Thinking through the Mothers: Reimagining Women's Biographies

by Janet Beizer

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780801438516
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	01/15/2009
Pages:	296
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

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.

What People are Saying About This

Melanie Hawthorne

We think back though our mothers if we are women, proclaimed Virginia Woolf, but what happens when we go looking for our mothers and find that they are missing in action? So much of the enterprise of writing the biography of our foremothers—what Beizer here dubs 'salvation biography'-consists of filling in blanks, but what happens to the biographical enterprise when we admit that most of the time we are ventriloquizing, speaking our own desires through our foremothers' reconstructed mouths? In Thinking Through the Mothers Janet Beizer finds herself compelled to speak about what must ultimately remain unspoken, while respecting the silences we have inherited. Drawing on a range of theoretical perspectives, Beizer uses close reading and juxtaposition to read—and reread—the work of French women writers from George Sand to Louise Colet to Colette (via Flaubert) and to reframe the question 'What do women want?' Reading athwart rather than through the mother, Beizer honors the desire to fill in the blanks of the past while showing how and why we must instead read the blank space itself. Don't you wish all books about biography were this smart? This intellectually and emotionally satisfying?

Lawrence D. Kritzman

A major work of feminist inquiry. In reimaging feminist biography Janet Beizer has established herself as one of the leading essayists of French letters.

Catherine Nesci

With her vibrant new book, Janet Beizer achieves a subtle blend of aesthetic, ethical, philosophical, and epistemological inquiries that mark the best work in humanistic scholarship. Thinking through the Mothers forges alternative models for feminist biographical writing as a process in which new relational metaphors such as fostering and adoption open fresh insights on the role of mothers and foremothers as precursors. Supported by fruitful considerations of new modes of parenting, Beizer's moving explorations of feminist biographies deserve a large readership in modernist and feminist studies as well as outside academic circles.

Rosemary Lloyd

Janet Beizer's exploration of relationships both real and imagined between mothers and daughters, women and their feminist biographers and critics, is a wide-ranging meditation on the possibilities and difficulties of recuperating past lives, especially those veiled in obscurity, either through the repressions of patriarchy or through a determined stance of secrecy on the part of the subject herself. An excellent close reader, Beizer is adept at dealing with the critical and theoretical underpinnings of her project and in so doing advances theoretical discussion in interesting and imaginative ways.

Editorial Reviews

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.

Modern and Contemporary France - Maire F. Cross

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.

Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature - Nicole S. Dobianer

"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."—Maire F. Cross, Modern and Contemporary France (August 2011)

"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."—Nicole S. Dobianer, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature (Fall 2010)

"With her vibrant new book, Janet Beizer achieves a subtle blend of aesthetic, ethical, philosophical, and epistemological inquiries that mark the best work in humanistic scholarship. Thinking through the Mothers forges alternative models for feminist biographical writing as a process in which new relational metaphors such as fostering and adoption open fresh insights on the role of mothers and foremothers as precursors. Supported by fruitful considerations of new modes of parenting, Beizer's moving explorations of feminist biographies deserve a large readership in modernist and feminist studies as well as outside academic circles."—Catherine Nesci, author of Le Flâneur et les flâneuses

"A major work of feminist inquiry. In reimaging feminist biography Janet Beizer has established herself as one of the leading essayists of French letters."—Lawrence D. Kritzman, Dartmouth College

"We think back though our mothers if we are women, proclaimed Virginia Woolf, but what happens when we go looking for our mothers and find that they are missing in action? So much of the enterprise of writing the biography of our foremothers—what Beizer here dubs 'salvation biography'-consists of filling in blanks, but what happens to the biographical enterprise when we admit that most of the time we are ventriloquizing, speaking our own desires through our foremothers' reconstructed mouths? In Thinking Through the Mothers Janet Beizer finds herself compelled to speak about what must ultimately remain unspoken, while respecting the silences we have inherited. Drawing on a range of theoretical perspectives, Beizer uses close reading and juxtaposition to read—and reread—the work of French women writers from George Sand to Louise Colet to Colette (via Flaubert) and to reframe the question 'What do women want?' Reading athwart rather than through the mother, Beizer honors the desire to fill in the blanks of the past while showing how and why we must instead read the blank space itself. Don't you wish all books about biography were this smart? This intellectually and emotionally satisfying?"—Melanie Hawthorne, Texas A&M University

"Janet Beizer's exploration of relationships both real and imagined between mothers and daughters, women and their feminist biographers and critics, is a wide-ranging meditation on the possibilities and difficulties of recuperating past lives, especially those veiled in obscurity, either through the repressions of patriarchy or through a determined stance of secrecy on the part of the subject herself. An excellent close reader, Beizer is adept at dealing with the critical and theoretical underpinnings of her project and in so doing advances theoretical discussion in interesting and imaginative ways."—Rosemary Lloyd, Rudy Professor of French emerita, Indiana University, author of Shimmering in a Transformed Light

From the Publisher