[In the following negative review of When Memory Speaks, Stannard criticizes Conway's selection of material for the collection and faults several of her theories regarding the genre of autobiography.]

Any book by Jill Ker Conway demands respect. A distinguished feminist scholar, she is also a fine autobiographer. The Road from Coorain and True North established her as a leading voice of the genre. Her academic work investigating the suppression and release of the female voice is no less powerful, and the two volumes she edited entitled Written by Herself are essential reading for anyone interested in women's memoirs. Somehow she has also managed to find time to serve as vice president at the University of Toronto and to spend a decade as president of Smith College. Now she is a visiting professor in M.I.T.'s Program in Science, Technology, and Society. This book opens with a typically provocative question: “Why is autobiography the most popular form of fiction for modern readers?” (4), and goes on to reveal a mind thoroughly engaged with a conspectus of theoretical and practical issues at the root of literary self-construction. Indeed, one might see her own experience haunting these reflections, a life in which education offering escape from an Australian sheep station, the mystery of her father's death, and the combination of executive and creative power all merge to provide her point of view. “In a long life as a feminist,” she remarks, “the question I have been asked most frequently is ‘How do you make yourself heard?’ … We're heard when we speak confidently out of our own experience” (180). This principle informs everything she writes.

When Memory Speaks is a structure strung between two chapters like the entrance and exit pillars of a suspension bridge. The opening chapter, “Memory's Plots,” offers the thesis. The skeptical postmodern world, she argues, has lost patience with realist fiction and male history, yet still craves knowledge of “how the world looks from inside another person's experience” (6). Hence the popularity of autobiography. Conway then provides a formalist analysis of the “archetypal life scripts” of Western society and its colonies. Fundamental to this is the notion of life as an odyssey. Achievement is the product of agency, and the material details of the external life become metaphors for the transformation of consciousness “making the journey of initiation the journey of conversion” (7). Thus we have a variety of male “heroes” from St. Augustine (spiritual) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (secular) to Benjamin Franklin (economic), James Joyce (artistic), and Malcolm X (ethnic). This male consciousness of agency is founded on the Western notion of continual “progress,” imaged, particularly in America, by frontier battles with virgin territory. Women's autobiographical writing, however, is different. Although it maintains the form of an odyssey, it generally disavows agency. This tradition begins with theological speculation within closed communities of nuns. Dame Julian of Norwich “possesses a formidable knowledge of Scripture, but it is the vision of God she wants to convey rather than how she feels about it” (12). Such female self-elision developed into the “archetypal form for the bourgeois female history” in the “secularised romance, the life plot linking the erotic quest for the ideal mate with property and social mobility” (13). The visionary encounter with God is replaced by the romantic search for the immaculate male who will “complete” the intrinsically “incomplete” (and by implication “incompetent”) female. Ambition is regarded as unseemly, physical strength (as in frontierswomen's narratives) played down. Even when the woman professional emerged as a “potentially revolutionary social type,” she “told her story as a philanthropic romance” in which success “just happened” to her (15).

The last chapter, “Word and Image,” is an exercise in autobiography. Conway walks out from behind her screen of objective discourse and speaks directly to the reader. That word “agency” which has recurred throughout now takes on a personal dimension. “If we see the past as fully determined,” she writes, “… we see ourselves as victims of those forces, with our best hope a kind of stoic resignation. If we see our past as a moral and spiritual journey in time, our imagined future will continue that quest” (176). Clearly Conway prefers the latter attitude. This is a feminist issue in that female autobiographers are seen all too often to disguise their own agency and to settle instead for a kind of romantic victimhood, while their male counterparts write women out of their lives. It is a (mild) call to arms.

