Jean Rivard - University of British Columbia

Books in Review
Mary Antin's question "How long would
you say, wise reader, it takes to make an
American?" As if in an excellent seminar in
progress, Paul Jay, working with Sherman,
Duras, and Momaday, exploring image and
the construction of identity, seems to invite
Hertha Wong's examination of the autobiography
inherent in naming practices for
Plains Indians. David Haney's discussion of
Wordsworth's "A Farewell" may seem to
belong to the conversation at the next table,
in part because its theoretical foregrounding
is more strenuous than most, in part
because Haney lacks the flexibility with
which Gilmore connects Julian of Norwich
to Mary McCarthy. Even so, his treatment
of some limits and boundaries for the autobiographical
makes an important contribution
to what feels, as one works through
this text from start to finish, like heated
exchange. Finally, Sidonie Smith, asking
"What does skin have to do with autobiography?"
is "answered" by Shirley Neuman's
opening line: "Bodies rarely figure in autobiography."
Neuman shows that bodies can
and do figure, however, and not only as
products but also as producers of ideology.
So the text comes full circle and the discussion
continues: of the relations of literature
and life, of plurality both social and interpretive,
of boundaries and transgressions,
of self-ing and other-ing. Andrei
Codrescu's witty opening observations on
the complications of self-representation
before various audiences/readers establishes
the endlessly reflexive nature of the
autobiographical and, indeed, the critical
enterprise.
More concerned with ideological marginalisation
than with reflexivity, The
Writing on the Wall engages with the social
and political constructions of gender and
insanity that effectively discredit "incredible"
voices (in this case, of American
women, for the most part, incarcerated in
mental asylums through the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries). Wood
focusses on some of the historical issues of
mental science, including evolving definitions
of sanity and insanity and the effective
reform activity of women like Elizabeth
Packard, who supported campaigns for legislative
protection of married women and
the mentally ill by writing of her own experiences
in an asylum. Working very closely
with historical constructions of the "self,"
the "alienated" and the "Other," Wood also
explores the literary tropes on which these
autobiographers depended in order to connect
with their reading public and to convey
some sense of their distress: in
particular, the slave narrative, sentimental
and domestic fiction, and sensation literature.
Within these literary genres, each
expressive of particular historical conditions,
asylum writers demonstrate to varying
degrees some control over the
ideological and narrative paradigms that
threaten to control them. Wood's analysis,
furthermore, of the asylum as originally
modelled on the family, and the family
itself as threatened by the diseased insider,
makes a case for fictions that offer wholes
where the insane autobiographer cannot
provide closure.
With the development of the talking
cure, of course, autobiography moves from
being secret or protest literature into an
important new role complicit with the
healing process. Increasingly, too, it makes
the mental patient familiar; her self-expression
diminishes the apparent distance
between writer and reader. Wood's reading
of Zelda Fitzgerald's Save Me the Waltz
extends concern for the asylum inmate and
analysis of her tropes for narrative expression
well into the twentieth century. The
reflexivity of the theorist, furthermore,
expressed in Wood's opening, as she "recognize[s]
[her] discomfort with the topic of
sanity/insanity" makes effective rhetorical
distinctions between the objectifying "case
study" and the unavoidable implication of
writer/reader/subject in normative con-
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