she was taught to do by her mother when she cried in the hospital during the early months of treatment, she begins her rejection of the part of herself that causes her alienation. She sees her baldness as some “thing” separate from her self, “some digression,” which is what her face would later become. The pejorative connotation of

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“digression” indicates that the baldness is a rogue feature of her body that has diverged from the appropriate course of her life. For this reason, it has to be “fixed” so that her life will be ‘normal’ again. Because her body will not conform to her wishes, she sees herself as fragmented, and growing hair is what will make her “whole” again. Her use of the world “still” implies that the naivety of her youth allowed her to believe she was “fixable,” and that she later understood differently; however, Grealy’s repeated cosmetic surgeries throughout her life insinuate that she never managed to reconcile herself with the image she saw in the mirror. Once her hair returned, the “digression” became her scarred jaw, and just as she waited for her hair to grow back so that she could “be complete,” so too would she wait for her jaw to be “fixed” to begin her real life. However, because she would never be satisfied with her face, no matter how many surgeries she underwent, Grealy was unable to begin a life for herself that did not center on her face, despite what the ending of her book indicates. Grealy claims, in her final chapter, to have finally “experienced a moment of freedom” not from “getting a new face to put on” but from “shedding [her] image,” that is the negative image that she associated with her face (222). In other words, Grealy implies here that she no longer identified herself with the persona her face produced, that she had somehow shed that façade and become a Lucy Grealy “freed” from her face. This would allow her to write an autobiographical account “of a face” that was not her story because she was now, so she believed, leading a life separate from the burden of her face. Grealy’s entrance into junior high school marked a new understanding of her physical self as ugly. Thrust into a new public situation, where children were less shy and more preoccupied with beauty, Grealy became the target of cruel humiliation: “My initial tactic was to pretend I didn’t hear them, but this only seems to spur them on. In the hallways, where I suffered similar attacks of teasing from random attackers, I simply looked down at the floor and walked more quickly, but in the lunchroom I was a sitting duck” (125). The act of “looking down” and trying to disappear is clearly an avoidance method, but it again demonstrates the problematic belief that it was Grealy who should adjust herself to deal with or appease others. She was allowing the words and actions of others to dictate her life, which led to them dictating her identity: “I felt safe and secure […] , but I also felt lonely, and for the very first time I definitively identified the source of my unhappiness as being ugly” (126). The movement from blaming baldness to blaming ugliness is significant because baldness is an obvious problem, lack of hair, with a specific solution, grow some. However, “being ugly” is a seemingly boundless problem, one that she

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will later reduce to her scar, with a complicated solution- to erase the scar. The impossibility of this task will follow Grealy from junior high to her grave, as will the quest for beauty and love. The loneliness she mentions only intensifies as she matures and begins to see herself as a sexual being and longs for relationships and love. The first teenage stirrings of this desire are rejected for fear that she is not worthy of love because of her disfigurement without really understanding why: “I wanted nothing to do with the world of love; I thought wanting love was a weakness to be overcome. And besides, I thought to myself, the world of love wanted nothing to do with me” (124). The belief that “love wanted nothing to do with” her demonstrates that even at this young age she was starting to understand the value society places on beauty and the emphasis that it is necessary if one wants to be loved. The repeated tormenting from boys throughout high school with no interest in her physically or emotionally, left an emotional scar as permanent as the one on her face reminding her that as long as she was disfigured, she was not worthy of love. Thus, she had internalized an identity that was based solely on society’s reaction to her facial disfigurement, indicating that although Grealy states, and attempts to, presents an account of her face, she is really presenting an account of herself. Although she believes the two are separate and attempts to write a narrative from this vantage point, she is unable to do so. Ann Patchett’s memoir reveals that while Grealy may have faced male rejection in high school, the same was not true for college and later life, but Grealy had long before ingrained the belief that she was incapable of being loved and, therefore, was never able to fully accept a healthy relationship with a man: “The question of love was a dark hole into which Lucy swam daily. She claimed to be alone, alone, alone, and bringing up the legions of friends who adored her was only an irritant, ‘It’s not the same,’ she said pointedly… Lucy had been alone too much of her life, and in her loneliness had created a vision of what a perfect relationship would look like.”9 Grealy had been alone because she was rejected by ‘normal society’ as other; however, as Patchett explains, she was also alone because this rejection forced her to create an alternate life that could only exist after she “fixed” her face, and this imaginary, future life “was so dazzling…that anything human seemed impossibly thin by comparison” (70). Grealy could not accept love from men, and often not from anyone, as her co-dependent relationship with Patchett reveals. This was not because love was not offered; rather it was because Grealy saw two identities in herself: one that believed she was not worthy of love because

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of her disfigurement and one that would accept only the perfect love she believed would come after she was “fixed.” Patchett’s book further implies that Grealy is never able to see herself as a woman, not only because of her face, but because her entire body was damaged from being harvested for bone, tissue, and veins to reconstruct her jaw, again demonstrating Grealy’s inability to truly separate her identity from the physical limitations of her body. Patchett quotes Grealy as saying, “When I try and wear the guise of a woman, it’s a disaster” (53). Grealy sees any femininity as a “guise” because her body is often flat, scarred, or jagged where ideals of traditional feminine beauty would have it curved. Adrienne Asch and Michelle Fine explain in their essay “Nurturance, Sexuality, and Women with Disabilities” that “…attractiveness is linked to virtue, to all that is desired, especially by men of women…beauty is linked to goodness and nurturance, the traits more sought after in women both as lovers and workers.”10 Because Grealy was not only scarred on her face, but on her entire body as well, she did not and could not identify herself as ‘feminine.’ The consequences of this inability, as explained above, were both a cultural and personal identity that lacked “goodness and virtue,” not that Grealy herself did not possess those virtues, but that both she and those who could only judge her based on casual physical observations, could not recognize those qualities typically associated with femininity since she did not physically encompass traditional beauty standards. Asch and Fine further point out that disabled women are more likely to pursue less traditionally feminine roles in society, often resulting in the label of “feminist,” not necessarily because they want to but because the traditional roles of wife and mother are unavailable to them.11 While Grealy was pleased with her success as an author and poet, she also expresses longing for a husband and children; this is not to say that Grealy was not a ‘feminist’ or was not satisfied with her professional independence and success, but that her identity as an ‘other’ prevented her from seeing alternatives. While Grealy recognized a lack of choice in her life, her belief that surgery would open unlimited possibilities perpetuated a rejection of her face and body that resulted in a book that she believed was not about her life, but about her body, specifically the face that symbolized it. What Grealy was unaware of that we understand after reading Patchett’s memoir and account of Grealy’s death, is that Grealy was never really able to separate herself from the face that identified her. Repeated surgeries and drug use proved that Grealy was never able to truly detach her own identity from the disfigurement of her face and resulting psychological damage, despite her book’s suggestion that she was. While Grealy was incapable of fully rejecting the

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stigmas associated with her face and identify herself as a healthy, happy women apart from it, her belief in that separation allowed her to write a distinctive narrative, one of a face. She hopes to open up the genre of autobiography by allowing a narrative of a body that she feels is separate from the narrative of the self, but her failure reveals that the genre’s distinctiveness from all other autobiographies is to demonstrate the impossibility of separating one’s self from one’s body and to show the damaging ramifications of the psychological and social criticisms of bodies that are not considered normal. The ability to recognize the limitations of one’s actual body and accept it without an obsession with some idealized, fictional version of that body is what Lucy Grealy was unable to do, despite what her text implies. By the end of the book, Grealy says that she is no longer looking in mirrors and implies that she has learned to accept her face as it is. While claiming that she had finally made “the journey back to [her] face” and no longer reacted to her face as something that was “reflected back to [her]” from others, she immediately admits that the “indication of [her] [male] companion’s behavior was positive” and in the next moment “experienced … freedom” (222). Ironically, while claiming accept her face rather than relying on the opinion of others, her “freedom” comes only after her male companion expresses “positive behavior;” this demonstrates that while Grealy wants to send a positive message to her readers, and perhaps even convince herself, she had still not truly accepted her face as a part of her ideal self and was still relying on others’ reactions to it for confirmation. While her goal proves unattainable, both within her text and through the accounts of others, there is a certain relief the reader feels at the end of the book, not only for Grealy but for themselves. That feeling comes from the belief that if Lucy Grealy can learn to accept herself, we all can. A recognition of one’s self in Grealy allows the reader to move toward a rejection of the idealization of the body over the spirit. Susan Wendell explains in her essay “Toward a Feminist Theory of Disability” that “the oppression of disabled people is closely linked to the cultural oppression of the body.”12 She argues that need for a “theory of disability” because “disability is largely socially constructed” and we need to consider the “ethical, psychological, and epistemic issues of living with disability.”13 This theory is not just relevant to those who are disabled or disfigured, but to women whose bodies are also “other.” Wendell explains that the masculine culture dictates control over the body, and idealizes it through advertisements and other avenues, and this same culture marks the disabled as “other” and rejects them for their inability to control their body. The need for control, she says, leads to blaming the victims, i.e.

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What could they have done to prevent this? Lucy Grealy asks the same questions of herself; could she have prevented the cancer? Wendell claims rejection and blame spawn from the inability of the disabled to meet the standards of the idealized body; Grealy rejects her face for this very reason. Wendell, however, argues that this idealized version of the body does not just prevent the disabled from accepting their bodies and being accepted by others, it prevents everyone from identifying with and loving their own real bodies, since no one’s can meet the ideal. Integrating the “other” into the “normal” community, Wendell concludes, will reject the idealized version of the body and embrace the flawed, real body, thus liberating everyone’s experience with their own bodies. Grealy’s text is able to do this for her readers. Because the readers have empathized with Grealy and accepted her face, just as she presumably has, by the end of the book Grealy has liberated them from the flaws of their own bodies, if even momentarily. By, seemingly, finally accepting her disfigurement, Grealy is creating a place for ‘the other’ in her identity of self and attempting to integrate it into the “normal” community, not only liberating herself but her readers as well. She momentarily seems to admit that her because face cannot be separated from her identity, she must accept it as part of her identity. In doing so, Lucy Grealy has achieved the “autobiographical moment” that de Man says “happens as an alignment between the two subjects involved in the process of reading in which they determine each other by mutual reflexive substitution” (921). Lucy Grealy is able to create a moment when the reader is able to substitute him/herself for the subject of the narrative, that is Grealy; more precisely, because Grealy’s tale ends with the stated acceptance of her physical imperfections, readers can empathize with her plight and more readily accept their own flaws. While de Man and Grealy both demonstrate the slipperiness of the genre of autobiography by questioning authorship and unreliability of re-creating a past period in life, de Man is able to recognize and Grealy is able to provide the value of such a genre. Autobiography should be able to, according to Grealy and de Man, offer the reader a lens through which to see him/herself, and in doing so can provide valuable information about the community in which we live.

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Works Cited Anderson, Linda. Women and Autobiography in the Twentieth Century. New York: Prentice Hall, 1997. Asch, Adrienne and Michelle Fine. “Nurturance, Sexuality, and Women With Disabilities”.” In The Disability Studies Reader ed. Lennard J. Davis. New York: Routledge, 1997. 241-259. Brown, Sylvia A. “Scripting Wholeness in Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face.” Criticism 48.3 (2007): 297-322. Couser, G. Thomas. Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability, and Life Writing. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1997. De Man, Paul. “Autobiography as De-facement.” MLN 94.5 (Dec. 1979): 919-930 Gilmore, Leigh. Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women’s SelfRepresentation. Ithica, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994. Grealy, Lucy. Autobiography of a Face. New York: HarperPerennial, 1995. Grealy, Suellen. Interview. The Guardian. August 7, 2004. Hillyer, Barbara. Feminism and Disability. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993. Jain, Sarah Lochlann. “Living in Prognosis: Toward an Elegiac Politics” Representations 98 (2007): 77-92. Marcus, Laura. Auto/biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994. Mintz, Susannah B. Unruly Bodies: Life Writing by Women with Disabilities. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. —. “Writing as Refiguration: Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face.” In Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 24.1 (2001): 172-184. Morgan, Kathryn Pauly. “Women and the Knife: Cosmetic Surgery and the Colonization of Women’s Bodies,”.” Hypatia 6.3 (1991): 25-53. Patchett, Ann. Truth and Beauty. New York: HarperCollins, 2004. Polkey, Pauline, Ed. Women’s Lives into Print: The Theory Practice and Writing of Feminist Auto/Biography. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Smith, Bonnie G. and Beth Hutchison, Eds. Gendering Disability. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2004. Thompson, Rosemarie Garland. “Feminist Theory, the Body, and the Disabled Figure.” In The Disability Studies Reader ed. Lennard J. Davis. New York: Routledge, 1997. 241-259. Wendell, Susan. “Toward a Feminist Theory of Disability.” In The Disability Studies Reader ed. Lennard J. Davis. New York: Routledge, 1997. 241-259.

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Notes 1

Some of my psychological reading of Lucy Grealy builds on the work of Susannah Mintz. Her article “Autobiography as Refigureation: Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face,” argues that Grealy “displays her ‘freakishness’” but ultimately “comes to terms with a face that does not abide by societal norms” in order to “expose the deleterious effects not of disease, but rather of the normative attitudes about the body and identity” (173). While I agree that Grealy attempts to demonstrate this, I will argue that she is never really able to “come to terms with” her body, which actually alienates her from her face. Thus, while I concur with Mintz’s assertion that Grealy “demonstrates that her sense of self is inseparable from the condition of her face,” I believe she does so unaware and unwillingly. Much of my departure from Mintz’s reading is based on Grealy’s death from drug addiction and Ann Patchett’s publication of her account of Grealy, both of which had not occurred at the time Mintz wrote her article. 2 Sylvia A. Brown’s article “Scripting Wholeness in Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face.” provides a detailed reading of how Grealy becomes “fragmented” as a result of her disfigurement and also examines the implications on the genre of autobiography. However, while Brown’s focus is more on the creation of identity in Grealy’s text, I examine the implications that her fragmentation has on the reliability of the genre of autobiography. 3 Paul De Man, “Autobiography as De-facement” MLN 94.5 (Dec. 1979): 921. 4 Suellen Grealy, Interview. The Guardian. August 7, 2004. 5 Kathryn Pauly Morgan, “Women and the Knife: Cosmetic Surgery and the Colonization of Women’s Bodies” Hypatia 6.3 (1991): 32. 6 Ibid, 28. 7 Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face (New York: HarperPerennial, 1995): 43. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 8 Sarah Lochlann Jain, “Living in Prognosis: Toward an Elegiac Politics” Representations 98 (2007): 80. 9 Ann Patchett, Truth and Beauty (New York: HarperCollins, 2004): 169-70. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 10 Adrianne Asch and Michelle Fine, “Nurturance Sexuality and Women With Disabilities,” in The Disability Studies Reader ed. Lennard J. Davis (New York: Routledge, 1997): 244. 11 Ibid, 242. 12 Susan Wendell, “Toward a Feminist Theory of Disability,” in The Disability Studies Reader ed. Lennard J. Davis (New York: Routledge, 1997): 260. In my analysis of Susan Wendell’s argument and its application to Lucy Grealy’s text, I interchange “disability” and “disfigurement.” While I recognize the two have vastly different cultural implications, Wendell’s argument about the disabled body as “other” applies to the disfigured body as does her call to denounce the idealized body image and accept “othered” bodies. 13 Ibid, 261.

