New Essays on Life Writing and the Body (review)

Christy Brown’s landmark autobiography, My Left Foot (1954), a narrative both by and about the body, reaches out from the experience of one body to all others. As the author recounts a life dominated by both the limitations and advanced capabilities of his body, he writes a text which is not “just something about myself, but about all who had a life similar to my own” (139). In doing this, Brown provides a narrative born out of intellectual and physical knowledge; his writing is to pass from one mind to another and between bodies. Such a project is at the core of New Essays on Life Writing and the Body and as Timothy Dow Adams rightly points out in the foreword, the collection is both timely and significant since our sense of self “is so often connected to both body image and body function” (ix).

Despite this claim of universal relevance, the editors point to the absence of the body in a large section of life writing and an often-limited acknowledgement of its importance by critics. In this way the collection brings the body into sharp focus and in doing so opens up a wealth of new readings. The readjustment of perspective this encourages in readers is admirable and impacts upon not only the texts and contexts covered within the book but on readings of life writing more broadly. Indeed, both general and specialist readers will be rewarded by the way the theme is taken up by the contributors. While some of the themes evoked might be considered required elements in such a collection—such as illness and dis/ability—the inclusion of more atypical bodily concerns—for example, the athletic or adopted body—adds a freshness to the book’s approach.

The introduction by Christopher Stuart grapples with the enormous-but-vital trinity of gender, race, and disability, traditionally central to any discussion on the body, and then expands into analyses of the absence of the body in western philosophy and history. Stuart moves from Cartesian readings of the bodiless self into the age of Anglo-Romanticism, in which the promotion of the idealized imagination began to erase the materiality of bodily experience, through to de Man’s “sweeping pronouncement” of de-facement in which bodies “recede entirely into irretrievability, and thus invisibility”(7). Stuart’s introduction will prove particularly useful for scholars of life writing, providing as it does a useful overview of the field but also a thought-provoking breakdown, compartmentalizing texts which are considered as “body-centered” into sub-sections on the Head, Torso, Feet/Legs, Skin, Whole Body, and Sexual Orientation. This useful dismemberment of the topic points to numerous potential avenues for future research while also sketching possible sub-fields for this burgeoning subgenre of life writing.

The claims made here for body-centric life writing can at times seem tied to a previous generation of life writing research, focused on widening the scope beyond the privileged, white, male, literary canon—as Stuart has it “to liberate the bodies that had previously been oppressed or obscured in autobiography” (7). While this is in some danger of seeming a little behind the times, several examples can be found within these pages which present nuanced contemporary readings of clearly post-millennial topics such as eating disorders and intra-racial adoption. The arrangement of the essays into sections focusing on literary life, women, adopted selves, and disability/disease/disfigurement points to the array of approaches taken here. Although all of the essays in this collection contribute in their variety and scope to the overall project, a selection of highlights is presented here to provide an overview.

Modernist women writers Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, and Gertrude Stein are the subject of the first section of New Essays on Life Writing and the Body, and the focused intersections highlighted by Mary V. Marchand, Nóra Séllei, and Jill Pruett hint at a worthy separate collection which could...