Text and Image in Women's Life Writing: Picturing the Female Self (Palgrave Studies in Life Writing) 3030848744, 9783030848743

Table of contents :
Acknowledgments
Contents
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Introduction
Images and Memory
Identity
Image/Text and the Question of Referentiality
Images and Embodiment
References
Part I: Imagining Identity
Chapter 2: Thinking Through the Book and Reimagining the Page: Julie Chen’s Artists’ Books and Faith Ringgold’s Story Quilts
Julie Chen’s Artists’ Books: Architectures of Cognition
Faith Ringgold’s Story Quilts: Reimagining the Page and the Frame
Conclusion
References
Archives
Primary and Secondary Sources
Chapter 3: “[Un]systematic, even with the image”: Text-image Blurring, Self-Inquiry and Ontological Anxiety in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Works
“[Un]systematic, even with the image”: A Disruptive Use of Text-image Dialogue
Verbal Images and Iconic Texts: Semiotic Identity-Blurring
Towards Erasure: Ontological Anxiety
References
Primary Sources
Secondary Sources
Chapter 4: Womanhood 2.0: A Visual-Verbal-Virtual Redefinition of Womanhood by Janet Mock
From Trans Life Writing to Transmedia Life Stories: Moving Selves Beyond the Written Page
The Visual-Verbal-Virtual Janet Mock(s): Embracing Womanhood 2.0
The Power of Images and Sisterhood: Janet Mock, Her Sisters’ Keeper
Conclusion
References
Chapter 5: Authoritatively Her/Self: Georgia O’Keeffe’s Life Writing
Roleplaying: A Woman Among Men
Herstory: Of Images, Words and Letters
Autobiography: Outside the Self Inside
The Visual/Textual Matrix
Yet Another Perspective
References
Part II: Reframing Memories
Chapter 6: Fun Homes and Queer Houses of Memory in Alison Bechdel’s Graphic Memoirs
Drawing the Divide Between House and Home
Hybridity and Slippages
Houses of Queer Memory: Articulating the Private and the Public Lesbian
Redrawing and Rewriting the Fragmented Self
The Observer Effect: Belonging, Relationality, and the Graphic Memoir
Conclusion
References
Chapter 7: Framing Herself Then and Now: Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s Self-Writing and the Evolving Practice of Photo Albums
The Father in the Text
Referentiality as Misleading
The Self Meets the Social
Conclusion
References
Chapter 8: Nostalgic Albums or Alternative Lieux de mémoire? The Interplay Between Stories, Photographs, and Recipes in Ethnic Culinary Memoirs
Composing Family Myths
Rewriting History
Alternative Archives
Conclusion
References
Part III: Elusive Textual/Visual Referentiality
Chapter 9: Zelda Fitzgerald’s Self-Portraiture: A Strenuous Performance from Ink to Gouache
A Glamorous Multifaceted Composition
A Fabricated Paper Family
Cracks in the Picture, Cracks in the Mind
Conclusion
References
Chapter 10: Isabella Bird Bishop’s 1897 Journey up the Yangtze Valley and Beyond: Beyond the Writing/Photographing Divide
Photography: a “Craze,” a Necessity
Beyond the Documentary Value of Photographs: Implied Criticism
Portrait of the Traveller/Writer as a Manchu Woman: The Illusion of Identification
Conclusion
References
Chapter 11: A Woman’s Life of War Pictures: Elizabeth Butler (1846–1933)
The Making of a “Tremendous English Patriot”
Coming, Seeing and Conquering Gender Prejudices
Truthfulness and Legitimacy
Ironies
References
Chapter 12: Whistler’s (Mother’s) Daughter: Image-Text Relations in Marilyn French’s Fictionalized (Auto)Biography
A Private Collection and a Collective History
The Historical Frame: A Tragic Truth
The Family Album: Accidents Will Happen
The Feminist Photographer: An Aesthetics of Authenticity
Conclusion
References
Part IV: Visual/Textual Embodiment
Chapter 13: “It Is Difficult to Find the Words”: The Text-Image Interface in Lynn Kohlman’s Cancer Auto/biography
Illness Narratives and Agency in the Twenty-first Century
Did You See the Beautiful Lady Today?
Conclusion
References
Chapter 14: Creating Together an “Unexpected Home”: Navigating the Matrixial Borderspace Through Text and Image in Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document (1973–79)
Bracha Ettinger’s Matrixial Borderspace and Art
Documentation V: On the Order of Things
Conclusion
References
General Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN LIFE WRITING SERIES EDITORS: CLARE BRANT · MAX SAUNDERS

Text and Image in Women’s Life Writing Picturing the Female Self

Edited by Valérie Baisnée-Keay Corinne Bigot Nicoleta Alexoae-Zagni Stephanie Genty Claire Bazin

Palgrave Studies in Life Writing

Series Editors Clare Brant Department of English King’s College London London, UK Max Saunders Department of English King’s College London London, UK

This series features books that address key concepts and subjects in life writing, with an emphasis on new and emergent approaches. It offers specialist but accessible studies of contemporary and historical topics, with a focus on connecting life writing to themes with cross-disciplinary appeal. The series aims to be the place to go to for current and fresh research for scholars and students looking for clear and original discussion of specific subjects and forms; it is also a home for experimental approaches that take creative risks with potent materials. The term ‘Life Writing’ is taken broadly so as to reflect its academic, public, digital and international reach, and to continue and promote its democratic tradition. The series seeks contributions that address global contexts beyond traditional territories, and which engage with diversity of race, gender and class. It welcomes volumes on topics of everyday life and culture with which life writing scholarship can engage in transformative and original ways; it also aims to further the political engagement of life writing in relation to human rights, migration, trauma and repression, and the processes and effects of the Anthropocene, including environmental subjects where lives may be non-human. The series looks for work that challenges and extends how life writing is understood and practised, especially in a world of rapidly changing digital media; that deepens and diversifies knowledge and perspectives on the subject; and which contributes to the intellectual excitement and the world relevance of life writing. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15200

Valérie Baisnée-Keay Corinne Bigot Nicoleta Alexoae-Zagni Stephanie Genty Claire Bazin Editors

Text and Image in Women’s Life Writing Picturing the Female Self

Editors Valérie Baisnée-Keay University of Paris-Saclay Sceaux, France Nicoleta Alexoae-Zagni Université Paris 8-VincennesSaint Denis Saint-Denis, France

Corinne Bigot Université Toulouse-Jean Jaurès Toulouse, France Stephanie Genty Université d’Évry Paris-Saclay Evry Cedex, France

Claire Bazin Paris Nanterre University Nanterre, France

ISSN 2730-9185     ISSN 2730-9193 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Life Writing ISBN 978-3-030-84874-3    ISBN 978-3-030-84875-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84875-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank all those who helped in one way or another with the preparation and publication of this book. Special thanks go to the colleagues and students who participated in our research group seminars on women’s life writing at the University of Paris Nanterre. Many of the ideas in this book have been discussed with them. We also want to thank all the colleagues who attended the international conference we organized on Text and Image in Women’s Life Writing in 2018, most of whose work has been edited and included in this book. Lastly, we wish to acknowledge the generous and continued support of the Center for Research on the English-Speaking World (CREA) at the University of Paris Nanterre and the following research bodies that have provided funding for the book and conferences: TransCrit at Paris 8 University, Cultures Anglo-Saxonnes (CAS) at Toulouse Jean Jaurès University, and SLAM at the University of Evry/Paris-Saclay. We also wish to thank the ECLLA research group from Jean Monnet University in Saint-Etienne, France, for its support in publishing Zelda Fitzgerald’s paintings.

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Contents

1 Introduction  1 Valérie Baisnée-Keay Part I Imagining Identity  19 2 Thinking Through the Book and Reimagining the Page: Julie Chen’s Artists’ Books and Faith Ringgold’s Story Quilts 21 Hertha D. Sweet Wong 3 “[Un]systematic, even with the image”: Text-­image Blurring, Self-Inquiry and Ontological Anxiety in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Works 41 Marie-Agnès Gay 4 Womanhood 2.0: A Visual-Verbal-Virtual Redefinition of Womanhood by Janet Mock 59 Aurélia Mouzet 5 Authoritatively Her/Self: Georgia O’Keeffe’s Life Writing 77 Edyta Frelik

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Contents

Part II Reframing Memories  99 6 Fun Homes and Queer Houses of Memory in Alison Bechdel’s Graphic Memoirs101 Héloïse Thomas 7 Framing Herself Then and Now: Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s Self-Writing and the Evolving Practice of Photo Albums119 Nicoleta Alexoae-Zagni 8 Nostalgic Albums or Alternative Lieux de mémoire? The Interplay Between Stories, Photographs, and Recipes in Ethnic Culinary Memoirs137 Corinne Bigot Part III Elusive Textual/Visual Referentiality 155 9 Zelda Fitzgerald’s Self-Portraiture: A Strenuous Performance from Ink to Gouache157 Elisabeth Bouzonviller 10 Isabella Bird Bishop’s 1897 Journey up the Yangtze Valley and Beyond: Beyond the Writing/Photographing Divide179 Floriane Reviron-Piégay 11 A Woman’s Life of War Pictures: Elizabeth Butler (1846–1933)199 Nathalie Saudo-Welby 12 Whistler’s (Mother’s) Daughter: Image-Text Relations in Marilyn French’s Fictionalized (Auto)Biography215 Stephanie Genty

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Part IV Visual/Textual Embodiment 239 13 “It Is Difficult to Find the Words”: The Text-­Image Interface in Lynn Kohlman’s Cancer Auto/biography241 Marta Fernández-Morales 14 Creating Together an “Unexpected Home”: Navigating the Matrixial Borderspace Through Text and Image in Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document (1973–79)259 Justyna Wierzchowska General Bibliography279 Index283

Notes on Contributors

Nicoleta  Alexoae-Zagni is Associate Professor at Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis. Her areas of research include Asian American writing, Ethnic and Postcolonial studies. After her extensive work on self-­ writing in Chinese American literature, she turned her attention to non-­ Anglophone textual productions only recently recognized as belonging to American literature (Yan Geling). She has also been delving into contemporary Japanese-American fictional and self-referential representations (Ruth Ozeki’s writing). She is currently mapping out Taiwanese American literature in English. She is co-editor (with Sämi Ludwig) of the critical volume, On the Legacy of Maxine Hong Kingston: The Mulhouse Book (2014), and co-editor and contributor to the collection of essays Women’s Life Writing and the Practice of Reading/She Reads to Write Herself (2018). Valérie Baisnée-Keay  is Associate Professor of English at the University of Paris Saclay, France. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Her research interests revolve around the personal writings and poetry of twentieth- and twenty-first-century women, with a particular focus on New Zealand women writers, including Katherine Mansfield. She has contributed to several published books and journals on women’s autobiographies and diaries and co-edited Women’s Life Writing and the Practice of Reading/She Reads to Write Herself (2018). She is the author of Gendered Resistance: The Autobiographies of Simone de Beauvoir, Maya Angelou, Janet Frame and Marguerite Duras (1997), and In the Long Corridor of Distance: Space and Place in New

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Zealand Women’s Autobiographies (2014). She is a member of University of Paris Nanterre’s research group on women writers (FAAAM). Claire  Bazin  is Professor of nineteenth-century English and Commonwealth literature at Paris Nanterre University, France. She is the author of La Vision du Mal chez les Sœurs Brontë (1995) and Jane Eyre, Le Pèlerin moderne (2005). She co-authored Janet Frame: Naissance d’une œuvre, The Lagoon and Other Stories (2010), and is the author of Janet Frame in Writers and their Work (2011). She has also published many articles on Janet Frame and on Brontë’s Jane Eyre. She also co-edited Women’s Life Writing and the Practice of Reading (2018). She has been head of the University of Nanterre’s research group on Anglo-Saxon women writers (FAAAM) for over 20 years. Corinne  Bigot is Associate Professor of postcolonial literature at Université Toulouse-Jean Jaurès. Her research focuses on nineteenth to twenty-first-century Canadian women writers, and many of her published essays and books are devoted to the short story writer, Alice Munro. Since 2016, she has also been working on transnational culinary memoirs and short stories by women. She recently co-edited a special issue of The Journal of Postcolonial Writing, “Diasporic Trajectories” (2019). She coedited Women’s Life Writing and the Practice of Reading/She Reads to Write Herself. Elisabeth  Bouzonviller is Professor of American literature at Jean Monnet University in Saint-Etienne, France. She is the author of Francis Scott Fitzgerald ou la plénitude du silence (2000), Francis Scott Fitzgerald, écrivain du déséquilibre (2000), and Louise Erdrich. Métissage et écriture, histoires d’Amérique (2014). She is a member of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society and has contributed not only to its Review and Newsletter, but also to A Distant Drummer: Foreign Perspectives on F. Scott Fitzgerald (2007) and Fitzgerald in Context (2013). Marta  Fernández-Morales  is Associate Professor at the University of Oviedo, Spain, where she teaches Anglophone literature, culture, and film. Her research focuses on gender issues in contemporary US cultural products, particularly literature, film, and television. She is the author of four books and the editor or co-editor of eight scholarly volumes, including Rethinking Gender and Popular Culture in the 21st Century: Marlboro Men and California Gurls (2017). She is involved in a research project

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about young people’s “produsage” of gender and sexual identities through social networks. Edyta  Frelik is Assistant Professor in the Department of American Literature and Culture at Maria Curie-Sklodowska University, Lublin, Poland. She is the winner of the 2013 Terra Foundation for American Art International Essay Prize, awarded by the Terra Foundation and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, for her article “Ad Reinhardt: Painter-as-Writer” and a co-recipient of 2014 Terra Foundation for American Art Academic Program Grant. In 2016 she published Painter’s Word: Thomas Hart Benton, Marsden Hartley and Ad Reinhardt as Writers. Marie-Agnès Gay  is Professor of American literature at Université Jean Moulin—Lyon 3. Her research interests focus on twentieth- and twenty-­ first-­century American literature. Initially a specialist of F.S. Fitzgerald and Gerald Ford, she has recently been working on Asian-American authors. She recently published articles on Shawn Wong, Sui Sin Far, Chuang Hua, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. She recently wrote the entry on Asian-American female authors in Dictionnaire des femmes créatrices published by Editions des femmes-Antoinette Fouque. Her last essays were published in Revue Française d’Etudes Américaines, The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review, and The European Journal of American Studies. Stephanie Genty  is Senior Lecturer at the Université d’Évry Paris-Saclay. Her PhD dissertation explored the representation of women’s condition in Marilyn French’s oeuvre, and particularly her “iconography” of feminine malaise. She has published on Marilyn French, Margaret Atwood, Nadine Gordimer, and Patti Smith. She wrote the afterword to French’s sixth novel, In the Name of Friendship (2006) and is writing a literary biography of Marilyn French (1929–2009). Aurélia  Mouzet  is Assistant Professor of Francophone Studies at the University of Arizona. She specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first-­ century literatures, cultures, and theory of sub-Saharan Africa and the diaspora, with a focus on myths, religion, and politics. She is particularly interested in the impact of race, gender, and sexuality on social identity(ies). She is revising her PhD dissertation into a monograph that investigates the figure of Moses as a transatlantic black Prophet in literatures and cultures of the black Atlantic.

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Floriane Reviron-Piégay  is Senior Lecturer in nineteenth- and twentieth-­ century English literature at Jean Monnet University, Saint-Etienne, France. She has written a number of articles on Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf and Jean Rhys. She is working on the transition from the Victorian Age to Modernism and on the relationships between fiction and life writing, with a special interest in generic hybridity and intermediality. She is the editor of Englishness Revisited (2009) and of the first issue of the online journal, Voix Contemporaines, devoted to “Family Auto/biographies” (2019). Her latest articles are devoted to Isabella Bird-Bishop’s travel narratives and their links with anthropology and photography. Nathalie Saudo-Welby  is Senior Lecturer at the Université de Picardie in Amiens, France, where she teaches British literature and translation. Her doctorate (2003) focuses on degeneration in British literature (1886–1913). She is accredited to direct research in British literature (HDR). She has published over twenty articles on fin-de-siècle literature, women’s writing, and women’s perception of conflict. Her book on the New Woman, Le Courage de déplaire, was published by Classiques Garnier in 2019. Héloïse Thomas  is a PhD student at the Bordeaux Montaigne University, writing a dissertation on the representation of historical consciousness, futurity, and the apocalypse in twenty-first-century North American literature, through feminist, queer, and decolonial perspectives. Recent publications include an essay on the autobiographical Works of Cathy Park Hong and Therese Hak Kyung Cha, in Self as Other in Minority American Life Writing (2019). Justyna Wierzchowska  is Assistant Professor at the Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw. She holds a PhD in American studies. She is the author of The Absolute and the Cold War: Discourses of Abstract Expressionism (2011), co-editor of In Other Words: Dialogizing Postcoloniality, Race, and Ethnicity (2012), and the author of numerous academic articles published in Poland and abroad. She translates American modern fiction and art-related books into Polish. Hertha D. Sweet Wong  is Professor of English and Associate Dean of Arts and Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley. She teaches

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and writes about autobiography, visual culture, and American literature, particularly indigenous literatures. She is the author of Picturing Identity: Contemporary American Autobiography in Image and Text and Sending My Heart Back Across the Years: Tradition and Innovation in Native American Autobiography as well as editor or co-editor of three anthologies of and numerous essays on Native American literature.

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 5.1

Fig. 5.2

Fig. 5.3

Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2 Fig. 9.1

Julie Chen. Bon Bon Mots: A Fine Assortment of Books, 1998. (Photo by Sibila Savage. Courtesy of Julie Chen) 27 Julie Chen. Bon Bon Mots: A Fine Assortment of Books, 1998. (Photo by Sibila Savage. Courtesy of Julie Chen) 28 Alfred Stieglitz. Georgia O’Keeffe.1918. Photograph. Metropolitan Museum of Art. (Credit Line: Gift of Georgia O’Keeffe, through the generosity of The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation and Jennifer and Joseph Duke, 1997. Wikimediacommons)81 Alfred Stieglitz. Georgia O’Keeffe.1918. Photograph. Metropolitan Museum of Art. (Credit Line: Gift of Georgia O’Keeffe, through the generosity of The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation and Jennifer and Joseph Duke, 1997. Wikimediacommons)83 Alfred Stieglitz. Georgia O’Keeffe.1932. Photograph. Metropolitan Museum of Art. (Credit Line: Gift of Georgia O’Keeffe, through the generosity of The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation and Jennifer and Joseph Duke, 1997. Wikimediacommons)88 Shirley Lim. 2018. Facebook post July 28, 2018. (Courtesy: S. Lim) 130 Shirley Lim. 2018. Facebook post August 13, 2018. (Courtesy: S. Lim) 132 Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald. “Proposed book jacket for The Beautiful and Damned,” about 1922. Reprinted by permission of the Department of Special Collections at Princeton University Library. By permission of the Trustees of the xvii

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List of Figures

Fig. 9.2

Fig. 9.3

Fig. 9.4

Fig. 10.1 Fig. 10.2

Fig. 14.1

Fig. 14.2

Fitzgerald Estate Under Agreement Dated July 3, 1975, Created by Frances Scott Fitzgerald Smith Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald. The Paper Dolls of the Fitzgerald Family, about 1932, 10 3/8, 7 5/8, 10 1/8 inches. Reprinted by permission of the Trustees of the Fitzgerald Estate Under Agreement Dated July 3, 1975, Created by Frances Scott Fitzgerald Smith Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald. Self-Portrait, early 1940s, gouache on paper, 20x18 inches. Reprinted by permission of the Department of Special Collections at Princeton University Library. By permission of the Trustees of the Fitzgerald Estate Under Agreement Dated July 3, 1975, Created by Frances Scott Fitzgerald Smith Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald. Ballerinas, about 1933, oil on canvas, 36 1/4 x 26 1/4 inches. Reprinted by permission of Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery, Alabama. Gift of the artist 1942.3. By permission of the Trustees of the Fitzgerald Estate Under Agreement Dated July 3, 1975, Created by Frances Scott Fitzgerald Smith “Gala Head-dress, “Dog-faced” Woman.” 1896. Photograph by Dr. Kinnear. Gelatin Silver Print, 9.8x14.3 cm. Copyrights The Royal Geographical Society Mrs. Bishop in Manchu Dress (1899) The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Picture Collection, The New York Public Library. (1899). Retrieved from https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/ items/510d47e1-­3d2c-­a3d9-­e040-­e00a18064a99 Mary Kelly. Post-Partum Document: Documentation V, Classified Specimens, Proportional Diagrams, Statistical Tables, Research and Index, 1977. Perspex, white card, wood, paper, ink, mixed media, 36 units. 18 × 13 cm, 7.1 × 5.1 in. Installation view: Generali Foundation, Vienna, 1998. Courtesy of the artist and Generali Foundation, Vienna. (Photograph: Werner Kaligofsky) Mary Kelly. Post-Partum Document: Documentation V, Classified Specimens, Proportional Diagrams, Statistical Tables, Research and Index, 1977. perspex, white card, wood, paper, ink, mixed media, 36 units. 18 × 13 cm, 7.1 × 5.1 in. Installation view: Generali Foundation, Vienna, 1998. Courtesy of the artist and Generali Foundation, Vienna. (Photograph: Werner Kaligofsky)

162

166

170

173 188

192

262

266

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Fig. 14.3 Mary Kelly. Post-Partum Document: Documentation V, Classified Specimens, Proportional Diagrams, Statistical Tables, Research and Index, 1977. Perspex, white card, wood, paper, ink, mixed media, units 6, 6a and 6b.18 × 13 cm, 7.1 × 5.1 in. Installation view: Generali Foundation, Vienna, 1998. Courtesy of the artist and Generali Foundation, Vienna. (Photograph: Werner Kaligofsky) 267

CHAPTER 1

Introduction Valérie Baisnée-Keay

The contemporary proliferation of images has not only affected life writing in many ways, but has also changed our critical perspective on the genre, fostering a transdisciplinary and multimodal approach to its study in the wake of the “iconic turn” in art history and visual studies (Moxey 2008).1 If graphic memoirs are the most noteworthy examples of that phenomenon, other genres of life writing, itself a form of self-­representation, have engaged with images, spurring a reflection on the text-image dialogue in past recollections. Images, especially photographs, have often been included in autobiographies, memoirs, or diaries, to name a few, with the purpose of supplementing, making more complex, or disturbing the written narrative. As Laura Marcus (2018) points out, it is the advent of photography in the early nineteenth century that created a new and more intense relationship between text and visual image, coinciding with the  In art history and visual studies, the disciplines that study visual culture, the terms “pictorial” and “iconic turn” found in Boehm (1994) and Mitchell (1994) emphasize the need for a change of paradigm in approaching visual artifacts: these should not only be interpreted or read, but also experienced. So the pictorial turn is in actual fact ontological (Moxey 2008). 1

V. Baisnée-Keay (*) University of Paris-Saclay, Sceaux, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 V. Baisnée-Keay et al. (eds.), Text and Image in Women’s Life Writing, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84875-0_1

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establishment of autobiography as a genre. Today, it is the explosion of the use of social media networks that revolutionizes and multiplies possibilities for text-image combinations. The essays presented in this collection focus on the diverse and multiple visual elements in British and American women’s life writing from the end of the nineteenth century to the start of the twenty-first. They all acknowledge the cultural dimension at the heart of images, and especially how gender affects the way images are produced and read. The term, life writing, is used here as “a signifier of generic category,” as Marlene Kadar (1992, 20) puts it, to emphasize a feminist canon that had been neglected in traditional autobiographical studies until the 1980s. By linking the personal to the political, the feminist critique that challenged male-dominated studies of autobiography from the 1980s to today has played a central role, not only in expanding and valorizing the field of life writing but also in sharpening theoretical tools for reading autobiographically. Addressing the multi-­ faceted relationship between text and image in a body of woman’s life writing, this book aims at contributing to those feminist interventions into the field. Until recently, representations of women by women in art and history books have been few and far between compared with male representations of “woman.” The pioneering role of female photographers—in the early days of photography—can be seen as evidence, on the woman’s part, to represent herself on her own terms, as subject (or agent) rather than as object. On the other hand, images may also accentuate narcissistic readings of women’s works and may suggest they cannot rise above the personal. To reclaim visibility for themselves, women artists may “reoccupy” narcissism and use it strategically, as Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson argue in the introduction of Interfaces: Women, Autobiography, Image, Performance (2002, 13–14), by making the personal political and by transforming self-representations into acts of resistance to social and sexual roles. Thus, images of women and by women remain at the center of a political and cultural struggle: the struggle for women to resist objectification and to have a “say” in their own representations. A central theme in the essays, the manipulation of images, can be used for or against women. Before looking at the way images are intertwined in women’s memoirs and other life-writing texts, a number of theoretical assumptions about the relationships between text and image needs to be examined. First, what kind of images are we talking about? The common notion of image has always been thought of as being self-evident, as something that does not

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require explaining. For W.J.T. Mitchell (1986), however, there is a methodological issue in trying to define the nature of images. The main problem is that defining images with ideas is tantamount to explaining images by images: the word “idea” comes from the Greek eidon which means image. Hence, instead of looking into the nature of images (or intension in linguistics), Mitchell chooses to define them by their extension: his list includes “pictures, statues, optical illusions, maps, diagrams, dreams, hallucinations, spectacles, projections, poems, patterns, memories, and even ideas as images” (1986, 9). This definition mixes material and mental images as Mitchell aims at breaking down the barriers between the very different disciplines that take images as objects. But this definition also poses methodological problems, as it rests on the notion of resemblance that supposedly binds all images: images are not a copy of reality, but something close to it. This in turn separates images from words. Indeed, an image of a dog looks like a dog, but the word “dog” doesn’t look like a dog. Resemblance does not characterize all images, however. In his essay, The Future of the Image (2019), Jacques Rancière argues that an image may resemble reality, but when it becomes art, it alters reality and deviates from the techniques that produced it (2003, 15). In doing so, the artistic image creates another form of resemblance. Research into multimodality, in particular text-image combinations, is relatively recent. John A. Bateman (2014, 31) dates it back to the ground-­ breaking work of Roland Barthes in the 1960s. In Elements of Semiology, published in 1964, Barthes followed up on Saussure’s idea of a science of signs of which linguistics would form a branch. Barthes aimed at extending linguistic concepts to “any system of signs, whatever their substance and limits; images, gestures, musical sounds, objects, and the complex association of all these” (9). Thus, Barthes paved the way for a discourse theory that would include different modes of signification. As for text-­ image relations, he created a system of classification that scholars continue to use today to discuss text-image relations, and that Bateman (2014, 35) has represented in the diagram below:

TEXT-IMAGE

unequal

RELATIONSHIP

equal [relay]

amplifying [anchorage] text ‘amplifies’ image reducing [illustration] image ‘reduces’ text

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However, semiotics’ claim to englobe all systems of meaning, making language the model for all symbolic systems, has also been criticized.2 In semiotics, both text and image are considered part of language. This leads to reading image as text, assuming that only words can make sense of an image. Yet, an image does not need a text to exist. As Rancière (2019) points out, an image has a life of its own; images have their own ways of producing their forms of identity and otherness. The domination of some systems of thought over others means that aesthetics cannot be separated from politics; any definitive view of the relation between text and image, including semiotics, is infused with power relations. In Iconology, Mitchell argues that the relationship between text and image has often been viewed as competitive, with each symbolic system claiming to be closer to true representation. That opposition has a long history marked by different ideological phases, opposing iconophile and iconophobic positions. With the linguistic turn in the twentieth century, the domination of language as a system of thought made the relationship between text and image an unequal one: language was viewed as being constitutive of social and individual life, while visuality was associated with mass media manipulation and the commodification of people. How does the discourse on text-­ image relations affect life writing? Bearing in mind these ideological positions, I shall address four notions at the heart of life-writing narratives which are challenged by the confrontation/juxtaposition of text and images: memory, identity, referentiality, and embodiment.

Images and Memory Flicking through a family album, whether printed or digital, to reminisce about the past is a familiar experience for many people, rendered even more popular by the exponential use of digital photography. This way of remembering is a more common practice than writing memoirs. There is no doubt that images are closely involved in the process of remembering. For some scholars, the link between memory and images is constitutive: representing the past necessarily involves having an image of it. But there is also a long philosophical tradition associating memory and imagination, considered as the lowest form of knowledge (Ricœur 2000, 5). As a consequence, the idea that memory is a faithful record of the past has suffered from its negative association with images, considered by 2

 Mitchell mentions the philosopher Nelson Goodman as the main critic of semiotics.

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philosophers as untrue or fantastical. Yet, as Ricœur (2000) points out, we have nothing better than memory to remember the past. There is no denying that our remembrance is visual; images have the power to materialize memories. But images are not only a medium by which we remember, alongside other forms of mediated memories; they are part and parcel of what we remember. Cultural memory is always mediated, so how we remember will affect what we remember. Moreover, memories do not take place in a vacuum. In his ground-­ breaking work about memory, social scientist Maurice Halbwachs famously said that we cannot remember outside the social: personal memories are bound up in the collective memory of a culture. For survivors of trauma, this link is even more significant. Marianne Hirsch coined the term “postmemory” to refer to a specific kind of memory situated between personal memory and History, a term she develops in relation to Holocaust survivors and which she defines as “second-generation memories of cultural or collective traumatic events and experiences” (1997, 22). However, collective memory can also be manipulated: there is a “politics of remembering” within a culture that shapes its vision of the past. Indeed, we are encouraged to remember some events and forget others.3 Hirsch and Smith (2002) note that “what a culture remembers and what it chooses to forget are intricately bound up with issues of power and hegemony, and thus with gender” (6). As ideological constructs, family albums exemplify this politics of memory: they focus on particular events and people, leaving disturbing events in the dark. They fix individuals in social and sexual roles. Looking back at a photographic exhibition, “The Family of Man,” organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New  York in 1955, Marianne Hirsch (1997) shows that the decontextualized display of family pictures across cultures contributed to homogenizing individual and social groups. The exhibition emphasized similarities rather than differences, thus sustaining “a mythology of the family as stable and united, static and monolithic” (51).4 To resist the reduction to certain gender roles in family albums, a woman’s radical strategy may thus consist of deleting images in order to increase their evocative power without revealing the self or making the self too 3  For a discussion on the “politization of memory,” see Susannah Radstone, Bill Schwarz, eds. Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates, Fordham University Press, 2010. 4  See also “La grande famille des Hommes” in Roland Barthes’ Mythologies, Paris: Seuil, 1957.

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personal, thus avoiding an excessive gendering of the self. Annie Ernaux’s “impersonal autobiography” Les Années (2008), for example, does not contain actual family photographs: the narrator uses ekphrastic description instead. In the process of selecting photographs for a family album, the family produces itself as a family, argues Annette Kuhn in Family Secrets (2002). To avoid being limited by personal response to memories emerging from looking at a family album, Kuhn lays out a method for decoding and contextualizing family photographs to reveal their broader cultural and historical meanings (8). The politics of memory is further complicated by the fact that the memory process is not only a conscious one. The work of the unconscious sorts out events, buries some, and creates screen memories. Freud compares memories to the archaeological objects of Pompei or Tutankhamun’s tomb: “All of the essentials are preserved; even things that seem completely forgotten are present somehow and somewhere, and have merely been buried and made inaccessible to the subject” (Freud 1937/1964, 260). Layers of memory may remain inaccessible to us, especially when trauma is involved, and what we “see” may not be necessarily what really happened. In terms of remembering, we’re in the same position as archaeologists. Yet, images are thought to be the only way to remember events. With the contemporary proliferation of images, the current trend is to remember everything. Not only have new media technologies multiplied possibilities of recording the past, but they have also altered temporalities and thus the way we record our lives.5 Reflecting on new media and autobiography, Philippe Lejeune (2014) states that “new communication tools are not only changing autobiography—the expression of a life—but are also attacking life itself” (249). These tools affect the speed, time frame, and spatial sense of our lives. With social media applications such as Facebook and Instagram, the gap between experiencing and remembering has narrowed. On social media, by sharing a photo, we turn the present into the past more quickly. Online sites have also changed our mnemonic processes. On those sites, we are encouraged to remember the past in words and pictures. It is difficult not to put a photo of oneself on a Facebook profile. Not only do social media influence how we remember, but also what we remember, as memories can be triggered by social media themselves. Facebook is full of automated processes that help people 5  For a discussion of the digitization of memories, see José van Dijck, Mediated Memories in the Digital Age, Stanford University Press, 2007.

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resuscitate memories. There is no need for a subject to remember. Moreover, new media technologies have accentuated the tendency to remember everything, whereas “real” memory cannot function without its Other, forgetfulness. With social media, we are witnessing what Ricœur (2000) would call “an excess of memory” which not only hinders memory-­ work itself, but can lead to dramatic consequences in the present, such as losing your reputation or your job, as Viktor Mayer-Schönberger argues in his book, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (2009). New social media also raise the question of the ownership of the cybermemories we leave on the Internet. According to Gunnþórunn Guðmundsdóttir (2014), “no one really knows who owns or will have access to these traces” (44). She draws attention to the commercial interests that thrive on anything we leave on the Internet. Digital technology, however, has not replaced the traditional life-writing media. Philippe Lejeune (2014) observes that among life-writing forms, correspondence is the one that has been the most affected by high technology, while autobiographies and diaries continue to be written in their traditional forms. All in all, the association of images and memory has been negative. The fear is that we will be eventually manipulated by images and by the giant companies that profit from them, and that we won’t have ownership of our past anymore. With digitization, memories have become more fragile than ever as they are both everywhere and nowhere. Hence, the resistance to images we find in some autobiographies. The same ambivalence can be found as regards to identity.

Identity The question of self-identity haunts life writing, especially contemporary forms of life writing, for the individualization of modern societies has brought the question of identity to the forefront. Social science has shown that in traditional cultures, identities were conferred by fixed social roles pertaining to gender, birthright, parental status, religious status, and so on. Although gender roles still have a strong influence in determining the sense of who we are, in modern cultures, identities have become increasingly fluid and dynamic. As individuals have freed themselves from the constraints of social roles, identity has become something one may invent, as social scientist, Jean-Claude Kaufmann (2004), argues in his theory on identity, L’invention de soi (“Inventing Oneself”). Today, identity is no longer perceived as a given, but as a creative and flexible construct, even

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though this “invention” is framed by those models a society makes available. Self-invention is not incompatible with the fact that the identity of an individual reflects his/her society. Within this context of self-invention, images play a key role. Kaufmann argues that identity can be understood, to some extent, as an image of oneself (2004, 68). Identity, therefore, may be thought of as the product of a representation of oneself. It is images of oneself that form the basis of the construction of one’s identity, guiding action and interaction in everyday life. They provide the necessary multiplicity and fluidity to the individual’s self-representation. Therefore, images enable the play of identity more easily than stories, according to Kaufmann. This also applies to life writing. Laura Marcus notes that “the relationship between life-writing and photography, and the incidence of photographs (actual or described) in life-writing texts, are at their most prominent in works which possess a particular generic hybridity, or represent identity itself in hybrid terms.”6 If images open up the expression of identity, they can also restrict it. Visual images, which have multiplied with digital photography, may also fix and constrain identity (Kaufmann 2004, 70). For instance, the portrait which features on official documents is supposed to sum up our identity, even though this photograph is only one among many images and does not reflect the dynamism at the heart of identity. Thus, in her experimental and multicultural memoir, Dictée (1982), Korean American writer Theresa Hak Kyung Cha contests the use of photographs as a means of accessing identity, as Marie-Agnès Gay notes in this book. Moreover, images of the past may dramatize the autobiographical subject’s sense of a gap between one’s own sense of identity in the present and the otherness of what was. Finally, images can also be manipulated more easily than stories, hence the link between ideology and image. Thus, in terms of constructing one’s identity, images are ambivalent. On the one hand, identity images are a reflection of oneself, and as such, they encourage reflexivity and therefore self-knowledge, one of the cognitive conditions of life writing. Looking at an old photograph of oneself can often be the starting point for writing memoirs. But images are also characterized by plurality and changeability so that they lead to a certain fragmentation of the individual subject. This apparent 6  Laura Marcus, “‘The split of the mirror”: Photography, Identity and Memory.” Paper presented at the 2018 FAAAM conference on Women’s Life Writing in Text and Image (University of Paris Ouest Nanterre).

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contradiction disappears if we distinguish between two types of identity as Kaufmann does: ordinary identity (what he calls ICO identity),7 or biographical identity. For Kaufmann (2004, 169), there are more images than narratives involved in the way ordinary identity works. Images dominate what Kaufmann calls “immediate identity,” which is characterized by fluidity, multiplicity, and readiness for action, while “biographical identity,” which tends towards unity and coherence, rests on a narrative process, and involves a certain distancing from everyday life. Hence, the concept of “narrative identity,” which produces a different type of identity than that produced by images. Until recently, autobiographical theory focused primarily on text; the construction of the self was considered as independent from visual images and emerging essentially from the stories we tell. This was validated by the fact that several disciplines—philosophy, social science, psychology, and so on—embraced the concept of narrative identity to understand the self as a tissue of stories. These disciplines have identified a cognitive and communicative activity called “autobiographical reasoning” in individuals. This activity creates links between past and present that are essential for an individual’s development.8 When a subject tells about her life in an organized narrative, she acquires a sense of self-continuity as the events of her life are symbolically integrated into a story. The tendency of autobiographical reasoning is to look for a certain unity of the self, through a reconciliation of past and present. Self-narratives are ontological in their everyday forms and tend to posit a stable being across time. Stories also make sense of our relationships with others, as no self is isolated from the rest of the world. These relationships contribute to the creation of an interwoven fabric of ontological stories. With the rising use of social media in everyday life, a new form of identity has appeared: online identity. If social roles no longer define identities, new communication technologies have given rise to new types of identities. The concept of online identity challenges that of narrative identity. For Rak and Poletti (2014), “Self-representation online challenges the tendency to read for narrative, which has been a hallmark of ­ auto/ 7  The acronym ICO coined by Kaufmann means “Immediate, Contextualized, Operational” (Invention de soi, 172). 8   Tilmann Habermas and Christin Köber. 2015. “Autobiographical Reasoning is Constitutive for Narrative Identity: The Role of the Life Story for Personal Continuity.” In The Oxford Handbook of Identity Development, ed. K.  McLean and M.  Syed, 149–165. New York: Oxford University Press.

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biography studies” (7). They point out that some digital activities, such as the posting of photographs, are not narrative at all. The question is whether there is such a thing as a “virtual identity” which would be different from the “real” one. To answer that question, one needs first to consider the different stages of development of the Internet: Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. The second stage, dubbed Web 2.0, is characterized especially by the change from static web pages to dynamic or user-generated content and the growth of social media. This new stage has affected the perspective on the online self. While the scholars of Web 1.0 hailed the birth of the “cyborg,” a virtual identity that exists only online and creates its own communities,9 Web 2.0 theorists, such as social scientist Rob Cover (2016), argue that digital selves epitomize the concept of identity as performance that Judith Butler articulated in Gender Trouble (1990). What Butler said about gender identity—“There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the ‘very’ expressions that are said to be its results” (33)—also applies to online identities. In other words, when we set a profile on Facebook, post photographs and texts, or respond to messages, we are performing acts of self-identity. In the case of transwoman Janet Mock analyzed by Aurelia Mouzet in the first part of this book, these performing acts lead to a visual-­ virtual-­verbal (re)definition of womanhood: “Womanhood 2.0.” Online performance, however, is not fundamentally different from performing acts of identity in real life. So that unlike what the first theorists of online identity demonstrated, the gap between real and virtual life may not be absolute.

Image/Text and the Question of Referentiality The juxtaposition of photographs and autobiography in life writing also returns us to the issue of referentiality, which poststructuralist theories deconstructed in the 1980s. These theories demonstrated that neither text nor image can give us an unmediated access to reality. In studies on autobiography and photography alike, the idea that photography and autobiography merely reproduce or represent reality is considered naïve. Acknowledging the referentiality of a text has even been deemed as tantamount to holding traditional views on language, the self and literary form, 9  Turkle, Sherry. 1995. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon and Schuster.

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as Eakin (1992) argues in his study of reference in autobiography, Touching the World. With poststructuralist theories, addressing the issue of reference has become almost taboo. This has had several consequences on autobiographical studies: first, memoirs analyzed by poststructuralism are thought to say more about the present than about the past, as the subject of discourse is in the present; next, autobiography is considered as an art form (or a rhetorical construct) rather than a historical document. Importantly, one of the key arguments in the poststructuralist deconstruction of referentiality is that the self is staged in photography and text alike. The subject of autobiography is split between the narrating I and the narrated I, thus inscribing at the origins of the diegesis a multiplicity of selves that heightens the fictionality of the account. Similarly, the subject of the photographic self-portrait can never be identical with himself/herself. Using Lacan’s mirror stage in a child’s development, Marianne Hirsch (1997, 89) points out that there is an irretrievable gap between the subject represented in the photo and the one looking at it. In the photographic portrait, the subject can only gaze at otherness. For some scholars (Hirsch 1997; Adams 2000), the referential basis of autobiography and photography is but an illusion, masking “their constructed and mediated qualities,” as Hirsch puts it. As a result, when text and image occur together, neither can guarantee the veracity of the other. An example of this poststructuralist distrust for personal images can be found in Roland Barthes’ autobiography, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1975). The work opens with a series of photographs of the author’s childhood and youth accompanied by comments. Although Barthes professes a certain fascination for these photographs, which he will explain further in his essay, Camera Lucida (1981), images can only form a pre-text; they belong to the body, the Id, something that the subject has to detach himself from to enter writing (écriture), which is abstract and signifies without representing. Visuality, even verbal, has to be eliminated from writing to achieve a certain purity. About the “adjective,” Barthes writes: “He is troubled by any image of himself, suffers when he is named. He finds the perfection of a human relationship in this vacancy of the image: to abolish—in oneself, between oneself and others—adjectives; a relationship which adjectivizes is on the side of the image, on the side of domination, of death” (43). An image is an annihilating otherness for Barthes. The ultimate self-writing is devoid of images. With less extremism than Barthes, the narrator of Marilyn French’s third novel, Her Mother’s Daughter (1987), who is also a photographer, takes issue with the referentiality of the images, which may omit

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more than they reveal, or allow for multiple readings—and ultimately depend on words to correct or complete them, as Stephanie Genty argues in this book. All these arguments represent a radical shift from the first studies on autobiography, which were undertaken by historians. Autobiography was then considered as a subgenre of biography, with the same truth value attached to it. The nature of the referent, however, is different in autobiography and photography. Because of their indexical nature, photographs constitute material traces of the past. There was necessarily a referent for a photograph to be taken. As Barthes points out in Camera Lucida, “…in photography I can never deny the thing has been there” (76). While autobiographies may have a loose relation to their referent, this is not possible for photography. In other words, the referent persists in photography. Hence, a troubling raw presence, which Barthes refers to as “punctum,” while Mitchell (1994) notes that photography has a “mythic status as a kind of materialized memory trace embedded in the context of personal associations and private ‘perspectives’” (289). Thus, there is something magic about a photograph, something that cannot only be explained with words. The semiotics of images is opposed to or coexists with a metaphysics of presence, producing what Mitchell (1994) calls a dialectic of exchange and resistance between photography and language (289). Resistance and ambivalence can be witnessed in the works of Roland Barthes himself. Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes has been hailed as anti-­ autobiography, attacking the myth of the subject and the grand narrative of the self. Yet, in Camera Lucida, Barthes also turns to photography as autobiography to find presence. This leads him to define two different ways of perceiving photographs: through “studium” or “punctum.” While the “studium” is coded and traversed by multiple significations, the “punctum,” whose powerful effect on us is muted, is not. It brings about an emotional response that is beyond words. Because of their material presence, photographs are sometimes invaluable, unique repositories of the past. As a result, they often feel indispensable when writing the story of one’s life. Many creators of autobiographical comics use photography in their stories, as a gesture toward authenticity, Andrew Kunka (2018, 72) notices. In fact, there are multiple ways in which images point toward reality as Jacques Rancière demonstrates in an effort to reconcile modernity and historicity. Rancière (2003, 22–31) makes a distinction between three types of images—the naked image, the ostensive image, and the metaphorical image—encountered in museums

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and exhibitions. The naked image is concerned with giving testimony, not making art. Naked images are exemplified by the photos of the Nazi camps taken in 1945 by famous photographers. Next, the ostensive image displays its power as “sheer presence,” but this presence is showcased as art. The third category, the metamorphic image, breaks the distinction between artistic and non-artistic images, which allows a critical circulation between the two. For example, an art installation can be transformed into a “theatre for memory,” in which the artist collector or archivist critically displays the heterogeneous elements of a common history (33–34). For Rancière, these three types of images are not pure categories: they are all compelled to borrow something from the others. Even the “naked” image can bring about a contemplation filtered by art: the dehumanization process at work in the camps is supported by representations such as Rembrandt’s skinned ox (35). Thus, images make more complex rather than simplify the relationship to the referent, producing new systems of visibility and invisibility, presence and absence, language and silence.

Images and Embodiment In the relationship between the image and its referent, the representation of the body holds a special place in our cultures and continues to be the focus of much critical attention, more particularly in feminist theory. Second-wave feminism aimed at liberating the female body from patriarchal control and violence, an effort that is still under way as the contemporary #Metoo movements attest. In this struggle to resist control, the role of images is central as part of the struggle is staged on a symbolic level. In a patriarchal context, images of women highlight their position as objects, whether they are beautiful objects to be contemplated or sexual ones to be desired. For Teresa de Lauretis, this representation of woman as image is so culturally pervasive that “it necessarily constitutes a starting point for any understanding of sexual difference and its ideological effects in the construction of social subjects, its presence in all forms of subjectivity” (1984, 37–38). The contemporary emphasis on the materiality of photography has increased the presence of the body and heightened sexual difference in the representation of women as image. Some photography theorists, such as Roland Barthes (1980), came to consider the photographic portrait as a direct emanation of a body. This is a relatively new development as photographs were first considered as the products of an inexpressive and

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mechanical process of reproduction, inferior to painting in terms of bodily representation. This was Walter Benjamin’s position in particular; Benjamin argued that photography differs from both poetry and painting in that “the camera records our likeness without returning our gaze.” A photograph, therefore, had no “aura” according to Benjamin, as we can’t “invest it with the ability to look at us in return” (188–189).10 Today, the opposition between painting and photography is exactly the opposite, as Jacques Rancière points out: And photography, formerly accused of opposing its mechanical, soulless simulacra to the coloured flesh of painting, sees its image inverted. Compared with pictorial artifices, it is now perceived as the very emanation of a body, as a skin detached from its surface, positively replacing the appearances of resemblance and defeating the efforts of the discourse that would have it express a meaning. (2019, 9)

Rancière refers here to Barthes’ theory of the punctum and the studium, which has become fundamental for anyone studying photography. In photographic studies, bodily metaphors abound to stress the materiality of photography. Barthes even uses the metaphor of the umbilical cord to describe the relationship between the photographer and the object. This development raises the question of voyeurism. Emphasizing the materiality of photography underlines the voyeurism inherent to the nature of the medium and may reduplicate women’s position as objects of male gaze. Some life-writing practices, such as confession, have already been surrounded with shame, sin, and voyeurism. They have been accused of playing with readers’ voyeuristic instincts. Pictures added to narratives may delve even further into the intimacy of the writer. This is even more problematic in the case of disability where “visual representation of visible disability runs the risk of objectifying its subjects precisely because of its visual nature” (Couser 2009, 50). Hence, a resistance in women’s life writing to models of narrative of illness and disability that play on the myth of the beautiful sufferer. This is the case of former model Lynn Kohlman’s autobiography, Lynn Front to Back (2005) analyzed by Marta Fernández-Morales in this book, which documents Kohlman’s 10  “To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return.” On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Shocken Books, 1969).

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transformation from object of the male gaze to subject as a breastless samurai warrior in words and pictures. As women’s bodies have become truly objectified, women who represent themselves may play with images as a mode of resistance and a way to defy cultural stereotypes of the female body. The self-portraits of American photographer Cindy Sherman, for example, stage the artist in Hollywood poses, the images referring to other images and stereotypes. Women also may invent new forms of embodiment that engage with the history of seeing women’s bodies. The collection of essays Interfaces (2002), edited by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, examines displays by twentieth and twenty-first century women artists who have represented themselves through multiple media, including their own bodies. For Smith and Watson, these representations are material performances, that is “autobiographical acts [that] situate the body in some kind of material surround that functions as a theatre of embodied self-representation” (5). An example of such an autobiographical act is Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document analyzed by Justyna Wierzchowska in this book. This iconic installation of the mother-child relationship combines image and text to produce a form of life-writing which is both intimate and political. Such self-­representations refute the idea of narcissism, as the personal is transcended by wider narratives and representations of the body. Multiple media are thus available for women to engage with representations of their body in life writing. Graphic memoirs especially may “reframe” the body, for as McCloud (2004) argues, “cartooning isn’t just a way of drawing, it is a way of seeing” (31). This may lead to new epiphanic embodied representations of the female self. One of the iconic pictures in Jennifer Hayden’s autobiographical comic, The Story of my Tits (2015), which deals with the author’s experience with breast cancer, is a picture of a goddess that has eyes instead of nipples. This picture epitomizes what the author tries to achieve in the book: “It’s as if I saw my life more clearly having had breast cancer and I was looking back at it through my breasts.”11 Not only does the comics form change the way artists tell their lives, but it also entails a different way of reading life. The power of comics lies in the freedom granted to the reader as she comes and goes between words and images, looking for narrative closure. Similarly, Hertha Wong’s close readings of Julie Chen’s artists’ books and Faith Ringgold’s 11  Interview with Jennifer Hayden reproduced in Andrew Kunka, Autobiographical Comics, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018, 229–243.

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story quilts examine how each creates webs of image-text interfaces, requiring readers’ active engagement, both looking and reading, which generates perceptive dissonance and leads to new cognitive resolutions. Finally, through her reading of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home in this book, Heloïse Thomas argues that the graphic memoir materializes a queer home where the self is ceaselessly disassembled and recomposed. In life writing, autographics, a term coined by Gillian Whitlock (2006), is as unique an act as autobiographics. The dialogue between text and image in life writing is never a simple matter for women who write about themselves. The essays included in this collection focus on the tension, misrepresentation, distortion, or correspondence that may exist between text and images in women’s life writing, while addressing the gendered dimension of the visual/textual interface. The book is divided into four sections that guide readers through the text-­ image debates addressed in this introduction. The first section, “Imagining Identity,” examines how women’s self-representation in text and image creates a matrix through which female subjectivity can be contested and redefined. The articles focus on innovative visual, textual, and virtual combinations in life writing, such as Julie Chen’s artists’ books, Faith Ringgold’s story quilts, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée, Janet Mock’s multimedia life writing, as well as the autobiographical writings of Georgia O’Keeffe. The second section foregrounds memoirs that rely on visuals such as comics, family photographs, and digital images to interrogate and create family stories and memories while highlighting the author’s sense of belonging to a community. The third section discusses the elusive referentiality of textual/visual representations through the memoirs of artists such as Zelda Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Butler, along with the travel writing of Isabella Bird-Bishop and the novels of Marilyn French. The final section centers on visual/textual embodied experience—women who have been looking at their own bodies during profound or life-changing events, such as motherhood and illness. The purpose of Text/Image in Women’s Life Writing is to contribute to the ongoing conversation on text, image, and gender, which is particularly germane to the present times, by bringing together essays discussing a wide range of life writing texts.

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References Adams, Timothy Dow. 2000. Light Writing and Life Writing, Photography in Autobiography. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press. Barthes, Roland. 1967/1964. Elements of Semiology. Trans. A.  Lavers and C. Smith. London: Jonathan Cape. ———. 1981/1980. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. R. Howard. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ———. 1994/1975. Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. Trans. R. Howard. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Bateman, John A. 2014. Text and Image: A critical introduction to the visual/verbal divide. London: Routledge. Benjamin, Walter. 1969. On Some Motifs in Baudelaire. In Illuminations. Trans. H. Zohn. New York: Shocken Books. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge. Couser, G.  Thomas. 2009. Signifying Bodies: Disability in Contemporary Life Writing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Cover, Rob. 2016. Digital Identities: Creating and Communicating the Online Self. London: Elsevier. De Lauretis, Teresa. 1984. Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Eakin, Paul. 1992. Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Freud, Sigmund. 1937/1964. Constructions in Analysis. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol 23. Trans. J. Strachey et al. London: The Hogarth Press, 257–269. Guðmundsdóttir, Gunnþórunn. 2014. The Online Self: Memory and Forgetting in the Digital Age. The European Journal of Life Writing III; VC42– VC54: 42–54. Habermas, Tilmann, and Christin Köber. 2015. Autobiographical Reasoning Is Constitutive for Narrative Identity: The Role of the Life Story for Personal Continuity. In The Oxford Handbook of Identity Development, ed. K. McLean and M. Syed, 149–165. New York: Oxford University Press. Halbwachs, Maurice. 1997/1950. La Mémoire collective. Paris: Albin Michel. Hirsch, Marianne. 1997. Family Frames. Photography Narrative and Postmemory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Hirsch, Marianne, and Valerie Smith, eds. 2002. Feminism and Cultural Memory: An Introduction. Signs 28 (1): 1–19. Kadar, Marlene. 1992. Coming to Terms: Life Writing – From Genre to Critical Practice. In Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

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Kaufmann, Jean-Claude. 2004. L’invention de soi : une théorie de l’identité. Paris: Armand Colin. Kuhn, Annette. 2002/1995. Family Secrets. Acts of Memory and Imagination. London: Verso. Kunka, Andrew. 2018. Autobiographical Comics. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Lejeune, Philippe. 2014. Autobiography and New Communication Tools. In Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online, ed. Julie Rak and Anna Poletti, 247–258. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Marcus, Laura. 2018. Autobiography: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mayer-Schönberger, Viktor. 2009. Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. McCloud, Scott. 2004. Understanding Comics. The Invisible Art. New York: Harper. Mitchell, W.J.T. 1986. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1994. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Moxey, Keith. 2008. Visual Studies and the Iconic Turn. Journal of Visual Culture 7 (2): 131–146. Rak, Julie, and Anna Poletti, eds. 2014. Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Rancière, Jacques. 2019/2003. The Future of the Image. Trans. G.  Elliott. London: Verso. Ricœur, Paul. 2000. La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli. Paris: Seuil. Van Dijck, José. 2007/2004. Mediated Memories in the Digital Age. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Watson, Julia, and Sidonie Smith. 2002. Interfaces: Women, Autobiography, Image, Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Whitlock, Gillian. 2006. Autographics: The Seeing ‘I’ of the Comics. Modern Fiction Studies 52 (4): 965–979.

PART I

Imagining Identity

CHAPTER 2

Thinking Through the Book and Reimagining the Page: Julie Chen’s Artists’ Books and Faith Ringgold’s Story Quilts Hertha D. Sweet Wong

A period of intense social upheaval and technological innovation, the last thirty to forty years of the twentieth century were notable for the fractious struggles of ethnic and racial minorities, women, and the underclass overall. The era gave rise to second- and third-wave feminisms, Ethnic Studies programs, LGBTQ rights, antiwar movements, the multicultural wars, postcolonial voices, and radical transdisciplinary experimentation in literature and art. Historical recovery projects, ethnic and feminist manifestos, and an unapologetic politicized (re)interpretation of inherited modes and media sprang up. Part of the Postmodern Era, this was a period in which scholars claimed that history was over, at least for Europeans; a diminished present, the only reality; unmediated representation, impossible; and identity assumed to be a fiction. Writers and artists contended with the

H. D. S. Wong (*) University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 V. Baisnée-Keay et al. (eds.), Text and Image in Women’s Life Writing, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84875-0_2

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question of how to do creative work if there was no history or agreed upon cultural context, but only the shattered remnants of a broken world with no possibility of representation and no self to represent it. A growing body of artistic production by women and ethnic minorities exposed the myth of “universality” as a Western notion that disregarded non-Western epistemologies and experiences. Individual identity was itself deconstructed: the notion of an autonomous, unchanging, singular self was determined to be a socio-historical construction. Scholars, artists, and activists redefined identity as relational, fluid, and multiple. But even as certain sectors of the academic world were declaring the “death of the subject” or making claims about “post-identity,” publication of autobiographies and memoirs in the United States burgeoned. The self was very much alive and now, more than ever before, clamoring to be seen and heard in previously unfathomable modes.1 By the 1970s, American culture, previously described as a melting pot (an assimilationist fantasy), began to be acknowledged as a stew, a tossed salad, or a mosaic. Rather than an undifferentiated union, then, the United States was seen as a collection of variables in proximity. Relatively unheard voices and unseen images of women and underrepresented minorities proliferated in literature and art, often in hybrid autobiographies composed of image and text. While, historically, visual and literary studies have been considered separate disciplines,2 over the past fifty years, disciplinary borders and medium-specific art practices have become increasingly permeable. Scholars, writers, and artists are more likely than ever to work across disciplines and media. I use approaches from literary and visual studies to examine hybrid forms of autobiography that blur established disciplinary boundaries. Although pictures have been used to communicate since cave paintings, and images and texts have been together since at least the illuminated manuscripts,3 this is a new category of autobiographical 1  The enduring interest in self-representation has only ramped up with the latest technology. Opportunities for circulating instantaneous self-expression in text and image are endless: in the blogosphere, on Facebook, and via Twitter, Snapchat, YouTube, Instagram, and other social media. My focus, however, is not on digital autobiographical forms. 2  Visual studies is distinct from art history in that its focus is not on “high art” but on the primacy of the visual in everyday life and an analysis of the power relations embedded in visual regimes and the act of looking. See, for instance, Berger, Elkins, McLuhan, Mirzoeff, Mitchell, and Sturken and Cartwright. 3  There is a long history of picture narratives, followed by image-text codices, but after the printing press was invented, print became more standardized and less inclusive of images

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expression that I call variously “visual autobiography” (a term British photographer Jo Spence used to refer to her work as early as 1979), “intermedia autobiography,” “interart autobiography,” “intersectional autobiography,” “transmedia autobiography,” “hybrid autobiography,” or simply “autobiography in image and text.” A necessarily capacious category, visual autobiography encompasses a wide range of self-representations—glimpses into a moment of a life or self—and self-narrations—stories of a life or self, developing over time. These intermedia autobiographies take many forms: conventional books in which images are integral to the whole, rather than mere supplementation or illustration; photo-autobiographies; artists’ books—individually handmade textual objects that are experienced as both text and sculpture; story quilts; comics; word paintings; installation art; performances; and other visual forms. Such a proliferation of hybrid autobiographies testifies to a serious search for new verbal-visual modes with which to explore and articulate a complex sense of self, to reexamine received and conventional histories in order to challenge social inequities, and, often, to offer a meta-­ commentary on the process of self-representation itself. This meta-­ commentary, an awareness of the process of autobiographical construction, documents how autobiographers imagine individual and collective histories in response to conventional concepts of selfhood and history. It implies the collage-like nature of a marginalized self that both participates in the dominant culture and stands apart from it, claiming alternative notions of and possibilities for subject formation. Focusing on the formal relations between image and text, W.J.T. Mitchell, Sidonie Smith, and Julia Watson offer useful analytical categories. Mitchell identifies three types of visual-verbal interaction: image-text that denotes a relationship between image and text; image/text that emphasizes a juxtaposition of image and text; and imagetext in which there is a synthesis of image and text (89, n9). Extending Mitchell’s image-text categories, Smith and Watson outline four basic ways that artists “texture the interface to mobilize visual and textual regimes” (Interfaces, 21): relationally, contextually, spatially, and temporally. A relational interface is one in which “visual and textual are set side by side, with neither subordinated to the other” (21). In the relational interface, image and text are in dialogue; they either parallel or interrogate each other. A contextual interface unless they were used to illustrate a point. Even so, books with both images and text have always existed.

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explicitly cites “sociohistorical sources” that provide a cultural context for the autobiographical persona (25), and may be either documentary or ethnographic. A spatial interface is one that can be “infiltrated either from outside in as a paratext or inside out as a palimpsest” (28). The supposed “surface is redefined by its surround; or, alternately, shown as making a history of previous iterations” (28). Finally, a temporal interface involves a contraction or expansion of action over time. This mode may collapse distinctions between image and text (31) or it may consist of serial self-­ presentations that emphasize “subjectivity as processual” (34). These categories are still being explored and refined. Certainly, they are not all-inclusive. For instance, because virtually all visual-verbal interfaces are “relational,” Smith and Watson’s “relational interface” and Mitchell’s “image-text” function primarily as a single catch-all category. It is especially important to note that different types of interfaces are not mutually exclusive. Often, writers-artists experiment with several types of visual-­ verbal interfaces simultaneously in a single project, creating complex and layered sets of image-text relations. I argue that in place of a single interface, it is more accurate to envision multiple, simultaneous sets of image-­ text relations as a matrix or a network or a crystal, with many surfaces and axes of interaction. In addition to refining the Smith-Watson structural analysis, I consider where a particular image-text falls on the spectrum of text to image (and it is a spectrum, not a binary opposition), how writers-artists often confound the supposed image/text divide, and most importantly, the interaction between viewer/reader and what is viewed/read. Visual autobiographies, in their multifarious forms, demand an intense engagement to read creatively and look mindfully. How does this dual process affect the reader? While visual-verbal forms may include conventional text, they often require readers to learn new ways of traversing the image-word by including experiments with pagination and textual flow, unconventional line breaks, re-conceptualizations of the page—as is often the case in artists’ books, presentation of words as images (e.g., word paintings), and reading image and text simultaneously as in comics. The visual elements claim our immediate attention, setting a mood and eliciting emotions such as shock, confusion, or curiosity that pull us into attentive relationship with what is viewed. Visual elements may be “translated” into a standard page such as cinematic techniques, or require that the text be reconfigured as a visual feature in an image, such as use of text as a frame or a quilt square as a page. Generally, visual autobiography demands from

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readers/viewers more intensely active participation, since moving between image and text relies on defamiliarization that requires us to become more self-aware about the process of decoding and interpreting image and text at the same time. Reading and looking demand constant comparison, shifting the frame of reference. The difference between image and text generates perceptive dissonance leading to new cognitive resolutions. By examining closely the varied experiments in a network of visual-verbal interfaces, we learn why it makes a difference how words and images are linked, juxtaposed, fused, or separated in the service of autobiography. In this essay, I focus on two American artists-writers who create self-­ representations and self-narrations in imaginative configurations of image and text: Julie Chen’s artists’ books,4 and Faith Ringgold’s story quilts. Chen and Ringgold participate in the age-old act of telling personal and cultural stories, but in visual-verbal forms that allow them to represent themselves in all their complexity and convey their stories with nuance as part of a diverse, “multicentered” society (Lippard 7). Chen focuses on individual interiority, while Ringgold examines individual experience in its socio-historical-cultural contexts. Chen grapples with personal loss and the erosion of self with the passage of time; Ringgold depicts personal loss in light of transgenerational trauma.5 Ringgold seeks also to correct or refine historical narratives that have distorted or omitted her. The work of both can be understood as part of “the pictorial turn” (Mitchell 11), a move not only toward the dominance of the image rather than text, but also toward considering the visual as a “place where meanings are created and contested” (Mirzoeff 6), as well as a site of memory itself.

Julie Chen’s Artists’ Books: Architectures of Cognition Julie Chen, Chinese-Japanese American artist and educator, makes conceptually nuanced, meticulously rendered, acutely self-aware, and obliquely autobiographical artists’ books. In “Books in Balance,” her 1989 M.A. Thesis, Chen articulated her artistic vision. For each artists’ book, her aim is to make “a book in which the elements of visual content, materials, text, illustration, format, and structure all work … together to create  Artists’ books are not books by or about artists, but books as art.  For further consideration of trauma in women’s autobiography, see Egan, Fuchs, Schwab, and Whitlock. 4 5

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a unified whole” (1). Striving to keep a balance between craftsperson and artist, she wants her books to be both “visual and sculptural objects” that bring text and image together so that neither overshadows the other. Like others, Chen is invested in “reader/viewer interaction with [her] books,” as readers embark on the visual journey of reading that includes the “tactile experience of turning the pages” (3) and the experience of an “intimate” and “sensual” environment created by various papers, fonts, and images (6). Echoing definitions of artists’ books that emphasize their meta-critical experimentation with formal structure, Chen creates books that are “more than beautiful settings for texts,” but books that are “compelling objects in their own right” (9). She never loses sight of “the book as a physical object and a time-based medium” (http://www.flyingfishpress.com). Book artists allude to the long history of book structures—Western codex, folding books, fan books, accordion books, concertina-bound books, slat books, tunnel books, boxed books, and so on, creating forms that themselves reflect the meaning of the text and images within them. They are both texts and art objects simultaneously. Chen creates a disembodied, deracialized, dehistoricized, almost ungendered autobiographical persona that ranges free of material referents, but renders a Western linear sense of time spatially. While Chen’s work neither narrates linear stories nor reveals explicit personal details, the elaborate design of Chen’s unique book forms demands that the reader/viewer have a temporal-spatial experience of Chen’s cognitive processes. She creates what I call “architectures of cognition” through which readers navigate. In the process of learning how to read each of her works—where to start, how to proceed, when to linger, what to open, readers enter Chen’s imaginative and analytical mind; they learn to see through her eyes. Chen explains that “the book is an extension of my consciousness” (Chen conversation); so seeing through Chen’s eyes is seeing/thinking “through the structure of the book.” Chen designs structures that force readers/viewers to have a unique tactile, kinesthetic, and temporal engagement with the book form that results in enhanced awareness not only of the process of “reading,” but also of the process of cognition itself. Chen’s central and enduring theme is time as it relates to subjectivity. She returns, again and again, to the inevitable and relentless passage of time that is associated with incremental and insistent loss and consequent mourning; she elaborates time by slowing it down, focusing on a single moment and then stretching a singular act of attention into a temporal

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meditation. She places herself and readers within time that is also within space: the refashioned space of the page. One example of Chen’s range of style is her playful and charming, but serious, artists’ book, Bon Bon Mots: A Fine Assortment of Books (1998). Chen’s title is a pun. “Bon Bon” is French for candy and “Bon Mots” is French for “a good word” or “clever saying.” Bon Bon Mots plays with both; Chen emphasizes this by presenting her book collection packaged as a box of fancy chocolates (https://nmwa.org/art/collection/ bon-­bon-­mots). Bon Bon Mots is actually a collection of five distinct, but interrelated, artists’ books (see Fig.  2.1). In this collection, Chen’s autobiographical persona muses about time, subjectivity, the pressures of societal expectations, and loss. Overall, all five books focus on the relationship between time and self: life as a journey (Labyrinth), a cycle (Life Cycle), or a process of self-erosion or slow decline (Elegy). In one book, she breaks time into discrete units in order to record precisely her feelings and behavior on a daily basis (Either/Or). In another, she ponders the limits of the social self (Social Graces). In each book, with their combined relational, spatial, and temporal visual-verbal interfaces, Chen makes palpable the pressure of time passing, of life diminishing.