MEMOIR AND (LACK OF) MEMORY: FILIAL NARRATIVES OF PATERNAL DEMENTIA G. THOMAS COUSER

After a recent visit with her parents, one of whom is beginning to show signs of dementia, my wife exclaimed, “I hope I never lose my memory!” To which I replied, “No, you hope I never lose my memory.” My point was, of course, that the lot of the caregiving partner may be more difficult than that of the person with dementia. After all, the very losses that ravage people with dementia in some ways cancel themselves out. In his recent book, The Forgetting: Alzheimer's: Portrait of an Epidemic, David Shenk points out that, despite the fickle nature of the illness, in which moments of startling lucidity can punctuate a long decline, its course can be divided loosely into the awareness stage and the post-awareness stage.1 Those in the post-awareness stage may be said to suffer less than those in the preceding stage, who are haunted both by what they’ve already lost and what they dread losing. Caregivers, however, never progress to a postawareness stage. Shenk concludes that the best they can do is to try to find significance in their ordeal and that of their loved one: While scientists [do] battle with this disease, victims and their families [have] the opposite task: to make a certain peace with it, to struggle to understand the loss, come to terms with it, create meaning out of it. (32)

As indicated by Shenk’s subtitle, it is common to refer to Alzheimer’s disease as an “epidemic.” Because Alzheimer’s is not communicable, it is not an epidemic according to the strict definition of the term, “an outbreak of a contagious disease that spreads rapidly and widely,” but it certainly qualifies as an epidemic in the looser sense of “a rapid spread, growth, or development.”2 The present and anticipated costs of Alzheimer’s have made it a high priority for clinical and drug research. But barring a medical miracle—the sudden development of a vaccine or an effective treatment—Alzheimer’s awaits half of those who reach their late 80s.3 Although its progressive shutting down of brain function does eventually cause death, the condition is survivable for long periods of time; indeed,

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among late-life diseases, Alzheimer’s threatens to disable the largest number of people for the longest period of their lives—especially in countries, like the U.S., where life expectancy is high and rising. “The stay of Alzheimer’s sufferers in a nursing home is, on average, twice as long as that of other patients” (Shenk 66). And that is only part of the picture. As Shenk points out, The unique curse of Alzheimer’s is that it ravages several victims for every brain it infects. Since it shuts down the brain very slowly, beginning with higher functions, close friends and loved ones are forced not only to witness an excruciating fade but also increasingly to step in and compensate for lost abilities. (87)

The burden of caregiving is such that it is sometimes said to precipitate a kind of dementia in caregivers themselves (91). The role of the caregiver can be devastating, for reasons Shenk concisely enumerates: The caregiver must preside over the degeneration of someone he or she loves very much; must do this for years and years with the news always getting worse, not better; must every few months learn to compensate for new shortcomings with makeshift remedies; must negotiate impossible requests and fantastic observations; must put up sometimes with deranged but at the same time very personal insults; and must somehow learn to smile through it all. The work shift in this literally thankless job lasts for twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. . . . (87)

Even this account of the caregivers’ lot may minimize its challenges, since it confines itself to emotional demands, eliding the logistical and financial dimensions of the process. Shenk may also be too optimistic in positing the love of the caregiver for the recipient of care. This may obtain in the best-case scenarios, but even there, love may be severely tested, and one suspects that many caregivers occasionally, or ultimately, fail the test. A Newsweek article on caregiving by adult children (referred to as “reverse parenting”) notes that “care is hardest for those whose parents did not parent well; that is, children are more likely to accept the role when they see it as reciprocal.”4 (Kantrowitz and Springen, 6). Like the proportion of the populace affected by Alzheimer’s, the amount of media attention devoted to it is constantly expanding. Countless articles on the condition have been published in medical journals and in mainstream newspapers and magazines; in 2004, the Alzheimer’s Foundation of America (AFA) launched a free quarterly publication, Vantage, aimed at caregivers. As Denise Grady noted in a New York Times

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op-ed piece, “It is telling, maybe a tacit admission of defeat, that a caregiving industry has sprung up around Alzheimer’s. Books, conferences and Web sites abound.”5 We should not be surprised, then, that in addition to clinical and journalistic writing about Alzheimer’s, life writing about it is also suddenly “on the radar” and very much on the rise.6 Specifically, in the last decade a new class of memoirs has also sprung into being: narratives of Alzheimer’s by family members, usually caregivers. Among the relatives of those with Alzheimer’s, who actually provides this care? In some cases, of course, partners, but spouses of the same age as those with Alzheimer’s are often disqualified by their own impairments. And many persons with Alzheimer’s (hereafter, for convenience, PWAs) lack living partners; typically, then, the onus falls on the offspring of the PWA. The extant personal narratives offer an interesting window on the epidemic as a cultural phenomenon, because the scenario represented by what I will call the visible (i.e., widely known) narratives (still relatively few in number) is not representative of larger demographic trends. In September 2007, an unscientific survey of the extant literature using the databases of Amazon.com and other on-line booksellers turned up more than forty published memoirs of Alzheimer’s written by a family member and prompted by, if not entirely concerned with, the intrusion of dementia into an otherwise ordinary life. This is a very recent phenomenon: the earliest of these dates from the early 1990s, and most were published after 2000. Publication of such memoirs is clearly a growth industry. The vast majority of these, however, have been in effect self-published (issued by outfits like Infinity, iUniverse, PublishAmerica, and AuthorHouse) or published by small presses with niche specialties, such as religion (Augsburg Fortress and Faithwalk), self-help (Authority), or large print (Thorndike). So while Alzheimer’s may be generating more and more memoirs, most such narratives are never reviewed nor widely advertised and therefore do not reach large audiences. Many have abysmally low Amazon.com sales ranks. (Interestingly, however, judging from reader comments and reviews, some nevertheless reach appreciative readers and serve to create a kind of virtual supportive group on the internet.) The demographics of the subjects of these memoirs are what would be expected in view of the fact that life expectancy (and thus the risk of developing Alzheimer’s) is higher for women than for men: of the forty narratives, more than half (23) concern women. An analysis according to who writes the memoir—whether a partner or an adult child—reveals that more women (10) than men (8) had their stories told by their partners; similarly, more women (14) than men (9) had their stories told by adult

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children. Among the adult children writing about their mothers, there were twice as many daughters as sons; among adult children writing about their fathers, there were also twice as many daughters as sons. Thus, women are in the majority both as subjects (which would be predicted by the demographics of the epidemic) and as narrators (which would be predicted by the gendering of caregiving, the bulk of which is provided by women in contemporary American society). The titles of these narratives attest, on the one hand, to the losses caused and demands made by the condition—i.e., Where Is Jack?, Through the Wilderness, Into the Shadows, A Curious Kind of Widow, The Last Childhood, Death in Slow Motion—and, on the other, to a powerful impulse (more explicit in caregiving partners than in children) to find some element of hope or redemption in the experience—i.e., You Too Can Survive, Everything Will be Alright [sic], I’ll Never Wander Away, An Enduring Love Affair. The thrust of many of the narratives self-published by surviving spouses, male or female, is encapsulated in the poignant title of one: Love Conquers Alzheimer’s. The first memoir of someone with Alzheimer’s to come to my attention—and to achieve wide recognition—was Elegy for Iris, John Bayley’s memoir of his wife Iris Murdoch, which appeared first in the New Yorker in 1998, then as a slim volume a year later, and subsequently as a film (starring Judy Dench and Jim Broadbent) in 2002. But although Bayley’s remarkable memoir may have inspired Americans to produce Alzheimer’s memoirs (and presses to publish them), his contribution to the literature remains unusual in the amount of attention it garnered, which had a good deal to do with the fame of both its subject, a professional philosopher better known as a novelist, and its author, a well known literary critic and, like Iris, an Oxford don. It is also unusual (among visible memoirs) in its being written by a husband about his wife. Remarkably, almost ten years after the advent of Iris, not a single Alzheimer’s memoir published by a major American press and recognized by mainstream reviewers in the U.S. concerns a female subject. (Admittedly, they are still few in number.) On the contrary, all of the Alzheimer’s memoirs to have achieved substantial sales and media attention concern male subjects, and they are all written by their adult children, usually a daughter, who is usually the primary caregiver. Thus, there is a significant disparity between the demographics of the epidemic as a whole (and of its representation in all published life writing) and the demographics of what might be called its literary representation. The scenario typified by the literary memoirs is not at all indicative of the

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incidence and impact of the condition in the general population. (I suspect that this is true of much life writing concerning illness and disability.) ***** With that important caveat, I wish to examine a small selection of memoirs of paternal dementia: Jonathan Franzen’s “My Father’s Brain,” Elizabeth Cohen’s The House on Beartown Road., and Sue Miller’s The Story of My Father. All of these are visible memoirs, and all are of some literary quality. The scenario presented in these American narratives is radically different from Bayley’s: all of the book-length accounts are written by daughters about their fathers. Given the gendering of caregiving, perhaps we should not be surprised at the domination of this category of memoir by women writers; still, the fact that nearly all these narratives are by daughters may give us pause. For these women are typically middle-class members of the baby boom generation, who experienced firsthand, if they did not participate in, the Women’s Liberation Movement. The preponderance of female authors in visible Alzheimer’s memoirs is such that I have been tempted to call the phenomenon “demented dads and devoted daughters.” The alliteration highlights a dimension of the American literary life writing about Alzheimer’s that some will find appealing, others appalling. Some will view these daughters’ dedication to their senile fathers as touching reciprocation of paternal love; others will view it as troubling evidence of an unreconstructed patriarchy. The full significance of these narratives emerges only when they are seen not only as a subset of the memoir of illness and disability, which has burgeoned in the U.S. in the last twenty-five years, but also as a subset of a seemingly unrelated, but also new and growing category of narratives, which I refer to as filial narratives—that is, memoirs of parents by their sons and daughters. These are mostly written by members of the babyboom generation, who are being forced to confront their own mortality as they enter their sixties and their parents enter old age or die. And as many assume increasing responsibility for dependent parents—as they assume, that is, quasi-parental roles toward them—they are stimulated to reflect on the way they were parented and the extent to which they identify with their parents. Moreover, just when these baby boomers may seek to confirm, supplement, and investigate their memories of growing up, irreplaceable repositories of those memories become fallible and eventually unavailable, either through senility or through death. Simultaneously, but conversely, adult children may come to serve as surrogate memories for ailing parents.

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So memory and the loss of it are especially important motifs in this life writing. In this larger set of narratives, filial memoirs, there is also a gender imbalance: considerably more are devoted to fathers than to mothers. This stems from the fact that in the parental generation in question it was far easier for men than for women to “have a life”—that is, a life narratable according to conventional criteria of visible accomplishment or worldly success. In addition, my research suggests that when adult children write memoirs of a parent, they tend to write about the absent or unavailable parent; this tendency also favors memoirs of fathers. In dementia narratives, of course, the issue is not the fathers’ absence from the household of the growing child; it is the fathers’ presence in the household of the adult child, which is a function of their disappearance into dementia. In any case, the complex renegotiation of family dynamics and the relational (re)construction of identity in these fraught circumstances are at the heart of the best of Alzheimer’s narratives. ***** Although they may reflect the general concerns of an entire generation (perhaps uniquely inclined to think of itself as forever youthful), Alzheimer’s memoirs reflect the particular challenges of the Alzheimer’s caregiver. Indeed, typically, the narration is stimulated by, arises from, and may extend the project of giving care. Certainly, it is the performance of caregiving that usually authorizes the narrative—providing the narrator with an intimate perspective on the ailing parent and a privileged (if demanding) relationship with that parent. That is one reason that it is usually daughters who write memoirs of paternal dementia. Although the writing sometimes originates during the process of giving care—in the form of diary entries—it is typically not pursued in a consistent way until after the death of the subject—partly for lack of time, partly for lack of perspective. (John Bayley is again an exception; he not only wrote but published his account of his wife’s dementia while she was still alive.) Writing the narrative, then, is a way of grieving, of achieving—or at least approaching—emotional closure on a painful chapter of one’s own life, and of memorializing the dead father. Which is to say that although such narratives grow out of the process of caregiving, they also differ in nature and in purpose from the process that first impels them. One difference between providing care and narrating Alzheimer’s (and between narrating Alzheimer’s and narrating other disabling conditions in the third person) stems from what is generally regarded as the most threatening and tragic aspect of the illness: the way in which it seems to

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strip those affected of their memories, their personalities, their identities, and in the end their humanity. As Shenk points out, Alzheimer’s seems to destroy brain functions in the reverse order of their initial development, a process referred to as “retrogenesis.” It is thus common—and Shenk claims, not only inescapable but appropriate—to compare adults with advanced Alzheimer’s to children: The child analogy understandably rankles many caregivers. They are deeply offended at the suggestion that their mother or father or husband or wife is now to be regarded as a mere child. It feels like the ultimate insult. . . . But the comparison is a valid, and even necessary, one to make. Here is an instance where scientists fighting disease and caregivers trying to make peace with a human tragedy can come to some common ground: the science of retrogenesis can help caregivers forge a new understanding and appreciation of what their loved ones are going through. . . . By viewing their loved ones as reverting back to childhood abilities and mentalities, caregivers can establish a more humane formula for their care. Whether or not it feels demeaning, retrogenesis can be instructive. (126-27)

This regression can be extremely discomfiting to observe and frustrating to deal with; the role of the adult child caring for a parent (especially a male parent) who behaves like a child is at the very least awkward. To narrate such a development obviously poses ethical challenges: how much of a parent’s decline into senility is it decent to reveal? How does an adult child avoid gratuitously patronizing—and infantilizing—a demented parent? A related issue has to do with the matter of memory. When filial narrative is undertaken—or at least anticipated—before the death of the parent in question, there is often an active engagement of the parent’s memory to evoke stories predating the child’s existence. (Think of Art Spiegelman’s Maus.) One decision to be made by any filial narrator is the extent of the parent’s life to be covered by the narrative. More than caregiving itself, the writing of a narrative can compensate for the loss of memory by inscribing a lasting, if not permanent, account of a life and a personality even as that individual’s personality and memory are eclipsed by Alzheimer’s. (One of the not inconsiderable effects of even the largely neglected self-published narratives is to put the lives of otherwise anonymous individuals on record.) This active countering of the loss of the parent’s identity by narrating at least some of the parent’s early life is a feature of the most rewarding narratives. It also serves an important rhetorical purpose in this class of narratives: it is one thing for an adult child to record the loss of a parent to Alzheimer’s; it is another for an

