Autobiographical Inscriptions: Form, Personhood, and the American Woman Writer of Color (review)

In Autobiographical Inscriptions Rodríguez analyzes the ways seven ethnic women writers deal with issues of race and gender in their autobiographical representations of the self, using innovative language and equally inventive literary forms. Two chapters on single works, the opening discussion of Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road and the concluding analysis of Cecile Pineda’s Face, bracket three chapters of paired works read as autobiography: Mary Rowlandson’s Captivity Narrative and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior and Hisaye Yamamoto’s “The Legend of Miss Sasagawara”; and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Storyteller and Adrienne Kennedy’s People Who Led to My Plays.

Throughout, Rodríguez presents revisionist and innovative theoretical readings of these texts as autobiography, some of which are conventionally read as fiction and biography. Like many critics, Rodríguez reads The Woman Warrior as composed of myths and legends emblematic of race and gender, an orientation she brings to her other readings as well. Women writers of color, she contends, resist, rewrite, and adapt formal conventions of genres contoured to the experiences of men (such as slave narratives) or white women (sentimental novels). Negotiating “with the stubborn material of existence, be it language,” experience, or artifact, these women writers transform existing literary structures to reflect their race, face, and gender.

From this stance Rodríguez proffers deliberately controversial readings of the works at hand. She defends Hurston’s style and bifurcated format in Dust Tracks on a Road, to which other critics object. In the first half, “the incorporation of form and content usually associated with the fairy tale, folktale, and frontier narrative, metaphorically represents the worlds open to Hurston during her childhood.” Rodríguez defends Hurston’s reworking of the autobiographical genre in the second half, justifying its disjointedness and absence of chronological structure as another means of constructing “a professional and public identity . . . determined by the private experiences that shape the first half of the text.” In a similarly innovative (even contrarian) manner, Rodríguez reads Face, a novel about the “‘refacement’” of its poor, mixed-race, male protagonist whose face is devastatingly disfigured (“a loss of self”) and must be reconstructed (he “begins to piece himself back together with . . . a scalpel, a needle, and thread”) as a generic “female autobiography.” She buttresses her interpretation with an analogy to the plastic surgeries of Orlan, an “experimental French performance artist [who] replaces her features with others drawn from classic artistic representations of feminine beauty,” manipulating “subject/object boundaries while ‘remaining in control of her own destiny.’” Whether or not one accepts Rodríguez’s mandate for an about-face in reading these works, seeing them through her critical lens puts them into perspectives simultaneously in flux, and new.