The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England (review)

138 the minnesota review 7"Ae Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England. Felicity A. Nussbaum. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1989, 288 pp., $29.95 In The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England, Felicity A. Nussbaum challenges previous, structuralist analyses of autobiography which have assumed that the genre is best understood as a single, unified, well-defined set of discursive traits where the "self is distinct. She argues that the concept of "autobiography" must be read instead as a complex and contradictory one, where a historical framework of intersecting gender and class ideologies work to fashion a fictional "self that both simultaneously upholds and resists the dominant culture. As such, "autobiography" and "self may not be singularly defined or read, but must be examined through a kaleidoscopic lens that takes in the diverse elements present in the panorama. The text opens with two introductory chapters outlining the theoretical perspective that guides the vision of the text. She adapts Althusser and Foucault to create a special brand of feminist materialism that allows her to define "self and "autobiography" as historically-determined, gendered ideologies functioning through state apparatuses. In the following chapters, Nussbaum pans the lens over, around, and about the landscape of eighteenth-century autobiography to demonstrate that autobiography acts as both "a site of resistance as well as justification," where ideologies are "reinscribed" as much as they are "resisted" (176). The chapter on "The Autobiographical Subject" focuses on the result of the conflicting descriptions of "self present in eighteenth-century philosophical and religious writings. According to Nussbaum, Locke, Hume and other eighteenth-century philosophers both create and deny an individuated self. She implies, but does not state directly, that the contradictory position of the self in these writings produces, and therefore characterizes, the eighteenth-century autobiography. In the chapters that follow, she discusses spiritual autobiographies written by both male and female Dissenters and Methodists, Boswell's journals and his Life of Johnson, women's scandalous memoirs, and Hester Thrale's "Family Book" and Thralina. In each autobiographical work cited, she finds a "self that speaks simultaneously for and against the dominant culture. Nussbaum's criticism is best when it describes this flux of "self in its analysis of specific autobiographical texts, as we see for example when she writes of Thrale's attempt to "capture" herself as mother. Hester Thrale used the prevailing modes to define herself as the prototypical bourgeois mother in the "Family Book," yet she counters by asserting her authority against doctors and by granting practical "mothering" a systematic textual representation. In other words, Thrale sets out the justification for the impossible task of "mothering" in which the various systems of representation intersect and collide. She recognizes, but does not elide, the contradictions of her gendered subjectivity that make the production of a linear tale with a consistent and authoritative point of view quite remote. Quick to dismiss the philosophical complexities of the controversy over identity still lingering in the late eighteenth century, she nevertheless embodies them (215). In similar readings of other texts, for example, her exploration of Bunyan's inability to reconcile the converted self with the ever-sinning self, Nussbaum's work is equally impressive. Unfortunately, Nussbaum's critical method moves from the discussion of specific texts to more generic, theoretical issues difficult; in these cases, her exploration of différance degenerates into a routine and inconclusive study. In order to prove that autobiography operates simultaneously as a site of resistance and as one of conformity, she naturally needs to mark "the norm." In specific texts, it is easy for her to point to several, conflicting definitions of the standard (e.g., "mothering" in the passage quoted above) without actually "fixing" an exact definition of the term in question. However, to prove that the flux of meaning exists in a generic concept that is not presented directly in a text, and that therefore cannot be pointed to (e.g., her discussion of gendered ideologies), she finds it necessary to designate the term of opposing it to its extreme opposite. So, to explain the concept "female voice," she compares the concept to a "male voice"; to demonstrate the notion...