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Alzheimer’s narrative to give its readers some appreciation of what is being lost. Narratives that memorialize their subjects quite fully preempt the question that sketchier narratives sometimes raise: what makes this parent worthy of such devotion? Most dementia memoirs, visible or not, display certain conventional topoi or commonplaces. These include incontinence, incoherence, and aggression on the part of the parent; concern on the part of the caregivers about the parent’s driving, house-keeping, and diet (while the parent is still living independently); agonizing over whether, when, and where to institutionalize the parent; fear of inheriting Alzheimer’s and living the nightmare oneself; and anticipatory grieving for a person not yet dead. At the same time, the visible narratives are far from formulaic; there is considerable variety in approach. The sole narrative by a son, that by Jonathan Franzen, is distinct not only in the gender of its author but also in its genre, a New Yorker “Personal History” piece that is more essayistic than narrative. This may have something to do with the fact that Franzen was not his father’s caregiver; his mother performed that role until her husband went into a nursing home. Franzen not only expresses little appreciation of her role; he takes her caregiving as an opportunity to ally himself with his father against his mother: his memoir is the site and occasion of considerable male bonding. Significantly, it takes its title, “My Father’s Brain,” from what Franzen portrays as an act of monumental insensitivity on his mother’s part: in a packet with her annual Valentine to her son, she sent along the autopsy report on his father’s brain. Opening the memoir with this gesture serves double duty. First, it aligns Franzen with his father as a victim of his mother’s tactlessness; second, it associates her with a kind of problematic contemporary materialism—according to which what matters is the brain, rather than the mind, let alone the soul. Not incidentally, the agenda of Franzen’s memoir involves rebutting that point of view. Despite its patriarchal gender politics, Franzen’s piece has merit as a kind of meditation on the New Yorker rubric under which it appeared, “Personal History,” insofar as it focuses on what, if anything, remained of his father’s distinctive personality as his Alzheimer’s “progressed.” Franzen is determined not to take the postmortem as the last word on his father’s fate. He acknowledges that during a five-week stay with his father while his mother was hospitalized he, Jonathan, was largely oblivious to what his mother had already identified as symptoms of his father’s dementia. But he insists that this was not solely a function of denial on his part:

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One of the basic features of the mind is its keenness to construct wholes out of fragmentary parts. . . . I think I was inclined to interpolate across my father’s silences and mental absences and to persist in seeing him as the same old wholly whole Earl Franzen. I still needed him to be an actor in 7 my story of myself. (italics mine)

Thus, the son’s response to his father’s Alzheimer’s is characterized as the very antithesis of the condition—indeed, almost its remedy: the active restoration of the fading father by an act of filial mentation. This insistent quest for traces of the father’s essence also underlies Franzen’s close scrutiny of his father’s last hours, which yields one of the most (to me, at least) affecting deathbed scenes of this literature: Hour after hour, my father lay unmoving and worked his way toward death; but when he yawned, the yawn was his. And his body, wasted though it was, was likewise still radiantly his. Even as the surviving parts of his self grew ever smaller and more fragmented, I persisted in seeing a whole. I still loved, specifically and individually, the man who was yawning in that bed. And how could I not fashion stories out of that love—stories of a man whose will remained intact enough to avert his face when I tried to clear his mouth out with a moist foam swab? I’ll go to my own grave insisting that my father was determined to die and to die, as best he could, on his own terms. (13)

This compulsion to find evidence of his father’s persistence is the key to Franzen’s memoir; it links the son’s early response to his father’s condition (the reconstruction of the whole from residual fragments) with the author’s later textual challenge to a claim about Alzheimer’s made by Shenk. Influenced by Morris Friedell, a retired sociologist with Alzheimer’s, who has argued that there may be something delicious in oblivion, Shenk suggests that in some ways it may actually be desirable to live in an eternal present (97). If there’s a silver lining in the cloud of Alzheimer’s, this is it: no memory, no nostalgia; no memory, no regrets; most important, no memory, no boring repetition. Rather, eternal novelty, surprise, and wonder—a second childhood, indeed. For Franzen, however, personality, selfhood, individual identity—all depend on the perpetuation, if not the awareness, of distinctive traits over time; for him, living in an eternal present is tantamount to suffering the erasure of selfhood. And so he unabashedly continues to seek—and to find—signs of the perseverance of paternal traits despite the corrosive effects of Alzheimer’s. There’s something masculinist in this response, and no doubt, given the heritability of Alzheimer’s, Franzen has a personal stake in his belief in the persistence of the essence of Earl. Franzen fils

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argues that his impression that his father’s condition was not serious during his five-week sojourn with him may have been partly a function of his father’s willful suppression of symptoms. Together, then, father and son collaborated to defy Alzheimer’s, to deny its losses. And in his memoir, the son carries on this somewhat quixotic quest. In the rest of the narratives to be discussed, all written by women, the narrative stance is typically more accepting of the father’s decline. Elizabeth Cohen is a journalist; she had written a domestic weekly column (“Close to Home”) for a local paper, and her book, The House on Beartown Road., grew out of columns devoted to her caring for her aging, failing father in her own home. In this role, Cohen—despite having an infant daughter and having been abandoned by that child’s father—did what her sister and her mother had separately not been able to manage. The House on Beartown Road. is structured as a series of titled chapters covering a year during most of which Sanford Cohen lived with his daughter and granddaughter. Cohen did not have sole responsibility for her father the entire year. At times, a nanny came in to oversee both child and parent, giving Elizabeth time to write; at others, she sent Sanford to adult daycare (which he tolerated only as long as he misunderstood his role there: as soon as he discovered he was not there to instruct the others, the former professor refused to go); and eventually, his wife joined him in an assisted living facility nearby. Still, the year was punctuated with challenges large and small: the flight of Cohen’s young husband; episodes of paternal incontinence; his accidentally starting a fire in the house, as a result of which he was sent back to New Mexico; his reappearance on Beartown Road, after caring for him proves beyond his wife and his other daughter. Sanford Cohen had been a professor of economics and, as such, took great pride in his intellectual prowess; for individuals like him—and their families—dementia may be particularly difficult: My father’s intellect had defined him as a man. It also defined him as a husband. The loss of Daddy’s mental acuity was confounding to my mother. If he no longer knew who he was, who was she? What then, when he no longer knew her? It was beyond unthinkable.8

This may shed some light on the asymmetrical gendering of filial dementia narrative: mental deterioration seems more threatening for those who do intellectual labor, and among the parents of the baby-boomers, most of these were men. At age 40, Cohen is exactly midway between her daughter’s and her father’s ages; she thus nicely embodies the predicament of the “sandwich

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generation.” Her memoir’s most distinctive feature is the odd ménage on Beartown Road, which juxtaposes the demented grandfather with his infant granddaughter, who is in some ways his intellectual peer. Obviously, this presents a strong risk of patronizing the father. But Cohen deftly avoids this pitfall. Granted, Sanford Cohen’s decline is particularly sad when seen against the backdrop of Ava’s rapid learning. (For much of the narrative, he cannot name her nor even remember her sex: he usually refers to her as “the little guy,” occasionally as “the one that fills the room with hurricanes” [55].) And yet, sad as it may seem, their intellectual parity makes them good companions, and their relationship is far less fraught than his relationships with his daughter or his wife. Having never known him without Alzheimer’s, his granddaughter has no standard against which to measure him and can regard him without pity or regret; his intellectual decline is no tragedy to her. Nor does Ava tire of her grandfather’s stories or repeated questions. So while being caught between two generations needing care might seem to impose a double burden on Cohen, it doesn’t always work that way. The presence of her daughter gives Cohen access to a redemptive vantage on her deteriorating father, and it can function similarly for the reader, as well. In this way, her narrative simultaneously realizes and disarms the parent-as-child trope. Still, a major concern of Cohen’s book is the inverse relation between her daughter’s intellectual growth and her father’s intellectual decline. Ava’s mind is developing fast, soaking up knowledge; Sanford’s is steadily losing capacity. One is accumulating, the other losing, memory. One is building selfhood, laying down the narrative line that is identity; the other is forgetting both his narrative and the identities of those around him, if not his own. Cohen’s sweet conceit, with which she ends the book, is that, as her daughter’s increasing mental skills surpass her father’s declining ones, his mental abilities are not vanishing but rather being transferred to the little one, as though by some law of the conservation of intellectual energy: The brain of my father and the brain of my daughter have crossed. . . . They look upon each other with fond familiarity. And they see each other heading to the place they have just come from. On his way out of this life, Daddy has passed her the keys. Instead of thinking about him losing the abilities to speak, to walk, and to negotiate the world, I like to think he has given them to her. (267)

This is not literally true, of course, but Cohen takes comfort in her sense that in creating a structured learning environment for her daughter, she has also provided a supportive one for her father. When, toward the end of the

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year, he finally gets Ava’s name and sex right, Cohen takes pleasure and pride in his simple accomplishment. Perhaps more gratifying, he finally identifies Cohen correctly as his daughter, not his wife or a potential sexual or romantic partner. In achieving this identification, he re-identifies himself as well, reclaiming, if only temporarily, his place in the family. Understandably, Cohen takes some credit for, as well as great gratification in, this surprising development. Cohen’s narrative is also distinguished by its recurrent meditation on memory as a constituent of family relations and family history. This motif recurs in different keys. One has to do with Alzheimer anxiety; like many entering middle age, she fears that little failures of information retrieval are signs of early-onset Alzheimer’s. Another has to do with the pain caused by her husband’s sudden departure and her learning of his infidelity from friends. She finds that, given all that she has to cope with, she quite easily forgets about Shane, and she is not altogether pleased when he decides to return to the household. Her painful experience of abandonment has made her see some advantage in forgetting—if only she could choose what to forget. Another has to do with establishing family memories, ensuring that they are passed down. One of her strategies for dealing with her father’s memory loss is what she calls “the memory project”; each night she asks him to relate a particular memory to her. She does not pass these along to her readers, but she insists that, whatever his own powers of recall, his mere physical presence functions as a memory-stimulant in her; it helps to keep her rooted in an ongoing family narrative (189). One after another, these memories coincide with and evoke her own: “It is as if his life has been boiled down to these few, singular experiences, and they have come to stand for everything in between” (256). The confluence of his memories and hers is an affirmation of a shared history, whatever the future may bring. This may be the basis of Cohen’s claim that “the memory project is what saves me” (192). Cohen astutely identifies one of the reasons dementia is so threatening to family members: being forgotten by a living parent is a different—in some ways more severe—loss than that parent’s death. While still physically present, a demented parent is unable to remember shared history and appreciate filial achievements (194). Family members, especially children, can no longer gain gratification from the demented member’s pride. What compensates for this in Cohen’s case is her sense that she is being prepared for the eventual death of her father; thus, the lot of the caregiver is seen as a rehearsal of the fate of most children, to be predeceased by their parents.

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In admitting, poignantly, after her husband returns, that “on a certain level I realize I would rather have my father come home,” Cohen articulates a revised understanding of family: It feels like an unhealthy thing, to prefer your father to your husband. But it is true. The meaning of family for me has shifted entirely. Now I think of family as the people who stick by you, the ones who are there when you go through things. (250)

This is meant mostly to contrast her disloyal husband to her father, but its application to her father is consciously ironic: he has stuck by her in large part as a function of his dysfunction. In a sense, of course, both Shane and Sanford have abandoned her, but only her husband does it deliberately, and the narrative is devoted to ways in which she feels she can slow down, or learn from, the inexorable eventual departure of her father. Again, the odd ménage gives her a rare but redemptive perspective on the losses of Alzheimer’s. My last example of this class of texts is the most impressive overall: Sue Miller’s The Story of My Father: A Memoir. Like Jonathan Franzen, Miller is a novelist, and her book benefits from her skill with narrative. But it is not particularly novelistic in technique; it trades more in summary than in scene, and it contains very little direct dialogue. Indeed, it is relatively conventional in form; it proceeds more or less chronologically from the first signs of her father’s dementia, not long after his wife’s sudden death (her father gets lost while driving a familiar route), through his diagnosis to his eventual institutionalization and death. But more than any of the narratives discussed above, this one includes sufficient interpolations of back story to warrant its title: it is not merely the story of her father’s dementia; it is the story of his life. Like Cohen, Miller is the daughter of a professor, and the loss of paternal mental prowess is a major issue; however, her father’s discipline, religious history, gives an interesting twist to the topos of loss of self. As I’ve suggested earlier, the literary memoirs do not simply track the inexorable degeneration of the parent; as Shenk implies all caregivers and families of those with dementia must, they seek not merely “closure” but also meaning. Like Franzen, Miller seeks and detects some continuity between her healthy and her diseased father; in that, perhaps paradoxically, she finds something redemptive. This pursuit of continuity follows a couple of threads. One is her meditation on the topos of absence. As I’ve suggested earlier, most, if not all, filial memoir is stimulated by a sense of the father’s absence; often,

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writing the memoir constitutes a posthumous attempt to redress that absence, to fill in a large hole in the writer’s universe. Missing the living father, the memoirist attempts to conjure his ghost. Miller’s approach is particularly complex here. She notes that, when her father was at home, he was a more stable and reassuring parental presence than her rather highstrung mother. Yet a formative experience was her father’s absence from the household in her early childhood while he did research in church history in Germany, leaving her mother alone with three young children for six months. As an adult, Miller understands how hard this must have been on her depressive mother; she also notes the effect of this early abandonment on her own relation to her father. Significantly, her earliest memory of him is of his absence: “My memory, then, is not really of him but of the effort of trying to reconstruct him in my mind, of struggling to imagine him, of missing him. My memory is of memory, working to find its object.”9 She goes on to note that he was, despite his stability, an emotionally distant father all of her life, owing to his temperament and professorial preoccupation. And his later pathological absence hurts in part because it intensifies—and seems to finalize—the sense of distance between them. In a passage that will resonate with most family members of those with Alzheimer’s, she remarks on the effects of his dementia: I felt very distant from him, even angry at him—for his otherness, for what seemed his unconsciousness of the strangeness of what he was going through and what he’d done. I wanted him restored to himself. I wanted my father back. This old geezer made me mad. (15)

Yet rather than attempting to close the gap between them, Miller comes to accept it and let that be part of the meaning of his Alzheimer’s. In a wonderful afterword—a kind of meta-memoir—she reflects on the process of writing her book. Here she explains how her new understanding (achieved in part by writing the memoir) of his characteristic and perennial absence from her life in some ways diminishes the pain of the new kind of absence attendant on his Alzheimer’s: [I concluded] that his Alzheimer’s disease in a sense merely exacerbated a lifelong feeling of loss I had about my father. My father was not his own. Therefore he couldn’t be anyone else’s—and he wasn’t. He couldn’t be my mother’s, he couldn’t be mine or my siblings’ . . . . An abstract father. A father who might forget you if what he was thinking about at the moment was more compelling to him.

