Whose life is it anyway, the subject's or the biographer's? Biography at its best is more than gossip, a window into the bizarre practices afflicting the notorious. Biography is the history of an era, as seen through the life of a figure who has transformed her or his own time. People read biographies to satisfy a hunger to discover how others lived. So much more disturbing, then, comes the malady that has recently infected the writing of women's biographies.
A significant number of women authors seem to be exploiting their subjects, inflicting on them a victimization from which they purported to emancipate them when they announced that they were restoring forgotten or neglected women to their rightful place in literary history. Objectivity in any biography - is of course not a reasonable expectation: the biographer selects, emphasizes and dramatizes certain scenes and not others.
Yet the biographical subject today is in danger of being sacrificed. Too many women biographers are demanding that their subjects fill unoccupied roles in their own lives - as mothers, sisters, friends, lovers and even priests. The women who now write the preponderance of biographies of women seem to have usurped the genre for their own purposes.
In one biography after another the author pushes her subject aside, the better to explore unresolved personal agendas.
In " Alias Olympia," a life of Manet's model Victorine Meurent, Eunice Lipton enters the narrative to ponder whether she should stay married, whether she should quit her teaching job. Elinor Langer, in her biography of Josephine Herbst, a radical leftist intellectual of the 1930s, seeks in Herbst's life a means of keeping her own failing '60s radicalism alive, of transcending her own foggy political miasmas.
Herbst becomes for Langer a " rescuer" with whom she shares " a mysterious kinship." Such biographers approach their subject primarily out of their own need. This practice leads invariably to errors of perspective. Herbst may have written about
Spain, but her views were confused; she was no Orwell. Francine Du Plessix Gray in her recent study wildly overestimates the poetry of her subject, courtesan-cum-poet Louise Colet, once mistress of Flaubert. Her subtitle prepares us: " Pioneer Feminist, Literary Star, Flaubert's Muse."
The biographical subject becomes an unwitting victim of the biographer, for how can she defend herself against these storms of emotion? In her biography of Simone de Beauvoir, Carol Ascher scolds her subject: " I have been badly troubled by you. I feel resentful, begrudging, sick of the lack of reciprocity between us." Ascher's tone is whining, one a child might use with an insensitive mother: " Why should I be devoting myself to you when you never did anything for me." With the departure of the biographer as a historian, we have the biographer who asks " what can I get out of this for myself?"
Governed by the view espoused by Eleanor Roosevelt's biographer, Blanche Wiesen Cook, that all biography is autobiography, the biographer renders her subject a mirror image of herself. The woman writer, who treats her subject as her double and her sister, glides over character flaws. The reader is offered only half a life. Or we are offered a life oddly skewed, as in Louise DeSalvo's " Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse On Her Life And Work," in which we are asked to see Virginia Woolf's work as a " missing link in the history of incest, abuse, and the effects of family violence." (DeSalvo is now writing a memoir of her own childhood sexual abuse.)
Nor has the reader signed on to read about the troubles of the biographer. Bad writing results. We are informed gratuitously of Langer's own need to believe in the innocence of Alger Hiss! Ascher compares the death of Jean-Paul Sartre to that of her own father. Gray irrelevantly recounts a visit to Colet's ancestral home in which she encounters Colet's philistine great-great-grandnephew. Indeed, whose life is it anyway?
The biographers seem sometimes even to enter into quasi-erotic relationships with their subjects. Carolyn Heilbrun has spoken of the " perfectly symmetrical" face of her subject, Gloria Steinem. When her publisher, W. W. Norton, wondered why Heilbrun did not discuss fully Steinem's long relationship with media figure Mortimer Zuckerman, a relationship that did not embody feminist norms, Heilbrun replied, " it's not a book about Mortimer Zuckerman." She was obliged to take the book elsewhere. (It will appear in May from The Dial Press.)
Sometimes these biographers expect the subject to have had lesbian experiences and then miraculously discover the event on the basis of inference, which smacks of nothing so much as projection. They proceed to make these experiences the defining ones of their character's life, as Cook has been accused doing in her " Eleanor Roosevelt." Often they assume the subject has been victimized by some man - father or husband - or both.
In these biographies, the male characters shrink to insignificance, or are unnuanced enemies. In the hands of Francine Gray, Flaubert becomes a syphilitic blowhard and a fool, a caricature. Husband John Herrmann gets no sympathy in Langer's book about Josephine Herbst. In contrast, the women gain undeserved talent, like Louise Colet, who was hardly a major literary figure - even if Flaubert committed the unforgiveable sin of burning her letters to him. Between the lines the reader can discern that, contrary to the author's agenda, Colet was, in fact, a literary opportunist, a very minor poet who cashed in on her " cascades of blond curls."
It's certainly true that conventional biographies have become the last outpost of the 19th century family saga, an outdated literary form. Experiment in the craft is welcome.
A test of the credibility of a woman biographer may be whether she tackles male subjects. Deirdre Bair, whose biography of Anais Nin will be published in March, and whose Simone de Beauvoir is scrupulously free of references to her own needs, has written about Samuel Beckett, and is embarking on the life of Carl Jung; Marion Meade has gone from the definitive study of Dorothy Parker to a biography of Buster Keaton, which will be published next October.
The danger persists that women biographers will squander their opportunity, circumscribe, and ghetto-ize themselves, as they confound personal memoir with biography. Women's stories need to be told. But it is not in the interest of truth or a feminist agenda to assign women accomplishments to which they had no claim - let alone to transform their lives into an arena in which the biographer acts out her own conflicts. These biographies have become a post-feminist version of taking the cure.
Janet Malcolm is off the mark in her new book, " The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes," a misguided attack on biography as a " flawed genre." It's not the biographers who are reprehensible, " like the professional burglar, breaking into a house." The reverse is the case. The new breed of exhibitionist biographers, in ferreting out its own secrets and dumping them at the feet of both its helpless subjects and captive readers has ceased to be biographers in anything but name.
Joan Mellen, a professor in the English Department at Temple University, has written 12 books, including " Woman and their Sexuality in the New Film" and " Big Bad Wolves," a history of the idea of masculinity in the American film. Her other works include a novel, a biographical portrait of Bob Knight, the basketball coach and, most recently, a biography, " Kay Boyle: Author of Herself" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Her " Hammett and Miss Hellman," a dual biography, will be published next year by HarperCollins.