The intervening chapters, then, flesh this out. Conway investigates the images of the secular hero and of the romantic heroine; she looks at the autobiographies of empire; there are two chapters on feminist issues, one on homosexual and transsexual narratives, and one, “Grim Tales,” on the life stories of those from poor and/or dysfunctional families. The usual pattern is to set up a debate between three or four texts to develop the male/female disjunction of the thesis. It is highly selective, concentrating on American women's writing. One would have liked to see how The Book of Job fitted with her ideas about Augustine's Confessions, how recent British autobiographies—Doris Lessing's Under My Skin, Muriel Spark's Curriculum Vitae, Blake Morrison's When Did You Last See Your Father?, John Mortimer's A Voyage Round My Father, for instance—tallied with her theory. These limitations often nag at the edges of one's consciousness as qualifications of the central idea. But it is a good idea, and the art of a convincing polemicist is precisely the art of rhetorical reduction. The book is well-written, cogently argued. Ultimately it presents its position as subjective and the entire text as another form of autobiography. Quite apart from these virtues, it acts as an excellent introduction to a wide range of reading many of us will either not have encountered or will not have subjected to formal analysis.

Nevertheless, some omissions are more seriously baffling and relate to category confusion. One of the basic questions investigated is: “What constitutes an autobiography?” Where it suits Conway, she is happy to include “fiction” like Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Sometimes it is difficult to tell in her first chapter whether she is speaking of novels or of memoirs. (Becky Sharp is cited as an anti-heroine of male discourse.) Sometimes biographies (of parents) are read as the autobiographies of the children who write them. Conway can justify this with the escape clause of that first sentence: autobiography is fiction rather than documentary history; all history is in some sense fiction. But that basic question is never teased out. If we can use Portrait, why can't we use other autobiographical novels—David Copperfield or The Mill on the Floss? Why can't we use Jane Austen's letters or Fanny Burney's Journals? The clearest omission is surely A Vindication of the Rights of Women. There is nothing on the Brontës. An obvious chapter in a book like this might have examined the relationships between famous writers and their partners, as recorded in their public and private writings: William and Dorothy Wordsworth; William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, P. B. and Mary Shelley; George Eliot and G. H. Lewes; Virginia and Leonard Woolf; Ford Madox Ford and Stella Bowen; Joseph and Jessie Conrad; D. H. Lawrence and Jessie Chambers. One could go on. The book seems both to raise the complex issue of the fictional status of autobiography and to back off from it into the safe territory of considering only books published as memoirs which are then read as factual statements.

Lying behind this, there is another problem. Conway's sharp intelligence doesn't help her much when it comes to literary criticism, literary theory, or even to a discussion of the postmodern condition. Large swathes of the book constitute plot summary, which frequently make it read like a collection of reviews or a descriptive bibliography. These “reviews” are vivid rehearsals of the life-stories told but rarely move the argument forward. They are also rather literal-minded and insensitive to linguistic nuance. Sometimes she even repeats a plot summary. There is not much sense, despite the formalist analysis of genre markers, of the debates which have riven post-war cultural analysis: of the ways in which literary language defamiliarizes functional language, of the arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign, of the sense of endless anteriority which has both plagued and stimulated twentieth-century writers. There has been an explosion of feminist writing engaged with these issues and, for instance, the notion of multiplicity and multiple selves.¹ None of it is referred to directly. Much work, for instance, has been done on women's writing of the First World War.² No mention is made of this. “If postmodernism means anything,” she states, “it's the abandonment of the idea everyone over fifty was raised on—of linear development or universal progress.” Everyone? Over fifty? Doesn't modernism abandon this idea? The implication, itself problematic, is that postmodernism is a post-World War Two phenomenon. Evelyn Waugh denied universal progress in a 1932 radio broadcast, Beckett's Trilogy was begun in that decade. And what about Pirandello, Samuel Butler, Pope, Shakespeare's and Webster's tragedies? Do the countless dystopias count for nothing? Who wrote that life was “nasty, brutish and short”? Conway's title is a version of Nabokov's but Speak, Memory is ignored.