Fig. 2.1  Julie Chen. Bon Bon Mots: A Fine Assortment of Books, 1998. (Photo by Sibila Savage. Courtesy of Julie Chen)

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Just as the chart inside a box of chocolates identifies and maps the sweets within, the inner cover of Bon Bon Mots outlines each of the five artists’ books included inside: Either/Or, Social Graces, Elegy, Life Cycles, and Labyrinth. There is no prescribed order in which to read these books. Rather, like selecting a chocolate from a candy box, the reader chooses according to what strikes his or her fancy (see Fig. 2.2). Labyrinth (Fig. 2.2, second from left, front) is found within a 2¼-inch by 2¼-inch box with an ornamental spiral on the top lid. Inside is a small box “book” with a see-through plexiglass window that reveals a poem in the shape of a labyrinth. The poem functions as a textual path upon which the reader embarks on the cyclical journey of the labyrinth, traveling away and then returning, ending in the center with an indented red dot. The text uses the common metaphor of life as a journey: “… walking so slowly, every step becomes a journey emerging into the light, a shadow of my future self ….” The ellipses at the beginning and end of the sentence suggest a continuous, circuitous journey in which the autobiographical persona loops back and moves ahead, spiraling into her “future self.” In each of the four corners of the box are tiny round indentations surrounded with a printed circular frame. Five small brass balls roll around in the box

Fig. 2.2  Julie Chen. Bon Bon Mots: A Fine Assortment of Books, 1998. (Photo by Sibila Savage. Courtesy of Julie Chen)

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and, as in one of the inexpensive children’s games, the reader can, with patience and skill, roll the balls into the five indentations. Here Chen’s design makes the book highly interactive. Readers not only take the labyrinth journey, a walk often associated with meditation and reflection, through time and into “a shadow of [a] future self,” they tilt, shake, and manipulate the book in order to align the balls, associated with randomness, into possible resting places—temporarily creating order out of chaos. Life Cycle (Fig. 2.2, third from left, front) is a unique book made of a single paper folded into eight-sided angles and linked together to create what Chen calls a “rotating book” (Chen conversation). The entire book fits into the palm of a hand (and measures 2½-inches by 2½-inches). There are eight “pages” for each of the four sides. On the tiny pages, which Chen has transformed into four spreads (two pages treated as one), she has printed four related reflections. Because it is easy to miss the inside pages until the viewer learns that the tiny book can be rotated, Chen cues the reader where to begin with an asterisk at each level: Top level: “*Over and over/always the same/one thing/after another” Outside: “*I observe myself/allowing time/to pass/without reflection” Bottom: “*Keeping secrets/from myself/being the keeper/of your secrets” Inside: “*Treading/in circles/waiting for life/to begin”

Again, Chen thematizes time, playing with the idea of repetition (“over and over”) and routine (“always the same”) that seem to obstruct self-­ awareness (“allowing time/to pass/without reflection”) and hinder life itself (“Treading/in circles/waiting for life/to begin”). Self-critically, the speaker laments her perpetual and enduring capacity to waste time with mindless routines; time passes while she waits for an ever-deferred life to begin. The architectural book—with its circular shape, multi-faceted surfaces, rotating pages, and seamless continuity—mirrors the cyclical passing of time, while suggesting hidden or secret spaces of the psyche. Again, the autobiographical persona is an amorphous questioning and observing “I,” an Every Woman reflecting on self and other in the web of time. Either/Or (Fig. 2.2, far right, back) is a two-page book (4¾-inch long and 2¼-inch wide) made to look like a checklist or personal journal. Here, she plays with familiar forms: to-do lists and records of behavior. Within the book, Chen compares and contrasts negative thoughts, emotions, and self-judgments with positive ones. Printed in the center of the front cover atop a lovely peach-colored flower on a gray background is: “Either.” The

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back cover has the same design with the colors reversed; printed in the center is: “Or.” Inside is a hand-drawn grid and checklist printed onto the page. The two halves of the record book mirror the internal struggle of its owner. Chen grapples with competing emotions and how to manage them. In calendric style, she breaks time into manageable units, separating the day into A.M. and P.M. In the tradition of self-help books dating back at least to Benjamin Franklin’s plan for moral perfection and his fastidious record keeping of his failures, Chen keeps track of the number of mornings and afternoons she is afflicted with “worry,” “guilt,” and “anxiety” on page one and how many times she can claim “calm,” doubt,” comfort,” “sleep,” “pain,” “thinking,” memory,” growth,” “risk,” “wonder,” and “humor.” Chen plays with duality and opposition in book theme and structure, with the front and back of the books and pages one and two in thematic and structural opposition. Chen is aware that “[e]very side is a front when the codex book is opened, and only while it is opened to that position. When the page is turned, that front becomes a back” (K. Smith 17). Chen plays, also, with notions of “evidence” as she inserts two papers with the words “The Evidence,” as if the checkmarks in her daily record book are incriminating proof of her interior struggles, as if she is documenting her unruly subjectivity in an autobiographical archive. The plastic front and back covers of Social Graces (Fig. 2.2, just left of Either/Or) look like a small (2-inches long by 2¼-inches wide) pale pink soap bar. The title, Social Graces, is engraved on the front in a graceful font. The book opens to five pages on the first side and four pages on the back side, actually eighteen conventional pages, but she uses the two pages as a single surface. Across the recto and verso, she has inserted a lavender paper printed with a design onto which the text is printed and which has been folded to look like a blossom, reminiscent of a pop-up book. The blossom-page spreads across the two pages, turning recto and verso into a single surface known as a spread. She has numbered each page in the upper left and bottom right. An ornamental design mirrors the page number (e.g., one stamped/printed design for page 1, two designs for page 2, etc.). The text appears to be drawn from clichés of social conventions: “Avoiding the backward glance/Learning to lose without a struggle/ Letting bygones be bygones/Keeping a positive attitude/Always looking your best/Smiling in the face of adversity/Forgiving and forgetting/ Putting your best foot forward/Never speaking out of turn.” While practicing these bits of advice may smooth social relations, they may also invite hypocrisy: being so polite that you never express what you really feel.

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“Always looking your best” and “Never speaking out of turn” are highly gendered, female-specific advice used to keep women attractive and compliant or at least silent. The decorative pages enhance the positive affirmations, making them seem harmless or, perhaps, merely superficial. This collection of social conventions suggests a masking of genuine subjectivity. The autobiographical persona of Either/Or documents her “doubt” and “fear,” but in Social Graces she is silenced. Finally, the 3½-inch by 1½-inch book, Elegy (Fig. 2.2, far left), has a plastic book cover in the shape of a single leaf; the covers have been molded to resemble leaf veins. Paper pages, also in the shape of a leaf and printed with leaf veins, have been adhered to the inside of each cover; and all the leaves of the pages are bound with a folding strip of paper, concertina style. The leaf pages refer ironically to the leaves of a book, but also to a fallen leaf—a notion associated with death and suitable for an elegy, a poem, or song of mourning. In this instance, Chen’s lament seems to be for a generalized sense of lost time, for time passing without the autobiographical persona’s acute awareness, for her forgetting to “notice” the world and herself and their many and continuous transformations: I kept a leaf from the tree that died an ambiguous gesture of remembrance … for the way things might have been but weren’t

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disregarding how I continually forgot to notice its presence … A brittle reminder of the passage of time … each branch a measure ment of loss each twig the echo of a voice whispering I am, I am, I am.

While the traditional trajectory of a Western elegy mirrors stages of loss: grief, praise for the deceased, and finally, consolation for the living, Chen’s poem is a more generalized lament about the passage of time. The act of keeping the leaf is “an ambiguous gesture of remembrance.” Although it may be forgotten or trivialized, the leaf serves as a fragile token for the poetic speaker, a “brittle reminder” of the passing of time and continuous change. Although the speaker never idealizes the dead, the second stage of Western elegy, she concludes with a sense of affirmation: the voice “whispering I am, I am, I am.” As time passes relentlessly, leaving a wake of loss, the poetic voice insists on affirming her own being in the present moment.

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Considered as a whole, Bon Bon Mots offers an aesthetic sampling of artists’ book forms even as they, sometimes seriously, sometimes playfully, thematize the insistent passage of time, the journey of life, the human obsession with self-improvement and desire for self-awareness, the ever-present background noise of (gendered) social expectations, and the possibility of renewal after profound loss. The autobiographical persona observes, ponders, and reflects, sharing not a life story, but a consciousness in process. In short, in her proliferation of simultaneous, sequential, and juxtaposed image-text interfaces, she creates architectures of cognition. Sculptural and architectural objects that place image and text in innovative relation to each other, Julie Chen’s artists’ books challenge readers/viewers’ expectations about reading conventions: they demand that readers pay attention, question assumptions, and consider the entire book as a visual-verbal field, a collection of interfaces with multiple sites of interaction. Overall, they offer “a confluence of relations—between image and text, type and the page, form and functions, writer/artist and reader, space and time […]” (Ollman n.p.). Through this interrelationship of image and text, Chen thematizes and spatializes time and its influence on subjectivity. She reflects upon the passage of time, the unceasing erosion of life, and the accumulation of loss associated with each. Chen shares her personal experiences obliquely—no explicit linear life stories, but rather an assemblage of interpenetrating moments and processes of cognition. As readers navigate the unique pathways of the book, they journey through Chen’s musings and an array of finely crafted sensory processes. Focusing on the book as a timebased medium and experimenting with the book form and the page, Chen manipulates the reader’s temporal experience, emphasizing her preoccupation with ever-flowing linear time that erodes the structures of self, inevitable second by inevitable second. At the same time, she ponders not only the nature of subjectivity, but of its construction and representation. Just as it is not possible to stop time, it is not possible to limit the self to any fixed set of characteristics or one’s life story to a finite selection of moments. By design, Chen heightens the reader/viewer’s awareness of each singularly precious present moment and emphasizes the importance of bringing full consciousness to it. The act of reading/ viewing her books requires nothing less.

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Faith Ringgold’s Story Quilts: Reimagining the Page and the Frame African American artist, Faith Ringgold, is best known for her story quilts: enormous painted image-text narratives on fabric. The quilt squares are stitched together, functioning simultaneously as individual images or texts and as part of the entire visual field of the quilt. Each part may be examined as part and whole. Each quilt square functions as a page, while a series of quilt squares can function also as a frame. The sets of relations between page and frame, between image and text, are multiple and variable, offering many visual-verbal interfaces simultaneously. Ringgold employs and/or refers to the piecing process of quilting to redesign a personal and collective history that enables her, as an African American woman artist, to be visible on her own terms. Inspired by her mother’s fabric remnants,6 Ringgold joins so-called “high art” with “folk art,” transforming the quilt form, associated with female domestic space, into a public display in art galleries.7 In her quilts, Ringgold experiments with various relations of image and text as well. Ringgold tends to create series that naturally use a temporal interface, but with her explicit political engagement, she creates contextual interfaces as well. Ringgold uses the visual and verbal and their interfaces, then, as sites to stage a social debate about racialized and gendered identities, including her own. Generally, Ringgold makes two types of quilts and mixes several visual-­ textual interface categories. In the first type of quilt, each panel contains a discrete image or text; each quilt consists of a collection of panels arranged in a series to highlight the relation between image and text. In her first story quilt (1983), entitled “Who’s Afraid of Aunt Jemima?”, for instance, Ringgold creates a collection of juxtapositions or a sequence of images and texts that are in dialogue with one another. In this case, the alternating text and image panels require the viewer to both “look” and “read.” In this quilt as well as other early quilts, Ringgold’s emphasis on individual

6  Ringgold’s mother, Willi Posey (Willie Edel Jones, 1907–1981), collaborated with Ringgold on many of her early works. 7  In her short story, “Everyday Use,” Alice Walker thematizes the conflicting functions of African American quilts. For the college-educated older sister, the family quilts become an abstract symbol of African roots and African American historical struggle and aesthetic production. For the younger sister, who has remained home, the quilt is an article of everyday utility and beauty.

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panels highlights her book-format layout in which each panel is a “page” as well as a canvas. In Ringgold’s second type of quilt format, a large central canvas is made to resemble a collection of quilt pieces by stitching that suggests the quilt form, and is itself framed by stitched-together pieces of fabric. These are paintings on a quilted surface. Her paintings, then, de-accentuate the boundaries of the individual “panels” in the service of a single, large scene. Ringgold “speaks” in the language of “high art”—that is, through painting, but in a manner that evokes a rupture not only between the scenes, but also in the accompanying narrative. She both fuses and juxtaposes “high art” (painting) and “domestic craft” (quilting). The stitching is placed strategically to link, divide, and highlight individual sections of the painting. This quilt-as-canvas format allows for multiple simultaneous frames—binding; patterned, textual, and painted panels; and stitching— within a single painting and calls attention to the way Ringgold sutures together the personal and collective past. “Who’s Afraid of Aunt Jemima” (see it at https://www.faithringgold. com/portfolio/whos-­afraid-­of-­aunt-­jemima/) is the first of her works to talk back to historical misrepresentations of African American women. Ringgold transforms “Aunt Jemima” from a mono-dimensional, endlessly reproducible brand into Aunt Jemima as a living woman with a multiplicity of selves, affiliations, and locations.8 While this quilt is not autobiographical, it prefigures Ringgold’s strategy and form in her later, more autobiographical, work as well as challenges historical racist stereotypes that threaten to occlude her self-narration. A well-known racist-sexist stereotype—the black mammy or domestic servant—“Aunt Jemima” is servile, willingly taking care of all the needs of her white employers. She is single and without any relations other than those with her employers; she lives to serve. But here Ringgold has invented a whole family and history for Aunt Jemima. Ringgold places Jemima “at the center of a family narrative and a migration story, the object of sympathetic sentiment rather than disgust or fear” (Sheehan 6). Jemima, the center of the quilt both visually and thematically, is located just beneath the title page at the center of the square that is itself the 8  Ringgold was not alone in redesigning Jemima; a number of “artists associated with the black arts movement” even depicted Jemima as a dangerous militant (Farrington 76). “What mystified Ringgold,” explains Farrington, “was the fact that, no matter who was constructing the image, Aunt Jemima seemed to be portrayed in extremes” (76).

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center of the quilt. The four human figures that frame and surround Jemima represent her African-Native American mother, daughter, husband, and father, everyone explicitly color coded—high yellow to dark black. Numbered “pages” help the viewer to follow the alternation between text and image, each in a panel reminiscent of a page in a book. The top right textual panel is numbered 1. Viewers read down, alternating between family portraits and text, to panel 4, then to the top left to locate page 5 and back down to the bottom center, page 9. Although Ringgold maintains a sense of a conventional page, she appropriates the page as a quilt square in a narrative quilt. The pages are surrounded, informed, and sometimes interrupted by family portraits. The viewer/reader is required to get up close to the quilt to read Jemima’s story and must read unconventionally, top right to bottom right, top left to bottom left with the concluding page centered in the bottom middle. Handwritten in vernacular African American English, the writing tells a family history of struggle and triumph. Jemima Blakely “didn’t come from no ordinary people,” but from former slaves who “bought they freedom.” A woman who “could do anything she set her mind to” (Cameron 81, 9),9 Jemima runs off to marry Big Rufus, gains an inheritance from her white employers after their death by lightning, develops a successful business, and, as she ages, questions the values of younger generations. By the end of the story, Ringgold’s Jemima and Big Rufus die in a car accident; their bodies are returned to Harlem, dressed in African clothing, and given an African funeral. “They looked nice,” explains the narrator, “like they was home” (81, 2). Ringgold, then, reconfigures the long-standing Aunt Jemima stereotype of black female servitude, gives her a story of self-­ sufficiency, and then kills her, figuratively at least, destroying the racist stereotype and laying it to rest with an African ritual (81, 9). It is noteworthy that “home” is associated not only with Harlem, but also with “Africa” and “death,” all linked to a notion of return or rebirth. African American death, in this case, is a passage into subjectivity, a way of becoming legible as fully human.10 Like nineteenth-century slave narratives in which African American speakers and writers articulate blacks as human subjects and not

9  From here on, the first number refers to the page of The French Collection, and the second and subsequent numbers to the quilt panel/s. 10  For discussions of the relationship between African American subjectivity and death, see Patterson, Holland, and JanMohamed.

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“property,” Ringgold’s Jemima story quilt wrestles with dominant racist discourse and insists on African American female specificity and agency. Ringgold’s reclamation of Jemima’s image is an attempt to free herself from the distortions of racist historical lenses, a necessary precursor to her more autobiographical projects such as The French Collection, a series of twelve story quilts produced from 1990–1997, and widely considered her “most revealingly autobiographical” work (French 15). The protagonist of this story sequence, Ringgold’s autobiographical persona, is Willia Marie Simone. The figure of Simone serves to “demythify and historicize the nature of the split between the representor and the represented—often a gendered as well as a racializing separation—that characterized the historical avant garde as much as it had traditional art” (Gibson 70). Significantly, Simone is an expatriate African American artist/model/wife/widow/ mother/café owner. She is a woman who both creates images and herself serves as one, a woman actively engaged in a network of personal, social, artistic, and financial relations. Ringgold tells Simone’s story visually, but also textually in a series of letters to her Aunt Melissa that literally frames the images. As she did in “Who’s Afraid of Aunt Jemima?”, Ringgold dismembers the book form and reassembles it imaginatively. While she conceptualizes the quilt square as both a “page” and a “canvas,” she decenters the text, repurposing it to serve as a partial frame for the painting. Five quilt rectangles at the top and five at the bottom function simultaneously as pages and frames. Each quilt in the series has twelve “pages” of text in the form of quilt rectangles: six pages at the top and six pages at the bottom. The image-text interfaces are complex: relational in that the text is in dialogue with the images, contextual in that Ringgold portrays cultural contexts, spatial in that the text not only tells the epistolary story, but also serves as a frame for the hand-­ painted images, and temporal because of its series format. Viewers are drawn first to the enormous scale, vibrant colors, dynamic shapes, and painterly play with fabric. Only after an intense visual experience does the viewer notice the text. Even then, it is difficult to access. Because the large quilts hang on gallery walls,11 the pages are literally too high or too low to read easily. Literally, viewers have to stretch or bend physically; they have to exert effort, change points of view, to be able to read it at all. Perhaps the initial textual inaccessibility is another way that Ringgold underscores the challenges of accessing the past.  The sizes of the quilts range from 73 inches by 68 inches to 74¾ inches by 94 inches.

11

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Eschewing visual realism and historical literalism, Ringgold recontextualizes history and incorporates figures of African American history (Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Malcolm X, for example) and art history (among them, Edouard Monet, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Vincent Van Gogh). In each quilt, she features a famous European male artist— sometimes representationally, sometimes in the form and composition of her images. Staging dialogues through and across generations and continents and people and languages, Ringgold creates a relational subjectivity for her autobiographical persona. Simone is the result of a history of both deprivation and possibility. The subaltern, in this case, not only speaks (to invoke Gayatri Spivak), she also paints, writes, and sews. In The French Collection, then, Ringgold re-narrates African American history, re-­ appropriates art history, and in the process makes a place for herself.

Conclusion Despite the dramatic formal differences in their visual autobiographies, Julie Chen and Faith Ringgold focus on a set of crucial questions about American identity. How does race or gender or geography or history define us? Who are we when we are most authentic? How can we re-­ narrate the legacies of loss we inherit? In addition, they share an autobiographical storytelling impulse and a belief in the power of creative interventions that provoke dialogue about identity. Experimenting with image-text relations, Chen and Ringgold insist that readers-viewers look— at the book structure, the page, the canvas, the frame, the image-text, or a particular point of view. Chen links the personal and the metaphysical, guiding readers through architectures of cognition in dialog with the book form; Ringgold links the personal and the political, redefining page, canvas, and frame and participating consciously in a process of creative rewriting/re-imaging of “haunting legacies” (Schwab)—slavery and prejudice as well as ongoing forms of physical and discursive violence—in order to revise painful histories. Wrestling with histories of contested self-representations and webs of inter-subjectivity, both artists innovate with image and text to represent subjectivity, reexamine history, and intervene in the tangled network of power relations by self-reflexively critiquing verbal and visual regimes. This creative intervention performs a shift from the margins to the center; and then deconstructs that binary opposition itself. It makes visible the “invisible” nature of underrepresented women’s experiences in fresh

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autobiographical forms. They each construct a matrix of American identity in all its plurality, creativity, and messiness and address many of the concerns central to Autobiography Studies—subjectivity, representation, memory, and narration—and Visual Studies—visual experience, visual regimes, and modes of looking.

References Archives F. W. Olin Library. The Heller Rare Book Room. Julie Chen Collection in Center for the Book. Mills College, Oakland, California.

Primary

and

Secondary Sources

Auther, Elissa. 2020. String, Felt, Thread: The Hierarchy of Art and Craft in American Art. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Berger, John. 1972. Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books. Cameron, Dan, et al., eds. 1998. Dancing at the Louvre: Faith Ringgold’s French Collection and Other Story Quilts. New  York and Berkeley: New Museum of Contemporary Art and University of California Press. Chen, Julie. 1989. Books in Balance. M.F.A. Thesis. ———. 1998. Bon Bon Mots: A Fine Assortment of Books. Berkeley: Flying Fish Press. ———. 2012. Conversation with Hertha D. Sweet Wong. 20 April 2012. Berkeley, California. ———. 2014. Flying Fish Press. Accessed May 12, 2014. www.flyingfishpress.com. Egan, Susanna. 1999. Mirror Talk: Genres of Crisis in Contemporary Autobiography. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Elkins, James. 2003. Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction. New  York: Routledge. Farrington, Lisa E. 2004. Faith Ringgold. San Francisco: Pomegranate. Fuchs, Miriam. 2004. The Text Is Myself: Women’s Life Writing and Catastrophe. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Gibson, Ann. 1998. Faith Ringgold’s Picasso’s Studio. In Dancing at the Louvre: Faith Ringgold’s French Collection and Other Story Quilts, ed. Dan Cameron, Richard J. Powell, Michele Wallace, Thalia Gouma-Peterson, Moira, and Ann Gibson, 64–73. Berkeley: University of California.

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Henke, Suzette. 1998. Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women’s Life-­ Writing. New York: St. Martin’s. Holland, Sharon Patricia. 2000. Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity. Durham: Duke University Press. JanMohamed, Abdul. 2005. The Death-Bound Subject: Richard Wright’s Archaeology of Death. Durham: Duke University Press. Lippard, Lucy R. 1997. The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society. New York: The New Press. McLuhan, Marshall. 1994 [1964]. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge: MIT Press. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. 2011a [1999]. An Introduction to Visual Culture. New York: Routledge. ———. 2011b. The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mitchell, W.J.T. 1994. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ollman, Leah. 1993. Introduction to Brighton Press Art Books, 1985–1993. San Marcos, CA: Boehm Gallery, Palomar Community College. Patterson, Orlando. 1982. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Schwab, Gabriele. 2010. Haunting Legacies: Violent and Transgenerational Trauma. New York: Columbia University Press. Sheehan, Tanya. 2009. Faith Ringgold: Forging Freedom and Declaring Independence. In Declaration of Independence: Fifty Years of Art by Faith Ringgold, 3–12. Institute for Women and Art. Rutgers: The State University of New Jersey. Smith, Keith A. 1984. Structure of the Visual Book. Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. 2002. Introduction: Mapping Women’s Self-­ Representation at Visual/Textual Interfaces. In Interfaces: Women/ Autobiography/Image/Performance, ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, 1–46. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Sturken, Marita, and Lisa Cartwright. 2001. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Walker, Alice. 1973. Everyday Use. In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women, ed. Alice Walker, 47–59. New York: Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt. Whitlock, Gillian. 2015. Postcolonial Life Narrative: Testimonial Transactions. New York: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 3

“[Un]systematic, even with the image”: Text-­ image Blurring, Self-Inquiry and Ontological Anxiety in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Works Marie-Agnès Gay

Writing Self, Writing Nation was the title chosen for the first collection of essays about Korean American writer Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s now canonical 1982 book Dictée, a clear index of its autobiographical dimension and its link with the tradition of ethnic self-writing. The episodes recounted in Dictée are related to Cha’s family history and her personal experience as a Korea-born immigrant who arrived in California in 1964. However, in her article “Memory and Anti-Documentary Desire in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée,” Anne Anlin Cheng identifies the book as an “ethnic memoir” while expressing reservations about the legitimacy of this label: “Speaking through disembodied yet multiple voices, borrowed citations, and captionless photographs, this supposed autobiography gives us a confession that does not confess, a dictation without origin, and history without names” (Cheng 1998, 119).

M.-A. Gay (*) Université Jean Moulin—Lyon 3, Lyon, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 V. Baisnée-Keay et al. (eds.), Text and Image in Women’s Life Writing, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84875-0_3

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It is clearly the form of this unclassifiable book that is shown to problematize the traditional autobiographical gesture. Dictée proves an extreme example of what Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson call “women’s self-­ representation at visual/textual interfaces” (Smith and Watson 2002, 4) as it juxtaposes, in an often-obscure way, narrative passages, poetry, pages of manuscript text, grammar and translation exercises, the photograph of an anonymous wall carving in Korean characters, pages with Chinese characters, a typed letter, a map, diagrams, black and white photographs and film stills. Along with so many other female “minority” writers and artists in the last decades of the twentieth century, Cha engages in disruptive self-­ referential practices that question the “constraining script of femininity” (Smith and Watson 2002, 14) to which they have long been subjected by hegemonic patriarchal and western-centric discourses, “writ[ing] back to the cultural stories that have scripted them as particular kinds of subjects” (ibid., 10). She also more widely connects with modernist and postmodernist artists that show the autobiographical self to be a process rather than a product, and identity to be “discursive, provisional, intersectional, and unfixed.” (ibid., 10) My purpose in this article is to explore the paradoxical impact of Cha’s highly experimental verbal/visual apparatuses, as the very multiplication of representing modes and their intricate relationship, which suggest an aesthetic mode of excess, eventually appear to be in the service of self-­ effacement. This remapping of identity through a complex interplay of textuality and visuality characterizes Cha’s crowning achievement, Dictée, published only a few days after her “untimely and tragic death” (Lewallen 2001, 1), but not only.1 Prior to Dictée, Cha had been working as a writer, a visual artist and a performer. Her radically polymorphous body of work has been made easily available thanks to two posthumous volumes published in 2001 (The Dream of the Audience) and 2009 (Exilée—Temps Morts—Selected Works). As explained by Constance Lewallen, the editor of these books, “there [is] no firm distinction between Cha’s visual and linguistic practices” (Lewallen 2009, 2). Cha’s production, which most often taps autobiographical material, includes poetry, diary entries, mail art, handmade books, videos, films, multi-media performances, and so on.2 Page 164 of Exilée—Temps Morts—Selected Works is made up of four short lines of text:  Cha was murdered in New York on November 5, 1982, at the age of 31.  A great number of Cha’s visual works can be seen on the Online Archive of California website: https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf238n986k/entire_text/. 1 2

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image sans son son sans image image sans text text sans image

This textual fragment, which (as often with Cha) mixes French and English,3 can be said to be a description in the negative of Cha’s body of work. Photographs included in texts, voice-over image, visual representations of voice, images made of words, image-like texts—no generic boundary or frame has resisted Cha’s attempt to blur all aesthetic lines. After analyzing Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s disruptive use of text/image dialogue as a means to question the very possibility of a stable autobiographical self, I will contend that it is the very distinctiveness of texts and images as modes of representation that is disrupted by Cha, who thus extends her reflection on ungraspable identity to the semiotic level. I will finally argue that her ceaseless play on the textual/visual interface ends up emptying out the autobiographical subject, expressing a prescience of the inevitability of erasure and suggesting an ontological anxiety which cannot speak its name nor show its face.

“[Un]systematic, even with the image”: A Disruptive Use of Text-image Dialogue The self-defeating nature of any autobiographical act is acknowledged clearly, if indirectly, by Cha in Dictée, when she provides the following biographical fragment on Korean revolutionary and martyr Yu Guan Soon, who died at the age of seventeen after having played an active role in the resistance to the Japanese occupation of Korea: YU GUAN SOON BIRTH: By Lunar Calendar, 15, March 1903 DEATH: 12, October, 1920. 8:20 A.M. She is born of one mother and one father. (Cha 2001a, 25)

3  When she arrived in California at the age of twelve (1964), Theresa attended a catholic school, the Convent of the Sacred Heart, where she learned French. She continued to practice it as a B.A. student in Comparative Literature at Berkeley, and later on when she spent a few months in Europe and Paris in 1976.

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The scarce amount of basic information given is discrepant with the necessarily rich—albeit short—life of this heroic figure. Furthermore, the somewhat incongruent precision of the exact timing of her death is reinforced by the choice of the capitalized form of the contraction A.M.. Finally, the minimalist “She is born of one mother and one father” both reduces Yu Guan Soon’s individual life to the only common factor to the lives of all human beings, and dis-anchors her existence from temporality with an awkward use of the present tense of generalizations which also contradicts the temporal landmarks provided just before.4 All these testify to the inadequacy of words when it comes to capturing the identity of a person. The rest of the page, tellingly, is made up of the blank space left by failing words. The opposite page provides a classical head-and-shoulders photograph of Yu Guan Soon used in a complementary relational regime (Smith and Watson 2002, 25) with the text. The authentication potential of photographs is an established fact: “[T]he testimonial aspect of photography […] derives from its ‘indexicality’ and ‘evidentiality’, two notions emphasized by Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag” (Petit and Pozorski 2018, §14). The photograph of Yu Guan Soon would thus seem both to authenticate the historical figure and to bring her to life for the reader. Indeed, Roland Barthes has emphasized the presentifying effect of photographs: [T]he photograph always leads the corpus I need back to the body I see; it is the absolute Particular, the sovereign Contingency, the This […]. In order to designate reality, buddhism says […] tathata, as Alan Watts has it, the fact of being this, of being thus, of being so; tat means that in Sanskrit and suggests the gesture of the child pointing his finger at something and saying: that, there it is, lo! […]; the Photograph is never anything but an antiphon of “Look,” “See,” “Here it is”; it points a finger at certain vis-a-vis, and cannot escape this pure deictic language. […] It is as if the Photograph always carries its referent with itself. (Barthes 1999, 4–5)

However, the two former quotes expound the way common sense perceives photographs, something Barthes acknowledges: “A specific 4  Shelley Sunn Wong further remarks that “The adherence to calendrical time is […] complicated by the reference to the ‘Lunar’ calendar, a system of measurement of Chinese origin which predates the Gregorian calendar which has become the standard measure in the West. The reference to the Lunar calendar reinforces the idea of the cultural specificity of ways of marking time, and [undermines] the idea of a universal history.” (Wong 1994, 125)

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photograph, in effect, is never distinguished from its referent (from what it represents), or at least it is not immediately or generally distinguished from its referent […]: it is not impossible to perceive the photographic signifier (certain professionals do so), but it requires a secondary action of knowledge or of reflection. […] a pipe, here, is always and intractably a pipe” (Barthes 1999, 5). But Cha, very well versed in arts theory,5 obviously expects her readers to perceive the signifier, to have this distantiation brought by the intellectual knowledge that reality is just as irreducible to visual representation as it is to verbal representation. This is no more a pipe in a picture than in a painting. Indeed, photography is aporetic in the way it articulates presence and absence, and the reproduction of the photograph in the book, which keeps the referent at a second remove, is obviously meant to emphasize the elusiveness of the figure represented.6 This is confirmed by the striking absence of a caption, which blurs the identification process, of both the picture itself and its referent. Obviously, in the present case, one might say that the biographical fragment on Yu Guan Soon on the opposite page precisely acts as a caption. However, all the other photographs included in the book equally lack proper documentation. The next two photographs are one of a fairly young woman (Cha 2001a, 44) and one of an older lady (59); they frame section 2 of the book, devoted to Cha’s mother. They can therefore be understood to represent her and to sum up her life, in two chronological images and a vertiginous short-cut. However, in the absence of any identifying data, this remains pure conjecture, all the more so as the older face does not seem quite to match the younger one. The real-life referentiality of the pages in-between the two photographs and the autobiographical drive to which they pertain are therefore clearly problematized through the deviant use of images as complements to the text. As explained by Nicole McDaniel: “Cha goes as far as to historically decontextualize the images and texts incorporated within the narrative as much as possible […. The] images are not labeled, titled or footnoted. Removing the images from any context outside this memoir emphasizes its metatextuality” (McDaniel 2009, 82).  She obtained two M.A. in Fine Arts from Berkeley.  The last photograph in the book is a group picture whose figure in the right-hand corner is Yu Gan Soon. The careful reader will realize that the head-and-shoulders picture of the Korean heroine reproduced on p. 24 is actually a fragment from this group picture, which reminds them that images can be manipulated and are therefore never an objective re-presentation of reality. 5 6

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And indeed, the identification of other photographs later in the book turns more and more challenging. The one that appears on page 93, the opening page of section 5, seems to spring from nowhere. There is no text on the opposite page to help us put a name on the not quite distinct yet clearly—and dissonantly, in the Asian context of the book—Eurasian face of the full-length woman seen from afar on the left-hand side of the picture (the woman is standing in front of a wall in what appears to be a courtyard). Furthermore, the pages that immediately follow are totally disconnected from the picture: they describe a woman entering a cinema, and then scenes from the film she is supposedly watching and which critical research has identified as Gertrud by Carl Dreyer (1964). The picture is in fact a fairly well-known photograph of Sainte Thérèse de Lisieux, wearing armor and dressed as Joan of Arc, to whom the first explicit reference appears eight pages later. Such a loose mode of interconnection between text and image clearly prolongs Cha’s blurring of the genre of the autobiographical memoir, all the more so because of the French saint’s eponymous relation to the writer (Thérèse/Theresa). Section 5 closes on yet another captionless photograph of a woman’s face (Cha 2001a [1982], 119), identified by critics as a still of Maria Falconetti, the actor impersonating Joan of Arc in another Carl Dreyer film (1928), La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc. If the name of Joan of Arc has been alluded to two pages before, the poetic text on the mirror page is once again totally at odds with the picture of Maria Falconetti, some of its fragments directly jarring with the picture. The phrase “her body,” repeated twice on page 118, is contradicted by the close-up on the actress’s face on the opposite page, while the latter’s open eyes fail to match the words “closes the eyes” (118). The documentary immediacy of image-use is thus once more undercut. It is noteworthy that Cha never includes pictures of herself in the book, unveiling her self more truthfully by way of a forever-incomplete composite portrait that foregrounds her conviction that one is never a singular entity, but is shot through with others, the metamorphic result of multiple identifying processes. As Lawrence Rinder puts it: Cha still seeks her identity by charting her place within a constellation of lineage and relation; […] these constellations have become radically multicultural, and their signifiers—the myriad women who appear in the book— are not biologically related, but reflect what Carl G. Jung would have called an archetype of the collective unconscious, drawn from the ‘ancestral heritage of the possibilities of representation.’ (Rinder 2001, 19)

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Furthermore, the growingly unsettling use of the visual/textual interface as the book unfolds contests the “documentary or probationary value” of photographs (Montier 2018, §6),7 and expresses Cha’s distrust of photographs as a means of accessing identity, as she ironically voices it on page 56 of Dictée: I have the documents. Documents, proof, evidence, photograph, signature. One day you raise the right hand and you are American. They give you an American Pass port. The United States of America. Somewhere someone has taken my identity and replaced it with their photograph. The other one. Their signature their seals. Their own image. (Cha 2001a, 56)

Another example of Cha’s complex way of writing her/self in text and image is provided by “Photo-Essay,” “a facsimile of an untitled loose-leaf binder of poetry and photographic images, probably assembled by Cha for a photography class” (Lewallen 2009, 3).8 In this illustrated poetic memoir published in Exilée—Temps Morts—Selected Essays, Cha alternates poetic texts evoking memories of her first years in the United States (on the left page) and illustrative, yet again captionless, photographs (on the right page) (Cha 2009, 91–111). Although the text/image interface is more direct than in Dictée, one or several details almost systematically loosen the bond between the textual and the visual fragments. I will only focus here on pages 98–99, in which Cha affixes a very short textual fragment—“systematic. Even with the image”—to the photograph of a photo booth with its display of serial portraits.9 The distancing effect created by the mise en abyme, the regretful comment on the left page, and the empty photo booth once more express the gap that separates an image from its referent, a photograph from its subject, forever uncapturable. Furthermore, the empty seat is also a reminder that Cha herself remains insistently absent from this avowedly autobiographical photo-essay, which provides only indirect material about her. Another clearly autobiographical piece, entitled Chronology, consists in color-photocopied photographs of her family attached onto eighteen 7  “One of the prime semiotic virtues of photography resides in its documentary or probationary value.” [my translation from the original French: “L’une des valeurs sémiotiques premières de la photographie réside dans sa valeur documentaire ou probatoire.”] 8   This piece can be seen here: https://oac.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ tf1p30016z/?brand=oac4. 9  https://oac.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/tf1p30016z/?order=10&brand=oac4.

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pressboard panels and accompanied by complex textual fragments in place of clear captions (Cha 2001b, 110–127).10 Here again, the family album proves self-contradictory in its intention, as it is all but impossible to identify the persons represented or their relationship to Cha. In the first picture, Cha’s mother is recognizable only for the reader of Dictée,11 and identification is made possible only retrospectively, through tentative reconstruction, thanks to the next photograph, that of a young man whose accompanying textual fragment includes the word “pa.” But the succession of photographs soon proves more and more disruptive. It proposes palimpsestic montages that blur the faces, features slightly different versions of the same individual several pages apart, and reproduces eleven times the same family group picture, whose unrecoverable members paradoxically turn more spectral as they are repeatedly displayed on the page. By “embed[ding] archival images in new layered and composite texts that recontextualize these images,” Cha, in keeping with other artists who question the conventions of family photography, reveals “absence as well as presence, fantasy and unreality as well as reality, gaps as well as plenitude” and disrupts “the documentary authority and the evidentiary status of the photograph” (Hirsch 2002, 243–244). The chaotic visual procession thus fails to achieve the reassuring program put forward by the title, Chronology. Furthermore, not only are the captions replaced by seemingly unrelated textual fragments, but the latter are resolutely opaque, and show Cha at her most inventive and experimental with language.12 Text/image apparatuses are often the promise of added meaning because of their supplementary dynamic; however, with Cha’s play on referential instability, they systematically lead to blurred meaning and maintain her autobiographical self in a forever more remote and inaccessible limbo. Furthermore, can the notion of a “text/image interface” still be used as a point of entry into her works when, as made clear by some pages of Chronology, language itself sometimes morphs into purely visual material?

 https://oac.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/tf0f59n3pf/?brand=oac4.  It is the same picture as that which inaugurates section 2 of Dictée about Cha’s mother and which has been commented above. 12  See https://oac.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/tf0f59n3pf/?order=19&brand=oac4 or https://oac.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/tf0f59n3pf/?order=12&brand=oac4 for instance. 10 11

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Verbal Images and Iconic Texts: Semiotic Identity-Blurring Smith and Watson, in their introduction to Interfaces: Women, Autobiography, Image, Performance, remind us “how frequently women’s artistic production of the autobiographical occurs at the interface of the domains of visuality (image) and textuality (the aural and written word, the extended narrative, the dramatic script)” (Smith and Watson 2002, 7). They underline how “[i]n these heterogenous self-displays, textuality implicates visuality as, in different ways, the visual image engages components of textuality at material, voiced, and/or virtual sites.” (7) Cha is therefore no exception in the world of twentieth- and twenty-first-century women artists. However, she seems to carry this stance to an extreme, as she not only combines heterogeneous semiotic systems, but aims to blur, and even dissolve, all boundaries between them. The cumulative effect of Cha’s highly polymorphous production conveys the impression that she attempts to create Unidentified Aesthetic Objects, or at least artistic objects which resist identification, in an obvious parallel to her insistence on the fluidity of identity. Whoever enters her aesthetic universe indeed find themselves engaged in an uncanny world of iconic texts and verbal images. According to Nicole McDaniel: Clearly, Cha challenges the ways in which her audience perceives and understands the distinction between letters and images. As evidenced by the inclusion of Chinese and Korean ideograms, and the incorporation of handwritten pages from Dictée’s own manuscript and handwritten correspondence, all of which are texts that are simultaneously letters and images, the boundaries between what constitutes a letter and what makes an image are blurred. (McDaniel 2009, 74)

The same applies to Cha’s recurrent use of French in her works. Indeed, for anyone who does not know a language—and most American readers, her primary readership, would not be familiar with French—letters become mere forms or even images as characters replace meaningful words made up of letters. (Zabunyan 2013, 83). However, Cha’s challenging play with letters and images far exceeds such examples. First, many of her works as a visual artist or performer heavily rely on language and consist in staging words or letters on various materials like

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cardboard paper or envelopes,13 fabric used to make artist’s books,14 and on slides,15 or TV monitors.16 Furthermore, Cha often highlights the frame of these supporting materials, as in Faire-Part (Cha 2001b, 70–71)17 or Commentaire (Cha 2009, 205–271). Because frames traditionally harbor and foreground images, whether it be paintings or photographs, such textual pieces, which verge on the obsessional with Cha, may be said to acquire the status of verbal images. The same applies when Cha uses fabric to create single canvas-like pieces featuring only words, like Untitled (Hand Hearing) or Repetitive Pattern for instance, both reproduced on pages 106 and 107 of The Dream of the Audience.18 Yet, just as obsessional is Cha’s creation of iconic texts. Like many other writers, and particularly experimental poets, Cha uses language as visual material when typography or the lay-out of the page complement the linguistic message, or even seem to take precedence over the often opaque meaning of words and sentences. Studying comparative literature at Berkeley where she earned a B.A. in 1972, Cha felt attracted to Stéphane Mallarmé’s poetry, and according to Constance Lewallen, “[i]t is conceivable that her introduction to unconventional typographic design, which became a constant in her work, was through Mallarmé’s long poem ‘Un coup de Dès [sic].’” (Lewallen 2001, 2) And indeed, with their oddly-­ spaced words, their irregular use of font, their curvy lines, some of the linguistic messages that accompany the family portraits of Chronology mentioned above, remind us of Mallarmé’s experiments, which transform the page into a canvas on which words become pictorial material. Many poetic pieces which are collected in Exilée—Temps Morts—Selected Works play on fragmented and uneven lines whose visual aspect catches the reader’s attention before the meaning of words does. An example, which is too long to be quoted at length, is the poem “view from the willow tree” on 13  Cha practiced mail art or stamp art, as with Mot Caché (Cha 2001b, 74–75). [https:// oac.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/tf9d5nb36r/?brand=oac4] or Audience Distant Relative (Cha 2001b, 30). [https://oac.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/tf8f59n96k/?brand=oac4 and https:// oac.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/tf3489n5j9/?brand=oac4]. 14  See for instance Pomegranate Offering (Cha 2001b, 66–67) [https://oac.cdlib.org/ ark:/13030/tf209n983c/?brand=oac4]. 15  It is Almost That (Cha 2009, 193–203). 16  Vidéoème (Cha 2001b, 22) [https://oac.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/tf1m3n97tc/?order=2 &brand=oac4]. 17  https://oac.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/tf067n96vg/?brand=oac4. 18  Repetitive Pattern can also be seen here: https://oac.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ tf7d5nb1tg/?brand=oac4.

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page 139. Its “letters typed on paper” (line 3) seem to start free-floating on the page as the speaker mentions “wind breeze clouds” and “ecume / green canal drifting elm leaves t.” The next lines are made up of single letters that trace an irregular and meandering line which, as it were, will not let itself be constrained by the straight canal banks:  […] Green canal drifting elm leaves t                    h                  i             s    y      a        w […]  (Cha 2009, 139)

Cha’s inventiveness with iconic text is also exemplified in section 5 of Dictée, entitled “ERATO: LOVE POETRY,” which explores spiritual marriage (between Sainte-Thérèse and Jesus) or civil marriage (that of husband and wife). More or less extensive blanks between paragraphs on one page fit with the exact amount of text on the page opposite needed to fill the blank. Cha therefore foregrounds the visual flesh of text as, in Ed Park’s words, “[r]ecto and verso leaves interlock, the text of one page fitting erotically into the white space on the other” (Park 2009, 9). We may also recall the quote given in the introduction: image sans son son sans image image sans text text sans image (Cha 2009, 164)

We can see here that this short piece, whose message is a denial of the interplay of textuality with visuality and aurality, precisely draws an image, that of a square, by way of textual material, proving in the most paradoxical way the centrality of iconic language in Cha’s oeuvre. Cha, therefore, does not only create visual/textual interfaces; she experiments with radical semiotic hybridity, as she expounded it herself: “My video, film, and performance work… are explorations of language structures inherent in written and spoken material, photographic, and filmic images—the creation of new relationships and meanings in the simultaneity of these forms.” (Lewallen 2001, 9, emphasis mine) Cha’s

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representational mode aspires to a fusion of radically discordant semiotic forms, this appearing as an aesthetic transcription of her militant rejection of any essentialist conception of identity. Cha’s oeuvre is indeed that of a postcolonial subject who has made the shattering experience of personal and cultural alienation and who refuses to be scripted into the fixed identities produced by centuries of hegemonic discourses; and her highly intellectual profile,19 as well as her appetence for theoretical thought, explain the complex and often abstract nature of her politically-engaged artistic production. However, my contention is that this level of abstraction, in a final analysis, turns literal. Indeed, the subject paradoxically seems to abstract herself from her autobiographical artistic production, as if in a prescience of the inevitability of erasure. This is prefigured in the square of words commented upon above by the central presence of “sans,” on which all other elements hinge.

Towards Erasure: Ontological Anxiety Not only does Cha’s self-chronicling oeuvre hardly yield anything very personal about her, but owing to its opaque and highly abstract nature, nothing concrete or tangible ever seems to solidify as regards what is represented. Her very self thus seems to dissolve despite the almost obsessional need for self-representation, whether it be through literature, visual arts or—paradoxically—performance.20 Tellingly, the representation of disappearance is a recurring feature in her work, from the play on the ephemeral presence of words in grammatical or semantic declensions, to the obsessional use of blank space in most of her written texts, to the insistent resorting to lap dissolves in her filmic works. As underlined by Rinder, “it is remarkable to observe that virtually every image in Cha’s videos and slide projections appears and disappears by means of the lap dissolve. Her repeated fading in and fading out of images imparts a distinct sense of suspension, a sense of in-betweenness and proximity to the unknown.” (Rinder 2001, 26–27) In the performances in which Cha bodily appeared, this uncanny sense of a proximity  She acquired a B.A. and three M.A. from Berkeley in the 1970s.  Theresa Hak Kyung Cha produced a fairly large body of work (underlining her appetite for aesthetic variety) for an artist who died at the age of thirty-one, and whose artistic career spanned approximately eight years. 19 20

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with the unknown is also favored by their oneiric atmosphere and her spectral-like presence. Her voice was often close to whispers and “hypnotic” (Lewallen 2001, 9). In A Ble Wail (1975), Cha is clad in a long white gown which makes her ghostly, especially in the vaporous atmosphere created by the candle-lit space. In Réveillé dans la Brume, whose title underlines the dream-like quality of the performance, Cha “move[s] in the space, barefoot, not making a sound, ‘as if she were floating.’” (Lewallen 2001, 7). Furthermore, the piece actually stages her flickering presence/absence as the already dim lights come and go, until she exits the hall, leaving an empty door frame for the audience to gaze at. Such an approach is clearly very different from the importance often given to the materiality of the body by female artists who want to reinvest this site of colonization through visual arts or performance,21 and who sometimes do so through visually aggressive representations. A video piece with the ambivalent title, Re Dis Appearing (1977), begins with a voice-over that delivers the following words: “Où commencer? début. debut. fin. end” (Minh-Ha 2001, 44), the end-focused term “Appearing” of the title immediately yielding the equally end-focused term “end.” A written piece from Exilée—Temps Morts—Selected Works expresses the same fascination with disappearance: Backwards.  from backwards from the back way back. To This    This phantom image/non-images almost non-images   without images.  each antemoment    moment no more.   no more a moment a moment no duration.   no time.  phantom no visible no name no duration no memory no reflection no echo. (Cha 2009, 39)

The final line predicts ultimate disappearance, prefigured in the overwhelming presence of the iconic letter o,22 on which the line ends. But the fragment as a whole, with its spasmodic evocation of being/ non-being, and Cha’s oeuvre in general, first and foremost play on the 21  “During the last century women have been naming themselves by making art and performance from their own bodies, experiential histories, memories, and personal landscapes in myriad textual and visual modes and in multiple media. These autobiographical acts situate the body in some kind of material surround that functions as a theater of embodied selfrepresentation.” (Smith and Watson 2002, 5) 22  This letter can stand for the arithmetical symbol zero and its shape is that of a circle framing a void.

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ambivalent nature of the trace. Many pieces illustrate Cha’s concern. The evocation of Carl Dreyer’s 1964 film Gertrud in section 5 of Dictée reads: “All along, you see her without actually seeing, actually having seen her. You do not see her yet. For the moment, you see only her traces” (Cha 2001a, 100). The book presence/absence23 is an artit’s book whose black covers respectively feature the words “absence” and “presence” and whose pages are photocopies of a photograph of Cha and her brothers24; as one turns the pages, the photograph moves farther and farther to the side until the image disappears. And Cha shifts the motif of the trace onto a universal plane when, on page 134 of Dictée, she includes the photograph of the mark left by a hand, as if used as a stencil. This captionless image is in fact that of a cave painting of a woman’s hand, part of a series of negative hand stencils that were found in the prehistoric El Castillo cave in Northern Spain. Although the grainy and irregular texture of the surface seems to give depth and life to the form of the hand, what stands out is the white form, the blank space left in place of the hand that was pressed to the surface. The hand is here and not here, the white space acting both as a vivid trace of human presence and as the reminder of absence. The picture is the verso of the following textual fragment, which makes the link with the theme of writing: Dead words. Dead tongue. From disuse. […] […] Let the one who is diseuse, one who is daughter restore spring with her each appearance from beneath the earth. The ink spills thickest before it runs dry before it Stops writing at all.  (Cha 2001a, 133)

Despite the positive sense of momentum associated with the figure of the diseuse, the central figure of the book who stands for all women who have been deprived of a voice, and despite the movement from death and silence to rebirth and voice linked to the trace left by ink, the fragment irremediably leads to nothingness again, and to the blank space that ends the final line in lieu of words. Yet, the book continues, Cha’s hand spilling more ink on paper… until the last page, the very last one ever written by Cha:  https://oac.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/tf2g5001r7/?brand=oac4.  It is the same picture as one of those included in Chronology.

23 24

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Lift me up mom to the window the child looking above too high above her view the glass between some image a blur now darks and greys mere shadows lingering above her vision […]. Lift me up to the window the white frame and the glass between, early dusk or dawn when light is muted, lines yield to shades, houses cast shadow pools in the passing light. […] The ruelle is an endless path turning the corner behind the last house. […] There is no one inside the pane and the glass between. […] Lift me to the window to the picture image unleash the ropes tied to weights of stones first the ropes then its scraping on wood to break stillness as the bells fall peal follow the sound of ropes holding weight scraping on wood to break stillness bells fall a peal to sky. (179)

This passage hinges yet again on the motif of appearance/disappearance or being/non-being. The very last words, which are devoted to the evocation of the sound of a bell losing itself in the immensity of the sky, a sound in the process of vanishing, echo Derrida’s words: the trace “is never as it is in the presentation of itself. It erases itself in presenting itself, muffles itself in resonating” (Qtd in Neel 2016, 151). Cha’s autobiographical masterpiece seems to have gone in reverse, ending with this moving image of a helpless child looking through a window which frames little more than a void. Dictée, and therefore Cha’s oeuvre, does not close on a sense of achieved identity nor even on a reminder of the inevitability of a shifting sense of identity, but on a scene of metaphysical questioning and anxious “appealing,”25 which perhaps yields a part of Cha’s autobiographical truth, her ontological anxiety in the face of inevitable erasure. The untitled and undated piece, which shows a single, frail horizontal line or thread against a white background on page 135 of The Dream of the Audience, is perhaps the best embodiment of Cha’s negotiation of autobiography.26 The vital self-inscription of the subject (as the etymology of the word auto-bio-graphy reminds us) is little more than this minimal and fragile thread, neither image nor textual line, symbolically originating nowhere and heading into the unknown, while tracing only one recognizable figure/letter, an o that threatens to engulf both artist and viewer/reader….

25  Considering Cha’s constant play with words, “bells fall a peal to sky” seems to leave the trace of one further echo: “appeal to sky.” 26  This piece is made up of an irregular thread that has been glued horizontally in the lower half of a white page.

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References Primary Sources Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung. 2001a. Dictée [1982]. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. ———. 2001b. The Dream of the Audience: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951–1982). Edited by Constance M.  Lewallen. University of California Berkeley Art Museum/Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. ———. 2009. Exilée—Temps Morts—Selected Works. Edited by Constance M. Lewallen. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Gertrud. 1964. Directed by Carl Thedor Dreyer. La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc. 1928. Directed by Carl Thedor Dreyer.

Secondary Sources Barthes, Roland. 1999. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Cheng, Anne Anlin. 1998. Memory and Anti-documentary Desire in THK Cha’s Dictée. MELUS 23 (4, Winter): 119–133. Hirsch, Marianne. 2002. Collected Memories: Lorie Novak’s Virtual Family Album. In Interfaces: Women/Autobiography/Image/Performance, ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, 240–260. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Lewallen, Constance M. 2001. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha—Her Time and Place. In The Dream of the Audience: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951–1982), ed. Constance M. Lewallen, 1–13. University of California Berkeley Art Museum/ Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. ———. 2009. Audience Distant Relative: An Introduction to the Writings of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. In Exilée—Temps Morts—Selected Works, ed. Constance M. Lewallen, 1–6. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. McDaniel, Nicole. 2009. ‘The Remnant is the Whole’: Collage, Serial Self-­ Representation, and Recovering Fragments in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée. Ariel 40 (4): 69–88. https://journalhosting.ucalgary.ca/index.php/ ariel/article/view/34918. Accessed 11 July 2019. Minh-Ha, Trinh T. 2001. White Spring. In The Dream of the Audience: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951–1982), ed. Constance M. Lewallen, 33–50. University of California Berkeley Art Museum/Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press.

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Montier, Jean-Pierre. 2018. Le dispositif photolittéraire comme mode de résilience. Polysèmes [online]. Vol. 19. https://doi.org/10.4000/polysemes.3448. Accessed 11 July 2019. Neel, Jasper. 2016. Plato, Derrida and Writing [1988]. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Park, Ed. 2009. “This is the writing you have been waiting for.” In Exilée—Temps Morts –Selected Texts, ed. Constance M. Lewallen, 9–15. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Petit, Laurence, and Aimee Pozorski. 2018. Photography and Trauma: An Introduction. Polysèmes [online]. Vol. 19. https://doi.org/10.4000/polysemes.3366. Accessed 11 July 2019. Rinder, Lawrence R. 2001. The Plurality of Entrances, the Opening of Networks, the Infinity of Languages. In The Dream of the Audience: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951–1982), ed. Constance M. Lewallen, 15–32. University of California Berkeley Art Museum/Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson, eds. 2002. Interfaces: Women/Autobiography/ Image/Performance. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Wong, Shelley Sunn. 1994. Unnaming the Same: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée. In Writing Self, Writing Nation, ed. Elaine H. Kim and Norma Alarcón, 103–140. Berkeley: Third Woman Press. Zabunyan, Elvan. 2013. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Berkeley—1968. Dijon: Les presses du réel.

CHAPTER 4

Womanhood 2.0: A Visual-Verbal-Virtual Redefinition of Womanhood by Janet Mock Aurélia Mouzet

Janet Mock, a trans woman writer and trans rights activist of African American and Hawaiian descent, was eighteen when she traveled to Thailand for gender confirmation surgery. She had been a sex worker for several years, while also working regular jobs to pay for hormones and save the $7000 that she needed for her surgery. Working in the sex industry was not a matter of choice, since, as she points out, society does not provide much support for trans people. Many are those who simply have to find means to survive and are left with no other choice than sex work. After GCS,1 Mock went on to college and received a Master’s degree in communication which helped her land a job at People magazine. In 2010, Mock was approached by Kierna Mayo, journalist at Marie-Claire, to tell her life story in an article entitled, “I Was Born a Boy,” which was published in the magazine a year later. Although Mock was flattered to 1

 Gender Confirmation Surgery, acronym used here to avoid redundancy.

A. Mouzet (*) University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 V. Baisnée-Keay et al. (eds.), Text and Image in Women’s Life Writing, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84875-0_4

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appear in one of the leading magazines of the feminine press, a symbolic recognition of her womanhood, the four-hand article was not truly liberating (Kierna 2011). As she highlights: “After each reading, I was moved but strikingly detached,” because as she puts it “It was a stranger’s story to me. It belonged to some brave girl who defied all odds, crossing the sexes, leaving her past behind, making it to People magazine, and living to tell her story in a major women’s magazine” (Mock 2014, xiii–xiv). An avid reader herself, she knew the only way to truly tell her story was to write it herself. But she was also well aware that trans life writing had historically reified trans people and she was, therefore, naturally hesitant about writing her life story: “I was reluctant to open up to the world for the same reasons I had been afraid to reveal myself as Janet to my mother and siblings at thirteen, to wear a dress through the halls of my high school, to tell the man I loved my truth: I didn’t want to be ‘othered,’ reduced to just being trans.” (xiv) The reification of the trans body2 is part and parcel of the genre of trans life writing: early trans life writing is indeed characterized by a strong medical undertone, due to its context of emergence. “The first format that trans life writing took was ‘the traditional trans narrative,’ which had to be recounted in the doctor’s office in order to qualify for hormonal therapy and surgery” (Horvat 408). The medical gaze imposed on the transsexual body interestingly had contradictory outcomes.3 On the one hand, it marginalized the trans community, turning individuals into objects of curiosity, othering them in a manner that was reminiscent of the dynamic that underpinned the colonial imaginary, while, on the other hand, it also turned every GRS4/GCS/GAS5 candidate into an autobiographer. “Whether s/he [sic] publishes an autobiography or not, then, every transsexual [sic], as a transsexual [sic], is originally an autobiographer. Narrative is also a kind of second skin: the story the transsexual [sic] must weave around the body in order that this body may be ‘read,’” (Prosser 101) thus ironically initiating a cathartic process allowing a liberating I to replace an imprisoning eye. 2  The trans body is presented in the singular precisely because of the ways that the heterogeneity of transness is effaced in dominant discourses. This narrative runs contrary to the myriad articulations of transness that exist. 3  Historically, academia’s theorizing and recounting of trans bodies, lives, and concerns has used the term “transsexual,” long past the period during which was considered appropriate by trans communities. 4  Gender Reassignment Surgery. Different terminology but same meaning as GCS. 5  Gender Affirming Surgery. Idem.

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The highly formalized nature of published trans bios, and the fact that trans autobiographies,6 and memoirs usually focus on the transition—from the “suffering and confusion” caused by the sex assigned at birth to the “corporeal and social transformation/conversion” that precede what Prosser calls “the arrival’ home’” that is, gender confirmation surgery (101)–lead us to wonder to what extent these life narratives allow their authors to reveal the extraordinary complexity of their identities,7 and what strategies, if any, contemporary trans authors use to debunk the potential limitations of the written text. I will demonstrate that in her memoir and literary debut, Redefining Realness. My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More, published in 2014, Janet Mock refers to her social media platforms while highlighting the limitations of the genre of trans memoir to invite her readers to move beyond the written text. Following up on Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson who, reflecting on the concept of automediality, referred to emerging forms of life writing as being “visual-verbal-virtual” (Smith and Watson 2010, 167), I argue that Mock’s visual/verbal/virtual self-narratives contribute to expanding the life story presented in her memoir, and thus (re)shape her reader’s understanding of trans women’s communities. This chapter intends to show that, beyond the obvious underlying marketing strategies used to sell her book,8 Mock also uses pictures, GIFs, and videos to redefine womanhood, and complicate the narratives about trans women in a world that is still informed, in its vast majority, by heteronormative and cisnormative discourses.9 As the author argues, “The media’s insatiable appetite for transsexual women’s bodies contributes to the systematic othering of trans women as modern-day freak shows, portrayals that validate and feed society’s dismissal and dehumanization of trans women” (Mock 2014, 255). Written words, pictures, GIFs, and videos fuse to create a visual-virtual-verbal (re)definition of womanhood that I 6  The term autobiography is highly contested when referring to non-Western and/or “minority” life writings. See Smith and Watson (2010, 3). 7  Following the contemporary trend and in order to reflect the multifaceted nature of our identity, I chose to use the plural form of the noun. 8  Mock’s memoir is a New York Times bestseller. One of the conditions to be on this bestseller list is to sell 10,000 copies, but the New York Times and the publishers do no marketing, authors are expected to sell their own books. On this subject, see https://www. entrepreneur.com/article/280520, consulted on Jan. 11, 2020. 9  “Cis,” an abbreviation of the term cisgendered refers to those individuals who identify with the sex assigned to them at birth.

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call “womanhood 2.0,”10 that is a conception of womanhood that arises from both a “traditional” life narrative (Mock’s memoir) and the virtual-­ visual-­verbal life narratives that the author creates on her social media platforms (Youtube, Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr), as well as on her personal website. I will first analyze Janet Mock’s strategies to move beyond the generic restrictions of the trans memoir. I will show that while her memoir is rather traditional in its form, that is, without any pictures, and content—it focuses on her path from childhood to her arrival “home,” finding love after her gender reassignment surgery—the text is also bracketed with references to her social media platforms, and punctuated with comments about the inability of the book to tell the whole story, thus inviting the reader, both directly and indirectly, to search for the whole picture beyond the book. I will then discuss Mock’s visual-virtual-verbal redefinition of womanhood, and more precisely, the ways in which pictures, GIFs, and videos echo and complete the image of the self that emerges from the reading of Redefining Realness. Finally, I will demonstrate that Mock’s use of images contributes to strengthening trans women’s sisterhood, while countering the “cis gaze narrative,” a reductive discourse notably denounced by GATE, the U.S. based non-profit organization advocating trans people’s rights: “For too long, the trans community has been viewed through the cisgender narrative of being eternally victimized and needing to be rescued by a (cisgender) hero. This cis gaze narrative is not unlike the male gaze that women have been subjected to for centuries: one of rescuer and victim” (GATE §1). We shall see that Janet Mock’s memoir is only one part of a broader life story, the pieces of which the reader is invited to gather on a variety of internet platforms in order to grasp the complexity of what it means to be a trans woman of color in twenty-first-­ century America.11

10  By definition, the Web 2.0 is the second stage of development of the World Wide Web and is characterized by its emphasis on social media and user-generated content. 2.0 is also an adjective used “to describe a new and improved version or example of something or someone” (Merriam-Webster), a dimension that characterizes Mock’s (re)definition of womanhood which, in my opinion, is an improved version of the concept, because it is based on a politics of inclusion rather than exclusion. 11  Mock’s experience(s) is, of course, one articulation of transWOC-hood [transwoman-ofcolor-hood] among myriad possibilities.

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From Trans Life Writing to Transmedia Life Stories: Moving Selves Beyond the Written Page The ambiguous nature of trans life writing, both reifying and liberating, is captured by Mock throughout the text. She considers the writing, and subsequent publishing, of her memoir a privilege. She notes in a preliminary remark: “[T]his is one personal narrative out of untold thousands, and I am aware of the privilege I hold in telling my story” (2014, xii). But she also highlights its generic limitations and the fact that the written text is just a fragment of a larger story: The U.S. media’s shallow lens dates back to 1952, when Christine Jorgensen became the first “sex change” darling, breaking barriers and setting the tone for how our own stories are told. These stories, though vital to culture change and our own sense of recognition, rarely report on the barriers that make it nearly impossible for trans women, specifically those of color and those from low-income communities to lead thriving lives. They’re tried-­ and-­true transition stories tailored to the cis gaze. What I want people to realize is that “transitioning” is not the end of the journey. […] These stories earn us visibility but fail at reporting on what our lives are like beyond our bodies, hormones, surgeries, birth names, and before-and-after photos. (2014, 255–256)

Reification is an attempt at fixing alterity into a form of immutability. To remain the agent of her life narrative and counter mainstream society’s tendency to essentialize the trans community, Mock guides the reader toward her automedial texts. In the author’s note that precedes her life narrative, she invites the reader to visit her website: “Visit Janetmock.com for more information, resources, and writings” (2014, xii). To debunk the alienating “otherization” potentially emerging from her memoir, Mock chooses to tell her story both offline and online. She, therefore, suggests that one must “read” beyond the written page to truly understand what it means to be a trans woman of color in America. In recent years, the shift from traditional literature to the digital era opened up new spaces that allowed for the complexity of contemporary trans identities to emerge. “What the gap between memoir and new directions (digital, performance) then reflects is the rift between the medical view of transsexuality as a disorder and trans activists’ insistence on self-­ determination and the plurality of trans stories” (Horvat 2017). Mock’s visual-verbal-virtual life stories aim at highlighting not only the “plurality

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of trans stories,” but also the plurality of Mock’s identities and her multifaceted personality. Mock’s website is a crucial space for her transmedia life stories, for it groups her various media platforms and offers an alternative to the restrictions of the book. “Websites [also] allow greater freedom in layout and functionality” than other social media sites such as Facebook or YouTube (Maguire 2018, 96). Mock enhances this freedom by linking her website to her various social media pages. The website contains eight tabs: Home, About, Books, Press, Speaking Events, Writing, Podcasts, Contact. It also includes six social media plugins (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, Google +), all of which weave together Janet Mock’s different facets as a trans woman of color, writer, activist, and speaker. Here, I want to show that the “Books” section of her website Books page, her YouTube and Twitter pages all contribute to complicating the narrative of Redefining Realness, and see how the images associated with the pages aim at showing that there is much more to being a trans woman than what mainstream media con. While Mock’s Books page on her website does not provide information on Redefining Realness beyond the editor’s presentation, a video, embedded on the right sidebar, shows her appearance on Oprah Winfrey’s Super Soul Sunday and provides the reader with an insight into an episode that appears in the first pages of her memoir, the earliest moment of her childhood when Mock felt the “desire to step across the chasm that separated [her] from the girls—the ones who put their sandals in the red cubbyholes labeled Kahewi, Darlene, and Sacha” (2014,  16) instead of putting her “slippers in the blue cubbyhole labeled Charles” (2014,  15). Here, Redefining Realness appears as a typical trans memoir in that the written narrative focuses on the subject’s body and gender dysphoria. The mention of Janet’s birth name and the child’s, who was assigned male at birth, confusion about her gender identity, all demonstrate the intrinsic link between the body and trans life narratives. It also demonstrates a lack of departure from cis-acceptable versions of transness, since it is the narrative required to be told to cis doctors to obtain hormone letters, as well as surgery letters. The video, on the other hand, moves the focus from the individual, the body’s ingrained experience, to the collective with a broader reflection on two fundamental problems of our society: normativity and imposed identities. The original interview is about forty minutes long. Mock chooses a two-minute-long excerpt, titled “The Lifeshaping Moment Janet Mock

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Had in Kindergarten,” and points her readers/audience towards her symbolic (re)birth, as a starting point for both her self-understanding and the narrative of her life. She, therefore, intrinsically connects the formation of her identity as a trans girl to her journey as a writer. Wearing a blue sleeveless business jumpsuit with brown heel sandals, Mock appears both classy and professional. While in her memoir, Mock resorts to the traditional storytelling technique “show don’t tell” to allow her reader to witness the inner struggle of her young self, the video enables the narrating self to intellectualize this pivotal moment in the life of the narrated self. “This is the first time in my life where I was told this is where you’re supposed to be. This is the box, this is the literal box where you’re supposed to exist in” (“The Lifeshaping Moment Janet Mock Had in Kindergarten” 00:31–00:41). Appearing on Oprah, Mock not only rewrites the media narrative about trans women, she also becomes part and parcel of a lineage of successful black women. And while the written text showed a confused little boy, the video shows a stunning, intelligent woman, who invites us to rethink transness by changing our perspective: the problem is not the child, assigned male at birth, who wants to embrace her girlhood, but the society that tries to impose on us fixed and given identities, the boxes we are expected to fit in, while identity is by its very nature, marked by fluidity, both transient and plural. Mock’s YouTube channel also provides the reader willing to “see” beyond the written page a six-part-conversation where the author discusses in more detail her book, disclosure, sex work, Pop culture, and “Passing.”12 In the videos, Janet Mock wears a black-and-white zipped, low-cut dress, which she uses to tease her audience, fanning herself with the bottom of her dress. The medium shot frames her from about waist up, making the gesture more suggestive than provocative. Perfectly made up, Mock looks attractive, feminine, sensual, and confident as the words “Janet Mock writer” appear on the screen to the sound of a typewriter. The combination of Mock’s chosen words and image symbolically debunks the gender stereotype according to which women could not be “smart AND beautiful,” while challenging “the media’s bias in favor of women who are traditionally feminine and who are not too able, too powerful, or too confident” (Wood 1994, 233). Like Oprah’s interview, the YouTube videos allow Mock to further reflect on her writing: “Through my own story and emotional experience, 12  “Passing” is having features that fit the “standards” of femininity or masculinity and being therefore perceived as cis.