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This, I had thought, must be what gave Alzheimer’s disease its peculiar emotional potency for me, even beyond the tremendous power it exerts in every family’s life where someone suffers from it. It took my father away, yes. But it reminded me that my father had long since been taken. He’d been gone, claimed elsewhere—by his beliefs, by his convictions, by the way they dovetailed with whom he’d become, growing up with the peculiarly Victorian and religious upbringing he’d had. (165)

Miller comes to believe that her father suffered less than others from Alzheimer’s because of the kind of man he was. Never having been his own, but always in some sense God’s, he did not suffer the loss she did when he developed Alzheimer’s; he was more easily resigned to, and even became intellectually interested in, his own deterioration. With little ego to begin with, he had less ego to lose. In saying this, she is not attempting to beatify him; by her account, he wasn’t so much self-effacing (because that implies will and effort) as just lacking in self to efface (169). As compensation for his daughter’s suffering, this may seem meager stuff. But by her own account, it brings her some degree of comfort. What distinguishes Miller’s memoir most is its astute insights into how the process of dementia alters not only her father but also her; in this regard, it is a particularly relational and self-reflexive memoir. Like many dementia narratives, this one contains scenes involving the most disconcerting symptom of the condition, lack of or mis- recognition of family members: more than once her father tells her of his wish to get in touch with “Sue.” Her first response is indignant: she is Sue! But she comes to realize that, from his point of view, perhaps she is not any longer the Sue with whom he had been familiar: It seemed to me, thinking about it afterward, that what had happened was that his memory of me and the person he saw and recognized as me when I visited him had somehow sheared off from each other. . . . . Oddly, sadly, I also felt he was getting at something else, a deeper reality, in his confusion. For in my treatment of him, I had become another Sue—a caretaker Sue. A cheerful, dismissive Sue. A Sue who, from his perspective, was grossly insensitive to the shocking and astonishing and sometimes painful things that went on daily in his universe. If he was altered, I thought, so was I—and strangely, in some of the very same ways he was: made bland and callous, reduced by Alzheimer’s disease. (137)

This is a shrewd perception and a brave admission. It is conventional in filial memoirs of dementia for the narrator to lament and mourn the loss of

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the parent; Miller’s distinction lies in her empathetic identification with the parent. As he seems lost to her, she understands that she may seem lost to him. Her gesture reveals the extent to which many such narratives, ostensibly focused on the parent, are largely a function of the emotional needs of the adult child. The reversal of perspective achieved by her consideration of how she, and his perception of her, may have been changed by the new dynamics of their relation is all the more impressive for its rarity in Alzheimer’s narratives. Like many caregivers, Miller learns to accede to hallucination (when it is benign) rather than to deny it; in the face of an often hostile staff, she makes a conscious decision to let her father occupy a kind of parallel universe (123). But more than any other dementia memoirist—perhaps uniquely—rather than merely lamenting the absence of the other and seeking comfort in restoring that other in memory and preserving him in print, Miller recognizes, understands, and embraces the concomitant altering of her own ego: He changed, and changed again. And in response, often lagging a step or two behind him, I changed also. Slowly, reluctantly, I learned new ways to behave, and I too was transformed, at least with him as his illness deepened. (119)

To admit that a loved one’s disability or diminishment reshapes oneself is a rare but salutary insight, and insofar as it shapes the narrative, rather than merely being stated in it, it gives the book real distinction. And it is Miller’s thoughtfulness about the project that may make it the most appealing narrative to those in her position. She notes that for those who witness the degeneration of a loved relative, the project of memoirwriting is partly one of exorcising “the final haunting images” and “reconstructing my father again . . . imagining him whole, putting together the pieces that slowly disintegrated and broke off . . . [to] bring him home in my own memory from the faraway land of his disease” (40-41). More self-aware than most narrators, too, she explicitly addresses the problem of performing this reconstruction without gratuitous invention and without misrepresenting her own fallible memory. But in the end, she comes to an almost contrary realization—that the work accomplished in the long and fitful process of memoir-writing is not the re-calling of her father, the recreation of the man before the disease: her father, she came to realize, “didn’t need me to rescue him, to make sense of his life” by writing it as a coherent narrative (170). Rather, while she never renounces her desire to produce a narrative useful to others in a similar situation, she accepts, in

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the end, that her work is primarily concerned with her own comfort, which is found in the messy, simultaneously painful and pleasurable process of writing, rather than the literary product: “it is by the making of the story, and by everything that changed in my understanding of him and of myself as I made it, that I have been, as the writer that I am, also consoled” (171). Miller’s conclusion brings to mind Shenk’s assertion—cited at the outset—that the task of the caregiver is not to battle Alzheimer’s but “to make a certain peace with it, to struggle to understand the loss, come to terms with it, create meaning out of it” (32). This endeavor need not take narrative form, of course. But when it does, the narrative may bid to reconstitute in words the personality distorted, obscured, or effaced by Alzheimer’s. Alzheimer’s narratives are life writing in a particularly literal and urgent sense, as they seek to perpetuate personality threatened with erasure even before death. One motive fundamental to such narratives is to create a sort of surrogate parent to replace the one disappeared by dementia; thus, the most compelling narratives are those that succeed in conveying precisely who is being lost. At the same time, as Miller sees, narrative cannot repair Alzheimer’s damage or replace the missing parent. What it can do is faithfully register the losses suffered both by the afflicted and their survivors; the aim (and potential gift) of such narrative is recognition of the other, in a number of senses: acknowledgment and acceptance, certainly, but also knowing again and anew under great duress.

Works Cited Bayley, John. “Elegy for Iris.” New Yorker, July 27, 1998, 44ff. —. Elegy for Iris. New York: St. Martin’s, 1999. Cohen, Elizabeth. The House on Beartown Road: A Memoir of Learning and Forgetting. New York: Random House, 2003. DeBaggio, Thomas. Losing My Mind: An Intimate Look at Life with Alzheimer’s. New York: Free Press, 2003. —. When It Gets Dark. New York: Free Press, 2007. Franzen, Jonathan. “My Father’s Brain: What Alzheimer’s Takes Away.” New Yorker, September 10, 2001, 80ff. Grady, Denise. “Zen and the Art of Coping with Alzheimer’s.” New York Times on the Web, August 14, 2007. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/14/health/14seco.html (accessed July 21, 2008). Iris. Dir. Richard Eyre. BBC Films. 2002. Kantrowitz, Barbara, and Karen Springen. “Confronting Alzheimer’s,”

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Newsweek on the Web, June 18, 2007, http://www.newsweek.com/id/34002 (accessed July 21, 2008). McGowin, Diana Friel. Living in the Labyrinth: A Journey through the Maze of Alzheimer’s. New York: Delacorte, 1993. Miller, Sue. The Story of My Father: A Memoir. New York: Knopf, 2003. Neergard, Laura. “Training Helps Alzheimer’s Caregivers,” Washington Post on the Web, August 13, 2007, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2007/08/13/AR 2007081300352.html (accessed July 23, 2008). Shenk, David. The Forgetting: Alzheimer's: Portrait of an Epidemic. New York: Doubleday, 2001.

Notes 1

David Shenk, The Forgetting: Alzheimer’s, Portrait of an Epidemic (New York: Doubleday, 2001), 103-04. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 2 American Heritage Dictionary, 4th ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000). 3 Thus far, medication seems at best to moderate symptoms, but there have been some encouraging experiments involving mice in which Alzheimer’s has been induced; a vaccine that stimulates the immune system to attack the plaques and tangles that characterize, and may cause, the deterioration of the brains of affected individuals has shown some promise. 4 Barbara Kantrowitz and Karen Springen, “Confronting Alzheimer’s,” Newsweek, June 18, 2007, http://www.newsweek.com/id/34002 (accessed July 21, 2008). 5 Denise Grady, “Zen and the Art of Coping with Alzheimer’s,” New York Times on the Web, August 14, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/14/health/14seco.html (accessed July 21, 2008). 6 The least likely perspective, of course, is that of the person with Alzheimer’s, which would seem to preclude the writing of personal narrative (and does, in its late stages). Nevertheless, several such memoirs have been published, notably those by Diana Friel McGowin, Living in the Labyrinth: A Journey through the Maze of Alzheimer’s (New York: Delacorte, 1993), and Thomas DeBaggio, Losing My Mind: An Intimate Look at Life with Alzheimer’s (New York: Free Press, 2003); DeBaggio has actually published a sequel to his first account, When It Gets Dark (New York: Free Press, 2007). 7 Jonathan Franzen, “My Father’s Brain: What Alzheimer’s Takes Away,” New Yorker, September 10, 2001: 4, http://www.newyoker.com/printables/fact/010910fa_FACT1 (accessed July 21, 2008). Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 8 Elizabeth Cohen, The House on Beartown Road: A Memoir of Learning and Forgetting (New York: Random House, 2003), 19. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 9 Sue Miller, The Story of My Father: A Memoir, (New York: Knopf, 2003), 44. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically.

SIDE BY SIDE: LIFE-WRITERS ON DISABLED SIBLINGS SUSANNAH B. MINTZ

Narratives of illness and disability have proliferated in the last few decades. In part the sign of an increasingly politicized, visible, and vocal disability community, life writing has emerged as an important venue in which people with disabilities can redefine the cultural story of their experiences. But what happens when the primary subject of a disability narrative is not the author but rather a disabled sibling? Such is the case in many recent memoirs composed by the brothers and sisters of people with cognitive and intellectual impairments, forms of “auto/biography”1 in which the authors “speak for” a relative who cannot—or, equally often, simply does not because of established specifications for “publishable” personal narrative—tell his or her own story. Such texts as My Sister’s Keeper: Learning to Cope with a Sibling’s Mental Illness, by Margaret Moorman, The Love within a Smile: A Sister’s Memoir of a Brother’s Disability, by Kimberley Smith, and Kate Strohm’s Being the Other One and Siblings: Coming Unstuck and Putting Back the Pieces examine disability as it shapes the structure of the family, and in turn the meaning of disability as it is informed by family dynamics.2 They are in part recuperations of the marginalized or misunderstood sibling, in part explorations of the authors’ own complicated emotional histories, and tend accordingly to fluctuate between apologetic regret at wrongs done to the sibling, defensiveness about the difficulty of growing up with disability in the household, guilt about being nondisabled, anger at ableist cultural prejudice, and admiration for the sibling’s unique way of being in the world. But while such texts might have the legitimate intentions of raising awareness about disability or providing support for siblings (who are sometimes also caregivers), they also risk perpetuating a problematic link between “normalcy” and brain function, or uncritically uphold the centrality of language and intellect to definitions of viable identity. As suggested rather starkly by the title of a recent book by Jeanne Safer—The Normal One: Life with a Difficult or Damaged Sibling—many accounts of

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cognitive disability or mental illness in a family reify hierarchical distinctions, even when (perhaps especially when) they are at their most benevolently well-intentioned. Are sibling memoirs about cognitive impairment thus inevitably inflected by ableist attitudes toward mentation, intellect, emotional “health,” and selfhood as inherently rooted in the mind? Can an “able” author capture an accurate version of his or her sibling’s experience, incorporating the point of view of the disabled sibling into the text? In turn, to what extent does the author take on a privileged and pedagogical stance, presuming to teach readers some lesson that might seek to capitalize on or sentimentalize the disabled sibling’s life? On the other hand, given an emphasis in disability activist circles on self-representation—speaking in one’s “own” voice—as the hallmark of full recognition in the human community, how do we understand and respond to the selfhood of the sibling written about?3 The idea that only those family members construed as mentally “normal” can tell the story, or that legible stories are only produced by “normal” minds,4 calls attention to how we understand subjectivity and its manifestation in or as narrative. This is the point Paul John Eakin makes in the introduction to his edited collection addressing the ethical issues of life writing: “Do you have to have a story in order to be a person? … [W]hen brain disorders of various kinds impair or prevent our saying to others who we are, our claims to recognition as persons may suffer irreparable harm. What are the responsibilities of the ‘normal’ to those with apparently damaged identities?”5 We might rephrase Eakin’s question as, “do you have to tell a story to be a person?” and if so, what forms of narrative “count” as recognized representations of a self? James Overboe has protested that the very notion of self-narration as a concretizing of identity is founded on ableist paradigms that exclude “persons who communicate differently,”6 and levels the suspicion that narratives about people with disabilities (by doctors, sociologists, literary scholars) tend to be biased by a link between normalcy and certain forms of language use. If it is true that “[p]ersonal stories are not merely a way of telling someone (or oneself) about one’s life; they are the means by which identities may be fashioned,” as George Rosenwald and Richard Ochberg have claimed,7 but also that our definition of “story” is limited by an ableist privileging of generic conventions, how do sibling memoirists responsibly represent their disabled subjects? Focusing here on three recent works—The Ride Together: A Brother and Sister’s Memoir of Autism in the Family, by Paul and Judy Karasik, Greg Fraser’s autobiographical collection of poems entitled Strange Pietà, and Rachel Simon’s Riding the Bus with My Sister8—I want to investigate

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the various strategies these authors employ to tell stories about minds and lives that do not readily conform to narrative expectations of linearity or dramatic resolution.9 While the individuals at the center of the books I examine lead independent lives apart from their author-siblings, they are not the ones to generate the version of those lives offered to a public audience. What differentiates these particular texts from others in the subgenre of sibling disability memoir are the ways in which they manage to tread that delicate line between co-opting their siblings’ ownership of life experiences and asserting their siblings’ personhood even in the absence of self-authoring. Representation is a means to each author’s discovery of what really matters to his or her own sense of self, but also a powerful form of advocacy and counterdiscourse on behalf of the sibling—what Arthur Frank calls the “remoralization work” of life writing about (and not necessarily by) people with disabilities.10 An important feature of the narrative, graphic, or poetic enterprise in these texts is the dismantling of an entrenched mind/self conflation whereby having a “broken brain”11 would become a stigmatic mark of less-than humanness (what Overboe deems “post-personhood”12). Writing the sibling, for these authors, becomes bound up with their own attitudes toward intelligence, eloquence, cognitive ability, and the constitutive relationships of these to personhood. At the same time, each text also challenges a mind/body binary that falsely situates selfhood entirely in the workings of consciousness. On the one hand, the conditions affecting the siblings in each of the books to be discussed here (autism, spina bifida, and retardation) are described in physical terms, as spectrum disorders that result from neurological, genetic, or chromosomal anomalies. On the other, the difficulties depicted in each text, the experiential knots to be untangled, are largely psychical, having to do with the complexities of interaction between siblings who operate at radically different psychological and emotional levels. While the selves in question are thus rendered as embodied, their physical conditions—impairments of the brain—become narratively significant insofar as they determine aspects of self we tend to think of as disembodied—intellect, emotion, affect. Yet part of the narrative arc of these texts is precisely the effort to understand, and accept, a sibling’s character, including his or her unpredictable (perhaps vexing) behavior, as a function of neurological make-up (rather than characterological flaw), which in turn tends to stimulate new ideas on the part of the author about his or her own embodied identity. The selves that emerge in these books are imbricated ones—bodies inextricable from minds, siblings inseparable from one another as related by the intricate webs of both upbringing and DNA. Bodies bear outward

