Approaching the Master: Gender, Genre, and Biographical Tradition

Ní Dhúill, Caitríona

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-34663-8_2

Caitríona Ní Dhúill⁴

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Life Writing ((PSLW))

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Abstract

This chapter begins to examine the gender politics of biography. While feminist biographies play a vital role in redressing an imbalanced cultural history, the very form of biography is constituted by, and complicit with, a patriarchal culture predicated on heroic individualism and fictions of sole achievement and (self-)authorship. In biography’s quest narratives, the quest for mastery (of self, art, and circumstance) shapes the presentation of evidence. Recent groundbreaking studies in metabiography (on Alexander von Humboldt, David Livingstone, and the Brontës) advance the understanding of biography’s generic, rhetorical, and ideological features, but remain caught in its contradictions insofar as they implicitly endorse the very mechanisms of cultural visibility and prominence they set out to interrogate. This chapter disentangles the productive interventions of metabiography from their reliance on established biographical models, bringing them into dialogue with literary explorations of biography (Peter Handke, Christa Wolf, and Colm Tóibín) which probe the tensions between mastery, memory, and obscurity.

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Notes

1.
Virginia Woolf , letter of 4 September 1927, quoted in Max Saunders , Self-Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 449.
2.
Virginia Woolf, ‘The Art of Biography’ [1939], in Woolf, Selected Essays, ed. David Bradshaw (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 116–123 (121).
3.
The description of biography as a ‘branch of the art of writing’ is Lytton Strachey’s . See Strachey, Eminent Victorians [1918] (London: Continuum, 2002), 4. The notion of biography’s ‘resistance to theory’ is explored by, among others, Ray Monk , ‘Life Without Theory: Biography as an Exemplar of Philosophical Understanding’, Poetics Today 28 (2007), 528–570; Edward Saunders, ‘Introduction: Theory of Biography or Biography in Theory?’ in Biography in Theory: Key Texts with Commentaries, ed. Wilhelm Hemecker and Edward Saunders (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2017), 1–8; Bernhard Fetz, ‘Die vielen Leben der Biographie’, in Die Biographie—Zur Grundlegung ihrer Theorie, ed. Fetz and Hannes Schweiger (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009), 3–66 (3); David Ellis, Literary Lives: Biography and the Search for Understanding (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 1. The definition of biography as ‘life without theory’ in these discussions refers to a quote from Benjamin Disraeli.
4.
Sharonna Pearl, About Faces: Physiognomy in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2010); Lucy Hartley, Physiognomy and the Meaning of Expression in Nineteenth-Century Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
5.
Peter Sloterdijk , Sphären I: Blasen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998), 141–209; Emmanuel Levinas discusses the ‘face to face’ as the ‘ethical relation’ in Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), esp. 202. On the relevance of the facial to discussions of the relationship between the internal and the external, with particular relevance to biography, see Monk, ‘Life Without Theory’, 564–565.
6.
Cynthia Freeland, Portraits and Persons: A Philosophical Enquiry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Hans Maes, ‘What Is a Portrait?’, British Journal of Aesthetics 55, no. 3 (2015), 303–322.
7.
Hermione Lee, Biography: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 5.
8.
Eric Homberger and John Charmley, eds, The Troubled Face of Biography (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988).
9.
Thomas Karlauf, Stefan George. Die Entdeckung des Charisma. Biographie (Munich: Blessing, 2007), 14. Where not otherwise specified, all translations from German are my own.
10.
Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas [1933] (London: Penguin, 2001), 7.
11.
See Simone Lässig, ‘Introduction: Biography in Modern History—Modern Historiography in Biography’. In Biography Between Structure and Agency: Central European Lives in International Historiography, ed. Simone Lässig and Volker Berghahn (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2008), 1–26 (5).
12.
Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History [1840]. With an introduction by Michael K. Goldberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 26.
13.
Saunders, Self-Impression, 447.
14.