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I hope it empowers other girls to know that, first off that they are not alone, and that it’s not bizarre and that they’re not the first ones to have been there. That would be the biggest goal for me with Redefining Realness” (“Janet Mock on her Book Redefining Realness” 00:50–01:05). This is a goal she develops throughout her various internet platforms as on her Twitter page that she connects visually, verbally, and virtually to her YouTube channel via the subtitle “#redefiningrealness,” and a Twitter plugin appearing on her YouTube homepage. A powerful marketing tool, the hashtag allows Mock also to create a sense of community and build bridges between herself, her readers, and trans communities, as well as with mainstream media. By weaving these multiple self-narratives together, Mock is not only “redefining realness,” but she is also contributing to redefining the mainstream perception of womanhood.

The Visual-Verbal-Virtual Janet Mock(s): Embracing Womanhood 2.0 Mock uses a great variety of social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr) to counter mainstream media representations of trans women and promote her self-brand while advocating for trans rights. “Such digital practices of self-mediation and networked autobiographical engagement provide a rich set of texts for analysis that can tell us more about how digital spaces are shaping contemporary notions of self” (Maguire 2018, 85). Mock uses her digital spaces to redefine what it means to be a woman and debunk a perception of womanhood that remains strongly patriarchal and heteronormative. The homepage of her website, https://janetmock.com/, shows Janet wearing a dark blue, low cut, snakeskin jacket. Perfectly made up, wearing large creole earrings, her mouth half-open, Mock looks away from the camera, outside the frame with an intense gaze like a cover girl in a glossy fashion magazine. In this regard, Mock’s picture fits in the traditional representation of women in the media: A final theme in mediated representations of relationships between women and men is the representation of women as subject to men’s sexual desires. The irony of this representation is that the very qualities women are encouraged to develop (beauty, sexiness, passivity, and powerlessness) in order to meet cultural ideals of femininity contribute to their victimization. Also, the qualities that men are urged to exemplify (aggressiveness, dominance, sexu-

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ality, and strength) are identical to those linked to the abuse of women. (Wood 1994, 236)

But while for cis women, embracing qualities such as beauty and sexiness can be considered somewhat reductive and alienating, for a trans woman, it is, on the contrary, often truly liberating. Trans women’s womanhood has been negated so virulently for so long that they are frequently left with no other choice than advocating extreme femininity.13 And while the notion of womanhood has been questioned by non-trans feminists, trans women theorists do not reject it, but rather advocate a broader understanding, and more inclusive notion, of womanhood. This redefinition of womanhood—and adoption of the term—is also a way to distance trans feminism from white feminism. Trans women have endured rejection from cis feminists unwilling to accept—or even recognize—their womanhood. Juliet Jacques has pointed out that some, like the academic/activist Janice Raymond, perceived “male-to-female transsexuality as a plot to infiltrate the feminist movement’s spaces,” while denouncing one of the crimes supposedly committed by most transsexual women “who ‘attempt to possess women in a bodily sense while acting out the images into which men have molded women’ (that is, conforming to patriarchal stereotypes of femininity)” (Jacques 2017, 359). The overtly feminine attributes trans women display are, in this regard, a force majeure in response to the cruel negation of their intimate being. As I wrote elsewhere: “Unlike the traditional Western autobiography, the postcolonial autobiography could be seen as force majeure in the literary world. It is indeed not about a sole ego pouring out one’s feelings so much as to claim one’s individuality and value per se, but rather an attempt at reclaiming a voice that has been shut by decades of domination so as to denounce persisting inequities” (Mouzet 2015, 233). Trans women’s stance on femininity is an attempt at reclaiming a womanhood that has been shut, negated by decades of arbitrary domination—patriarchal domination as well as that of cis feminism. 13  It is important to note that the term “womanhood” has long been contested by white feminist theory as being intrinsically linked to the myth of “true womanhood” that developed in nineteenth-century North America, otherwise known as the cult of domesticity according to which a “true woman” was expected to embody the four values of piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness. See Roberts (2002, 151).

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On Mock’s website homepage, the biography to the right of her portrait demonstrates that Mock is far from being “just a pretty face,” she is also a talented writer and a gifted businesswoman: JANET MOCK is a trailblazing storyteller. She has published two bestselling memoirs about her journey as a trans woman. She has written and directed for POSE (FX), THE POLITICIAN (Netflix) and HOLLYWOOD (Netflix). She’s been nominated for a Golden Globe and Emmy, and won a Peabody and AFI Award. She starred in a fashion campaign for Valentino. She’s been interviewed by Oprah, Ellen and Wendy. She recently made history with her landmark deal with Netflix. (janetmock.com)

Once again, the association of Mock’s words and image contributes to debunking the mainstream view of women. Wood argues that “[W]omen are defined by their bodies and how men treat them. Their independent identities and endeavors are irrelevant to how they are represented in media, and their abilities to resist exploitation by others are obscured” (236), but Mock ironically (re)defines herself by using the very tools of patriarchal exploitation. In displaying her female body as an object of desire alongside a text that highlights her multiple successes, she counters the adverse effects of such reification. Whether on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, or on her website, all of Mock’s images are flattering and posed, alluding to the author’s taste for haute couture and building her as a fashion icon. While the images alone may be somewhat reifying, the association of text and image calls into question the general narrative about women, femininity, and leadership. Like the words “Janet Mock Writer” in her YouTube videos, her biography defies the media’s representation of women, both trans and cis, as either objects of sexual desire or agents of their success. By (re)claiming her femininity through glamorous pictures, Mock is not fueling a patriarchal vision of women as objects of sexual desire, but she is instead astutely denouncing the notion of trans women as being “fake women.” “If a trans woman who knows herself and operates in the world as a woman is seen, perceived, treated, and viewed as a woman, isn’t

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she just being herself? She isn’t passing; she is merely being” (Mock 2014, 155). Her life story is a complex tale of multiple self-revelations that debunk any preconceived ideas of womanhood to highlight the importance of accepting all manifestations of being a woman in the world: I am a trans woman of color, and that identity has enabled me to be truer to myself, offering me an anchor from which I can uplift my visible blackness, my often invisible trans womanhood, my little-talked about native Hawaiian heritage, and the many iterations of womanhood they combine. (Mock 2014, 249)

If the photographed self may sometimes appear as a representation of the other, Mock ironically counters this alienation by reclaiming her identity through the very process of otherization of the self that is the art of photography. And while traditional photography and its permanence may, to a certain extent, connote death, Mock also uses Graphics Interchange Format, animated images, more specifically looping animations that are also an excellent tool for “communicating jokes, emotions and ideas” (Heinzman 2019, §5), to oppose life and movement to the deathlike bite of fixed identities. In a Tweet posted on February 4, 2017, three years after the publication of her first memoir, Mock thanks her readers for their support with a GIF. The GIF is taken from her YouTube videos, the sixpart-­conversation about Redefining Realness. She is holding an open copy of her memoir in her hands. Her gaze goes from her book to the camera, and her audience, as she bursts out laughing in a loop. Above the GIF, one can read Mock’s tweet: “Three years ago today, I released #redefiningrealness. Thanks to the readers who embraced my story. Deeply grateful” (@ janetmock). A picture of Mock reading her book or bursting out laughing would not have the same effect on her audience: the GIF indeed shows her playfulness and enhances Mock’s complicity with her readers. Moreover, by cheerfully placing herself in the position of a reader, she also symbolically suggests that she is part and parcel of the community she intends to (re)create with her ideal reader, the trans community at large. Pictures and animations are automedial life narratives that Mock turns into visual arguments to defend the rights of trans women of color, an especially vulnerable group within trans communities.

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The Power of Images and Sisterhood: Janet Mock, Her Sisters’ Keeper Pictures, GIFs, and videos materialize the goals Mock assigned to her memoir and bridge the gap between the written text, the virtual selves, and real life by turning the multimedia life narratives into impactful political statements. Mock was able to become a spokesperson for trans communities in the U.S.,14 because she stood at the intersection of several worlds. She first had to distance herself from her community to gain access to mainstream society’s ideals: “Isolation made me feel safer, though the irony of separating from the pack, from my trans sisters in an effort to be welcomed in the larger society (into the gaze of a guy), is glaring to me now” (Mock 2014, 158). This position at the crossroads not only provided her with a clearer insight into the suffering and injustice endured by her community, but it also allowed her to speak out and be heard. As she points out, “beauty opens doors,” her feminine features de-marginalized her, to a certain extent, and allowed her to find her place as a woman, a wife, and a professional in mainstream society. When she became a journalist, she gained access to mass communication, and used it as a platform to denounce the discrimination faced by members of trans communities, as well as to express the urgent need to acknowledge the persisting inequities her peers have to endure. Being a trans woman of color and having experienced poverty, discrimination and a life as a sex worker, she used her influence and her position at the center to speak out for the community denouncing the “violence that trans women face at the hands of heterosexual cis men [that] can go unchecked and uncharted because society blames trans women for the brutality they face” (Mock 2014, 161), while asking the larger society to take responsibility for the trans’ involvement in the sex trade: “The greatest push factor for trans girls engaged in the sex trade is poverty, stemming from homelessness (often brought on by parents and/or guardians refusing to accept their gender identity) or growing up in already struggling low-income communities where resources are scarce.” (2014, 213) Mock’s memoir and social media platforms form the multilayered fabric of the author’s activism. The political stance of Redefining Realness is 14  It is important to note that it is a cisgendered public that positions Mock in this way. While some trans communities do uphold her as a spokesperson, there are still many trans communities that do not see her as a spokesperson.

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deepened and connected to trans women’s everyday realities via social media. I will be looking at Mock’s website Speaking Events page, and her Tumblr page, I am #redefiningrealness, to show how images and written words contribute to building sisterhood within the trans women community, while advocating for trans rights in the larger society. While some may argue that the overwhelming numbers of selfies, pictures, and videos on Mock’s website and social media accounts betrays a form of narcissism, I will demonstrate that the author’s self-love is also put to use for the greater good of her community. For women, automedial practice incorporating narcissistic strategies, such as selfie genres, can function as a kind of self-love that positively contributes to the sense of a cohesive self. This is tempered by a culturally situated negative narcissism, that of the accusation of narcissism, whereby a conservative cultural definition of narcissism attached to identity politics functions to undermine the challenge posed by minority identities to traditional power structures. (Maguire 194)

Mock’s intersectionality, as a trans woman of color living in America, should be kept in mind when analyzing what seem to be her narcissistic strategies. The author’s approach is indeed first and foremost an answer to the challenges her community has to face on a daily basis. As I have shown in the previous section, the large number of pictures, GIFs, and videos posted on social media respond to the negation of Mock’s “true” womanhood, but they also serve another purpose: Mock indeed uses her own image to defend the rights of trans women of color in America. The video and speech titled, “I Am My Sisters’ Keeper: Read My Women’s March on Washington Speech” on her website writing page are particularly revealing in this regard. The 2017 Women’s March on Washington was a peaceful protest held on January 21, 2017, one day after the inauguration of President Donald Trump, to express support for LGBTQ and civil rights among other issues, rights that had been blatantly threatened during the presidential campaign. Wearing a black pea coat on a white spearpoint blouse, with just a touch of makeup, Mock’s style is both classy and discreet, and reflects the solemnity of the event. Facing the crowd, Mock asserts both her intersectional identities and her belonging to a long line of African American women who resisted oppression: “I stand here as someone who has written herself onto this stage to unapologetically proclaim that I am a trans woman-writer-activist-revolutionary of color. And I stand here today

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because of the work of my forebears, from Sojourner to Sylvia, from Ella to Audre, from Harriet to Marsha” (janetmock.com/2017/01/21/ womens-­march-­speech/ §6). Following her black forerunners,15 Mock resorts to biblical rhetoric to convey her political argument: I stand here today most of all because I am my sister’s keeper. My sisters and siblings are being beaten and brutalized, neglected and invisibilized, extinguished and exiled. My sisters and siblings have been pushed out of hostile homes and intolerant schools. My sisters and siblings have been forced into detention facilities and prisons and deeper into poverty. And I hold these harsh truths close. They enrage me and fuel me. But I cannot survive on righteous anger alone. It is my commitment to getting us free that keeps me marching. (janetmock.com/2017/01/21/womens-­march-­speech/ §7)

Here, the biblical intertext—the allusion to Cain’s answer to God after he killed Abel—“I am not my brother’s keeper”—has a triple function: it legitimates Mock’s protest by putting it within a long lineage of black protests, from the slavery era to the present day by way of the civil rights movement; it justifies black women’s anger toward racism and discrimination,16 and build sisterhood; it also brings to light the intrinsic relation Mock draws between her life narrative(s) and her fight for the rights of trans women of color. Telling herself in text and images allows her to bring hope to her community, reassuring them by showing them that one can be trans and lead a successful life, while promising them that she will continue fighting for their rights: “It is my commitment to getting us free that keeps me marching” (https://janetmock.com/2017/01/21/ womens-­march-­speech/ §7). Mock is using her success to bring awareness to the issues faced by trans communities and to change society’s views of trans women. Her Tumblr page, I AM #redefiningrealness, invites her trans readers to share their stories and become part of a larger narrative that she calls “storysharing”: 15  Politics, religion, and protest are intrinsically linked in the African American imaginary. In the context of the United States, the rhetoric of black liberation movements has historically been informed by biblical figures and images. 16  For African American writer, feminist, and civil rights activist, Audre Lorde, anger was a justifiable answer to the evils of racism: “My anger is a response to racist attitudes, to the actions and presumptions that arise out of those attitudes. If in your dealings with other women your actions have reflected those attitudes, then my anger and your attendant fears, perhaps, are spotlights that can be used for your growth in the same way I have had to use learning to express anger for my growth” (Lorde 1997, 278).

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The book is about discovering, becoming and revealing ourselves to the world. It’s about authenticity and owning our stories in a world that tells us that who we are is wrong, shameful and should be kept secret. We’re banishing this silence together through storysharing. I AM #RedefiningRealness is a space where readers can share parts of their lives, proclaim and declare their identities and discuss where their journey intersects with the messages in the book. Please add your selfie, five words that define you, and your story of #redefiningrealness.

There are dozens of pictures on the web page, heartbreaking stories of rejection, but also proof of the resistance and resilience of trans communities and individuals. Every story is an invitation to society to learn to embrace its diversity and the richness of our humanity. Far from the egocentric drifts of traditional autobiography, Mock’s visual-verbal-virtual self-narratives are opening doors to other trans women’s stories, giving them a voice and providing them with a platform to share their own life story. Mock’s automedial texts therefore reinvent both the notion of womanhood and the concept of life writing which becomes life writing 2.0: an online collective experience of life storytelling and sisterhood.

Conclusion In conclusion, for trans authors writing their life stories, self, body, and text are so intrinsically linked that images, pictures, and videos have become essential components of the self-narrative(s). These elements are gathered to create powerful visual-verbal-virtual life stories that counter reductive discourses about transness. These automedial texts also allow the narrating selves to move beyond the straightjacket of the written text. In using a combination of written text and visual self-representations, Mock opposes over-simplified images of trans people tailored to the “cis gaze” with the complexity of multifaceted lives and aspirations. Both her words and images contribute to challenging the narratives put forth by mainstream media about trans people, while opening new spaces that allow for the complexity of contemporary identities to emerge. Through the subtitle on her YouTube channel homepage, “our stories matter,” Mock enters into dialogue with the Black Lives Matter movement. This

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dialogism between black texts,17 that Henry Louis Gates Jr. has theorized as the process of “Signifying,”18 repetition through revision, allows Mock to personalize her activist stance by focusing on trans communities while linking her automedial life narratives to a larger movement, thus advocating justice, healing, and freedom for both trans and black communities. Through the process of signifying, Mock’s multiple identities merge into the collective consciousness of her (trans and black) communities, thus turning her visual-verbal-virtual life narratives into powerful tools of community healing and compassion.

References “‘Perspectives’ of Transgender Women, Delivered by Cisgender Scientists and Researchers?” GATE, 30 July 2019. transactivists.org/trans-­exclusion-­ ias-­2019/. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 1998. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism. Oxford University Press. Heinzman, Andrew. 2019. What Is a Gif, and How Do You Use Them? Howtogeek, 25 September. howtogeek.com/441185/what-­is-­a-­gif-­and-­how-­do-­you-­use-­ them/. Accessed 21 January 2020. Horvat, Ana. 2017. What’s Next for Trans Life Writing. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 32 (2): 408–409. Web. Accessed 21 January 2020. Jacques, Juliet. 2017. Forms of Resistance: Uses of Memoir, Theory, and Fiction in Trans Life Writing. Life Writing 14 (3): 357–370. Web. Kierna, Mayo. 2011. I Was Born a Boy. Marie Claire, 18 May. Web. Lorde, Audre. 1997. The Uses of Anger. Women’s Studies Quarterly 25 (1/2): 278–285. JSTOR. www.jstor.org/stable/40005441. Accessed 24 February 2021. Maguire, Emma. 2018. Girls, Autobiography, Media. Gender and Self Mediation in Digital Economies. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Ebook. Mock, Janet. 2014. Reaffirming Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Love, and So Much More. New York: Atria Books. Print.

17  Here, I refer to the word “text” in the broad sense. Mock’s visual, verbal, virtual life stories dialogue with the #blacklivesmatter’s political stance, as well as with other African American activists, writers, artists and thinkers. 18  “Signifyin(g) is black double-voicedness; because it always entails formal revision and an intertextual relation [that is] the formal manner in which texts seem concerned to address their antecedents. Repetition, with a signal difference, is fundamental to the nature of Signifyin(g)” (Gates 1998, 56).

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———. 2017. I Am My Sister’s Keeper: Read My Women’s March on Washington Speech. Janet Mock, 21 January. janetmock.com/2017/01/21/womens-­ march-­speech/. Accessed 21 January 2020. ———. I Am #Redefining Realness. Tumblr. redefiningrealness.tumblr.com/. ———. Janet Mock. janetmock.com ———. Janet Mock on Her Book Redefining Realness. YouTube, uploaded by Janet Mock, 30 January 2014. youtube.com/watch?v=KCELVQviCvw. Accessed 21 January 2020. ———. @janetmock (Janet Mock). Three Years Ago Today, I Released #redefiningrealness. Thanks to the Readers Who Embraced My Story. Deeply Grateful. Twitter, 4 February 2017, 9:03 a.m. twitter.com/janetmock/ status/827910554077519872. ———. Redefining Realness—A Trans Girl’s Memoir. Janet Mock. janetmock. com/redefiningrealness/. Accessed 21 January 2020. Mouzet, Aurélia. 2015. The Postcolonial Autobiography: Force Majeure? In Autobiography as a Writing Strategy in Postcolonial Literature, ed. Benaouda Lebdai, 161–178. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Prosser, Jay. 1998. Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality. Columbia University Press. Roberts, Mary Louise. 2002. True Womanhood Revisited. Journal of Women’s History 14 (1): 150–155. https://doi.org/10.1353/jowh.2002.0025. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. 2010. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. 2nd ed. University of Minnesota Press. Wood, Julia T. 1994. Gendered Media: The Influence of Media on Views of Gender. In Gendered Lives: Communication, Gender, and Culture. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing.

CHAPTER 5

Authoritatively Her/Self: Georgia O’Keeffe’s Life Writing Edyta Frelik

Following Barbara Rose’s persuasive argument that any serious analysis of Georgia O’Keeffe’s painting must recognize the significance of her writings, this essay focuses on her verbal self-representation to demonstrate that she was not only an accomplished visual artist, but also a skillful and literate user of language. While she did not aspire to literary mastery, she consciously and with deliberation resorted to verbal communication to challenge in diverse ways both her public image as a silent object of the male gaze and countless routine readings of her art—especially interpretations of her flower paintings—as thinly veiled expressions of the dominant sense of what constituted femininity in her time. Significantly, the O’Keeffe emerging from her letters, which she wrote all her life but for a long time was reluctant to publish, is not exactly the same one as the O’Keeffe of her short autobiography, Georgia O’Keeffe (1976), an essay she only agreed to write after much persuasion. The relation and the difference between the two are so much more significant and revealing than the little-known if

E. Frelik (*) Maria Curie-Sklodowska University, Lublin, Poland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 V. Baisnée-Keay et al. (eds.), Text and Image in Women’s Life Writing, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84875-0_5

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obvious fact that her own version of “herstory” is quite different from that construed, and to a significant degree constructed, by her promoter and husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz, as well as by his numerous protégés and associates. What is especially intriguing is that O’Keeffe consciously chose to play a role, sometimes quite equivocally so, in shaping, endorsing and finally undermining the prevalent public perception of her artistic persona, her integrity, and her intelligence. The diverse threads and the complex texture of the fabric she wove that constitutes her life writing deserves a closer look for at least two reasons. First of all, it will reward the reader with some valuable insights into the nature of self-expression and self-representation as such. And it will also reveal what it meant for O’Keeffe to cultivate her identity as an artist and as a woman. Given her iconic status, it is all too easy to forget that, because of her gender, she was expected, or felt forced, to hide her ambitions or disguise them as feminine whims, ones that her male colleagues and friends from the Stieglitz circle were willing to accept or tolerate, and the critical establishment and the general public found aesthetically justifiable if extravagant or provocative.

Roleplaying: A Woman Among Men From the start, even when she was still a debutante in the 1920s, O’Keeffe already sensed the disparity in how she and her critics perceived her art, especially in relation to her gender, a feeling that was to haunt her for the rest of her long career. She resented their well-meaning but skewed and one-sided interpretations, in which almost by default she was first of all pictured as a perfect embodiment of the ideal modern woman artist, a notion deliberately fostered by Stieglitz, who was convinced that American modernism, invented and dominated by men, needed a female icon. The effect of Stieglitz’s aggressive promotion was that O’Keeffe was “written” into American art as a painter bound to her gender, sexuality, and body, which she felt obscured and diminished her true contribution to the modernist project. What frustrated her most was that, no matter what new imagery and style she experimented with, her innovations were persistently seen by the critics in the light of Stieglitz’s notorious statement about the impact of her first drawings shown by him in his gallery in 1916: “‘291’ had never before seen woman express herself so frankly on paper” (qtd. in Lynes 166–167; emphasis added).

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Determined to accommodate Stieglitz, her enamored champion and patron, but wary of the constrictions of the corset he wanted to put her in, O’Keeffe performed a balancing act, on the one hand giving some credibility to the men’s view of her while at the same time insisting on her right to pursue her own goals as an artist, one who, unlike them, happened to be a woman. As Anne Middleton Wagner observes, “Making art from such a position is inevitably rhetorical, must often employ assertion, denial, tactical evasion, subterfuge, deception, refusal” (13). Indeed, many of O’Keeffe’s career choices and stylistic shifts—some of them surprisingly radical—appear to have been carefully thought-out stratagems which she devised and perfected to buttress her artistic and intellectual integrity. And although she repeatedly insisted that her sole métier was painting, because unlike language it was more precise and definite, she chose to negotiate her two identities—defined by Wagner as “the feminine” and “the professional” (97)—not only in her preferred mode of expression but also in her writings, very often by means of daringly polemical statements with which she confronted both her colleagues and her critics and exegetists. In her letters to friends and colleagues, O’Keeffe frequently contested her fellow painters’ and critics’ views as fixated on their peculiar notion that her paintings, both the abstract and the figurative ones, were, as painter Marsden Hartley put it, “full of utterly embedded femininity” (“291” 85). The Stieglitz Circle chief theorist, Paul Rosenfeld, shared Hartley’s view: “For, there is no stroke laid by her brush, whatever it is she may paint, that is not curiously, arrestingly female in quality. Essence of very womanhood permeates her pictures” (141). The simple equation Rosenfeld made—“it is female, this art” for it derives from “the nature of woman” (141)—was the premise of the slanted discourse orchestrated by Stieglitz and endorsed by members of his circle. Like many others at that time, he was fascinated by the ideas of Sigmund Freud and Henri Bergson, but Havelock Ellis held special appeal to him because he posited a direct link between sexual and artistic impulses. Stieglitz concluded that artists— and women even more so than men—intuitively imbued their art with sexual import. This was what he saw in O’Keeffe’s charcoal abstractions in 1916, sensing that this was the culmination of his search for a female artist whose painting exposed her innermost self. Women’s art, he also believed, had more in common with children’s and primitive tribal art than with the art of men, because it sidelined analysis and reasoning and placed direct, unmediated self-expression at the center. In his 1919 essay, “Woman in Art,” Stieglitz confidently opined: “Woman feels the World differently

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than Man feels it. And one of the chief generating forces crystallizing into art is undoubtedly elemental feeling—Woman’s & Man’s are differentiated through the difference in their sex makeup. […] The Woman receives the World through her Womb. That is the seat of her deepest feeling. Mind comes second” (qtd. in Norman 137). Given the unquestioned authority of Stieglitz’s pronouncements, it is small wonder that despite the fact that much of O’Keeffe’s publicly known early work was abstract and devoid of gender undertones, she was hailed by colleague and painter, Oscar Bluemner, as the “priestess of Eternal Woman” (qtd. in Chave 123). Much of this perception was also affected by how Stieglitz presented O’Keeffe in his photographs of her. Taken in staggering numbers, they were initially inspired by his documentary impulse and desire to explore the biographical dimension of photography, of which Sarah Greenough writes: “Embracing the modernist idea of the fractured, ever-changing self, Stieglitz for many years had wanted to create a composite portrait, a visual diary of someone’s life, photographing them from birth to death” (54). But Stieglitz also believed that in photographs “[t]here is a reality— so subtle that it becomes more real than reality” (qtd. in Orvell 220), and his original diaristic intention soon gave way to a desire to construct an icon—that of an archetypal modernist female artist. Thus, in his 1921 retrospective, the section of photographs presenting his muse and lover, whose career as a painter was only beginning, was given a symptomatically generic title: A Woman [One Portrait]. Also symptomatically, neither the catalog nor the prints’ titles disclosed her name (although O’Keeffe’s identity was not a secret, either). Stieglitz knew that his forty-five photographs did not illustrate some written or unwritten story, but functioned in a way that could best be described with the words Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson use in their Reading Autobiography when talking of what may stand “in the place of an absent but suggested narrative” (76; emphasis added). In his composite portrait of O’Keeffe as a figure with an arresting face and body, the photographer, as Wagner writes, “insisted that the artist be understood as portrayed there: as a woman” (79). Even when abstracted and isolated in thematic clusters, the various parts of her body—the hands, the feet, the breasts and the torso—exude eroticism and do so in a way that transgresses Victorian/bourgeois norms. Waiflike, sleepy, gazing with wonder and innocence, O’Keeffe looks at once sexually liberated and solemn, natural and poised, mysterious and ostentatious, delicate and provocative (Fig. 5.1). But whose gaze is recorded in these pictures, Stieglitz’s or hers? Or do we have a case of collusion here?

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Fig. 5.1  Alfred Stieglitz. Georgia O’Keeffe.1918. Photograph. Metropolitan Museum of Art. (Credit Line: Gift of Georgia O’Keeffe, through the generosity of The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation and Jennifer and Joseph Duke, 1997. Wikimediacommons)

Herstory: Of Images, Words and Letters We know that the couple treated the series as a collaborative project, but does that mean that the photographs can be considered, at least partly, as instances of O’Keeffe’s self-portraiture or self-(re)presentation? Initially, she willingly cooperated with Stieglitz and patiently endured his cumbersome working methods, including long exposures of up to four minutes during which she had to stand still in uncomfortable poses. She was eager to please him with her demeanor as she did with her art. Writing to her friend Anita Pollitzer in 1915, she confessed: “I believe I would rather have Stieglitz like something—anything I had done—than anyone else I know of—I have always thought that—If I ever make anything that satisfies me even ever so little—I am going to show it to him to find out if it’s any good” (Art and Letters 144). She only very subtly indicated to him that she did have her own point of view as well: “I like what you write me—Maybe I dont get exactly your meaning—but I like mine—like you

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liked your interpretation of my drawings” (My Faraway 4).1 Why did O’Keeffe give herself over so readily to her mentor’s interpretations and promotional strategy, which was to mold her into what Kathleen Pyne has described as “a collective modernist fantasy” (192)? The fantasy was that the “Great Woman” was in fact a “Great Child” (Stieglitz’s terms)—innocent, guileless and unschooled in art history and theories, a true intuitive “genius”—and O’Keeffe consented to the equation because in those early days she associated freedom of expression with femininity as much as she did femininity with childlike innocence. In a letter to Stieglitz, she openly admitted: “I don’t know if it’s woman or little girl—I am mostly both” (My Faraway 167). But then things began to change. At the beginning, having looked at the pictures taken during their first sessions, she confidently wrote to Stieglitz: “[I] like myself as you make me” (My Faraway 161), but in later years, she concluded that in fact he was “always photographing himself” (Greenough 55). More importantly, however, she came to realize that the image of her his camera projected cast a long shadow on her own art. This is particularly true about those photographs in which Stieglitz focused on her head, arms, or hands with her paintings used as the backdrop (Fig. 5.2). He thus directed the viewer to assume that her art sprang out of her body, or, as Hartley put it (un)poetically, that in her pictures one encounters “the world of a woman turned inside out” (“Some Women Artists” 116). O’Keeffe seemed to take it all in stride, even saying that she delighted in feeling entirely different from what others said about her. It would be quite natural if her patience and feigned indifference were gradually eroded, turning into indignation and distaste. When the art dealer, Samuel Kootz, declared that in her paintings O’Keeffe was firstly “being a woman and only secondarily an artist” (qtd. in Mitchell), she could have retorted in the same way she had responded to the Rosenfeld and Hartley reviews: “I wonder if man has ever been written down the way he has written woman down—I rather feel that he hasn’t been—that some woman still has the job to perform—and I wonder if she will ever get at it—I hope so” (Art and Letters 174). But the artist, who admitted she was embarrassed by publicity (ibid. 170), took a more private turn and instead of engaging in feuds with her critics concentrated on writing herself down herself. 1  When citing O’Keeffe’s correspondence, I follow Sarah Greenough’s editorial choice to retain O’Keeffe’s idiosyncratic punctuation, spelling mistakes and erratic use of apostrophes.

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Fig. 5.2  Alfred Stieglitz. Georgia O’Keeffe.1918. Photograph. Metropolitan Museum of Art. (Credit Line: Gift of Georgia O’Keeffe, through the generosity of The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation and Jennifer and Joseph Duke, 1997. Wikimediacommons)

Despite the fact that O’Keeffe is one of the most recognizable and extensively discussed modern artists, it is relatively little known that she was as prolific and dexterous using her pen as she was using her paintbrush. Throughout her life, she produced a great number of letters which she wrote to numerous friends and colleagues. But the bulk of her correspondence was with Stieglitz. Between 1915 and 1946, they exchanged over 5000 letters, which, according to Greenough, the editor of two collections of O’Keeffe’s letters,2 amounts to over 25,000 pages.3 Yet, while 2  In 1987, Greenough selected and annotated O’Keeffe’s letters to Stieglitz, friends, and colleagues in Georgia O’Keeffe: Art and Letters, a catalogue accompanying the exhibition Georgia O’Keeffe: 1887–1986, organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. In 2011, she compiled and annotated a wide selection of letters exchanged between O’Keeffe and Stieglitz published as My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, Volume 1, 1915–1933. The second volume still is forthcoming at the time of this writing. 3  Most of these letters are housed in the Stieglitz-O’Keeffe Archive in the Yale Collection of American Literature, while the remaining part is stored at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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O’Keeffe’s outstanding epistolary output has allowed researchers to accurately reconstruct a large part of her life almost down to every single day, her letters offer much more than a detailed timeline. They can also be studied as a composite psychological self-portrait, intimate and candid, stark and yet suave and stylish, whose narrative texture reveals how her personality evolved through the complex process of introspection, intellection, and articulation—life writing in the raw that is “natural,” honest, and resplendent. She believed that what she put into her letters to Stieglitz, as he did, writing to her, worked in ways analogous to how her drawings and paintings, like his photographs, bespoke their innermost selves. Typically, discussing one of Stieglitz’s works, O’Keeffe remarked: “It’s very much you—You are really here—a lot of you” (My Faraway 93).4 Stieglitz clearly felt the same way both about her art—“your drawings & what I felt through them—& saw in them—of you”—and her writing style, which he summed up succinctly: “you give yourself” (86). Given the age difference between them—when they first met she was not yet thirty, while he was over fifty and married—it seems quite understandable that O’Keeffe was timid and did not hide it—for instance, she openly admitted: “I find myself afraid to be honest” (145). However, the “authenticity” of the self-written “I” in many of her confessions, which strike the reader as quite uninhibited and uncontrived, shall be considered with caution. As Smith and Watson argue in Interfaces: Women, Autobiography, Image, Performance, the assumption that “the autobiographical” is by default truthful and free of deceit is erroneous since writing about oneself—and O’Keeffe’s correspondence is almost always straightforwardly autobiographical in this sense—“is not a transparent practice” (Smith and Watson 2002, 8). In her case, at least one thing is quite intriguing: her early letters were quite obviously written for Stieglitz’s eyes only, and for a long time she did not even consider making them public. In this connection, it is worth quoting O’Keeffe’s biographer, Laurie Lisle, who describes the artist’s ambivalence about writing an autobiographical piece for the catalogue of her paintings exhibited at a New York gallery in 1939: “The reticent painter […] had never thought of herself as a ‘word person,’ despite the fact that she had always exhibited a distinctive, lucid, and compelling writing style in her letters” (411). Pointing out that 4  All subsequent quotations from this selection of letters will be followed by page number in brackets. When the quotation comes from Art and Letters, the title will be included in brackets.

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she “fell back on quoting Sir Joshua Reynolds, who had said that an artist should sew up his mouth,” Lisle then quotes O’Keeffe’s own words with which she objected to an interviewer in 1934: “I think it’s very silly to talk about myself like this […] I don’t approve of it at all” (411). But near the end of her life, the artist began to actively seek somebody to compile a selection of her letters for publication, giving, as Greenough, who collaborated with her, recollects, “few explicit instructions on the content and character of the book […] except to ‘make it beautiful and make it honest’” (My Faraway xiv). Over the years after Stieglitz’s death in 1946, she had had hundreds of their letters transcribed, which means she considered them as documents that were worth preserving for more than just personal or private reasons. In the first volume of the couple’s letters, My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, 1915–1933, the book’s editor asserts that there is no indication of the painter ever trying to revise or modify the overall picture of their relationship by, for instance, removing from the collection some of her letters or editing them. There are no unexplained gaps or erasures and the sense of unpolished and unfiltered immediacy one gets when reading them seems to attest to their complete authenticity as an unvarnished record of thoughts, emotions, and experiences. Of course, questioning the veracity of anybody’s self-representation is itself open to question in view of the fact that all self-writing is as if by definition authentic having come from the mind and hand of the writing subject—but in postmodern discourse, the author is but a “performative” category, an entity that is both autonomous and, as Smith and Watson have it, always “in dialogue with multiple and disparate addressees or audiences” (2002, 9). Ultimately, the important thing is that despite her reservations as an autobiographer, O’Keeffe did create and preserve a verbal self-portrait which, though for obvious reasons less “eye-catching” than her paintings, deserves close attention if only because it reveals how significantly different this self-portrait is from the image of her that was projected in the public eye based on her art and its interpretation by her colleagues and critics. One of the first things one notes while reading her texts may seem superficial, but in fact it reflects the fundamental uniqueness of the way she verbalized her perceptions and reflections: her diction—in contrast to the affected verbosity of her male peers—is simple and unadorned, free of hyperbole, coming across as unrefined, casual, and matter-of-fact. She seemed to make a point of not writing the way “the men” (as she referred to Stieglitz and his acolytes) did, crafting her own—direct, lucid and

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sparse—way of expressing herself. Not only do the tone and tenor of Stieglitz’s epistolary effusions stand in polar opposition to O’Keeffe’s straight-from-the-shoulder way of expressing herself but also, unsurprisingly, her letters were remarkably shorter. She rarely needed more than a few words to make a statement. But the conciseness of her letters did not make them any less informative, precise, or vibrant, nor did the apparent artlessness of her locution preclude the possibility of deeper meanings. Combined with the absence of superfluous detail, this (apparent) artlessness has a parallel in her paintings, in which she tried to get at and bring out the simple, unadorned essence of things and through minimal means achieve maximum expressive power. The picture of O’Keeffe that emerges from these letters is that of a person who is alert and energetic, witty, and playful, smart, and pithy, upfront and pragmatic—that is, quite unlike the “untutored child” and “unconscious woman” that Stieglitz saw and became enamored with. Yet, though in her early letters (those written between 1916–1918), she seemed to accept the role he had designed for her and thus kept referring to herself as “a little girl” who was not “grown up” (53), she also signaled that she was aware that that was what he expected, but it was not necessarily how she always felt. After some time she stopped calling herself a child or girl altogether, and tellingly began to address Stieglitz (who was almost sixty) as one instead. For instance, she opened her letters with “Dearest Child” and “Little One,” which—affection and tenderness notwithstanding—not so much marked a reversal of roles, but rather foreshadowed the consolidation of her own integrity. She not only wanted to be seen as a woman when she wrote she was “feeling particularly feminine I suppose.” She wanted to be seen as the kind of woman she felt she was—not the emblematic “Great Woman” Stieglitz envisioned but one who felt “as if [she’s] been out cracking hickory nuts the size of pumpkins” (58). There are many indications in O’Keeffe’s letters that she did not really share Stieglitz’s sense of what in his view constituted her uniqueness. He once wrote to her: “Women like you are a Woman” (60), perhaps forgetting that she had already, so to speak, preempted this idea in an earlier letter, in which she said she was glad that “there are no more like me—I hope there are not” (28). That she considered his attempts to mold her into a goddess as misguided is confirmed by another letter, where she simply declared: “The woman you are making seems to have gone far beyond me—Almost out of sight” (302). Then, as if to soften the bluntness of her rebuke she intimated that the source of their disagreement was

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not his faulty notion of her, but her own lack of a clear notion of her/self. She explained, hesitatingly and almost apologetically: “So I come to the conclusion that the thing that disturbs me is something in myself because it only exists for me through me as I touch the world—Yes you have told me many things but I must find it for myself” (340; emphasis added). In writing her/self, O’Keeffe carefully staked her ground negotiating between staying true to herself and allowing Stieglitz and others to see her as the kind of person they wanted her to be. She accepted that her career required certain sacrifices and even though she felt “embarrassed” by the gendered interpretation of her work, she did not protest. Not yet. She understood that because “most people buy pictures more through their ears than their eyes—one must be written about and talked about […] whether one likes it or not” (Art and Letters 170). But her pragmatism also had another side. While on the one hand, as Griselda Pollock writes in her recent reconsideration of feminist perspectives on O’Keeffe occasioned by the 2016 retrospective at Tate Modern in London, “she had to, and did, negotiate” her status within the “framework offered to her,” she managed to “escape its potential enclosure of her own artistic project” by renouncing “the known and conventional.” Her exploration on her own terms of matters of both gender and artistic form, Pollock writes, “was indeed an opening” (109).

Autobiography: Outside the Self Inside When in 1929, O’Keeffe began to spend more and more time in the Southwest—a sign of her progressing self-liberation from Stieglitz—his project of photographically documenting her artistic and personal maturation by his side could not be continued on an ongoing basis. One obvious change in the photographs he took when she returned to spend time with him in New York or at Lake George is that she was no longer portrayed nude, a development that had, in fact, begun to take place after 1923 when, becoming increasingly prudent about her public image, O’Keeffe objected to being photographed naked. In these late portraits, fully dressed mostly in black or white attire, she exudes an air of confidence, independence, and detachment—as she does in a series of photographs Stieglitz took of her inside or in front of her model A Ford, which she taught herself to drive defying his advice. The sober, aloof, and stern depictions of O’Keeffe that Stieglitz took in the 1930s and 1940s set the

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Fig. 5.3  Alfred Stieglitz. Georgia O’Keeffe.1932. Photograph. Metropolitan Museum of Art. (Credit Line: Gift of Georgia O’Keeffe, through the generosity of The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation and Jennifer and Joseph Duke, 1997. Wikimediacommons)

standard for the portraits other photographers would take of her in the decades to come (Fig. 5.3). As she had done before, she accepted, and even endorsed, this new public image of her and upheld it for the rest of her life. But her private correspondence with close friends proves that it was only just that—an image, or persona. It allowed her to protect her innermost self against unwanted intrusions from the outside world which wanted to claim her. Refusing to comment on her works, she might snap at an interviewer, “If you don’t get it, that’s too bad” (qtd. in Rose), just as she would reject the adulation of 1960s feminists when they tried to nominate her as their movement’s icon. On one occasion, she unceremoniously sent Gloria Steinem away from her door, on another—she refused Judy Chicago’s permission to appropriate her work. A hard, independent recluse, unreceptive to interview requests, unwilling to lend paintings for exhibitions and aloof from the local art scene, she waited a long time to draw in words a self-portrait by which she wanted to be remembered. She was eighty-nine when she finally agreed to write a short autobiographical essay. What ultimately made her overcome her

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reluctance to speak about herself was a renewed interest in her work generated by the 1970 Whitney retrospective exhibition and the accompanying realization that, even though Stieglitz had been dead for twenty-four years, his endorsement and influence still lingered, making O’Keeffe, as Pollock puts it, “almost too well-known, for wrong and trivializing reasons” (104). The truth was that despite the publicity that accompanied the retrospective and her recognition as one of America’s most important living artists (certainly the most important American woman artist)—no comprehensive art-historical interpretation of her work had been written that placed her paintings in the broader context of American modernism. The person who finally convinced her that such a state of affairs was detrimental to her reputation was Juan Hamilton, who had arrived in O’Keeffe’s life when she was eighty-six. Six decades O’Keeffe’s junior, he became her secretary, companion and caretaker (possibly also lover), when her advanced age finally began to be a factor in her life and work. With her deteriorating eyesight, she needed his assistance in various matters, but always made sure she had the final word in how they were resolved. But one important thing he alone has to be credited with was sparking O’Keeffe’s interest in publicity, so much so that, after years of rejecting offers from various filmmakers, she in the end agreed to have a documentary made about her art and life in New Mexico in 1975. Aired two years later, on the painter’s ninetieth birthday, it was widely acclaimed and would often be re-broadcast in later years. It gave O’Keeffe the opportunity to let the world hear her own voice and tell her story the way she wanted it to be known. Soon, she also agreed to write some of it down with her own words. Published in 1976, her autobiography has a title that is as simple as it is odd—Georgia O’Keeffe sounds like the title of a biography, that is, a third-­ person narrative, but the text is written in the first person and the voice is that of Georgia O’Keeffe telling her own story. However, the suggested (self)distantiation can be seen as the artist’s attempt to confront the publicly sanctioned iconic image she had had to passively endorse and conform to for decades. This in fact, as Smith and Watson argue in Reading Autobiography, is a more common situation than one might think. Citing the words of Stephen Spender, they point out that a “life-narrator confronts not one life, but two. One is the self that others see—the social, historical person, with achievements, personal appearance, social relationships. These are ‘real’ attributes of a person living in the world. But there is also the self experienced only by that person, the self felt from the inside

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that the writer can never get ‘outside of’” (5). Nearing the end of her life, O’Keeffe, spurred on by Hamilton, decided it was time for the world to hear her story, but did she really intend to expose “the self felt from the inside”? The art historian, Barbara Rose, offers an important clue in her review of the autobiography, where she writes that “O’Keeffe’s text is ostensibly autobiographical” and that the artist “intends to remain […] opaque” (emphasis added). But certain things are very clear from the start. For one, the book, in whose design O’Keeffe had the final say as stipulated by the contract with the publisher, immediately strikes one as an unusual object intended to impress with its sheer materiality. Printed on high quality paper, it measures two feet across when opened, which makes it rather difficult to hold in one’s hands, but the size of the pages gives the reproduced images space to breathe and so they appear more true-to-life than small reproductions in most art books. The interplay between the illustrations and the text (which also includes a chronological account of O’Keeffe’s development as a painter) is more like that in so-called artist’s books. The narrative is truly a hybrid which eludes classification, if only for the reason that there is no telling whether the reproductions are made to complement the text or the other way around. The two simply coexist within the unpaginated space enclosed by the covers in a relationship that is dialogical and open-­ ended. Quite unconventionally for an autobiographer, the artist declares on the first page: “Where I was born and where and how I have lived is unimportant.” Thus from the start she directs the reader’s attention away from the hard facts of her life and toward, as she puts it, “how my paintings happen.” She also dispenses with another conventional autobiographical practice, namely, that of including photographs. As Smith and Watson contend, photographs accompanying self-narratives often form “a separate system of meaning” which may support the stories told or “contradict the claims of the verbal text.” Briefly put, photographs in an autobiography help to “memorialize identity” (2001, 76). Curiously, however, in this book, there are only two photographs—one inside it and one on the back cover. Both are recent, too—one shows O’Keeffe working on a clay pot, a creative avenue she discovered late in her life thanks to Hamilton, while in the other, taken from a distance, she is standing on a hill with her back facing the camera. If they refer to anything in the book, it is its last sentence: “I must keep on.”

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The Visual/Textual Matrix Stripping the story of detailed factual content and visual documentation certainly helps foreground the art—the narrative only describes O’Keeffe’s life in relation to her work and her artistic development. Among the most captivating moments are those when she reflects on the very nature of the relation between her paintings and the words they provoke. Already in the opening paragraph, explaining the book’s raison d’être, she admits somewhat apologetically: The meaning of a word—to me—is not as exact as the meaning of a color. Colors and shapes make a more definite statement than words. I write this because such odd things have been done about me with words. I have often been told what to paint. I am often amazed at the spoken and written word telling me what I have painted. I make this effort because no one else can know how my paintings happen.

Setting the stage for a paragone of sorts, she prompts the reader to treat the book as a textual/visual matrix (Smith and Watson’s term) in which meaning is collaboratively produced by words and images. On several other occasions O’Keeffe reminds the reader that this is how her essay “speaks.” For instance, next to the first plate, showing her 1916 abstraction, Blue Lines, a minimalistic composition that is more calligraphic than painterly, she describes how she forged her own visual language: “It was in the fall of 1915 that I first had the idea that what I had been taught was of little value to me except for the use of my materials as a language—charcoal, pencil, pen and ink, watercolor, pastel, and oil. I had become fluent with them when I was so young that they were simply another language that I handled easily. But what to say with them?” Rejecting all traditional notions about painting and expression, she continues: I said to myself, “I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me—shapes and ideas so near to me—so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn’t occurred to me to put them down.” I decided to start anew—to strip away what I had been taught—to accept as true my own thinking. This was one of the best times of my life. There was no one around to look at what I was doing—no one interested—no one to say anything about it one way or another. I was alone and singularly free, working into my own, unknown—no one to satisfy but myself. (opposite pl. 1)

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Then there are more clues that O’Keeffe’s art may hold the key to her self-­ definition. Opposite plate 13, which shows her 1917 atmospheric watercolor, Canyon with Crows, she writes: “I found that I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say in any other way—things that I had no words for.” In her commentary placed next to Shell and Old Shingle VII (1926), a grey and white abstraction composed of horizontal shapes and a cloud-like form on top, she states: “I find that I have painted my life— things happening in my life—without knowing,” thus openly declaring that her painting is just another form of self-representation, one that is perhaps more expressive than is the case with words. To expect the textual/visual matrix offered by O’Keeffe’s book to be easily decodable, however, would be a mistake, just as looking for direct, unambiguously self-representational content in her paintings is bound to frustrate the viewer. The images she selected for the book give one a good sense of the wide range of styles, themes, and techniques she pursued, but despite her observation vis-à-vis plates 62 and 63 that artists “have to paint a self-portrait,” it seems she would rather the reader remember what she once wrote in a letter to Stieglitz: “I don’t like to be looked at” (140). True to that early declaration, she did not include any work from her 1917 series of semi-abstract watercolors showing a naked woman drawing herself. Even though her facial features are not rendered, many critics consider them to be self-portraits, so it seems reasonable to assume she did not want to revive any of the connotations with her sexuality and body that she dreaded so much in interpretations of her art. She did, however, select several paintings of flowers, as if she wanted to resolve once and for all the question of their alleged meaning. Opposite her two paintings of flowers in extreme close-ups—Abstraction—White Rose III (1927) and An Orchid (1941)—is her well-known statement written thirty-seven years earlier for an exhibition catalogue: So I said to myself—I’ll paint what I see—what the flower is to me but I’ll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it—I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers. Well—I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower you hung all your own associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower and I don’t. (opposite pls. 23 and 24)

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Teasing the reader about the possibilities and limits of visual (self-)representation, some twenty plates later she reveals: “I have painted portraits that to me are almost photographic. I remember hesitating to show the paintings, they looked so real to me. But they have passed into the world as abstractions—no one seeing what they are.” Plate 55 opposite these words shows Green-Grey Abstraction (1931), which she suggests is indeed a portrait, but as such, it does not really represent the person portrayed but rather the painter’s feelings toward her subject. The irony is of course that although as an autobiographer O’Keeffe often expresses her skepticism about the adequacy of verbal language as opposed to the clarity and precision of forms and colors, many of her paintings compel one to look for clues about their meaning in her public statements or her private correspondence. Sometimes it is possible to identify her subject from the painting’s title—for instance, the 1928 Abstraction—Alexis is an abstract portrait of the artist’s deceased brother. Others can be gleaned from her letters, as is the case with African-American writer, Jean Toomer, to whom she wrote in 1934: “I never told you—or anyone else—but there is a painting I made from something of you the first time you were here” (Art and Letters 218). But what do O’Keeffe’s portraits of others have to do with her self-­ representation and autobiography? How can we find O’Keeffe in her paintings and words or in the dialogue she establishes between the two in her book? Rose’s description of the pictures, which, as she puts it, “remain as strange and ineffable as ever,” may seem to apply to the narrative as well, but close attention to the artist’s words rewards the reader with some crucial insights about how she inscribed herself into her images. For instance, in the passage next to Dark Abstraction (1924), she quite precisely describes her understanding of the relation between representation and abstraction: It is surprising to me to see how many people separate the objective from the abstract. Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense. A hill or a tree cannot make a good painting just because it is a hill or a tree. It is lines and colors put together so that they say something. […] The abstraction is often the most definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can only clarify in paint. (opposite pl. 88)

This was not the only time O’Keeffe signaled that she was no stranger to theoretical considerations of aesthetic theory and philosophy with regards

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to the meaning of figuration and abstraction in art. For instance, Barbara Buhler Lynes quotes another perceptive observation of hers in which she addresses the same issue: “Nothing is less real than realism. Details are confusing. It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis, that we get at the real meaning of things” (180). A more succinct and to-the-point definition of the modern idea could hardly be imagined. What really matters, however, is that O’Keeffe applied these principles effectively to both form and color and to words. For her, representation and abstraction were not contradictory or mutually exclusive but complementary, when they served the purpose of expressing feelings and through them the identity of her subjects or of herself. Had she chosen language to be her primary medium, she would likely have followed the path chosen by Gertrude Stein, whose 1909 “abstract” portraits of Picasso and Matisse appeared in Stieglitz’s Camera Work in 1912 and made a great impression on members of his circle. Tellingly, while most of her colleagues acknowledged the impact of Stein’s ideas about abstraction and cubism on their painting, O’Keeffe took more interest in her writing as … writing. She thus praised Stein’s style in a letter to Stieglitz: “You know those things of hers [make] much better sense to me than most supposed-to-be intelligent combinations of words—They make ordinary prose seem so stupid” (245). She clearly saw her limits and the limits of her language and knew what to do if she found words inadequate. In a letter to Toomer, she quite frankly admitted: “The feeling that a person gives me that I can not say in words comes in colors and shapes” (Art and Letters 218). But this admission also explains why she disliked so many things that had been written about her paintings. Just as she painted how her interaction with other people and with nature made her feel, she wanted her viewers to experience her feelings and perceptions in a direct act of communion with her works. Words that critics might interject into that exchange rarely facilitated that process, and all too often were superfluous and disruptive.

Yet Another Perspective But did O’Keeffe ever consider her own writing might have the same effect? Her reluctance to write about herself is evidence she did. At the same time, her autobiography also definitively proves that she had a reflective mind and was capable of profound insights which she was able to articulate in words that she skillfully and deliberately selected and arranged like a true wordsmith. Praising her “unexpected” literary talent and her

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ability to spin “provocative” and “unornamented” passages, Rose discerningly points to one important analogy between her writing and her painting: “O’Keeffe does not give away any secrets, about either her life or her work. What she has chosen to exclude is as striking as what she has included; the omissions in her text can be compared to the suppression of anecdotal detail in her broadly generalized, reductionist landscapes and still lifes.”5 We can only speculate which of O’Keeffe’s omissions were to remain as such, but she made sure one of them would be posthumously revealed the way she had planned, becoming her postscript to a long career which Wagner has described as “a ‘masquerade’ of her ambitions” (100). On the one hand, she insisted that, as she put it in a letter to a friend, she was “quite illiterate” (Art and Letters 222), bolstering the widespread view that—in Hartley’s words—she “lays no claim to intellectualism” (“Georgia O’Keeffe” 106). She also downplayed or altogether disclaimed others’ influence on her art. Tight-lipped about what she read and what might have inspired her thinking, she arranged with deliberation how the world would be forced to acknowledge what had for such a long time been ignored, disregarded and dismissed namely, that, as Anna Chave has it, although she was perceived by many as “an intuitive creature who groped her way along,” in reality O’Keeffe “was no plant, no amoeba, and no dimwit” but “a self-possessed literate person” (116). Only after her death, one of the best-kept secrets of her Abiquiu home was revealed: her “book room,” a collection of over 3000 volumes of poetry, fiction, philosophy, history, and art criticism, many first editions and author-signed copies. Clearly, O’Keeffe felt no need to showcase her learnedness and the masquerade of her ambitions included many that were carefully masked. This is not to say that she completely succeeded. She certainly did not mislead Toomer, who once observed in a letter to Stieglitz that O’Keeffe liked to pretend “she hasn’t a mind.” But then he also added: “I don’t think she thinks she fools me” (Art and Letters 138–139). Toomer may have been onto something important here. For did O’Keeffe ever intend to fool anyone in the first place? More likely, she simply understood that with her self-writing, she could only contribute yet another perspective, the difference being that hers was to be authoritatively subjective—subjective, and thus partial, like all others, but with an authority no one else could claim or pretend.

 Among the many biographical details that O’Keeffe omits is her marriage to Stieglitz, whom she mentions only in connection with the development of her career, but not as a factor in her personal life. 5

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References Chave, Anna C. 1990. O’Keeffe and the Masculine Gaze. Art in America 78 (1): 113–125, 177, 179. Greenough, Sarah. 2016. Touching the Centre: Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz’s Artistic Dialogue. In Georgia O’Keeffe, ed. Tanya Barson, 50–59. Tate Publishing. Hartley, Marsden. 1921. Some Women Artists in Modern Painting. In Adventures in the Arts: Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville and Poets, 112–114. Boni and Liveright. ———. 1982a. 291—And the Brass Bowl. In On Art, ed. Gail R. Scott, 81–87. Horizon Press. ———. 1982b. Georgia O’Keeffe. A Second Outline in Portraiture. In On Art, ed. Gail R. Scott, 102–108. Horizon Press. Lisle, Laurie. 1987. Portrait of an Artist: A Biography of Georgia O’Keeffe. Washington Square Press. Lynes, Barbara Buhler. 1989. O’Keeffe, Stieglitz, and the Critics, 1916–1929. UMI Research Press. Mitchell, Marilyn Hall. 1978. Sexist Art Criticism: Georgia O’Keeffe  – A Case Study. Signs 3 (3): 681–687. Norman, Dorothy. 1973. Alfred Stieglitz: An American Seer. Random House. O’Keeffe, Georgia. 1976. Georgia O’Keeffe. Viking Press. ———. 1987. Georgia O’Keeffe, Art and Letters. Ed. Sarah Greenough, Jack Cowart, and Juan Hamilton. Washington: National Gallery of Art. O’Keeffe, Georgia, and Alfred Stieglitz. 2011. My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz: Volume One, 1915–1933. Ed. Sarah Greenough. Yale University Press. Orvell, Miles. 1989. The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880–1940. University of North Carolina Press. Pollock, Griselda. 2016. Seeing O’Keeffe Seeing. In Georgia O’Keeffe, ed. Tanya Barson. Tate Publishing. Pyne, Kathleen. 2007. Modernism and the Feminine Voice: O’Keeffe and the Women of the Stieglitz Circle. University of California Press. Rose, Barbara. 1977. O’Keeffe’s Trail. The New York Review of Books, March 31. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1977/03/31/okeeffes-­trail/. Accessed 20 May 2019. Rosenfeld, Paul. 2016. The Paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe. In Georgia O’Keeffe, ed. Tanya Barson, 138–142. Tate Publishing.

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Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. 2001. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. University of Minnesota Press. ———, eds. 2002. Interfaces: Women, Autobiography, Image, Performance. University of Michigan Press. Wagner, Anne Middleton. 1998. Three Artists (Three Women): Modernism and the Art of Hesse, Krasner and O’Keeffe. University of California Press.

PART II

Reframing Memories

CHAPTER 6

Fun Homes and Queer Houses of Memory in Alison Bechdel’s Graphic Memoirs Héloïse Thomas

If anyone is going to breach the time-space continuum by drawing comics, Alison Bechdel seems a fair candidate, and that is what happens in the prologue to the Essential Dykes to Watch Out For compilation. A horrified Bechdel suddenly realizes that, throughout all those years drawing the comic strips, she forgot to get a job. The desire to understand how this came about leads her to “retracing the steps” through the immense archive of her life, literally materialized by file cabinets, overhead projectors, and books stacked up to the ceiling (ED vii–viii). Throughout this trip down memory lane, she recounts how she developed her art and her writing as a two-pronged exploration of queer countercultures and identities, both her own and those of everyone she met. She then reflects on the concept of “essential” (is there an essence of anything?) and the role of the Dykes to Watch Out For (DTWOF) comic strips (1983–2008) in the broader cultural discussion of lesbian and queer identities. She concludes that by failing to account for the observer effect, she has indeed tampered with the time-space continuum and contributed to making lesbians conventional and boring. In a moment of metatextual mise en abyme, she tosses the

H. Thomas (*) Bordeaux Montaigne University, Pessac, France © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 V. Baisnée-Keay et al. (eds.), Text and Image in Women’s Life Writing, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84875-0_6

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volume of Essential Dykes to the reader, asking them to decide for themselves whether lesbians are essentially the same as everyone else or essentially different, while she sets out to “rethink this thing” (ED xviii). In parallel to the humor inherent in any reflection on one’s role in the end of the universe, the prologue stages three fundamental aspects: Bechdel’s uneasiness with any normative system of classification; the methodical documentation of her own life; and her construction of the self as a referential and relational entity. While meshing together labels such as “dyke,” “lesbian,” and “queer,”1 to reference the countercultural energy she both experienced in her life and portrayed in the DTWOF comic strips, she affirms her status as both “a writer and an artist” (ED xiv). Her refusal to separate the two finds its logical outcomes in the graphic narrative as her medium of choice and in the density of her work: the proliferation of significant visual details and intertextual references that position her within multiple semiotic and hermeneutic networks. Bechdel’s autobiographical narratives thus queer graphic memoirs specifically, insofar as they disrupt conventional modes of representation through their visual/verbal hybridity, non-linear approaches to temporality, and alternative constructions of the narrative around the self. Simultaneously, they open a space where complicated relationships to family, belonging, community, identity, and home—that is, the vast archive of one’s life—can be explored on the author’s own terms, apart from normative frameworks. The graphic memoir thus materializes a queer/ed home,2 rooted and mobile, a refuge against the processes of othering, objectification, marginalization, and exclusion endured by the author, a lab where the self is ceaselessly disassembled and recomposed. In short, through the use of a queered mode of representation, Bechdel’s autobiographical narratives create queer “houses of memory,” to echo Jean-Pierre Wallot’s 1  In recent years, labels like “lesbian” and “queer” have been repeatedly pitted against each other in scholarly and activist discourses, with some pronouncing one or the other more radical and emancipating. When I first presented this paper, someone questioned my use of “queer” in relation to Bechdel, arguing that she belonged to an older, “homonormative” generation of lesbian activists. This disregards the genealogies linking the two terms, the groundbreaking importance of Bechdel’s work in terms of providing dynamic, empowering portrayals of queer communities, and Bechdel’s almost interchangeable use of “lesbian” and “queer” to refer to herself. 2  I am indebted to Jamie A. Lee’s excellent work on archives and queerness, to which I come back later on, for the specific use of “queer/ed,” as both practice and politics, which helps avoid the pitfalls of static categorization “queer” may have at times fallen into nowadays.

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coined expression, as the vantage point from which to reconsider the childhood “fun home.” I will focus here on Bechdel’s first graphic memoir, Fun Home (2006), with additional material from its follow-up, Are You My Mother? (2012), as well as the prologue from The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For (2008).

Drawing the Divide Between House and Home What makes the graphic memoir “queer”? And what makes it a house, or a home? Fun Home, and, to a lesser extent, Are You My Mother? answer these questions simultaneously. In Bechdel’s hands, the genre of the graphic memoir is queered by its content (the focus on the multiplicity of queer existence), its form (hybrid and intermedial), and its use (constructing a structure for the archives of self and collective). Through its composite structure, the graphic memoir almost literally houses the subject’s reflexive journey through memory: the concept of inhabiting a hybrid space to produce meaning out of the confrontation with the past goes further than mere metaphor. In fact, the childhood house itself—both the actual material structure and its representation—is paramount to the child’s journey and to the recollection of that journey. The first images we see when we open Fun Home show the characters (Bechdel’s family) in front of the house where they lived. The cover of the 2007 Mariner edition is a drawing of a photograph representing the mother and the children posing in front of the blurred-out porch. This porch is a recurring element, either in the background of the images, or as an element structural to the space of the house. As a visual frame, it points to the broader issue of structure, as means of both support and order. The space within the house, with its baroque elements orchestrated by the father who leads the “monomaniacal restoration” of the house (FH 4), also matters in the process of the narrator’s subject construction because it signals a deeper artifice—that of making “things appear to be what they were not” (FH 28). The father requires that both the family and the house look “impeccable” (FH 16). But the perfection of appearance, of “authenticity” (FH 13), does not coincide with happiness, harmony, or unity for the house’s inhabitants. The first use of the word “home,” which would signify appropriation of the house by the family as a cohesive unit, instead correlates with the revelation of the “dark secret” the father is hiding—his sexual relations with teenage boys (FH 17). Fun Home thus establishes links and echoes between the representation of various forms of

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architecture, as the materialization of order and stability, and the evolution of queer identities, as the characters wrestle with problems of (maintaining or destroying) appearances and social facades. Moreover, the title is short for “funeral home.” While the funeral parlor is not actually located within the house where the family lives, the term “fun home,” though originally assigned to the funeral parlor, also refers to the house of the family. Death creates continuity between the two spaces— the workplace and the house. “Fun home” is also close to “fun house,” a building with trick mirrors, shifting floors, and other devices designed to scare or amuse people walking through. This matches Bechdel’s portrayal of her childhood house, as she compares it to Daedelus’s labyrinth, with rooms endlessly leading into each other, mirrors distracting visitors who often get lost, and the specter of the “Minotaur”—the father’s anger— haunting every room and every moment (FH 12). In its ironic double meaning, “fun” signifies the intersection of different conceptual categories: death, family life, and a grotesque distortion of reality. “Home” is thus located from the very beginning within a shifting, liminal space that defies categories. We can contrast this with the depictions of other makeshift or transitional homes for Bechdel during major moments of her identity construction. The Gay Union at her university is first characterized as an “underworld,” in keeping with the Greek mythology theme running throughout characterization of home-like spaces. While the childhood house was a labyrinth where an avatar of the Minotaur lurked, the Gay Union is literally located in a basement and, as with any journey to or through the underworld (katabasis), the young Bechdel comes out transformed (FH 76, 209–210). By contrast, the father’s queerness has been kept closeted, repressed, and only released in pedophilic relationships, thus perpetrating and perpetuating violence, as well as preventing him from achieving any true sense of belonging. This repression transforms the childhood house into a fun house, a maze-like distorted space where the daughter’s own subject formation is contaminated with the father’s containment and concealment of identity. It is only when she steps out of the house, by going to college and becoming aware of her identity, that she can start repairing and reconstructing her own sense of home and belonging. In this context, how do we triangulate house, home, and family? The intermediality of the graphic memoir—layering the written and visual narrative with images of staged scenes and re-drawn photographs, maps,

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letters, and so on—helps Bechdel peel back the façade of perfection and show the unstable or rotting background fixtures. Because the graphic memoir proposes a space, where the narrative can be visually subjected to memory’s particular logic, meandering and anti-teleological, Fun Home and Are You My Mother? open a space where Bechdel can unveil certain truths about herself far from normative forms of narrativization. They complicate and queer “home” not just by representing the author’s growing self-awareness of her own queerness in a Bildungsroman-like trajectory that takes her from the childhood house to university and back again, but also, beyond that, by interrogating normative frameworks that typically regulate its construction.

