Autobiography as Journey in The Professor's House

AUTOBIOGRAPHY AS JOURNEY IN THE PROFESSOR'S HOUSE Janis P. Stout Texas A&cM University Recent critical interest in autobiographical writing, particularly the autobiographical writings of women, has shattered the notion of autobiography as a "mirror" or a "transparency" valued for its revelation of the life as lived. It was that (perhaps unrecognized) notion or assumption that shaped earlier considerations of autobiography so that they often took the form of a moral appraisal of the life itself, as if only the life were worthy of attention, not the writing of it. The writing, the autobiography, was to be an object of critical attention only insofar as the critic might examine the accuracy of its mirroring or the clarity of its revelation of the life. Now, after some two decades or more of intensive critical reconsideration, autobiography has been reconceived as a genre far from transparent or transparently simple. Both the generic boundaries of autobiographical writing and the "relationship between literature and life" have come to be viewed as "problematic."1 The autobiography interprets and makes meaning of the writer's life; indeed, it may well be said to create the "life," making an assortment of scattered memories, facts, perhaps old letters or receipts, into a whole that can be experienced by a reader and which may differ markedly from any hypothetical summation of the parts. But one could say much the same of the novel or other fictional forms: the novelist creates a text out of, or partly out of, fragments of observations , memories, documented events, an assortment of "real life" material, making of these pieces a new and newly meaningful whole. The borders between autobiography and fiction, or between autobiography and lyric poetry, have been blurred. The two, or the three, have moved beyond confederation toward merger.2 Autobiography is especially problematic for women. The autobiography has traditionally been based on distinctly masculine assumptions about purpose, appropriate sequence and emphasis, and the worthwhileness of the document itself, even about the nature of individuality itself. It has emphasized public deeds and public importance . But women, being typically enjoined to define their lives within a private sphere, have had to contend with a sense that their lives were not worth the autobiographical act. Unable to assume, as did male autobiographers of the pre-twentieth century, at any rate, that they could write their lives large as the representatives of their age, unable to assume a "conflation of [femininity] and humanity," 204Janis P. Stout as males have assumed the conflation of masculinity and humanity, they have had to struggle not only against marginality but also against the stifling weight of gender stereotyping, that pervasive custom of defining women in terms of their gender, blurring their own sense of self.3 Moreover, in the views of some feminist critics engaged in the project of theorizing autobiography, the individualistic assumptions of the traditional autobiography do not comport well with the individuation process of women, which psychological theorists such as Sheila Rowbotham and Nancy Chodorow see as being based more on "collective and relational identities" and relations with the mother.4 A woman may tell her life in "what she chooses to call an autobiography " or in "what she chooses to call fiction,"5 but in either case she must work within enormous, troubling complexities both of genre and of social identity. Willa Cather never wrote an autobiography, yet her work is of great interest in relation to recent theories of autobiography. Prevailing views of her life and of her work have shifted dramatically over the years from an emphasis on her supposed simplicity and wholesomeness to an emphasis on her indirection and inner conflicts. Her earlier novels, especially, were traditionally read (and are still read, in many school classrooms) as direct inscriptions of Cather's own feelings about her early environment in Nebraska. Indeed, one strain of Cather studies continues to evoke pilgrimages to "Cather country" and to identify local scenes and people who appear in her novels, which are conceived more or less as transparencies laid over the countryside, celebrating its vigor and health. A second generation , as it were, of Cather critics complicated matters by emphasizing her technical artistry, in particular her Jamesian manipulations...