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signs of their neurological conditions, and these authors devote some textual space to detailing their siblings’ physicality as a key component of what makes them who they are, while also being concerned to discover (one might even say fascinated by) the invisible, prenatal events that presumably caused those conditions. At the same time, it is the emotional and affective nature of relationships that matters most to these stories; to the degree that a sibling’s unruly body instigates the personal and family drama these texts record, it becomes in turn the occasion for analyses of psychology, language, and ethics that go far beyond the disabled sibling’s immediate circumstances. Indeed, following more or less overtly the terms of recent postmodernist thinking about the social and discursive contexts in which disability happens, these authors represent themselves and their siblings not just as bodied but as fundamentally environmental beings—or to put it another way, they suggest how thoroughly the bodies in question are produced by social agreement and unprotected standards of physical and intellectual normalcy. The Ride Together, the Karasiks’ story of their autistic brother David, is told in alternating chapters of text, written by Judy, and comics, drawn by Paul. This dual authorship manifests in an obvious and visual way the idea that no single version of family history can prevail; each sibling maintains her or his own point of view, but the simultaneous unfolding of two depictions of events also suggests the shared experience, the overlapping of perspectives, that defines family life. Moreover, the sequence from text to graphic and back again disrupts both narrative and representational continuity: the David who appears in Judy’s story is not precisely the same as the one Paul portrays, and this rupture reminds us not simply of the elusive quality of identity or the fictive status of characters in autobiographical work, but also of the social milieu in which disability becomes meaningful. Disability, as activists and scholars have long argued, is not a defect in the individual body but a consequence of the encounter between bodily variation and societal norms. There is no single version of disabled experience, and no inevitable or one-to-one correspondence between ontology and physical or cognitive “condition”— just as the self we read in an autobiography is never exactly the self who writes. “David” is thus a composite figure in The Ride Together, his autistic identity not a monolithic construct but the product of interaction and conversation between siblings, of multiple and sometimes conflicting memories, of words and pictures. Disability is also, of course, something that happens in and to families. As the Karasiks make explicit, David’s autism profoundly affects each member of the family, but who David is as an autistic is also shaped by

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how the family cares for him, as well as by each individual sibling’s relationship to him. As Judy and Paul construct their respective autobiographical selves and remembered Davids, then, they repeat in their book what they had learned as children, that disability—understanding it, accommodating it, and redefining it against prejudice—is always, necessarily, a joint enterprise, and one that often operates to shift normative hierarchies or roles within families. An early graphic chapter entitled “Diagnosis” establishes this confluence of discourses and needs that affect the family after David is born. Paul writes that in 1948, “‘autism’ was not a common word in America” (13). He draws six panels representing neurons and a brain to accompany his definition of autism as one set of symptoms produced by “scrambled neuron situations” (14), and then depicts an episode in which the Karasik parents take David to a doctor for consultation. The chapter foregrounds problems of legibility, as Joan and Monroe struggle to interpret their son’s behavior and to match the various explanations they receive from “learned physician[s]” (24) with their own experiences—many of which, as this episode reveals, require more emotional flexibility and the capacity to care than anything like physiological or psychiatric accuracy. That interpersonal dynamics matter more than “science” might explain why “Diagnosis” moves so swiftly from a certain kind of technical language to a scene that emphasizes family drama. G. Thomas Couser has written that “diagnosis is usually a welcome development” in disability narratives in that it offers “relief at knowing what is wrong and having one’s sense of dysfunction officially validated” (61). Initially, this pattern seems true of Paul’s chapter, which begins in somewhat neutral terms, with neat accounts of autistic behavior: “social interaction may be difficult for those with autism” (14), and “frustration at not being able to cope can lead to anger and aggression” (15); many autistics thus “turn inward, avoiding contacts with people” (15). But after the caption explaining that “when he was 1 ½ my parents knew there was something different about David” (16), Paul disappears as the narrative voice, and so too do “official” verdicts. The parents’ relationship to each other and to their oldest two sons (David and Michael) then determines the course of the story, as retrospective explanatory discourse and graphically simple frames are replaced by more intricately drawn panels that represent the immediacy of action and conversation between Joan and Monroe. As the chapter unfolds, the results of yet another round of developmental testing are juxtaposed with the parents’ efforts to manage two toddlers, acknowledge their failure to understand David’s signals, and navigate their own relational friction; in turn, the “scrambled situation” in the Karasik

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family expands from David’s neurons to encompass a much larger psychological and conceptual dynamic. Parental conflict seems as significant to the story as the child’s autism, and when parents can’t figure out why their child is crying, the usefulness of official diagnoses like “aphasia … due to organic causes” (24) or “disability to comprehend words or ideas resulting from brain damage” (25) emphatically disappears. A core tension here has to do with how the parents cope with their own emotional needs vis-à-vis each other and David. At the start of the scene, Joan sits at a large roll-top desk compiling “background information” (17) about David while Monroe feeds the two boys, offers occasional commentary, and tries to hurry his wife along: “Let’s go, Joan, we’ll be late” (16), he says; “Who’s making this report? You, or the doctor?” (17). Paul draws his mother as using language and list-making to ground herself in a chaotic situation, where his father seems to prefer motion and completion. As Joan lingers at her desk, noting that David “loves being read to,” “loves to eat and feeds himself,” and “repeats phrases” (16), Monroe piles the boys into the car, sings to them, and offers them candy and toys, but also grows increasingly frustrated, growling at Joan, “We’ll be late, goddammit!” with furrowed brows (19). When Joan asks “when David began to walk,” he snaps back, “Christ, Joan, I do not remember and I do not think that the doctor will care” (19). He is shown grinding his teeth when David and Michael erupt in tears in the car, shouting “Enough! I’m trying to drive,” and later shakes David, looking furious, when David refuses to pick up a toy giraffe (25). He even accuses Joan of “doting” on David and not “pay[ing] enough attention to [her] loving husband” (25). Significantly, in the background of some of these frames, a resounding “WAH!” indicates David’s unaddressed distress, even as Joan cites the now-outmoded “early lack of parental warmth” (25) as one potential cause of autistic disorders. What might be Paul Karasik’s investment in this particular episode, which culminates in his parents’ chagrined realization that David, crying inconsolably, “was just thirsty” but “simply couldn’t tell us” (27)? What motivates the graphic triangulation of angry but physically interactive father, a mother engrossed in descriptive detail, and a smart but uncommunicative boy? At the start of the chapter, Paul suggests that “a contemporary diagnosis might call David, ‘a nice guy who has mental retardation with distinct autistic behaviors and controlled epilepsy who is trying to get along in someone else’s world’” (15; italics mine). By the end, he has demonstrated both the aptness and the poignancy of that final phrase. The difficulty—perhaps the impossibility—of fully accommodating oneself to the parameters of someone else’s world is

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precisely what the chapter portrays, whether that entails a clash of discourse (as in the discrepancy between medical terminology and a mother’s account of her son’s behavior, or between the parents’ affective and cognitive styles) or an inexact translation of body language (such as David’s crying) to narrative and response. It seems important that Paul, as David’s brother, renders David’s “non-standard” (15) brain and his bodily needs—from neurons to thirst to tears—in a way that calls greater attention to the unruliness of their parents’ minds and bodies, their irritation, their inability to communicate well. If the visual-verbal sequence of this chapter aims to dramatize “diagnosis,” it does so by situating David in a family drama in which autism is only one narrative thread. Paul thereby tells what his brother “simply couldn’t.” In the subsequent chapter, Judy Karasik reiterates an understanding of autism as both an accident of brain structure and a relational dynamic that is as much produced by familial patterns as it affects them. Where “scrambled neurons” is Paul’s phrase, Judy remembers her mother explaining to her that “‘the parts of [David’s] brain are the same—it’s the way they’re connected that’s different,’” and that for him, “‘Things arrive splintered’” (35). Judy presents this moment as revelatory. She writes that she “stood there,” mentally transferring David “from one classification to another.” Still an “incomprehensible pain in the neck,” her brother is now “someone who … had a tough situation. …all that was wrong was the wiring. Otherwise his brain could have been mine. And vice versa” (35). Later, when Judy reports what she’s learned to her brother Michael, he says confidently, “‘David is David” (35). The tautology is fundamental to the Karasiks’ project in this book: David is David in a certain incontrovertible way because some of his traits cannot be medicated or willed away. Yet one sibling “is” him- or herself only insofar as s/he is not another—as Judy’s wonderment at the accidents of birth suggests. David may be David, but the siblings who compose the text do not take that identity as given in any a priori sense, no matter what scrambling or splintering may have occurred in his brain. The point seems to be less about claiming David as himself than about uncovering who that self is in relation to the brothers and sister who might, but for mere chance, have been even more like him than they are. Joan’s information thus works not so much to solidify a sense of difference between Judy and her brother but rather to complicate her own sense of who she is. As David’s brother and sister, Paul and Judy share a certain kind of relationship with him to their parents, but they are also thrust into a caretaking role with their older brother that frequently strains their maturity and their own developing sense of self.13 For example, when

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David returns home from one of several facilities the family tries out for him, Judy bemoans the loss of her “normal life” and complains that while living with David “was going to make me a better person … right then and there I didn’t want to be a better person” (81-82). There is a danger here of representing the disabled person as first a burden and then an inspiration, less an individual in his own right than an impetus for his siblings to learn patience or fortitude. But despite the very real challenges of managing David’s erratic and sometimes violent behavior, the thrust of this narrative emphasizes mutuality. Judy writes that “we trained one another to be human beings in this particular family” (193), and that “being together was really all that counted” (153); there is, in her words, “only this life. This life we all shared” (84). Sharing a life in this case means that brothers and sister take turns caring for each other. Describing a trip she takes with David, for instance, Judy allows that “I’d thought I was running the show, but it was David who had been managing me” (152). If there is a lesson in this text, it is one that rattles rather than upholding the privilege of normative cognition or recognizable emotional registers.14 A concern to critique ableist attitudes toward developmental disability by way of complicating a mind/body split as well as reorganizing dominant hierarchies pervades Greg Fraser’s collection of poems entitled Strange Pietà. In the first poem, “Ars Poetica,” Fraser presents his brother’s severe spina bifida as a consequence of “cells,” “genes,” and the “false logic of his DNA” (3), but he does not thereby subscribe to a medical model of disability. Rather, Fraser puts pressure on the assumptions that transform a random physical event into a tragedy, one that fractures family dynamics. Because the poet’s parents are encouraged by the medical community to perceive their disabled newborn as a “miracle / gone wrong” (5)—because the doctor who delivered him stimulates their feelings of “failure, doubt, / fear” (4)—they consign Jonathan to “a hospice hours from home” (4), unable to fold him into a network of familial bonds. This repudiation of the shame-inducing, even errant brother becomes the focal point of poems that both record the anguish of Jonathan’s absence from the family and lambaste the kinds of discriminatory prejudices about disability that stoke the parents’ sense of humiliation and regret. “All poetry begins,” declares Fraser in the first line of his book, “…with my brother’s legs” (3), and subsequent pieces make good on this premise: Jonathan’s body, that “body’s language,” is “the word” that gives life to the author’s enterprise (3). There is no poetry, and no poetic identity, without the precipitating event of Jonathan’s condition. This is not to suggest, however, that Fraser capitalizes in an exploitative way on Jonathan’s experience for his own artistic gain. To the

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contrary, the poet repeatedly implicates himself as an agent in the complex set of relationships that make Jonathan meaningful in a certain way, and shifts the weight of words in their relation to the construction of identity and reality. The “lemon” in this book is not the disabled brother, but the poet himself, and all those who, with him, might retreat from the frightening implications of a random and chaotic world. In the poem of that name, the speaker, disillusioned and “gasping for breath” in a “cyclopic world” in which human lives seem but “footnotes,” laments the ineffectuality of his voice, his very presence, suggested by the plaintive repetition of “For months without crying out I’d been crying out” (20), “I’d been crying out without crying out” (21). Into this moment of psychological despair and stymied expression rolls “a brilliant, unbruised lemon”—“fiery slaver” (20), “a gilded interjection” (21)—and the speaker’s mouth suddenly “explode[s]” with the word: “lemon, lemon” (21). This mouth-filling sign, ending as it does the fourth in a series of poems focused on Jonathan’s disability, plays with the metaphor of lemon as something unsatisfactory, without usefulness or worth. This lemon arrives by pure chance—just as “the gap in my brother’s back, / the window to the spine someone forgot to shut” (“Ars Poetica,” 5) also does—and it is “unbruised,” rather than the brother who, though able in a strict sense to write poems, has lost his creative way. What does it mean to be both “brilliant” and a dud, or to think of dramatic sibling difference in terms of happenstance, one piece of fruit rather than another “fallen off the sidewalk display” (20)? And what might happen if we stopped studying “the asterisks of stars” (20) for meaning and turned our attention to that single lemon, following nothing, unconcerned with purpose or design? The fact that it is “lemon” in the speaker’s mouth, ushering in the middle section of the book, suggests not so much that the poet experiences a kind of liberation from himself by presuming to speak for his brother, but rather that, in a more “explos[sive]” philosophical way, the world no longer exists as he once knew it, now that he has discovered his brother anew. The speaker admits that there’s “no fruit stand … / anywhere in sight” (20-21), revealing his awareness that whatever he might say about Jonathan is an act of imagination, compelled more by his own than his brother’s needs, but at the same time, it is the unexpected, brilliant accident of lemon that answers his desperate “crying out.” The difference between having a bruised or “unbruised” mind and body—even what being “bruised” means in a social, ideological context—is purely a matter of chance, and “we must learn to cherish chance,” as Jonathan’s brother writes elsewhere, “to have one” (Strange Pietá, 88).

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Fraser unflinchingly confronts his own guilt about being the “normal” brother, estranged from Jonathan by virtue of a privilege that the poet represents as arbitrarily, and unfairly, conferred by a culture preoccupied with health, youth, beauty, and intellectual achievement. In the poem “Ignis Fatuus,” the speaker imaginatively rebirths himself and his brother in the alchemical womb of the imagination, in which “the gash between split sons” might be “suture[d]” (15). More radically here, the poet, become “[his] brother’s ghost” in Jonathan’s “absence” (16), claims he must “re-ent[er]” his mother to become Jonathan fully, “hobbl[ing]” on “makeshift / crutches” (17) with his “muscled thighs” now “erase[d]” (16). Still more urgently, mother and “abled” son (16) are called upon to give birth together to a brother figured as “fully ours” only because they have become, in a cleansing conflagration, “fully his” (17). This rearranging of familial roles manifests the poet’s despair about his mother’s inability to nurture Jonathan, whose very existence seems to accuse her insufficiencies, the “fritz in her body electric” (14). Faulty familial relationships—between the mother who sidesteps her “strange, / mismade” son and the son who speaks to his mother “at one remove from the genuine” (15)—must unravel before they can “rise / again” (18) with renewed understanding about the ripple effect of Jonathan’s disability. The “new nativity” (19) of this poem is characterized by an honest reckoning of one family’s collusion in marginalizing their disabled member, as well as an insistence on the identification between two brothers whose existential differences from one another would seem to be both undeniable and insurmountable. It is this kind of revision of attitude toward disability that Fraser describes as speaking not with “my mother” but “with my brother, tongue” (17). Language (and particularly what are construed as the obfuscations of poetry) comes under particular attack in Strange Pietà as the vehicle that perpetuates oppressive cultural standards of beauty, intelligence, and value. Poet and disability scholar Jim Ferris points out that “[b]ody metaphors abound in discourse about poetry”; the poem, for many writers about poetry, is “a body unto itself.”15 But what happens, Ferris implicitly wonders, when the body is in effect enjambed— abruptly interrupted, its closure forestalled? In “Ars Poetica,” Fraser responds to that question by initiating a poetics of disability that takes issue with a literary obsession with order, perfection, symmetry, and visionary inspiration. Our need for comforting narratives of closure and design, the speaker here suggests, manifested in our preference for neat and unembarrassing poems, does a certain violence to a body like Jonathan’s, perpetuating stereotypes that mark disability as deviance, characterological ugliness, ontological lack, or punishment for sin.

