Reconceiving the feminist biographical subject: A study in metabiography

The genre of biography has been justly criticized in recent years for failing to respond to the modern and postmodern theoretical constructs of identity and representation which fiction and autobiography have made use of for decades. Though it remains immensely popular, one critic has labeled biography the "last bastion of unexamined assumptions about referentiality" (Stanley, Autobiographical I7). A close reading of several experimental feminist biographies and novels that mimic the biographical quest reveals an emerging critique of realist biographical representation, which, in its drive towards coherence, inflicts a kind of violence upon its subjects' more complex layers of identity. These new "metabiographies" introduce a self-conscious or self-reflexive biographer who attempts to avoid objectifying or patronizing her subject and at the same time attempts to create a textual space where the subject can be nurtured rather than dominated by interpretive certainties. These writers, like various relational feminist theorists, are fascinated by biography's potential to form "reciprocal reparations" between the metabiographer and the historical other, and to deconstruct realist notions of referentiality without "prematurely foreclos[ing] the question of identity" (Miller 106) for women. Metabiographers emphasize the materiality of their documents. By doing so they help to form a new ethics and aesthetics of biography which present any limited understanding of self or other as a "struggle between opposing discourses" (Herrmann 15). Alice Munro, Carol Shields, A. S. Byatt, and Alison Lurie, fiction writers who graft the metabiographical quest onto the popular genres of detective fiction and the romance novel, and non-fiction biographers Eunice Lipton, Elinor Langer, and Rosemary Sullivan, attempt to unravel the genre which has traditionally inscribed "that closed-off dialogism we have called monologism" (Schwab 65), and to uncover the inherently dialogical nature of this intersubjective genre.