Hybridity and Slippages The graphic memoir is “used” to house a narrative of queerness; its form is no less queer—hybrid, slippery, resisting all categorization. Van Dyne pointed out that Bechdel was “motivated by what she experienced as the unreliable narration of her parents, the ‘persistent slippage between seeing and saying’ that disturbed her childhood (Lecture at Amherst College)” (105). This “slippage” is characteristic of both graphic memoirs and queer theory, so it comes as no surprise that such a medium would be used to dexterously grapple with issues of queer existence and coming-into-being. Admittedly, queer theory has always championed queerness as something impossible to properly define, although countless volumes have been written on the topic. Halperin emphasized its sheer potentiality, seeing it as “a horizon of possibility” and “a variety of possibilities,” but anchoring its definition in negation: “Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence” (62). Sedgwick echoed this in her own attempt to approach the teeming and sometimes competing definitions of the concept: “one of the things that ‘queer’ can refer to [is] the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically” (8). More recently, Jamie Ann Lee has explored the links between archival work and queerness, and uses more readily the term “queer/ed,” “as both a practice and a politics of mis/recognizing, critiquing, and challenging stable categories of collection, recollection, identity, and ideas of belonging as they have become

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embodied, normativized, and often invisibilized” (8). Queerness resists assimilation and homogenization; it thrives on hybridity, openness, and juxtaposition—as do graphic narratives. The last decades have produced a wealth of scholarship on graphic narratives—encompassing comics (including bandes dessinées and mangas), graphic novels, graphic memoirs, and so forth—which has indeed clearly demonstrated the need to understand such narratives as not merely the combination of image and text, but the creation of a new form, with varying and ever-evolving characteristics and conventions, to the point that a specific hybrid field of study, “graphic narrative theory,” has been gradually emerging (Gardner and Herman). The analytical models offered by Scott McCloud—himself a well-known comics creator—in Understanding Comics (1993) and its sequels, Reinventing Comics (2000) and Making Comics (2006), all of them in comic book form—have been instrumental in renewing specific vocabulary needed to apprehend comics (such as “closure”), and in furthering the discussion on visual literacy and on the reader’s role. Thierry Groensteen’s System of Comics (initially published as Système de la bande dessinée in 1999 and translated from the French in 2007), while taking a much more theory-heavy route, has also proven fundamental to comics studies and has reinforced the view of graphic narratives as “not only an art of fragments, of scattering, of distribution,” but also “an art of conjunction, of repetition, of linking together” (22). Graphic memoirs take this heterogeneity one step further since they integrate the autobiographical genre, with its own conventions and complex, intertwined dynamics, into a materially composite medium. The popularity of graphic memoirs, such as those by Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis, 2004), Roz Chast (Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, 2014), or Mira Jacob (Good Talk, 2019), points to enduring interest in a sustained reflection about the fluctuating parameters of autobiography. Bart Beaty sums up the stakes when he points out that, in the wake of the poststructuralist “death of the Author,” “autobiography in comics holds the possibility of giving the author birth for the first time” (143–144), something Elisabeth El Refaie echoes in her study Autobiographical Comics, where she discusses the means by which autobiographical graphic narratives address the creation of a sense of self and of authenticity, alongside a renewed relation to time. Thanks to their pervasive queerness, Bechdel’s Fun Home and Are You My Mother? complicate these key points—self, authenticity, and temporality—by maintaining a constant hybridization that extends further than

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form. Their respective subtitles, “A Family Tragicomic” and “A Comic Drama,” highlight the combination of different genres and discursive modes. Both books also include re-drawn archival material: photographs and documents, which Bechdel painstakingly reproduces on the page. The covers of both editions feature such a photograph: respectively, one of the family (Alison, her mother and her two brothers, photographed by the father in front of the porch of the family home) in a decorated frame, and one of Alison’s mother and herself, along with a mirror, a string of beads, and a lipstick. It is worth noting that the latter are objects conventionally associated with femininity, but even their presence, juxtaposed on Alison’s mother’s and her own forms of femininity, remains slippery, as we associate them more with the figure of the mother in Fun Home, rather than with the mother in the second memoir or with Alison herself. It is tempting even to think of their use in drag culture, providing a visual reference to the slippery identities and masks that queerness reclaims, and perhaps echoing Alison’s father’s own slippery grasp of his identity as a closeted gay or bisexual man. As I will highlight in the next section, authenticity becomes a highly problematic concept in this perspective, since it is never stable and constant, and it can even be denied in the case of queer identities (because of political, social, and psychological repression). Not even the house that the father keeps on renovating in Fun Home can provide any degree of authenticity, reduced to a distorting “fun home” as it is. The graphic memoir can then be the “house” where diverging strands of memory are brought together to attempt repairing the fragmented self and sketching out a personal sense of authenticity. Moreover, neither graphic memoir follows linear chronology; instead, they jump back and forth in time, following the author’s train of thought as she appears to be piecing together different parts of her life in order to make sense of her relationship to her father and mother. The formal aspects of graphic memoirs also imply alternative representations of memory and temporality: “the art of crafting words and pictures together into a narrative punctuated by pause or absence, as in comics, also mimics the procedure of memory” (Chute 4). A significant example of this is the double-page spread in Fun Home portraying college-age Bechdel (after her coming out) and her father, driving to a movie theater. In twenty-four square panels, the faces of Bechdel and her father are repeated as if on a film reel, with subtle differences indicating movement from one panel to the other. They are talking; Alison repeatedly turns her head or at least her eyes toward her father, but he never reciprocates; he eventually tells her

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about his first queer experiences. The tension between the stagnant, linear temporality of the drive, and the subtly circular, fluid temporality engendered by the effect of repetition, has a double effect. First, as the visual recording and re-telling (an archive if you will) of a personal scene staging a coming-out narrative that has broader political implications, it complicates our understanding of archives as a site that does not just interweave the personal with the political, but that also possesses a queer/ed temporality of its own, as Jamie A. Lee reminds us. Second, it highlights the source and the complexity of the traumatic relationship that lies at the core of Fun Home and whose impact continues to reverberate throughout Are You My Mother?

Houses of Queer Memory: Articulating the Private and the Public Lesbian Jean-Pierre Wallot, a former National Archivist of Canada and ICA President, coined “house of memory” to refer to the ideal purpose of archives, whereby archivists were meant to build “a living memory for the history of our present” (282). Terry Cook, who reprises the phrase when retracing the history of archival paradigms, highlights the collective, social dimension of this vision: thanks to these “houses of memory,” “the world’s citizens can open the doors to personal and societal well-being that comes from experiencing continuity with the past, from a sense of roots, of belonging, of identity” (18). However, Cook also makes explicit that in practice, such a history has implied erasure, so that we need to consider “what was worth remembering and, as important, what was forgotten, deliberately or accidentally” (18). “Houses of memory” are not apolitical spaces, unmarred by human dynamics of power: in fact, the latter are inscribed within the very composition of archives, which from the very beginning served as a means of legitimization for state power in particular. Hence. the reason why archives are of prime importance for marginalized communities and individuals: constituting archives means attesting to one’s presence in a past and a present predicated on one’s exclusion. In this perspective, archives also mean being able to imagine oneself into the future. We find the same dynamics in Bechdel’s work, where the graphic memoir functions as an archive that articulates the personal and collective aspects of queer and lesbian identities. In a 2006 review of Fun Home by

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Sean Wilsey, Bechdel is quoted as stating, “I’ve always been a careful archivist of my own life. […] I’ve kept a journal since I was 10. I’ve been logging my income and expenses since I was 13. […] All this detritus came in handy as I wrote Fun Home, as a corrective to the inevitable distortions of memory.” As the prime archivist of her life, Bechdel highlights the private function of archives as a record of her childhood, which extends into the sequel, Are You My Mother? However, the collective function is not overlooked, as both books chart the narrative arc from childhood to adulthood: Bechdel grows up in an emotionally repressive household, realizes she is queer in college, copes with her father’s death, and attempts to delve into her relationship with her mother in her later adult years, as she struggles with her romantic relationships, therapy, and the writing and publishing process for what will become Fun Home. As Julia Watson remarks, “By interpreting her familial story as a narrative of middle-class American family life filtered through the social persecution of dissident artists in the later twentieth century, Bechdel graphs the personal as a site of struggle for liberation that has analogs in human rights battles being waged around the world, particularly for homosexuals and women” (Watson 53).3 The formation and evolution of her queer identity within both social (public) and familial (private) environments, is, arguably, the focus of both books; and the medium of the graphic memoir allows for a subtle and complex portrayal of the evolution of the subject, who must position herself first within her family, then within social relations. The prologue of Essential Dykes reprises the movement between general and particular, social and individual. The “detritus” from childhood is represented on the page as literal artifacts, with Bechdel pulling out various objects from the drawers of file cabinets to present them to the reader as testimony of her trajectory as a lesbian and a comics writer. Thus, Bechdel keeps positioning herself within personal and public spaces, in the same way that she seeks to draw up “a catalog of lesbians,” which would allow her to “derive a universal lesbian essence from these particular examples” by “following a meticulous inductive methodology” (ED xiv). The background images of pinned insects assert the parallel between entomological pursuits and the scientific approach Bechdel means to carry out. When talking about lesbians, she uses first-person plural pronouns (ED 3  Margaret Galvan has also pointed out how Bechdel’s involvement in queer grassroots politics shaped both her personal trajectory and her work, notably through the portrayal of queer communities in DTWOF (Galvan, “The Lesbian Norman Rockwell”).

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xv), intentionally including herself in this experiment, and implicitly rejecting illusions of objectivity and distantiation. Moreover, as she comes across an old rejection letter from 1982, penned by Adrienne Rich, she takes up a correspondence with the poet who praises Bechdel’s comic strips and encourages the artist to “explode dyke essentialism & explore our real humanity” (ED xvii). And so Bechdel’s initial project of retrieving a lesbian essence, bound to fail, has morphed into something else: “I had set out to name the unnamed, to depict the undepicted, to make lesbians visible, and I had done it!” (ED xvii). She positions her work as an “antidote to the prevailing image of lesbians as warped, sick, humorless, and undesirable. Or supermodel-like Olympic pentathletes, objective fodder for the male gaze” (ED xv). This applies as well to her graphic memoirs: she offers visibility by unveiling her own trajectory and displays the complexity of lesbian/queer subjectivities while countering mainstream portrayals predicated on erasure or heteronormative fetishism. The autobiographical graphic narrative thus serves as the queer/ed house of memory where Bechdel can map out the connections between her personal subjectivity and collective consciousness, and address (and hopefully work to repair) deeply-rooted traumas.

Redrawing and Rewriting the Fragmented Self In Graphic Women, Hillary Chute explains why “the cross-discursive form of comics is apt for expressing [the] difficult register” of trauma, especially when it comes to women’s graphic narrative (2). She draws on the work of Jacqueline Rose to point out how the “hybrid, visual-verbal form of graphic narrative” integrates the practice of repetition, which may in turn manifest the presence of the repressed, within a psychoanalytic frame (4). The “work of (self-) interpretation is literally visualized” as opposed to conventional autobiographic discourses that remain on the textual plane (4).4 Fragmentation characterizes both comics and memory, but is an especially “prominent feature of traumatic memory” (4). Bechdel’s graphic memoirs thus open a space where past traumas can be apprehended on different terms and where Bechdel has the means of controlling a narrative that escaped her or was denied her as a child. The irreducible hybridity of the archival graphic memoir reinforces this articulation of private and public, personal and collective, and anchors the 4

 See also Chaney, Graphic Subjects, 4.

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genre as a queered or queerable space, where the queer fragmented self can be re-membered into something that exceeds attempts at homogenization or normalization. Combined with Bechdel’s assertion that she has been drawing and keeping some sort of diary ever since childhood, which is plain to see in Fun Home, we understand that words and images, as modes of representation, are not just ornamental hobbies for her, the result of living with cultured parents; instead, they form the integral structure of the formation of her subjectivity. We see this notably in the reproductions of Bechdel’s childhood journals: over the years, she started writing at first between sentences and then over entire entries with a glyph, which was shorthand for “I think,” to offset the assertiveness of declarative sentences (141–142). However, this glyph does not remain contained to this grammatical replacement function: it proliferates in the journal and elsewhere, repeated in certain architectural elements or in the ways that bodies are positioned in certain scenes for example. The multi-­functionality of this glyph, both a textual and a visual clue, anchors Bechdel’s subject construction in the hybrid, liminal space of dual verbal-visual representation. In interviews, Bechdel has also explained her drawing method (Karpel): she literally stages herself into each character, plans out every pose, takes a photo of herself in that pose, and then draws from that photo,5 a process that she depicts in Are You My Mother? (232–233). This dual process of distantiation and confrontation offered by visual re-­ presentation is tripled when Bechdel draws herself writing or drawing, for example, when she types a letter to her parents, where she comes out to them as a lesbian (FH 58): the visual re-staging of the artistic process adds another perspective to Bechdel’s subject formation. This ties into how Bechdel is drawn to any space that contains books or words. She encounters queer people in her childhood, notably glimpsing a butch woman at a diner before being rebuked by her father who asks her if that is what she wants to look like (FH 118–119), but these encounters are marked by denial and repression. In college, however, her encounters with affirmed queerness start with texts: definitions in a dictionary, portraits written in books, books written by lesbian and queer authors (FH 74–76, 203). Many of her subsequent sexual encounters are associated with the erotics of language and literature (FH 80). Words provide another 5  Bechdel has also done this for the DTWOF comic strips, therefore extending the autobiographical interrogation about the self into supposedly non-autobiographical work in a manner that is unique to the medium of the graphic narrative.

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type of a makeshift, ambivalent home for Bechdel that propel her toward rethinking how and where she belongs and how her identity is being constructed. To better understand her father in Fun Home, she keeps mapping the two of them onto various father-child pairs of Greek mythology: Daedalus and Icarus, Odysseus and Telemachus, eventually settling on “fatherless Stephen and sonless Bloom” from James Joyce’s Ulysses (FH 221). A similar process happens with her mother in Are You My Mother? where such texts as Virginia Woolf’s The Waves play a crucial role in refracting the mother-daughter relationship. Key documents are reproduced within the book, and this visual reproduction within the graphic memoir further embeds the fundamentally referential and relational characteristics of Bechdel’s subjectivity and selfhood into the very form. This referentiality is expressed in multiple ways, first and foremost through intertextuality, as Bechdel’s work is constantly layered with visual references to other texts. These can be overt and chiefly for humorous purposes, as in the first vignette of the Essential Dykes prologue: we see heaps of various DTWOF collections, real or imagined, whose titles are parodies of well-known pop culture landmarks, such as Bride of DTWOF, DTWOF Strike Back, and so on (ED vii). But the references also purport to embed Bechdel within a network of various subjectivities. As we see her exploring her sexuality, both in Fun Home and the Essential Dykes prologue, she is constantly surrounded by books and texts belonging to lesbian culture: in stark contrast with her closeted father, she embraces the counterculture which provides her with a more nurturing form of belonging. Fun Home “explores the legibility of the father figure at its center, allowing the author the intimacy of touching her father through drawing him, while suggesting that the form of comics crucially retains the insolvable gaps of family history” (Chute 175). The graphic memoir does not seek nor provide easy resolution to the aporias of memory; instead, it seeks understanding and the recreation of intimacy and relationality on the author’s own terms. Are You My Mother extends the work already pursued in Fun Home and applies it to the relationship with the mother, with a decidedly more psychoanalytic angle. Bechdel notably draws on the work of British psychoanalyst, Donald Winnicott, to understand the lack of affection she experienced from her mother during childhood, through the lens of such notions as true/false self and transitional objects. In both cases, the graphic memoir is a hybrid space where Bechdel delves back into her past. Simultaneously using lexical and visual means, she reflects on the

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evolution of her own identity through books and images, and comes to understands how her own queer sexuality has opened up new regenerative forms of home and community for her.

The Observer Effect: Belonging, Relationality, and the Graphic Memoir Death permeates Fun Home and Are You My Mother? but the narratives Bechdel spin from it are far from stultifying, precisely because they do not follow the same course as the father. The latter was “a preserver of dead bodies, a preserver of the family home” and sought “to always keep the past whole, to keep it the same,” while his daughter, acting both as “a preserver but also a reanimator of archives, inhabits a form, comics, that demands the crafted arrangement of objects in space in order to propose the difference her very body suggests: repetition as regeneration” (Chute 175). In keeping with a conventional heteronormative vision, queerness was deathly for Bruce Bechdel; in turn, it proves liberating and regenerative for Alison because she works against repression, toward a repositioning that helps her relate rather than separate herself. Disentangling herself from the “fun home” of her childhood, she can turn to the graphic memoir, as the most potent combination of words and images, to initiate the construction of a house of memory that will have her sketch out new modes of belonging. Ultimately, these new forms are no longer predicated on previous norms of subjectification. The implications of the lack of relationality recur throughout both graphic memoirs, to highlight how isolation may not impede creativity, but may cut off emotional vitality. In every instance, one image stages a synthesis of human interactions (or the lack thereof); the textual captions or annotations help expand the possibilities of meaning and meaning-making. For example, in Fun Home, to illustrate the complexity of the relationship between Bechdel as a child and her father, she juxtaposes an image of the two of them in two different panels: in the first one, they are in the same room, reading and writing side-by-side, but in the second panel, they are seen from the outside of the house, each framed in a separate window (FH 86). Another later cross-view of the house, figured as an “artists’ colony,” where residents “ate together, but otherwise were absorbed in [their] separate pursuits” (FH 134), shows each member

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of the family, silhouetted in his or her own room, absorbed in his or her creative pursuit without interacting with one another. The spatial proliferation of houses and homes where relation triumphs over isolation is echoed, in both Fun Home and Are You My Mother?, by a non-linear, open, almost rhizomatic temporality that is inherently queer, refusing the teleology and resolution of heteronormative time. Hence, why the memoir functions as a queer “home” (and not just “house”) of memory—a free space that eludes genre categorization, where the writer can explore and reclaim for herself a fraught concept. This regenerative mode of temporality goes hand in hand with the “observer effect” which Bechdel claims to have forgotten in the Essential Dykes prologue and which is everywhere at work in her graphic memoirs: “You can’t pin things down without changing them, somehow” (ED xvii). Redrawing the past, pinning it down in ink on the page, implies transformation: however, this does not mean accentuating the distortions of memory, especially since Bechdel’s knowledge of the past relies so heavily on careful documentation. Instead, it implies to interrogate what is left behind the erasure, to question not facts but the subjectivities that crisscrossed a life. The queer self is always necessarily relational: the purpose of the work of memory within these graphic memoirs is not to single out the individual, but to put them in relation with everyone else, to contextualize them. Are You My Mother? further evidences the evolving nature of the relations the subject creates and through which it defines itself. The very title interrogates the conventional self-evidence of the primacy of blood ties, and the recurring visual motif of the mirror inscribes within the text the need to consider the self as, at the very least, dual, ceaselessly doubled up. After experiencing a moment of closeness between her mother and her adult self after going to see a play, Bechdel describes the two mirrors that were positioned, facing each other, in the entry vestibule of her childhood house. She remarks, “In one way, what I saw in those mirrors was the self trapped inside the self, forever. But in another way, the self in the mirror was opening out, in an infinite unfurling” (AYMM 244–245). This constant dual tension within the self between repression and liberation, containment and proliferation, parallels the entire project of Bechdel’s memoirs, which provide house and home—structure and refuge—to address this tension, which can find relief, if not resolution, in the hybrid visual-verbal representation of relationality. Furthermore, asking “Are you my mother?” sheds light on the complexity of the mother-daughter relationship: the question appears because

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the mother has not appeared to fulfill her social role as a caring, warm, doting mother. But the question does not entail a rejection of the mother: instead, Bechdel chooses to grapple with both her mother’s and her own subjectivities before pigeonholing her mother as a failed mother (meaning, in the eyes of society, a failed woman). She replaces her mother and herself in the context of complex familial and social bonds, an analysis which she combines with Winnicott’s conception of true and fake selves, to better depict the two women as complex subjectivities who have been denied a part of themselves and who coped using different strategies. The goal is not to condemn or absolve anyone: it is first and foremost a function of empathy. The title thus highlights the need for a mutual recognition of any bond linking two people and echoes the idea of the chosen family within a queer framework. Chosen families are not the result of random chance like blood ties are, and thus do not carry the same degree of injunction to loyalty: they are chosen freely and constructed intentionally. Within the queer semiotic framework, the chosen family is a refuge that guarantees freedom, acceptance, and life. By interrogating her relationship to her mother, Bechdel places the latter in this network, removing the injunction integral to blood ties and replacing it with an intentional form of bonding that may not lead to complete understanding but rather to reciprocity.

Conclusion Fun Home and Are You My Mother? thus both echo Freeman’s reimagining of “queer belongings,” which she takes to name not just “the longing to be, and be connected” but also “the longing to ‘be long,’ to endure in corporeal form over time, beyond procreation” (299). Both graphic memoirs offer a structure that re-members fragmented, disjointed understandings of the self and of temporality, without reverting to the trap of either the illusion of a unified, stable subject experiencing linear time, or a stagnant, closed, circular time in which nothing can ever transform. These “houses of memory” are queer insofar as they help Bechdel—and her readers—escape once and for all the queerness-as-deathbound dynamic, in which Bechdel’s father remained trapped, and they help us imagine what it could be like to “offer oneself beyond one’s own time,” to “have something queer exceed its own time” (299)—to move into the future as a queer self.

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From 2009 through 2012, Fun Home was adapted and work-shopped into a stage musical, with a book by Lisa Kron and music by Jeanine Tesori. It premiered Off-Broadway at The Public Theater in 2013, and on Broadway in 2015, to great critical acclaim. It is the first musical to literally put the spotlight on a lesbian character—it thus pursues the project of making visible what was until then unseen that has motivated Bechdel throughout her work, be it fiction or non-fiction. The musical integrates textual, visual, and aural/musical elements, adding one further step in the possibilities that graphic memoirs allowed for Bechdel. The latter wrote a graphic coda, published in Vulture, when the musical came out, expressing how cathartic it was to see her family’s story played out on stage. Thus, the home built for the self becomes even more enmeshed with juxtaposed modes of representation, temporality, and relationality, as the move to the stage, which feels like a new and natural home for Fun Home, integrates the experienced time of the play and the presence of the gaze of the audience—that supreme observer. Home in Fun Home and Are You My Mother? became a polymorphous and systematically ambivalent site, as the graphic memoir opened up the queered space needed to explore queered constructions of home and identity, away from normative definitions of gender and sexuality—a true “house of memory” working as the nexus between personal and collective identities and memories.

References Beaty, Bart. 2007. Unpopular Culture: Transforming the European Comic Book in the 1990s. Toronto University Press. Bechdel, Alison. 2007. Fun Home. Mariner. ———. 2008. Essential Dykes to Watch Out For. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. ———. 2013. Are You My Mother? Mariner. ———. 2015. Alison Bechdel Draws a Fun Home Coda. Vulture, April 10. https://www.vulture.com/2015/04/alison-­bechdel-­fun-­home.html. Chaney, Michael A., ed. 2011. Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels. The University of Wisconsin Press. Chute, Hillary. 2010. Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. Columbia University Press. Cook, Terry. 1997. What Is Past Is Prologue: A History of Archival Ideas Since 1898, and the Future Paradigm Shift. Archivaria 43: 17–63. Jstor. El Refaie, Elisabeth. 2012. Autobiographical Comics: Life Writing in Pictures. University Press of Mississippi.

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Freeman, Elizabeth. 2007. Queer Belongings: Kinship Theory and Queer Theory. In A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies, ed. George E. Haggerty and Molly McGarry, 295–314. Blackwell Publishing. Galvan, Margaret. 2018. ‘The Lesbian Norman Rockwell’: Alison Bechdel and Queer Grassroots Networks. American Literature 90 (2): 409–438. https:// doi.org/10.1215/00029831-­4564358. Gardner, Jared, and David Herman. 2011. Graphic Narratives and Narrative Theory: Introduction. SubStance 40 (1): 3–13. Jstor. Groensteen, Thierry. 2007. The System of Comics. Trans. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen: University Press of Mississippi. Halperin, David M. 1995. Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography. Oxford University Press. Karpel, Ari. 2012. Alison Bechdel Deconstructs Her Latest Graphic Memoir. Fast Company, July 23. https://www.fastcompany.com/1680937/ alison-­bechdel-­deconstructs-­her-­latest-­graphic-­memoir. Lee, Jamie Ann. 2017. A Queer/ed Archival Methodology: Archival Bodies as Nomadic Subjects. Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 1 (2): 1–27. https://doi.org/10.24242/jclis.v1i2.26. McCloud, Scott. 1993. Understanding Comics. Tundra. Sedgwick, Eve K. 1993. Tendencies. Duke University Press. Van Dyne, Susan R. 2012. ‘The Slippage Between Seeing and Saying’: Getting a Life in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. In Teaching Comics and Graphic Narratives: Essays on Theory, Strategy and Practice, ed. Lan Dong, 105–118. McFarland & Company. Wallot, Jean-Pierre. 1991. Building a Living Memory for the History of Our Present: Perspectives on Archival Appraisal. Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 2: 263–282. Watson, Julia. 2008. Autographic Disclosures and Genealogies of Desire in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. Biography 31 (1): 27–58. Jstor. Wilsey, Sean. 2006. The Things They Buried. New York Times, June 18. https:// www.nytimes.com/2006/06/18/books/review/18wilsey.html.

CHAPTER 7

Framing Herself Then and Now: Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s Self-Writing and the Evolving Practice of Photo Albums Nicoleta Alexoae-Zagni

Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s internationally acclaimed memoir, Among the White Moon Faces (1996), ends on a disturbing note of ambiguity in respect to one of its central themes, the quest for belonging. This was certainly kindled by the personal circumstances of the Malaysia-born author’s childhood and adolescence and amplified by subsequent experiences of displacement, migration, and loss, put into motion by her choice of doing her graduate studies in the United States—“uncertain whether [she] was choosing expatriation, exile, or immigration” (Lim 1996, 194). It would be difficult not to be moved by the harrowing reflections this note brings to the fore: “Everywhere I have lived in the United States— Boston, Brooklyn, Westchester—I felt an absence of place, myself absent in America” (232). They echo the search for a community and lineage expressed in the poem placed as “prologue,” of which I will quote a few relevant lines:

N. Alexoae-Zagni (*) Université Paris 8-Vincennes-Saint Denis, Saint-Denis, France © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 V. Baisnée-Keay et al. (eds.), Text and Image in Women’s Life Writing, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84875-0_7

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Midlife stalled, I look for women. Where are they my mothers and sisters? I listen for their voices in poems. Help me, I have fallen asleep, fallen With sleepers. These women have murdered Themselves, violent, wrenched from home. […] I […] look for women, the small Sufficient swans, showers of stars. (Fifth inside front cover)

These lines place the narrator in a timeless quest for kinship and belonging, both familial and artistic, a quest that comes across as marked by invisibility, stasis, and hopelessness. If anything, the final sections of the memoir do offer the promise of being part of a community that sustains and supports, on the West Coast—“where Asia and America merge” (227)— where other women writers and critics light up “a different space, one that promised rather than denied community” (ibid.). My essay seeks to interrogate the presence, place, and purpose of photographs in this quest for belonging. Julia Hirsch’s basic understanding of family images as “metaphors for the family itself” as they depict the family “as a state whose ties are rooted in property” as well as “a bond of feeling which stems from instinct and passion” (Hirsch 1981, 15) has provided a useful springboard to understanding “family” as more than mere simple social institution. I will thus attempt to explore how visual representations not only capture but signify “family,” from Among the White Moon Faces to Lim’s subsequent personal writing, most precisely her Facebook posts. In Among the White Moon Faces, an album of personal photos precedes, indeed, the linchpin chapter “Outside the Empire,” which marks the second half of the memoir, parts 3 and 4, written at the behest of Florence Howe, Lim’s editor. The author had initially planned to end her story with her departure from Malaysia for the United States, and it was only at Howe’s insistence that she agreed to engage with her American life. This scriptural opening of a door always kept close proved surprisingly beneficial for her personal and literary identity, allowing her to “come to grips” with her life in the United States, to achieve peace with [her] life, [her]self as an American (Newton 2002, 222). The charting of this other territory of the self is fraught with anxiety, as if to acknowledge that the effort of imagining the inner lives of people, including her own, at specific moments in time, will always prove faulty and provisional, punctured by blind spots.

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My analyses will look at the photo album as part of this overarching gesture of exploring one’s sense of belonging and community, originating in the author’s desire to reconstruct a sense of missing or misunderstood roots and charts. Lim’s recent self-writing, on the other hand, bespeaks the changing cultural practices brought about by social media and digital platforms and is played out mostly on Facebook. It displays an ongoing and transitional representation of the self—due also to the episodic-like quality of the posts. In respect to this, I will examine how self-narration has moved from being a solitary act to becoming a more social and creative process when aimed at her readers (“dear FB friends”) or in dialogue with them. In this process of articulation of oneself in alternative spaces and forms, communication takes precedence over memorialization, as photos do not only illustrate words, but replace and rival them. They reinforce the importance of living, thinking, saving, and sharing the stories and the moment. They signify that in those moments of posting and sharing, the people who appear on them produce “[themselves] as a family”—to use Annette Kuhn’s phrasing from Family Secrets (Kuhn 1995, 22).

The Father in the Text In Among the White Moon Faces, the photo album is clearly meant to offer a certain “evidential force”—to use Roland Barthes’s term (Barthes 1981a, 89)—as well as shed, retrospectively, a new light on the ekphrases predominating in the first two parts,1 in addition to providing glimpses into the future. These statements will most certainly be better understood if we look at the way in which the first half of the narrative has chased the figure of the father, Baba, the one who kept the family together once financial disaster hit and Shirley’s mother, Emak, fled to Singapore. The father-­ daughter relationship is depicted as troubled and fraught with difficulties, yet to write of herself and for herself, the narrator acknowledges the need to return to the region where she was born and raised, confront the past, her memories of it and of those who are part of it: “Before I could learn to love America, I had to learn to love the land of unconditional choice. The searing light of necessity includes my mother and father […]” (Lim 1  For the sake of simplicity and common discourse, I will use James A. W. Heffernan’s basic acceptation of ekphrasis as “the verbal representation of visual representation” (Heffernan 2006, 40).

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1996, 10). In textually resuscitating actions and events, words and sensations, the retrospective narration subverts all expectations which would make the absence of the mother a trauma and feeds itself on the “reality” restored by other presences and existences, especially that of the paternal figure. The narrator proceeds by digging into the past and connecting pieces which seem incompatible or contradictory, to stitch them into a canvas representing the father’s life—and him and his children—as a family. The father’s importance is symbolized through a crossfade that superimposes the voluntary evacuation of Emak—“She is out of our lives […] Mother became a huge silence” (52)—with the survival of the family unit through her father’s efforts to keep his children and provide them with a home of their own: “The move to our own house was more immediate to me than the few reminders of Mother two hundred miles away in Singapore […] With our own space, we became a family again” (53). The textualization of a few moments of presence, the few surviving clichés of the father as a young man—which are not included in the memoir—is part of this quest: the gaze is wrapped around them and as the writing cannot come from a trustworthy relationship to memory, the textual mediation tries to account for the gap between Baba and the other members of his family. By nature of their literal absence in the book, these photographs occupy a position intriguingly similar to Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida’s Winter Garden image of the French theorist’s mother as a young girl. Writing these photographs amounts to “undoing their objectification”—in Marianne Hirsch’s words—to take them out “of the realm of stasis, immobility, mortification […] into fluidity, movement and thus, finally, life” (Hirsch 2002, 3–4). Through one such photograph that seems to “yield [his] essence” (to paraphrase again Hirsch’s words), the father comes across as a very graceful young man, smooth-skinned, tanned, the well-drawn features and the carefree smile, already “non-Chinese” in the pose he takes: The convention of individual portraits, a seriously considered expenditure when it wasn’t an extravagance, taken perhaps only once in a lifetime, was that of the gaze across the centuries. One was looking at masses of one’s great-grandchildren and expecting their worship. It was as human deities that Chinese parents looked into the camera, lofty, and as always under the eye of eternity, with a tragic cast. (Lim 1996, 20)

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If family photography is to be understood within the framework of the “aesthetic and social conventions of the people who take them, pose for them, and hold on to them” (Hirsch 1981, 12), in the Chinese tradition, one always had to convey a very serious, austere self-image, aiming to impress posterity and remind it of the need to continue the rites dedicated to ancestors. This can prove useful in understanding how Lim’s father seems to defy this “Chinese divinization.” The narrator describes him as copying the pose of the favorite Hollywood stars he admires, inviting admiration like the playboys of his non-Chinese world. In his daughters’ words, he comes across as restless among his own kin, chasing freedom from restrictive familial and societal rules, playing the loafer and charmer, always at the center, always smiling a devastating smile. The detailed textualization of a missing photograph, by means of an ekphrasis, feeds the narrative with this immediate projection of the distant reality of the father and complicates the meaning of his physical presence. The enunciating “I” is embarked on a quest that has become a microscopic vision. Thus, the extreme precision of the scrutinizer’s lens brings to light even the smallest details of clothing: he wears wide linen trousers and sports a wool cardigan with sleeves nonchalantly placed on his shoulders and loosely tied around his neck; on another photo, he is described as showing off a Panama hat and playing a mandolin (Lim 1996, 20). Nevertheless, in the shadow of the image, questions keep scaffolding without an echo of an answer, revealing all along the affectionate gaze of the viewer: “Where did my handsome father get his Western ways?” (ibid.). Embedded in the self-narration, this photograph that the narrator keeps from her readers, opens the way to analepses and functions as adjuvant of the reflexive mechanism; the attentive, tender gaze of the daughter mediates the understanding and imparts her trust in the paternal figure: the description of the photo establishes and reinforces an image of the father as fundamentally sociable, with a shark’s appetite for life, food, games, and pleasure. The punctum, that “accident which pricks” the reader, “poignant” and “bruis[ing]” him/her, to use Roland Barthes’s words (Barthes 1981a, 27), marking the “unique and very personal response” (Hirsch 2002, 4) to photographic details, reinforces not only the emotional connection between the daughter, reader of the photo, and the photographed (Hirsch 2002, 10), but allows her to reinvent and signify anew her own place within the family. Expanding the scope of the lens, in a manner not much dissimilar to Barthes’s studium—the “application,” “commitment” to what is under one’s gaze (Barthes 1981a,

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26)—the narrative reading of the photograph uncovers that it was indeed the father who chose the name “Shirley” (after the child actress Shirley Temple), a highly unusual first name in a traditional Chinese family. By placing her considerations under the sign of the retrospective wish—“I’d like to think”—the first instance enunciator imagines that this prenatal westernization is not pure “colonial imitation,” but Baba’s dream of making her transgress the identity limitations and fixations predestined by her birth, as well as escape the denial of individual liberties by ancestral traditions: It remains a mystery to me what strange racial yearnings moved Baba to name me after a blond child. I’d like to think he was not tied to the fixities of race and class, that this presumption was less colonized mimicry than bold experiment (…) Although, unarguably, he has written in his neat English script my Chinese name on my birth certificate, he never called me anything but Shirley, a Hollywood name for a daughter for whom he wished, despite everything his heritage dictated, a life freer than his own. (Lim 1996, 3)

The father stands conspicuously apart—“[w]hen I study the few photographs I have of him as a young man, it becomes clear how differently he saw himself from his older Chinese-educated brothers” (19) and so does she—the narrator firmly remembers that all her cousins were called by their Chinese ming, Ah Lan, Ah Mui, Ah Pei, while she remained Shirley for everyone—“Ah Shirley, my aunts called me” (2). The father-daughter relationship is time and again depicted as a very complicated one, marked even by moments of physical abuse, yet the journey of memory through time, when gazing upon a photograph, takes the narrator even further into the mysteries of mind and body, of the self and of others. This journey allows for a reconfiguration of perspectives and as a result, for previously undetectable or unacknowledged anchorages and connections to become visible and real, more so than those exposed in the subsequently included family album. Significantly—and this reminds us again of Roland Barthes’s decision not to include the famous cliché of the “winter-garden photo” in Camera Lucida—this image of the father as a young careless man is not reproduced in this album, making its narrative recovery even more significant in the itinerary of self-mapping.

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Referentiality as Misleading Subsequent to these queries, the visual transition provided by the author’s family album seems to be there to illustrate, through a series of individual and collective photographs, these two lives on two different continents that the narrator has found difficult to “place side by side” (227). This “imaginary of images”—to use another term by Roland Barthes (Barthes 1975, 5)—appears more like a reinforcement of the autobiographical pact, adds a strong “evidential force” (Barthes 1981a, 89) to it, and seems more likely to authenticate (by gesturing to her readers) the narrator’s own bodily self and times. She appears initially as a child, alone or in family portraits, subsequently as an adolescent and young woman, surrounded by schoolmates or friends. The iconic chronology—the photos are, with a few exceptions only, arranged chronologically—takes precedence over the narrative, precedes and anticipates, by means of a few images, an American family and professional life. One of the last photographs symbolically unites the different territories of the self, the intimate as well as the geographical and cultural dimensions in that it depicts the writer, her son, and her husband in front of her mother’s burial place. These biographical photographs are accompanied by laconic (possibly allographic) comments, written in the third person: “Shirley in Malacca, 1958”; “Shirley and friends, Malacca Beach, 1959”; “Shirley in her study in Katonah New York, 1988”; “Shirley with Gershom in Bangkok, 1995”; “Shirley with her husband Charles and son Gershom in front of her mother’s grave in Singapore, 1985.” In a narrative in which research into the past is never fully rewarding, these images seem to fulfill a function of “biographical witness par excellence,” of amplifier of one’s own existence (Mora 2004, 103). The private and public dimensions of the subject who looks for herself through the scriptural act, who catches fleeting images and real sensations, are asserted, through photographs, with a certain form of silvery clarity and realism. The voice that says “I” in the text is identified, in a tacit reading contract, with the photographic subject. It is this enunciating voice which seems to feel the need to identify and authenticate itself, to show itself, by the insertion of the photographs which illustrate a past and prefigure a future. Nevertheless, ironically, what comes across most poignantly is the incongruity between the photos that can be presented and are arranged coherently—the photo album—and the revelation, through writing, that memory is in fact faulty and blurred.

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The dialogue that is established in the narrative frame between text and images appears, indeed, as most ambivalent and problematic. The clichés do disturb the act and the pact of reading by their sudden entrance, breaching the textualized discourse. However, if there is destabilization and defamiliarization, I believe the first one affected by it is the enunciating instance. The narration seems to proceed in a paradoxical way: it leans onto the image so as better to undermine it. This truth is revealed to the attentive reader, the one that Roland Barthes theorized as the “symbolic reader” (Barthes 1981b, 100), who will know how to practice a sufficiently intelligent reading and will be able to settle into a “reversible” reading time (ibid.), recompose his/her memories, turn back pages in order to make the connections that will provide appropriate reading keys and clues. Thus, leafing through backwards, one comes across a reference made to family photographs (in the second chapter of the second part) that cannot but echo a visual representation in the later-inserted album; this remark undermines the “portrait chronicle” of the family—to use Susan Sontag’s words (Sontag 2005, 5)—what she calls the “portable kit of images that bears witness to its connectedness” (ibid.). If photos were meant not simply to reflect, but constitute family life and mark an individual’s notion of belonging, this one here is (retrospectively) placed under the shadow of the problematic, even of the doubtful, as the narrator asserts: “Those studio portraits for which we sat every Chinese New Year posed us together as a family—permanent, transfixed, the moment held in mercury and paint innocently displayed in a way that I do not remember us at all” (Lim 1996, 34 emphasis mine). The ekphrasis beckons not only a complex and problematic relation between text and image, but also opens the image beyond its surface, beyond its visibility, as the silver cliché is revealed as being not necessarily the most tangible and trustful means of shedding light on the past. Consequently, if we place ourselves in a reading frame that expects images to complete the text, we are far from grasping the functioning of this other enunciative level which is the iconic one. The few redundancies between the textual and the visual seem to indicate, on the one hand, the difficulty of grasping the meaning of family relationships, as well as a certain self-­ truth. On the other hand, this refusal of subordinating the text to the image encourages a consideration of the interdependence between the visual and the verbal—what Hertha S. Wong has expressed as “read creatively and look mindfully” (Wong 2018, 10)—and acknowledges that images do not make sense in and by themselves. This undertaking is a

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mise-en-abyme of the scriptural act at the macro level of the memoir: the self must be apprehended both visually and textually, and connections and configurations must be made by means of hesitation, worries, dissociations. The legends below the images testify to this, the use of the third person and the allegedly objective and plain style creating distance with the photos, allowing them to expand, gain in elasticity and relief when and if invested by discourse and imagination. In the same vein, the inability to assign an accurate indicial value to some of these clichés, the impossibility of precise recollection resulting in a series of lapses in the comments— “Shirley Lim, circa 1950,” “Family portrait, circa 1951”—bespeaks the difficulty of recovering and connecting. In this perspective, the visual “pause” between the past and the present of the narrator’s personal history has a double function of both recall and anticipation. Significantly, showing (herself) does not necessarily allow her to tell (herself): the image accompanies the work of memory, but it does so in a tenser mode. It is only in this mode that the enunciator could insert certain images in order to seek a continuation, and some other ones to create anticipation. The photographs actually reflect the polysemy to which her questions lead and reinforce the idea that the self cannot be defined in a single or univocal way. The images and the text reflect each other (in every sense of the word) and open up the reading to other meanings, the hermeneutic activity prompted in the reader mirroring the one the narrator herself has to undertake. Indeed, she reveals herself in an interesting situation: she is able to stage a concrete visual contact with images (and representations) of herself and of certain periods of her life. The photographs tell “truths” and serve as proof; however, this visual mediation of oneself remains insufficient. Photos alone cannot tell the realities of the self and, as I see it, their referentiality is put to the test of writing.

The Self Meets the Social “In California, I am beginning to write stories about America, as well as about Malaysia. Listening, and telling my own stories, I am moving home” (Lim 1996, 232) was the concluding sentence in Among the White Moon Faces, the inchoative aspect of the verb signifying that the sense of existential uprootedness and transience that followed Lim into adulthood might calm down and morph into something else on these other Pacific shores.

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Unlike other Asian American authors—most notably the case of Maxine Hong Kingston, who published a verse memoir in her mid-sixties, I Love a Broad Margin to My Life, that brings to conclusion many personal and artistic undertakings—Among the White Moon Faces is so far Lim’s only auto referential narrative and it is thus quite impossible to learn, in its wake, if the writer has finally found, in California, the fertile ground onto which the multiple filaments of personal history and research could harmoniously grow and thrive. This is quite impossible but not totally so, in these times when identity is being performed and written in other environments, especially online and digital ones. In her study on “personal connections in the digital age,” Nancy K. Baym has observed that while the internet enhances the “multiplicity of traces of oneself,” there is nothing new about it and refers back to Erwin Goffman’s 1959 analysis of the self as playing a variety of roles in everyday life, ungraspable as a “single unified entity” (Baym 2010, 106). In line with the contemporary challenge of the self as singular, autonomous, unchanging, and self-sufficient and its conceptualizations as fluid, active, flexible, and changeable throughout interactions and relations, Sherry Turkle has refined this multiplicity of situatedness through her metaphor of “windows”: “The self is no longer simply playing different roles in different settings at different times. The life practice of windows is that of a decentered self that exists in many worlds, that plays many roles at the same time” (Turkle 1996, 14). Seen in this light, Shirley Lim’s Facebook world and life (in existence since 2012), a window in itself, gestures to, as well as triggers, a myriad of other windows. And while the Facebook self-presentation may appear as “categorically different from what is understood as traditional life writing, be it published autobiography, memoir, or confession” (Smith and Watson 2017), the common denominator remains a “constructed and situated” “I” of reference (ibid.), different from its embodied persona: “Both offline and online, the autobiographical subject can be approached as an ensemble or assemblage of subject positions through which self-understanding and self-positioning are negotiated” (ibid.). Online lives and spaces have thus to be conceived as intimately related and interwoven with the offline ones. New media and new technologies have certainly offered new ways of self-expression, but they have not changed the fundamental motivation of auto referential writing, that is making sense of life experiences and connecting with our own estranged and distant selves as well as with those of others. These basic insights prove valuable when trying to understand what it means, in Shirley Lim’s case,

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to represent her life and self through these social, networked, multimedia ways. The California-based academic and writer makes different uses of different “affordances”—“packages of potentials and constraints” (Baym 2010, 17)—to exist and communicate on Facebook. A full user of Web 2.0 technologies that facilitate dynamic interaction and engagement among individuals and/or communities, Lim has made her Facebook page both a personal and public space. Her photographs both contribute and testify to this reality and they clearly suit Lim, the user’s, need for continuous communication and bonding. Taking and posting photographs seem no longer primarily an act of memory intended to safeguard a certain pictorial heritage, but come across more like a tool for her self-­ presentation and communication (“Pixes to follow once I find a wifi location to get the IPad to talk to the Airbook” reads such a post from February 17, 2014). In this networked reality, the distinction between diary and correspondence, and also between public and private is eliminated, and photos seem to exacerbate self-disclosure—I do write “seem” as Lim is very careful of what she posts, in the same manner in which she carefully chooses whom she allows as “FB friend.” These are indeed glimpses of a self always on the move, always in another context and always with different people (a somewhat constant presence being her husband, Chuck, especially of late), but maybe not that revealing of the intimate or the personal self—“S. GL. Lim Anne Teoh True confessions are not FB material” (July 10, 2018). Lim’s posts, almost always accompanied by images, actually prolong many of the subjects and questions limned in Among the White Moon Faces, testifying that online lives gain in being read in relation to the offline world and life. Food is one such topic, as her Facebook profile glows with her joyously-colored cooking, mixing Eastern and Western culinary traditions—and constant spells of improvisation—and testifies to the physical and mental balance cooking and food bring to one who has always had a life-or-death relationship to them. Among the White Moon Faces chronicled indeed the narrator’s lack of sustenance, going from sheer lack of food when living under financial stress with her father (“hunger was continuous in our lives” (Lim 1996, 44), to the unstomachability of American food while studying and living on the East Coast (“I was always hungry, a hunger that rebelled against American food”) (148). It is thus only normal that food and cooking are used as comfort and anchorage while images and posts of them fulfill one of the main functions of

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autobiographical memory as defined by American psychologist Susan Bluck, that of reinforcing social bonds by sharing personal memories (quoted in van Dijck 2007). If, in autobiographical memory, “the self meets the social as personal memories are often articulated by communicating them to others” (ibid.), Lim’s posting and sharing of images derive their significance from what they convey in respect to the writer’s positioning of herself in her living environments and to her reshaping her sense of self, family, and community. Thus, I believe her food and cooking posts are not necessarily interesting by virtue of their content (dishes and culinary experiences), but by what they reveal as to community—and family-­making (Fig. 7.1). Unlike other instances of online emotionally charged spaces, Lim’s posts, where text and image come together as inseparable, are not meant for “faceless” friends, to paraphrase Lauren Berlant’s blog entry on different forms of intimacy, especially the “reality” of the “mediated” ones, “stranger and distance-shaped” (Berlant 2007). Lim befriends “only folks whom [she] ha[s] actually met and enjoyed a relationship with (albeit brief, as at a conference!)” (August 3, 2018), the personal, real-life connection conditioning thus the membership to the virtual curated community. Seen in this light, the style and structure of Lim’s Facebook chronicle

Fig. 7.1  Shirley Lim. 2018. Facebook post July 28, 2018. (Courtesy: S. Lim)

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of “moments of being” becomes a space to express and process the contours of her own identity, in a dynamic and interactive way. Consequently, the writer’s sharing of images of meals with friends, neighbors, and family, her Facebook photo album, becomes her family album as it fulfills the same main functions of the photographs of family meals as identified by Julia Hirsch, those of alluding to community and ritual (Hirsch 1981, 59). Taking and posting pictures are thus part of a process of creation, confirmation, and communication of bonds which also brings to the fore how “lived experience” is entwined, in our contemporary culture, with “mediated experience”—what media sociologist John B. Thompson theorized as the “hermeneutic nature” of the relationship between individual agency and media reception, which covers not only the different media tools and products individuals use in their private sphere (Thompson 1995, 74–75), but also “the active choices of individuals to incorporate parts of culture into their lives” (van Dijck 2007). Thus, to show yet another dimension of Shirley Lim’s food posts, they often provide a forum for political expression, her comments and images of food interlocked with commentaries on current affairs. This is obvious in the two examples below, where both domestic and foreign critical situations “bear down on the project of the self,” to use John B.  Thompson’s formulation (Thompson 1995, 234), and find deep personal reverberations (the “forever hunger” expressed in the August 13, 2018 below post) (Fig. 7.2): As visual semiotician Daniel Chandler has argued, digital media have been leading to the exposure of “what might formerly have been private writing (such as in a personal diary)” to “the eyes of the world” (Chandler 1998). Following his observations that “the personal function of ‘discovering’ (or at least clarifying) one’s thoughts, feelings and identity is fused with the public function of publishing these to a larger audience than traditional media have ever offered” (ibid.), we can add that in this writer’s case, posts not only convey thoughts or emotions, but also trigger “affects.”2 Illustrating the “rapidly changing visual and textual cultures of autobiography” (Whitlock and Poletti 2008), Lim’s digital self-writing brings together text, image, and miscellany, non-verbal items like emojis

2  I use and understand the term “affect” in line with Teresa Brennan’s canonic discussion of “transmission of affect, whether it is grief, anxiety, or anger,” which she defines as “the emotions or affects of one person, and the enhancing or depressing energies these affects entail [and] can enter into another” (Brennan 2004, 1–2).

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Fig. 7.2  Shirley Lim. 2018. Facebook post August 13, 2018. (Courtesy: S. Lim)

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or hashtags imbedded into the page, at times allowing even for synchronous communication. Indeed, taking fully advantage of Facebook’s affordances as an interface, Lim not only does reach out to her readers, but also brings them into her (cyber)world, in some cases in a most conspicuously personal way, as in December 2017 during the California wildfires when she solicited her “dear dear FB friends” for advice on a possible course of action. The digital media interface not only shapes the writer’s self-­ representation and life narrative, but equally calls upon her readers to process and produce meaning at the intersection of multimodal frameworks, meanings unavailable in either words or images alone. The photo capturing an apocalyptic-like sky projects a jolt of dramatic urgency over the words, the urgency somewhat appeased by the enactment of unfleeting concern and solidarity played out in the comments, discussion threads, and emoji. Written by friends and family members from across the world, they convey not only anxiety and concern, but mostly empathy, sympathy as well as good wishes for “dear Shirley.” This may not be so different from other similar occurrences on social media, yet I believe that in Lim’s case, this manages to convey the myriad ways in which the Malacca-born writer, so much in need of belonging and community, has found—and preserved—them, not only in California, but everywhere in the world. Notwithstanding legitimate doubts as to the authenticity of connections or engagement sustained through new media, I would argue that similar to what is conveyed in traditional self-writing, Lim’s online life appears as “fundamentally relational” and “refracted through engagement” (Smith and Watson 2017) with the lives of significant others. Unlike the former case however, it takes its contours in interactivity, co-construction—“Am SO happy to have the comments (…) (August 3, 2018)—in embeddedness and tagging, in synchronous and asynchronous transmission and exchange. Photographs are here to create, to negotiate and to provide layers to both personal and collective memory. Shirley is photographed with “friends”—family, writers, scholars, neighbors, former graduate students, or current ones—at her place and all around the world, making Facebook a place of shared memory and a context for celebrating connections and signifying remembering, where the perception of “family” itself seems to have changed.

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Conclusion This essay has traced the telling of personal and cultural stories as expanding from the memoir, a rather traditional form of self-narration, to encompass more innovative multimedial online experiments in self-expression (such as Facebook posts and conversations). The analyses have evidenced the different manners in which, in Shirley Lim’s case, personal photos are used to document and to mediate memories, to interact and to bond, inevitably shoring up the self as relational. Whether textualized by means of ekphrases or juxtaposed to the narrative, uploaded and shared on social media, they always engage in different forms of dialogue (with the text, with oneself or with the readers in general), serving as instruments of self-­ exploration as well as vehicles of connection. I would like to place my conclusion under the aegis of Philippe Lejeune’s remarks that “it is not only […] the written expression of the self […] that changes with social structures and communication tools but also the way in which we manage and think about our identity (Lejeune 2014). For this Asian American writer, who has always defined herself as diasporic and transnational, the act of writing herself has first given birth to a narrative anchored in geographies of immigration; the “home” it delineated— [l]istening, and telling my own stories, I am moving home” (232)— thwarted all notions of monolithic cultures and offered a concrete possibility of embracing one’s multiplicity. On Facebook, with the social “space” becoming a “place,” in these media-facilitated imagined and real communities, the harrowing question of belonging to a community that marked Lim’s early writing is steered toward more balanced and serene manifestations and embodiments. I believe that it is here that it reaches viable accommodations and expressions of self that take their contours and draw their strengths from interaction and dialogue. This posting networked and connected self, claiming virtual space for herself and her “friends,” shaping and reshaping itself constantly, thriving in hybrid linguistic and cultural practices and spaces, has convinced this reader (me) at least that the narrator in Among the White Moon Faces has definitely “moved home”—to echo again the last words in the memoir. It is (still) a home in writing, but one transcending the boundaries of any nation-state and complicating the notion of proximity and family by collapsing the frontiers between temporal and geographical locations. And this feels only fitting for an author who has always fought labels and categories.

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References Barthes, Roland. 1975. Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes. Paris: Éd. du Seuil. ———. 1981a. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang. ———. 1981b. Le Grain de la voix. Entretiens 1962–1980. Paris: Éd. du Seuil. Baym, Nancy K. 2010. Personal Connections in the Digital Age. Cambridge: Polity. Berlant, Lauren. 2007, December 25. Faceless book. Supervalent Thought. WordPress.com. Web. 15 August 2019. https://supervalentthought. com/2007/12/25/faceless-­book/. Brennan, Teresa. 2004. The Transmisson of Affect. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Chandler, Daniel. 1998. Personal Home Pages and the Construction of Identities on the Web. Web. 24 February 2020. http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/ short/webident.html. Heffernan, James A.W. 2006. Cultivating Picturacy. Visual Art and Verbal Interventions. Waco Texas: Baylor University Press. Hirsch, Julia. 1981. Family Photographs: Content, Meaning, and Effect. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hirsch, Marianne. 2002. Family Frames. Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (1997). Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press. Kuhn, Annette. 1995. Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination. London and New York: Verso. Lejeune, Philippe. 2014. Autobiography and New Communication Tools. Trans. Katherine Durnin. In Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online, ed. Anna Poletti and Julie Rak. [Kindle Version]. Retrieved from Amazon.com. Lim, Shirley Geok-lin. 1996. Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian-American Memoir of Homelands. New York: The Feminist Press. Mora, Gilles. 2004. Manifeste photobiographique. In Traces photographiques, traces autobiographiques, ed. Danièle Méaux and Jean-Bernard Vray, 103–106. Saint-Etienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Etienne. Newton, Pauline T. 2002. Cultural Roots vs. Cultural Rot: An Interview with Shirley Geok-lin Lim. In Transcultural Women of Late Twentieth-Century American Literature: First-Generation Immigrants from Islands and Peninsulas, 219–225. University of Tulsa. [doctoral dissertation, electronic version]. ProQuest (UMI number: 3040687). 12 May 2006. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. 2017. Life Writing in the Long Run: A Smith & Watson Autobiography Studies Reader. [E-reader Version]. https://doi. org/10.3998/mpub.9739969. Sontag, Susan. 2005. On Photography (1973). New  York: RosettaBooks. [Electronic Edition]. Retrieved from rosettabooks.com. Thompson, John B. 1995. The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Media. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

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Turkle, Sherry. 1996. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson. Van Dijck, José. 2007. Mediated Memories in the Digital Age. [Kindle Version]. Retrieved from Amazon.com. Whitlock, Gillian, and Anna Poletti. 2008. Self-Regarding Art. Biography 31 (1): v–xxiii. Wong, Hertha Sweet. 2018. Picturing Identity. Contemporary American Autobiography in Image and Text. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.

CHAPTER 8

Nostalgic Albums or Alternative Lieux de mémoire? The Interplay Between Stories, Photographs, and Recipes in Ethnic Culinary Memoirs Corinne Bigot

The very origin of the word “recipe”—recipere, the imperative of receive— involves sharing, something given and received. Nowadays private cooks and chefs like to share more than food; they like to share personal experiences and the story behind the dish. Although cookbooks have increasingly included personal experience and stories, women have been telling their life stories “through the cookbooks they wrote” for a very long time, as demonstrated by Janet Theophano in her seminal work (2002). Janet Theophano (2002) and Sherrie Inness (2001, 2006), have shown that women from ethnic minorities have used the culinary to write about their lives for at least six decades in the United States. Since the 1950s, women from the Chinese-American and, then, the African-American communities

C. Bigot (*) Université Toulouse-Jean Jaurès, Toulouse, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 V. Baisnée-Keay et al. (eds.), Text and Image in Women’s Life Writing, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84875-0_8

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have used culinary literature to “rescript” their lives, “rejecting the script that whites had assigned to them” (Inness 2006, 59). Thus, African-­ American women have used cookbooks to pass on black history and culture, and to “highlight women’s daily lives, which are not included in traditional history books” (ibid., 114). The same holds true of ethnic and diasporic culinary autobiographies that have become increasingly popular (Smith and Watson 2010, 248). Traci Marie Kelly, who defines the culinary autobiography as “a complex pastiche of recipes, personal anecdotes, family history, public history, photographs, even family trees” (2001, 252), argues that “the autobiographical self that is represented in the culinary autobiography claims for herself a sense of place, heritage, and history that may not be otherwise articulated” (ibid., 266). Kelly’s definition of culinary autobiographies draws attention to the role played by “non-­ recipe elements.” Although Kelly analyzes Norma Jean and Carole Darden’s Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine, an iconic text in African-­ American culinary literature, she does not mention the many photographs the book includes. Generally speaking, little critical attention has been paid to the interplay between recipes, stories, photographs, and illustrations in culinary memoirs. Yet, most culinary memoirs include photographs, and their design—from drawings to specific typefaces—is often quite complex. In this essay, I analyze the role played by the rich text-­ image relationship in Norma Jean and Carole Darden’s Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine. Recipes and Reminiscences of a Family (1978) and in Laura Schenone’s The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken (2007), which reflects a major concern of third-generation immigrants—the loss of roots. I do not intend to downplay the role Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine has played in African-American culture, being well-aware that it was published in the wake of the Civil Rights and Black Arts movements; here, however, I am interested in how the text-image interface creates a space of cultural memory which works to preserve or restore the history of a family, and of a community, and suggests the idea of a shared history with the readers. The main question I address as I analyze the interplay between photographs, illustrated narrative and recipes is whether the authors create nostalgic collages that fix stories, gestures, and photos, or whether they create alternative “lieux de mémoire” (Nora 1989, 12) as they attempt to preserve and pass on the memories of ordinary women’s skills and knowledge. French historian Pierre Nora explains: “lieux de mémoire originate with the sense that there is no spontaneous memory, that we must

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deliberately create archives, […] because such activities no longer occur naturally” (Nora 1989, 12). He goes on to insist that without “commemorative vigilance” history would be swept away (ibid.).

Composing Family Myths Kelly argues that as a form the culinary autobiography simultaneously resists and evokes Estelle Jelinek’s assertion that women’s life stories appear fragmented, as “the combination of [stories and recipes] provides a strong framework for organized recollection” (Kelly 2001, 253). In both Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine and The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken, the text-image dialogue is unproblematic, based on “parallel relationality” (Smith and Watson 2002, 21–22): images (photographs and design) complement the main narrative, stories, and recipes. The unproblematic text-image interplay in Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine creates a feeling of nostalgia, which evokes the sisters’ attempt to collect and preserve traces of their family’s past. A book’s dustcover or dust jacket is, in Gérard Genette’s definition, “a threshold” (1997, 1). The peritext is “a zone not only of transition but also of transaction: a privileged place of pragmatics and a strategy, of an influence on the public, an influence that […] is at the service of a better reception for the text and a more pertinent reading of it” (3). In the 1994 and 2001 editions, a handwritten-style font is used for the book’s title, which stresses the memorial task undertaken. Inside the book, the layout of a page—with a photograph next to a recipe or a story, within a framed square—clearly shows that the three elements cannot be separated, demonstrating the intent to create a text-image dialogue that emphasizes collaboration. The book’s design is striking in its imitation of a scrapbook—a thin line creates a square frame on each page, enclosing a faded floral pattern. In the 1994 and 2001 editions, a handwritten-­style font is also used for the chapter titles and the names of the recipes. While Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine is a collage that represents the result of the Dardens’ quest, Laura Schenone’s memoir reads as a quest. The opening chapters of The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken, A Search for Food and Family manifest a great sense of loss and disconnection as Schenone describes her relationship to her family’s past as characterized by absence, silence, and loss. The text-image dialogue is meant to connect the threads and strands of her family’s history. As her parents had severed all ties with their past and their families, Laura Schenone decided she needed a recipe that would reconnect her to her family’s heritage The

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quest starts with an old kitchen utensil, a broken ravioli press that used to hang in her parents’ kitchen (2007a, 16) and which was said to have been brought from Liguria by her great-grandmother, Adalgiza Schenone. Considering that the ravioli dish both symbolized her family’s legacy and the Schenone’s ancestral region, Laura felt that recovering the recipe would help her recompose her identity, as an Italian-American. The illustration on the dust jacket for the hardbound edition,1 which can be best described as an “imagetext” (Hirsch 1997, 271), displays an intimate connection between dish and family. A series of yellow ravioli has been drawn against a red background and a small black-and-white studio photograph of a family fills one of the ravioli squares. One of the functions of the collaborative text-image dialogue in both culinary memoirs is to create family myths and narratives. Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine opens with a family tree starting from the authors’ grandparents. The sisters do not reveal much about their own lives, but present themselves as heirs to their ancestors’ rich heritage. Twenty out of twenty-­ four chapters bear the name of a relative, and each chapter concludes with eight to ten recipes and includes old family photographs which, like the recipes, have been collected by the authors, as they point out. The first chapter, which is devoted to their paternal grandfather, is entitled “Papa Darden’s Grace,” fixing him in his role as patriarch. The chapter devoted to his wife, “Dinah Scarborough Darden,” is illustrated by a photograph of a woman and three young men whose caption reads “Mama Darden with oldest sons J.B., Charlie, and John” (Darden 2001, 21). The Simpson section is preceded by a photograph of the house their grandfather “built for his family” (169), illustrating the assertion that “he built most of the homes in which his family lived” (172). The word “homes” rather than “houses” indicates that, like Charles Darden, William Simpson was a family man. The eighty-odd embedded family photographs—formal studio portraits and informal snapshots—create a sense of cohesion, uniting the Dardens and the Simpsons. The collected photographs compose the sisters’ own family album, creating and perpetuating a myth of family, in the same way family albums do, as demonstrated by Marianne Hirsch (1997). Hirsch argues that a family photograph album displays “the cohesion of family and is an instrument of its togetherness” (Hirsch 1997, 7). It thus erases the rupture of exile, of death and loss, of conflict and dislocation 1  The dust jacket can be seen on the publisher’s website: https://wwnorton.com/books/ The-Lost-Ravioli-Recipes-of-Hoboken.

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(ibid., 192). In Spoonbread, the collected photographs and recipes have precisely this role as they are presented as salvageable traces of the lives of the authors’ relatives. Interestingly, despite the imposing 300 pages of photographs, memories, and recipes, there are also gaps and silences in the text-image dialogue. Although the Darden sisters encourage African Americans to restore their family histories, which have been destroyed by slavery (xiii), they themselves failed to retrieve large parts of their own ancestors’ history. The family tree starts with the grandparents, illustrating the fact that nothing is known of the previous generation except for the fact that Charles Darden had been born in slavery and that his wife’s parents were “a freeborn couple” (4). Charles Darden’s early years remain a mystery and the sisters insist that he never spoke about his life as a slave (5). The family knew little about their maternal grandmother, Corine Simpson’s early life (181) and their Simpson grandfather did not know the truth about his origins. A stranger supposedly left William at the door of a wealthy white family, the Percivals, who took him into their home “to be raised as a houseboy” (171). The rumors in town—he was said to be Percival’s son—were neither dispelled nor confirmed. However, the authors did not investigate any further, and do not comment on the fact that the photographs show him to be rather light-skinned. The sisters never attempt to analyze or interrogate the photographs they include. Such reticence confirms that their aim is to buttress the family myth rather than question it and, as I will show, create a narrative of resilience. Thanks to a cousin of her father’s, Adalgiza’s granddaughter, Laura Schenone had access to several photographs of Adalgiza and Salvatore Schenone. Like the Dardens’ family album, but on a much smaller scale, Schenone’s selection of photographs—a wedding picture, presumably taken in Recoo (25), a formal studio photograph of Adalgiza and Salvatore with their children (24), an informal snapshot showing the couple in their old age (229), and a final snapshot of Adalgiza and her daughter Tessie (230)—creates a narrative of her great-grandparents’ lives. Most interesting is the effect of a haunting presence suggested by the text-image interface in The Lost Ravioli Recipes. For each chapter, the design is the same: an artificially faded photograph or painting in an oval frame appears as a background to the chapter number and title. For instance, a faded image of a couple can be seen behind the words “Chapter 3/Salvatore and Adalgiza”—in an old-fashioned typeface (21). The image is subsequently revealed to be a detail of her great-grandparents’ wedding picture (25).

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The title of the twenty-second chapter, “Ghosts,” which is also devoted to them, recalls the ghostly image of Adalgiza’s and Salvatore’s heads on page twenty-one. The effect echoes Schenone’s claim that she can hear her great-grandmother speaking to her when she cooks (3) and reveals her desire to welcome Adalgiza’s ghostly presence into her life and book. Schenone also examines the formal family photograph, which becomes an “imagetext” or “visual text” (Hirsch 1997, 271): “In her face I see her love and worries all bound up, as she sits straight-backed and strong in her chair […]. As was the habit back then, they do not smile for the camera but look out stoically to the uncertain future that we have become” (Schenone 24). Her own comments help fill in the gaps and (re)create their story, as Adlagiza and Salvatore become a struggling young couple, parents, and Laura’s ancestors. Due to her focus on a single recipe, Laura Schenone does not present dozens of family recipes, and the memoir includes few family photographs compared with the Dardens’. Instead, The Lost Ravioli Recipes displays a dozen photographs of old-fashioned culinary utensils that belonged to her relatives. Schenone’s is the only culinary memoir I know of that features so many photographs of kitchen utensils and includes them in the main section. For instance, photographs of Adalgiza’s rolling pin feature in both the recipe section (264) and the main narrative (235); Tessie’s handmade ravioli press features as a faded image and peritext to the second chapter (12) and in the recipe section (265). The text-image interface endows them with meaning: they become “prosthetic devices” or “autotopographical objects” (Gonzalez 1995, 140) that recall the person who used them. The photograph of Laura proudly holding Adalgiza’s long wooden rolling pin (240) echoes her assertion that she felt connected to her great-grandmother when she used it (236). A 2007 promotional video further illustrates Schenone’s choice to connect past and present owners of the utensils.2 The video emphasizes the connection to the memoir by a close-up on the cover (first shots) and by the presence of the book itself on a shelf behind Laura Schenone, and thus constitutes an “epitext” (Genette 1997, 344–370). In the video, Laura uses Adalgiza’s rotella and rolling pin, and a ravioli press in front of the camera, and mentions the women who owned them. Thus, the image-­ text interface of the book is complemented by a dynamic verbo-visual interface, performing a connection to her female ancestors. Interestingly 2  The site (www.lostravioli.com) is extinct, but her video was posted on December 15, 2007 by a friend of hers and can be seen on YouTube.

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enough, Carole and Norma Jean Darden play down their own professional achievements—there is no mention of their catering business nor of Norma Jean’s successful restaurant—and the few photographs of themselves mainly emphasize their identity as daughters and nieces (292, 216, 164). Thus, they present themselves as heirs to their family whose rich history they have preserved.

Rewriting History In his analysis of the relationships between photography, history, and counter-history, François Brunet argues that from the 1960s, photographs of and by ethnic minorities challenged representations of marginalized groups in American society as victims, which he sees as an instance of counter-history (Brunet 2017, 330–331). In Spoonbread, the text-image interplay asserts self-representation as a strategy to reclaim the African-­ American community’s memory and cultural heritage. Spoonbread is the perfect example of an auto-ethnographic culinary memoir (Kelly 2001, 259) that documents the lifestyle of a community and engages with the stereotypical perceptions of that community. In this respect, the numerous photographs in Spoonbread announce illustrated publications such as Deborah Willis’ Picturing Us: African American Identity in Photography (1994), that debunked the idea that African Americans had no say in their representations. The “Darden section” features several embedded formal studio portraits which show men in three-piece suits with ties or bow ties and women in elegant dresses with high collars adorned with lace or a brooch. As was the practice in the late 1890s and early 1900s, the Dardens dressed well for formal studio photographs. The authors, however, also point out that Dinah Darden made sure that her ten children were well-­ dressed at all times, and instilled in them what she called “race pride” (Darden 19). This is perhaps best exemplified by the photograph showing “Uncle John” standing proudly in a three-piece tweed suit, with his hands in his pockets (47). Looking down at the viewer, he seems to dominate him. As informal snapshots replace formal studio portraits, other narratives are created, revealing proud access to ownership—typically, a couple standing in front of their home (105, 115, 138). In one instance, the legend under the photograph creates a perfect imagetext: “John and Annie Darden in front of their home” (115). Photographs of the authors’ parents on holiday (152, 153, 223) and of their mother playing tennis (232) show access to middle-class leisure.