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Thus “[t]he couplet is no hero,” as the speaker corrects; “heroic is a spinal tap at two, feasting / through a tube.” “Suppose / we make verse blank, to match my brother’s eyes” (5). “Ars Poetica” declares that “All verse forms are now deformed” (7) and pays angry “homage” (4) not to some putatively universal truth, but rather to “slobber, / blunder, slip” (6). In this way, the poet tries to write wreckage into words, ones that frankly acknowledge Jonathan’s broken body—“my brother’s knees where his thighs / should be” (4)—and the “dark jail” of his brother’s mind (5). These are grimly ironic images, calculated to catch readers up in the dual habits of stigmatizing mental impairment as a kind of catastrophic and terrifying vacuity, and falsely locating in the cognitively disabled a type of mystical light or grace. “Making light is easy,” snarls the speaker of this poem; “Watch: / half-wit, numbskull, saphead, lamebrain, nincompoop, dope. / Light’s been made too long of my brother’s state” (4). To take Jonathan’s state seriously is to accept the challenge of dismantling our uncritical acquiescence to stereotypes about mental ability.16 Thus language must be recalibrated, especially since its artful use is the very demonstration, in this text, of the difference between brothers. Rachel Simon’s Riding the Bus with My Sister, also a tale of sibling reconciliation and self-discovery, similarly emphasizes the role of language in establishing rigid hierarchies around cognition and identity. Simon is 39, newly single, and an overworked writer and teacher in Philadelphia; her sister Beth, 38 and described in the text as mildly retarded, lives alone several hours away. Beth spends her days riding the buses around her town, conversing with drivers who are in some cases friendly and supportive, in others annoyed and insensitive. The story begins when Rachel, casting about for a feature idea for the Inquirer, decides to spend a day with Beth on these rides. The resulting article gains national attention, “creat[ing] a stir” and “generating a tide of enthusiasm” from readers (11); more importantly, it instigates increased contact between the sisters: soon after the article appears, Beth asks Rachel to devote some part of every month for a whole year to riding her buses with her. Rachel nervously agrees, and so begins a journey that is significantly literal and psychological at once. As in Strange Pietà, one of this book’s primary concerns is to dispel stereotyped assumptions about cognitive and emotional dysfunction and material or intellectual achievement. It examines cognitive “disability” as a consequence of brain function and development but also of societal prejudice, and in turn reveals the supposedly “able-minded” as emotionally restricted and capable of egregious interpersonal wrongs. To put it simply, who is more “impaired” in this story? Importantly, Simon

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describes the text as being initiated by her need for an interesting article; at the start of things, Beth seems more commodity than individual, something to amuse people over breakfast or to inspire them on their evening commute. To put it another way, Rachel is the harried, lonely but also ambitious and successful older sister whose romantic failure is mitigated by her professional—read, mental—accomplishments, while Beth is the unemployed and aimless bus rider whose loud voice and imperviousness to social rules make her a nuisance to at least some of her fellow travelers. But the text quickly interrupts this kind of dichotomized interpretation. For example, Simon devotes considerable space to detailing the lives and personalities of the many bus drivers whom Beth befriends, upon whom she develops intense crushes, and who look after her in quite poignant ways (bringing her along on family outings to the beach, for instance, or tending to her after eye surgery). Far from an isolated, bereft person “exiled to society’s Siberia,” as Simon puts it (11), Beth “thrive[s]” (11) in a self-determined network of relationships with other people who are themselves uniquely individualized—not a faceless sweep of working class service providers, but rather a bustling collection of men and women with their own stories to tell and wisdom to impart. Simon lingers over the histories of the drivers (even, in one instance, reproducing a driver’s favorite recipes) as if to emphasize how little she has known of Beth’s milieu and thus to reinforce her discovery that Beth maneuvers herself independently within a richly articulated community. Waiting for Rachel in the doorway of one bus, Beth “usher[s]” her sister “into her world” (20); in that world, Beth displays “a level of discernment that,” Rachel acknowledges, she “do[es] not possess” (64). If Beth is the shunned “other” in a society disinclined to respect her difference or accommodate her needs, Rachel is also a stranger in the environment that Beth—perhaps against the odds and even against what others, such as family and case workers, would want for her—has created for herself. Here, Rachel loses the confident sense of control and even self-knowledge that she enjoys (or at least pretends to) in her life as teacher and writer; here, it is Beth who navigates motion, Rachel who seems childlike: “You need to be fast to keep up with me, I’m not slow,” Beth instructs (61), and Rachel obliges. “I run after Beth up the street” (57), “I scamper behind” (59). This is not to say that Simon ignores either the intolerance Beth has faced from certain drivers or other riders, or the difficulty Beth sometimes has in understanding or responding to other people’s cues and boundaries. Indeed, these complexities form a central thread in the story, particularly as they coincide with Rachel’s own frustration with her sister’s sometimes

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intrusive or “inappropriate” actions. The point seems to be to map her internal experience of Beth, which is largely historical, from childhood, onto what she observes in the present of the adult Beth, a woman she describes as “self-assured” (11), “spirited” (13), “irrepressible” (13), and “greathearted” (19). Rachel knows her sister, of course, in a way that the drivers and case workers do not, yet she must also discover who Beth is from precisely those people who know Beth now, in the present, with a depth of feeling that Rachel is chagrined to realize she does not share. Her shy question of Beth, “Do you really like having me here?” (66), manifests nervousness about fitting into Beth’s world, where Beth is far from helpless and where Rachel, used to being in command, experiences a kind of upheaval of her stable sense of self. If the complex overlap of societal norms and Beth’s unexpectedly vibrant and active life is registered by representative vignettes of activity on the buses, it is also portrayed through remembered scenes of childhood, which document Rachel and Beth’s common history as well as the way in which disability is cause but also effect of family disruption. Beth’s condition, the medical etiology of which is unknown, certainly shapes family dynamics and the roles and identities forged by each member. For example, the family rallies around Beth, refusing to institutionalize or “hide [her] from the world” (104); as children, Rachel and her other siblings are told to help Beth whenever she needs it: “‘Don’t you ever forget,’” their mother intones, “‘it could have happened to any one of you,’” and their father instructs them to save money “‘so when we’re gone you can take care of her’” (72). Later, they struggle to know “‘what to do with her’” (253), and Rachel complains that Beth is “‘a dead weight’” (255) when her sister’s increasing stubbornness and disinterest in work make Beth a less than cooperative housemate. In one moment, Rachel experiences herself as the protective older sister who “kind of like[s]” the fact that Beth feels “safe holding onto” her (73); in another, she is the “bad sister” (255) more invested in her own process of becoming an adult than in sharing weekends with Beth to give their father an occasional break from caregiving. But Beth’s identity is, just like Rachel’s, also brought into being by family relationships. As Simon pointedly asks, trying to understand her sister’s behavior in both its limitations and its willful disregard of what polite society might call decorum (“Thiz what I do” is one of Beth’s signature declarations [29]), “How much is Beth, and how much is Beth’s brain?” (142, 146, 151). How much is Beth’s brain and how much a result of the family splintering apart? Referring to an acutely traumatic episode in which all of the children except Beth flee their mother’s house and the

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violent stepfather who will eventually threaten Beth at gunpoint, “Is it just her mental retardation that made her who she is, or did her experiences after, or even before, that February day somehow spin her personality in this direction?” (13). Simon takes care to depict her parents’ respective absences—first the father leaves to move in with another woman and later the mother enacts a far more dramatic and comprehensive abandonment of her children apparently at the command of the abusive second husband— as precipitants entirely of their own complicated desires. She records a conversation in which father, for example, confesses that he simply fell out of love with mother, and portrays the latter, in turn, as oddly protective of Beth even as she sacrifices familial bonds for the sake of what seems a helpless and self-destructive attraction. The yearlong journey to rekindle something like sisterly love thus entails a painful but ultimately liberating excavation of parental narcissism and loss, a detailing of events that entangled all the Simon children in their parents’ badly handled needs. To some extent, in fact, and despite the fact that it was she pinioned at the end of the stepfather’s pistol, Beth emerges as the more emotionally resilient sibling, capable as both a child and as an adult of affection, empathy, and forgiveness. This is not, then, a simple tale of two neatly differentiated sisters, one older, unimpaired, personally and professionally successful, the other simply “other.” Indeed, Simon makes interesting use of the fact that by an accident of timing, she and Beth are temporarily “twins” for a few months every year when their ages overlap. She frequently identifies herself as Beth’s sister in the context of guilt—as when she worries she “has become… a bad sister” (255), or calls herself back to her “good-sister obligation” (82), or tells herself “I must be the big sister” (269) when they fight. But while such remonstrances work to solidify the differences between them, the repeated notion of an “annual twinness” (146) disrupts it, for it is not only a numerical age that they may have, if briefly, in common. To identify herself as Beth’s twin is in some symbolic sense to defy the radical categorical distinction between them that disability would seem to erect; it is to claim a depth of connection that goes beyond mere sisterhood. In these moments, Simon aligns herself with Beth—allies herself with Beth—in a way that disputes derogatory hierarchies based on normative behaviors and skills. The goal is not to elide important differences, however. As part of her effort to rediscover Beth, to figure out both what and how Beth thinks, Simon embarks on another sort of journey halfway through the book, a late-night internet investigation of mental retardation. “I am a detective on a trail,” Simon writes, “I am amassing a profile of what might as well be a

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missing person” (149). She learns the causes, the criteria, the classifications; she learns the statistics and the currently agreed-upon usage when referring to people with cognitive impairments. Most importantly, she recognizes the limitations of her own understanding of Beth’s condition. “[H]ow could I have known Beth for all these years,” she chastens herself, “and just come to this realization now?” (151). “Yes, there was a missing person here; we were twins thirty-nine times before I even started to find out about Beth” (151). The technical information does not reduce Beth to a type; rather, it serves to explain to Simon some features of Beth’s conduct—such as her nonstop talking on the buses, her eccentric style of dress, or her indifference to matters of health or nutrition—as typical instead of deliberately annoying. And it does not overshadow what is simply Beth, with her “stubborn personality” (151), or a function of living “in a society that careens between bullying her and seeing her as a perpetual child.” One feature of this text that directly mitigates the danger of turning Beth into a case history, “representative” of people with cognitive impairment, is the inclusion of some of the dozen or so weekly letters she writes to her sister, reproduced here with all their idiosyncratic punctuation and capitalization. These letters, brief and infrequent as they are in the text, do not exactly constitute Beth’s version of the narrative Rachel Simon is telling about their lives, yet they do offer a counterpoint to both Rachel’s perception of events and her simulation of Beth’s speech. This is significant, I think, because Simon’s own identity is so thoroughly informed by being a writer. Language is Simon’s protective device; her book registers an almost compulsive effort to produce language, to demonstrate mentation and creativity, in a kind of compensatory way—but making up for her own sense of insufficiency, rather than masking Beth’s. At the same time, language is Simon’s particular weapon on behalf of her sibling (as is true for Fraser and Judy Karasik as well). If words can taunt and oppress—as the list of such offending epithets as “DIMWIT, HALFWIT, SIMPLETON, IDIOT … MORON, DEFECTIVE … RETARD” (100) makes brutally obvious—they can also resist and redefine. Simon takes up the challenge of retrieving Beth from “the periphery of society’s vision” (3) in her own manner of discourse, but she also gives over some of the narrative space to her sister, letting Beth write for herself. Beth emerges in her letters as a clearly defined subject with desires, dislikes, and a style all her own, perhaps most fully captured in her standard signature, “Cool Beth.” Fundamentally, Riding the Bus with My Sister is a meditation on the meaning of love—between sisters, lovers, friends. At the end of the book,

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reunited with her former boyfriend and about to be married, Simon writes of this “miracle” that “it would never have happened had I not spent my year with Beth. It was she whose very presence caused the ice around my heart to thaw” (293). The danger here lies in construing Beth’s disability as an “inspirational” catalyst for the resolution of a conventional and “able” marriage plot. Throughout the text, however, it is Beth, rather than Rachel Simon, who boasts the more rewarding relationships, Beth whom Simon observes loving others in an uncomplicated and unself-censoring way, Beth who tries to matchmake for her older sister. And, in the final sentences of the book, it is with Beth that Simon shares her “love of life” (293). Hardly the lonely third in a triangulated love story, Beth is as integral to the culmination of this textual journey as she was to its inception. Perhaps more crucially, it is clearly Beth’s way of life—with its bold colors, its hunger for motion, and its pride in being “diffrent!” (6, 7)—that convinces Simon, on the brink of the next phase of her own life, to “reach forward and open the door” (293).17 Simon presents her own identity in Riding the Bus with My Sister as being equally opaque to her as Beth’s had been, despite the presumption of self-knowledge that, as a woman of words, intelligence, and the sensitivity of a writer, she had indulged. The same can be said of the Karasiks and Fraser as well. The various odysseys these writers recount are ones of true psychodynamic recognition: to understand the self, the authors must acknowledge their siblings as separate and legitimate subjects in their own right, just as finding out about those siblings entails a painful but ultimately rewarding eschewal of old emotional habits. Provocatively, each author seems to try to create texts that make use of the sibling’s particular vernacular. The Karasiks’ graphic text deliberately fragments information in a way that might mimic autistic perception, and also honors David’s fondness for the visual. Fraser writes the accidental into his poems, finding beauty in words or forms of bodily experience we hold at bay for their putatively inherent ugliness. Simon incorporates Beth’s voice into her book, letting Beth speak as so many of her fellow bus riders would not. The works discussed here attempt to combine idioms, to produce stories that don’t simply represent but somehow embody the sibling, speak not just for but somehow as the sibling. At the same time, of course, these authors are always, ultimately, only themselves, the siblings in question subjects but also potential audiences of the books that inscribe them. It is a sense of responsibility to their siblings as individuals and readers of their own lives that finally distinguishes these texts as respectful inquiries into the familial and social meanings of cognitive disability. As Judy Karasik

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remarks, “Paul is going to show David the final draft of the book we’ve been writing about the family. I hope David finds a way to like it” (190).

Works Cited Andreason, Nancy C. The Broken Brain: The Biological Revolution in Psychiatry. New York: Harper and Row, 1984. Bérubé, Michael. Life As We Know It: A Father, A Family, and an Exceptional Child. New York: Vintage, 1996. —. “Citizenship and Disability.” Dissent Magazine 50.2 (Spring 2003): 52-57. Couser, G. Thomas. Vulnerable Subjects: Ethics and Life Writing. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. —. “Disability and (Auto)ethnography: Riding (and Writing) the Bus with My Sister.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 34.2 (April 2005): 121-42. Davis, Christine S. “Sisters and Friends: Dialogue and Multivocality in a Relational Model of Sibling Disability.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 34.2 (April 2005): 206-34. Eakin, Paul John, ed. The Ethics of Life Writing. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. Ferris, Jim. “The Enjambed Body: A Step toward a Crippled Poetics.” The Georgia Review 58.2 (Summer 2004): 219-221. Frank, Arthur W. “Moral Non-fiction: Life Writing and Children’s Disability,” In The Ethics of Life Writing ed. Paul John Eakin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. 174-94. Fraser, Greg. Strange Pietà. Lubbock: Texas Tech UP, 2003. Goodley, Dan, and Mark Rapley. “Changing the Subject: Postmodernity and People with ‘Learning Difficulties.’” In Disability/Postmodernity: Embodying Disability Theory, ed. Mairian Corker and Tom Shakespeare. London: Continuum, 2002: 127-42. Karasik, Paul and Judy. The Ride Together: A Brother and Sister’s Memoir of Autism in the Family. New York: Washington Square Press, 2003. Lardieri, Leigh A., Jan Blacher, and H. Lee Swanson. “Sibling Relationships and Parent Stress in Families of Children with and without Learning Disabilities.” Learning Disability Quarterly 23.2 (Spring 2000): 105-16. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: Harper, 1994.