Thomas Carlyle, The Life of Friedrich Schiller: Comprehending an Examination of His Works [1825] (London: Chapman and Hall, 1873), 1.
15.
Leon Edel: Henry James (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1953), 5 vols., vol. 1, 10. Quoted in Paula R. Backscheider, Reflections on Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 22.
16.
John Dryden, ‘The Life of Plutarch’, prefixed to Plutarch’s Lives, translated from the Greek by Several Hands (1683–6), quoted in Biography as an Art. Selected Criticism 1560–1960, ed. James L. Clifford (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 17–19.
17.
Roger North , ‘General Preface’ to ‘Life of the Lord Keeper North’, quoted in Clifford, Biography as an Art, 31. Clifford places North’s preface in the eighteenth century, but does not provide a date; the extracts are taken from an unpublished manuscript. See David Novarr, The Lines of Life: Theories of Biography, 1880–1970 (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1986), 134, for further discussion of this source.
18.
Patricia Waugh notes with regard to metafiction that ‘although the term “metafiction ” might be new, the practice is as old (if not older) than the novel itself’. Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (London: Methuen, 1984), 5.
19.
Nicolaas A. Rupke, Alexander von Humboldt: A Metabiography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 215.
20.
Richard Holmes, ‘The Proper Study?’ in Mapping Lives: The Uses of Biography, ed. Peter France and William St Clair (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 7–18 (15).
21.
Lucasta Miller, The Brontë Myth (London: Vintage, 2002), x.
22.
Lucasta Miller, ‘Lives and Afterlives: The Brontë Myth Revisited’, Brontë Studies 39 no. 4 (2014), 254–266.
23.
Roland Barthes, Sade Fourier Loyola, trans. Richard Miller (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), 9.
24.
Hermione Lee, ‘Jane Austen Faints’. In: Lee: Body Parts. Essays in Life Writing (London: Chatto & Windus, 2005), 64–85.
25.
Susan Tridgell, Understanding Our Selves: The Dangerous Art of Biography (Bern: Peter Lang, 2004), 27–31.
26.
Tridgell, Understanding Our Selves, 32–40.
27.
Justin D. Livingstone, Livingstone’s Lives: A Metabiography of a Victorian Icon (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014).
28.
Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey: The New Biography (London: Chatto & Windus, 1994), 111.
29.
Holroyd, Lytton Strachey, 256.
30.
Richard Holmes, Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer (London: HarperCollins, 2000), 375.
31.
Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973).
32.
Richard T. Vann, ‘The Reception of Hayden White’, History and Theory 37, no. 2 (1998), 143–161; Michael S. Roth, ‘Foreword: “All You’ve Got Is History”,’ in Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, fortieth anniversary edition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014).
33.
See Berghahn and Lässig, Biography Between Structure and Agency; Hans Renders et al. (eds.), The Biographical Turn: Lives in History (London: Routledge, 2017).
34.
‘The psychological conventions of personality-description, with its roots in romantic confession and autobiography , conflict inevitably with the more Augustan convention that hopes to demonstrate the dignity of a biography’s subject through the excellence of his work’. Edward Mendelson , ‘Authorised Biography and Its Discontents’, in Studies in Biography, ed. Daniel Aaron (Cambridge MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1978), 9–26 (19).
35.
Tridgell, Understanding Our Selves, 58.
36.
Leo Löwenthal, ‘Die biographische Mode’ [1955], in Löwenthal, Literatur und Massenkultur (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980), 231–257 (244).
37.
Strachey, Eminent Victorians, 3.
38.
Paula Backscheider quotes the bullfighter metaphor re. the selection of the biographical subject (‘Some will show off your talents, others will probably kill you’). Backscheider, Reflections on Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 30.
39.
Strachey, Eminent Victorians, 3.
40.
Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973).
41.
Patricia Waugh, Metafiction. The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (London: Methuen, 1984).
42.
Ruth Hoberman, Modernizing Lives: Experiments in English Biography, 1918–1939 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987), 1.
43.
Rupke, Alexander von Humboldt: A Metabiography, 215.
44.