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Just as the text-image dialogue in Spoonbread tells the story of an African-American family, it also illustrates the memoir’s agenda to “celebrate the advances and achievements of a specific American culture” (Zahar 1996, 77). It creates a counter-narrative that emphasizes resilience, economic self-reliance, and personal and economic achievements. Charles Darden is shown as the embodiment of the American myth of the self-­ made man. Charles, who arrived in Wilson, Carolina, in 1868, at age fourteen, with no money in his pockets, became a successful businessman (5). The so-called “family legend” (3), is preceded by a studio portrait showing an old gentleman in an elegant three-piece suit (3). The Dardens’ achievements are showcased by text (stories) and image (photographs). As Wilson did not have a high school for black youngsters, all ten Darden children went to larger towns to pursue their education (5–6) and travelled further to attend all-black colleges.3 The sisters included a photograph of “Aunt Lizzie wearing her graduation cap” (128), and a 1901 picture taken at the medical college Uncle John attended (42). It announces John’s story, which the sisters tell: John Darden settled in an Alabama town, the only black doctor in a thirty-mile radius (40), and established a hospital. While hardships and obstacles are recalled, the photographs and stories are meant to show that they were overcome. A snapshot shows Uncle John proudly standing in his drugstore (48). The authors explain that their father worked his way through medical school (Howard University) and became a physician in Newark, in Central Ward, after he was forced to leave his first practice in Alabama, due to harassment by a white doctor. A snapshot shows Walter (Bud) Darden and his father standing in front of Bud’s medical practice in Newark, with the name “Dr. W. T. Darden clearly visible” (6). The text-image interplay in The Lost Ravioli Recipes evokes a typical immigrant family narrative. Although Laura Schenone travels to Liguria, her quest takes her back to Hoboken, the industrial working-class town in which the Schenones raised their family. The peritext also brings Liguria and Hoboken together. The table of contents is followed by a map of Italy, with an inserted close-up of Liguria, but the previous page features an old photograph of an Italian sea-side town, with a smaller embedded photograph of Hoboken harbor. The wedding picture was taken in Recco, in 3  The memoir, in this way, pays tribute to Black educational institutions that helped many African Americans become lawyers, physicians, and teachers such as Howard University, Livingstone College (North Carolina), and Shaw University (North Carolina).

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Liguria, but the other three photographs show the couple in Hoboken. The narrative starts with formal photographs, such as the studio portrait, a solemn occasion for which the immigrant family dressed well, and then includes informal snapshots. The last two pictures—Salvatore and Adalgiza (229), Adalgiza and her daughter Tessie (230)—illustrate the account of Laura’s visit to the Holy Cross cemetery in North Arlington in search of the Schenones’ grave (228). Thus, the couple’s final resting place, in New Jersey, aptly concludes the immigrant family narrative, which the photographs also tell. The story of the ravioli recipe(s) illustrates the dual enterprise of paying tribute to Ligurian traditions and her family’s immigrant background. When Laura was given Adalgiza’s recipe, which had been preserved by her daughter Tessie, she initially dismissed it as inauthentic because its ingredients included Philadelphia Cream Cheese and frozen spinach (18). Although she went to Liguria to get the “authentic” Ligurian recipe, she eventually acknowledges that the family recipe is authentic. It is evidence of Adalgiza’s story, of her life as an immigrant, of her adjustments to a life in Hoboken at a time when Italian produce was scarce. Traci Marie Kelly argues that the culinary autobiography “allows the author to present her heritage as she knows it,” which implies a rewriting of generally known history, and that it “gives a place to articulate alternative voices and viewpoints” (2001, 166–267). The focus on the domestic and the culinary helps the authors engage in “memory work,” as Annette Kuhn defines it: “a practice of unearthing and making public untold stories, stories of lives lived out on the borderlands […] lives of those whose ways of seeing the world are rarely acknowledged, let alone celebrated” (Kuhn 1995, 9). As a strategy, the focus on the domestic and the culinary has helped African Americans to reject white stereotypes about their culture, and assert that “black culture is as rich and complex as that of any other racial or ethnic group” (Inness 2006, 105–125). The Dardens’ collection of recipes and stories shows that “black culinary culture is not circumscribed by typical food such as fried chicken and chitterlings” (ibid., 123). The family’s repertoire includes “typical” southern dishes and generic American and “world cuisine” dishes. For instance, the sisters point out that their Aunt Norma made “gumbo” (Darden, 90) and grits (94), but also prepared stuffed eggplants and goulash (98–99). Similarly, the title strikes a balance between a southern staple, “spoonbread,” and a more generic “strawberry wine.” Southern dishes that are usually associated with African-American cuisine also feature quite late in the memoir— for instance, chitlins, pig ears, and okras (305, 314, 317) are relegated to

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the very last section, which is devoted to traveling, friends, and picnic foods, as if the sisters were playing with stereotypes about African-­ American cuisine. Both Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine and The Lost Ravioli Recipes “highlight ordinary people’s daily lives which are not included in traditional history books” (Inness 2006, 114). Traveling to Liguria, Laura Schenone is told that the Ligurian dish, which uses wild herbs and left-­ overs, emblematizes resilience: in a poverty-stricken region, the dish recalls the peasants’ ability to make do with very little. In a similar way the text-­ image interface in Spoonbread pays tribute to sensible homemaking skills such as canning fruit and vegetables, making preserves and making wine with wild flowers. William Simpson’s recipes reflect his talent as a bee-­ keeper, and together with the photographs showing him working in his garden and making lye soap, also evidence self-reliance. The title of the memoir celebrates ordinary homemaking skills and dishes. The major difference between the two memoirs lies in the way they evoke, depict, and praise women. Although the Darden sisters insisted on their female relatives’ talent as cooks in the introduction (xiii), the text-­ image dialogue in Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine challenges gender roles and reveals an attempt to debunk the stereotypical image of the Black woman commonly referred to as the Mammy. While eleven chapters are devoted to women, nine are devoted to male relatives and both men and women are shown to have created ordinary and extraordinary dishes. Both men and women are commended for their educational and professional achievements. There isn’t a single photograph of a woman cooking, or even of a woman in her kitchen. The authors’ mother features in many photographs, as if to show multiple facets of a modern woman—she appears as young wife (152) and as a mother (216), but also as a young woman with female friends (223, 2255, 228, 234), as a university student (242), and teacher (215). She is never shown cooking. By contrast, one could argue the text-image interface in Laura Schenone’s The Lost Ravioli Recipes—descriptions by an outsider who includes numerous photos of old women making pasta by hand—verges on “savage ethnography” (Sutton 2001, 147). It also verges on “imperialist nostalgia” (ibid.), as Schenone expresses fears that making pasta by hand is a dying art. Yet, The Lost Ravioli Recipes clearly intends to make public and celebrate the lives of the women Schenone met in Liguria. It further illustrates the project to tell and record women’s history through food and stories which she undertook in A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove. A History of American

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Women Told Through Food, Recipes and Remembrances (2003). Schenone’s assertion in The Lost Ravioli Recipes that she is “one of them”/”one of these old women” (2007a, 221) further shows that in her mind her project is not tantamount to ethnography. Both the memoir, which contains photographs of women in their kitchens (43, 123, 207, 240), and the video, which features Laura in her kitchen, suggest that alternative history can be told from such humble places. Interestingly, Schenone also includes a reproduction of a medieval drawing she discovered in a fourteenth-­ century Italian cookbook, representing “women making pasta” (176). Schenone clearly intends the drawing to resonate with her own photographs, in an attempt to challenge ideas of what constitutes history.

Alternative Archives Illustrated culinary memoirs treat recipes and photographs as documents, recalling and preserving a family’s history, and, more often than not, the history of a community, as pointed out by Smith and Watson (2010, 127). The facsimile of Tessie’s handwritten recipe (20) shows that Schenone has come to treasure it as a legible trace of her family’s history. She collects stories and photographs that illustrate people’s craft at making everyday food. The 2001 preface to Spoonbread emphasizes the Dardens’ memorial task: “oral history is fragile and should be made concrete by all methods available” (x). They collect photographs, recipes, and stories. They treat stories, pictures, and recipes equally as “documents.” The Dardens explicitly encourage readers to preserve recipes and photographs (xi) as traces of their families’ stories, which, they point out, “deserve documentation and organization” (x, my emphasis). Such a call to action recalls an American vision of photography as history which dates back to the late 1930s, according to François Brunet. Brunet argues that Robert Taft in Photography: The American Scene (1938) encouraged Americans to collect photographs as a form of social, familial, and local history, and treat their family photographs as “documents,” by adding dates, captions, and comments (Brunet 2017, 225–226). The Dardens’ memorial task also recalls Pierre Nora’s concept of “commemorative vigilance” and his call to action, urging us to create archives and lieux de mémoire (Nora 1989, 12). I would like to suggest that the culinary memoirs studied here be seen as alternative lieux de mémoire as they collect and preserve traces of ordinary men and women whose lives are recalled.

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The text-image relationship in The Lost Ravioli Recipes suggests an attempt to record and capture traces. It is no coincidence that the memoir includes photographs of utensils such as corzetti stamps, which “imprint” a design on the dough (138–139), and ravioli presses and checkered rolling pins, which also imprint designs. While Schenone focuses on the art of making pasta and on one dish, the Dardens showcase their family’s rich heritage and culture by displaying a very large number of recipes—one hundred and forty-four—and the scope of the repertoire is striking. In doing so the authors document a family and a community’s lifestyle, as argued by Zahar: “Spoonbread can be called a keepsake and an archive” (1996, 77). In Schenone’s 2007 video, it is quite clear that the utensils Laura holds up symbolize traditions that are hundreds of years old—they were hand-made, cared for, and passed down—and evoke women’s labors in the kitchen. Both the video and the memoir suggest that ordinary or old-fashioned utensils are cultural and personal artifacts that should be treasured, and passed on, as they represent one’s connection to one’s relatives and culture. In contrast to the Darden sisters’ discreet role and presence, The Lost Ravioli Recipes highlights Schenone’s own learning journey, away from recipe books, towards practice. Her own efforts to learn how to make the ravioli dough by hand is central to her project. In doing so she reveals a desire to transmit these women’s knowledge, however elusive she finds it to be. The French sociologist, Luce Giard, evokes a similar task in “Doing Cooking” as she insists that women must recover, preserve, and pass on their female ancestors’ knowledge: “As long as one of us preserves your nourishing knowledge, as long as the recipes of your tender patience are transmitted from hand to hand and from generation to generation, a fragmentary yet tenacious memory of your life itself will live on” (Giard 1998, 154). The first chapter describes Schenone’s failed attempt but also the frisson of exhilaration going through her body as her hands touch the dough, awkwardly repeating the gestures she learned from her teacher in Genoa. In the recipe section, there is a total of twenty-three photographs showing a person’s hands in the process of kneading, cutting or shaping dough, or adding the filling. Both photographs and prose pictures illustrate a desire to “capture” their gestures, recalling the Dardens’ intent to “capture [their female relatives’] elusive magic” (Darden, xiii). Observing Enrichetta’s gestures as she makes a pie, Schenone confesses to feeling awed, dazzled and stupefied, so she decides to “capture all this on videotape” (208), no doubt in an attempt to store up and fix the elusive magic.

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Yet, watching the tape at home forces her to realize that “you could never write this in a recipe” (208, italics in the original). The text-image dialogue suggests a never-ending attempt to “translate the poetry of their gestures” (Giard 1998, 254). While there is no photograph featuring the Senegara sisters making troffie, Schenone composes a “prose picture” (Hirsch 1997, 3) or perhaps a “prose film,” as she attempts to describe their gestures as they are making troffie (140). By contrast, the Darden sisters’ attempt to “capture the elusive magic” (xiii) is reflected in the collected recipes. They have translated the magic, literally fixing it and preserving it via text (recipe) rather than attempting to capture it on film, as Schenone does. As they collect and share family stories, recipes, and photographs in the memoirs, the authors simultaneously preserve traces of their ancestors’ lives and attempt to elicit recognition of a similar legacy in their readers. Reflecting on “memory work,” Annette Kuhn (1995) argues that when personal stories are told, via photographs for instance, they “speak with a peculiar urgency to readers in whom they elicit recognition of a shared history” (10). To elicit recognition in their readers, culinary autobiographies typically enforce cultural belonging and create kinship, which the text-image interface helps to achieve. The five different editions of Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine (1978 to 2003), feature the same photograph of Carole and Norma Jean Darden in front of a white-picket fence. The sisters, in elegant aprons and dresses, smile at the readers, inviting them into their American home. One of them holds a basket full of vegetables, suggesting the reader will be offered a feast (of recipes). The text-­ image dialogue in Spoonbread helps to create webs of connections. There are several photographs of picnic scenes, with friends or family. As pointed out by Deborah Lupton (1996), the sharing of food is a vital part of kinship, and shared meals are directly related to the construction and reproduction of emotional relationships (37), which the picnic scenes showcase. The recipes typically connect several relatives: “Aunt Lil gave us the recipe for sister Nell’s own violet vanishing cream” (76); “Aunt Maude’s brother-­ in-­law invented his own gingerbread, which she loved to bake” (63). Calling the Hoboken ravioli recipe “Tessie and Adalgiza’s Ravioli” and pointing out that Tessie, who inherited the recipe from Adalgiza, shared it with her, Laura Schenone creates a link between generations, which is materialized in the facsimile (20). In both memoirs, a shift from family to less narrow definitions of kinship, based on cooking as practice, or on sharing food and recipes is suggested. Schenone’s choice to include

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photographs of Maria Carla, Enrichetta, and Giusippina alongside the family photographs, symbolically includes these Ligurian women in the family. Several photographs show Carole and Norma Jean Darden’s parents with friends, and the final section weaves a network of friends across the country, through the recipes collected by the sisters, as these friends are called “aunt” or “cousin” as a token of affection: “Aunt Ruby’s Seafood casserole” pays tribute to one of Aunt Norma’s favorite students. While the sisters insist on the emotional role of sharing food, Schenone presents cooking as a practice which creates kinship. The description of Laura’s struggles with the dough, the medium-close-ups of Ligurian women posing in their kitchens, the prose pictures, and the close-ups showing hands shaping dough eventually form a web of image-text interfaces connecting Laura and these women. The Lost Ravioli Recipes focuses on stories and embodied memory as Laura attempts to recover, preserve, and pass on the legacy and memory of the past. Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine’s design—a typeface imitating handwriting for the names of the recipes and a layout that evokes a scrapbook— adds a personal, intimate dimension to a manufactured printed book. It conjures up the memory of the persons who wrote down the recipe and composed the book, and also recalls a cross-cultural female practice. Early in The Lost Ravioli Recipes, Schenone turns the shape of the ravioli into a verbo-visual symbol of the memoir’s purpose: “a little square of ravioli is like a secret […] it is an envelope with a message” (4). Intimate scenes— women caught in the process of cooking—are meant to be shown, as evidence of an implied common experience. This is best illustrated by the ravioli-manti video anecdote, which clearly serves as a metaphor indicating that cooking can bridge cultural divides, and that culinary practices can create intimacy between strangers when shared. Schenone explains that her sister’s husband took a videotape of his wife and Laura making ravioli to Istanbul, to show his mother, and that the Turkish family made a tape for her “in return”—a video featuring the man’s wife and mother making manti together (224–225). Although Spoonbread is clearly intended as a model for the African-­ American community, which the reference to slavery in the 2001 preface indicates, the authors also indicate that the lessons they share in the book have an even larger scope: “The lessons we learned from this are everyone’s lessons […] Everyone has some form of a Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine” (x). Thus, the memoir gathers stories, photographs, and recipes that represent the types of “documents” that “everyone” could collect,

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preserve, and share. Most of the informal snapshots feature scenes that can elicit recognition in any reader—children reading a book, a woman enjoying ice cream, laughing women standing in a garden, and several picnic scenes. Some snapshots show family members in a close embrace, such as a mother or aunt embracing children (216, 292), or siblings. One picture shows Carole and Norma Jean as children sitting together on an armchair, reading the same book (260). With these intimate scenes, the sisters create intimacy with their readers. Such pictures can trigger a sense of recognition, as many readers would likely have similar pictures, but they may also touch—that is to say affect—readers emotionally by drawing attention to the act of touching another person’s body. Interestingly, The Lost Ravioli Recipes has been reaching a wider audience since the book was published. In December 2007, a friend of Schenone’s posted and shared her “Lost Ravioli Recipes” video on YouTube. With its emphasis on the specular/ spectacular, the video—which is meant to be “shared”—elicits recognition of a shared history.4 Laura seems to be working in her own kitchen, as shown by the clutter to her left, and the children’s drawings on a cupboard behind her. The video, which reverses her position—she is no longer the intruder in a Ligurian woman’s kitchen—turns her intimate space into a public space of sharing. Although the video was first and foremost a promotional tool for the book, its posting on YouTube modified its focus. Viewers have been adding comments ever since, and they typically involve an emotional response. Several viewers thank “Laura” for bringing back memories of their grandmother making pasta or evoke a “similar quest.” The video blurs boundaries between past, present, and future. It tells viewers that they can retrieve their cultural legacy, from recipes and techniques to family utensils, the embodied memories of an ancestor’s know-how, but also tells them they can create prospective memory and share their legacy and their experience in their comments.

Conclusion Recovering one’s heritage is central to both memoirs that give recipes and photographs a documentary value. While a similar memorial task—and commemorative vigilance—informs both, the text-image dialogue reveals differences. When read together, the two memoirs reveal two sides of the same attempt. Schenone focuses on the quest, while the Dardens display 4

 Similar points are raised in Nicoleta Alexoae-Zagni’s analysis in the previous chapter.

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the result of theirs. The Dardens focus on preservation, which the design of the book—a collection of approximately eighty photographs and one hundred and forty recipes—suggests. The sisters point out that they feel the “responsibility of preserving their heritage” (Darden 2001, xi, my emphasis). Perhaps more clearly than the Darden sisters, Schenone is concerned with finding a way to move from fixed memory to women’s embodied memory, which she attempts to recover. She also links the memorial task to the need to pass on knowledge, which her obsession with utensils and gestures reveals. She clearly intends to pay tribute to the poetry of women’s gestures. The Dardens, however, do recall their ancestors’ gestures as they mention their skill at making jam, honey, or ice-­ cream, even if they shift the emphasis away from women’s gestures and craft in their attempt to challenge stereotypical visions of African-American women. The three authors clearly envision the memoir as an alternative archival locus, or lieu de mémoire in which they can document, record, and preserve ordinary people’s lives and achievements. Schenone uses the text-­ image dialogue to picture herself as the descendant of immigrants, whose life she chooses to briefly evoke. The Dardens clearly write an African-­ American counter-narrative emphasizing resilience and achievements. In spite of their differences, both memoirs share common aims, to remember ordinary people’s lives, praise their knowledge, and inscribe a family history into a larger history.

References Brunet, François. 2017. La photographie. Histoire et contre histoire. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Darden, Norma Jean, and Carole. 2001 [1978]. Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine. Recipes and Reminiscences of a Family. New York: Broadway Books. Genette, Gérard, and R.  Macksey. 1997. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Trans. J. Lewin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Giard, Luce. 1998. Doing Cooking. In The Practice of Everyday Life, Living and Cooking, ed. Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard, and Pierre Mayol, vol. 2. Trans. Timothy Tomasik. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gonzalez, Jennifer. 1995. Autotopographies. In Prosthetic Territories Politics and Hypertechnologies, ed. Gabriel Brahm and Mark Driscoll, 133–149. Boulder: Westview Press. Hirsch, Marianne. 1997. Family Frames. Photography, Narrative and Postmemory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

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Inness, Sherrie, ed. 2001. Kitchen Culture in America. Popular Representations of Food, Gender and Race. University of Pennsylvania Press. ———, ed. 2006. Secret Ingredients. Race, Gender, and Class at the Dinner Table. London, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kelly, Traci Marie. 2001. ‘If I were a Voodoo Priestess’: Women’s Culinary Autobiographies. In Kitchen Culture in America, ed. Sherrie Inness, 251–269. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Kuhn, Annette. 1995. Family Secrets. Acts of Memory and Imagination. London, New York: Verso. Lupton, Deborah. 1996. Food, the Body and the Self. London: Sage. Nora, Pierre. 1989. Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire. Trans. Marc Roudebush. Representations 26 (Spring): 7–24. Schenone, Laura. 2003. A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove. A History of American Women Told Through Food, Recipes and Remembrances. New York: Norton. ———. 2007a. The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken. A Search for Food and Family. New York: Norton. ———. 2007b. The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken. Video Posted on 15 December 2007. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkoSY50FUBM. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson, eds. 2002. Interfaces. Women/Autobiography/ Image/Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ———, eds. 2010. Reading Autobiography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sutton, David. 2001. Remembrance of Repasts. An Anthropology of Food and Memory. Oxford, New York: Berg. Theophano, Janet. 2002. Eat My Words. Reading Women’s Lives Through the Cookbooks They Wrote. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Willis, Deborah. 1994. Picturing Us: African American Identity in Photography. New York: New Press. Zahar, Rafia. 1996. Cooking up a Past: Two Black Culinary Narratives. Voix ethniques/Ethnic Voices 2: 77–83.

PART III

Elusive Textual/Visual Referentiality

CHAPTER 9

Zelda Fitzgerald’s Self-Portraiture: A Strenuous Performance from Ink to Gouache Elisabeth Bouzonviller

Since the publication of Zelda Fitzgerald: A Biography by Nancy Milford in 1970, Zelda’s life has been an object of interest for biographers and novelists, many of them intent on focusing on the literary vocation of the one they claim to have been a psychologically abused wife and a thwarted artist.1 Indeed, as both Fitzgeralds fed on their daily life for inspiration, from the time of their marriage on April 3, 1920 they necessarily relied on the same material and this led to artistic competition. Thus, Doni Wilson claims that […] camps […] have developed over the Fitzgerald marriage, referring to the biographers and scholars who have taken sides as members of ‘Team Zelda’ and ‘Team Scott.’ As Fowler correctly states, for ‘every biographer or 1  Milford, Taylor, Leroy, Tournier, Michaux, Fowler and Siméon offer different approaches to her life.

E. Bouzonviller (*) Jean Monnet University, Saint-Etienne, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 V. Baisnée-Keay et al. (eds.), Text and Image in Women’s Life Writing, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84875-0_9

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scholar who believes Zelda derailed Scott's life, there is one who believes Scott ruined Zelda's’. (Wilson 2013, 171-172)

Rather than joining in this controversy, in this paper, I would like to focus on Zelda’s life narrative through her own essays, letters, novel, paintings, drawings and photographs. Beside her essays and novel edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli in Zelda Fitzgerald: The Collected Writings (1992), her letters in Jackson Bryer’s Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda (Bryer and Barks 2002) and a medical transcript (Bruccoli 1991, 409-415), this analysis will particularly rely on the paintings, drawings and photographs presented in The Romantic Egoists: A Pictorial Autobiography from the Scrapbooks and Albums of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (Bruccoli et al. 2003) and Zelda: An Illustrated Life. The Private World of Zelda Fitzgerald (Lanahan 1996). These last two works published respectively by Zelda’s daughter, Scottie Fitzgerald Smith, and her grand-daughter, Eleanor Lanahan, will lead us to consider a visual and textual family narrative transmitted and built through females from three generations. Given Zelda’s mental trouble, since she was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1930,2 we could almost talk of a case of “postmemory,” along Marianne Hirsch’s terminology,3 both female descendants trying to rebuild the life of their mother and grandmother through their publications of images of herself and by herself. Hirsch focuses indeed on the way pain and trauma can be explored by later generations who have not experienced them directly but manage to remember them through stories and images. With these two books, a sort of visual mise en abyme of a family memoir is offered, since they present

2  Linda Wagner-Martin particularly questions this hasty diagnosis and suggests Zelda might have suffered from a burn-out due to her desperate efforts to become a ballerina under Professor Egorova in Paris (182). According to her, other diagnoses might also have been “mania (perhaps a bipolar condition), […] a ‘substance-induced psychotic disorder’ (stemming from her overuse of both alcohol and nicotine” or “perhaps the more physiologically based ‘Psychotic Disorder Due to a General Medical Condition,’” for example “systematic lupus erythematosus” (Wagner-Martin 2004, 178). 3  “In developing the notion of postmemory to account for the aftermath of catastrophic histories, I have thought precisely about the ways in which we might make ourselves vulnerable to what Susan Sontag has called ‘the pain of others,’ whether our ancestors or more distant subjects, in the past or the present. Postmemory describes the relationship that later generations or distant contemporary witnesses bear to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of others—to experiences they ‘remember’ or know only by means of stories, images, and behaviors.” (Hirsch 2014, 339)

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Zelda’s own life narrative as she herself tried to express it through her writing, dancing and painting. After much strain to be a writer, after taking up ballet too late in life to be hired by the Ballets Russes she aimed for, Zelda turned to painting in the 1930s to communicate with the world and express the story of her life, thus abandoning, under marital and medical pressure, the other media that her husband and some doctors considered were not meant to be hers. She had first taken painting lessons in Capri in February 1925, that would be followed by life drawing classes at the Ringling School of Art in Sarasota, Florida, in February 1939 (Lanahan 1996, 26, Milford 1970, 326). Eventually, her busy pictorial practice led her to consider herself as “a professional artist” by the end of the thirties (Lanahan 1996, 79). Her life narrative is therefore a composite creation involving texts then images. It echoes Smith and Watson who contend that “frequently women’s artistic production of the autobiographical occurs at the interface of the domains of visuality […] and textuality […]” (Smith and Watson 2002, 7). For the one who had doggedly tried to become a ballerina in the late 1920s, the visual and textual intermix seems to be part of a desperate attempt at a self-performance challenging a woman and wife’s status within conservative norms. The written and pictorial self-portrait at stake is therefore a composite picture of glamour and pain created by an artist who claimed the right to personal expression and self-representation. To unveil the intricate arrangement of this rebellious and wrenching self-narrative, this paper will first assess the initial flamboyant picture the provocative flapper from Montgomery, Alabama, tried to convey. Then, it will consider her attempt at creating the illusion of a happy family, an effort which was nevertheless followed by her being unable to conceal the widening cracks within a visual and literary portrait that reflects a shattered mind and life.

A Glamorous Multifaceted Composition The Fitzgeralds constantly staged their own lives,4 creating a mixture of admiration and scandal. In their early twenties, they were the couple in the spotlight of the New  York of the Jazz Age, “romantic egoists” blessed 4  “The Fitzgeralds had always been public property, adepts at self-advertisement […] the ultimate fascination […] was what masters of invention they became, creating new versions of themselves, putting themselves into their stories, acting out their stories in real life.” (Mellow 1985, xvii, xx)

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with “early success.”5 Many pictures were taken of them throughout their lives and they often chronicled their eventful existence, intending to display a certain image of themselves. Thus, on a photograph from 1923, Zelda considered that she had an “Elizabeth Arden face,” (Mizener 1987, 57). Her conceited remark reflects the preoccupations of the new consumer society of the roaring twenties, “the aspirin age” during which people devoted time to health and beauty after reading advertisements in the press and detailed descriptions of the Hollywood stars’ lives. Zelda’s self-­ assessment also suggests her position as a role model in terms of beauty for the young women of the age. This portrait was actually part of a series of photographs, one of which, showing both the Fitzgeralds as a fashionable couple emblematic of the period, appeared in Heart’s International in May 1923 (Bruccoli et al. 2003, 105). Scottie’s The Romantic Egoists relies on her parents’ personal scrapbooks and, in her own way, she contributed to a posthumous glamorous image of her parents with this publication which displays numerous photographs of the family in fashionable places like New York, Hollywood, Paris and the French Riviera. In the pages devoted to Zelda’s youth, which recall her dancing, theatrical, musical and sports activities in her native Montgomery, we can immediately notice her artistic temperament (37, 42-49). These photographs bear witness to an early and daring self-­ representational desire that ran against the gendered rules of propriety in southern society. In her introduction, Scottie explains that she mainly relied on her parents’ “seven scrapbooks and five photograph albums” for this work (Bruccoli et al. 2003, ix). This is why, according to her, “[t]his is, in short, the real McCoy: their own story of their lives, rather than someone else’s interpretation of them” (ix). She also adds that the “scrapbooks stop at 1936, when [her] father moved to North Carolina from Baltimore and put them temporarily in storage” (ix). Surprisingly, she does not explain that this was the year when Scott Fitzgerald, unable to write fiction, published his Crack-Up essays detailing his inability to write and depressive state and when Zelda entered Highland Hospital in Ashville. By focusing on those scrapbooks devoted to the years which preceded her parents’ complete collapse, Scottie tried to come to terms with their past and became a witness to their growing “pain,” as Susan Sontag

5  Fitzgerald evoked the beginning of his famous writer’s life in the autobiographical essay entitled “Early Success” (Fitzgerald 1965, 57-63).

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phrases it,6 while, at the same time, avoiding mentioning it fully. Incidentally, the title of Scottie’s publication recalls her father’s first novel despite a spelling variation,7 but it is also a striking reminder of the couple’s self-conceited attitude induced by Scott’s unexpected “early success.” In the wake of this success, at the beginning of their married life, Zelda published some articles which emphasize the idea that she had become a celebrity, even an authority on certain subjects like beauty and womanhood because she had come to embody the flapper in her daily life, but also in her husband’s novels and short stories. This modern female archetype inspired from Zelda was, indeed, at the heart of his successful writing in magazines, even though he got tired of it in the long run (Turnbull 1964, 145, 342). In “Eulogy on the Flapper” (Bruccoli 1992, 391-393), published in the Metropolitan Magazine in June 1922, she regrets that the flapper should have become common place and should no longer be a provocative and original character as she used to be herself. In “Paint and Powder” (Bruccoli 1992, 415-417), initially entitled “Editorial on Youth” in 1927, but first published in The Smart Set in May 1929, she claims the right for women, like herself actually, to use make-up as it is emblematic of their desire “to choose their destinies– to be successful competitors in the great game of life” (416). Throughout the text, she uses the pronoun “we,” meaning American people, and refers to “our young women,” suggesting that she may no longer belong to this group, but understands it very well: “[…] let us be grateful for the mascara and red paste which keeps young girls and old ladies in tune with their atmosphere” (416). In “What Became of the Flappers?” (Bruccoli 1992, 397-399), published as a diptych with Scott’s “Our Young Rich Boys” in Mc Call’s in 1925, she takes stock of her own situation as a married woman who has forgotten the frivolity of her youth when she exclaims: “The flapper […] has gone at last, where all good flappers go–into the young married set, into boredom and gathering conventions and the pleasure of having children […].” (399) More than the voice of reason, these words seem to be the nostalgic realization of her own growing old, losing illusions and forgetting her former rebellious behavior. In keeping with this flapper imagery echoing a self-portrait, she proposed a drawing for the dust jacket of Scott’s novel, The Beautiful and  Cf note 3.  The draft of Scott’s first novel was initially entitled “The Romantic Egotist” (Bruccoli 1991, 94-99). 6 7

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Fig. 9.1  Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald. “Proposed book jacket for The Beautiful and Damned,” about 1922. Reprinted by permission of the Department of Special Collections at Princeton University Library. By permission of the Trustees of the Fitzgerald Estate Under Agreement Dated July 3, 1975, Created by Frances Scott Fitzgerald Smith

Damned, which shows a provocative, naked flapper inside a champagne glass who looks very much like herself (Fig.  9.1) (Lanahan 1996, 23, Milford 1970, 87), and recalls her disordered life filled with many parties, pranks and even her facetious jumping into fountains in New York (Bruccoli 1991, 155).

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Writing about and drawing flappers meant evoking her own experience, it also emphasizes her status as a powerless, passive object, “an idealized figure, an object of male desire” subjected to “the male gaze,” an “objec[t] of art and not […] its make[r]” (Smith and Watson 2002, 14-15). Actually, what appeared playful to her in her young days would become increasingly unbearable with time as she tried painstakingly to assert herself as a woman and artist. She was both a muse and the incarnation of female modernity but, as such, she remained what was expected of her as the successful novelist’s wife. In terms of self-representation, the frail silhouette in the champagne glass, which was eventually not adopted for the cover of Scott’s novel, combines “exposure and disguise” (Posner 1998, 158) through its nakedness and the absence of a signature. Indeed, due to its intended use, the drawing bears only Scott’s name and the title of his novel. Echoing this erasure of personality behind a married life, on September 30, 1928, The Courier-Journal from Louisville published an article entitled “What a ‘Flapper Novelist’ Thinks of His Wife,” in which Zelda exclaimed with a mixture of vanity and submission: “I love Scott’s books and heroines. I like the ones that are like me!” (Bruccoli et al. 2003, 112). In her first publication under her maiden name,8 which appeared in the New York Tribune on April 2, 1922 as “Mrs. F. Scott Fitzgerald Reviews ‘The Beautiful and Damned,’ Friend Husband’s Latest,” Zelda humorously evokes Scott’s novel and recommends its buying to pay for their daily expenses, but she also mentions the fact that Scott borrowed some of his inspiration not only from her character but from her diary and letters: “In fact, Mr. Fitzgerald–I believe that is how he spells his name–seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home.” (Bruccoli 1992, 388) This would indeed become the recurrent feminist criticism against Scott: Zelda’s writing having been stolen and discouraged by her husband who defended his sole right to this activity. In terms of publishing, because she could benefit from Scott’s reputation, she often had to publish under his or both their names, which was the case for her short stories and some of the articles mentioned above. In the Collected Writings, Bruccoli specifies that some texts were “[p]ublished as by F.  Scott Fitzgerald [or as by F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald], but credited to Zelda in his Ledger” (Bruccoli 1992, 273, 293, 299, 309, 317, 327, 337, 407, 411, 415, 419, 433). Nevertheless, in the previous article about The Beautiful and Damned for example, thanks to her sense of humor, she managed to express both criticism and 8

 More precisely, her maiden name came first and her married name was given in brackets.

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admiration about Scott’s work, while revealing her own taste in literature and her view of what she expected of and admired in women: “I think the heroine is most amusing. I have an intense distaste for the melancholy aroused in the masculine mind by such characters as Jenny Gerhardt, Antonia and Tess (of the D’Urbervilles).” (Bruccoli 1992, 389) Besides the plagiarism that is denounced, Zelda departs from a romantic and tragic taste on which the Regionalists, Realists and Naturalists fed,9 to express another, modern view of what a heroine should be and consequently what a woman should be. The conclusion of her article is then both a joke on her husband’s writing and a rebellion against the sad seriousness of a canonical literature that had provided women only with tragic roles for decades: “This is a tragedy unequaled in the entire work of Hardy. Thus the book closes on a note of tremendous depression and Mr Fitzgerald’s subtle manner of having Gloria’s deterioration turn on her taste in coats has scarcely been equaled by Henry James” (389). This humorous hyperbolic assessment offers an insight into Zelda’s revolutionary taste in literature. It also expresses her approach to modern womanhood within society, which actually echoed her rebellious attitude as a teenager, young woman and then wife. Moreover, this conclusion asserts her exquisite taste and knowledge in terms of fashion, as she herself proudly owned a fur coat, as shown on a 1921 picture of the young couple (Bruccoli et  al. 2003, 77). However, these rebellious and insolent days would be quickly over, replaced by a more conventional married life that channeled her creativity in other ways.

A Fabricated Paper Family Despite Scott’s “early success,” the Fitzgeralds never settled anywhere, nor owned a home of their own and the story of their life is one of journeys, rented apartments and villas, as expressed in Zelda’s article “‘Show Mr. and Mrs. F. to Number–––––’,” first published in Esquire in May-June 1934, which follows chronologically the hotels where they stayed from 1920 to 1933 in the US, Europe and Algeria (Bruccoli 1992, 419-431). This article conjures up a wandering life, far different from the one of Zelda’s family rooted in the American South for generations, but not as exciting and liberating as expected. Under the 1920 caption, the article opens with the sentence “We are married” (Bruccoli 1992, 419). There follows, year by year, the description of their hotels and stays, always using the pronoun “we,” even to evoke Zelda’s pregnancy in 1921, “we were pregnant” (420), or her  See Dreiser, Cather, Hardy.

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health trouble in 1925, “in the Pyrenees we took a cure for colitis” (423), while in the 1927 section, the sentence “one of us thought he had appendicitis” alludes to Scott’s own sudden worries during a trip to California (424). This taxonomic article seems to erase individual references to emphasize a married life, and the iconic couple becomes representative of an age group, as in Annie Ernaux’s Les Années, which relies on the recurring use of “nous” and “on” to express a woman’s life narrative as part of a generation. Beside this use of the pronoun “we,” Zelda’s accelerated traveler’s life narrative seems strangely impersonal at times, as for example, when she writes “At the O. Henry in Greensboro they thought a man and wife ought not to be dressed alike in white knickerbockers in 1920” (419) or “in Paris […] We bathed the daughter in the bidet by mistake” (420).10 In these private recollections, the intimate is hidden behind the collective and impersonal, thus producing an effect of distance and detachment. The general impression remains that of endless movement, multiplicity, speed and the unavoidable passing of time, with the anticlimax of the sudden, flippant conclusion: “We thought Bermuda was a nice place to be the last one of so many years of travelling” (431). The Fitzgeralds’ daughter, Scottie, was born in 1921 and followed them in their ceaseless national and international movements, as shown in their numerous family photographs, including, first of all, their passport ones (Bruccoli et al. 2003, 115). In a particular picture from their Paris years, when they lived at 14 rue Tilsitt (Bruccoli et  al. 2003, 134), the whole family had adopted a joyful dance step in front of a Christmas tree that seems to evoke fun and intimacy despite a daily life that was often less neatly choreographed than they pretend on the photograph, although Scottie did recall a “golden childhood” (Van Develder 2017). In this picture, the goal seems to have been to put themselves on stage as the embodiment of the perfectly happy family, another display of their daily life: once a fashionable couple, now elegant, carefree parents. Zelda had an artistic temperament and expressed her mother’s care that way. Her scrapbook, for example, includes a playful composition showing several pictures of herself and Scottie announcing a baby party in 1922 in St Paul (Bruccoli et al. 2003, 90). We could even wonder who the child is on those pictures, as Zelda looks like a little girl herself with her short white dress and a big white bow in her hair. With the lampshade she painted in 1928, which represents a merry-go-round (Lanahan 1996), once again life is presented like an endless happy game. Various places  My emphasis.

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where the Fitzgeralds stayed can be recognized in the background,11 and the members, friends and servants of the family are the joyful riders: Zelda on the rooster, Scott on the elephant, Scottie on the horse, her “Nanny” on the mouse, Tana, the Japanese butler, on the turtle and maybe George Jean Nathan on the lion. Life seemed fun for the whole household according to Zelda in her artistic creations. She also painted various series of paper dolls for Scottie and even got in touch with Scott’s editor, Maxwell Perkins, to find a way to publish them, but despite his interest, the plan did not come through (Lanahan 199, 83). Hence, they remained a mother’s achievement for her daughter, who later explained: “Once upon a time these dolls had wardrobes of which Rumpelstiltskin could be proud.” (Fitzgerald 1988, 8). The Fitzgeralds themselves became paper dolls for Scottie’s amusement (Fig. 9.2) Lanahan

Fig. 9.2  Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald. The Paper Dolls of the Fitzgerald Family, about 1932, 10 3/8, 7 5/8, 10 1/8 inches. Reprinted by permission of the Trustees of the Fitzgerald Estate Under Agreement Dated July 3, 1975, Created by Frances Scott Fitzgerald Smith  Villa St Louis, Juan les Pins, White Bear Lake Yacht Club Minnesota, Ellerslie Delaware, the Plaza Hotel in New York, Capri, Villa Marie at St Raphael, the Spanish steps in Rome and the cottage in Westport, Connecticut. 11

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1996, 30-33). These family dolls are painted in underwear and were to be dressed according to the little girl’s fancy. Zelda’s self-portrait shows a fashionable woman in stockings, garter and high-heeled shoes. As for Scottie, she was granted several silhouettes representing her at different ages. Within Scott’s wardrobe, Zelda imagined a formal suit, but also an angel’s costume (31), which echoes a passage from her novel Save Me the Waltz,12 a roman à clef in which the heroine’s husband is Scott’s replica. It is significant to notice that Zelda created these family dolls, along with other imaginary or historical ones like Louis XIV, Cardinal Richelieu, the three Musketeers, Little Red Riding Hood, the Good fairy, or Goldilocks and the three bears, as if reality and imagination merged, as if their family life was as fanciful as fairy tales or historical plots.

Cracks in the Picture, Cracks in the Mind However, despite Zelda’s efforts to paint and tell an enchanted life story devoid of problems and suffering, she was prey to serious mental trouble which came to a climax in 1930. In “‘Show Mr. and Mrs. F. to Number–––––’,” that dreadful year is not mentioned, as if it was too confusing, but the ellipsis is not complete as the 1929 section includes the Algerian trip supposed to relax Zelda in February 1930. In the self-­ narrative, she uses a detached mode of expression as in other publications, but the quotation “The world crumbled to pieces in Biskra” (Bruccoli 1992, 428) is no comment on the North African town decay though, it actually refers to hers. In the same way, the next step in her narrative suggests her painful condition in a veiled manner: “Then Switzerland and another life” (428). Zelda was indeed hospitalized in various French and Swiss clinics,13 before going definitely back to the US in September 1931. The pretense of a happy life was over and even the perfect family outing in Annecy, immortalized on a photograph showing the three of them on a small boat in their swimming costumes (Bruccoli et al. 2003, 181) and mentioned in the 1931 section of Zelda’s article, was just a short holiday away from the Swiss clinic, a happy parenthesis within dark times: “But we  “There seemed to be some heavenly support beneath his shoulder blades that lifted his feet from the ground in ecstatic suspension, as if he secretly enjoyed the ability to fly but was walking as a compromise to convention.” (Bruccoli 1992, 37) 13  Zelda was first admitted to Malmaison clinic in Paris, from April 23 to May 11, 1930, then to Val-Mont, in Glion, Switzerland, from May 22, 1930 to June 5, 1930, and eventually she stayed at Les Rives de Prangins in Nyon, Switzerland, from June 5, 1930 to September 15, 1931. 12

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went to Annecy for two weeks in summer, and said at the end that we’d never go there again because those weeks had been perfect and no other time could match them” (Bruccoli 1992, 429). Two of her paintings from the early thirties represent nursing mothers and are far from the evocation of blissful motherhood and family life (Lanahan 1996, 45). They picture violent body distortions and, in one of them, a bloody colored blanket seems to emphasize maternity as a wrenching condition rather than the happy state conjured up in previous photographs, paper dolls and collages. From then on, Zelda would be in and out of clinics and Scottie would be brought up by others, Scott of course, but above all, nannies, governesses and friends like the Obers, Harold being Scott’s agent. While at Prangins, Zelda was afflicted with severe eczema. In July 1930, she wrote a 42-page summary of their marriage and sent it to Scott. In this private correspondence, she did not use the detached, sometimes humorous tone of her published articles, but offered a bitter and painful synthesis of her married years marked by an accusatory tone. This text is a chronological series of memories from 1920 to 1930, some good, others more painful, aiming at understanding her condition and the collapse of their marriage and of her health. If the pronoun “we” is still used, she also uses the first and second person ones to contrast their individual behaviors and fates: “We did not like women and we were happy.” “We quarreled, and you broke the bathroom door and hurt my eye.” “[…] when there was nothing more to do on the house I began dancing lessons.” “[…] at Valmont I was in torture, and my head closed to-gether.” (Bruccoli 1991, 351-357)

Back home in Montgomery in 1931, Zelda began writing a novel, but she had a second breakdown with fits of hysteria and eczema, so she was hospitalized at the Phipps Clinic of Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore and this is where she completed Save Me the Waltz, which she dedicated to her doctor, Mildred Squires. When she sent her manuscript to Scott’s editor, he was enraged by this unexpected literary competition. Within this tense marital atmosphere over the topic of fiction writing, in a letter to her husband from March 1932, she concluded with self-mortification: “I am that little fish who swims about under a shark and, I believe, lives indelicately

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on its offals” (Bryer and Barks 2002, 154). However, Save Me the Waltz was published by early October 1932. On May 28, 1933, as a therapeutic process, Dr. Rennie met the Fitzgeralds at their home, ironically called “La Paix,” and a stenographer took down the 114-page typescript of their discussion (Bruccoli 1991, 409-415). Once again, they quarreled about their literary projects, since Zelda had published her novel while Scott was still stuck with Tender Is the Night to be published only in 1934. She intended to write a second novel set in a psychiatric environment and partly inspired from Nijinsky’s life, which might have encroached upon Scott’s novel in progress and led him to exclaim: “Now one of the agreements made between Dr. Adolph Meyer and Dr. Rennie and myself was that it was extremely inadvisable for you to write any novels which were a resumé of your insanity or discussed insanity.” (Bruccoli 1991, 410) Whereas he fiercely tried to prevent her from writing, in particular on topics he felt were his reserved source of inspiration, she asserted her desire to do so: Scott: Everything that we have done is mine. […] That is all of my material. None of it is your material. […] I want you to stop writing fiction. (Bruccoli 1991, 410-412) Zelda: I want to write and I am going to write. I am going to be a writer, but I’m not going to do it at Scott’s expense if I can possibly avoid it. (Bruccoli 1991, 413)

These were harsh days, as shown by Zelda’s static tormented gaze in a 1929 picture (Mizener 1987, 84), which seems to recall Dos Passos’ 1922 observation about her latent illness that he said to have noticed on their first meeting: “Though she was so very lovely I had come upon something that frightened and repelled me, even physically…” (Bruccoli 1991, 204). Under another portrait from 1931, Scott wrote “Recovered” (Bruccoli et al. 2003, 182), which is anything but confirmed by her aged and tired appearance. This picture heralds a third portrait, a gouache on paper she painted in the early 1940s revealing her fragmented perception of herself (Fig. 9.3) (Lanahan 1996, 41). With this work, Zelda drew a wounded self-portrait that corresponds exactly to Nancy K. Miller’s approach to “graphic illness memoir” (Miller 2020). It is to be noticed that, unlike the flapper in the champagne glass portrait, this drawing is signed with Zelda’s first name and married name in the bottom right-hand side corner; self-representation is therefore claimed

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Fig. 9.3  Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald. Self-Portrait, early 1940s, gouache on paper, 20x18 inches. Reprinted by permission of the Department of Special Collections at Princeton University Library. By permission of the Trustees of the Fitzgerald Estate Under Agreement Dated July 3, 1975, Created by Frances Scott Fitzgerald Smith

here through naming. The lost eyes, stern mouth and angular face, caught within the undisciplined curls and the constraining frame of the page, seem to sketch her prisoner’s status as a mental patient. In this case, the deformed face becomes an autobiographical act, “a theater of embodied self-­representation” (Smith and Watson 2002, 5). As she radically departs from the novelist’s beautiful showcase wife’s representation, she baffles “the male gaze” (Smith and Watson 2002, 15) and becomes the gaze herself. She is the subject of the drawing, thus asserting her true self, although a fragmented one.

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Better than photographs, her drawings and paintings tell the self from inside. They sketch a bodily experience and build a “narrativ[e] of breakdown and breakthrough,” as termed by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, who explain: “Increasingly, people are chronicling their journeys through illness, diagnosis, treatment, and survival as stories of self-reinvention […]” (Smith and Watson 2010, 141) No wonder Scottie and Eleanor got involved in a publication process, which has enabled them to provide the reader with, among other evocations, a story of physical and mental pain, and to offer Zelda access to genuine self-representation beyond time and generations. Her story is both a literary and pictorial self-narrative, but, in the early 1930s, she was strongly advised to avoid the literary medium. By the Fall of 1934, she sent a letter to Scott saying: “I’m sad because I can’t write–” (Bryer and Barks 2002, 209). Although she kept writing against all odds, “Auction––– Model 1934,” which appeared in Esquire in July of that same year, was her last publication (Bruccoli 1992, 433-438) and Caesar’s Things, her second novel, was never completed. Echoing “‘Show Mr. and Mrs. F. to Number–––––’,” her last essay relies on a taxonomic structure as it lists fifteen lots of objects acquired during fifteen years of wandering existence. Once again, the list evokes the passing of time and reflects the Fitzgeralds’ life from 1919 to 1934, with, for example, Zelda’s feather fan (436), a gift from Scott during their courtship, or a Jean Patou suit bought just after their wedding (436), or “[t]welve scrapbooks, telling [them] what wonderful or horrible or mediocre people [they] were” (437). Despite the desire to “auction” all those memorabilia, attachment remains for those objects that tell the story of their life and the conclusion is: “We shall keep it all––the tangible remnant of the four hundred thousand we made from hard words and spent with easy ones these fifteen years.” (438) Relying on Daniel Schachter’s Searching for Memory, Smith and Watson contend that memory has a material history that involves both the body and objects (Smith and Watson 2002, 9). After engaging in textual acts of memory which listed objects and places, Zelda would explore the body on canvas and paper as sites fit for remembering and self-revealing. Since writing was, and ballet had been, extremely stressful, she turned to painting to express her life narrative, which had the advantage of not encroaching upon what Scott considered his field. He even organized an exhibition of her works entitled “Parfois la folie est la sagesse,” in New York, at the Cary Ross Gallery, from March 29 to April 30, 1934. However, she was not so keen on this event that was not her personal initiative, just as she would be

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upset when, in December of the same year, Scott let Gertrude Stein pick two paintings of her own choosing, which happened to be Zelda’s favorites. She reacted to Scott’s obsequiousness with the famous poet and art expert by saying she had earmarked them to give to her doctor, which forced Stein to make other choices (Wagner-Martin 2004, 185-186). Through her life, Zelda acquired a strong background about art, as suggested in Save Me the Waltz, which quotes a wide range of works and artists from antiquity to modern times. She read art and illustrated books, visited museums and galleries, and was directly in contact with artists, especially during her time in France, thanks to her friendship with the Murphys, who were in close touch with the modernist painters of the time, especially since shortly after their arrival in Paris in 1921, they had helped repaint Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes scenery, under the regular supervision of Picasso, Braque, Derain or Bakst. According to Kathryn Lee Seidel, Alexis and Alvin Wang, “[Zelda] is an artist who has searched for her medium, and in painting, she finds it” (Seidel et al. 2007, 139). However, it is striking to notice that many of her paintings are not signed, that she was not particularly intent on showing them and that she even willingly destroyed some of them.14 When Dr Robert Carroll asked her to paint floral screens for Highland Hospital in 1940, she was flattered, but very defensive about the offer, as expressed in a letter to Scott (Bryer and Barks 2002, 324-325), as if painting was a rather intimate gesture to be preserved from too much exposure, as opposed to her attitude during her youth, but also too serious for neglect and meager financial reward (Milford 1970, 335-337). With painting, her efforts at self-performance had become far more private than during her literary and dancing years, although they often referred to those times. The dancers of her paintings recall these strenuous days and seem to evoke her own painful physical efforts when she believed she could become a professional dancer (Fig. 9.4) (Lanahan 1996, 42-44, 47). To the question “‘Why do you paint all your characters with exaggerated limbs?’,” she answered: ‘Because that’s how a ballet dancer feels after dancing’” (Lanahan 1996, 80). Even though she had abandoned her ballet ambitions, she kept her ballet outfit and even imagined using pictures of herself 14  Some of Zelda’s paintings were also destroyed by fire by accident on two major occasions: at La Paix (1933) and at Highland Hospital (1948). Apparently, she and, after her death, one of her sisters also destroyed some of her works, which may have been deemed inappropriate or worthless (Lanahan 1996, 78).

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Fig. 9.4  Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald. Ballerinas, about 1933, oil on canvas, 36 1/4 x 26 1/4 inches. Reprinted by permission of Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery, Alabama. Gift of the artist 1942.3. By permission of the Trustees of the Fitzgerald Estate Under Agreement Dated July 3, 1975, Created by Frances Scott Fitzgerald Smith

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dressed as a ballerina for the dust jacket of Save Me the Waltz as the novel chronicled the heroine’s dancing aspirations, which were in certain aspects very similar to her own. Beside the distorted ballet dancers who express her own painful artistic experience from within, and an occasional pencil self-portrait from the early 1940s (Lanahan 1996, 16), her paintings from that same period recall the places where she had lived, with city-views of Paris and New York, most of which are devoid of characters, although we can guess at human presence through objects scattered in the foreground like glasses, bottles and newspapers in Brooklyn Bridge (Lanahan 1996, 49), top hats in Place de l'Opéra (Lanahan 1996, 58), or top hats, gloves, walking sticks, tickets and bouquets in Fifth Avenue (Lanahan 1996, 50). The Pantheon and Luxembourg Gardens, Notre Dame Cathedral and Times Square, dating all from 1944, show empty streets except for anonymous vehicles, whether cars or carriages drawn by horses (Lanahan 1996, 59, 57, 51). Despite their bright colors, those paintings conjure up the loneliness of the great cities, which had been the Fitzgeralds’ daily environment, and echo other urban pictorial evocations of the period like Edward Hopper’s. Only one painting shows Scottie with her fiancé –Scottie and Jack Grand Central Time– while the bride and bridegroom of Washington Square seem to allude to their wedding (Lanahan 1996, 55-56). Those cityscapes, where nothing seems built on a strong basis and drawn rigorously, depict a moving, collapsing world in keeping with the fragmentation and disorder of the artist’s mind and, more widely, of troubled, unstable modernity. Progressively, Zelda would even forget those well-known places of her earlier life and devote her painting to religious or floral subjects, thus forgetting her family life as a pictorial inspiration to withdraw into a world of her own, as she kept living in and out of clinics. Despite life-long poor eyesight and fragile mental balance, she painted till her death and Seidel et al celebrate her works as skillful self-reflection: “[…] Zelda presents an analysis of self which looks carefully but passionately at the place of the body, the grotesque, the role of fantasy, and the comfort of religion” (Seidel et al. 2007, 145). Eventually, she lived longer than Scott since he died in 1940, whereas her remains were found in 1948 after a tragic fire at Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina. Through their visual biographies, Scottie and Eleanor have managed to reassess their mother and grandmother’s life and to give her a voice, whereas her condition as a wife and a mental patient had put many obstacles on her way as a self-performer. She had started as a southern Belle and

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ended as a talented painter who tackled canvas and paper as suitable sites for her performance, but her art remained rather confidential till recently. However, as she moved from ballet to a representation of the body mediated by painting and drawing, she truly reached the medium fit for her self-referential display. Whereas she had written articles, letters and a novel, all intensely inspired from her own life, with time, she eventually relinquished this intimate inspiration for broader subjects, as if liberated from the personal. Scottie admitted that, although she had been the Fitzgeralds’ daughter, biographical commentary superseded memory in her mind: “The highs and downs of their short, dramatic lives have been examined under so many microscopes (including some pretty inaccurate ones) that I can’t distinguish any longer between memories and what I read somewhere” (Bruccoli et al. 2003, IX). For her, editing her parents’ scrapbooks was certainly a way of rediscovering them as well as understanding her own family story, even in its darker aspects. Publishing The Romantic Egoists became both celebration and memory: “And for me collaborating on this book has been a double source of satisfaction: first, I’ve come to see my parents through my own pair of spectacles rather than the eyes of others; second I’ve paid a tribute to them” (Bruccoli et  al. 2003, IX). As for Eleanor, she has engaged in offering her grandmother artistic visibility and therefore the possibility to move from passive muse to active creator: “Although some of her paintings have been exhibited over the years, only recently have her accomplishments been afforded the respect they deserve” (Lanahan 1996, 8). For years, Zelda’s eventful life was an object of interest because she was the canonical novelist’s wife, thus erasing the importance of her own artistic contribution, Eleanor’s publication tries to pay homage to her talent by granting her center stage at last.

Conclusion Smith and Watson claim that “[a]utobiographical narratives […] do not affirm a ‘true self’ or a coherent and stable identity. They are performative, situated addresses that invite their readers’ collaboration in producing specific meaning for the ‘life’” (Smith and Watson 2002, 11). Zelda was the fragile flapper in a champagne glass, the elegant paper-doll in stockings and garter, the distraught woman of the 1940s self-portrait and the nomad who had stopped at numerous hotels and accumulated heterogeneous objects. Hers was an unfixed, fragmented identity, both fanciful and

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ravaged by mental pain that her descendants have tried to grasp, in a kind of “postmemory” gesture, through their publications involving texts and images. Thus, the reader/viewer is called upon to assemble those fragments and imagine a life, the one of an artist engaged in a quest for self-­ knowledge through self-performance despite her husband’s and, more widely, her society’s constraining norms. Since, as Georges Gusdorf claims “the specific mark of autobiography is giving priority to the intimate over the extrinsic,”15 Zelda, through a multilayered composition of texts and iconographic documents, does offer to the reader/viewer an approach to her “private world” (Lanahan 1996), a real autobiography. However, through writing, ballet and painting, while negotiating the past and pondering her identity, Zelda claimed her right to an artistic self-­representation that was not merely personal, but was also a historical gendered gesture questioning social, artistic and cultural norms.

References Bruccoli, Matthew J. 1991. Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F.  Scott Fitzgerald. London: Cardinal. ———. ed. 1992. Zelda Fitzgerald: The Collected Writings. London: Little, Brown, and Co. Bruccoli, Matthew, Scottie Fitzgerald Smith, and Joan P.  Kerr, eds. 2003. The Romantic Egoists: A Pictorial Autobiography from the Scrapbooks and Albums of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (1974). Columbia: South Carolina Press. Bryer, Jackson, and Cathy Barks, eds. 2002. Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. London: Bloomsbury. Ernaux, Annie. 2008. Les Années. Paris: Gallimard. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. 1922. The Beautiful and Damned. New York: Scribners. ———. 1965. The Crack-Up with Other Pieces and Stories (1936). Harmondsworth: Penguin. ———. 1988. Bits of Paradise: Twenty-One Uncollected Stories by F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, ed. Scottie Fitzgerald Smith and Matthew J.  Bruccoli. London: Penguin. Fowler, Therese Anne. 2013. Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Gusdorf, Georges. 1991. Les Écritures du moi. Lignes de vie I. Paris: Odile Jacob. Hirsch, Marianne. 2014. Presidential Address 2014: Connective Histories in Vulnerable Times. PMLA 129 (3): 330–348. 15  Our translation from the original French: “[…] la marque propre de l’autobiographie est la priorité reconnue à l’intime sur l’extrinsèque.” (Gusdorf 1991, 182)

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Lanahan, Eleanor, ed. 1996. Zelda: An Illustrated Life. The Private World of Zelda Fitzgerald. New York: H. N. Abrams. Leroy, Gilles. 2007. Alabama Song. Paris: Gallimard. Mellow, James R. 1985. Invented Lives: F.  Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (1984). London: Souvenir Press. Michaux, Agnès. 2006. Zelda. Paris: Flammarion. Milford, Nancy. 1970. Zelda Fitzgerald: A Biography. London: Bodley Head. Miller, Nancy K. 2020. Indelible Memories, Legible Bodies: The Case of Graphic Illness Memoirs. In Mémoires, traces, empreintes, ed. Elisabeth Bouzonviller, Floriane Reviron-Piégay, and Emmanuelle Souvignet, 27–45. Binges: Orbis Tertius. Mizener, Arthur. 1987. Scott Fitzgerald (1972). London: Thames and Hudson. Posner, Helaine. 1998. The Self and the World: Negotiating Boundaries in the Art of Yayoi Kusama, Ana Mendieta, and Francesca Woodman. In Mirror Images: Women, Surrealism, and Self-Representation, ed. Whitney Chadwick, 156–171. Cambridge: MIT Press. Schachter, Daniel. 1996. Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind, and the Past. New York: Basic Books. Seidel, Kathryn Lee, Alexis Wang, and Alvin Y. Wang. 2007. Zelda Fitzgerald’s Art and the Role of the Artist. The Scott Fitzgerald Review. Hempstead: The F. Scott Fitzgerald Society and Hofstra University 5: 133–163. Siméon, Christian. 2016. Brûlez-la. Paris: Quatre-Vents. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson, eds. 2002. Interfaces: Women, Autobiography, Image, Performance. Anne Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ———. 2010. Reading Autobiography. A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (2001). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Taylor, Kendall. 2001. Sometimes Madness Is Wisdom: Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald: A Marriage. New York: Ballantine. Tournier, Jacques. 2008. Zelda. Paris: Grasset. Turnbull, Andrew, ed. 1964. The Letters of F.  Scott Fitzgerald. London: Bodley Head. Van Develder, Julia. May 31, 2017. “The Daughter of… The Frances ‘Scottie’ Fitzgerald Lanahan Smith Papers.” https://stories.vassar.edu/2017/170531-­ scottie-­fitzgerald.html. Wagner-Martin, Linda. 2004. Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald: An American Woman’s Life. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Wilson, Doni M. 2013. From Both Sides Now: Fiction, Fairness, and Zelda Fitzgerald. In The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review. State College: The Pennsylvania State University Press 11: 171–173.

CHAPTER 10

Isabella Bird Bishop’s 1897 Journey up the Yangtze Valley and Beyond: Beyond the Writing/Photographing Divide Floriane Reviron-Piégay

When, in the autumn of 1896, Isabella Bird Bishop launched into her most distant journey through China, (mainly on the Yangtze River, through the Province of Szechwan, then almost up to the frontier with Tibet, where she met the indigenous Man-Tze people of the Somo territory), she was 65 and at the height of her fame. She was the first female fellow of the Royal Geographical Society (as clearly stipulated by the initials F.R.G.S. next to her name on the title page), and was also elected fellow of the Scottish Royal Geographical Society and honorary fellow of the Oriental Society of Peking the same year—1892—which amply justifies the apparently dismissive “etc. etc.” found on the title page of this, her tenth travel account. The Yangtze Valley and Beyond was the second travel narrative published with maps and illustrations, most of them

F. Reviron-Piégay (*) Jean Monnet University, Saint-Etienne, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 V. Baisnée-Keay et al. (eds.), Text and Image in Women’s Life Writing, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84875-0_10

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photographs.1 The 116 illustrations and maps are mentioned on the title page, probably to entice the reader into opening the book, promising entertainment and the immediate satisfaction of curiosity. By then, Bird Bishop’s accounts were very popular and the addition of photographs to her travel narratives partly answered the marketing strategy of her editor, partly humored the readers’ growing taste for and interest in photography. Essentially these photographs attest to her own passion for the new medium. She had taken photography lessons in London in 1892, in preparation for further travel and thought with reason that photographs were a necessary tool in her “laborious effort to be accurate” and to “convey a truthful impression of the country and its people” (Yangtze Valley, IX-X). Traditionally, in nineteenth-century female travel accounts, the lines are blurred between the autobiographical, the ethnographic and the anecdotal.2 Do Bird Bishop’s photographs contribute to this blurring of borders or do they rather clarify her relation to the people she encountered (and notably the women), the places she visited and the events and situations she witnessed? Bird Bishop had already spent 17 days in China during her second world tour between December 1878 and January 1879, but this was nevertheless a pioneering journey, leading her further up than any explorer in this area. If China was not uncharted territory, the hostility to foreigners after the settlement of Treaty Ports in the aftermath of the Second Opium War and the dangers of navigation on the Yangtze River alone would have deterred even the hardiest. Taking photographs and developing them in these circumstances was no mean feat and required both expertise and determination. Bird Bishop had plenty of both.

1  Bird Bishop’s first travel account that contained photographs was Korea and her Neighbours, A Narrative of Travel, With an Account of the Recent Vicissitudes and Present Position of the Country, published by John Murray in 1898. All references to this work in this article will be indicated thus: (Korea). It is to be noted that the 487-page-long account of Korea is illustrated with 20 photographs, whereas the 557-page-long narrative of the journey in China (published only a year after) contains no less than 106 photographs, figures which tell about Bird Bishop’s (and her readers’) growing interest in and passion for photography. The edition of reference for this article is Isabella L. Bishop, The Yangtze Valley and Beyond (London: John Murray, 1899). All references to this work in this article will be indicated thus: (Yangtze Valley). 2  I am here paraphrasing Susan Bassnett, who concludes her chapter about “Travel Writing and Gender” on the idea that these are tendencies, but that there is no way women’s travel writing can be differentiated from that of male writers in terms of stylistic features (239-240).

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We shall first see that the photographs of the Other that pepper her text also say a lot about her own motivations as a photographer and about her practice of photography. Travel-writing and photography became inseparable precisely at the time Bird Bishop started taking lessons in photography. Besides, photography and ethnography developed at the same time, and it is clear that Bird Bishop’s photographs had first and foremost a documentary role. But there was yet another, more unavowed and more personal reason why she needed to include photographs in her account: outrivaling her masculine counterparts. Whether seen as an illustration of the text, or taken independently, the photographs tell different stories of how Bird Bishop interacted with the Chinese, with the native people of the remote Somo area and with the women she encountered, as a traveller, as a writer, as a photographer and as a representative of the British Empire all in one. Finally, an image has as much to say about its maker as about its subject: the only self-portrait Bird Bishop included in her text speaks volumes about her awareness of the evocative power of photography. Her self-portrait is a visual statement about her self-­consciousness that is at loggerheads with the image we get of her when reading her text. This photograph participates in the ambiguity of a travel narrative that hovers between othering and identification and between the truthful rendition of reality and fictionalization.

Photography: a “Craze,” a Necessity Bird Bishop was not the first photographer to travel around China, but she was one of the first female ones. Before her, John Thomson had brought back countless photographs and published a monumental four-­ volume work of ethnographical investigation, Illustrations of China and its People (1873-1874). Interestingly, Thomson was appointed as Instructor in Photography at the Royal Geographical Society in 1886 and a letter from Bird Bishop to John Scott Keltie, secretary of the Royal Geographical Society, proves that she started photography under his prestigious supervision. It also proves that to Bird Bishop, photography had become “a complete craze”: “I like it better than any other pursuit I ever undertook” (RGS/ CB 7/11). Paradoxically, in the paratext of The Yangtze Valley, she does not seem to credit her own photographs with any particular value, including them in the generic appellation of “illustrations” together with the 11 reproductions from Chinese drawings which figure in her travel account. Yet,

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reading her letters to John Murray, both before and after publication, one becomes aware that Bird Bishop was excessively concerned about her negatives and about the whole process of including photographs in her text and of publishing them.3 This interest and care is recorded in her travel narrative too, but as Elisabeth Hope Chang aptly noticed, “Bird Bishop’s text spends far more time describing the difficulties of extracting images in China than it does reflecting on her reasons for making them” (168). Bird Bishop repeatedly alludes to the technical problems entailed by being a travelling photographer: she reminds us that photography is on one level a chemical-mechanical process, recording on film the rays of light emanating from an object. The text very plausibly explains the way the technology determined what could be recorded and how it would be presented, and fortunately, Bird Bishop is as accurate and fond of details when she documents her own photographing practice as in her observation of the Other. There were natural impediments to photography and thanks to one of them (elevation), we learn about the type of camera she used (“one of Ross’s best”) and the technique she resorted to (“celluloid films”) (Yangtze Valley, 421-422). Sometimes there is too much wind to take pictures (Yangtze Valley, 378, 395, 396), at others not enough condensed water to develop them, the water on the Yangtze River being improper because too muddy, so that a fine, even veil is deposited on her negatives (156). At times there is too much light to develop her photographs (210), but not enough to take a good one. But despite these difficulties, on the whole, we get a picture of her as a natural-born photographer, one who photographs as easily as she walks (and the two activities are often linked): “[…] walking and photographing as it suited me” (208-209). She is an amateur photographer only in the etymological acceptation of the term (from the Latin amare, to love) and the text records the pleasure she takes at each step of the difficult, but rewarding process (Yangtze Valley, 156). Although Bird Bishop reminded her readers in her preface that “these journeys […] were undertaken for recreation and interest solely” (ix), it soon becomes clear that she took photography very seriously: her camera was not an accessory in her travels but an essential tool, a prolongation of 3  Bird Bishop’s letters to her life-long editor, John Murray, are kept at the John Murray Archive at the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh. For letters about photography and its hold on her, see in particular, folios 1-2; 4-6; 9-10, 22-25, 29 (NLS. MS 42028) and folios 1-2 (NLS. MS 42029).