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Overboe, James. “Ableist Limits on Self-Narration: The Concept of Postpersonhood.” In Unfitting Stories: Narrative Approaches to Disease, Disability, and Trauma, ed. Valerie Raoul, Connie Canam, Angela D. Henderson, and Carla Paterson. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2007: 275-82. Rosenwald, George C. and Richard L. Ochberg, eds. Storied Lives: The Cultural Politics of Self-Understanding. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992. Safer, Jeanne. The Normal One: Life with a Difficult or Damaged Sibling. New York: Delta Trade Paperbacks, 2003. Simon, Rachel. Riding the Bus with My Sister. New York: Plume, 2003. Squier, Susan M. “So Long as They Grow Out of It: Comics, The Discourse of Developmental Normalcy, and Disability.” Journal of Medical Humanities 29 (2008): 71-88. Trent, J. Alacia, Ann P. Kaiser, and Mark Wolery. “The Use of Responsive Interaction Strategies by Siblings.” Topics in Early Childhood Special Education 25.2 (2005): 107-18. Vadasy, Patricia F. et al. “Siblings of Handicapped Children: A Developmental Perspective on Family Interactions.” Family Relations 33.1 (Jan. 1984): 155-67.

Notes 1

The term is G. Thomas Couser’s, from his book Vulnerable Subjects: Ethics and Life Writing (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 56. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 2 In an essay examining her relationship with her disabled sister, Christine S. Davis writes that “there is little research that looks at the relationship between the sibling with the disability and the nondisabled sibling as it is experienced by the two of them,” and that “[r]esearch on impairment as a family systems and relational disability is scarce but crucial.” Davis’s concern about “the moral ethics of speaking for Kathy” impels her to include in the essay segments of email exchanges between her and her sister, and to send Kathy a draft of the essay once completed. “Sisters and Friends: Dialogue and Multivocality in a Relational Model of Sibling Disability,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 34 (2005): 206-34, 209, 231, 210. 3 At the end of his carefully argued Life As We Know It: A Father, A Family, and an Exceptional Child (New York: Vintage, 1996), Michael Bérubé tells his readers, “[m]y task, ethically and aesthetically, is to represent James to you with all the fidelity that mere language can afford, the better to enable you to imagine him—and to imagine what he might think of your ability to imagine him.” Bérubé’s metaphor for his project in the book is “setting a place” for Jamie at the

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collective table—a goal I believe the sibling authors studied here would say they share—but Bérubé’s hope, finally, is that “Jamie will someday be his own advocate, his own author, his own best representative” (264), which seems to return us to the privileged enterprise of self-authoring. Bérubé is, of course, an eloquent advocate for social justice and the rights of people with disabilities. See also his article “Citizenship and Disability” in Dissent Magazine (Spring 2003). 4 Jeanne Safer, The Normal One: Life with a Difficult or Damaged Sibling (New York: Delta Trade Paperbacks, 2003). 5 Paul John Eakin, ed., The Ethics of Life Writing (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2004), 5-6. 6 James Overboe, “Ableist Limits on Self-Narration: The Concept of Postpersonhood,” in Unfitting Stories: Narrative Approaches to Disease, Disability, and Trauma, ed. Valerie Raoul, Connie Canam, Angela D. Henderson, and Carla Paterson (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2007), 275-82, 277. 7 George C. Rosenwald and Richard L. Ochberg, eds., Storied Lives: The Cultural Politics of Self-Understanding (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 1. 8 Paul and Judy Karasik, The Ride Together: A Brother and Sister’s Memoir of Autism in the Family (New York: Washington Square Press, 2003), hereafter to be cited parenthetically; Rachel Simon, Riding the Bus with My Sister (New York: Plume, 2003), hereafter to be cited parenthetically; Greg Fraser, Strange Pietà (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2003); hereafter to be cited parenthetically. Citations refer to page numbers rather than line numbers. 9 In an article on graphic novels and disability, including the Karasiks’ The Ride Together, Susan M. Squier writes of David B.’s Epileptic that “the medium of graphic fiction is essential to an appreciation of the resolution accomplished” by this particular work, and quotes Scott McCloud: “If visual iconography is the vocabulary of comics, closure is its grammar … In a very real sense, comics IS closure!” As my discussion of The Ride Together will suggest, however, narrative and also conceptual closure is precisely what the text resists as an important aspect of its critique of conventional models of autism. Susan M. Squier, “So Long as They Grow Out of It: Comics, The Discourse of Developmental Normalcy, and Disability,” Journal of Medical Humanities 29 (2008): 71-88, 80, citing Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (New York: Harper, 1994), 67. 10 Arthur W. Frank, “Moral Non-fiction: Life Writing and Children’s Disability,” in The Ethics of Life Writing, ed. Paul John Eakin, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 174-94, 178. 11 See Nancy C. Andreason, The Broken Brain: The Biological Revolution in Psychiatry (New York: Harper and Row, 1984). 12 See Overboe, 279 and throughout. 13 This shifting of roles and “status” is often referred to as role asymmetry or role tension in studies of sibling interaction between developmentally impaired and nondisabled siblings. See, for example, Patricia F. Vadasy et al., “Siblings of Handicapped Children: A Developmental Perspective on Family Interactions,” Family Relations 33 (Jan. 1984): 155-67; J. Alacia Trent, Ann P. Kaiser, and Mark

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Wolery, “The Use of Responsive Interaction Strategies by Siblings,” Topics in Early Childhood Special Education 25 (2005): 107-18; and Leigh A. Lardieri, Jan Blacher, and H. Lee Swanson, “Sibling Relationships and Parent Stress in Families of Children with and without Learning Disabilities,” Learning Disability Quarterly 23 (2000): 105-16. 14 For a discussion of The Ride Together that focuses more fully on the brother relationship between Paul and David Karasik as well as on the use of comics within the text itself, see Squier. 15 Jim Ferris, “The Enjambed Body: A Step toward a Crippled Poetics,” The Georgia Review 58 (2004): 219-221, 219, 220. 16 In “Changing the Subject: Postmodernity and People with ‘Learning Difficulties,’” Dan Goodley and Mark Rapley detail the ways in which assumptions about people with cognitive impairment work to produce rather than merely confirm the preexistence of various forms of processing and interactional “incompetence.” In Disability/Postmodernity: Embodying Disability Theory, ed. Mairian Corker and Tom Shakespeare (London: Continuum, 2002), 127-42. 17 On these points, and for a compelling reading of Riding the Bus as a form of autoethnography, see G. Thomas Couser’s “Disability and (Auto)ethnography: Riding (and Writing) the Bus with My Sister,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 34 (2005): 121-42.

CONTRIBUTORS

CHRISTOPHER STUART is Katharine H. Pryor Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. His essays have appeared in Critique, American Literary Realism, The Henry James Review, and other journals. STEPHANIE TODD is a PhD candidate in 19th century American literature and environmental literature at the University of South Carolina. Stephanie wrote the Edith Wharton entry for the Encyclopedia of American Literature, and she is currently writing a book on American women nature writers and the domestic narrative. She has been working to recover Appalachian author Emma Bell Miles, and her work on Miles is being presented at both the American Literature Association's conference and the American Society for Literature and Environment's conference in 2009. TIMOTHY DOW ADAMS is a Professor of English at West Virginia University. He is the author of two scholarly books on autobiography: Telling Lies in Modern American Autobiography (1990) and Light Writing and Life Writing: Photography in Autobiography (2000), both from the University of North Carolina Press. Additionally, he is a founder and coeditor of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies and the author of numerous essays on life writing. TRACY J.R. COLLINS teaches in the Department of English Language and Literature at Central Michigan University. Much of her current work is an analysis of the female body and health and the politicization of athletic rituals of play, work, and competition in canonical literary contexts as well as New Woman novels. Some of her essays have appeared in Conradiana, Pedagogy, and Victorian Periodicals Review, as well as in books on the New Woman, and the subject of women in the work of Bernard Shaw. G. THOMAS COUSER is Professor of English and Director of Disability Studies at Hofstra University. His books include Vulnerable Subjects: Ethics and Life Writing (Cornell UP, 2004), Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability, and Life Writing (U of Wisconsin P, 1997), and Signifying

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Bodies: Disability in Contemporary Life Writing (U of Michigan, forthcoming). He is currently working on a book about memoirs of fathers and on a memoir of his own father. ELIZABETH GRUBGELD is a Professor of English at Oklahoma State University. She is the author of two books: Anglo-Irish Autobiography: Class, Gender, and the Forms of Narrative (Syracuse UP, 2004) and George Moore and the Autogenous Self: The Autobiography and Fiction (Syracuse UP, 1994). Additionally, she is the author of "Body, Privacy, and Community: Reading Disability in the Late Fiction of Andre Dubus" in Religion and Literature 39.2 (2007) and has published articles on autobiography and poetry in many journals, including Genre, Eire-Ireland, Religion and the Arts, and The New Hibernia Review. EMILY HIPCHEN is an Associate Professor of English at the University of West Georgia. She co-edits a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, and her scholarly work has appeared in the anthology On Second Thought: Updating the Eighteenth-Century Text (U of Delaware P, 2007) and The Eighteenth Century Novel. She is the author of Coming Apart Together: Fragments from an Adoption (The Literate Chigger Press, 2005), a work of creative nonfiction; her essays have won prizes at Georgetown Review and Open Windows. CYNTHIA HUFF is a Professor in the Department of English at Illinois State University. She is the editor of Women's Life-Writing and Imagined Communities (Routledge, 2005), the co-editor of Inscribing the Daily: Critical Essays on Women's Diaries (University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), and the author of British Women's Diaries: A Descriptive Bibliography of Selected Nineteenth-Century Women's Manuscript Diaries (AMS Press, 1985) as well as articles in journals such as Biography, a/b:Auto/Biography Studies, Victorian Review, and Prose Studies. MARY V. MARCHAND is an Associate Professor and the Chair of the Department of English and the chair of the Department of American Studies at Goucher College. Her work on Edith Wharton has appeared in Legacy: a Journal of American Women Writers, Women’s Studies, and American Notes and Queries. SUSANNAH B. MINTZ is an Associate Professor of English at Skidmore College. She is the author of two books: Unruly Body: Life Writing by Women with Disabilities (U of North Carolina P, 2007) and Threshold

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Poetics: Milton and Intersubjectivity (University of Delaware P, 2003); as well as numerous articles and chapters on life writing, disability in literature, seventeenth-century poetry, psychoanalysis, and creative nonfiction. She is currently at work on a book on the representation of pain. CAROLINE C. NICHOLS received her Ph.D. in the field of American Studies at The College of William and Mary in May of 2008, earning the College's Distinguished Dissertation Award in the Humanities in the process. She has presented work on American Literature and Culture at the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center Lecture Series, the Northeast Modern Language Association Annual Convention, and the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing, among other venues. She has also published an article entitled “The ‘Adventuress’ Becomes a ‘Lady’: Ida B. Wells’ British Tours” in Modern Language Studies’ Winter 2009 issue. JILL PRUETT is an Assistant Professor of English at The University of Alabama at Birmingham. She recently completed a dissertation titled, “Autobiography and the Business of Being Modern: Gertrude Stein, Josephine Baker, Sylvia Beach, and Elsa Schiaparelli in Paris.” She has presented her work at several conventions of the Modernist Studies Association and at the conference of the South Atlantic Modern Languages Association. KATRINA M. POWELL is an Associate Professor of English at Virginia Tech University. She is the author of The Anguish of Displacement: The Politics of Literacy in the Letters of Mountain Families in Shenandoah National Park (U of Virginia P, 2007), several chapters in anthologies, and articles in journals such as College Composition and Communication and Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal. NÓRA SÉLLEI is a Reader at the Institute of English and American Studies at the University of Debrecen, Hungary. Her numerous publications include four books: Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Personal and Professional Bond (Peter Lang, 1996), Lánnyá válik, s írni kezd - on 19th-cenury English women writers (Kossuth UP, 1999), Tükröm, tükröm... - on women writers' autobiographies from the beginning of the 20th century (Kossuth UP, 2001), and Mért félünk a farkastól? - on the state of feminist literary criticism in Hungary (Kossuth UP, 2007). She is the editor of the volume A nĘ mint szubjektum, a nĘi szubjektum (Kossuth

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UP, 2007), the editor and translator of a volume of theoretical essays A feminizmus találkozásai a (poszt)modernnel (Csokonai, 2006), the translator of Virginia Woolf's Moments of Being (Csokonai, 1999), Jean Rhys's Smile, Please (Csokonai, 2001), and Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas (Európa, 2006).

