The Lessons of the Medusa: Anna Jameson and Collective Biographies of Women

It is commonly assumed that women’s lives remained largely hidden from history until their systematic recuperation by second-wave feminists. A glance through the annals of European arts and letters can yield the impression that women could audition for parts only as angels or viragos: much better or no better than they should be. Anna Brownell Murphy Jameson (1794–1860), pioneering a form of feminist criticism in 1832, observed, “Women are illustrious in history, not from what they have been in themselves, but generally in proportion to the mischief they have done or caused” (Characteristics xviii). Like many recent feminist scholars, this early-Victorian woman of letters sought to supplant the stereotypes with her own models

to show [. . .] how much of what is most fair, most excellent, most sublime among the productions of human genius, has been owing to [women’s] influence, direct or indirect; and [to] call up the spirits of the dead,--those who from their silent urns still rule the pulses of our hearts--to bear witness to this truth.

(Memoirs of the Loves 129; see Johnston 51–54)

This rather ambiguous statement of purpose is characteristic of Jameson’s recuperative work. To honor women’s “fair [. . .] influence” and to summon the overpowering spirits of women past are not quite the same project, though they have been interdependent impulses of women’s biographical history for centuries. Let us now praise once-famous women. Or, let us dissolve the panegyric of heroines in quite a different medium.

Those who wish to address the woman question--from any angle, at any period--often “illustrate [. . .] by examples,” as Jameson puts it in her study of Shakespeare’s heroines (Characteristics xiii). Often, that is, they sidestep those irresolvable disagreements over constructed or essential difference, over equal rights or complementary duties, by presenting a collection of exemplary women. Catalogues of mutually illustrative, albeit mutually exclusive, types of female excellence arise in contexts ranging from classical Latin, Chinese, and Arabic, to medieval and early-modern Italian and French, to Victorian and contemporary British and North American. It is such a venerable discursive practice that we have to wonder about the continuing popularity of role model collections of women as a form of feminist intervention; do the model lists not reinforce rather than alter the differential norms? My Library of Congress 1999 engagement calendar, Women Who Dare, echoes the biographical collections that flourished throughout Victoria’s reign and that found a publishers’ niche as Jameson was launching her career in the 1830s.¹ Collective biography of women could be said to be the generic form that dominates feminist discourse, even those varieties opposed in principle to humanist representationalism. Much as I embrace this form, I wish to encourage skeptical examination of the effects of various select assemblies in their historical contexts. At the same time, if I assist in a belated Jameson revival, I also wish to reserve an ironic distance on an undertaking that echoes her own work.

In feminist recovery there is an element of repetition compulsion, a reenactment of the loss of the mothers we think back through. It begins to seem like a worthy occupation while we wait, a Penelope’s web: so much has already been done--again and again. The process of recognition seems to bury as much as it exhumes, just as disciplinary narratives of fields and periods hide historical anomalies, lost colonies, throwbacks. As Marjorie Garber argues, today’s redundant lists of the great bespeak a “fantasy of wholeness” provoked by a sense of “something missing” (42), but the loss is reinscribed in making the restorative list. If constructing supplementary canons or histories were an effective way to infiltrate dominant canons or histories, we would long since have ceased to need such supplements, yet the lists continue to proliferate for every minority group.² Nevertheless, there may be a corrosive rather than a slow waterdrop effect. In Judith Butler’s terms, the “reiteration” of the norms opens up “gaps and fissures” (10). Repeating sets of personified refutations of the nothingness of woman have accompanied changing conditions for...