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her own self almost. She presents herself as a very meticulous photographer, a perfectionist even, and the quality of her photographs attests to it. In her text, she mentions missed opportunities to take photographs with vivid regret: “When owing to weather or hurry, or some other tyranny I did not photograph some striking peculiarity, I never met with it again” (252, emphasis mine). She constantly worries about the quality of her work and about its reception by critics (Yangtze Valley, 156), and I would agree with the critics who have interpreted these self-dismissing comments as manifestations of anxieties about her generic status as author and photographer.4 Bird Bishop’s tone is often apologetic although she seems to have been a very self-possessed and skilled photographer. Luke Gartlan, in his 2011 essay on Bird Bishop and photography, is one of the very few who regard Bird Bishop’s photographs not just as a recreation but as a serious means to “establish her credentials as an explorer deserved of her hard-fought membership of the Royal Geographical Society” (Gartlan, 17). Photography was very much a means for Bird Bishop to prove her worth and legitimacy as a woman traveller. She was fully aware that travel-­ narratives could not do without photography, therefore proving her skill was of paramount importance. If her photographs failed, she took pains to show that the failure was due to external circumstances, some natural as we have seen before, others human: more often than not it was the crowds that formed around her that thwarted her plans and she vents her frustration in the text more than once (166-167).5 Indeed, mastering the technical aspect was one thing, but taking photographs, like developing them, was very seldom a solitary practice and implied interaction with the Other, whether it be the subject of the photograph or the people around it. It was truly an event in the sense Sontag attributed to it.6 And on this score, Bird Bishop’s self-control was sometimes not enough. Mostly, it was precisely the curiosity awakened by her 4  See Elizabeth Hope Chang who lists these critics and quotes Lila Matz Harper who suggests that Bird Bishop studied nursing and photography as part of an effort to gain a new, more professional authorial status (Chang 165, note 59). 5  In another instance, the wet weather and the people conjointly spoil her picture: “My films were spotted with damp, and would have failed anyhow, owing to the overpowering curiosity of the people” (Yangtze River, 505). 6  “A photograph is not just the result of an encounter between an event and a photographer; picture taking is an event in itself. […] After the event has ended, the picture will still exist, conferring on the event a kind of immortality (and importance) it would never otherwise have enjoyed. […] Photographing is essentially an act of non-intervention” (Sontag, 11).

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camera, the tripod and all the cumbersome paraphernalia necessary to her taking and developing pictures that prevented her from achieving her goal. She explains how on entering a village she noticed a particularly beautiful arch which she wished to photograph: policemen tried in vain to push the crowds aside (198). The people’s curiosity was such that it amounted to a disregard for Bird Bishop’s authority (although a beautiful picture of the said arch is to be found on the page opposite, which proves that in the end, she did manage to take the picture). On some other occasion, their violently jerking her camera may be seen as a natural reaction in the face of the aggression it represented. As Susan Sontag put it, “there is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera” and that it is “a tool of power” (7-8). The people’s scopic desire to see in Bird Bishop’s stead may be linked to the voyeurism she constantly complains about. Bird Bishop seems to fail to understand that her camera hurts the people’s feelings and represents a breach of propriety. Her eagerness to take photographs sometimes unleashes very violent reactions, as when she tries to climb a ladder to take a photograph in a temple.7 The people are outraged at her behavior and fear the indignation of the gods (Yangtze Valley, 285). Taking photographs is indeed a question of proxemics, of keeping the right distance, and it can be seen as trespassing. Her rather complacent remarks about Chinese superstitions—foreigners are either accused of eating or abducting children to get their eyes (176)— betray her obtuse refusal to see that, after all, there is an obvious and logical link between her camera and their beliefs in magic. Her binoculars and cameras are said to be able to see the treasures of the mountains (122), they are therefore treated as “foreign devils” (154)—and the Chinese people Bird Bishop encounters think there is a black devil in her camera. Although she dismisses these claims with aloofness and the superiority of the educated, we may see the natives as entitled to thinking that her photographs are “foreign magic” (306). Sontag would have agreed with them, seeing as she did photographs as expressing “something both sentimental and implicitly magical, […], [as] attempts to contact or lay claim to another reality” (Sontag 1971, 16). The people instinctively feel what she 7  Respectable Chinese women were not allowed to travel on their own in broad daylight in China at the time, and Bird Bishop may have added a further sacrilegious impropriety by trespassing upon the sacred grounds of the temple. As Olive Checkland aptly said, “had Mrs Bishop adopted a safe posture hidden away as the Chinese would have liked she would have seen nothing of the countryside, nor learnt anything of the habits and customs of the people” (131).

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was to theorize much later, namely that “[…] there is something predatory in the action of taking a picture. To photograph people is to violate them by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed” (Sontag 1971, 14). In an effort to rally their support, Bird Bishop also uses her own photographs for didactic purposes, to educate them: “I showed the people a number of my photographs taken en route, to show them that I was not doing anything evil or hurtful, but they said, though quite good-naturedly, that it was ‘foreign magic’” (306). Bird Bishop considers this as a “humanizing” process (135): the degree of intimacy reached is measured by the interest her trackers take in her art. So there are also instances when taking or showing photographs brings people together and establishes a bond between them. It can provoke “yells,” or “giggles,” and even open laughter which binds people more surely than a common language (50). This bond can even lead to a reversal of the seeing/seen relationship as when her coolies’ “growing interest in photography, reaches the extent of pointing out objects at times ‘to make pictures of’” (207). This unsettles the domineering/domineered or the superior/inferior paradigm and turns her coolies into active agents, co-producing the art and imposing their own choice of subjects worthy of photography. Photography may therefore be seen as a form of “reciprocal vision,” a form of ritualized and symbolic exchange which Pratt has shown has been at the core of many an encounter between travellers and indigenous peoples (Pratt, 80-81).

Beyond the Documentary Value of Photographs: Implied Criticism The technical difficulties of the new medium were a challenge that greatly interested Bird Bishop and she was equally taken with the visual advances associated with photography. She seems to have embraced the belief, still common in the late nineteenth century, that photography, in alliance with nature, afforded visual clarity. Her comment on the collection of zoological and botanical books kept in the Ting Library (the finest private library of China, in Hangchow) that they were “superbly illustrated in the best style of Chinese wood engraving,” meaning that “the illustrations are almost photographically accurate,” implies that in her mind, photographic accuracy was synonymous with scientific merit (Yangtze Valley, 34). The

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same association between photography and scientific accuracy is made through her comment about one of the doctors she meets at the Hangshow Medical Mission hospital: “Dr. Lu is a remarkable man in his profession, first as a brilliant operative surgeon, and then for insight and accurate diagnosis. […] He is a skilful medical photographer, and his microscopic and physiological drawings are very beautiful and show great technical skill” (Yangtze Valley, 48-49). In another passage she praises “the superb friezes” which ornate arches and represent “in a most masterly fashion mandarins’ processions, mandarins administering justice […] all rendered with photographic accuracy, and with a wonderful power of catching the expressions of the various faces” (Yangtze Valley, 198-201). In fact, in her attempt to scientifically document China, Bird Bishop took hundreds of photographs which could not be included in this text but which were partly published in 1900, in a photographic album entitled Chinese Pictures, Notes on Photographs made in China. The selection she made to accompany her travel account is worth commenting upon: her photographs fall into the usual categories of early photographs, divided into clearly demarcated genres with distinct visual conventions: people, places and events. Out of the 106 photographs, 23 represent people (men, women, officials, soldiers, missionaries) and activities, 80 represent places (cities and villages with their gates, bridges, castles and temples, rivers, landscapes), 2 represent events (a religious dance, and a death). These figures are telling: the sociological and ethnological aspects entailed in the discovery of another country are massively overshadowed by Bird Bishop’s photographic interest in places, be they natural or man-made structures: in this respect, the first chapter aptly entitled “Geographical and introductory” seems to set the tone for the whole narrative and Bird Bishop seemed truly reluctant to broach the subject of the people despite her introductory disclaimer: “To write of the Yangtze Valley […] without any allusion to such an important factor as its inhabitants, would be a mistake, for sooner or later, in various ways, we shall have to reckon with them” (Yangtze Valley, 10). One must bear in mind that Bird Bishop was extremely anxious to please the members of the Royal Geographical Society, and one may argue that it was probably easier to photograph places than people. It is also true that Westerners had a fascination for the exotic Oriental architecture that had inspired many illustrations and imitations in Europe since the eighteenth century, so taking a large number of architectural photographs was a means for Bird Bishop to satisfy the common reader (Cody, 12). Most of

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the photographs, instead of offering a real typology of people, offer a typology of bridges (bamboo bridges, ordinary covered bridges, zig-zag bridges, double-roofed bridges, suspension bridges, dragon bridges, etc.), of temples and pagodas (of the God of Literature, Rock temple, City temple, porcelain temple, etc.). The text itself, however, is as much about human encounters as it is about scenery or villages and cities, so the discrepancy between the total number of photographs and the number of paragraphs devoted to people is huge. This hiatus between text and image is particularly telling in the case of photographs of women, as only three portraits of Chinese women appear in the account. The first photograph included is that of a beggar woman peering at us from the confines of her mat hut. She seems barely human because of her squat, ape-like posture and it is difficult to identify anything conventionally feminine in her distraught features. The photograph comes at the end of a lengthy description of the life of those Bird Bishop qualifies as “the very lowest dregs of the Chinese humanity of a large city, […] the pariah débris of Hankow” (Yangtze Valley, 77). In this subjective description, disgust and pathos vie for prominence (she mentions their “loathsome” bodies and calls them “he unsightly and unnatural” [77]). There is some kind of progression in the way the photographs of female characters are organized: the second picture being that of a woman reeling silk and the last one of a woman wearing an elaborate gala head-dress; the three main strata of society are thus represented. The last photograph, which was taken by Dr. Kinnear, was chosen by Bird Bishop to be included in her text (Fig.  10.1). The woman is seen in profile, which is also the most reminiscent of the ethnographic impulse to classify peoples according to race, ethnicity and so on. The fragmentation resulting from the close chest shot and the legend both dehumanize the woman, the scientific objectivity of the photographer being ascertained by a note that invites us to go back to a previous page to understand that the name of the people in question, referred to as “dog-faced,” bears no relation to their physiognomy.8 When taken together, these three photographs seem to endorse the colonialist’s complacent superiority, the Eurocentric gaze and 8  The linguistic signs that accompany the photographs are mostly to be blamed for the reification of the subjects photographed: for instance, there are countless photographs with people on them (even sometimes seen in close-up), but they remain unidentified and it is their function, or the objects they carry, or the buildings they stand next to that give the photographs their names as if the people were transparent: “oil baskets and wooden purse” (Yangtze Valley, 344), “barrow traffic” (345), “altar of Incense on Man-Tze Roof” (418);

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Fig. 10.1  “Gala Head-dress, “Dog-faced” Woman.” 1896. Photograph by Dr. Kinnear. Gelatin Silver Print, 9.8x14.3  cm. Copyrights The Royal Geographical Society

appraisal of the Other as a barbarian, a sub-species close to the animal realm: the first woman is seen squatting like a dog in its kennel,9 and the last one, although more socially advanced, is a dog-faced woman. Yet, it is possible to read these photographs as a subtle subversion of this gaze, as their very paucity seems to make visible and, discreetly but firmly, denounce the subaltern status of women. The striking scarcity of photographic material concerning women may be explained by very practical reasons. The fact is that Bird Bishop was constantly accompanied or guided by men: she was first in the company of the trackers who hauled or pulled her boat up the Yangtze rapids, and then of the coolies who carried her luggage and her chaise during her road trip through Sze-Chuan. She did meet women, often in large groups when “Elephantiasis” (427) being perhaps the worst case in point as only the name of the disease is mentioned. 9  Bird Bishop even uses the word “kennel” to describe the mat huts in which the beggars live (Yangtze Valley, 77).

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their curiosity led them to come and see Bird Bishop at her inn, but then she complained that they shunned exposure and were reluctant to have their picture taken, out of fear and superstition. By choosing only three female portraits, Bird Bishop shows that women are virtually absent from public life and that they are most often subjected, first to their father, then to their husband and mother-in-law: very early in the text, she voices her concern that “hurry, crowds, business, the absence of the feminine element and noise are common to all Chinese cities” (Yangtze Valley, 81). Taken together, these three photographs of women deliver a powerfully visual statement of woman’s subjection in China, of her status as a subaltern, not just to European visitors, but to Chinese people as well. Bird Bishop makes visible the constraints imposed upon them by choosing to represent their bodies as framed by structures and objects (the mat hut, the loom, the head-dress) that seem to prevent them from moving freely, like the bandages of the bound feet Bird Bishop saw only on two occasions, but refused to photograph, because she considered the subject already widely illustrated. Yet, the numerous comments on foot-binding that pepper the text express Bird Bishop’s sympathy for the pain and deformity inflicted upon these women for the sake of a “barbarous” tradition (Yangtze Valley, 241). She laments over the fact that these “golden lilies,”10 (240) doom them to hobble and waddle rather than walk, and that their bodies are crippled just for them to be able to marry. So the absence of photographs is not necessarily synonymous with indifference on Bird Bishop’s part. On the contrary, it just means that text and image complement each other and that we need to turn to the text to get a full picture of women’s role in society. In this regard, one may say that one of the most potent photographs of women in the text is an absent photograph, one that exists only through ekphrasis (like Barthes’s evocation of the winter-garden photograph of his mother, the one that truly allows him to “rediscover his mother,” 91). It is a group portrait of the Man-Tse women who are “beautiful after the Madonna type” (Yangtze Valley, 430), a statement which is clearly ethnocentric, taking the European “Madonna type” as a gauge of Oriental beauty. Bird Bishop suggests that their beauty could not be fixed for eternity on the film, because they fled giggling instead of posing long enough for her to capture their likeness. These women, contrary to other Chinese women, can run freely and 10  “Golden lilies” was the poetic name given to bound feet, otherwise called “golden lotus” or “lotus” feet. Bird Bishop does not expatiate on the origins of the expression.

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escape the authoritative gaze of the European photographer because they are themselves powerful women, equal to the men of their indigenous group, the Man-Tse. By saying that “the reader must take their good looks on trust” (Yangtze Valley, 430), Bird Bishop implies that we need to trust her words: she invites us to turn to her text rather than simply to her photographs, and indeed, elsewhere in the text she professes an admiration for Chinese women, which the photographs fail to convey.11 It may be argued, as Laurence Williams does in her article about Bird Bishop’s account of Japanese women, that Bird Bishop’s “strong interest in the lives and degree of social freedom” of Chinese women may be understood as “a key generic expectation of female-authored accounts, filling a gap in knowledge that had often been passed over by male writers or dealt with in a largely superficial or stereotyped manner” (Williams, 2). Just like the quasi absence of photographs of women, the fact that the men photographed are either missionaries, soldiers, or Chinese officials and mandarins, may be wrongly interpreted as an endorsement of British or Chinese imperialism. The text is also very vocal on this subject and denounces the stereotypes and clichés about any form of brutality and subjection, be it Chinese or English. So it appears that Bird Bishop’s stance as a photographer is unstable, hesitating between an objectifying gaze and a humanizing one, between the anthropologist’s instinct to record and classify and her instinct as a woman traveller to seek and render the diversity and variety of what she saw. Bird Bishop’s practice of photography, her choice of subjects, her inclusion of photographs in her texts really adumbrate Susan Sontag’s suggestion that photographs are “inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, fantasy” (23). There is one photograph in particular that is liable to such “speculation” and “fantasy” more than any other in the text because of its uniqueness, and that is her own photographic portrait.

Portrait of the Traveller/Writer as a Manchu Woman: The Illusion of Identification The only photographic portrait of Isabella Bird Bishop comes late in the text, on page 353. Roughly, two-thirds of the book have been read and the reader has had time to become familiar with the first person narrator 11  Bird Bishop admits that she “like[s] the Chinese women better than any Oriental women that [she] know[s]” (Yangtze Valley, 270).

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of this mostly very personal travel account, heavily relying on the impressions of a narrator who flaunts her femininity the better to vie with masculine travel writers.12 Besides, the reader’s expectations and legitimate curiosity as to what the author of the book might look like have been raised a few pages earlier by the legend of a photograph mentioning “The Author’s arrival at a Chinese Inn” (303). Yet the said photograph fails to deliver any photographic likeness of the author: only her coolies appear in the midst of a jumble of luggage. The author is characterized by her absence, which makes sense as she is the only photographer and cannot stand before and behind the camera at the same time. Therefore, the full-­ length portrait we discover on page 353 (Fig.  10.2) finally comes as a surprise, unprepared as we are for this untimely arrival, in the midst of a chapter about the beauty of poppy fields in April and about the traveller’s impressions of the plain and city of Chengtu. In this photograph, the author appears “in Manchu dress,” a beautiful silk garment embroidered with white butterflies. The fluidity of the dress enhances the feminine curves of Bird Bishop, but contrasts greatly with the rigidity of her posture. Seen in three-quarter-profile, Bird Bishop is facing the camera. Her commanding and imperious gaze seems to look us straight in the eye (with a slight upward angle, the photograph even manages to convey the impression that Bird Bishop is slightly above us, although in real life she was only four feet eleven inches tall). She is holding a fan in her left hand and is pressing it close to her chest. This is clearly a studio photograph, the first of its kind in the text; the bare background is probably meant to help the viewer focus on the character portrayed. If we turn to the list of illustrations, we find that the photograph was taken in Edinburgh. This photograph, meant to convey a likeness, is puzzling in more ways than one. The Manchu dress evokes a

12  As in her previous travel accounts, Bird Bishop never misses an opportunity to stress the fact that “no European woman” has been there before (173, 403) or to show that she is a great sight for women who travelled far to come and see “the foreign woman” (269). She notices that the Chinese people are surprised that a woman could write, sew and take photographs (210). As she ventures beyond the authorized borders, what she calls “the beyond,” she registers the fact that the lamas have never seen a foreign woman before (400). She also asserts her femininity by paying attention to “details of clothing, accounts of domestic life,” documenting the everyday life of the people she meets, or stressing the kind of relationship she has with them, which, according to specialists like Susan Bassnett or Sara Mills, are many hallmarks of women’s travel writing (Bassnett 230; Mills, 51).

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Fig. 10.2  Mrs. Bishop in Manchu Dress (1899) The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Picture Collection, The New York Public Library. (1899). Retrieved from https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/ items/510d47e1-­3d2c-­a3d9-­e040-­e00a18064a99

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region of China previously visited by Bird Bishop13 but which was not on her route during this particular trip. The linguistic signs therefore point to two different locations, introducing dislocation and estrangement within the text. Edinburgh and Manchuria are brought together in an artificial way and are apparently disconnected both from the actual location of the author in her journey (the province of Sze Chuan) and from the text itself (as there seems to be no link between text and image), introducing a double de-territorialization. Upon closer examination, text and image are linked but in the most artificial way, transforming the text into a pretext for the photograph to appear “justified.” On the page facing the photograph, as she recounts her arrival in Chengtu, Bird Bishop remarks upon the Tartar quarter of the city: In a street of shops several of the signs are written in Manchu. In this quarter it was refreshing to see the tall, healthy-looking women with “big feet,” long outer garments, and roses in their hair, as in Manchuria, standing at their doorway talking to their friends, both male and female, with something of the ease and freedom of Englishwomen. (352)

In the first volume of Korea and her Neighbours, her previous travel account which told of her unplanned and precipitated escape from Korea to the Vice-Royalty of Manchuria, she reminded her readers that it was the Manchu Dynasty that had ruled China by right of conquest since 1644 (Korea, 218). The Manchu dress is therefore a very potent symbol of Chinese imperialism, but also of strong femininity as Manchu women are the only women in China who do not bind their feet, which Bird Bishop sees as an expression of their freedom (Korea, 221). The photograph of the author therefore introduces a double process of difference and identification: the garb is an index of Bird Bishop’s identification with the Manchu dynasty inscribing her endorsement of the Imperial stance and her feeling of kinship with the Manchu women, and at the same time, it precludes her own identification with the author/ traveller the text has made us familiar with. Indeed, the punctum of the photograph, “the element that rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me” (Barthes, 26) is the apparently innocuous fan, which is much more than just the sartorial detail meant to put the 13  She escaped from Korea to Manchuria where she remained for two months in the summer of 1897, that is to say, just before she embarked upon her journey up the Yangtze River.

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finishing touch to the outfit or to make it look more real, more authentic. The folding-fan which looks like some kind of attribute of power, a scepter of sorts, confers to the figure a regal look and signifies her authority; it says: here is the woman who was presented to the Queen before her departure, who dined with the Prime Minister, William Gladstone, and who has just dedicated her book to the Marquess of Salisbury, K.G. with his permission. The fan, unlike the pen, which is too markedly phallic, is a much more ambiguous symbol as far as gender is concerned, as both men and women carry fans in Asia, it is also an object that tells a story, therefore reminding us of Bird Bishop’s “authority.” Here, because it is folded, it looks much more like the weapon it was sometimes used as. Besides, it creates a vertical line that points at the dainty but unbound foot which emerges out of the plaits of the dress, reminding us that unlike the women she met in China, Bird Bishop was not maimed by tradition, but free to follow her own path. This unique photograph was probably circulated and reproduced, “part of the currency of her literary fashion” (Chubbuck 1). It imposes the vision of a woman who appears to be very different from the one we see in the text. Bird Bishop travelled in Chinese cotton clothes which functioned as a camouflage to secure her anonymity.14 Her normal travelling outfit was a mixture of a Japanese hat, English shoes and gloves and Chinese cotton dress that contradicted the uniformity of her Manchu outfit.15 The humor that often characterizes the descriptions of her attire is absent from the photograph,16 lost perhaps during the long pose Bird Bishop must have taken while posing for the photographer in Edinburgh. This photograph, taken when she was back home and inserted retrospectively in the text, draws our attention to the myth-making process or to the fictionalization at play both in text and image. Because we can plainly see that Bird Bishop chose a photograph of herself as another,17 we 14  See in particular page 172 where she mentions the fact that her Chinese dress allows her to escape an angry mob. For other descriptions of her clothes during her travels see, Yangtze Valley, 195, 407, 417, 467. 15  “I wore straw sandals over English tan shoes to avoid slipping and this they regarded as a confession of foreign inferiority. I was wearing a Chinese woman’s dress with a Japanese kurumaya’s hat, the one perfect travelling hat, and English gloves and shoes” (Yangtze Valley, 210). 16  See for instance, page 407, where she considers herself as a ragamuffin. 17  “Soi-même comme un autre” according to Paul Ricoeur’s notion of “ipseité.” Ricoeur’s definition of the self means that selfhood does not define itself against the other but includes it, which is what Bird Bishop does when she poses in a Manchu dress: she embraces the alterity of the Manchu women and makes it hers while remaining herself absolutely.

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are reminded of “the fundamental tension between the process of self-­ fictionalization and the travel-writer cum photographer’s claims to veracity” (Bassnett, 235).

Conclusion Bird Bishop refused to be considered as an itinerant photographer, yet her photographic practice was sustained by her nomadism. Her interest in people and particularly in women was real, yet is not reflected in the selection of photographs she included in her text. She considered that photography was a democratic art and that it could educate people (both in China and at home, where she took part in conferences showing lantern slides) yet she was adamant her photographs should only be reproduced sparingly. She took hundreds of photographs in China, yet included only a few of them in her travel narrative. She was eager to show them but wanted to protect herself from the curiosity they triggered. She included a photographic portrait of herself in her text, yet one that is so different from the other photographic portraits that it creates wonder and awe rather than quenching the reader’s thirst for facts. Whereas her text allows the reader to see her in a multifarious way, sometimes allowing us to catch glimpses of a female traveller full of humor, self-derision and doubt, the portrait imposes a rather constrained, rigid and monolithic image of a woman who looks certain of her prerogatives, although her garment is perhaps an index of the ambivalence of her position. The Manchu dress both evokes Bird Bishop’s taste for exoticism and her embracing another type of femininity, another culture, yet it also looks like a tacit endorsement of Manchu imperialism. This series of contradictions and paradoxes concerning her practice of photography and use of it in this travel narrative could be said to be emblematic of her whole attitude to China. They are also typical of the tensions which Sara Mills considers as inherent to the work of women travel writers (Mills 63). To paraphrase Susan Bassnett, we could say that her photographic stance is “a fascinating combination of imperious behaviour and social conscience” (227- 228). The relationship between text and image is therefore very complex, at times concordant and congruous, at times discordant and incongruous. The text often complements the photographs, as when it gives lavish descriptions insisting on the colors of scenery, whereas the nearest photograph in black-and-white necessarily fails to give a truthful image of reality. The photographs thus participate in the text’s ambiguous relationship to

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truth-telling: as a record of things past, they attest to a certain reality. The fact that there are no studio photographs (except for her own portrait) means that we are led to believe that this is authentic China, that this is a reliable testimony, not a fake situation, no Chinese portrait à la Miller.18 Yet the photographs do not necessarily “illustrate” the text in the etymological sense of “making clearer” or bringing into light. Sometimes, the relationship between text and image can be jarring: then, they tell a completely different story, adding to the complexity of the interpretation (her own photographic portrait is an excellent case in point, but is not the only one). “Going beyond” was an apt metaphor for her daring travels through China, it is also an invitation to the reader to follow in her footsteps and “read beyond,” beyond our prejudices about China and its people by reading her text anew and looking at her photographs with new eyes.

References Barthes, Roland. 2000. Camera Lucida, Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. London: Vintage. Bassnett, Susan. 2002. Travel Writing and Gender. In The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, ed. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, 225–241. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bird Bishop, Isabella L. 1898. Korea and her Neighbours. Vol. I.  London: John Murray. ———. 1899. The Yangtze Valley and Beyond. London: John Murray. ———. 1900. Chinese Pictures: Notes on Photographs Made in China. London: Cassell & co. ———.. n.d. Letters to John Murray, John Murray Archive, National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh, NLS. MS 42024-42029. Checkland, Olive. 1996. Isabella Bird and “A Woman’s Right to Do What She Can Do Well.”. Aberdeen: Scottish Cultural Press. Chubbuck, Kay, ed. 2002. Letters to Henrietta: Isabella Bird. Boston: Northeastern University. Cody, Jeffrey W., and Frances Terpak, eds. 2011. Brush & Shutter: Early Photography in China. Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute. Gartlan, Luke. 2011. ‘A Complete Craze’: Isabella Bird Bishop in East Asia. PhotoResearcher 15: 13–25.

18  We are referring here to the studio photographs of Chinese people by the American, Milton Miller, which were all the rage in the late 1860s and were highly codified and artificial (Cody, 80).

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Harper, Lila Marz. 2001. Solitary Travelers: Nineteenth-Century Women’s Travel Narratives and the Scientific Vocation. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Hope Chang, Elizabeth. 2010. Britain’s Chinese Eye. Literature, Empire and Aesthetics in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. Mills, Sara. 1991. Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and Colonialism. London: Routledge. Pratt, Mary Louise. 1992. Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge. Reviron, Floriane. 2009. "Isabella Bird in Japan: Unbeaten Tracks in Travel Literature." In In-Between Two Worlds: Narratives Female Explorers and Travellers, 1850-1945, ed. Béatrice Bijon and Gérard Gâcon, 67–80. New York: Peter Lang. Reviron-Piégay, Floriane. 2016. “Isabella Bird Bishop’s Unbeaten Tracks in Japan ou le récit de voyage comme autoportrait d’une aventurière engagée.” E-rea 14.1. http://erea.revues.org/5493, DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/ erea.5493 Ricoeur, Paul. 1990. Soi-même comme un autre. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Sontag, Susan. 1971. On Photography. London: Penguin Books. Thomson, John. 1873-1874. Illustrations of China and its People. A Series of Two Hundred Photographs with Letter Press Descriptive of the Places and the People Represented. London: Sampson Low, Marston Low & Searle. Williams, Laurence. 2017. ‘Like the Ladies of Europe’? Female Emancipation and the ‘Scale of Civilisation’ in Women Writing on Japan, 1840-1880. In Studies in Travel Writing, 1–16. London: Routledge.

CHAPTER 11

A Woman’s Life of War Pictures: Elizabeth Butler (1846–1933) Nathalie Saudo-Welby

Pictures played a major role in the life of Elizabeth Butler, born Elizabeth Thompson. Having developed an early passion for history and horses, she made a career as a battle artist and was almost elected a member of the Royal Academy in 1879.1 The large oil canvases that brought her fame made her life story worth telling, and she narrated the progress of her career and her vivid memories of her visits to foreign countries in several pieces of autobiographical writing (Letters from the Holy Land, 1903; From Sketchbook and Diary, 1909), which she illustrated with her own watercolours. In 1922, at the age of 76, when she was no longer an active

1  “However, as it turned out, in 1879, I lost my election by two votes only! Since then I think the door has been closed, and wisely” (An Autobiography, 122) Further references to Butler’s Autobiography will be indicated as follows (A x).

N. Saudo-Welby (*) Université de Picardie Jules Verne, Amiens, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 V. Baisnée-Keay et al. (eds.), Text and Image in Women’s Life Writing, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84875-0_11

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painter,2 Elizabeth Butler published her autobiography, which she illustrated with reproductions from her sketchbooks. The foreword to this Autobiography is written in the form of a dialogue: Butler’s friends request her to write her memoirs; she objects that there is already “rather a plethora” of memoirs and that writing one is an “exceedingly difficult thing to do without too much of the Ego” (n.p.). Elizabeth Butler is anticipating the reproach of vanity which was often levelled at those, women in particular, who deemed their life experience interesting and profitable enough for publication. Finally, she agrees, recognizing that, as her friends say, she “can bring in much outside [her]self” (n. p.), thus situating her text outside the narrow confines of the Lady’s diary. In Elizabeth Butler’s autobiographical writings, a rare account of a woman artist’s formative years,3 the “Ego” is indeed displaced by broader issues. In addition to their political and documentary dimension, their value lies in her special interest in military painting, a domain which had until then been only open to male artists. In François Robichon’s study of nineteenth-­ century French military painting, there is not a single mention of a woman artist. In England at the time, moreover, military art was not practised much. In her Autobiography, Elizabeth Butler quotes her contemporary, the French historical and military painter, Ernest Meissonnier, referring to herself in the following terms: “L’Angleterre n’a guère qu’un peintre militaire, c’est une femme” (A 109). This statement contains a suggestion that poor quality is added to scarcity. It allows us to gauge how difficult it must have been for a woman to make her way through the masculine politics of military conflict.4 Elizabeth Butler’s Autobiography is a precious document about the apprenticeship of a woman artist who dealt with a subject involving heightened gender norms and expectations. My analysis will firstly inquire into 2  “Lady Butler exhibited at the Royal Academy for the last time in 1920. Entered in the catalogue as ‘In the Retreat from Mons: the Royal Horse Guards,’ it is a sombre picture of a squadron of that regiment, riding along a wet road, during the retreat of 23 August–5 September 1914. […] In returning to the subject of the European theatre she abandoned the self-confident, sporting attitude of the pictures painted during the war and reverted to one of her original themes of the 1870s, that of weary and wounded soldiers, whose appearance […] suggests the trauma they have undergone.” Usherwood and Spencer-Smith, 152. 3  A few women artists, such as Marie Bashkirtseff, had written diaries, but none of these had been published at the time and some of them remain unpublished even today. See Denise Noël, 2004. 4  Florence Nightingale sent her sister to ask Elizabeth Butler whether she would allow The Roll Call to be taken to her after the exhibition at the Royal Academy, for her to see (A 87).

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the way Butler negotiates the masculine ethos of self-writing: Butler’s progress in a man’s domain leads her to write something resembling a man’s story of his education, but she also maintains a certain dose of self-­ irony. This is provided in part by the way she inserts extracts from the diary she kept from her teens into adulthood. These record her Grand Tour across Europe with her parents and sister, as well as her later stays in foreign countries with her husband, who was an Army officer. The Autobiography is thus double-voiced: the mature artist sometimes lets the young girl express her youthful enthusiasm and naïve hopes in her own words. Some of the original diary entries are included in inverted commas. The different textual layers allow Butler to cast an ironical look on her youthful ambitions, but the contrast between her early sketches and the large oil canvases mentioned in the text make these ambitions both legitimate and tolerable. Nevertheless, Butler’s legitimacy as an artist remains a point at issue, because she does not try to disguise the fact that she had never seen armed combat. The book contains discussions of the way she overcame the difficulty of painting an experience which she made hers without having gone through it. It also tells her story as the member of a very exclusive set of people in pre-First World War England.

The Making of a “Tremendous English Patriot” On the opening page of her Autobiography, Elizabeth Butler explains that, having failed to enter parliament, her father “devoted all his leisure to [her] and [her] younger sister’s education” (1) until they left the “paternal roof” for matrimony.5 “[H]having no boys to bring up,” she writes, “he tried to put all the tuition suitable to both boys and girls into us. One result was that as a child I had the ambition to be a writer as well as a painter” (4). Her father read Roman history to them and took them on a Grand Tour of Europe which spanned several years and was completed by their spending every winter in Italy. With its mixture of discipline and freedom, her education is presented as decisively masculine, and possibly even sheltered from feminine influence.6 Elizabeth was brought up as a “tremendous English patriot” (1) and this may explain why her vocation  Elizabeth’s sister Alice went on to become the poetess Alice Meynell.  Elizabeth’s mother was an accomplished pianist and water-colourist, so that her formative influence cannot be denied. Butler explains that she owes to her mother her help in improving her skill at painting landscapes. 5 6

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developed in the traditionally patriotic genre of battle painting. Around the age of 15, she resolved to join what her father called the “tremendous ruck” of war painters (11, 75), and thus put herself in a position which she once called “abnormal” (113). The first two thirds of her Autobiography contain much material that is traditionally gendered male. At the age of 15, she “stuff[s] [her] sketchbooks with British volunteers in every conceivable uniform, each corps dressed after its own taste.” She even “sen[ds] a design for a uniform to the Illustrated London News, which was returned with thanks” (7). She has an unusual interest in whiskers and pipes. The diary extracts also show how sensitive she was to existing gender roles and to the infringement of gender prejudices. While in Bruges, she records “with horror” in her diary that “one barge was pulled by a woman! ‘It was quite painful to see her bent forward doing an English horse's work, with the band across her chest, casting sullen upward glances at us as we passed, and the perspiration running down her face’” (13). While in Rome, she takes a pinch out of the snuff box of a Franciscan and goes “sneezing over the ruin” with her sister (57). She marvels at the “novel” sight of Italian men kneeling in churches (59). Her fascination for the enforcement and transgression of gender roles takes both an expressive and an empirical form. The diary extracts record Butler’s growing sense that her aspirations are being fulfilled. When she enrols as a student at the Royal Female School of Art in 1866 and is told by its director that she should indeed become an artist,7 she answers meekly that she is ready for “severe study” and does “not wish to start at the wrong end.” Her private thoughts on the question express a less humble determination: “I now really feel as though fairly launched. Ah! they shall hear of me some day. But, believe me, my ambition is of the right sort” (31). The terms in which her progress is told resonate with the masculine spirit expected in male-authored autobiographies: “my drawing is returned with the usual apologies. Well, never mind. The world will hear of me yet” 7  The director of the National Art Training School (also known as the South Kensington schools, which included the Female School of Art), Richard Burchett (1815-1875), belonged to the fringes of the Pre-Raphaelite movement and had common points with his admiring pupil, for he converted to Roman Catholicism, and painted several large history paintings. The left-hand side of Sanctuary, or Edward IV Withheld by Ecclesiastics from Pursuing Lancastrian Fugitives into a Church (1867) depicts a battle scene while the other half represents an ecclesiastical scene, two “masculine” subjects which also drew Elizabeth Thompson’s interest.

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(32). Butler occasionally uses an epic tone and military terms to describe her progress in the male-dominated work of battle painting and Academy exhibitions. Even though the aspiring female painters are given separate classes, they fight among themselves to get to the best positions around the sitter, and a few of them are described as the “loose easel brigade” (34). Her return to the Female School of Art after her Academy success with The Roll Call is described as “triumphal” (35),8 and is followed by an ovation. Her diary entry for May 9, 1866 starts “Veni, vidi, vici” (35). She then goes on to narrate how three of her fellow women students and friends performed a coronation ceremony on her, playing Handel’s famous march “See, The Conquering Hero Comes” on a comb and paper and carrying her along the corridor on a dandy chair (38). “It was a most uncomfortable triumphal progress,” she comments. Butler’s development is often presented in the formulas and phrases which characterize the steps in a man’s successful education. After the private view of her own painting at the Royal Academy in 1874, she expresses her “pleasure at having ‘arrived’ at last” (87): “I awoke this morning and found myself famous,” she writes (88). Some ask her what “the secret of success” is (179). Others send her celebratory poems: “Go on, go on, thou glorious girl” (103). By telling the story of her triumph and describing her moments of public acclaim, Elizabeth Butler exposed herself to the reproach of vanity, but the structure of the text allows her to negotiate her self-aggrandizement so as to make it more acceptable to the public. The adult painter writes from the standpoint of the celebrated artist she has become, but the extracts from the diary she started writing in her early teens allow her to build up interesting contrasts. The selected passages are introduced with gentle irony. She observes that the prolixity of the diary has made selection necessary (39). The distance involved in the process of re-reading herself and cutting out her own words allows her to take towards her youthful energy a stance which is both ironical and legitimizing. Thus, her youthful ambition, which would have been a source of ridicule in a less talented woman, becomes justified and deserving, because it allowed the development of genuine talent. The young Elizabeth’s buoyancy of spirits and her fierce ambition are made understandable by what she became later.

8  Elizabeth Thompson, The Roll Call (1874), Royal Collection. https://www.rct.uk/collection/405915/the-roll-call

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Coming, Seeing and Conquering Gender Prejudices In her Autobiography, Elizabeth Butler narrates her life story from a later perspective, quoting her earlier diaries (which she may have modified for the occasion) and commenting upon them from her later standpoint as an established artist. She is thus able to inflect the story with a spirit of revenge over her models as well as over her former male snubbers. Early in the book, Butler describes how jealous she was of John Everett Millais. What could have been absurd jealousy in a child turns out to be a symptom of legitimate ambition. The episode concerning the reception of The Roll Call contains visual as well as epic possibilities: we can visualize the paintings to be defended from the enthusiastic crowd of viewers, the rival artists, the potential invaders and the policeman who “had to be posted, poor hot man, in my corner to keep the crowd from too closely approaching the picture and to ask the people to ‘move on.’ That policeman was there instead of the brass bar which, as a child, I had pleased myself by imagining in front of one of my works, à la Frith’s ‘Derby Day’” (90). Elizabeth Butler’s father is sure to have taken her to the Royal Academy to see William Powell Frith’s canvas The Derby Day, which was exhibited in 1858 when she was 12 years old.9 The large-scale painting must have felt congenial to her since she had a passion for horses. The carefully-drawn details and the density of Frith’s painting, with its picturesque groups scattered around the canvas, bear a resemblance to Butler’s later paintings. Jealousy and rivalry are everywhere apparent in both the young girl (who covets the brass bar for her own paintings) and the grown-up artist, who coolly comments that the policeman’s “services were quite as necessary for the protection of two lovely little pictures of Leighton's, past which the people scraped to get at mine, they being, unfortunately, hung at right angles to mine in its corner” (90). The little girl’s ambition is shown in a comic light, for, while the rail was meant to act as a barrier between herself and the painting, it arouses in her a yearning for the same brass bar around her own painting, rather than a desire to emulate Frith’s art. We are reminded of Virginia Woolf’s experience in an “Oxbridge” College of being sent off the lawn by a Beadle and barred from the library by a Fellow, as recounted in A Room of One’s Own in 1929. The fact that, in Butler’s memory, the bar is not so much a source of contrariety as an 9  William Powell Frith, The Derby Day (1856-58), Tate Britain. https://www.tate.org.uk/ art/artworks/frith-the-derby-day-n00615

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object of envy, reveals how she situated herself within the male world of rivalry and even of collective violence. Unlike Woolf, Butler tries to find a niche in the patriarchal system rather than contesting it. She covets the power the brass bar implies rather than the protection it represents. However, Butler’s tales of ambition and even revenge over her former condescending superiors are tempered by a few tales of her humiliation, which are told in a comic manner. The stories surrounding her only religious work are full of humour. The Magnificat was painted to satisfy her mother’s hope that she would join the more respectable “ruck” of religious painters. Elizabeth insists that, although she had to call the picture “finished,” she was unsatisfied with it, and she admits that she would have been incapable of making her name in that genre. In any case, far from being better suited to a woman’s endeavours, the sphere of religious art proves to be just as prejudiced as the military world. In Italy, Elizabeth Butler enjoys the processions of men in ecclesiastical dress as a near equivalent to the military parades. The ecclesiastical sphere is indeed as heavily gendered as that of armed conflict. In Rome, she and her mother make “manful” efforts to convey the Magnificat to the Cloisters of Santa Maria degli Angeli, where it is to be exhibited. This is done by standing in the carriage, holding the picture straight. However, once there, Elizabeth is not allowed to take the painting into the exhibition room, because “no permission ha[s] yet been given to admit women before the opening.” (66) Her father and her doctor are thus forced to take her pass and carry the picture in for her while she hides in the carriage with her mother. Her father returns with the following story: “even Podesti, the judge, after some criticisms, and in no way ready to give [the painting] a good place, said to Severn he had expected the signorina's picture to be rubbish (porcheria). I suppose because it was a woman's work. He retracted, and said he would like to see me” (66-67). Judging by the Italian judge’s comment, the rule to exclude women was indeed meant to exclude all women, including the female artist. Even in London, the “poor Magnificat” meets with little success. The Royal Academy rejects it and returns it to her “with a large hole in it,” Butler writes simply. A few lines later, she coolly observes that her next picture is “rejected, but this time without a hole” (77). Elizabeth Butler’s efforts to enter the circle of artists exposed at the Royal Academy, to get a good place for her paintings in the exhibition rooms and to make a name as a battle artist thus involve a mixture of acceptance, deference and compliance on her part. There is no rebellion in her attitude, and the

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perspective of the established artist is not that of a lesson-giver, but rather that of a pithy observer. Nowhere does Elizabeth Butler generalize about the disadvantages surrounding her female sex. Rather, she is aware of how lucky she is to have been given by her father what she evidently regards as a boy’s education. The reluctance of fellow artists and art critics to think of her as a possible and valid rival obviously disturbs the aspiring painter, but what truly matters is the fact that she was able to modify their attitudes. During her first encounter with John Ruskin, at the age of 22, the great man encourages her: “there was no reason why [she] should not become a great artist (!), [she] was ‘destined to do great things’,” but he also warns her to “beware of sensational subjects” and “never mind the subject.” (41) Elizabeth disagrees with his views and dislikes his advice, but she keeps silent and reserves her judgement for her diary: “I did not like that; my great idea is that an artist should choose a worthy subject and concentrate his attention on the chief point. But Ruskin is a lover of landscape art and loves to see every blade of grass in a foreground lovingly dwelt upon” (41, emphasis mine). (I will come back later to the use of the generic masculine in Butler’s designation of the artist in her diary). A later passage proves that John Ruskin’s objections may not have been based on purely aesthetic reasons: Ruskin wrote a pamphlet on that year’s Academy in which he told the world that he had approached Quatre Bras with “iniquitous prejudice” as being the work of a woman. He had always held that no woman could paint, and he accounted for my work being what he found it as being that of an Amazon. I was very pleased to see myself in the character of an Amazon. (117)

The notion of herself as a female warrior must have been precious to Elizabeth Butler because of the suggestion that she had in her the makings of a soldier as well as of a painter. One year later, in 1869, she painted a frontal self-portrait, signed mimi, showing herself with the facial features of a young man. Her hairdo and the gold band in her hair against the dark red background combine to look like a service cap.10 While she does not stare directly at the viewer, her air of indifferent resolve suggests that she

10  The painting is held by the National Portrait Gallery, London (oil with traces of pencil on card, 219 mm x 181 mm, NPG 5314).

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might have envisioned herself as a modern Amazon, with the medallion around her neck heralding the future rewards for her artistic victories. The question of a woman’s legitimacy as a battle artist was crucially dependent on her authority as a source of reliable information on the events she depicts. There was indeed one domain in which Butler’s legitimacy as a woman painter must have remained open to doubt, even to her: this was her right to paint military action without any first-hand or eye-­ witness experience of it. All nineteenth-century military painters, François Bodichon explains, had a personal, albeit fragmentary or partial, experience of armed conflict. As I have already said, military painters were rare in England at the time. Butler’s avowed model, the French military painter Édouard Detaille,11 enrolled in the Eighth Mobile Battalion of the French Army at the beginning of the Franco-Prussian war, after he had made his début as a painter of military subjects. At the time, military painters had all had an experience of combat; they had seen what Elizabeth Butler calls “the real thing” (96, 121, 253). She even describes how, at the end of the year 1914, her “brothers of the brush” from the Royal Academy, “mostly somewhat podgy, and sometimes bald,” light-heartedly played leapfrog in Green Park while waiting to “meet the Boche” (259).

Truthfulness and Legitimacy The acceptance of Butler’s canvas “Missing” at the Royal Academy was a major breakthrough which brought her to the top of her “long hill climb.”12 It is correlated to an event which “proved of great importance to [her]” in 1872: “my introduction, if I may put it so, to the British Army!” (78). Befriended by a general, Sir F.C, and encouraged by her first commissioner, a Mr Galloway in Manchester, Butler then starts to work on The Roll Call.13 However, she remains uncomfortable with the fact that she has not witnessed the military action she depicts, or indeed any military action at all. When making the cartoons for her Quatre Bras painting,14 11  “We visited Detaille’s beautiful studio. He was my greatest admiration at that time. Also Henriette Browne’s and others, and, of course, the Luxembourg, so I drew much profit from my little visit” (103). 12  The oil painting is untraced, and is only known today through a photograph. Paul Usherwood and Jenny Spencer-Smith, Lady Butler, fig. 3, p. 26. 13  “I had long been turning The Roll Call in my mind” (80). 14  Elizabeth Thompson, The 28th Regiment at Quatre Bras (1875), National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia. https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/explore/collection/work/4408/

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she worries about the accuracy of the soldiers’ kneeling position. What would remain undetected by a civilian could appear as a major blunder to a military man. Butler fears that painting by the drill book could be detrimental to the movement and action in her works (99). More crucially, she seems to regard herself as an impostor because of her lack of first-hand experience of combat: “I told an artist the other day, very seriously, that I wished to show what an English square looks like viewed quite close at the end of two hours’ action, when about to receive a last charge. A cool speech, seeing I have never seen the thing! And yet I seem to have seen it – the hot, blackened faces, the set teeth or gasping mouths, the bloodshot eyes and the mocking laughter, the stern, cool, calculating look here and there; the unimpressionable, dogged stare! Oh! that I could put on canvas what I have in my mind!” (99)

These hesitations are typical of the early stage of her career, when she tried to put the picture she had in mind to the test of the historical evidence she could gather together: veterans’ testimonies, old uniforms and other war relics. Elizabeth Butler was indeed eager to prove her technical skills and even expertise: “some people might say I was too anxious to be correct in minor military details,” she observes, “but I feared making the least mistake in these technical matters” (81-82). She tries to come closer to the truth by carefully selecting her models, whether veterans or authentic-looking men: “I had difficulty in finding heads suitable for the Waterloo time,” she writes, showing on what irrational basis painterly truthfulness can rest. She also interrogates veterans and organizes what she calls dress-rehearsals (100), an expression which conveys the idea that history is a retrospective construction. During the preparatory work for The Defence of Rorke’s Drift,15 a painting depicting a scene from the Zulu war and commissioned by Queen, the heroes were “first summoned to Windsor and then sent on to [her]”: They even had a representation of the fight acted by the men who took part in it, dressed in the uniforms they wore on that awful night. Of course, the result was that I reproduced the event as nearly to the life as possible, but

15  Elizabeth Thompson, The Defence of Rorke’s Drift (1880), Royal Collection. https:// www.rct.uk/collection/405897/the-defence-of-rorkes-drift

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from the soldier’s point of view – I may say the private’s point of view – not mine, as the principal witnesses were from the ranks. (149)

The quest for truthfulness comes out as performance and artifice, but at this stage in the book, Butler also introduces the idea that there exists a form of truth about war which is independent of its agents. She even makes the curious comment that it is “against her principles to paint a conflict” (148), as though the essence of military painting could lie outside the battlefield.16 The female artist thus appears as an external source of authority, as well as a factor of relativism. This also comes out in the following anecdote, involving Elizabeth Butler’s observation and representation skills. In 1874, she explains, her canvas The Roll Call, then on display at the Royal Academy, fed the “silly controversy” about the movements of a horse’s legs in motion.17 Butler boasts that she has looked at horses long enough to know better than tradition and she even recommends the experimental method: I had told many people to go down on all fours themselves and walk, noting the sequence with their own hands and knees, which was sure to be correct instinctively. At this same dinner Lady Lothian told me she had followed my advice, and the idea of that sedate grande dame, with grey hair combed under a white lace cap, pacing round her room on all fours I thought delightful. Since those days I have been vindicated by the snap-shot. (95)

In this anecdote, the artist brings a grande dame down for the sake of vindicating her own version of the truth. Proud as she is to have been able to unsettle established truths about how reality is to be represented, she can afford to be slightly derisive about the quest for the truth and about the authority of private lived experience. In an early episode from her diary, her visit to the battlefield of Waterloo at the age of 16, she becomes 16  The context of this quote is the following: Elizabeth Butler’s husband, Sir William Butler, was sanctioned for objecting to the British policy in South Africa and for his belief in the Boers’ rights. His wife went along with her strong disapproval of the “deplorable Zulu War” (147) and disliked the idea of representing this conflict. 17  The controversy was settled thanks to Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic studies showing a horse at a trot and at a gallop. It was proved in 1878 that horses do have their four hooves off the ground when galloping, but this happens when the four feet are bent under the horse and not stretched out to the back and front as it was formerly believed.

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so immersed in a veteran’s stories that she starts performing them herself (27). The movements of the young girl imitating the English Guards reassert the established truth while also interrogating it: the official version of history is being put to the test by a teenage girl, whom nobody would ever have dreamt of performing male military action. Jacques Derrida’s idea, formulated in the course of his analysis of Nietzsche, that women’s writing tends to unsettle dogmatism and to question established truths, is here made apparent.18 Derrida’s imagery, borrowed from horse-riding, presents women as Amazons, unseating the males, and destabilizing gender boundaries, as well as the idea that there is such a thing as “woman”: “In its maneuvers distance strips the lady of her identity and unseats the philosopher-­knight. That is, if he has not already been twice-spurred by the woman. The exchange of stylistic blows or the thrust of a dagger confuses sexual identity.”19 It was probably against Lady Butler’s principles to enter a conflict and in her later comments on what it means to truthfully depict historical scenes, she accepts her marginal position, but gives pride of place to the subjective view of things, which she describes as a picture in the mind. Being able to see a scene in one’s “mind’s eye” (149, 206) is a condition of artistic success: “what you see strongly in that way means a successful realisation in paint” (206). Proposing an alternative truth is the great painters’ privilege: “Turner’s mind saw more truly than the camera,” she writes (237).20 However, Butler’s mind picture sometimes comes into conflict with factual truth: “To be as true to facts as possible I purposely withdrew my own view of the thing” (149). Butler’s perception occasionally challenges the male version of the truth and the patriarchal conception of truth-­ telling. In another light-hearted episode involving Colonel C., Butler explains that her own quest for truthfulness met with displays of male pride and even with imposture equal to her own: Some contradict each other flatly. When Col. C. saw my rough charcoal sketch on the wall, he said no dress caps were worn in that charge, and coolly rubbed them off, and with a piece of charcoal put mean little forage  Jacques Derrida, 1978, 1979, 53.  Idem. 20  François Bodichon notes that French military painters started working from photography as early as the mid-nineteenth century, but that this remained rare until the early twentieth century. Butler writes that she “never used a Kodak [her]self” (183). 18 19

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caps on all the heads (on the wrong side, too!), and contentedly marched out of the door. In comes an old 17th Lancer sergeant, and I tell him what has been done to my cartoon. “Well, miss,” says he, “all I can tell you is that my dress cap went into the charge and my dress cap came out of it!” On went the dress caps again and up went my spirits, so dashed by Col. C. (110)

In correcting the sketch, the colonel performs an authoritative act of male intervention on history-making and on feminine creation. The mark left by his intervention on her creation brings back to mind the “hole” in the rejected Magnificat. Since the display of male authority is undermined by further male intervention, Butler does not need to offer any comment. Indeed, the ultimate test will be the public’s response. Her Balaclava picture makes men cry: “One officer who had been through the charge told a friend he would never have come if he had known how like the real thing it was” (121). Lady Butler observes that truth is relative, and that historical truth is constructed even by those who lived through the historical moments. These insights turn the middle section of the Autobiography into a historical document of some importance for today’s readers, as we are made aware of how Elizabeth Butler’s position as a woman interfered with conventional narratives and representations, and of how gender intervenes in the process of negotiating one’s version of the truth, whether pictorially or verbally.

Ironies As the book progresses, however, there is an increasing sense that the distance between the voice of the aspiring artist and that of the established lioness diminishes. The narrator’s adherence to what she writes becomes greater. Elizabeth Butler sounds more and more like the representative of long-established values. Half-way through the book, she observes that her diary contains too many “superfluous” descriptions of dances and dinners (123), but she makes a more insistent use of the word “delightful” (122). She marvels at the “smiling life” around her in Italy and exults in the amenities of her social position and in her close relation to Empress Eugénie. She savours that “mental Devonshire cream of pleasant days” (152). There are anecdotes about the oddity and absurdity of high life, such as the tale of two friends of hers who spent their railway trip from Cairo to Khartoum playing bridge in the train to keep away from the dust (140). As the list of famous painters and public figures gets longer, the recitation starts bearing

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a resemblance to name-dropping: Alfred Tennyson, Alma-Tadema, Marcus Stone, John Tenniel, George Du Maurier, with whom she dances a quadrille, as well their Majesties, King Edward VII, the Queen and the descendants of Napoleon’s maréchals: the fourth Prince Murat, Ney (the fourth Prince of the Moskowa), Victor Masséna, and so on. The cohort of people of quality sometimes brings Butler’s Autobiography close to that of an aristocratic lady.21 The “charming” world and “nice” people around the artist in the radiant pre-war period come into marked contrast with the ugliness of her military subjects. Lady Butler seems to be more concerned with playing the part of what she has become than with the becoming. “I frankly own I loved these Court receptions,” she writes, “No, I was never bored by them, I am thankful to say; and I don’t believe any woman is who has the luck to go there, whatever she may say” (155). In the foreword to her Autobiography, Butler had warned her readers that they would need to “attune themselves to the stability” of the Victorian and Edwardian times (n.p.). She must have been aware that her life stood for this stability: the social hierarchy and the ideological values on which pre-war Britain was based. She rages against gambling, obesity and pigeon shooting (204) and calls the post-war period “this age of ugliness” (72), sadly missing in “eye-feasts” (73): “Monarchy calls much beauty into existence. Long may it endure!” she writes (231). By the time the Autobiography was published, the campaign for female emancipation had progressed, but this remains unaccounted for in Butler’s book. Did Lady Butler see herself as part of that struggle? Butler’s Autobiography is a sensitive and powerful account of a fascinating personal life, characterized by its involvement with the human dimension of conflict, but it can hardly be described as a feminist text. Butler does mention two female artistic influences, Rosa Bonheur and Henriette Browne,22 but overall, the gender imbalance in her sources of inspiration and admiration remains unquestioned. With the one exception of Evicted, a canvas depicting an Irish peasant woman lamenting over the ruins of her farm, her works always retained their masculine focus. In the diary extracts, the generic masculine is used to designate the artist, but this remains 21  The genre of the Lady’s autobiography was to become very fashionable in the 1930s, giving rise to many parodies. See Margaret Stetz, “Where Parody Meets Satire: Crossing the Line with ‘Lady Addle’,” “Women and Parody in the British Isles,” Polysèmes 23 (2020). 22  “We visited Detaille’s beautiful studio. He was my greatest admiration at that time. Also, Henriette Browne’s and others, and, of course, the Luxembourg, so I drew much profit from my little visit” (103).

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unacknowledged by the older artist: “Alas! for the artist, there is no peace for him. He cannot gaze and peacefully admire; he frets because he cannot ‘get the thing down’ in paint”23 (12). The use of the masculine pronoun to refer to the artist may have gone without saying in Butler’s youth, but it must have troubled the grown-up artist, who avoids using this form. In the last pages of her Autobiography, she obviously enjoys referring to the exhibition of her World War I “khaki watercolours” as her “‘one-man-­ show.’” The expression is used no less than four times, in inverted commas (239, 251, 252, 259); she never speaks of her “one-woman-show.” Irony and gentle humour are much more in Butler’s line than militancy and contestation. Lady Butler’s weapon was her brush and not her pen. Her canvases were evidence that women could master technical skills and expert knowledge in a field that was gendered masculine and seemed bound to remain so. Her relationships with famous British and French artists, politicians and military men also demonstrated her capacity to be treated by them as an equal. Having known Queen Victoria and frequented Empress Eugénie, she was comfortable with the idea that women could hold power equal to men’s. Running against the idea that women’s restricted experience and views had to limit their political and artistic take on things, Butler’s pictures were evidence that women could understand and render the masculine sphere masterfully. This is something which needed no demonstration in writing.

References Bowen, Claire. 2003. “Lady Butler: The Reinvention of Military History.” LISA e-journal. 1.1, accessed 08 jul. 2015. URL : http://lisa.revues.org/3128; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/lisa.3128 Butler, Elizabeth. 1922. An Autobiography. London: Constable. ———. 1993. Elizabeth Butler, Battle Artist: Autobiography. Sevenoaks: Fisher. ———. 1909. From Sketchbook and Diary. London: Black. Delaplanche, Jérôme, and Axel Sanson. 2009. Peindre la guerre. Paris: Chaudun. Derrida, Jacques. 1978, 1979. Spurs. Nietzsche’s Styles. Éperons. Les Styles de Nietzsche, introd. Stefano Agosti, trans. Barbara Harlow. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press. Devereux, Jo. 2016. The Making of Women Artists in Victorian England: The Education and Careers of Six Professionals. Jefferson: McFarland.

 See also p. 41.

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Gerish Nunn, Pamela. 1997. Lady Butler. In Dictionary of Women Artists, ed. Delia Gaze, 335–337. London/Chicago: Fitzroy. Noël, Denise. 2004. “Les Femmes peintres dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle.” “Femmes et Images,” Clio 19. https://journals.openedition.org/clio/646 Nott, D.A. 2015. “Reframing War: British Military Painting 1854 to 1918,” Thesis, University of York. Robichon, François. 2007. Édouard Detaille : Un siècle de gloire militaire. Paris: Giovanangeli/Ministère de la défense. ———. 2000. L’Armée française vue par les peintres 1870-1914. Paris: Herscher/ Ministère de la défense. ———. 1998. La Peinture militaire française de 1871 à 1914. Paris: Giovanangeli. Ruskin, John. 1875. Notes on some of the Principal Pictures Exhibited in the Rooms of the Royal Academy: 1875. 4th ed. London: Allen. Saudo-Welby, Nathalie. 2019. “[B]eyond my landscape powers”: E.  Butler and the Politics of Landscape Painting, “Landscapes/Cityscapes” Polysèmes 22. https://journals.openedition.org/polysemes/5533 Sparrow, Walter Shaw, ed. 1905. Women Painters of the World. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Usherwood, Paul. 1990-1991. Elizabeth Thompson Butler: a Case of Tokenism. Woman’s Art Journal 11 (2): 14–18. Usherwood, Paul, and Jenny Spencer-Smith. 1987. Lady Butler, Battle Artist, 1846-1933. Gloucester: Alan Sutton and the National Army Museum. Wynne, Catherine. 2009. Elizabeth Butler’s Literary and Artistic Landscapes. Prose Studies 31 (2): 126–140.

CHAPTER 12

Whistler’s (Mother’s) Daughter: Image-Text Relations in Marilyn French’s Fictionalized (Auto)Biography Stephanie Genty

The camera never lies. But of course it does, who knows that better than a photographer? The angle, the selection, the isolation  – the camera shows what the photographer wants it to tell. (French 1987, 465)

When James McNeill Whistler painted Arrangement in Grey and Black (1871), he was more interested in the formal qualities of the work than in its mimetic properties. The artist railed against visitors to London’s Royal Academy who reduced the painting to a portrait of his mother. It was an “arrangement,” he insisted in The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (1890), “what can or ought the public do to care about the identity of the portrait?” (Whistler (1890)  1980, 128). Yet, whatever reading the artist sought to impose, viewers refused to loosen the referential bond. And when the painting toured the United States during the Great Depression,

S. Genty (*) Université d’Évry Paris-Saclay, Évry, France © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 V. Baisnée-Keay et al. (eds.), Text and Image in Women’s Life Writing, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84875-0_12

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it so moved President Franklin D. Roosevelt that he sketched an idea for a postage stamp that would be put out “in memory of mothers of America.” The image of Whistler’s stern-faced subject became engraved in the national imagination as an iconic representation of motherhood.1 As irony would have it, Anna McNeill Whistler’s presence in the painting was mere “accident”—she had only stepped in to replace a model who hadn’t shown up that day. And, as Whistler’s mother was ill, she posed seated, modifying the artist’s original plan to paint her standing up. She sat, dressed in black, in mourning after her husband’s death in 1849. This likely suited her son, whose aim was to experiment with tone, form and space, limiting his work to its two-dimensional surface in the manner of the Japanese woodblock prints that were so popular at the time. In contrast to European traditions in portraiture, Whistler’s subject is positioned off-center, indicating that in addition to sparse ornamentation, the artist may have been experimenting with asymmetry. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, photography had replaced painting as the referential art, so painters were free to explore other venues and ultimately to move towards abstraction. With Arrangement in Grey and Black, among other experiments, Whistler paved the way for Piet Mondrian and other non-­ figurative artists.2 Given Whistler’s artistic intentions and his mother’s inadvertent appearance, it may seem odd that feminist writer Marilyn French (1929-2009) should borrow the painter’s title for a novel based on the real life of her mother, Isabelle Hazz Edwards (1904-1986), or Belle.3 Her Mother’s Daughter (1987) was provisionally named Arrangement in Grey and Black, then Portrait in Black and Grey, practically up to publication.4 1  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistler%27s_Mother. Accessed April 13, 2020. See too Monica Tan, “How Whistler’s Mother Became a Powerful Symbol of the Great Depression – in Pictures.” The Guardian. 28 March 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/ gallery/2016/mar/29/how-whistlers-mother-became-a-powerful-symbol-of-the-great-depression-in-pictures. Accessed 14 April 2020. 2  I am of course referring to the quite abstract Nocturne in Black and Gold – The Falling Rocket (c. 1875) for which Victorian critic John Ruskin accused Whistler of “flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.” The artist sued Ruskin for libel. 3  Belle was Marilyn French’s mother’s nickname in real life, and it is the nickname of the author’s heroine in the novel. 4  In May 1983, Marilyn French signed contracts with her Dutch publisher Meulenhoff and her Swedish publisher Askild & Kärnekull for Arrangement in Grey and Black. In 1986, editor Jim Silberman of Summit books refers to Portrait in Black and Grey in contract negotiations, and in November of that same year, the contract with British publisher Heinemann is

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Superficially, the choice may appear logical: the sentimental connotation of the Victorian painting having lodged itself in the American heart, what better reference for a tribute to one’s mother? French’s borrowing was coherent, for she would portray her mother in words much as Whistler had portrayed his in oil: encased within a frame for eternity, seated and silently gazing ahead at nothing. The contours of Belle’s prison, as described in the closing pages of the work, are those of the glass veranda of her comfortable suburban home on a lake on Long Island. However, in contrast to Whistler’s painting, French’s text is an exercise in referentiality, an (auto)biographical femmage to the author’s mother,5 to whom it is dedicated: a textual and visual momento mori. I write “(auto)biographical” as the daughter’s life inevitably overlaps with the mother’s in this hybrid work—a slippery form of fictionalized life writing in which photographs and photography take center stage. Her Mother’s Daughter owes a certain debt to Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida (1981), the English translation of which had appeared a few years earlier; it too was a eulogy to the author’s mother and a reflection on photography and referentiality. Marilyn French’s novel anticipates the ideas of W. J. T. Mitchell and others in its experimentation with image and text, as we shall see. Indeed, the work belongs to a category of autobiographical narratives in which “the regime of visuality, particularly photography, has come to play an ever-­ larger role […], incorporated as another mode of telling within the text or described and thematized within the narrative” (Smith and Watson 2002, 18). Among other things, Her Mother’s Daughter is what Marianne Hirsch would call a “meta-photographic text,” for it places family photographs into a narrative context, both reproducing and describing them (Hirsch 1997, 8)—and ultimately contesting the hegemony of familial and patriarchal modes of representation, particularly as they concern women.

for an “untitled novel.” See Boxes 6 and 7 of the Marilyn French Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library (RBML), Columbia University, New York. 5  I am using this term here in the sense of an “homage rendered by a woman” (Swedish artist Louise Lidströmer) as well as an “homage rendered to a woman” (linguist Laélia Véron), and not in the sense of artists Miriam Schapiro and Melissa Meyer who created collages from women’s traditional domestic arts which they called “femmages.” It is interesting to note in passing that these “femmages” combined image and text. See “Waste Not Want Not. An Inquiry into What Women Saved and Assembled. Femmage,” by Melissa Meyer and Miriam Schapiro, Heresies, 1 (4) (Winter 1977-78): 66-69. Available at http://heresiesfilmproject.org/archive/. Accessed 22 April 2021.