INDEX A Adams, Henry, 6, 7, 8, 9, 19 Adams, John, 6 Adams, Timothy Dow, 3, 13, 14, 15, 116, 125, 129, 169, 170, 183 Amigoni, David, 125, 128 Anderson, Linda, 220 Andreason, Nancy C., 258 Andrews, William L., 10, 19 Anstruther-Thomson, Clementina, 26, 27, 35, 36 Arnold, Carrie, 81, 82 Arnold, Matthew, 119 Asch, Adrienne, 218, 221 Ashley, Kathleen, 54 Atkinson, Diane, 125 Augustine, 3, 4, 5, 19, 40, 44 Auster, Paul, 169, 170 Avakian, Arlene, 73, 82 B Bacon, Gertrude, 104 Baird, Spencer F., 151 Barnum, P.T., 149 Barthes, Roland, 165, 182, 183, 187, 189 Bartholet, Elizabeth, 169, 183 Bartholet, Margaret Homans, 186 Baxter, Sylvester F., 136, 142, 147, 150, 153 Bayley, John, 226, 227, 228, 239 Beaton, Cecil, 69 Bederman, Gail, 147 Behar, Ruth, 166 Bell, Anne Olivier, 54 Bell, Susan Groag, 89, 104, 106 Benhabib, Seyla, 19 Benstock, Shari, 34, 36

Berenson, Bernard, 14, 24, 25, 28, 29, 32, 34, 35, 36 Bérubé, Michael, 258, 259, 260 Bhabha, Homi, 164, 165 Blacher, Jan, 258, 261 Blake, David Haven, 147, 149 Boehmer, Elleke, 124, 125 Bottome, Phyllis, 87, 92, 93, 94, 104 Bourdieu, Pierre, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36 Bower, Anne, 73, 82 Boynton, Victoria, 166 Brantlinger, Patrick, 147, 149 Brinnin, John Malcolm, 61, 68 Broadbent, Jim, 226 Brown, Sylvia A., 221, 222 Buber, Martin, 78 Butler, Judith, 9, 15, 19, 49, 54, 56, 104, 106 Byron, Lord George Gordon, 128 C Canam, Connie, 259 Caramagno, Thomas C., 50, 51, 54 Carlyle, Thomas, 110 Carp, E. Wayne, 182, 183, 186 Castelnuovo, Shirley, 90, 91, 93, 104 Chernin, Kim, 73, 82 Chorley, Katharine, 104, 107 Churchwell, Sarah, 183, 187 Cixous, Hélène, 52, 53, 54 Clarke, Austin, 73, 82 Cockin, Katharine, 184 Cohen, Elizabeth, 227, 232, 233, 234, 235, 239 Conn, Steven, 147, 149 Corker, Mairian, 258, 261

Index

266 Cornell, Drucilla, 19 Couser, G. Thomas, 2, 11, 12, 18, 19, 21, 195, 203, 204, 221, 246, 258, 259, 261 Cowley, Malcolm, 60, 63, 68 Cress, Donald A., 19 Crick, Mark, 73, 83 Cullwick, Hannah, 15, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128 Curtin, Deane W., 73, 82 Curtis, William E., 142, 147, 152 Cushing, Frank Hamilton, 16, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153 D Danahay, Martin A., 110, 119, 125 Daniel, Carolyn, 73, 83 Darwin, Charles, 97, 149 Davidoff, Leonore, 110, 111, 114, 125 Davis, Christine S., 258, 259 Davis, Lennard J., 221, 222 de Beauvoir, Simone, 104, 106 de Bondone, Giotto, 25 de Courtivron, Isabelle, 54, 166 de Lauretis, Teresa, 49, 54 de Man, Paul, 7, 8, 19, 38, 39, 40, 43, 54, 55, 208, 209, 210, 220, 221 de Voragine, Jacobus, 3 Dean, Amy, 184, 186, 188 Deans, Jill, 184 DeBaggio, Thomas, 239, 240 Decartes, René, 9, 11 Delman, Carmit, 73, 83 Deloria, Philip J., 148, 150 Dench, Judy, 226 deSalvo, Louise, 38, 43, 53, 54

Descartes, René, 3, 4, 5, 9, 19, 90, 207 Dettmar, Kevin, 59 Dettmar, Kevin J.H., 68 Dickens, Charles, 149 Digby, Joan, 73, 83 Digby, John, 73, 83 Douglass, Frederick, 10 Dreyfus, Hubert L., 54, 56 Dubus, Andre, 192, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 203, 205, 262 Ducasse, Alain, 82 Duckworth, Gerald, 43, 51 Dupee, Frederick Wilcox, 6, 19 E Eakin, Paul John, 2, 12, 18, 19, 54, 55, 125, 127, 170, 171, 172, 183, 243, 258 Edelman, Gerald M., 12 Edwards, Jonathan, 4, 19 Ehrlich, Elizabeth, 73, 83 Ellison, Ralph, 1 Ellsworth, P.C., 35, 36 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 5, 6, 19 F Faithfull, Lillian M., 105 Farmer, Fannie, 78 Ferris, Jim, 251, 258 Fine, Michelle, 218, 221 Fisher, Florence, 16, 169, 173, 174, 175, 176, 179, 182, 183, 184, 187, 188 Fisher, M.F.K., 73, 83 Flanner, Janet, 58, 68 Foster, Jeanne, 73, 84 Foucault, Michel, 40, 46, 47, 49, 54, 56 Frank, Arthur W., 193, 194, 201, 203, 206, 244, 258 Franklin, Benjamin, 5, 8, 209 Franzen, Jonathan, 227, 230, 231, 235, 239

New Essays on Life Writing and the Body Fraser, Greg, 243, 249, 251, 257, 258 Freud, Sigmund, 43 Frey, James, 208 Friedell, Morris, 231 Fuller, Clarissa Parsons, 148 Fussell, Betty, 73, 83 G Gagnier, Regenia, 105, 106, 119, 120, 125 Garber, Marjorie, 146, 148 Garofalo, Daniela, 125, 128 Gibson-Wood, Carol, 35 Gilbert, Sandra M., 55 Gilmore, Leigh, 2, 9, 19, 38, 39, 40, 54, 221 Gish, Nancy K., 184 Goodley, Dan, 258, 261 Goodman, Susan, 35, 37 Gopnik, Adam, 72, 74, 82, 83 Gottlieb, Lori, 73, 83 Grady, Denise, 224, 239 Grand, Sarah, 100, 105 Grealy, Lucy, 17, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222 Grealy, Suellen, 208, 221 Green, Jesse, 147 Grimm. M.F., 205 Griner, Marley, 188 Gubar, Susan, 55 Gunew, Sneja, 165, 167 Guthrie, Sharon, 90, 91, 93, 104 H Hall, Catherine, 114, 125 Hamilton, Mary Agnes, 105, 106 Hammett, Dashiell, 80 Haney, John, 73, 83 Haslanger, Sally, 184, 185, 186, 187 Heldke, Lisa M., 73, 82 Hellman, Lillian, 80 Hemingway, Ernest, 68, 73

267

Henderson, Angela D., 259 Henderson, Charles, 203, 206 Herman, Ellen, 184, 186 Hewitt, Martin, 125, 128 Hillyer, Barbara, 221 Hinsley, Curtis M., 147, 148, 150 Hipchen, Emily, 184 Hirsch, Marianne, 126, 129, 172, 184, 187 Hockenberry, John, 17, 192, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204 Holtz, Debra Levy, 16, 169, 176, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 187, 188, 189 Homans, Margaret, 183, 184 Hornbacher, Marya, 73, 83 Hudson, Derek, 111, 124, 126 Huff, Cynthia, 126 Hughes, Mary Vivian, 87, 95, 96, 104, 105 Hurston, Zora Neale, 10 Hutchison, Beth, 204, 221 I Inness, Sherrie A., 73, 83 Irigray, Luce, 15 Irving, Washington, 31 J Jacob, Naomi, 105, 107 Jacobs, Harriet, 10 Jain, Sarah Lochlann, 211, 221 James, Henry, 6 James, William, 13, 14, 24, 25, 26, 28, 34, 35, 36 Jefferson, Thomas, 5 Jelinek, Estelle C., 88, 91, 105 Jones, Judith, 73, 83 Jordan, Ellen, 106 K Kadar, Marlene, 126 Kaiser, Ann P., 259, 260 Kantrowitz, Barbara, 224, 239

Index

268 Kaplan, Alice, 166 Kaplan, Amy, 141, 142, 148, 152 Karasik, David, 261 Karasik, Judy, 243, 245, 246, 248, 249, 256, 257, 258, 260 Karasik, Paul, 243, 245, 246, 247, 248, 257, 258, 260, 261 Karp, Gary, 205 Kay, Jackie, 173, 182, 184 Keynes, Florence, 105, 107 Kingsolver, Barbara, 73, 83 Kingston, Maxine Hong, 10 Klein, Stanley, 205 Kondo, Dorinne, 165, 167 Kristeva, Julia, 49, 54, 56 L Lacan, Jacques, 213 Lane, Jill, 166 Lardieri, Leigh A., 258, 261 Launius, Carl Judson, 192, 200, 201, 204 Lavie, Smadar, 165 Lears, T.J. Jackson, 148, 150 Lee, Vernon, 14, 24, 26, 27, 28, 29, 32, 34, 35, 36 Leith, William, 73, 83 Lejeune, Philippe, 54, 55, 89, 105, 127 Lénárt-Cheng, Helga, 59, 60, 68 Lerner, Betsy, 14, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 82, 83 Lifton, Betty Jean, 16, 169, 181, 182, 183, 184, 186, 187, 188 Lim, Shirley Geok-lin, 16, 17, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167 Lind, Jenny, 149 Lindgren, Kristin, 195, 204 Lionnet, Françoise, 10, 19 Locke, John, 4 Logan, John A., 143 Loomba, Ania, 117, 126 Luhan, Mabel Dodge, 61

Lummis, Charles F., 132, 148 Lupton, Deborah, 73, 83 M Magill, Emily, 142, 143 Malcolm, Janet, 68 Malin, Jo, 166 Marcus, Laura, 105, 106, 221 Marks, Elaine, 54 Matthews, Washington, 153 Mayhew, Henry, 116 McClintock, Anne, 111, 126, 141, 148, 152 McCloud, Scott, 258, 260 McCrum, Robert, 105 McGowin, Diana Friel, 240 McPherson, James Alan, 73, 83 Melosh, Barbara, 184, 186 Menzie, Morgan, 81, 83 Meyer, Wulf-Uwe, 35 Mill, John Stuart, 110, 119 Miller, Nancy K., 126, 127 Miller, Sue, 18, 227, 235, 236, 237, 238, 239, 240, 241 Milton, John, 98 Miner, Madonne, 204, 205, 206 Minkeman, Kinneth P., 19 Mintz, Susannah B., 11, 12, 18, 19, 221, 222 Mitchell, David T., 204, 205 Miyake, Perry, 167 Monroe, Marilyn, 187 Moore, Judith, 14, 72, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83 Moorman, Margaret, 242 Morgan, Kathryn Pauly, 211, 213, 221 Morrison, Toni, 1, 2, 8, 19 Munby, Arthur J., 15, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 126, 127, 128 Murdoch, Iris, 226 Murphy, Robert, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 200, 204

New Essays on Life Writing and the Body N Neergard, Laura, 240 Neuman, Shirley, 40, 54, 126, 127 Nicolson, Nigel, 55 Novy, Marianne, 184, 185, 186, 188 O O’Donnell, James J., 3, 20 Ochberg, Richard L., 243, 259 Olney, James, 166 Ortega y Gasset, Jose, 33, 35 Overboe, James, 243, 244, 259 P Page, Violet, 36 Parezo, Nancy J., 148, 149 Parsloe, Muriel Jardine, 87, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105 Patchett, Ann, 208, 209, 210, 211, 217, 218, 221, 222 Paterson, Carla, 259 Peters, Gerald, 54 Peterson, Linda H., 88, 89, 105, 106, 122, 123, 126 Phelan, Peggy, 166 Picabia, Francis, 69 Picasso, Pablo, 68, 69 Pilkington, J.G., 19 Plato, 40, 44 Polkey, Pauline, 221 Pollock, Della, 162, 166 Powell, Katrina M., 166 Pratt, Mary Louise, 137, 148 Price, Reynolds, 17, 192, 194, 195, 196, 204, 205, 206 Puller, Lewis B., Jr., 192, 198, 199, 200, 204, 206 R Rabinow, Paul, 54, 56 Rachel, Simon, 252 Raoul, Valerie, 259 Rapley, Mark, 258, 261

269

Raverat, Gwen, 87, 97, 98, 99, 100, 104, 105 Raverat, Jacques, 107 Ray, Man, 69 Reay, Barry, 111, 126 Rehm, Diane, 77, 84 Reichl, Ruth, 73, 84 Reisenzein, Rainer, 35, 36 Reynolds, Jonathan, 73, 84 Rodriguez, Barbara, 10, 20 Rodriguez, Richard, 73 Rombauer, Irma, 78 Rosenwald, George C., 243, 259 Ross, Harold, 68 Rossetti, D.G., 111 Rugg, Linda Haverty, 126, 129 Ruskin, John, 111, 119 Rust, Martha Dana, 111, 126 S Safer, Jeanne, 242, 259 Sanchez-Eppler, Karen, 9, 20 Satz, Martha, 185 Schiach, Morag, 55 Schofield, Mary Anne, 73, 84 Schulkind, Jeanne, 55 Schutzwohl, Achim, 35 Secrest, Meryl, 35, 36 Shakespeare, Tom, 258, 261 Shapiro, Anna, 73, 84 Shenk, David, 223, 224, 229, 231, 235, 239, 240 Shilling, Chris, 35, 37 Simon, Rachel, 243, 252, 253, 254, 255, 256, 257, 259 Singer, I. B., 76 Skubal, Susanne, 73, 84 Smith, Bonnie G., 204, 221 Smith, John E., 19 Smith, Kimberley, 242 Smith, Sidonie, 2, 9, 20, 47, 49, 50, 51, 54, 90, 105, 106, 125, 126, 127 Smyth, Ethel, 43, 50 Snyder, Sharon L., 204, 205

Index

270 Sontag, Susan, 187 Spalding, Frances, 105 Spiegelman, Art, 229 Sprigge, Elizabeth, 64, 68 Springen, Karen, 224, 239 Squier, Susan M., 259, 260, 261 Stanley, Liz, 110, 111, 125, 126 Stanton, Domna, 89, 105 Stein, Gertrude, 14, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69 Stendhal, Renate, 68, 69 Stephen, Leslie, 52 Stevenson, Matilda, 149 Stimpson, Catharine R., 58, 68 Stocking, George W., Jr., 148, 150 Stout, Harry S., 19 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 149 Stowell, Phyllis, 73, 84 Strain, Ellen, 134, 148 Strainchamps, Anne, 84 Stringer, Mabel, 91, 105 Strohm, Kate, 242 Strong-Boag, Veronica, 185, 186 Suleri, Sara, 73, 84 Swanson, H. Lee, 258, 261 Swedenburg, Ted, 165 Swell, Barbara, 79 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 111 Swindells, Julia, 110, 126 T Talbot, John E., 204, 206 Tenatsali, 132, 133, 134, 136, 141, 145, 146 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 119 Theophano, Janet, 73, 84 Thompson, Rosemarie Garland, 148, 152, 221 Thurber, James, 68 Thurmond, Strom, 168 Toklas, Alice, 67, 69 Trautman, Joanne, 55 Trent, J. Alacia, 259, 260 Truettner, William, 148

V Vadasy, Patricia F., 259, 260 van Vechten, Carl, 69 Verrier, Nancy, 185, 186 Volk, Patricia, 73, 84 W Wachtel, Eleanor, 204 Wagner, Tamara S., 166, 167 Wagner-Martin, Linda, 68 Warnes, Andrew, 73, 84 Washington, Booker T., 65 Washington-Williams, Essie Mae, 168 Watson, Julia, 90, 105, 106, 125, 126, 127 Watt, Steven, 59, 68 Wegner, Frederick, 35 Wendell, Susan, 219, 220, 221, 222 Wertsch, Mary, 204, 206 Wexler, Laura, 141, 142, 149, 152 Wharton, Edith, 13, 14, 24, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37 Whitman, Walt, 19 Whittier-Ferguson, John, 61, 69 Wilcox, David R., 147 Willard-Traub, Margaret K., 154, 164, 166 Williams, Patricia, 166 Winegardner, Mark, 73, 84 Winthrop, John, 4, 20 Witt, Charlotte, 184, 185, 186, 187 Wolery, Mark, 259, 261 Wolfe, Thomas, 81 Wolff, Cynthia Griffin, 35 Wolfson, Susan J., 127, 128 Woolf, Virginia, 14, 38, 39, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 49, 50, 52, 53, 54, 55, 98 Wordsworth, William, 5, 6, 20 Wright, Richard, 73 Y Yalom, Marilyn, 89, 104, 106