Conclusion

Abstract

In this passage from Time Regained, the final volume of Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust explains that meaning in literature comes only from the interpretation or analysis of the object, not from its mere presence. Relations not facts establish significance. Biography also recognizes the importance of this quality as it becomes more aware of the value of narrative design, structure and style, as well as the position of the reader and the subject in the text. Elizabeth Gaskell as a character observing Charlotte Brontë holding her brother’s group painting while also narrating the scene graphically illustrates the complexity of the situation. The unmediated, comprehensive life, avoiding or unconscious of its own method, no longer satisfies; in its effort at completeness it only creates a greater awareness of its incompleteness. Replacing the positivist hope that the record of a life can be captured is the stronger awareness of how fictions regulate and articulate our past. History, as Hegel reminds us, ‘combines in our language the objective as well as the subjective side. It means both the historiam rerum gestarum and the res gestas themselves, both the events and the narration of the events.’¹