The difficulty here is that the voice behind this text, for all its nods towards the consciousness of ambiguity, is itself decided, as though ambiguity were precisely the condition from which women have suffered throughout the centuries. What we have, then, is a political, attractive, but rather old-fashioned feminist agenda. The women she admires most are those displaying “executive talent” like Jane Addams, and her treatment of Addams is typical (108). Twenty Years at Hull House (1910) obliterates her agency in social reform made plain in her letters and diaries. This is seen to be the lot of women until the late twentieth century: to be “in denial” of their talents, at least in the public male-dominated world, and to see their own decisive actions as unbidden vocation.

It is a convincing, if somewhat simplistic, argument. Conway is happier with the emergence of the unapologetic virago. Emmeline Pankhurst, repulsing the force-feeders in her prison cell by brandishing a heavy earthenware jug above her head, stands like an icon in this book, a Statue of Liberty. And why not? Of course we all cheer as the repulsive doctors and their lackey wardresses scuttle off. Conway, however, seems to find it difficult to sympathize with subtler forms of resistance. No reference is made to French feminism. And, on the American scene, Kate Millet is rejected as passé. “Millet,” she says, “buys the radical feminist view that individualism is a sin, and that what distinguishes women's culture is that women's groups function by consensus, without leaders. The feminist doctrine of the day taught that leadership was a male ego trip which women didn't want or need” (132). True, but there is no mistaking the tone of those words: “doctrine” and “of the day.” It has a whiff of the right-wing. All that cooperative nonsense is behind us, she seems to say. “Motherhood” gets short shrift. She is politely impatient with women like Mabel Dodge Luhan who say that they were “just naturally fluctuating and flowing all the time … in and out of the people I was with” (116). Such an attitude, Conway comments, prefigures “the views of many late-twentieth-century feminist psychologists”—but none of them is named or valorized. Instead, we seem rather to be in the brave new (and now itself rather dated) world of executive power-dressing with female role-models who are decisive.

Ultimately, this power of female decision becomes the essential issue of interpretation. Women's victimhood derives from their failure publicly to acknowledge their agency. Their writings are thus often in the passive voice. Motherhood is not “agency”; women who fall hopelessly in love—especially with their fathers as in Kathryn Harrison's The Kiss (1997)—are passive victims. The act of autobiography is an intervention, particularly for women, in that the writer can reimagine the past and create a future. In short, the ideology here is founded on the notion of “progress” and fixed determinants, and appears to be opposed to the postmodern view of the world. Conway believes there to be a moral imperative to rewrite inherited narratives and to accentuate the positive. One admires the use of experience to “reject out of hand the notion of female passivity and the lack of intellectual drive” (177). At the same time, however, so many of the generalized extrapolations would have left George Eliot (not to mention Angela Carter and Beckett) gasping with incredulity.

The whole point of Harrison's remarkable book is that it does acknowledge agency in an incestuous relationship. Conway can't ignore this, but she patronizes her subject by insisting that she was a victim, just as she suggests that most of the other powerful women cited here were (unknown to themselves) also victims. It is not just agency that matters but acknowledgment of agency. Without this, Conway says, it is almost impossible to reason about the morality of one's actions (179). Is it? Aren't there more ways than one to intervene in, or ignore, male discourse? Is moral reasoning the prerogative only of Conway's style of feminism? Wouldn't a lot of women say of her that she is, like Margaret Thatcher, imitating male systems of power? This is a stimulating book and it is a pleasure to read something driven by firmly held beliefs, but it might have been a better argument if it had tried to answer some of the questions it provokes. What she admires most is the “drive to improve the moment” epitomized by Benjamin Franklin (183). It is a log cabin-to-capitalist independence story for every life, with the good psychiatrist as its secular hero.

Notes

1. See, for example, Smith and Anderson.

2. See, for example, Tylee and Ouditt.

Works Cited

Anderson, Linda. Women and Autobiography in the Twentieth Century. New York: Prentice Hall/Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1997.

Ouditt, Sharon. Fighting Forces, Writing Women. New York: Routledge, 1994.

Smith, Sidonie. Subjectivity, Identity, and the Body: Women's Autobiographical Practices in the Twentieth Century. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993.

Tylee, Clare M. The Great War and Women's Consciousness: Images of Militarism and Womanhood. New York: Macmillan, 1990.