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Four generations of the French family tree are nearly perfectly reproduced in the novel’s three sections, each of which opens with a two-page spread of photographs from the author’s private collection and from wellknown photographers.6 The names of both the parents and the grandparents of the author, their dates of birth and of death, the number of siblings and offspring, their respective jobs, interests and personality traits all appear in the text, mirroring life. And although the author remains hidden behind the narrator, Anastasia Dabrowski, the autobiographical pact is sealed when the narrator notes in her November 21, 1977 journal entry, “I am forty-eight years old today” (French 1987, 791). Marilyn French was born on November 21, 1929, her arrival coinciding with the advent of both the Great Depression and her mother’s own inconsolability. The narrator’s quest in Her Mother’s Daughter is to make sense of a sadness which appears to be transmitted from mother to daughter, generation after generation, but which she exposes as growing out of women’s condition in patriarchy, a condition that remains largely unchanged over time. The final title thus points to the unbroken chain of female suffering described in the work. In an interview given during the promotion of the book, French is quoted as saying, “I’d always wanted to write about my mother’s life—a life she couldn’t understand” (Lovenheim 1987, 7).7 In the novel, Anastasia, a professional photographer, writes Whenever I am not on an assignment, I sit here hour after hour writing this account of my mother. […] I have few resource materials: my journals, which I kept only intermittently, a stack of yellow envelopes stuffed with family photographs, pictures I didn’t file and label, didn’t paste in albums. I leaf through account books. I used to keep a record of my expenses in those days. They are my only help in recalling where I was at times when I wasn’t keeping a journal. And there are a few letters. That’s all. That and my brain, in which the past is registered, my brain and the kids’, except they forget things, it’s amazing how they forget. Oh, I guess I forget too. (French 1987, 673)

 The source of each photograph is given on the copyright page of the novel.  She adds that both Belle and Frances are based on her own mother and grandmother and that she herself identifies with Anastasia. “I think that’s how Belle saw her – as a resurrection of herself.” 6 7

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The diegetic narrator’s biographical practice is a mise en abyme of the author’s own memory work.8 The “remnants found in a box” (688), “mere detritus” (714), are fragments of lives begging to be (re)assembled and (re)interpreted. Marilyn French spent years gathering material on her mother’s family, even taking a trip to Communist Poland in 1975 in search of traces of her grandmother’s former village east of Krakow.9 She spent hours interviewing her mother, taking down the stories familiar to her from childhood. She pored over family photographs, and when the novel was published, a year after her mother’s death, she chose several to be printed within its pages, reinforcing the (auto)biographical nature of the narrative. Whistler’s Arrangement appears among these, as do well-known photographs by Jacob A. Riis, Lewis Hine and others, establishing a multi-­ layered conversation between the clichés themselves, between the images and the text, the personal and the historical, the individual and the collective. Her Mother’s Daughter actively criticizes—not the principles of “art for art’s sake”—but those of patriarchy which enclose women in confining representations or leave them out of the picture altogether. The narrative engages a dialogue with familial and historical photographs—questioning their referentiality, weighing in their truth and their lies—finally aiming at a feminist aesthetic of authenticity. Photography and autobiography are traditionally seen as the most referential of the arts, and yet they only retain traces of what once was. Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes and Rosalind Krauss express this idea in similar ways. For Sontag, a photograph is “something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask” (Sontag 1977, 154). Barthes wrote that “[it] is literally an emanation of the referent” (Barthes 1981, 80). As for Krauss, it is “an imprint or transfer off the real; […] On the family tree of images it is closer to palm prints, death masks, the Shroud of Turin, or the tracks of gulls on beaches...” (Krauss 1981, 26). Turning to autobiography, Timothy Dow Adams uses the term “metaphorically authentic” to qualify its relation to life (Adams 2000, ix). Autobiography should not be taken to be historically accurate; the genre rather constitutes “an attempt to reconcile one’s life with one’s self” (Ibid). “[N]arrative truth and personal myth are more telling than literal fidelity” (Ibid, x-xi). The same 8  I borrow the term from Annette Kuhn’s Family Secrets. Act of Memory and Imagination. London: Verso, 1995, 2002. 9  I was able to consult the author’s journal of this trip, thanks to the generosity of her son, Robert French. New York, November 2019.

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holds true for the memory work involved in life writing. As Annette Kuhn reminds us, we cannot access the past through any unmediated form, for “the past is unavoidably rewritten, revised, through memory. And memory is partial: things get forgotten, misremembered, repressed” (Kuhn (1995) 2002, 155). What is remembered is not ‘truth’ but “material for interpretation” (Ibid, 157). Anastasia’s memory work in Her Mother’s Daughter resembles the phototherapy described by Jo Spence and Patricia Holland in Family Snaps: The Meanings of Domestic Photography (1991), in which photographs, and particularly family photos, are used as “starting points to trigger off and reconstruct memories” (1991, 204). One begins by talking about a photo, then proceeds step-by-step “into the minefield of memory, the tangle of our histories” (Ibid, 207). After a brief presentation of the black-and-white photographs that introduce each of the book’s three sections, my discussion will move through the text in chronological order so as to respect both the importance of history in the narrative and the evolution of the diegetic narrator. I will pay particular attention to the image-text relation in French’s novel, taking off from Timothy Dow Adams’s Light Writing and Life Writing, Photography in Autobiography (2000), which problematizes this relation: Photography may stimulate, inspire, or seem to document autobiography; it may also confound verbal narrative. Conversely, autobiography may mediate on, stimulate, or even take the form of photography. In my view, text and image complement, rather than supplement, each other; since reference is not secure in either, neither can compensate for lack of stability in the other. (Adams 2000, xx)

While underlining the “inherent tendency in both to conceal as much as they reveal,” Adams seeks to avoid any “artificial distinctions between fiction and nonfiction, between autobiography and other forms of life writing, between portraits and self-portraits, or between art photography and those found in family albums—[…] instead focusing on the borders between each of those oppositions where actual authors have themselves deliberately blurred such distinctions” (Adams 2000, xx and 21). Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson explore a few of these blurred borders in Interfaces: Women, Autobiography, Image, Performance (2002). And although Marilyn French’s use of the visual and verbal modes of representation does not fit nicely into any of the models of interfaces proposed by Smith and

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Watson,10 whose examples are taken primarily from the visual arts, the notion of a “visual/textual interface” seems particularly relevant to her (auto)biographical novel. It refers to the spaces where “visual and textual modes are interwoven but also confront and mutually interrogate each other” (Smith and Watson 2002, 21). “[T]he textual can set in motion certain readings of the image; and the image can then revise, retard, or reactivate the text” (Ibid). Indeed, the visual and verbal modes “must be read against/through each other […] to elucidate the autobiographical presentation of a subject” (Ibid). This is not to imply any sort of opposition between the two modes of representation, for in French’s work, the two tend to blend into an “imagetext” (Mitchell 1994, chapter 1), that is to say that they interact in a dialectical fashion, alternately commenting upon each other, complementing, completing or contradicting each other. The two also intersect in order to contest certain modes of representation. Marilyn French’s experimentation with visual and verbal referentiality in Her Mother’s Daughter involves, ultimately, a re-centering of the female subject and subjectivity.

A Private Collection and a Collective History The photographs from Marilyn French’s personal archives and those from well-known or professional photographers appear on the first page of each of the three sections of the novel. No images appear on any other pages. They are arranged in an apparently haphazard way, juxtaposed at odd angles, as if laid out on a kitchen table, occasionally cropped, often overlapping. Each series of images sets the stage for the narrative, signaling both the historical period to be treated and its respective themes. The title of the section is in the bottom-right corner. Each photo is numbered and the credit for each is given on the copyright page, so it is easy to check a source and then return to the reading. The mixing of family photographs and historical documents has several effects: it establishes a parallel between individual and collective experience; it inscribes a single family in a national history; it provides context. It illustrates perfectly the recent “biographical 10  The authors propose four non-exclusive models of visual-verbal interface: 1) relational, through parallel or interrogatory juxtaposition of word and image; 2) contextual, through documentary or ethnographic juxtaposition of word and image; 3) spatial, through palimpsestic or paratextual juxtaposition of word and image; and 4) temporal, through the telescoped or serial juxtaposition of word and image.

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turn” in which the life of an individual is seen as illuminating their historical period (Renders et al. 2017). Indeed, in terms of the memory work and interpretation triggered by the photographs in Her Mother’s Daughter, it is important to consider that […] if the  memories are one individual’s, their associations extend far beyond the personal. They spread into an extended network of meanings that bring together the personal with the familial, the cultural, the economic, the social, the historical. Memory work makes it possible to explore connections between ‘public’ historical events, structures of feeling, family dramas, relations of class, national identity and gender, and ‘personal’ memory. (Kuhn (1995) 2002, 5)

The juxtaposition of these images, similar in size and in shape, necessarily creates a dialogue between them, a “visual narrative” (Hirsch 1997, 8) occurring at several levels simultaneously. Their whisperings form one of the many layers of the complex image-text conversation of Marilyn French’s (auto)biography. Part 1, “The Children in the Mills,” is announced visually by seven images from early twentieth-century America evoking the mother’s immigrant and working-class background, her experience of urban poverty, her ignorance and dreams of a better life. Scanning from left to right, clichés from the nation’s past give way to pictures of the author’s history. Hence, the reader first encounters three photographs of children by Jacob A. Riis and Lewis Hine, then one of a Brooklyn brownstone and another of a busy street market before falling upon two featuring Marilyn French’s mother.11 In one of these, Belle is a young girl posing for her First Communion, dressed in white, with a long veil and a bouquet of flowers in her hand. In the other, she is older, a teenager standing against a brick wall with her siblings, her left arm slipped through her brother’s. Someone has written “All dressed up and no place to go” along the bottom of the 11  The two by Jacob Riis are of three boys in turn-of-the-century New York and one of a young girl holding a baby. Property of the Jacob. A Riis Collection, Museum of the City of New York. The Lewis Hine photograph is the familiar image of young girls working in the textile industry, property of the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House. The brownstone is taken from Charles Lockwood’s Bricks and Brownstone: The New York Row House, 1783-1929. New York: McGraw Hill, 1972. The busy street market scene belongs to Culver Pictures. As for the images of the author’s mother, this is indicated in the narrative itself. Having seen many family photos in my research on French, I can confirm this personally.

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photograph. Before turning the page, the reader may pause to consider the faces and places, and the spaces between them: the wide-eyed girl sitting on a stoop with a baby on her lap is interposed between images of other children, on the street and in a textile mill, anchoring her in hardship; the brownstone floats above, flanked by two street scenes which seem to contradict its existence; and the images of Belle, en famille and frozen in her white Communion dress, are placed just above the title of the section, asserting their centrality in the narrative. Inserted at an angle, leaning dangerously to the right, the Communion photograph has been cropped, its frame slit along the edge of the page, inviting its subject out of the image, and into the text. Another cropped photograph of Belle opens Part 2, “The Children in the Garden.” It too is placed at an angle, but on the left edge of the page, its frame sliced open to welcome its subject back into the picture. It is as if, after navigating through her daughter’s words—which bring the black-and-white photographs to life—Belle may resume a stationary pose, this time as a middle-­ aged mother, elegantly dressed and seated in an Adirondack chair. The cropping of these two clichés and their precise placement on the page is anything but accidental. The unlocking of the twin portraits of her mother creates a permeability between image and text, a true “imagetext.” The visual and the verbal flow together in one narrative stream, interrelated and interdependent. “Writing the image,” to quote Hirsch on Barthes, “undoes the objectification of the still photograph and thereby takes it out of the realm of stasis, immobility, mortification—what Barthes calls ‘flat death’—into fluidity, movement, and thus, finally, life” (Hirsch 1997, 3-4). The slitting of the frames of the two photographs points to the importance of what is going on beyond their borders, that is, in the text, as we shall see in our discussion of Parts 1 and 2. In the second photographic portrait of her much older mother then, an embroidered cardigan is wrapped around her shoulders and she holds a flower in her right hand. Her hair is tightly curled, her lips red; she squints at the camera in the bright daylight. The image is inserted between two photographs from the Magnum collection,12 showing a nuclear family 12  Magnum Photos is an international photographic cooperative owned and run by its member photographers. Founded in 1947 in Paris by Robert Capa, David “Chim” Seymour, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger and William Vandivert, Rita Vandivert and Maria Eisner, the cooperative has included photojournalists from all over the world who have covered many historical events.

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posing in front of a suburban tract house and a group of adults gathered in a bucolic backyard, surrounded by patio furniture and sheltered by a parasol.13 Placed straight across the page, above and below the image of the author’s mother, the pair secure her in the suburban landscape of the American middle class. To the right of these three photographs is a trio from the author’s private collection portraying children in gardens. The one in the top right is an image of herself in the early 1930s, sitting across a child-sized table from her younger sister. The girls’ sunlit heads seem to be bowed in prayer, but are likely occupied with the cups and plates laid out before them. Two similarly sunny snapshots, placed below it, picture the grown sisters’ offspring sitting cross-legged on a lawn in the late 1950s or early 1960s. In one, the author’s two children are seated around a board game with their cousins. From left to right then, our eyes move from Belle’s generation over to that of her children and grandchildren in a visual introduction to the narrative of the second part, which describes Belle’s single-minded goal to give her children what she herself had lacked: a comfortable home and the cultural accoutrements of a more affluent class. In terms of composition and cropping, there is no visible bridge between the images of Part 2 and those of Part 3. The photographs on the right and left pages of each section respectively are positioned at right angles, their frames intact. The lack of any link between the photographs of the second and third parts parallels the diegetic rupture between the historical periods described in each section—that of the events of the 1960s. Importantly, each of the pictures chosen to launch the third and final part of Her Mother’s Daughter is of women, with the exception of the author’s son, who figures in the only family photograph included here. Equally important is the presence of Whistler’s Arrangement in Grey and Black, which lends its title to this third part, placed in the top right corner above four photographs of women taken in the 1970s. Two of these were taken by Bettye Lane at the 1977 Houston conference on women, which Marilyn French had herself attended. The one by Irene Bayer/Monkmeyer Press is of elderly women at a social event, and the single family photo shows the author’s mother in a wheelchair being pushed by her grandson during a peace march in New  York. The presence of Whistler’s iconic painting among the photographs points to the question of referentiality, but also to that of gender, encouraging the reader to contemplate their  The first photograph is attributed to Bob Adelman, the second to Wayne Miller. Magnum.

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relations to each other—and to the text situated just beyond. The two clichés from the Houston conference picture large groups of women— hundreds of delegates filling an auditorium and rows of smiling participants waving signs indicating the state they represent. The family photo of the author’s mother holding a “Peace” sign as she is pushed along a crowded Manhattan street parallels these, the overlapping corners “connecting” her to the historic 1970s feminist activism. Conversely, both the reproduction of Whistler’s Arrangement and the photo of the elderly women at a social event depict feminine isolation, specifically in old age. A sign posted above the row of seated women instructs them to “Say hello to someone.” Their black coats are hanging on the wall behind them, their faces look bored as they watch others engaging in an activity from which they are excluded. Although there are four of them, their silent isolation echoes that of Anna McNeill Whistler positioned above them, whose gaze falls on the image of the crowded auditorium placed in front of her, with the enormous banner declaring the conference’s focus on WOMAN. The images of female activism seem to invite these passive older women to join them, as Belle has done. Textually, the third section focuses on the depression that isolates both Belle and the narrator emotionally, on their ageing, on gender and representations of women. Feminism and specifically the 1977 conference surface relatively late in the narrative, but play a transformative role in the personal and professional life of the narrator protagonist.

The Historical Frame: A Tragic Truth In the first part of Her Mother’s Daughter, the harsh history recorded through a shutter parallels the penning of the mother’s early years, forming a resonant imagetext. The photograph of a bustling street market would be familiar to French’s Polish grandparents, who settled in the immigrant neighborhood of Williamsburg,14 when they arrived in the United States in the late nineteenth century. Anastasia evokes the picture in the following passage: It was a neighborhood in the old sense. The cobblestone streets were lined with little shops; above them were two tiers of railroad flats, where the peo14  In the novel, French spells Williamsburg with an “h” at the end: Williamsburgh. See page 33.

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ple lived. The street was always full of action: trolleys clanked by, and drays pulled by great full-buttocked horses. Sometimes a couple pushed their cart through on their way to sell their wares in what everyone here called ‘Jewtown’. (French 1987, 33)

The narrator’s description brings the silent photograph to life, conveying its noises, movement and smells. Her mother’s personal experience of the street, however, contrasts with Anastasia’s pictorial exegesis, pointing to the subjectivity of human experience and memory, and to the fact that a single photograph may elicit various readings. For the three-and-a-halfyear-­old girl standing at the second-floor window, the street is frightening. It is so noisy, so rough. People bump into each other, sometimes they push. The men have thick arms, and some roll their shirtsleeves up so the dark hair shows. The women have loud voices and cackle with laughter. The trolleys glide by, huge and terrifying. (French 1987, 34)

As for the photograph of the tall brownstone, it seems to illustrate the “quiet and dignified” building which tenement-bound Belle dreams of occupying (35). The Riis photographs of the barefoot street urchins and, even more, of a stern-looking, brown-eyed girl sitting in a doorway with a baby on her lap haunt young Belle as a potent reminder of her true condition: she is both an orphan and the “mother” of her younger sister, Euga (123).15 The piercing gaze of the poor girl provokes a “moment of self-­ recognition,” of “self-discovery,” akin to what Barthes experienced upon unearthing a photograph of his mother as a child.16 As readers, we can examine the dark stare of the girl on the steps and imagine the punctum experienced by Belle as she stared back: “that prick and shock of recognition, that unique and very personal response to the photographic detail that attracts and repels us at the same time” (Hirsch 1997, 4). It “arrests 15  In real life, and in the novel, Belle’s violent and alcoholic father dies suddenly in May 1913, leaving his wife so destitute that she loses three of her four children to an orphanage. She chooses to keep nine-year-old Belle with her. A few months later, baby Eugenia is allowed to join them, forcing Belle to abandon school to care for her younger sister. This episode is one of the tragedies of French’s mother’s life. See her unpublished memoir, Depression Baby. Box 21, Marilyn French Papers, RBML, Columbia University, New York. 16  See Roland Barthes, Camera Lucinda: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981, and especially Marianne Hirsch’s discussion of the work in the introduction to Family Frames.

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and interrupts” her daydreams of an affluent, brownstone-dwelling alter ego she calls “Anastasia,” a construct which helps Belle cope with her fatherless, penniless urban reality. It is the name she will later give to her daughter, the diegetic narrator of the novel, in whom she will place her hopes for a better life. Indeed, “Anastasia” signifies “resurrection” in Greek—a “standing” or “rising “up—and the author will make use of this signification in the last act of the narrative. Here, however, Belle’s older brother can only laugh as he contemplates his cliché of the family taken on the tenement roof, “All dressed up and nowhere to go” (141). His laughter underlines the absurdity of such dreams, for “dressing up” is indeed all Belle can do; she is in statis—standing but still—her only horizon consisting of “roofs and walls of tenements, as far as you could see” (141). This said, her mother is brought to life—resuscitated, as it were—in the stream of the textual narrative, as we have seen. The reality of the lives led by Marilyn French’s forebears in the early part of the century was grim. However, if the above examples indicate an image-text relation bound by this reality, other narratorial commentary considers discrepancies in visual and verbal representations of her mother’s family life. As Kafka once said, “[p]hotography concentrates one’s eye on the superficial. For that reason it obscures the hidden life which glimmers through the outlines of things like a play of light and shade.”17 These hints of some “hidden life” are apparent to Anastasia as she sifts through boxes of family memorabilia and detects traces of untold stories. A mise en relation of two portraits of Belle’s mother, Frances, present in the text only as “verbal images” or “prose pictures,”18 reveals her suffering as a young wife at the hands of her abusive husband. Anastasia describes her face as “round” and “placid” in the 1901 wedding portrait, while in another taken six years later, she sees “lines of anxiety in her forehead and her mouth is hard set” (57). Her husband’s abuse, depicted in the narrative but absent from the family album, has left its mark on the young wife’s face. Frances may be unaware of how she appears as she looks into the lens, but the film records what even the photographer may not see. “The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses” (Benjamin 1969, 237). It provides “traces, 17  The quote by Franz Kafka is taken from Gustav Janouch’s Conversations with Kafka (1951). Susan Sontag includes it in her final chapter to On Photography, “A Brief Analogy of Quotations.” 18  The term “prose pictures” is borrowed from Marianne Hirsch, page 8.

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markers that point towards a past presence, to something that has happened in this place” (Kuhn (1995) 2002, 4) which, detective-like, daughters can luckily elucidate: The past is like the scene of a crime: if the deed itself is irrecoverable, its traces may still remain. From these traces, markers that point towards a past presence, to something that has happened in this place, a (re)construction, if not a simulacrum, of the event can be pieced together. Memory work has a great deal in common with forms of inquiry which—like detective work and archaeology, say—involve working backwards—searching for clues, deciphering signs and traces, making deductions, patching together reconstructions out of fragments of evidence. (Kuhn (1995) 2002, 4)

Although her grandfather’s fury has been edited out of the family’s public face, and so remains out of frame, the narrator has heard recurrent accounts of his fury in her mother’s stories. It is Belle’s words that complete the grandmother’s anxious portrait and set Anastasia on the path towards feminism. Destitute after her husband’s sudden death and mourning the loss of three of her four children, Frances—in reality and in fiction—was unable to give Belle the affection she craved. Adult, Belle would repeatedly lament to her real/fictional daughter Marilyn/Anastasia, “my mother never combed my hair” (31). However, the photograph of young Belle dressed in white the day of her Communion, an image dug up by the narrator and which she comments upon, shows her with “spaghetti curls” (31), proof that Frances did indeed comb it—and with great care. Here, “the photographic referent,” “the necessarily real thing which has been placed before the lens” (Barthes 1981, 76-77) asserts itself, sparking the following response from young Anastasia: “But it was there, in the picture, I insisted: Mommy at seven, my age exactly, with the same spaghetti curls. And I ran upstairs to get it, to show her. Her shoulders slumped, she grimaced. She was disgusted with me. ‘Oh, I don’t know, Anastasia, maybe the maid curled it’” (31). Belle’s lamentations are not lies, for the emotions tangled up with her childhood memories are real, as genuine as her “spaghetti curls.” They are “metaphorically authentic” (Adams 2000, ix). In the first part of the novel then, the image-text relationship emerges as complex. One image may elicit multiple readings. The imagetext may catalyze awareness of one’s condition or signal breaches in family history. We witness the development of the daughter’s “critical consciousness”

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(Kuhn (1995) 2002, 9), springing from the dialectical interactions between the visual and the verbal, the omissions of the family album and the questionable reliability of her mother’s memory.

The Family Album: Accidents Will Happen In the second section of Her Mother’s Daughter, “The Children in the Garden,” the author’s narrator pursues her reflection on the text-image relation and the authenticity of family photographs, concentrating precisely on what is hors champ, invisible to the viewer’s eye. The second part of the novel also sees the development of photography as a thematic device as Anastasia becomes first an amateur then a professional photographer. Historically speaking, Part 2 corresponds to the age of the Kodak camera and the emergence of the social function of photography as part and parcel of the ideology of the modern family (Hirsch 1997, 6-7). As the self-­ appointed family photographer, having taken on the role usually attributed to Father or Husband, Anastasia is able to offer shot-by-shot revelations of the truth behind the pretty pictures she took one sunny afternoon in August 1957. Her critique of stifling middle-class suburban life echoes that of many writers of her generation, especially feminists. Marilyn French uses family photographs to move “beyond their conventional and opaque surfaces to expose the complicated stories of familial relation – the passions and rivalries, the tensions, anxieties, and problems that have, for the most part, remained on the edges or outside the family album” (Ibid, 7). She interrogates both the family and its traditions of representation (Ibid, 8). The author is conscious of the role played by family albums in the construction of a happy narrative and may have been familiar with the ideas of Rosalind Krauss, for whom photography participates in “the ritualized cult of domesticity” (Krauss 1984, 57).19 According to Krauss, the photographic record “is an agent in the collective fantasy of family cohesion,” the camera “part of the theater that the family constructs to convince itself that it is together and whole” (Ibid, 57). French uses her narrator to poke holes in the construct by once again providing a contextualized reading of the photos, between the lines and off the page. Her subjects, Anastasia sardonically notes, could all appear “in an ad for the good life in America” (520). Their skin is appropriately fair, “they have 19  Cited in Lindsay Smith, “The Politics of Focus: Feminism and Photography Theory” in Isobel Armstrong, ed. New Feminist Discourses. London: Routledge, 1992: 242.

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the look of people raised in privilege. […] These are Americans who have made it” (italics hers, 526). The women and men of her post-war family, whose neat appearance and mechanical behavior are enumerated in detail in the text, are highly conscious of the codes governing their social class, ethnicity and respective gender. The presence of the camera reinforces the performative aspect of their gestures and interactions; the intervention of the photographer both “interrupts and shapes visual relations” (Hirsch 1997, 11). As the narrator notes, Joy is concentrating on her glamorous smile; Justin, an army captain, is “unmoved, spare and erect” (525), “avoiding any imputation of frivolity” (521). Anastasia’s comments reach beyond the borders of Belle in the Adirondack chair, textually panning down to her white shoes, over to the smiling daughter sitting opposite her, into the house and upstairs to the contents of the suitcases lying open in the bedroom. The narrator describes a number of photographs that do not appear on the opening page of Part 2, but which may exist in the French family collection, as well as “photographs” that she admits she did not take at all. These “verbal images” include the photographer herself, whose inappropriate dress and unmade face earned her a cool greeting from her disapproving mother. They also include Belle’s husband, Ed, methodically mixing drinks in the kitchen and swearing under his breath at the family member who put a half-filled ice tray back into the freezer. In these textual images, the children are mere blurs, ghostly trails of somersaults. The adults and their interactions are chronicled in meticulous detail however, the 36 images numbered and commented upon one-by-one in the style of a “sociologist-historian,” whose lucidity gradually succumbs to the effects of her father’s mixed drinks (526-7). Particular attention is paid to a “prose picture” in which something out of frame threatens to invade the photographic space. In the photo, the children are gaily eating their evening meal, but for one who has accidentally spilled his grape juice—its purple stain is spreading across the table. The incident provokes laughter on their part and alarm among the elder members of the family. The narrator has difficulty deciphering the expressions on her subjects’ faces because of a “problem of haze” (528): is it concern, panic or outrage? The picture is “too dark” and there is a “brilliance on the right side which suggests a setting or near setting sun, a huge flame on the verge of the horizon, just outside of the frame, that causes glare and seems to threaten to burn the film […] to set fire to the picture even as I hold it in my hand” (528). If the grape stain strains the faces of

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the photographer’s family, the “flame…just outside of the frame,” the “haze” and “brilliance” all point to the etymology of the word “focus” and its link to the domestic space. As Lindsay Smith notes in “The Politics of Focus: Feminism and Photography Theory,” the word derives from the Latin for “hearth,” the traditional center of a home and, in the optical sense, the “burning point of a lens or a mirror” which is also the center of the photograph (Smith 1992, 242). In this passage of the book, the “focus” is “off-center” for not only is the sun setting on the suburban garden, but the fires of some apocalypse threaten to jump out of the picture and literally burn the narrator. In the third part of the novel, Anastasia will reemerge, phoenix-like, from the brilliant haze as a photographer with a feminist gaze. In the examples just discussed, the unseen and unsightly penetrate the text in the form of narratorial commentary. Similarly, in her attempts to stage tender moments with young children, Anastasia is powerless before the intrusion of the accidental, illustrating the tension between posing for a photo and its truth-telling aspect (Sontag 1977, 86). Anastasia’s artistic practice grows out of her role as a mother. She is an “accidental” photographer, just as Anna McNeill Whistler was an “accidental” model. The protagonist begins by taking pictures of her children, considering it merely “make-work for the idle”—like “needlepoint, knitting, crocheting”— more craft than art (438). Such denigration of the domestic manifests her internalization of patriarchal values and her initial masculine gaze when she decides to go professional. However, photographing children proves to be a trying task. In a shot staged with her baby brother, her two-year-­ old daughter refuses to cooperate, watching her mother “as warily as any snake” (271). The mention of the phallic creature signals both the photographer’s gender allegiance at this point in her life and the future shedding of her masculine “skin” when she will adopt a feminist approach in her work. Rather than push the baby’s rattle as her mother instructs her to do, her daughter heads for the back door, turns and screeches “long and loud.” Likewise, when shooting images of her neighbors’ children, instead of capturing Johnny adorably eating a cookie, she catches him “socking Mommy in the eye” (274). Or, “as Mommy was arranging baby on a pretty pink blanket she’d washed and dried for the occasion, baby, naked as she was, decided to shit” (274). A mustard-colored stain, this time, mars the idealized image of motherhood. Convinced that the whole business of women and babies is “frivolous and mindless and even contemptible” (274), she “clothes'' her female

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subjects in “male dress” (451) to get a job at World magazine: the “verbal images” of men working and of machines which she submits in her portfolio were intentionally shot as metaphors for women’s work. “I knew better […] than to show women’s labor” (450). To succeed in the very masculine World, she changes her name, hides the fact that she has two children and represses all traces of her feminine self underneath “safari” clothes and tough behavior. She cuts off her braid, her short haircut taking on new significance when the narrator notes that “Delilah liked it” (467). The temptress’s name, like that of Eve, is synonymous with the fall of man. Here, however, the severing of her lock—which may recall the cropped photograph of her young mother’s “spaghetti curls”—implies the symbolic amputation of her feminine specificity and power, which she will only recover as a feminist. World photographer Stacey Stevens consciously builds her reputation on samsonesque images of dams and offshore oil rigs, emphasizing the ancient and very gendered man-versus-nature dichotomy, “mere muscle and brain challenging the enormity of a vacant mindless nature, full of traps and wiles, offering death at every step” (478). The alienated heroine is immersed in the “perverse” side of her profession, as described by Susan Sontag in On Photography (1977): picture-taking as image-theft, symbolic rape or murder when the phallic device, a sublimated gun, aims and shoots (1977, 14). A turning point is reached one day in Saigon in 1965 when Stacey, like a trained soldier, “shoots” a café bombing: And worst of all was me, my own reaction, my instantaneous pulling of my camera to my eye, setting the f-stop, checking the light, clicking, clicking, the shutter. Humanity? Where was mine? Did I rush to help, to heal, to console? They shot their weapons. I shot mine: what’s the difference between us? Complicit. I was complicit in the hideous world I lived in. (French 1987, 698-699)

Sontag expressed this complicity common to war photographers, whose non-intervention upholds the status quo: “The person who intervenes cannot record; the person who records cannot intervene”—“a way of at least tacitly, often explicitly, encouraging whatever is going on to keep on happening” (Sontag 1977, 12). In the second section of Her Mother’s Daughter then, the “visual narrative” initiated by the author’s family photos is revealed to be incomplete by the narrator’s comments, which both contextualize and correct them.

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The integrity of the family album is increasingly threatened from within and from without, and the space beyond its borders is more and more the locus of the focus. Finally, Anastasia’s photographic practice places the question of gender at the center of her ponderings on pictorial “truth.”

The Feminist Photographer: An Aesthetics of Authenticity In the final section of the novel, women collectively move center stage, both visually and textually. The photographs serve the text as illustrations of events described within it and, through Anastasia, French demonstrates how exposure to feminism can provoke a reevaluation of one’s world view and aesthetic practice. The protagonist covers the November 1977 Houston conference on women for a feminist magazine, Woman, just as Marilyn French had done as a writer for Horizon.20 The images Anastasia brings back, two examples of which appear at the opening of Part 3, provoke debate among the editors of Woman, who wonder whether they should be published. They fear the anger expressed by women in some of the clichés could be damaging politically. The representation of women freed of traditional gender constraints is seen (by feminists) as a threat (to feminism). Interestingly, these controversial photos exist merely as “prose pictures,” so the reader can only imagine them. Marilyn French frames Anastasia’s desire to publish them as stemming from her personal and professional transformation, a change provoked by her encounter with the women in Houston and one she would like to provoke in other women. In Camera Lucida, Barthes faced a similar choice: whether or not to render public the image of his young mother which had so moved him. It was deemed too personal, and thus meaningless, to share—a sentiment which recalls Whistler’s comment regarding the canvas of his mother, “what can or ought the public do to care about the identity of the portrait?” (Whistler (1890) 1980, 128). French’s protagonist takes another tack and, in a passionate plea for “truth” and realism coherent with her reflection in the previous section, argues: 20  Marilyn French covered the conference to write a piece for Horizon, staying in Houston from November 18th to November 21st—her forty-eighth birthday. Her novel, The Women’s Room, had just been released in October and was the object of much publicity. The author’s notes from the conference are in Box 12 of the Marilyn French Papers, RBML, Columbia University, New York.

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I admired the women at that convention. I thought they were great! And the most marvelous thing about them was their diversity. There were serious arguments in that group. It’s because there were serious arguments that the final unity was so extraordinary, so moving. […] To deny these things is just as bad as World’s showing an image of America with everybody happy and healthy. […] It’s a lie just like men’s lies. If you censor the truth about women in that way you might as well be putting out Lady’s Day, or Godey’s Lady’s Book. You’re not doing women a favor when you present them with a false image of themselves. That’s all they’ve gotten all these years. (French 1987, 804-5)

Anastasia has discovered a new “way of seeing,”21 one which finally values “the meatloaf, the lemon pie, the smocked pink dress” (French 1987, 800). Women’s art has its source in their domestic work, as Elaine Hedges and Ingrid Wendt have argued.22 The heroine’s own image-making is of course rooted in the experience of motherhood. The recognition of the value and dignity of women’s work leads Anastasia to re-center her practice: the photos she once considered personal and marginal become her focus in a fictional illustration of the ideas outlined by Marilyn French in “Is There a Feminist Aesthetics?”.23 The faithful and sympathetic representation of women’s experience—“the private, the daily, the small acts that make up the texture of life” (792)—becomes primary. In a passage that recalls the two very different readings of the busy Williamsburg street market in Part 1, French’s narrator notes the chasm between how she once photographed Stonehenge and how she would do it now: If only I’d known! I’d have photographed them entirely differently—showing the democracy implicit in circles, the beauty of the arrangement, the wisdom of the builders, the knowledge they must have possessed about the sun and the moon. Instead, I focused on how imposing they were, how impressive, how huge a task it must have been to cart the stones to the sites, to build these structures. (French 1987, 613)

21  The term is obviously borrowed from John Berger, Ways of Seeing. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1972. 22  See Elaine Hedges and Ingrid Wendt. In Her Own Image. Women Working in the Arts. Old Westbury, New York: The Feminist Press, 1980. 23  See French, Marilyn. “Is There a Feminist Aesthetics?” Hypatia 5:2. Summer 1990. Reprinted in Hilde Hein and Carolyn Korsmeyer, eds. Aesthetics in Feminist Perspective. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993.

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Appropriately, Anastasia’s new “focus” as a critically-conscious feminist photographer—her new female gaze—coincides with the creation of a new “hearth” for herself and her lesbian partner Clara. The novel closes on the narrator’s textual Arrangement in Grey and Black, a portrait of her own mother miming Whistler’s. Perhaps in order to highlight the contrast between the daughter’s feminist method, which seeks to portray women’s experience more completely, and her mother’s fantasy world, mentioned earlier, the author juxtaposes the two in the novel’s final pages. While Anastasia is on a mission for UNICEF in the Middle East, Belle “sees” her at a great reception “beautiful as a princess” meeting the (defunct) Shah and receiving an award for “Greatest Photographer in the World” (868). The final shot of Belle, described in the narrative, suggests a state of confinement, silence and isolation so complete that she is literally, or verbally, buried alive. Only the large picture window allows her to peer outside the four walls that encase her. It returns her gaze in the form of her own face, an oft-rehearsed portrait in the reflective surface (868). The narrator photographer’s refusal to censor the “truth” emanating from her images in this third part, and specifically a reality rooted in women’s experience, reinforces the referential bond that the nineteenth-­ century artist, James McNeill Whistler, refuted. A contradiction is however apparent in the textual treatment of Belle compared with the visual one mentioned earlier. For if pictorially she is portrayed as participating in a collective peace march, albeit seated and pushed in a wheelchair, textually the author has laid her to rest. How is the reader to interpret these two competing final representations of the daughter’s mother?

Conclusion Marilyn French’s 1987 novel, Her Mother’s Daughter, is interesting for its juxtaposition of familial and historical images, for its sophisticated use of visual and verbal narrative, and for its reflection on referentiality. Image-­ text relations are varied and inventive: the borders of the two modes of representation often blur, their interfaces forming imagetexts. The (auto) biographical nature of the work, in particular, the interaction of family portraits and family stories against a backdrop of traditional familial and patriarchal ideologies, add to their complexity, as do the interventions of a critical feminist family photographer and commentator. The written word may validate the reality of an image or reveal it to hide a different or darker

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truth. A photograph may invalidate an oft-repeated family tale, whose truth turns out to be more emotional than factual. The juxtaposition of personal and historical clichés may combine to form a message which is also conveyed in lines of letters, or not. Words may provide the context of a photograph or describe the scene beyond the picture frame, modifying the image’s surface meaning. And the text may tell of other photographs, real or invented, constituting so many “verbal images'' scattered across the page. How then should we summarize the image-text relation in Her Mother’s Daughter? It is, above all, interdependent, for images and text interact with each other in multiple ways. An isolated image is meaningless, insufficient or “insignificant” (insignifiant, non-signifiant): it requires other images or words—pictorial or textual exegesis—to create meaning. Or, as Annette Kuhn noted, “the image itself figures largely as a trace, a clue: necessary but not sufficient, to the activity of meaning making” (Kuhn (1995) 2002, 14). In her tribute to her mother, Marilyn French/Anastasia Dabrowski engages with photography in order to “disrupt a familiar narrative about family life and its representations, breaking the hold of a conventional and monolithic familial gaze” (Hirsch 1997, 8). By throwing light on the violence contained within the shadows and on the reality of a mother’s care, by reflecting upon what is placed within the frame and what is left out—and why—and on the intentional and the accidental, French’s “sociologist-historian” arrives at a more complete understanding of her mother’s life and of women’s plight. Given this evolution, how are we to interpret the conflicting representations of Marilyn French’s mother in the final pages of Her Mother’s Daughter? A decision to favor one over the other would land us back into the binary trap opposing image and text, an equation that has no place here. And yet, if we consider the importance of narratorial commentary and the sheer number of pages of text in relation to the number of images, even “verbal images,” the written word may claim to take precedence over the visual. Indeed, the “prose pictures” in particular are most critical in terms of the diegesis. These images are conjured for our imagination; their corporeality is a verbal one. Without wishing to diminish the very effective interplay of visual and verbal representations in Her Mother’s Daughter, and notably of what Mitchell would term “imagetext,” the work is primarily a fictionalized biography of the novelist’s mother and a representation of her own feminist awakening. It is a questioning of patriarchal values and of gender codes and aesthetic conventions, an impassioned call for an

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uncensored presentation of women’s experience. Being a writer with a message, Marilyn French necessarily asserts the primacy of text over image, upsetting Smith and Watson’s relational interface in which “visual and textual are set side by side, with neither subordinated to the other” (Smith and Watson 2002, 21). Although savvy in her use of photography in this (auto)biographical work, Marilyn French believes in the transformative power of words and through them seeks to put women into the center of the frame, both in art and in life.

References Adams, Timothy Dow. 2000. Light Writing and Life Writing, Photography in Autobiography. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press. Barthes, Roland. 1981. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang. Benjamin, Walter. 1969. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Illuminations New York: Schocken. Berger, John. 1972. Ways of Seeing. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books. French, Marilyn. 1987. Her Mother’s Daughter. London: Pan Books. ———. 1993. “Is There a Feminist Aesthetics?” Hypatia 5 (2). Summer 1990. Reprinted in Hilde Hein and Carolyn Korsmeyer, eds. Aesthetics in Feminist Perspective. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. ` ———. n.d. Depression Baby. Unpublished memoir. Marilyn French Papers. Box 21. Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, New York. Hedges, Elaine, and Ingrid Wendt. 1980. In Her Own Image. Women Working in the Arts. Old Westbury, New York: The Feminist Press. Hirsch, Marianne. 1997. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Krauss, Rosalind. 1981. “Photographic Conditions of Surrealism.” October 19. Fall 1981: 3-34. ———. 1984. “Photography and the Simulcral.” October 31. Winter 1984: 57. Kuhn, Annette. 2002. Family Secrets. Acts of Memory and Imagination. London: Verso, 1995. Lovenheim, Barbara. 1987. “Sacrificing Woman.” Interview with Marilyn French. New York Times Book Review. 25 October 1987: 7. Mitchell, William John Thomas. 1994. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Renders, Hans, Binne de Haan, and Jonne Harmsa, eds. 2017. The Bibliographical Turn. Lives in History. London: Routledge.

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Smith, Lindsay. 1992. The Politics of Focus: Feminism and Photography Theory. In New Feminist Discourses, ed. Isobel Armstrong, 238–262. London: Routledge. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson, eds. 2002. Interfaces: Women, Autobiography, Image, Performance. Michigan: University of Michigan Press. Spence, Jo, and Patricia Holland, eds. 1991. Family Snaps: The Meanings of Domestic Photography. London: Virago. Sontag, Susan. 1977. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Tan, Monica. 2016. “How Whistler’s Mother Became a Powerful Symbol of the Great Depression—in Pictures.” The Guardian. 28 March 2016. https:// www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2016/mar/29/how-­whistlers-­ mother-­b ecame-­a -­p owerful-­s ymbol-­o f-­t he-­g reat-­d epression-­i n-­p ictures. Accessed 14 April 2020. Whistler, James McNeill. 1980. The Gentle Art of Making Enemies. London and Edinburgh: Ballantyne Press, 1890. Available online as a Project Gutenberg ebook. https://gutenberg.org/files/24650/24650-­h/24650-­h.htm Accessed 18 April 2021.

PART IV

Visual/Textual Embodiment

CHAPTER 13

“It Is Difficult to Find the Words”: The Text-­Image Interface in Lynn Kohlman’s Cancer Auto/biography Marta Fernández-Morales

In her introductory piece to Lynn Front to Back (2005), the late Lynn Kohlman wrote: “I never believed in my beauty as a model, but here I am, 57 years old, with a double mastectomy, hair fried from radiation, never feeling more beautiful!” (n.p.).1 In 2008, she passed away after living with

The author of this essay wants to acknowledge her participation in the funded Research Project PID2019-109565RB-I00/AEI/10.13039/501100011033: Illness in the Age of Extinction: Anglophone Narratives of Personal and Planetary Degradation (2000–2020). 1  Kohlman’s book, which is used as a primary source here, does not include page numbers. This is an indication of the emphasis that is placed on the visual element. As discussed below, the volume includes some textual pieces, but the photographic dominates. The sequence of

M. Fernández-Morales (*) University of Oviedo, Oviedo, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 V. Baisnée-Keay et al. (eds.), Text and Image in Women’s Life Writing, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84875-0_13

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cancer for six years—first in her breasts, later in her brain. The large-­format volume remains as a memoir of her adult life, from her times as a young fashion icon in Europe at the beginning of her career through her maturity as cancer patient, photographer, and family woman in the USA.  It combines texts and images under the general idea of transformation: before and after cancer strikes; before and after Kohlman grabs the camera; before and after she becomes a wife and mother; before and after she decides to assume control of her treatment and lifestyle. She explains this in the opening text, before the large images of and/or by her take center stage: “cancer has been an unexpected gift that has brought with it dramatic changes and transformations” (n.p.). The dialogic relationship between fashion photography and cancer photography established in Kohlman’s visual work, as Mary Deshazer recalls, “follows in the footsteps of Matuschka, the U.S. model whose post-mastectomy photographic self-portrait […] caused controversy when it appeared in 1994 on the cover of The New York Times Magazine” (2013, 30). Matuschka is a feminist health activist who at the time wished “to demystify breast cancer and help women feel freer in their condition” (Matuschka 1996, 261). She displayed the physical consequences of the radical surgery within fashion aesthetics, but avoided euphemism. She exposed the scar and forced the reading public to acknowledge it: the image was accompanied by the words “You Can’t Look Away Anymore.”2 As chronicled by Nieves Pascual (2005, 61), the picture mobilized mixed responses: it was censored in Germany and France, but it received honors from the World Press Foundation, the Art Director’s Club, and the Rachel Carson Institute in the USA. Kathlyn Conway, an American psychotherapist and author who has faced three cancers, remembers seeing the cover of the magazine when it first came out and reacting strongly to it: “Although I know she is making a statement, I cannot get beyond my feeling of shock to decipher the meaning of the photograph. Why must she depict this mastectomy as so horrific? Is this the only way to communicate the havoc that breast cancer wreaks on women’s bodies? (1997, pos. 2071).3 the shots taken or selected by Kohlman, which sometimes double in size to occupy two full pages, serves as a narrative thread and conditions the reading/viewing experience, which does not require traditional pagination. 2  See http://www.matuschka.net/FINALBODSGallery.html. 3  I have used the Kindle version of Conway’s volume, which does not provide page numbers, but positions, hence the reference.

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One decade after Matuschka, whose photo series was entitled Beauty Out of Damage, Kohlman created a complex, hybrid project of self-­ representation. As had been the case with Matuschka, the organizing principles were beauty—as seen in the title—and agency—discussed by Matuschka in different texts after her cover made it to the newsstands.4 Writing at the dawn of the twenty-first century, Kohlman defined these two issues in her own terms within a frame of relationality that Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (2010) have recognized as inherent to life writing. Within a text-image interface where pictures dominate in number, size, and communicative strength, Kohlman presented her diverse selves as model, artist, friend, daughter, sister, wife, and mother. She completed a transformative journey from in front of, to behind, and then in front of the camera again. In the process, the gendered dimension was key, as she evolved from object of the male gaze as a top model to subject as a shaved-­ headed, breastless samurai warrior. Lynn Front to Back is a composite of words and pictures elaborated under Kohlman’s direction, and she acknowledges the challenge before her as a narrating self. As quoted in the title of this chapter, she confesses in her introduction: “It is difficult to find the words to describe how I felt each of the three times I was told I had cancer” (n.p.). To compensate for this obstacle, the autobiographical texts that she writes become a punctuation of sorts for the rich series of images that she selects, and they are complemented by a corpus of celebratory pieces about her that round up the narrative, which thus becomes auto/biography. Kohlman’s embodied presence in most of the photographs and her views of health and illness as depicted in the textual sections work together as parts of a whole. The writing interspersed among the images includes a loving foreword by a colleague-turned-best-friend; Kohlman’s personal reflections about cancer, traditional and alternative treatments, modeling, and becoming a photographer; intertextual references to Paulo Coelho, Neil Young, and Lance Armstrong that illustrate some of her points; a list of things to do after the brain cancer diagnosis; and letters to and from friends and relatives. Thus, among the four modes of textual/visual interface identified within female autographical praxis by Watson and Smith (2002, 4)—that is, relational, contextual, spatial, and temporal—it is the relational that takes center stage here. 4  Among others, “Why I Did It” (published in Glamour in 1993) and “Barbie Gets Breast Cancer” (quoted in this chapter, 1996).

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From the initial pages, in which we see reproductions of fashion photos in magazines and campaigns where Kohlman features as model, to the closing epistles, the book navigates the waters of (self)representation through text and image, offering a double-coded version of her plight that is at the same time auto/biography, personal legacy, artistic achievement, and, since 2008, also something else. As Thomas Couser suggests, the fact that we know about the author’s death affects the reception of the illness narrative, adding a layer of dramatic irony to the reader-writer relationship because “the readers now know that the author did not: the end of the story” (1997, 54). Thus, the 20 letters in the closing section, which were originally eulogies penned while Kohlman was alive, become elegies that contribute to the lament of her untimely demise. In turn, the snapshots of her life, as Susan Sontag argued about pictures in general in her classic On Photography (2005, 32), become powerful memento mori, bearing witness to mortality, vulnerability, mutability and the dissolution of time. Exploring the written and the visual auto/biographical praxis at work in Lynn Front to Back, this paper discusses the two pillars that sustain Kohlman’s hybrid project: on the one hand, the relationship that she establishes as narrator and experiencer to the question of agency in cancer narratives; on the other hand, the thematization of beauty as a key interpretive filter that conditions both the production and the reception of the book. The final aim of this study is to prove that Kohlman maintains control of the storytelling process, making an effort to conciliate the positions of object and subject. The result is the carefully constructed image of a person with powers of decision over the illness experience that defies some aspects of the mainstream breast cancer plot (e.g. conventional femininity) while still feeding into others (e.g. the myth of the beautiful sufferer).

Illness Narratives and Agency in the Twenty-first Century In Reading Autobiography, Smith and Watson tackled the question of agency within life stories. They recalled the generalized tendency “to read autobiographical narratives as acts and thus proofs of human agency” (2010, 54), and how traditionally autobiography and agency have been closely associated terms. As they also explained, however, “the issue of how subjects claim, exercise, and narrate agency is far from simply a matter of free will and individual autonomy” (2010, 54), and illness texts written

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by the sick person herself are examples of this. When discussing this type of work, Couser’s idea that “patients are by definition vulnerable subjects” (2004, 15) must be borne in mind, and the question is further complicated when we incorporate the gender variable, because the expectations about agency are not the same for men and women suffering, as in this instance, from cancer (Jain 2013). In this respect, Lynn Kohlman’s Front to Back makes an obvious claim for agency. In spite of her characterization of cancer diagnosis as a roulette wheel—pointing at luck as a key factor, despite her family history with the disease—and of her reaction to the brain cancer news as “falling into an unimaginable, endless black abyss” (n.p.)—assuming a temporary loss of control—she presents herself as struggling to hold the reins of her life and the narrative thereof, with the help of relatives and friends. The first sign of agency on the part of Lynn Kohlman is the fact that she is the very visible author of the longest text, the eight-page introduction, which establishes her as the most important source of information in the book. Kohlman is both the experiencer and the main narrator, that is, the one that chooses the rhetorical strategies and gives readers access to the experiencer as a narrated entity (Schmitt 2017, 138). She determines the chronological span of the story, limiting it to the last 35 years, from her graduation and first steps as a model to the narrative present of 2005, when she portrays herself as living with, and not dying of, cancer: “I now know that I don’t have to conquer cancer today. I have come to terms with it. Brain cancer is no longer something to get over, it’s an ongoing challenge, always present” (n.p.). Although Kohlman provides space for other voices besides her own in Front to Back, it is for them to speak about her and to reinforce the aspects that she has chosen to include in the narrative: her modeling experience, her decision to pose in front of or to stay behind the camera, motherhood, her challenges as a cancer patient, and so on. Donna Karan’s foreword summarizes all these facets: As a model and a photographer, Lynn has lived on both sides of the camera. To know Lynn is to know a woman who lives life to the fullest. She loves challenges of all kinds, using her extraordinary focus to figure out the best approach to take. She observes, she witnesses, she explores, she analyzes, and she gives it her all–as a wife, a mother, a friend, a photographer, a model, a yogi or as a woman facing cancer. (n.p.)

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This is not part of the history of modeling or cancer; this is an example of herstory, reflecting Lynn Kohlman’s priorities and worries about the different worlds that she has inhabited in her first young and healthy, later middle-­aged and sick body. In Foucauldian terms, as an auto/biography, the book functions “as a technology of the self that constitutes the cultural meanings of experience” (Smith and Watson 2010, 56). At the same time, it confirms June Schlueter’s argument that “agency is manifested in the (re)production of experience” (2007, 322). The visual side of the volume, while reinforcing her claim to agency over her self-representation, reveals Kohlman’s awareness of her different roles within the narrative. Her images are a perfect illustration of John Berger’s famous statement “[m]en look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at” (2003, 47). Through the juxtaposition of photographs of her in the section, “A View from the Front” and by her in “Behind the Lens” and “Outer Spirit,” she first foregrounds and then challenges the classical male gaze, becoming an agent by appropriating the instrument of creation (the camera). The model that was portrayed from all angles while at the service of the fashion business5 becomes the photographer who shoots others and who also decides how to frame herself. Interestingly enough, after so much exposition of her body, Kohlman uses the label self-portrait for a picture showing only objects and that she describes as follows, explaining the decision to photograph them and sharing something about her personality: I rolled over in bed this morning and there was my perfect self-portrait. I might have guessed—I’m such a shoe fanatic. Even I think of myself as Imelda Marcos! Most people, I believe, dress in the morning by putting on what they want to wear, then select their shoes. Me, I decide what shoe I’m into that day, many 5  See, for example, http://familypedia.wikia.com/wiki/File:Lynn_kohlman_montage_2. jpg, or http://familypedia.wikia.com/wiki/File:Lynn_Eleanor_Kohlman_1970_circa_ Vogue_3.jpg.

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times determined by the weather, then dress from the shoe up. There they were—two pairs of shoes, a perfect expression of me: the pointier-than-almost-possible shoes that I wore with my jeans yesterday, and my river shoes, the Tevas, that I wore out last evening with my chiffon dress. (n.p.)

The tension between the subject and the object positions, as well as the struggle to remain a narrating agent despite the potentially reifying forces of the modeling profession or the cancer treatments, are further problematized in the final chapter, entitled “A Warrior Spirit,” In it, Kohlman’s ‘Self-Portrait with Expanders’ (more on it below) features alongside her body ravaged by medical procedures in shots taken by Robin Saidman, Steven Sebring, and her husband, Mark Obenhaus. In Front to Back, as Vivian Sobchack explains from the phenomenological point of view, “the lived body [is] at once, both an objective subject and a subjective object” (2004, 2). In line with other visual narratives of cancer produced in the USA, such as Hannah Wilke’s Intra-Venus series (1991–92),6 the photographs of sick Kohlman “significantly complicate the early tension between the artist’s subjectivity and her assumed role as an object” (Avrahami 2007, 133). Her book includes self-portraits and images of her taken by others, and like Wilke’s work, it presents the subject-object positions as interdependent parts of a continuum (Avrahami 2007, 133). In contrast to Intra-­ Venus, however, Kohlman’s selection does not suggest an impending death or show any hint of irony. Wilke organized a posthumous exhibition setting out the pictures of her cancerous body within the medical environment like the twelve Stations of the Cross (De Villiers 2002), and their seriousness was disrupted by her reinterpretations of popular cultural icons. As Jo Anna Isaak has remarked, Wilke’s signature style is a humorous exhibitionism in which she plays all the roles (2002, 63). In her autobiographical cancer piece, we can see her as an oozing Carmen Miranda, as an injured Virgin Mary, or in a Pyscho-like shower scene, with the 6   See, among others, http://hyperbate.fr/mort/2014/09/27/lagonie-de-valentine-­ gode-darel/hannah-wilke-intra-venus-series/, or https://www.pinterest.es/ pin/345862446352949290/.

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murderer—the fatal disease, instead of Norman Bates—lurking. Wilke, Isaak suggests, assumes the role of the clown in the face of death (2002, 67). Conversely, Front to Back presents the sick individual as not dying; as a body living “in a liminal state, vulnerable to the recurrence of cancer and frequent medical scrutiny” (Deshazer 2005, 14), but participating fully in life. In the pictures, we can observe Kohlman modeling, taking photographs, camping, and mothering with a smile on her face. Her performance for the camera is that of a damaged, yet active and happy woman who is out in the world, beyond the hospital walls and the operating theater. Kohlman’s proposal connects more closely with the famous Tree Poster designed by Hella Hammid and Sheila de Bretteville in 1977 and featuring Deena Metzger than it does with Hannah Wilke’s end-of-life project.7 The Amazon warrior image that the Tree Poster displays and the celebratory message that it promotes constitute an antecedent of Kohlman’s post-millennial acceptance and optimism, in line with the twenty-first-­ century she-ro narrative. Through her combination of texts and images, Kohlman builds a self-representation that can be identified with the vulnerable empowered woman that Tasha Dubriwny describes as prevalent in twenty-first-century narratives of illness: a figure “who appears to have some agency and power to shape her own life” (2013, 9). In a context of neoliberal post-feminism that has taken over the feminist ideas of the Women’s Health Movement, women in the most popular stories of sickness appear “as highly gendered individuals who are empowered to choose among medical treatments, manage their future and current health by altering their lifestyles, and increase or play up their femininity by taking advantage of ever-expanding opportunities to modify their bodies and lifestyles” (Dubriwny 2013, 13). While Kohlman is more open than most post-feminist authors about the darkest side of breast cancer—for example, she compares the pain caused by expanders to “medieval torture” (n.p.)—her written narrative falls into the category of choice biography described by Dubriwny, and she utilizes the concept in forms that can be surprising. At the beginning of her introduction she reflects: “In some ways, it seems as if everything has just fallen into my lap—modeling, photography, adventures in the wilderness, even cancer. But has it really? Perhaps I’ve chosen these paths” (n.p.; emphasis added). She elaborates, expanding on the issue of agency, even 7

 See https://jwa.org/media/body-of-warrior-still-image.

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at her most vulnerable times: “Either way, it’s been up to me to decide how to respond” (n.p.; emphasis added). She then activates a thematic unit that, due to its recurrence, has been labeled by Couser a “generic convention” in breast cancer narratives (1997, 43): surgical treatment. Upon diagnosis, Kohlman recalls: “I needed to decide whether or not to have a double mastectomy” (n.p.; emphasis added). After surgery, resorting to another generic trait of the breast cancer master plot (Couser 1997, 43), she presents herself as empowered, again making decisions: “Back to the ‘Big C’ word—32C. Before my mastectomy, that was my bra size. Now that I would have a choice in the matter, I wanted something a little smaller” (n.p.; emphasis added). Kohlman’s self-portrayal as a vulnerable empowered woman—with her life on the line, but with a say in her individual circumstances—is rounded up by her reference to risk management and the burden of health on her shoulders. As Dubriwny explains, in the twenty-first century, “[a]s subjects who make choices, women are represented in discourse about their health as free to construct their own lives, to take responsibility for their bodies, and to craft better selves” (2013, 26). In her socioeconomically privileged status, Kohlman stands as the perfect embodiment of this idea after she is diagnosed with brain cancer: “I have a superb array of doctors at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. I believe there are no better. If there is a cure, they will lead me to it. I also recognized [sic.] that I have to take responsibility for myself, after all, it is my mind and my body” (n.p.). With a combination of positive thinking, visualization, smiling, raw food, meditation, and yoga, she appears as a fighter: “I envisioned picking myself up and emerging a samurai warrior, sword in hand, ready for battle” (n.p.). No image in the book summarizes the rhetoric of the vulnerable empowered woman and complements Kohlman’s writing about agency better than one shot by her husband where we can see her topless, in black underwear, staring seriously into the distance. Her partially shaved head shows the scar of the brain cancer surgery, her breasts are gone after mastectomy, an intravenous cannula is visible on her left arm, and she is wearing a hospital bracelet on her right wrist.8 It is a carefully composed portrait that Lochlann Jain has described as beautiful in its “hyper-designed 8  See https://www.google.com/search?q=lynn+kohlman+samurai+warrior&source=lnms &tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiunpmuwvzgAhUOoRQKHXEhCagQ_AUIDigB&bi w=1280&bih=881#imgrc=AoBPgLNlkvNtlM.

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quality,” drawing “attention to the markings that technology leaves on the body” (2013, 83). In it, Deshazer (2013, 30) identifies the Mohawk haircut that reveals the surgery staples as the punctum, that is, the element that pricks and disturbs the viewer; a detail that changes her reading of the photograph (Barthes 1990, 87). In addition, the mastectomy scars can also fulfill this function. At the very center of the picture, in full light in contrast with the background, and signaling radically the absence of the breasts, they attract our attention and force us to reconsider our idea of beauty, because this is a disturbingly beautiful image. Susan Sontag may have been right when she wrote that there is probably no subject that cannot be beautified by photography (2005, 49).

Did You See the Beautiful Lady Today? In Lynn Kohlman’s auto/biographical book, beauty is present from the first to the last page: female beauty, the beauty of the wilderness, and the beauty of mere existence. Setting the relational terms of the narrative at the beginning, in the foreword Donna Karan describes her friend’s story with these words: “This is the journey of a woman whose extraordinary story is an inspiration, constantly searching for the meaning of life and its beauty—inside and out” (n.p.). In her own introduction, as I mentioned in mine above, Kohlman recalls not recognizing her beauty as a model when she was younger, but feeling attractive in her damaged 57-year-old body after what she calls “another shift, front to back” (n.p.), thus insisting on the idea of transformation that accompanies the chronicle of her adult life and her cancer experiences. The prevalence of the topic of beauty seems to have two rationales in the volume: on the one hand, as model and photographer, Kohlman is aware of the importance of physical appearance, although she tries to go beyond canonical views and vindicate her own way of looking at herself and the world (her celebration of the wilderness in the chapter, “Outer Spirit” would be worth approaching from ecocritical perspectives, for instance). This widening of the concept of beauty is already hinted at in Karan’s description of Kohlman’s style as “androgynous street edge” (n.p.); a label that makes it possible to incorporate her samurai warrior persona, bare of traditional markers of femininity like breasts or makeup, but still appealing in its own terms. Kohlman imagines this new identity for herself:

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I also knew that a true samurai had to soften and relax enough to both absorb and deflect the energy of the opponent, to use the enemy’s strength and power. I looked at all the skills I have in my repertoire to be that warrior, to really come to terms with cancer, to deflect its attack. Decades of experience in meeting and conquering challenges have left me well-equipped. (n.p.)

The text-image interface also allows for a reading of some parts of Kohlman’s testimony as critical of the beauty industry that she knew so well as a model. ‘Self-Portrait with Expanders,’9 for example, makes visible a recurrent moment in conventional breast cancer narratives: the woman in front of the mirror after reconstruction. In isolation, the picture “appears initially to represent merely the photographer turned cancer patient capturing her post-surgical image” (Deshazer 2013, 33). However, the possibility of a discrepancy between the photographs and the verbal narrative is there and, as Christina Ljumberg has suggested in her discussion of the role of photography in postmodern autobiographical texts, it can open some interesting narrative questions (2007, 233). At this particular point in the book, the interaction of the self-portrait and the written word enriches the narrative by problematizing a stage in the cancer process, because in her first textual piece Kohlman had informed her readers about not being eligible for immediate reconstruction because she lacked fat tissue, about her shock when the doctor explained how he would create new nipples from the flesh between her legs, and also about the terrible pain caused by the expanders, which felt “as if the screws were being turned tighter and tighter,” making her “relate to Frida Kahlo” (n.p.). Her memories of the conversation about cup sizes convey “Kohlman’s indignation regarding the studium of the photograph, the prevalence of a male-dominant gaze and the fetishizing of large breasts in U.S. culture” (Deshazer 2013, 33). When she told her doctor that she wanted smaller breasts, the surgeon informed her that As and Bs were not available in the USA, only bigger sizes, which prompted her irate response: “Talk about a man’s world!” (n.p.). This was followed by a humorous turn: “I had this image of myself in a black-and-white movie, with my face pressed against the window of my car as a customs officer cuffed my hands behind my back and read me my Miranda rights for the crime of smuggling breast implants across the US border!” (n.p.). 9

 See the tenth picture at http://arts.cphoto.net/Html/jzxs/jpsx/142206869.html.

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On the other hand, Front to Back follows some of the typical patterns of the master plot of illness, including what Conway has dubbed “the myth of the beautiful sufferer” (2007, 21); a legacy from Romantic literature and art adapted by post-industrial American culture. “[H]owever ill a person becomes,” Conway explains, “she is depicted as, or expected to remain, beautiful” (2007, 24). This argument gains special momentum within the relational structure of this auto/biographical piece in the closing “Loving Letters.” In hindsight, they transform from items of celebration when they were composed to elements of commemoration after Kohlman’s death in 2008. Her relatives and friends refer to her strength, warrior impulse, inner light and, of course, to beauty before and during sickness—her looks, and her passion for it: “She sees beauty // intense beauty // and we see beauty reflected // in her eye,” yoga instructor Rodney Yee writes (n.p.). Fellow yoga learner, Julie Gilhart, remembers noticing Kohlman before she even met her: “She was one of those attractive women that stand out in a crowd.” After diagnosis, she muses: “The funny thing is, she is still one of those very attractive women that stand out in the crowd.” In the midst of “her intense medical stuff,” Gilhart concludes: “she is by far the most attractive woman in a crowd” (n.p.). The intensity of the praise reaches a climax in the letter shared by Marion Roaman, Kohlman’s spin instructor. Describing her chats with her colleagues, she confides: “one of us might say, ahh [sic.], yes, but did you see the beautiful lady today? The ‘beautiful lady,’ the strong, calm, warmhearted woman who would glide effortlessly through a gut-wrenching forty-five minute spin class and leave the studio as refreshed, calm, and beautiful as she entered.” A few lines below, she adds: “It was Lynn, the ‘beautiful lady,’ my female prototype, the perfect mother and wife in her purest form” (n.p.). This is one side of Kohlman’s life (her roles within the family) that is also visually present in the book: the antepenultimate photograph included in her selection shows Kohlman with her husband and son, the three of them smiling at the camera, standing very close to one another, united in an embrace. Kohlman’s brain surgery staples are visible and she seems to be tired, but she keeps her determined look, which is directed at the photographer and, by extension, at the reading public.10 Their image as an attractive, and loving family is reinforced by the inclusion, on the next page, of a letter by Kohlman’s son, Sam. Signed when he was 16 years old  See the thirteenth picture at http://arts.cphoto.net/Html/jzxs/jpsx/142206869.html.

10

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at Christmas 2002, the text repeatedly uses the words “love,” “bond,” “family,” and “strong,” circling from one declaration of filial love at the beginning to another at the end, and declaring Kohlman the best mother, wife, and friend anyone could hope for (n.p.). At this stage, the glamorous model of earlier times is gone, replaced by a vulnerable fighter that remains beautiful despite the obvious wounds. Working with the argument that beauty “stands as a central narrative in the rhetoric of breast cancer culture,” Jain takes Conway’s proposals about the myth of the beautiful sufferer one step further when she analyzes Front to Back from her vantage point as knowledgeable of Kohlman’s demise. Discussing the section “A Warrior Spirit,” she states: “Kohlman’s images bring the mastectomy into an aesthetic of the beautiful death […] Her scars pose not as ugly to be covered, nor as ugly to be embraced, but as beautiful—both in themselves and on this classically beautiful androgynous woman” (2013, 84). Her conclusion is that, despite not assuming the commercial pink charity visual codes that dominate in the early twenty-­ first century,11 Kohlman “takes her scars outside the realm of sadness and sentimentality and makes them matter as spectacle” (Jain 2013, 84). The photographs in Lynn Front to Back illustrate Sontag’s ideas about the embellishment of the real—however decrepit—through the representation of its pathos (2005, 148). The recognition of beauty in  sick Kohlman’s portraits shows that photography has expanded our notion of what is aesthetically pleasing (Sontag 2005, 151). This could be understood positively as part of the very necessary and pending process of making illness visible in earnest and normalizing the presence of sick people outside the medical environment. Conversely, the enlargement, publication, and commercialization of the images could also be interpreted as complicit with the phenomenon, also described by Sontag (2005, 158), of turning history into spectacle. If this were the case, Kohlman’s effort at redefining beauty would not have been totally effective against the commodification of her experience as a model-turned-patient-turned-model within an auto/biographical project where the images surpass the written texts, clearly dominating the narrative. The final picture by Robin Saidman, which shares some of the components of fashion photography (we could

11  Pink ribbon culture as described by Ehrenreich (2001), Jain (2007), and Sulik (2012), among other authors.

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actually read it as a blue jeans ad with a twist) supports this reading.12 It is an American shot of topless Kohlman. She is wearing unbuttoned blue jeans, under which we can see part of her black underwear. The hospital bracelet is still on her right wrist, the scar on her head is partially visible, and she is posing in full frontal position, displaying her flat chest and a wide smile, almost a laugh. Kohlman’s story is thus closed by a shot of a hybrid self that incorporates some sick woman traits, while maintaining the allure of her top model identity. It deconstructs the pink ribbon imagery by displaying the scars openly, but it sticks to its ethos of presenting the cancer patient as an ever-smiling, beautiful warrior.

Conclusion The juxtaposition of two different semiotic systems in an autobiographical work that includes text and photography invites active participation on the part of the receiver, who is implicated in a process of reconstruction that entails “the evaluation of the documentary fragments of words and images typical of the autobiographical ritual” (Ljumberg 2007, 222). In the text-­ image interface of Lynn Front to Back, the latter prevails and is more likely to affect the reading public. There are many more photos than texts, the large-format volume is at the service of the pictures, the iconic language is more powerful than the rhetorical style of the writings, and the photographs featuring Kohlman have a cumulative effect that is not present in the interspersed textual pieces, most of them very short. Nevertheless, the presence of a hybrid matrix incorporating both codes (word and image) demands attention as to their possible interactions. Their configurations are by necessity different, and as independent modes that are forced into a dialogue within the whole of the book, they “must be read against/ through each other,” as Smith and Watson have suggested (2002, 21). Lynn Kohlman is the author, experiencer, and main narrator of this auto/biographical story, and she presents herself as an agent fighting to keep control in the broadest possible sense: over her modeling career, her work behind the camera, her reactions to repeated diagnoses of cancer, her treatment options, and her life choices. Her struggle for agency transpires 12  Kohlman’s picture is included in this collage (second at the top, left-hand side): https:// www.flickr.com/photos/richard_arthur_norton/3015336408. See the third image at http://www.softblog.co/calvin-klein-jeans-ad-2014.html as illustration of the “blue jeans ad with a twist” idea.

