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

With Thinking through the Mothers: Reimagining Women’s Biographies, Janet Beizer investigates the history of womankind and in particular, women authors through time. It is a celebration of women’s identities as perceived through the roles of foremothers, mothers, daughters, and writers.

In her first chapter, Beizer sets the scene for an investigation into the past and establishes that the reconstruction of women’s identities is problematic. She explores a collection of famous women’s biographies entitled Elle était une fois (Once upon her time), published as a twenty-two part biographic series between 1987 and 1993, to identify the issues that autobiography and biography pose to the less famous women asked to compose this collection. In addition to providing a historical background on (auto) biographic writing and its limitations, the chapter comes to the conclusion that women’s lives have never been extensively documented throughout history because their stories have never been deemed sufficiently significant.

In chapter two the author’s intent is to allegorize the problematic of chapter one. Beizer intended it to be an analysis of the hermaphrodite figure, which became a symbol for scientific indecision and ambivalence during the nineteenth century in Louise Colet’s Les Pays lumineux (1875). However, considering that subsequent chapters concentrate on female identity influenced by the mother figure, I understood the merit of the chapter differently. Instead, I see it as a template for nineteenth-century male/female relationships operating under the patriarchal power principle. Colet, who features as the protagonist, is also Gustave Flaubert’s jilted lover. She is the woman who, consumed with jealousy, seeks to find herself through her lover’s footsteps by travelling to the Far East only to find her unworthy “double,” who is nothing more than a courtesan that Flaubert had once briefly idealized. The chapter thus seems to illustrate women’s lack of significance in a man’s world. Colet was a successful, talented, and for her time, very progressive woman, who fell in love with an aspiring author. Nevertheless, decades later the world remembers only Flaubert’s letters and Flaubert’s literary success while he himself burnt Colet’s letters—a gesture that one may call symbolic of the lack of appreciation that men attributed to remarkable women during the nineteenth century and which makes historical identity reconstruction so difficult today.

In the remaining chapters, Beizer proposes new ways and methods of interpreting women’s lives and their writing. Chapter three analyzes three texts by two women authors: Huguette Bouchardeau’s George Sand: La Lune et les sabots (1990) and Rose Noël (1990) and George Sand’s Histoire de ma vie (1855). Beizer’s analysis suggests that these texts intersect and intensely, but unintentionally, play out the daughter-mother-foremother dynamic. The underlying argument is that women cannot escape their own histories, their own genealogies, and their own mothers’ influences. Beizer’s conclusion derives from an interview that she conducted with Bouchardeau, which forms the central point of chapter four. The interview uncovers that Bouchardeau’s initial refusal to acknowledge the influence of her mother in her writing actually speaks to support Beizer’s conclusion that Bouchardeau was influenced and inspired by Sand’s Histoire de ma vie to write about her own mother in Rose Noël.

Chapter five addresses the topic of adoption through a personal essay written by Beizer herself. The essay engages in a warranted discussion on motherhood and the legitimacy of an adopted daughter with regard to ownership, genealogy, and family connectedness. Beizer’s analysis focuses on an interesting and intriguing point of view by suggesting that the independence of a child’s identity from its family can be beneficial to the child’s development. She argues that this independence would allow the child to grow up unfettered by his/her parents’ expectations. She outlines that for a parent of an adopted child, a divestment of biological kinship in regard to ownership issues is natural. Furthermore, she posits that this...