Vested Interests: The Con Artist, the Historian, and the Feminist Biographer

As feminist biographers we often see ourselves engaged in an act of rescue (Hall 23). This has certainly been the impulse that led me to research the life of convicted criminal fraudster Amy Maud Bock (1859–1943). Amy Bock secured her place in history for her impersonation of a man and subsequent marriage to an unsuspecting woman in 1909. This “escapade,” along with her impressive string of aliases and career of confidence scams, has ensured that her status as New Zealand’s most notorious female criminal confidence artist has entered into the realms of folklore. Her life, and in particular her cross-dressing exploits as Percy Redwood, has become the inspiration for poems, plays, documentaries, artistic exhibitions, and fictional works.

One of the ways in which legends are made is through the perpetuation of exaggerated and often factually incorrect biographical detail, and this has certainly been the case for Bock. From the time she gained nation-wide notoriety in 1909, the more sensational details of her life have been uncritically perpetuated in the popular media. As a confidence artist, Bock’s craft was to tell convincing stories and versions of her life, to recreate her autobiography in ways that could work to her advantage. So how does the con artist’s biographer navigate this minefield of self-perpetuated false representations and rehearsed untruths?

As Teresa Iles has written, the way the writer of the biography sees herself in relation to the subject, the reader, and the biography, will have consequences for the biography that is produced (4–6). If the writer sees herself primarily as the subject’s Biographer, she will be true to the evidence of her research but equally true to herself in her interpretation of that evidence. If the writer sees herself primarily as a Researcher, her commitment shifts to the reader of the biography whose priorities in judging her work will be bound up with criteria of scholarly presentation. The extensive notes that accompany this approach can have the effect of drawing attention away from the process of interpretation that has given shape to the biography. In practice, however, this distinction that Iles has made is not necessarily clear-cut.

Listening between the lines, one can hear the tensions between the historian who wants reliable, factual, documented “truths” and the feminist who understands how the daily realities of women’s lives are often lost, inaccessible, and misinterpreted. It is that process of interpretation that is the focus of this article. Biographers, like historians, are always dependent upon the records they can retrieve about their subject. Likewise, the biography is not simply an arrangement of facts but a constructed narrative, informed by a point of view: “No matter how subtly the biographer inserts herself into the text, she will have to be there behind the scenes, managing the chronology, not just documenting it” (Middlebrook 159). Constructing a life story is more than simply narrating a life history. It is a complex process that demands the skills of both the literary artist and the scientific researcher. As Dee Garrison explains, “The biographer must operate in accordance with strict rules of evidence—measuring the validity of documents, weighing contradictory findings, adding scrupulous footnoting. Yet the techniques of the novelist are also essential. One must shape and order the evidence, deal with flashbacks, develop believable characters, dramatize crucial moments, and analyze human relations—all this without conscious distortion of fact” (67). The first step in constructing a life story involves locating information about the subject’s life—what biographer Leon Edel calls the “mask of life”: “the appearance, the façade, the overt behaviour one sees (or finds in letters, diaries and other documents)” (qtd. in Smith 291). In the process of locating and collating this information, we need to be mindful of the constructed and partial nature of these sources and the contexts within which women’s lives are shaped and embedded.

The second step in constructing a biographical narrative involves creating and conveying a sense of who the individual is or was. Edel calls this the underlying “life myth”—the...