Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture 9781501723100

Citation preview

CR!..aling WOMEN

Writing a series edited by Shari Benstock and Celeste Schenck

Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture by Franc;oise Lionnet

Autobiographical

VOICES Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture Fran�oise Lionnet

Cornell University Press ITHACA and LONDON

Open access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities/ Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program. Copyright © 1989 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850, or visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu. First published 1989 by Cornell University Press Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lionnet, Françoise. Autobiographical voices. (Reading women writing) Includes index. 1. Autobiography—Women authors—History and criticism. 2. Women— Biography—History and criticism. 3. Literature, Modern—History and criticism. I. Title. II. Series. PN471.L56 1989 809'.93592 88-43236 ISBN-13: 978-0-8014-2091-7 (cloth) — ISBN-13: 978-0-8014-9927-2 (pbk.)

The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Cover illustration: Drawing by Desne Crossley Murdoch. Courtesy of the artist.

In memoria m J. L. L. In posterum J. & D.

Foreword

As the editors of

Reading Women Writing,

we are committed to

furthering international feminist debate. To that end, we seek books that rigorously explore how differences of class, race, ethnic back­ ground, nationality, religious preference, and sexual choice inform women's writing. Books sensitive to the ways women's writings are classified, evaluated, read, and taught are central to the series. Dedi­ cated primarily although not exclusively to the examination of litera­ ture written by women,

Reading Women Writing

highlights differing,

even contradictory, theoretical positions on texts read in cultural context. Of particular interest to us are feminist criticism of non­ canonical texts (including film, popular culture, and new and as yet unnamed genres); confrontations of first-world theory with beyond­ the-first-world texts; and books on colonial and postcolonial writing that generate their own theoretical positions. Among volumes in prospect for the series are a book on women's prison narratives in international context, a study of incest and the writing daughter in Jean Rhys and H . D . , and a reading of popular film, sexual differ­ ence, and spectatorship in an emphatically social context.

Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender, Self-Por­ traiture, the inaugural volume of Reading Women Writing, is compara­ Fran