Thinking through the Mothers: Reimagining Women’s Biographies (review)

Janet Beizer’s book begins, as many do, with a dedication page: “To Jenny.” An epigraph follows: “It is another world. But what else can a mother give her daughter but such beautiful rifts in time?” With this opening gesture—her offer of her book as a gift to her daughter, Jenny—Beizer inverts the familiar position of the female biographer who writes as a daughter in search of her mother. Beizer’s act—to write as a mother—is one, she argues, that “has only just begun” (226). The epigraph’s “rifts in time” not only mark the past as “another world” fractured by the gaps of incomplete memory, but also hint at the possibility of “beautiful” alternatives to totalizing conceptions of lives in history. This search for alternatives is driven by the question: “how does one read and write lives in retrospect and yet respect the silences of the past?” (63).

The way not to do this, in Beizer’s view, is to rely, as most biographers have, on “biological-genealogical traditions” (5). Beizer’s rethinking of genealogy structures her critique of conventional biographies of women as efforts at resurrection or recuperation: what she calls “salvation biographies.” Joining the work of numerous other postmodern theorists who have challenged the early feminist project to bring women’s silences into voice and thereby rescue them from oblivion, Beizer’s study begins by theorizing a new genre she dubs “bio-autography” (3): the writing of the self through the representation of another’s life. Bio-autography creates “alter egos” (31) through the conjoining of the story of one’s own life and that of another; specifically, it is a form of writing that “resurrect[s] a foremother who might redeem the maternal lack” (35). Such resurrections paradoxically lead to “an elision of the mother” (35); they kill her off and, at the same time, awaken “maternal phantoms” (3). As a “hybrid genre” (3), bio-autography exposes, in Beizer’s view, the intersubjective dimensions of biography in general. For those interested in women’s writing, bio-autography constitutes a particularly rich site for the exploration of the complexities of the mother-daughter relation.

Although this conceptual frame, elaborated in Chapter One, is crucial for an appreciation of Beizer’s contributions to the study of biography, her most powerful points emerge from the autobiographical narrative she weaves through the book, and from her meticulous close readings of a variety of authors, especially Louise Colet, George Sand, and Colette, the subjects of Chapters Two, Three, and Six, respectively. In the chapters of literary analysis, Beizer displays both her considerable skills as a gifted critic and her knowledge of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French culture. In all of her readings, Beizer is guided by her critique of redemptive models of reading, however well intended they might be. Her resistance to such models leads to original interpretations of some of the most widely studied authors of the French canon.

In Chapter Two’s analysis of Louise Colet, Beizer builds on her previous book about hysteria in nineteenth-century France, Ventriloquized Bodies (1994), to expose the fetishistic logic inherent in the salvation mission. She does so by engaging the story of Kuchuk Hanem, a nineteenth-century Egyptian woman made famous by her role as “Flaubert’s courtesan.” More recently, or at least since Edward Said’s Orientalism, Kuchuk has come to represent Western imperialism in its violation of the Oriental other it has feminized and conquered. Rather than trying to locate the “real” Kuchuk beneath the myth, however, Beizer finds that Kuchuk “seems to elude representation” altogether; she says, bluntly, “let me state at the outset that I won’t try to find Kuchuk Hanem” (45). Instead, Beizer reads the tangled relations that link Kuchuk, through Flaubert, to Louise Colet, another writer and Flaubert’s ex-mistress. Her reading includes an elaboration of hysteria through Colet’s encounter with a vampiric figure in her bed, the...