Thinking Through the Mothers: Reimagining Women's Biographies (review)

This is a trenchant, exploratory volume that takes forward questions for feminism about writing the life of another woman, about autobiography in critical discourse, and about new ways of reimagining a relation to one's child. Janet Beizer starts from Virginia Woolf's observation that 'we think back through our mothers if we are women', moving on to consider the 'tendency for contemporary feminist discourse to slide unthinkingly from mothers to female precursors' (p. 3). She examines feminist biography, seeking to shed light on its 'work of exhumation, resuscitation, veneration, denigration, and mourning for the missing place of women in culture' (p. 7). Such work is bound up generationally with a sense of the mother's story as missing, leading to a bid 'to resurrect a foremother who might redeem the maternal lack' (p. 35). Beizer does not shy away from critiquing former feminist practice; but, as Barbara Johnson writes, 'feminists have to take the risk of confronting and negotiating differences among women if they are ever to transform such differences into positive rather than negative forces in women's lives' (The Feminist Difference, p. 194). Confrontation and negotiation are key to Beizer's work. She offers hard-hitting, psychoanalytically informed accounts of biographical practices, revealing failures to encounter otherness and to recognise other lives as missing. A novelty of the volume is the inclusion of an interview with Huguette Bouchardeau, biographer of George Sand (and author of a work about her own mother). Beizer and Bouchardeau disagree in conversation; Beizer draws this difference of opinion into her narrative, offering a gripping account of her reflections on their relative views. What Beizer rejects in 'maternal resurrection quests' is their 'connective force' (p. 250) and their refusal to take on absence, opacity or lack. Beizer's own embrace of opacity provides the connection (if I may risk this) to other questions about motherhood, owning, and adoption. Beizer narrates her experience as an adoptive mother (of a child from China) and makes use of this knowledge to question kinship. Reacting to the division made between one's 'own' and 'adopted' children, she explores the risks of a vocabulary of ownership. Her chapter brilliantly envisages the possibility of 'unowning' children, of 'using the adoption model to divest biological kinship relations of their baggage of ownership' (p. 137). The work here offers a shining example of feminist analysis that draws on a nexus of autobiographical concerns (Beizer acknowledges that book performs, to a certain extent, the subject of its discourse), but generates from them rigorous, challenging scholarship. At the heart of the volume is a fine scepticism about unthinking acts of identification and possession. Beizer reflects interestingly on the influence of her previous work on hysteria and her attempt there to write about silenced women. This volume shows (as ever) her coruscating skills as a close-reader (of Sand, Colette and others). It is crisply written, constantly intriguing, and beautifully paced. In some ways it offers more than the study of women's biographies announced in its title, but this adherence to an account of the interconnected issues in an intellectual trajectory is true to the ethos of 'generosity and restraint' (p. 250) the book fosters so effectively through its various chapters.