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in her selection of words in the texts (“choice,” “decision,” “responsibility”) and in what she opts for in terms of visual self-representation: successful model, able photographer, adventurer in the wilderness, cancer patient that is vulnerable, but never relinquishes her power to decide and hope for a happy ending. As for the thematization of beauty, and despite some transgressions— most of them visual, such as the exhibition of the traces of surgery—the final product makes a resisting reading very complicated. Using Stuart Hall’s (1993) terminology, we could say that the preferred meaning of the book is that there is beauty to be found in and outside our bodies, in sickness and in health. Whether or not her decisions as cancer patient were the best ones for her condition, and whether or not they were really free choices, Kohlman as author succeeded in making her view of life and cancer prevail in the narrative. As experiencer, like many writers of illness autobiography, she had to negotiate the “tension between empowerment and powerlessness” (Avrahami 2007, 8). As narrator, she embraced the figure of the vulnerable empowered woman. She displayed what Michelle Peek labels willful vulnerability, which is “constituted by embodied vulnerability (and sometimes even powerlessness) and by empowerment” (2013/14, 191). “To be willfully vulnerable,” Peek explains, “is to (attempt to) lay oneself bare, to expose the self rather than be exposed, to understand certain representations of vulnerability as intentional, against other modes as imposed” (2013/14, 192).13 In that exposition, Kohlman communicated an idea of beauty despite everything that is unavoidable as a unifying thread in her book, from the foreword and all the way through the final letters. In this regard, Lynn Front to Back attempts to lift off as an alternative kind of auto/biographical project, but it falls into a process of recuperation, eventually standing amid the conventional cancer narratives of the early millennium as a tribute to a woman that lived in constant struggle against the extremely powerful dominant discourses about modeling, womanhood, and sickness.

References Avrahami, Einat. 2007. The Invading Body. Reading Illness Autobiographies. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press. 13   See the twelfth and seventeenth pictures at http://arts.cphoto.net/Html/jzxs/ jpsx/142206869.html.

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Barthes, Roland. [1980] 1990. La cámara lúcida. Notas sobre la fotografía. Barcelona: Paidós. Berger, John. [1972] 2003. Ways of Seeing. London: BBC and Penguin Books. Conway, Kathlyn. 1997. Ordinary Life. A Memoir of Illness. New  York: W.H. Freeman and Company. ———. 2007. Beyond Words. Illness and the Limits of Expression. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Couser, G. Thomas. 1997. Recovering Bodies. Illness, Disability and Life Writing. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. ———. 2004. Vulnerable Subjects. Ethics and Life Writing. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. De Villiers, Suzanne. 2002. Gender, Ideology and Display. Image & Narrative (Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative) 4. http://www.imageandnarrative. be/inarchive/gender/suzannedevilliershuman.htm. Deshazer, Mary K. 2005. Fractured Borders. Reading Women’s Cancer Literature. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. ———. 2013. Mammographies. The Cultural Discourses of Breast Cancer Narratives. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Dubriwny, Tasha N. 2013. The Vulnerable Empowered Woman. Feminism, Postfeminism, and Women’s Health. New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press. Ehrenreich, Barbara. 2001. Welcome to Cancerland. Harper’s Magazine, November: 43–53. Hall, Stuart. [1980] 1993. Encoding, Decoding. In The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During, 90–103. London and New York: Routledge. Isaak, Jo Anna. 2002. In Praise of Primary Narcissism. The Last Laughs of Jo Spence and Hannah Wilke. In Interfaces. Women/Autobiography/Image/ Performance, ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, 49–68. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Jain, S. Lochlann. 2007. Cancer Butch. Cultural Anthropology 22 (4): 501–538. ———. 2013. Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kohlman, Lynn. 2005. Lynn Front to Back. New York: Assouline Publishing. Ljumberg, Christina. 2007. Rituals of Remembrance: Photography and Autobiography in Postmodern Texts. In The Seeming and the Seen. Essays in Modern Visual and Literary Culture, ed. Beverly Maeder, Jürg Schyter, Ilona Sigrist, and Boris Vejdovsky, 343–365. Bern and Berlin: Peter Lang. Matuschka. 1996. Barbie Gets Breast Cancer. In ‘Bad Girls’/‘Good Girls’. Women, Sex, and Power in the Nineties, ed. Nan Bauer Maglin and Donna Perry, 246–264. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Pascual, Nieves. 2005. Photographs as Prostheses. In Witness to Pain. Essays on the Translation of Pain into Art, ed. Nieves Pascual, 55–74. Bern: Peter Lang.

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Peek, Michelle. 2013/14. Willful Vulnerability: Generous Offerings in Cancer in Two Voices and The Century Project. Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 32 (2)/33 (1) (Fall/Spring): 189–217. Schlueter, June. 2007. Beyond Reform. Agency ‘after Theory’. Feminist Theory 8 (3): 315–332. Schmitt, Arnaud. 2017. The Phenomenology of Autobiography. Making It Real. New York and London: Routledge. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. 2010. Reading Autobiography. A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. 2nd ed. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Sobchack, Vivian. 2004. Carnal Thoughts. Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley, Los Ángeles and London: University of California Press. Sontag, Susan. [1973] 2005. Sobre la fotografía. Madrid: Alfaguara. Sulik, Gayle A. [2010] 2012. Pink Ribbon Blues. How Breast Cancer Culture Undermines Women’s Health. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Watson, Julia, and Sidonie Smith. 2002. Introduction. Mapping Women’s Self-­ Representation at Visual/Textual Interfaces. In Interfaces. Women/ Autobiography/Image/Performance, ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, 1–46. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.

CHAPTER 14

Creating Together an “Unexpected Home”: Navigating the Matrixial Borderspace Through Text and Image in Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document (1973–79) Justyna Wierzchowska

In the Post-partum Document, I am trying to show the reciprocity of the process of socialization in the first years of life. It is not only the infant whose future personality is formed at this crucial moment, but also the mother[’s]. —Mary Kelly And what if … a celibate ‘state of birth’ was shared by/via the artwork as a matrixial borderspace of co-birth? (1999, 91) —Bracha Ettinger

J. Wierzchowska (*) University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 V. Baisnée-Keay et al. (eds.), Text and Image in Women’s Life Writing, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84875-0_14

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Post-Partum Document is a unique classic of second-wave feminist art. Created in London in the years 1973–79 by American visual artist Mary Kelly, this multi-media installation registers Kelly’s autobiographical experience of mothering a child from the moment he is introduced to solid food at five months until he writes his name at the age of six. The installation combines visuals and narrative as it traces the mother’s and the child’s mutual becoming in its organic, affective and cognitive dimensions. On the one hand, Kelly’s work belongs to a larger 1970s feminist intervention into mainstream art, one which challenged “the deliberate rejection of feeling by key artists and art movements, such as minimalism, conceptual art, land art and structural film” during a period in art generally characterized as “anti-aesthetic, anti-expressive and anti-subjective in approach and tenor” (Best 2014, 1).1 Like many feminist art works of the time, including Carolee Schneemann’s performance art, Cindy Sherman’s photographs or Louise Bourgeois’ installations, Post-Partum Document disrupts the notion of art depicted above by Susan Best. Laura Mulvey aptly describes Kelly’s work as a “slap in the face for old guard concepts of the artist as free-wheeling genius” (Mulvey 1983, 201), and Caroline Osborne and Lucy Lippard note that the piece “self-consciously subverts fine art practice” and “transcends the social expectations of ‘art’” (Osborne 1984 137; Lippard 1983, xiii). In the 1970s, the Document’s very subject, the mother-child interaction, was par excellence problematic, since historically, as Mulvey puts it, “the ability to produce children and the emotional relationship that ensues [was thought to be] the reason for women’s lack of creativity” (201). What is more, because of feminism’s complex and uneasy relation to the maternal, Kelly’s installation proved problematic also within feminist circles.2 All these factors reflect the novelty and boldness of Kelly’s artistic gesture. Even today it would be difficult to find 1  The Document’s visual similarity to conceptual art works may be misleading. The repetitiveness of the object is a wink to the formal tenets of minimalism/conceptualism, for example, the emotional frigidity of Judd or Kosuth. It is crucial to understand the shift introduced by Kelly. Kosuth does not use his objects to explore anything beyond “the art-idea itself” and assumes “an authoritative position outside of [his] field of investigation” (Iversen 1997, 38). Kelly’s Document, on the contrary, is very autobiographical. Moreover, she maintains that the Document “relies very heavily on the viewer’s affective relation to the visual configuration of objects and texts” (1983, xvi, emphasis original). 2  Various strands of feminism struggled to free women from societal reproductive demands (see Iversen 1997, 34; Schneir 1994). As a result, in the time when the Document was made, “[t]he mother artist was an oxymoron both within Patriarchy and within the movements which sought to challenge it” (Iversen 1997, 34).

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another motherhood-oriented artwork of such caliber, detail, critical sophistication and wit. At the same time, Post-Partum Document belongs to a growing body of artistic productions that employ diverse media to render representations of autobiographical experience. In their edited volume, Interfaces: Women, Autobiography, Image, Performance (2002), Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson posit that if we look beyond conventions, we become aware of the “proliferating sites of the autobiographical” (5). The two authors maintain that, in addition to the conventional—that is textual—autobiographical forms, such as memoirs and diaries, there are numerous visual modes, such as sculpture, painting, photography, collage, installations and performance art that are not usually recognized as autobiographical acts (5–6). They call for an inclusion of these diverse creations, with a particular attention to the “visual/textual interface,” that is any combination of text and image that combines in an autobiographical act. Similarly, Hertha D. Sweet Wong, in her recent book, Picturing Identity: Contemporary American Autobiography in Image and Text, (2018) emphasizes that even though “visual and literary studies have historically been considered separate disciplines, over the past fifty years disciplinary borders and medium-specific art practices have become increasingly permeable,” with many artists working across the disciplines and media. In the book, she explores various forms of what she terms “intermedia autobiography,” “intersectional autobiography,” or “autobiography in image and text” (2), such as Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus, Faith Ringgold’s story quilts and Leslie Marmon Silko’s photo narratives. Post-Partum Document perfectly falls within this approach: it is an installation that combines image and text to produce a form of life-writing which is both intimate and political, and which uses the mothering experience to expose and challenge the difficulties and misconceptions that this experience entails.3 Post-Partum Document consists of six sections, or “Documentations,” comprising a total of 135 similar looking units framed in Perspex boxes (Fig.  14.1). They chronologically document the consecutive stages of Kelly’s relationship with her son, each marking an important point in the child’s formation of the self: weaning from the breast, his speech acquisition, his introduction into daycare and into language.

3  In fact, Post-Partum Document can be seen as one of the forerunners of the theoretical shifts within autobiography studies. See Leigh Gilmore (1994, 4).

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Fig. 14.1  Mary Kelly. Post-Partum Document: Documentation V, Classified Specimens, Proportional Diagrams, Statistical Tables, Research and Index, 1977. Perspex, white card, wood, paper, ink, mixed media, 36 units. 18  ×  13  cm, 7.1 × 5.1 in. Installation view: Generali Foundation, Vienna, 1998. Courtesy of the artist and Generali Foundation, Vienna. (Photograph: Werner Kaligofsky)

Each of the 135 units contains an object that marked a moment in the development of the artist’s son and which has been cathected by Kelly, the mother: his dried-up soiled diapers, folded baby vests, blanket scraps, his tiny hand cast in plaster, his gifts to his mother, his preschool scribbles, first utterances and first written words. Each object is accompanied by captions that feature a multiplicity of narrative voices: the artist-mother’s contextualization of the event, the transcripts of the conversations between the mother and the child, and a critical analysis of the experience, referring to psychoanalytical—mostly Lacanian—theories developed and debated in the 1970s.

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In this article, I focus on section five of the Document, titled “Documentation V” and subtitled “On the Order of Things.”4 I approach it as an example of Smith and Watson’s “autobiographical textual/visual interface” and argue that this section anticipates the developments in the theories on subjectivity formation that were fully voiced only two decades later. Specifically, I maintain that Documentation V showcases the arguments put forward by Israeli theorist and visual artist, Bracha Ettinger. From the 1990s onwards, Ettinger has been developing a powerful reworking of and addition to Freud-Lacan by maintaining that it is not the Father, but a feminine-maternal sphere, with its symbolic and imaginary in the womb, that is decisive for and which sustains the making of the self. At the center of Ettinger’s writings is the concept of the matrixial borderspace, defined as a co-created inter-subjective field that transgresses the boundaries of the individual and sustains the process of mutual co-­ becoming (2006b, 218–219). This inherent interconnectedness of the living creatures, which is primarily organic, yet which affectively pulsates throughout human life, contributes in her view to ethical thinking about human responsibility to one another and to the world.

Bracha Ettinger’s Matrixial Borderspace and Art In her 2006 article, “Matrixial Trans-Subjectivity,” Bracha Ettinger writes: Psychoanalytic theory has struggled to overcome the limitations imposed on the understanding of the formation of subjectivity because of the reliance on the Freudian theory of the unconscious which privileges the phallus as signifier of the dynamic between lack and desire, and which supports the model of repression based on the castration complex and its male perspective. (2006b, 218)

In her own work, Ettinger juxtaposes this paternally oriented model with one focused on relational inter-subjectivity, where the self is construed as formed, in Ettinger’s own words, “in the relations between the caring adult (mother) and the baby” (218). Unlike Lacan, for whom the entry into the Symbolic rests upon a subjectivity on guard against the maternal abject (1949, 78), for Ettinger, the very crux of subjectivity is rooted in 4  All references are based on the print version of Post-Partum Document, first published by Routledge & Kegan Paul in 1983 and later republished by University of California Press in 1999.

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the “recycling and co-affecting” through which “an ephemeral, composite, unexpected home is successively crystalized […] inseparable from the process that creates it” (1999, 91). The idea of the “unexpected home” is modeled on Ettinger’s understanding of the womb not as “a container or a simple organ of reproduction but a space where subjectivity is shaped through co-emergence” (in Silver 425). Ettinger radically shifts Lacan’s preoccupation with the symbolic/linguistic as defining for the subject toward the foundational role of the bodily-affective exchange that begins before one acquires language and which continues throughout one’s life. In her 2004 article titled, “Weaving a Woman Artist with-in the Matrixial Encounter-Event,” Ettinger specifically explains how the birthing body must be denied in a culture centered on the paternal. She discusses the figure of the Hero-Genius, referring to the writings of Otto Rank. Ettinger explains that the signifier Genius literally means Begetter, which, as Rank makes clear, “draws our attention to the fact that the Hero-Genius is in reality the Ego, as structured by the Oedipus complex” (Ettinger 2004, 69). Ettinger goes on to say that, within the Freudian framework, for the seemingly universally “neutral” (that is male) child, who does not have a womb, the womb must be either denied or displaced (70). She quotes Rank: “If babies are born through the anus, then a man can give birth as well as a woman” (Rank 1959 in Ettinger 2004, 70). The birth-giving mother may then melt away into “obscurity and senselessness of no human significance” and the “universal” child can enjoy an interrupted sense of wholeness, since he may believe himself to be an owner of every possible valuable organ. (Ettinger 2004, 70). The womb is thus dismissed. Ettinger is not alone in theorizing the concept of the womb as an alternative model through which to approach culture (see Horney 1967; Kittay 1984; Irigaray 1985; Silver 2007; Semmelhack et al. 2011), yet it is her scholarship that forms a lens particularly fit to explore the contents of Kelly’s Document. Not only does Ettinger directly debate Lacan, but she also traverses the disciplines of psychology, art criticism and feminist critique to form a theory which allows to use one’s autobiographical experience as representative of the human condition with its rootedness in the maternal. She does so by approaching the self as formed in a process in which the pre-Oedipal impulses are linked to the “archaic Other/mother,” redirecting one’s sense of loss from the symbolic phallus onto the primordial loss of the mother (2006, 218). The symbolic womb becomes, as Catherine B.  Silver puts it, “a breathing space of reattunement and

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creativity,” which can be expressed “in aesthetic fields” (Silver 426). The human mother-interconnectedness allows Ettinger to establish a firm link between “the feminine and creation,” thus making artistic practice not only hospitable to autobiographic enterprises, but also connected to “an enlarged symbolic” in which the feminine (neither male nor female) is fully active, informing knowledge and the ethical realm (2006, 218). Ettinger’s focus on the maternal is analogous to that of British pediatrician, psychoanalyst and scholar Donald W. Winnicott, for whom art is an outgrowth of the transitional space between the mother and the child (1971, 87–114). In the words of Jessica Benjamin, in this space “both the mother and the child co-create and constantly renegotiate their relational pattern (Benjamin 1988, 2004). Ettinger also points to the inter-­ subjective, matrixial roots of the human capacity to create. Yet, while the pediatrician Winnicott moves within a down-to-earth register based on his clinical practice, Ettinger, as saliently vivid in the passages above, engages in a language of mythology, reminiscent of Jung’s ruminations on the figure of the Great Mother (Jung 2004). By doing so, she works on two planes at the same time: the autobiographical experience of the particular human being and the collectively shared symbolic capture of the existential condition of humankind. In what follows I am going to show that Documentation V, through its cunning employment of text and image, engages both with a singular (autobiographical) and a universal experience of the maternal, which enables one to view Kelly’s installation as an artistic forerunner of Ettinger’s conceptualization of the matrixial.

Documentation V: On the Order of Things Documentation V of Post-Partum Document subtitled, “On the order of things,” consists of eleven sets of three vertical panels (Fig. 14.2). The first panel in each of the sets contains an object, plant or animal, collected by the then three- and four-year-old boy as a gift for his mother and now mounted on an entomological pinning bloc, captioned in Latin, along with its common name and place and date of collection. The second panel features a photocopy of the gift-object mapped onto a proportional diagram and accompanied by a transcript of the child’s conversation with his mother that took place around the time of the collection. The third panel shows a fragment of a diagram illustrating a full-term pregnant body and an excerpt from an index of medical terminology, much of it in Latinized English, concerning gestation and birth.

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Fig. 14.2  Mary Kelly. Post-Partum Document: Documentation V, Classified Specimens, Proportional Diagrams, Statistical Tables, Research and Index, 1977. perspex, white card, wood, paper, ink, mixed media, 36 units. 18  ×  13 cm, 7.1 × 5.1 in. Installation view: Generali Foundation, Vienna, 1998. Courtesy of the artist and Generali Foundation, Vienna. (Photograph: Werner Kaligofsky)

Documentation V presents the maternal as omnipresent, yet dispersed and troubled. The organic gift-objects, the transcripts of mother-child verbal exchanges and the diagrams of the fragmented pregnant body present motherhood as both singular and universal, and yet as incohesive and eluding representation. First of all, the units visually and narratively frame the gifts with at least three incompatible discourses: that of making them into scientific exhibits, that of capturing the ephemerality of the moment in which they were given by the little boy, and that of transporting a singular experience into a broader context of the cycle of life (Fig. 14.3). What is more, the triptych-like design of each set of panels establishes a visual correspondence between the earthly and the transcendent, hinting

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Fig. 14.3  Mary Kelly. Post-Partum Document: Documentation V, Classified Specimens, Proportional Diagrams, Statistical Tables, Research and Index, 1977. Perspex, white card, wood, paper, ink, mixed media, units 6, 6a and 6b.18 × 13 cm, 7.1 × 5.1 in. Installation view: Generali Foundation, Vienna, 1998. Courtesy of the artist and Generali Foundation, Vienna. (Photograph: Werner Kaligofsky)

at the disparity between the lived experience of mothering a child and the idealized renditions of maternity (see Kristeva 1980, 1986). Additionally, the graphic cross-referencing that goes on within each set of three panels and which is reiterated through all eleven sets, makes the maternal ubiquitous to the point of dissolution: the square-shaped pinning blocs are echoed by the square-shaped proportional diagrams, which in their turn are echoed by the square-shaped diagrams of the pregnant body. This interconnection is further strengthened by the fact that the proportional diagrams are based on the method of co-ordinates. This method allows one to transmute any of the mapped objects into a different one by simply manipulating the co-ordinates. Thus, the maternal is presented as all-­ permeating yet dimmed: one has to make an effort to see the connections, for they are not overtly established. It can be argued then that Documentation V presents maternity as what Luce Irigaray has called “the

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silent substratum of the social order,” that is a factor that underpins the society’s going-on-being, yet remains scarcely visible itself (Irigaray 1991). However, when approached in light of Ettinger’s ideas, Documentation V not only illustrates the suppression of the maternal in Western culture, but also challenges it. The cross-referential arrangement of the panels, in the words of Margaret Iversen, “connects the three year-old’s curiosity about nature to his infantile investigation of the mother’s body” (Iversen 1997, 44), and at the same time, intervenes in the larger issues of how the maternal is represented in Western culture. The Documentation’s very subtitle, “On the Order of Things,” engages with Lacan’s three orders and his concept of the Thing. By pluralizing the word “Thing” and typing it in the lower case in her book edition commentary on Documentation V (1983, 162), Kelly questions its inaccessibility as put forward in the Lacanian theory. She slivers the supposedly inaccessible “Thing” into fragmentary insights into an experience that certainly goes beyond language, yet which can be productively engaged with. The very arrangement of the panels does exactly that: by indexing the maternal in a three-fold way— through objects, through dialogic narratives and through medical pictograms/discourse—Documentation V demonstrates that the maternal, albeit problematically and inconclusively, can be addressed in a meaningful way. This allows one to empathize with Ettinger’s conviction that, the Woman/Other should not be understood, as Lacan would have it, only ‘in the field of the Thing’, as the ‘other-Thing that lies beyond’ (1992, 214, 298). In my view, she should also be understood in the field of Event and Encounter and as an almost-other-Event-Encounter that is borderlinked to the I. … [The] traces of the Event-Encounter function as a transgressive subjectivizing link in a web of connections and not as a missing object. (Ettinger 2004, 71)

Documentation V showcases Ettinger’s words, for it brings the maternal Other from the domain of the “beyond” into the “Field of Event and Encounter,” while acknowledging the difficulties that surround it. The visual/narrative set up of the panels works through the aporias and the stakes culturally attributed to the maternal: the silencing of the maternal experience in Western culture, the fear connected with the mother figure, and the entanglement of life and death that accompanies motherhood. When scrutinized more closely, one can see that Documentation V does it on several planes.

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First of all, all eleven gift-objects represent common plant and animal species–weeds, bugs and moths—often unheeded and rendered insignificant, yet both life-sustaining and life-threatening. For example, all three botanical exhibits—the privet, the buttercup and the dandelion—allude both to fertility and death. They belong to the flowering plants, yet they pose a threat. The privet has small yet heavily scented flowers that turn into poisonous berries; the buttercup, a herbaceous plant with bright yellow cup-shaped flowers, is also poisonous; the dandelion, another herbaceous plant, has stems full of milky latex, it tastes bitter and turns quickly into a black sticky substance when picked. The zoological samples follow suit. They are a mollusk and seven insects—beetles and moths—that, similarly to the plants, do not enjoy an unambivalently positive reputation among people. The garden snail, for example, is a common pest for crops. At the same time, it has a spiral shell that can fit its whole body forming a protective barrier from the outside world, much like the womb in the case of the human child. The four moths alternately awe and disgust people: they live by night, are attracted to light, have furry bodies and seem to be negatives of the butterfly. Viewed as connectors between the mother and the child, the gift-objects’ ambivalent characteristics render them abject and emblematic of the figure of the monstrous feminine (Kristeva 1982). What is more, the chronological arrangement of the eleven gift-objects forms a narrative that inscribes them into the cycle of life and death. The three botanical exhibits are followed by a mollusk, three beetles and fours moths. The fragile plants are then followed by the hard-shelled gastropods and insects (the beetles), which are followed by the yet again fragile moths. What is more, the arrangement of the moths also forms a narrative that is inscribed into the larger pattern of the gift-objects’ presentation. The first three specimens—pebble prominent, swallow prominent and buff arches— gradually lighten in color, leading the way to the last one: the peach blossom moth. The white-and-pink spotted peach blossom moth gets its name from the fact that it resembles the petals of a peach blossom. This flowery visual analogy links the peach blossom moth to the first specimen of Documentation V, that is the flower-producing privet. Thus, I would suggest, that the eleven specimens are circularly connected, showcasing the cycle of life wherein life and death, day and night, the beautiful and the poisonous do not stand in opposition, but are intertwined and necessary to sustain the process of living. Secondly, from the perspective of Freudian psychoanalysis, the eleven specimens in Documentation V are ready-made metaphors for femininity:

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the cupped flowers, the cave-like snail, the clitoris-shaped moths all analogize the female body. As such, they also converse with Jung’s archetype of the Mother, whom he associates with “things and places standing for fertility and fruitfulness: the cornucopia, a ploughed field, a garden” and with any objects which are reminiscent of “the uterus, yoni, and anything of a like shape.” He adds to this list “many animals, such as the cow, hare, and helpful animals in general” (Jung 2004, 15). Also, Ettinger, when she recounts myths of the hero, notes that the role of the mother is usually relegated to the background and “often presented as an animal.” (Rank in Ettinger 2004, 69). Mary Kelly establishes an identical link via a different path: not mythology, but the empirical experience of interacting with her child. In the “Introduction” to Documentation V, Kelly writes that “the gifts coincided with [her son’s] questions about sexuality” and that she used to “construct a metaphorical space in which the mother’s body is named through the researches of the child” (113, italics in the original). However, even though Documentation V traces the process of the child’s efforts to name the mother’s body, it also shows that this process can never be complete. This impossibility is made particularly vivid in the third panel of each set, the one which contains a diagram of the pregnant body indexed with a terminology concerning pregnancy and labor. These panels make pregnancy and labor abject in a two-fold way. First, on the visual plane, it is remarkable that in none of the panels, the pregnant body can fit within the outline of the diagram. In each, the body is chopped into two-dimensional close-ups of details that do not combine to make a whole. Secondly, on the discursive plane, the experience of pregnancy and labor is reduced to a set of alphabetically ordered (thus random from the point of view of the experience) terms that often resist understanding or produce a traumatizing effect. These terms are presented in a language that itself generates fear, among the terms are: abnormal pregnancy, anal fissure, blocked duct, breech labor, cauterization, cervical smear, cervicitis, cystitis, dysmenorrhea, dyspareunia, ectopic pregnancy, enema, fibroids, fetal death, forceps, gonorrhea, hemorrhage, hysterectomy, intra-uterine death and others all the way to the letter “z” (PPD 117, 121, 125, 129, 133, 137). Altogether, these panels demonstrate two existentially undeniable yet deeply unsettling facts: that everybody is “of woman born” (Rich 1976) and that “the body carries the relation of the human being to its own death” (Ettinger 2004, 72). In the case of the pregnant body, this relation is so extreme, that, as Ettinger pointedly observes, it is collectively suppressed and repressed:

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A fabric of hidden connections between death and the feminine underlies Freudian psychoanalysis in general and Lacanian theory in particular. Thus, the foreclosure of the feminine is vital for the phallic subject: it does indeed stand for the split from the death drive. (Ettinger 2004, 72–73)

The panels, unapologetically featuring the pregnant body, make this foreclosure difficult, or even impossible, to sustain. However, it is not only the diagrams of the pregnant body that make this foreclosure difficult. The whole arrangement of Documentation V works toward bringing the ontological reality of the maternal to light. The first and the third panels in each set graphically level the gift-animals with the diagrams of the pregnant body. Such arrangement establishes a correlate between the two, as they form a visual bridge where the natural world and the world of science are both permeated by the maternal. The maternal lurks through the specimens presented in panel one and challenges the fragmented representations of pregnancy. This difficulty to contain the maternal is even further emphasized by the presence of the Latin language in the first and third panel of each set. Within Western culture, Latin is both the foundational language of science and a dead one, which powerfully signalizes the limitation of such discourse to contain the maternal. The excerpt from the list of unsettling medical terms presented in the previous paragraphs demonstrates the clumsiness and reductionism of the medical discourse to address the mothering experience. Thus, the maternal turns out to be omnipresent and troublesome, despite the efforts to overlook it or sweep it under the phallic carpet of expert discourse. The visual-narrative arrangement of Documentation V constitutes a powerful and quite direct response to Lacan. One needs to bear in mind that the gift-object panels and the pregnant body panels visually bracket the panels containing the mother-child conversations. This arrangement constitutes a fascinating reworking of the Freud-Lacan Oedipus complex, recasting it around a maternal axis. The contents of the conversations make it impossible to deny the fact of human maternal origin, thus disavowing the myths of the all-male Genius-Hero, discussed in the previous section. In one of the conversations, the son asks: “Do babies come from bottoms?” In another, he proclaims: “When I was a tiny baby I was in Mummy’s tummy. When I get big, I will give … Mummy a baby and when Daddy gets bigger he will have a baby” (148, 132). His words inscribe in the Genius-Hero narrative which upholds the myth of the “creation through the anus [so that] a man can give birth just as well as a

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woman” (Rank 1959 in Ettinger 2004, 70). Yet, in both conversations, the mother curtails his omnipotent fantasies, explaining the sexual difference and the female creative potential: “Boys don’t have babies” and “Only mummies… ladies have babies” (132, 136). The difference in the epistemic economy between the mother and child, along with the questions of the origin and sexual difference, runs throughout the eleven conversations presented in the second panel: K. [the son] Mummy, where’s your willy? M. [the mother] I haven’t got one. I’m a girl and you’re a boy. You’re like Daddy. You two have got one and I don’t. K. Show me. M. Oh Kel… (116) And: K. I can’t give you a baby, maybe Daddy can get you one in the shop. M. You were my baby, now you’re a big boy… but I don’t want another baby. Anyway, they don’t come from shops. (144) On the one hand, these conversations demonstrate the child as a “separate individual endowed with personal characteristics and changing mental states” (Raphael-Leff in Takseva 2017, 161). On the other, they expose the mother’s sense of being overwhelmed, helpless and confused, as the child’s questions coerce her into a necessity to respond. The mother’s effort to communicate with her son, despite their disparate positions and the difficulty of the subject, shows the two of them bound in a relationship of commitment in which neither adopts a position of unflinching authority. The dialogues illustrate situations in which, in the words of Ettinger, “[t]he fragile I senses the vulnerability in the Other in resonance, consonance, and dissonance before and beyond thinking” (2014, 19). Tucked between the carefully preserved gift-objects in panel one and the representation of the existentially threatening reality of pregnancy in panel three, the mother-child conversations are unapologetic in their recognition of maternal vulnerability and commitment. Thus, I want to suggest that the whole arrangement of Documentation V works toward the recognition of the fragile process of relationship-­ making, in which, as Ettinger puts it, “the maternal Other attempts to provide for the child’s well-being from within her own position of

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vulnerability and limitedness (2014, 19). The Documentation’s heterogeneous narratives, immersed in disparate yet interconnected visual environments, register the pain, joy and ephemerality of the mothering labor. The images, objects and diagrams are accompanied by disparate texts—including Latin of medicine, the Latin of biology and zoology, plain English and sophisticated English—which together, like the mother-child pair, relate to each other in different ways—by explaining, validating, contradicting, mystifying,—all of which are forms of “becoming.” It can be maintained then, that, on the one hand, Documentation V testifies to the fact that, as Ettinger argues, the “matrixial impossibility of not-sharing with the other is profoundly fragilizing” (Ettinger 2004, 77). On the other hand, because of its universalizing dimension, it fosters a sociality in which “[i]ndividuation does not require the negation of metamorphic transconnectedness,” but is “a source of aesthetical and ethical openings where the fragility of the self meets the vulnerability of the Other” (2014, 15; 11).

Conclusion In a recent, 2016 article on the politics of mothers and children, the authors write that the “relations between those positioned as women and children, and the political and intellectual consequences of how we conceptualize these connections, has received only scant attention” (Twamley et al. 2016, 1, see also Burman and Stacey 2010). Over four decades after the completion of Post-Partum Document, the topic of the mother-child positioning continues to be underrepresented both in academia and in visual culture. This renders the Document still highly relevant. Not only did it “inject the subject of motherhood into art discourse” (Archibald 2005, 23), but it also extended the horizon of the autobiographical genre. It presented the mothering task as a complex and challenging process of mutual commitment, whose representation crosses the boundaries of disciplines beyond hybridity. By intertwining the insights into an intimate mother-child relation with a multiplicity of discourses and textualities, the Document shows motherhood both as a lived experience and as an institutionalized idea, both of which cut through the life of every human being. As such, the piece dialogizes with Freud’s observations put forward in “The Theme of Three Caskets,” where Freud discusses the “three inevitable relations that a man has with a woman.” Among these women, he distinguishes:

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the woman who bears him, the woman who is his mate and the woman who destroys him; or that they are the three forms taken by the figure of the mother in the course of a man’s life—the mother, the beloved one who is chosen after her pattern, and lastly the Mother Earth who receives him once more. (Freud, “The Theme of Three Caskets,” SE 12, 301)

Documentation V, as we have seen, clearly illustrates Freud’s words by emphasizing the interdependence of the living species submitted to the cycle of life and death. At the same time, it transcends Freud’s theory by giving them gravity that neither Freud nor Lacan were keen to admit. However, the mother of Documentation V, scattered along discourses and pictorial renderings, is not solely a universalized harbinger of life and death. Nor is she an idealized, selfless and disembodied icon (see Thurer 1995; Douglas and Michaels 2005; Wierzchowska 2018). The mother-­ artist, through a careful combination of texts and images, presents her maternal experience conscious of the received conceptualizations of the maternal. She fashions herself as a living, breathing and vulnerable human being who does her best to accompany the child, despite her own limitations and the insurmountable otherness of the child. This mother enhances the child’s “primal capacity to trust and wonder” (Ettinger 2014, 6), by allowing him to establish connections between his enquires about the maternal body and the outside world. The mother-artist then publicizes this momentous process by inserting it first into gallery space, and then simultaneously into the discourse on art and the field of life-writing studies. I would venture a claim that Documentation V, as well the whole Post-­ Partum Document, beacons toward a shift in the conceptualization of the human self. Read through the concept of the matrixial borderspace, the piece’s exposition of our basic, foundational relationality, which is manifested in the dialectical resonance of objects/pictures and texts, challenges Lacan’s belief in the unhealable (self-)alienation of the human subject and emphasizes the human capacity for co-becoming. The texts and objects in Documentation V do not present human beings as subjects, but as embodied selves who, in Ettinger’s own words, exercise “[their] capacity for differentiation-in-co-emergence that occurs in the course of separation-in-­ jointness, where distance-in-proximity is continuously reattuned” (2004, 76, emphasis original). The textual-visual arrangement interpellates the domains of metaphysics, biology, discourse on sexuality, medical language and vernacular English, exposing the maternal as foundational in the

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process of self-becoming. Parallel to the enquires of the child, the texts and images put together by his artist-mother strive to make sense, signify, create new meaning and remain responsive. Such lived, mutual commitment, as Ettinger maintains, equips the child with an inter-subjective potential that, if not suppressed, informs its capacity for human to human connection “throughout life” (Ettinger 2014, 76). In a 1984 interview with Caroline Osborne, Mary Kelly stated: “I think the most interesting reading [of the Document] will be the one […] the Women’s Movement will be able to make of it in the future, in the sense of its representation of a particular historical movement within the Women’s Movement, and also within the discourse of past art” (in Osborne 1984, 138). This article offers one of such possible readings, understanding that art is not only a given to theory, but can also be “producer of theory” (de Zegher 1996, 23), harnessing text and image to envisage a co-created, unexpected home that may run ahead of theoretical conceptualizations within diverse, yet correlated fields of scholarship such as autobiographical studies and psychoanalysis.

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Index1

A Abel, 72 Absence, 13, 45, 48, 53, 54, 86, 107, 119, 122, 139, 163, 189–191, 250 Abstraction–Alexis (1928), 93 Abstraction–White Rose III (1927), 92 Accident/accidental, 36, 123, 216, 223, 229–233, 236 Adams, Timothy Dow, 11, 219, 220, 228 Aesthetic, 4, 33, 34n7, 42, 43, 49, 52, 52n20, 93, 123, 206, 233–236, 242, 253, 267 feminist aesthetic, 219 African-American/African American, 34–38, 34n7, 36n10, 59, 71, 72n15, 72n16, 74n17, 93, 137, 138, 141, 143–146, 144n3, 150, 152

Agency/agent, 2, 37, 63, 68, 131, 168, 185, 209, 229, 243–250, 254 Alexoae-Zagni, Nicoleta, 151n4 Alterity, 63, 194n17 Amazon, 206, 207, 210, 248 Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian-American Memoir of Homelands (1996), 119–121, 127–129, 134 Animation, 69 animated images, 69 Archival (graphic) memoir, 110 Archives, 30, 101–103, 102n2, 108, 109, 113, 139, 147–151, 221 Are You My Mother? (2012), 103, 105, 106, 108, 109, 111–116 Arrangement in Grey and Black (1871), 215, 216, 216n4, 224, 235

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 V. Baisnée-Keay et al. (eds.), Text and Image in Women’s Life Writing, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84875-0

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INDEX

“Art for art’s sake,” 219 Artist battle artist, 199, 205, 207 woman artist, 34, 78, 89, 200 Artist’s books, 90 Asian American, 128, 134 Authenticity, 12, 73, 84, 85, 103, 106, 107, 133, 219, 229, 233–235 Authority, 48, 80, 95, 161, 184, 194, 207, 209, 211, 274 Autobiographical Comics, 106 Autobiography, 1, 2, 6, 7, 9–12, 14, 22–25, 25n5, 38, 41, 55, 60, 61, 61n6, 67, 73, 77, 89, 93, 94, 106, 128, 131, 138, 139, 145, 149, 176, 200, 202, 212n21, 215–237, 241–255, 263, 263n3 autobiographical, 88, 90, 243, 244, 250, 252, 254, 262, 263, 266, 275 Autoethnography authoethnographic culinary memoir, 143 Automediality, 61 automedial narrative/text, 63, 69, 73, 74 Autotopographical, 142 Avrahami, Einat, 247, 255 B Barthes, Roland, 3, 11–14, 44, 45, 121–126, 189, 193, 217, 219, 223, 226, 228, 233, 250 Baym, Nancy K., 128, 129 Beaty, Bart, 106 Beautiful and Damned, The (1922), 162, 163 Beauty (female beauty), 250 Beauty Out of Damage (1993), 243 Bechdel, Alison, 16, 101–116

Benjamin, Walter, 14 Berger, John, 234n21, 246 Bergson, Henri, 79 Bible, the/biblical, 72, 72n15 Biographical turn, the, 222 Biography, 89 Bird Bishop, Isabella, 16, 179–196 Black, 35, 35n8, 36, 42, 71, 72, 72n15, 74, 87, 138, 144, 144n3, 145, 184, 216, 225, 245, 249, 254, 271 black woman, 65, 72, 146 Black Lives Matter, 73 Blue Lines (1916), 91 Body, 2, 11, 13–16, 22, 36, 42–44, 52n20, 53, 53n21, 60, 60n2, 60n3, 61, 63, 64, 68, 73, 78, 80, 82, 92, 111, 113, 124, 148, 151, 168, 171, 174, 175, 187, 189, 242, 246–250, 255, 266–273, 276 Bon Bon Mots: A Fine Assortment of Books (1998), 27, 28, 33 Bruccoli, Mathew J., 158, 160–165, 161n7, 167–169, 167n12, 171, 175 Brunet, François, 143, 147 Bryer, Jackson, 158, 169, 171, 172 Butler, Elizabeth, 16, 199–213 C Cain, 72 California, 41, 43n3, 127, 128, 133, 165 Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1981), 11, 12, 122, 124, 217, 233 Camera Work, 94 Cancer autobiography, 241–255

 INDEX 

brain cancer, 243, 245, 249 breast cancer, 15, 242, 244, 248, 249, 251, 253 cancer patient, 242, 245, 251, 254, 255 narrative, 244, 249, 251, 255 photography, 242 Canyon with Crows (1917), 92 Cathartic process, 60 Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung, 8, 16, 41 Chast, Roz, 106 Chave, Anna, 80, 95 Chen, Julie, 15, 16, 21–39 Cheng, Anne Anlin, 41 Chicago, Judy, 88 Choice biography, 248 Chronology, 107, 125 Chute, Hillary, 107, 110, 112, 113 Cis cisgender, 62 cis women, 67 Cis feminists/feminism, 67 “Cis gaze,” 62, 63, 73 Class, social, 230 Colonial imaginary, 60 “Commemorative vigilance,” 139, 147, 151 Community, 10, 16, 60–63, 60n3, 66, 69–74, 70n14, 102, 102n1, 108, 109n3, 113, 119–121, 129–131, 133, 134, 137, 138, 143, 147, 148, 150 Conway, Kathlyn, 242, 242n3, 252, 253 Cook, Terry, 108 Cookbook, 137, 138, 147 Couser, Thomas, 14, 244, 245, 249 Culinary memoir/culinary autobiography, 137–152 Cult of domesticity, 67n13, 229

285

D Daedalus, 112 Darden, Carole, 138, 140–145, 147, 148, 151, 152 Darden, Norma Jean, 138, 140–145, 147, 148, 151, 152 Dark Abstraction (1924), 93 Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (2002), 158 Death, 11, 22, 31, 36, 36n10, 42, 44, 54, 69, 80, 85, 95, 104, 106, 109, 113, 140, 172n14, 174, 186, 216, 218, 219, 223, 228, 232, 244, 247, 248, 252, 253, 270–273, 276 mortality, 244 Depression, 164, 225 Derrida, Jacques, 55, 210 Deshazer, Mary K, 242, 248, 250, 251 Diary, 1, 7, 42, 80, 111, 129, 131, 163, 200–204, 200n3, 206, 209, 211, 212, 263 Diaspora/diasporic, 134, 138 Dictée (1982), 8, 16, 41–43, 47–49, 48n11, 51, 54, 55 Digital, 4, 7, 8, 10, 16, 22n1, 63, 66, 121, 128, 131, 133 Digital space(s), 66 Distantiation, 45, 110, 111 Documentary, 24, 46–48, 47n7, 80, 89, 151, 181, 185–190, 200, 221n10, 254 Drawing, 15, 78, 82, 84, 92, 101, 103–105, 111, 112, 138, 147, 151, 158, 159, 161, 163, 169–171, 175, 181, 186, 202, 250 Dubriwny, Tasha, 248, 249 Dykes to Watch Out For (DTWOF, 1983-2008), 101–103, 109n3, 111n5, 112

286 

INDEX

E Ekphrasis, 121, 121n1, 123, 126, 134, 189 El Refaie, Elisabeth, 106 Elegy, 31, 32, 244 Ellis, Havelock, 79 Embodied memory, 150–152 Empower/empowerment, 66, 255 Epitext, 142 Ernaux, Annie, 6, 165 Essential Dykes to Watch Out For (2008), 101, 103 Ethnic, 21, 22, 41, 137–152 Ethnography/ethnographic, 24, 146, 147, 180, 181, 187, 221n10 Ettinger, Bracha, 265–267, 270, 272–277 Exegesis, 226, 236 Experiencer, 244, 245, 254, 255 F Facebook (FB), 6, 10, 22n1, 64, 66, 68, 120, 121, 128–134 Familial, gaze the, 236 Family album, 4–6, 48, 124, 125, 131, 140, 141, 220, 227, 229–233 Family history, 36, 41, 112, 138, 141, 152, 228, 245 Family myth, 139–143 Family photographer, 229, 235 Family photographs, 6, 16, 126, 140, 142, 147, 150, 165, 217, 218, 221, 224, 229 Family Secrets. Acts of Memory and Imagination (1995), 121, 219n8 Family Snaps: The Meanings of Domestic Photography (1991), 220 Female, gaze the, 235

Female icon(s), 78 Feminist, gaze the, 231 Feminist/feminism, 2, 13, 21, 67, 67n13, 72n16, 87, 88, 163, 212, 216, 219, 225, 228, 229, 231–236, 242, 248, 262, 262n2, 266 Femmage, 217, 217n5 Fernández-Morales, Marta, 14 Fictionalized, 215–237 Fiction/non-fiction, 21, 95, 116, 160, 168, 169, 220, 228 Figurative/non-figurative, 79, 216 Fitzgerald, Francis Scott, 158–160, 159n4, 163–166, 169, 171, 174, 175 Fitzgerald, Zelda, 16, 157–176 Fitzgerald Smith, Frances (Scottie), 158, 160–162, 165–168, 170, 171, 173–175 Flapper, the, 159, 161–163, 169, 175 Fragmentation/fragmented self, 8, 107, 110–113, 174, 187 Frame, 6, 24, 25, 28, 34–38, 43, 45, 50, 53, 55, 65, 66, 103, 107, 110, 126, 139, 141, 170, 217, 223–231, 233, 236, 237, 243, 246, 268 framed, 263 Freeman, Elizabeth, 115 French, Marilyn, 11, 16, 215–237 Freud, Sigmund, 6, 79, 275, 276 Fun Home (2006), 16, 103, 105–109, 111–116 G Gardner, Jared, 106 GATE, 62 Gates, Henry Louis Jr., 74, 74n18 Gay, Marie-Agnès, 8

 INDEX 

Gaze, 11, 14, 15, 53, 60, 62, 66, 69, 70, 77, 80, 110, 116, 122, 123, 163, 169, 170, 187, 188, 190, 191, 213, 225, 226, 231, 235, 236, 243, 246, 251 Gaze, Eurocentric, 187 Gender, 2, 5, 7, 10, 16, 38, 62, 78, 80, 87, 105, 116, 146, 194, 200, 202, 204–207, 210–212, 222, 224, 225, 230, 231, 233, 236, 245 Gender confirmation surgery (GCS/ GRS/GAS), 59–61, 59n1, 60n4 Gender dysphoria, 64 Gender identity, 10, 64, 70 Gender stereotype, 65 Genette, Gérard, 139, 142 Genius-Hero, the, 266, 273 Genre/generic, 1, 2, 8, 43, 46, 60–63, 71, 80, 103, 106, 107, 111, 114, 145, 181, 183, 186, 190, 202, 205, 206, 212, 212n21, 219, 249, 275 Genty, Stephanie, 12 Georgia O’Keeffe: Art and Letters (1987), 81, 82, 83n2, 84n4, 87, 95 Georgia O’Keeffe (1976), 77, 89 Giard, Luce, 148, 149 Glyph, 111 Google, 64 Graphic memoir, 1, 15, 16, 101–116 Graphic narrative theory, 106 Graphics Interchange Format (GIFs), 61, 62, 69–71 Greek mythology, 104, 112 Green-Grey Abstraction (1931), 93 Greenough, Sarah, 80, 82, 82n1, 83, 83n2, 85 Groensteen, Thierry, 106 Grotesque body, 174 Gusdorf, Georges, 176

287

H Hall, Stuart, 255 Halperin, David, 105 Hamilton, Juan, 89, 90 Hartley, Marsden, 79, 82, 95 Hedges, Elaine, 234 Heinzman, Andrew, 69 Herman, David, 106 Her Mother’s Daughter (1987), 11, 216–222, 224, 225, 229, 232, 235, 236 Herstory, 78, 81–87, 246 Heteronormative, 61, 66, 110, 113, 114 Hine, Lewis, 219, 222, 222n11 Hirsch, Marianne, 5, 11, 48, 122, 123, 140, 142, 149, 158, 158n3, 217, 222, 223, 226, 226n16, 227n18, 229, 230, 236 History/historical/period/events, 1, 1n1, 2, 4–6, 9, 11, 13, 15, 16, 21–26, 22n2, 22n3, 34–38, 34n7, 41, 44, 44n4, 53n21, 60n3, 68, 71, 82, 89, 95, 108, 112, 122, 127, 128, 138, 139, 141, 143–147, 149, 151, 152, 158n3, 160, 167, 171, 174, 176, 180, 183, 183n6, 186, 199–201, 202n7, 207, 208, 210–212, 219–228, 223n12, 233, 235, 236, 245, 246, 253, 262, 264, 277 Holland, Patricia, 220 Homepage, 66, 68, 73 Horvat, Ana, 60, 63 Houses of memory, 101 Hybrid/hybridity, 8, 22, 23, 51, 90, 102, 103, 105–108, 110–112, 114, 134, 217, 243, 244, 254, 275

288 

INDEX

I Illness narrative, 244–250 Illustrated narrative, 138 Illustration, 23, 25, 90, 138, 140, 179–181, 185, 186, 191, 233, 234, 246, 254n12 Imagetext/image-text, 10–13, 16, 22n3, 23, 24, 33, 34, 37, 38, 140, 142, 143, 150, 215–237 Immigrant, 41, 138, 144, 145, 152, 222, 225 Inclusive, 22n3, 67 Inness, Sherrie, 137, 138, 145, 146 Instagram, 6, 22n1, 62, 64, 66, 68 Installation, 13, 15, 23, 262–264, 267–269 Interface, 16, 23–25, 27, 33, 34, 37, 42, 43, 47, 49, 51, 133, 138, 141, 142, 146, 149, 150, 159, 220, 221, 221n10, 235, 237, 241–255, 263, 265 Interfaces: Women, Autobiography, Image, Performance (2002), 2, 15, 23, 49, 84, 220, 263 Internet, 7, 10, 62, 66, 128 Intersectionality/intersectional identity, 42, 71, 263 Inter-subjectivity, 38, 265 Intertextuality, 112 Irigaray, Luce, 266, 269, 270 Italian-American, 140 J Jacob, Mira, 106 Jacques, Juliet, 67 Jain, S. Lochlann, 245, 253, 253n11 Janet Mock/janetmock.com, 63, 66, 68, 72 Joan of Arc, 46 Jorgensen, Christine, 63 Jung, 267, 272

K Kafka, Franz, 227, 227n17 Kaufmann, Jean-Claude, 7–9, 9n7 Kelly, Mary, 15, 262–277 Kelly, Traci Marie, 138, 139, 143, 145 Kinship, 120, 149, 150, 193 Kohlman, Lynn, 14, 241–255 Kootz, Samuel, 82 Korea/Korean, 42, 43, 45n6, 49, 180n1, 193, 193n13 Krauss, Rosalind, 219, 229 Kristeva, Julia, 269, 271 Kuhn, Annette, 6, 121, 145, 149, 219n8, 220, 222, 228, 229, 236 L Labyrinth, 28, 29, 104 Lacan, Jacques, 11, 265, 266, 270, 273, 276 Lanahan, Eleanor, 158, 159, 162, 165–169, 172, 172n14, 174–176 Lee, Jamie Ann, 102n2, 105, 108 Lejeune, Philippe, 6, 7, 134 Lesbian, 101, 102, 102n1, 108–112, 116, 235 Lewallen, Constance M., 42, 46, 47, 50, 51, 53 LGBTQ rights, 21 Lieux de mémoire, 137–152 “Lifeshaping Moment Janet Mock Had in Kindergarten, The,” 64, 65 Life writing, 1, 2, 4, 7, 8, 10, 14–16, 60, 61, 61n6, 63–66, 73, 77–95, 128, 217, 220, 243, 263, 276 Life writing 2.0, 73 Light Writing and Life Writing, Photography in Autobiography (2000), 220 Lim, Shirley Geok-lin, 119–134 Lisle, Laurie, 84, 85

 INDEX 

Ljumberg, Christina, 251, 254 Lorde, Audre, 72n16 Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken, The (2007), 138, 139, 141, 142, 144, 146, 148, 150, 151 Lynes, Barbara Buhler, 78, 94 Lynn Front to Back (2005), 14, 241, 243, 244, 253–255 M Magnum, 223, 223n12, 224n13 Maguire, Emma, 64, 66 Making Comics (2006), 106 Male gaze, the, 15, 62, 77, 110, 163, 170, 243 Marginalized, communities, 108 Mastectomy, 241, 242, 249, 250, 253 Maternal, the, 262, 265–270, 273, 274, 276 maternal body, 276 maternal Other, 270, 274 Matrixial, the, 262–277 matrixial borderspace, 262–277 Matuschka, 242, 243 McCloud, Scott, 15, 106 Mediated, 5, 11, 66, 130, 131, 175 unmediated, 10, 21, 79, 220 Medium/media, 2, 4–7, 9, 10, 14, 15, 21, 22, 22n1, 26, 33, 53n21, 61–66, 62n10, 68, 70, 71, 73, 94, 102, 105, 106, 109, 111n5, 121, 128, 131, 133, 134, 159, 171, 172, 175, 180, 185, 263, 264, 268, 269 Memento Mori, 244 Memoir, 1, 2, 4, 8, 11, 15, 16, 22, 45–47, 61–65, 61n8, 68–70, 101–116, 119, 120, 122, 127, 128, 134, 137–152, 158, 169, 200, 226n15, 242, 263

289

Memory cultural, 5, 138 distortion of, 109, 114 representation of, 107 Memory work, 7, 145, 149, 219, 220, 222 “Meta-photographic text,” 217 Milford, Nancy, 157, 157n1, 159, 162, 172 Miller, Nancy K., 169 Minotaur, 104 Mitchell, W. J. T., 1n1, 3, 4, 4n2, 12, 22n2, 23–25, 217, 221, 236 Mock, Janet, 16, 59–74 Modeling/model/top model, 4, 8, 14, 37, 87, 106, 150, 160, 171, 204, 207, 208, 216, 220, 221n10, 231, 241–248, 250, 251, 253–255 Mode of representation, 102 Modernism (American), 78, 89 Modernist (female) artist, 42, 80 Mother-artist, 262n2, 276 Mother/motherhood/mother figure, 16, 34, 34n6, 36, 37, 43–45, 48, 48n11, 60, 103, 107, 109, 112, 114, 115, 120–122, 125, 143, 146, 150, 151, 158, 165, 166, 168, 174, 189, 201n6, 205, 215–237, 242, 243, 245, 252, 253, 262, 264–268, 270–272, 274–276 mothering, 275 Mouzet, Aurélia, 67 My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, 1915-1933 (2011), 83n2, 85 Myth/family myth/mythmaking, 12, 14, 22, 67n13, 139–144, 219, 244, 252, 253, 272, 273

290 

INDEX

N Narcissism/narcissistic, 2, 15, 71 Narrating/narrative self, 11, 65, 73, 243, 247 Narrative/travel narrative, 1, 4, 9, 10, 12, 14, 15, 22n3, 25, 34–36, 42, 45, 49, 60–65, 60n2, 68–70, 72–74, 80, 84, 89–91, 93, 102, 104–110, 111n5, 113, 121, 123–126, 128, 133, 134, 138–145, 158, 159, 165, 167, 171, 175, 179–182, 180n1, 186, 195, 211, 217, 219–221, 222n11, 223–225, 227, 229, 235, 236, 242n1, 243–251, 253, 255, 262–264, 270, 271, 273, 275 National identity, 222 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 210 Nora, Pierre, 138, 139, 147 Norm/normative, 80, 102, 105, 113, 116, 159, 176, 200 Norman, Dorothy, 80 Normative forms of narrativization, 102, 105, 115, 123, 133, 139, 266 O Objectification, 2, 102, 122, 223 O’Keeffe, Georgia, 77, 81 Art and Letters, 81, 82, 87, 93–95 My Faraway One, 82, 84 On Photography, 1977, 227n17, 244 Orchid, an, 1941, 92 Orvell, Miles, 80 Otherization/othering, 60, 61, 63, 69, 102, 181, 248, 269, 273, 275 Other, the, 181–183, 188, 274, 275 otherness, 276

P Painting/military painting, 14, 22–24, 35, 37, 45, 50, 54, 77, 79, 82, 84–86, 88–95, 141, 158, 159, 168, 171, 172, 172n14, 174–176, 200–205, 201n6, 202n7, 206n10, 207–209, 207n12, 215–217, 224, 263 Paper dolls, 166, 168, 175 Paratext, 24, 181 Parody, 112, 212n21 Passing, 27, 29, 31, 32, 55, 65, 65n12, 69, 165, 171, 217n5 Patriarchy/patriarchal, 13, 42, 66–68, 205, 210, 217–219, 231, 235, 236, 262n2 Performance/performer, 10, 15, 23, 42, 51–53, 53n21, 63, 157–176, 209, 248, 262, 263 Peritext, 139, 142, 144 Personal, public spaces, 109, 129 Photographed self, 69 Photographer, 2, 11, 13–15, 23, 78, 80, 88, 181–183, 183n6, 186, 187, 190, 191, 194, 195, 215, 218, 221, 223n12, 227, 229–235, 242, 243, 245, 246, 250–252, 255 Photography/Photograph, 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10–14, 16, 41–48, 45n6, 47n7, 50, 54, 69, 80–84, 87, 88, 90, 103, 104, 107, 120, 122–127, 129, 131, 133, 137–152, 158, 160, 165, 167, 168, 171, 180–196, 180n1, 191n12, 196n18, 207n12, 210n20, 216–226, 218n6, 222n11, 224n13, 228–233, 236, 237, 242, 243, 246–248, 250–254, 262–264, 268, 269

 INDEX 

Picturing Identity: Contemporary American Autobiography in Image and Text (2018), 263 Platform, 61, 62, 64, 66, 70, 73, 121 Podcast, 64 Poem, 3, 28, 31, 32, 50, 119, 120, 203 Poetry, 14, 42, 47, 50, 95, 149, 152 Pollock, Griselda, 87, 89 Pop culture, 65, 112 Portrait, 8, 11, 13, 36, 46, 47, 50, 68, 80, 87, 88, 93, 94, 111, 122, 125, 126, 140, 143–145, 159, 160, 169, 187, 189–196, 215, 220, 223, 227, 228, 233, 235, 249, 253 Postmemory, 5, 158, 158n3, 176 Post-Partum Document (1983), 265n4, 267, 275, 276 Pregnancy, 164, 272–274 pregnant body, 267–269, 272, 273 Presence, 12, 13, 45, 48, 52–54, 107, 108, 110, 116, 120, 122, 123, 129, 141, 142, 148, 174, 216, 224, 228, 230, 243, 253, 254, 273 Prose film, 149 Prose picture, 148–150, 227, 227n18, 230, 233, 236 Prosser, Jay, 60, 61 Psychoanalysis, 227, 271, 273, 277 Punctum, 12, 14, 123, 193, 226, 250 Pyne, Kathleen, 82 Q “Queer belongings” (2007), 115 Queered home/queered space, 111, 116 Queered mode of representation, 102 Queered temporality, 108

291

Queer identity/queer self, 101, 104, 107, 109, 114, 115 Queer(ing) memoirs, 102, 103, 105, 108, 114 Queerness, 102n2, 104–107, 111, 113 Queer theory, 105 Quilt quilt-as-canvas, 35 story quilt, 16, 21–39, 263 R Rancière, Jacques, 3, 4, 12–14 Rank, Otto, 266, 272, 274 Raymond, Janice, 67 Reader, the, 14–16, 24–29, 33, 36, 38, 44, 45, 45n6, 48–50, 55, 60–66, 69, 72, 73, 78, 84, 90–93, 102, 106, 109, 115, 121, 123, 125–127, 133, 134, 138, 147, 149, 151, 171, 175, 176, 180, 180n1, 182, 186, 190, 191, 193, 195, 196, 211, 212, 222–224, 226, 233, 235, 244, 245, 251 Recipe, 137–152 “Reciprocal vision,” 185 Referent/referential/referentiality, 4, 10–13, 16, 26, 44, 45, 47, 48, 102, 112, 125–127, 215–217, 219, 221, 224, 228, 235 Reification/reified, 60, 63, 68, 187n8 reifying, 247 Reinventing Comics (2000), 106 Relational/relationality, 22–24, 27, 37, 38, 44, 102, 112–116, 134, 221n10, 237, 243, 250, 252, 265, 267, 276

292 

INDEX

Representation/representational, 2, 4, 8, 13–16, 21, 22, 33, 39, 43, 45, 46, 52, 53, 66, 68, 69, 93, 94, 102, 103, 107, 111, 114, 116, 120, 121, 121n1, 126, 127, 143, 170, 175, 208, 209, 211, 216, 217, 219–221, 225, 227, 229, 233–236, 253, 255, 263, 268, 273–275, 277 Riis, Jacob A, 219, 222, 222n11, 226 Ringgold, Faith, 15, 16, 21–39, 263 Romantic Egoists, The: A Pictorial Autobiography from the Scrapbooks and Albums of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (1974), 158 Rose, Barbara, 77, 88, 90, 93, 95 Rose, Jacqueline, 110 Rosenfeld, Paul, 79, 82 S Samurai warrior, 15, 243, 249, 250 Satrapi, Marjane, 106 Save Me the Waltz (1932), 167–169, 172, 174 Scar, 242, 249, 254 Schenone, Laura, 138–142, 144, 146–152 Scrapbook, 139, 150, 160, 165, 171, 175 Sedgwick, Eve, 105 Seidel, Kathryn Lee, 172, 174 Selfie, 71, 73 Self-narrative, 9, 61, 66, 73, 90, 159, 167, 171 Self-portrait, 11, 15, 84, 85, 88, 92, 159, 161, 167, 169, 170, 174, 175, 181, 206, 220, 242, 246, 247, 251 Self-representation, 1, 2, 8, 9, 15, 16, 22n1, 23, 25, 38, 42, 52, 53n21, 73, 77, 78, 85, 92, 93, 133, 143,

159, 163, 169–171, 176, 243, 244, 246, 248, 255 self-representational, 92 Sex change, 63 Sex industry/sex worker, 59, 70 Shared history, 138, 149, 151 Shell and Old Shingle VII (1926), 92 She-ro, 248 Signifying, 74, 127, 133 Sketch/sketchbook, 113, 170, 171, 200–202, 210, 211 Slave narratives, 36 Smith, Lindsay, 231, 237 Smith, Sidonie, 2, 5, 15, 23, 24, 42, 44, 49, 53n21, 61, 80, 84, 85, 89–91, 128, 133, 138, 139, 147, 159, 163, 170, 171, 175, 217, 220, 221, 243, 244, 246, 254, 263, 265 Social media, 2, 6, 7, 9, 10, 22n1, 61, 62, 62n10, 64, 66, 70, 71, 121, 133, 134 Sontag, Susan, 44, 126, 158n3, 160, 183–185, 183n6, 190, 219, 227n17, 231, 232, 244, 250, 253 Space/personal space/public space, 27, 29, 33, 34, 44, 51–54, 63, 64, 66, 67, 73, 90, 102–105, 108–114, 116, 120–122, 128–131, 134, 138, 151, 216, 221, 223, 230, 231, 233, 245, 266, 267, 272, 276 spatial, 243 Spence, Jo, 23, 220 Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine. Recipes and Reminiscences of a Family (1978), 138 Stein, Gertrude, 94, 172 Steinem, Gloria, 88 Stereotypes of femininity, 67 Stieglitz, Alfred, 78, 81, 83, 88, 94 “Storysharing,” 72, 73

 INDEX 

Storytelling, 38, 65, 73, 244 Studio photograph/studio portrait, 126, 140, 141, 143–145, 191, 196, 196n18 Studium, 12, 14, 123, 251 Subjectivity, 13, 16, 24, 26, 27, 30, 31, 33, 36, 36n10, 38, 39, 95, 110–112, 114, 115, 221, 226, 247, 265, 266 Super Soul Sunday, 64 Surgery cancer, 249 gender reassignment, 60n4, 62 System of Comics (2007), 106 T Temporality modes of, 114 representation of, 107 Text-image, 3, 4, 16, 23, 41, 138–144, 146, 148, 149, 151, 152, 229, 241–255 Textual/visual matrix, 91–94 Theophano, Janet, 137 Thomas, Heloïse, 16 Time, 6, 9, 16, 23–27, 29–33, 44n4, 48, 53, 65, 77, 79, 83n2, 88, 92, 102n2, 106, 107, 114–116, 120, 124–126, 128, 133, 137, 143, 145, 157, 160, 161, 163, 165–168, 171, 172, 175, 181, 182, 184n7, 185, 190, 191, 193, 195, 200, 200n2, 200n3, 207, 207n11, 208, 212, 212n22, 213, 216, 218, 223, 226, 231, 242, 244, 246, 249, 253, 262, 262n2, 263, 267, 270, 271, 276 temporal, 243 Toomer, Jean, 93–95 Trans author/writer, 59, 61, 65, 73

293

autobiography/ trans life writing/ trans memoir/trans narrative/ trans stories, 60–66 community/ trans girl/ trans people/ trans woman, 59, 60, 60n3, 62–74, 70n14 feminism, 67 rights, 59, 66, 71 transness/trans identity, 60n2, 63–65, 73 transsexuality, 63, 67 Transition/transitioning, 61, 63, 125, 139 Transmedia, 63–66 Trauma, 5, 6, 25, 25n5, 110, 122, 158, 158n3, 200n2 Traumatic memory, 110 Travel narrative, 183 Travel writing, 16, 180n2, 181, 191n12 Truth, 12, 55, 60, 72, 89, 105, 126, 127, 141, 208–211, 219, 220, 225–229, 233–236 Tumblr, 62, 64, 66, 71, 72 Turkle, Sherry, 128 Twitter, 22n1, 62, 64, 66, 68 U Ulysses (1920), 112 Understanding Comics (1993), 106 V Van Dyne, Susan R., 105 Verbal images, 49–52, 227, 230, 232, 236 Verbo-visual, 142, 150 Victorian, 80, 212, 216n2, 217 Video, 42, 51–53, 61, 62, 64, 65, 68–71, 73, 142, 142n2, 147, 148, 150, 151

294 

INDEX

Viewer, 24–26, 29, 33, 34, 36, 37, 55, 82, 92, 94, 123, 143, 151, 176, 191, 204, 206, 215, 229, 250, 262n1 Violate/violation, 185 Visibility, 2, 13, 63, 110, 126, 175 Visual narrative, 104, 222, 232, 247, 270, 273 Visual text, 142 Visual/textual, 16, 42, 47, 51, 91–94, 221, 263 Visual/verbal hybridity, 102 Visual/verbal/virtual, 61 Voyeurism, 14, 184 Vulnerability ‘vulnerable empowered woman,’ 248, 249, 255 willful vulnerability, 255 W Wagner, Anne Middleton, 79, 80, 95 Wallot, Jean-Pierre, 102, 108 War artist, 202 Watercolors, 91, 92, 199, 213 Watson, Julia, 2, 15, 23, 24, 42, 44, 49, 53n21, 61, 80, 84, 85, 89–91, 109, 128, 133, 138, 139, 147, 159, 163, 170, 171, 175, 217, 220, 221, 237, 243, 244, 246, 254, 263, 265 Waves, the (1931), 112 Ways of Seeing (1972), 234n21 Web/Web 2.0/websites, 10, 16, 29, 38, 42n2, 62–64, 62n10, 66, 68, 71, 73, 129, 140n1, 149, 150 Wendt, Ingrid, 234 Whistler, Anna McNeill, 216, 225, 231

Whistler, James MacNeill, 215–217, 216n2, 219, 224, 225, 233, 235 Whistler’s mother, 215–237 Whitlock, Gillian, 16, 131 Wierzchowska, Justyna, 15, 276 Wilke, Hannah, 247, 248 Winfrey, Oprah, 64 Winnicott, Donald, 112, 115, 267 Woman [One Portrait], A (1921), 80 Woman artist, 34, 78, 89, 200, 266 Womanhood, 59–74, 79, 161, 164, 255 “Womanhood 2.0,” 59–74 “Woman in Art,” 79 Woman of color, 62–64, 69–71 Women’s March on Washington, the (2017), 71 Wong, Hertha D. Sweet, 15, 126, 263 Wood, Julia, 65, 67, 68 Woolf, Virginia, 112, 204, 205 Y The Yangtze Valley and Beyond (1899), 179–196 YouTube, 22n1, 62, 64–66, 68, 69, 73, 142n2, 151 Z Zelda, Fitzgerald, 157 Zelda: An Illustrated Life. The Private World of Zelda Fitzgerald (1996), 158 Zelda Fitzgerald A Biography (1970), 157 The Collected Writings (1992), 158, 163