Ansgar Nünning , ‘Von der fiktionalen Biographie zur biographischen Metafiktion: Prolegomena zu einer Theorie, Typologie und Funktionsgeschichte eines hybriden Genres’, in Fakten und Fiktionen: Strategien fiktionalbiographischer Dichterdarstellungen in Roman, Drama und Film seit 1970, ed. Christian von Zimmermann (Tübingen: Narr, 2000), 15–36; Julijana Nadj, ‘Formen und Funktionen gattungsspezifischer Selbstreflexivität in der fiktionalen Metabiographie am Beispiel von Carol Shields’ Swann’, in Janine Hauthal et al., Metaisierung in Literatur und anderen Medien (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2007), 321–339; see also Wilhelm Hemecker, “Anton Weberns Tod: Eine Metabiographie von Gert Jonke”, in Spiegel und Maske: Konstruktionen biographischer Wahrheit, ed. Bernhard Fetz and Hannes Schweiger (Vienna: Zsolnay, 2006), 160–174 (172–173). Nünning and Nadj both reference Linda Hutcheon, “Historigraphic Metafiction: ‘The Pastime of Past Time’,” in Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York and London: Routledge, 1988), 105–123.
45.
Elizabeth A. Reimer, Reconceiving the Feminist Biographical Subject: A Study in Metabiography (University of Toronto: unpublished dissertation, 2002), 25–26. Reimer also references Hutcheon , describing metabiography as ‘a more earnest younger cousin of historiographic metafiction ’.
46.
Woolf, ‘The Art of Biography’, 116.
47.
Christa Wolf, Nachdenken über Christa T. [1968] (Munich: Luchterhand, 1999), 131–132.
48.
Christa Wolf, The Quest for Christa T., trans. Christopher Middleton (London: Virago, 1982).
49.
See Tobias Heinrich, ‘Biographie als Hermeneutik: Johann Gottfried Herders biographischer Essay Über Thomas Abbts Schriften’, in Die Biographie: Beiträge zu ihrer Geschichte, ed. Wilhelm Hemecker (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009) for an account of the shift in the early eighteenth century from a eulogistic conception of biography focussed on the memory of the dead, towards a more hermeneutic conception focussed on the meaning of their contribution; Heinrich is specifically concerned with the role of Herder in this shift.
50.
Peter Handke, Wunschloses Unglück. Erzählung [= A Sorrow Beyond Dreams] [1972] (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001), 39–41.
51.
Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle, trans. Don Bartlett and Martin Aitken. 6 vols. London: Harvill Secker, 2013–2018. Vol. 6 (2018), 166–172.
52.
Handke, Wunschloses Unglück, 39–40.
53.
Samuel Johnson, [Biography], in The Rambler 60 (13 October 1750), in Samuel Johnson: The Major Works, ed. Donald Greene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 204–207 (205). See above, Chap. 1, note 9.
54.
On the proliferation of metadiscourses, see Janine Hauthal et al., Metaisierung in Literatur und anderen Medien (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2007).
55.
Quoted in Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (London: Vintage, 1997), 10. See Steve Weinberg, “Biography, the Bastard Child of Academe”, Chronicle of Higher Education, 9.5.2008.
56.
Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (London: Routledge, 1984), 2.
57.
Roald Dahl, James and the Giant Peach (London: Penguin, 1961), final page.
58.
Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas [1933] (London: Penguin, 2001), 272. See Saunders, Self-Impression, 354 ff.
59.
Waugh, Metafiction, 18.
60.
The notion of the ‘biographical pact’ is adapted from Philippe Lejeune’s ‘autobiographical pact’, according to which autobiography establishes a contract between reader, author, and publisher, revolving around ‘identity of name between the author […], the narrator of the story, and the character who is being talked about’. Philippe Lejeune, “The Autobiographical Pact” [1975]. In Lejeune, On Autobiography, ed. Paul John Eakin, trans. Katherine Leary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 12. See Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide to Interpreting Life Narratives, 2nd edn (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 207. For biography, obviously, the pact solely concerns the extra-textual verifiability of the character who is being talked about.
61.
Hermione Lee, ‘The Great Pretender’, Guardian, 20 March 2004.
62.
Adam Mars-Jones, ‘In His Master’s Voice’, Observer, 22 February 2004.
63.
Colm Tóibín, ‘Henry James for Venice’, in Lackey, Biographical Fiction: A Reader, 67–78 (74).
64.
‘die eigentliche Schreibtätigkeit’, Handke, Wunschloses Unglück, 40–41.
65.
See Tóibín, ‘Henry James for Venice’, 77.

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Caitríona Ní Dhúill

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Ní Dhúill, C. (2020). Approaching the Master: Gender, Genre, and Biographical Tradition. In: Metabiography. Palgrave Studies in Life Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34663-8_2

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34663-8_2
Published: 10 March 2020
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