Thinking through the Mothers

If questions of subjectivity and identification are at stake in all biographical writing, they are particularly trenchant for contemporary women biographers of women. Often, their efforts to exhume buried lives in hope of finding spiritual foremothers awaken maternal phantoms that must be embraced or confronted. Do women writing in fact have any greater access to their own mothers' lives than to the lives of other women whose stories have been swept away like dust in the debris of the past?In Thinking through the Mothers, Janet Beizer surveys modern women's biographies and contemplates alternatives to an approach based in lineage and the form of thought that emphasizes the line, the path, hierarchy, unity, resemblance, reflection, and the aesthetic-mimesis-that depends on these ideas. Through close readings of memoirs and fictions about mothers, Beizer explores how biographers of the women who came before rehearse and rewrite relationships to their own mothers biographically as they seek to appropriate the past in a hybrid genre she calls "bio-autography."Thinking through the Mothers features the work of George Sand and Colette and spans such varied figures as Gustave Flaubert, Julian Barnes, Louise Colet, Eunice Lipton, Vladimir Nabokov, Huguette Bouchardeau, and Christa Wolf. Beizer seeks an alternative to women's "salvation biography" or "resurrection biography" that might resist nostalgia, be attentive to silence, and reinvent the means to represent the lives of precursors without appropriating traditional models of genealogy.

Beizer investigates the history of womankind and, in particular, women authors through time. It is a celebration of women's identities as perceived through the roles of foremothers, mothers, daughters, and writers.... Her book is a pleasure to read for anyone interested in maternal representation s in literature and illustrates the connectedness that exists between daughters and mothers, which is often forgotten., The reader is richly rewarded by the unfolding of an extensive multi-layered discussion of motherhood and writing.... In her complex interpersonal study Beizer ambitiously claims to seek an alternative to what she terms women's salvation-biography or resurrection biography.... Beizer's concern seems to be attentive to intertwining anthropological reading of text whilst not forgetting the author but questions the possibility of ever recovering lost mothers. Instead she probes limitations and tensions between intentions, declared and undeclared, of authors and their interpreters, thereby taking generations of writers and their readers as her field of inquiry.

Janet Beizer is Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University and the author of Ventriloquized Bodies: Narratives of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century France, also from Cornell, and Family Plots: Balzac's Narrative Generations.