Heilbrun, Carolyn G. Writing a Woman’s Life (1988)
W.W. Norton & Company, 144 pages, $14.95 hardcover
ISBN 0-393-02601-9
In the “Introduction,” feminist scholar Carolyn Heilbrun explains the topic of her book:
There are four ways to write a woman’s life: the woman herself may tell it, in what she chooses to call an autobiography; she may tell it in what she chooses to call fiction; a biographer, woman or man, may write the woman’s life in what is called a biography; or the woman may write her own life in advance of living it, unconsciously, and without recognizing or naming the process. (p. 12)
Heilbrun says that she will focus on three of these methods, omitting fiction.
Men have always had narrative stories, such as the quest motif and the warrior exemplar, on which to base their lives and within which to tell their life stories. But, Heilbrun argues, such stories of action and accomplishment have been denied to women; the behavior praised by these stories has always been branded “unwomanly”:
above all other prohibitions, what has been forbidden to women is anger, together with the open admission of the desire for power and control over one’s life (which inevitably means accepting some degree of power and control over other lives). (p. 13)
Because this has been declared unwomanly, and because many women would prefer (or think they would prefer) a world without evident power or control, women have been deprived of the narratives, or the texts, plots, or examples, by which they might assume power over—take control of—their own lives. (p. 17)
Well into the twentieth century, it continued to be impossible for women to admit into their autobiographical narratives the claim of achievement, the admission of ambition, the recognition that accomplishment was neither luck nor the result of the efforts or generosity of others. (p. 24)
The concept of biography itself has changed profoundly in the last two decades, biographies of women especially so. But while biographers of men have been challenged on the “objectivity” of their interpretation, biographers of women have had not only to choose one interpretation over another but, far more difficult, actually to reinvent the lives their subjects led, discovering from what evidence they could find the processes and decisions, the choices and unique pain, that lay beyond the life stories of these women. The choices and pain of the women who did not make a man the center of their lives seemed unique, because there were no models of the lives they wanted to live, no exemplars, no stories. These choices, this pain, those stories, and how they may be more systematically faced…are what I want to examine in this book. (p. 31)
In subsequent chapters Heilbrun offers George Sand, Willa Cather, and particularly Dorothy L. Sayers as examples of women who tried to mold their lives into patterns other than those traditionally allowed to them. However:
Only in the last third of the twentieth century have women broken through to a realization of the narratives that have been controlling their lives. Women poets of one generation—those born between 1923 and 1932—can now be seen to have transformed the autobiographies of women’s lives, to have expressed, and suffered for expressing, what women had not earlier been allowed to say. (p. 60)
These poets, all American, are Denise Levertov, Jane Cooper, Carolyn Kizer, Maxine Kumin, Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, and Sylvia Plath.
Finally, Heilbrun argues for what she calls “reinventing marriage,” for a new kind of marriage in which husband and wife both recognize and nurture the other’s strengths. “Marriage is the most persistent of myths imprisoning women, and misleading those who write of women’s lives” (p. 77), she says. As an example of this new kind of marriage she cites the relationship between Leonard and Virginia Woolf.
One of the more interesting aspects of Writing a Woman’s Life is Heilbrun’s explanation, in chapter six, of why she chose to use a pseudonym in the 1960s when, as a young college professor, she started publishing detective novels: “I believe now that I must have wanted, with extraordinary fervor, to create a space for myself” (p. 113). “But I also sought another identity, another role. I sought to create an individual whose destiny offered more possibility than I could comfortably imagine for myself” (p. 114).
A potential problem with any type of literary criticism based on a particular ideology is that it often ends up reducing complex issues to dismissively simple statements, such as this declaration by Heilbrun: “Marriage, in short, is a bargain, like buying a house or entering a profession” (p. 92). Nonetheless, in general, Writing a Woman’s Life offers a compelling view of cultural and social conventions that are currently undergoing change.
© 1999 by Mary Daniels Brown
