Zarathustra's Sisters: Women's Autobiography and the Shaping of Cultural History (review)

Susan Ingram has selected six 'Sisters' whose intimate relationships have been represented in autobiographical writing: Lou Andreas-Salomé, Simone de Beauvoir, Maitreyi Devi, Asja Lacis, Nadezhda Mandel'shtam, and Romola Nijinsky. The opening quotation from Nietzsche's Zarathustra asks, 'What would your happiness be had you not those for whom you shine?' It is a question whose answer is at the core of Ingram's study; she is exploring 'the relationality of subjectivity.' Unlike most critical examinations of these writers, the book is not interested in the lives of its subjects solely for what those lives might reveal about the famous men who shared them. Neither does it attempt to suggest that a formula might be drawn by which the six and others like them can be understood. In fact, Ingram's attempts to demonstrate the opposite muddy the waters significantly at times because it would seem that she is in search of such a formula. Throughout the six chapters discussing her subjects by turns, there are frequent mentions of 'this one is like those two but not like that one,' and it may be that the strategy is an attempt to create interdependence among her subjects in the way that she believes they understood interdependence themselves. But the strategy takes over the narrative because of an inclination to anticipate the punchline: the answer to how they are all alike.

Eventually, the answer does come, but it comes in the form of an abstraction when all of the comparisons and contrasts have been in the concrete details of life. Ingram's summation reveals that contemporary writers within the academy have embraced the idea of acknowledging the autobiographical aspect of their theoretical work, 'conjugating literature, theory, and autobiography.' She sees the development as 'a specific kind of writerly academic practice to which the women in this study are precursors.' Their 'fragmentary, ambiguously autonomous identities that are nonetheless still ... identities' serve to prove the case. No one lives in isolation and the total compartmentalization of various aspects of life is not possible. Ingram seeks here to rehabilitate the reputation of the autobiographical within the academic community, in large part by showing that women writing over half a century ago already understood the significance of relationality.

The book requires patience because its point is sometimes difficult to discern, a problem easily assuaged by reading the conclusion before beginning to read the six chapters on the Sisters. Ingram keeps for the end secrets she does not need to keep, a decision which, in fact, obscures her argument. But it is an argument worth making and worth reading. There are occasions when she attempts to strangle a comparison out of situations in the lives she reads, a strange metaphor here and there, and an unnecessarily incomprehensible sentence when something more straightforward would have fitted better with the prevailing tone. These moments are not enough to undermine the work being done. If Zarathustra has anything to say to his sisters, it is 'Become who you are!' Ingram shows that her six subjects understood that identity cannot exist in isolation, that to 'become who you are' there must be interactivity with others who are becoming. This has often been misread as effacement of identity in favour of the culturally privileged identity of the man in the case. Ingram's study helps to redress the error.