Content area
Full Text
Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women's Self-Representation
Gilmore, Leigh. Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women's Self-Representation. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1994. Cloth $37.50; paper $14.95. 255 pp.
Leigh Gilmore, in Autobiographies: A Feminist Theory of Women's Self-Representation, presents a productive, feminist way of reading autobiography and interpreting the autobiographical elements in texts written by those whose lives have been placed on the margins of history, society, and literature. Through a careful and multicultural exploration of the various ways women have found to represent themselves and their lives, Gilmore expands the definition of autobiography. She examines how women throughout literary history have coped with a subject position in autobiographical texts. After a careful analysis of a broad variety of texts, Gilmore demonstrates how her feminist theory of autobiography accounts for women's self-representation in a way that exposes the limitations of traditional readings of the autobiographical.
Defining autobiographies as a way to describe "elements of self-representation which are not bound by a philosophical definition of the self derived from Augustine," she reads women's writing for elements of "self-invention, self-discovery, self-representation'' (42). She reads for insinuations that encode self, the "subject of autobiography" (185). She defines autobiographies as "a reading practice," as well as "a description of self-representation'' (42). She moves beyond the traditional, exploring alternate forms of self-representation.
Defining autobiographies as a descriptive approach, she proposes the technologies of autobiography as categories by which the self may be represented. Then she uses these categories to demonstrate how women writers "refuse the violence of gender identity" called for by conventional discourses of autobiography by writing "themselves into their texts through the agency of re-membering" (239). Women's autobiographical texts challenge and expand the boundaries of truth, locating it in other forms of self-representation, such as fiction, poetry, and biographies of others.
Gilmore opens her argument for a feminist theory of autobiography by defining differing approaches to reading autobiography, drawing on standard...