Mapping Our Selves: Canadian Women's Autobiography in English (review)

Reviews The following is a reprint of a review first published in Biography 17, no. 3 (Summer 1994). Because of a printing error, portions of the earlier publication in some copies were unreadable. Thus we are reprinting the review here in its entirety. HELEN M. BUSS, Mapping Our Selves: Canadian Women's Autobiography in English. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1993. χ + 237 pp. 839.95. Beginning her analysis here, Buss rejects the mirror metaphor so often used to define the function of texts; because of its ubiquity, she says, she must deal with its limitations, "since as a metaphor not only is it used by Lacan and poststructuralists , but it is an embedded humanistic metaphor as well, the only difference being mat the humanists see the mirror as capable of revealing truth, while poststructuralists , realizing the slipperiness of linguistic mirrors, expose its falsity" (8). For purposes of her own analysis, rather, Buss prefers mapping as metaphor , die advantages of which she explains as follows: "A mapping of autobiography recognizes both the palimpsest of layers in human subjects and the erosion of those layers; it recognizes that the contours of the world, the language people use to shape the self, to communicate the self, the ways that language assigns meaning, creates symbols, have not always been the same. Indeed, mapping itself and its technologies change constantly, shifting and readjusting our concepts of the self and the world" (10-11). Later on, in the midst of her argument, Buss makes another assertion which is especially germane: "Each of us must begin with the archaeology of our own lives, our parents' lives, and those of our forebears in the places they made their homes, the places that have become our homes. This mapping will give each of us our voice, but only when it is gathered in the palimpsest of other mappings, other voices" (150). 70 biography Vol. 18, No. 1 Each of these quotations represents, I think, one of three central elements vitalizing this excellent book: critical theory, autobiographical theory (both generically and with regard to women's autobiography), and the critic's personal relation to the texts she selects for examination. I offer no illustrative quotation for the fourth central concern—autobiographical texts by Canadian women writing in English—but it, obviously, is key to the book's design. Each plays its role in the argument. Buss actively critiques poststructural and feminist theory, demonstrating both its relevance and limitations as it furthers her project and, equally, as it hinders it. Moreover, Buss places her work squarely within the discourses surrounding autobiographical texts from George Gusdorf and Philippe Lejeune on, paying special attention to Üiose critics who have dealt most extensively with autobiographies by women, especially Patricia Meyer Spacks, Sidonie Smith, and Patricia Yaeger. Finally, Buss practices the autobiography she analyzes : throughout Mapping Our Selves, a reader is never far from Buss herself, and so from her own personal experience; particularly (and most effectively), this aspect of the book is evident in the sections that introduce each of the diree parts of the volume—"One: Reading for an Alternative Tradition," "Two: On Becoming a Twentieth-Century Woman," "Three: Finding a Counter-Discourse." As this description of method suggests, Buss shows herself a scholar and a person possessed of a generous and far-reaching intellect. Troubled throughout by the implications of her own analysis, pushing always to delve further, demanding understanding from the numerous juxtapositions she posits, Buss is never satisfied—her own presence in xhe text is salutary, as this quotation from the third introductory section illustrates: "I have come to believe that it is not myself as woman that is lacking, but language as it works through me, constructs me. What I lack is a fully embodied female tradition in language, a language that would rescue the vivid imaginations of those women at my mother's tea table, without censoring them, a language that put all that I have learned about language as symbol, language as sign, in the service of my experience of life in this female body" (184). I have not yet said anything about Buss's subject as described in her subtitle—Canadian Women's...