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Suzanne Raitt
Department of English
College of William and Mary
Introduction
“There is no
such thing as an objective biography”, writes Hermione Lee at the
opening of her biography of English novelist Virginia Woolf.1
Biography, then even though it can be seen as a form of historical
research (reconstructing the past), is also always an interpretation
of a life and of a personality. In other words, whenever a writer
puts together the story of someone’s life, he or she is offering an
interpretation of that life. That interpretation is sometimes
expressed explicitly, when a writer offers his or her own opinion
about something the subject did or said. For example, Arnold Rampersad, in his biography of African-American writer Langston
Hughes, remarks about Hughes’s decision to return to live with his
mother in Oberlin, Ohio, in 1935: “In returning to his mother, to
poverty, to dirty, dangerous black neighborhoods in Cleveland and
Chicago, he was to some extent realigning himself racially … If he
believed intellectually in interracial communism, he could not stand
forever, or even for long, away from black people.”2 This
comment suggests that Hughes’s move to Oberlin was an expression of
his disappointment with the left, and his reassertion of his ties to
the black community; it interprets, rather than simply
recording.
Interpretation can also be expressed in more subtle ways, however.
Even what might seem like a simple decision, such as how to begin a
biographical narrative, is also an interpretation of what is
important in the life of the person being written about, or in the
relationship between biographer and subject. Robert D. Richardson
Jr. begins his biography of Emerson with a description of the
exhumation of Emerson’s wife:
On March
29, 1832, the twenty-eight-year-old Emerson visited the tomb of his
young wife, Ellen, who had been buried a year and two months
earlier. He was in the habit of walking from
Boston
out to her grave in Roxbury every day, but on this particular day he
did more than commune with the spirit of the departed Ellen: he
opened the coffin. Ellen had been young and pretty. She was
seventeen when they were engaged, eighteen when married, and barely
twenty when she died of advanced tuberculosis. They had made frantic
efforts at a cure, including long open-air carriage rides and
massive doses of country air. Their life together had been stained
almost from the start by the bright blood of Ellen’s coughing.3
Although this
paragraph is mostly devoted to the recording of facts (Ellen’s age
at various stages, dates, what happened when), the fact that
Richardson places it at the opening of his biography suggests that
he sees this as a turning-point in Emerson’s life, and as an
exemplary moment which demonstrates Emerson’s insistence on “seeing
for himself”, on direct, unmediated experience In Richard’s opinion,
we must assume, something about this event captures the essence of
Emerson’s approach to the world. Another biographer, with a
different view of Emerson and of what was important in his life,
might have begun his or her book differently, implying that there
were other events or periods in Emerson’s life that were more
significant in the development of his personality than the opening
of Ellen’s grave.
Because a
biographer is always interpreting and analyzing the evidence with which he or she works
(evidence such as birth records, letters,
diaries, newspaper reports, company accounts, autobiographies, and
so on), biographers often fail to agree on the meaning, or sometimes
even on the facts, of someone's life. Sometimes the evidence will be
unambiguous, leaving almost no room for interpretation. Just as
often, however, the evidence will not necessarily be decisive, and a
biographer will have to weigh up his or her other relevant evidence, his
or her sense of the kind of person the subject was, or of the range
of opportunities that were open to him or her, in order to decide
what the available evidence really means. It is in this context that
the accuracy (or otherwise) of our understanding of our subject and
his or her life comes into play. Often, it is difficult for a reader
to be certain which of two different versions of a particular life
is the most accurate. For example, one biographer might decide that
Emerson never ceased to mourn Ellen, and that his sense of despair
informed much of his later thought. Another biographer might decide
that Emerson's second marriage marked the completion of his mourning
for Ellen, and that it represented a new start for him, both
philosophically and personally. All the reader can do is to weigh up
his or her own ideas about the evidence presented by each
biographer, and come to his or her own decision.
One writer
about whose life there has been a considerable amount of controversy
is Virginia Woolf. That controversy illuminates some of the central
issues in the complex area of biographical interpretation and the
uses of evidence, and this exercise will help you to think about
some of the choices you will have to make when you come to
write your own biography or life-narrative, however brief.
Next: "The Facts"
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