Hyland-Russell, Tara

English

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B O O K R E V I E W S 191 points in the direction of polyphony. Is Michaels's "poetry after Auschwitz" less legitimate than Appelfeld's "indirection" or Patrick Modiano's fugue for two voices, Laplace de Tetoile, treated in the essays that follow? The final essay in this volume negotiates the terrain between Robert Antelme's account of his experiences in the concentration camps, L'espece humaine, and Marguerite Duras's response to her hus-band in La douleur. Like the other essays, this one adds to our knowl-edge and our understanding of the Holocaust. Yet for all of its sophisticated techniques and theories, The Holocaust and the Text reaches its limits at the "unspeakable." After a little over a half-cen-tury, historical distance offers advantages and disadvantages. The Holocaust itself made possible the impossible (and vice versa), writing is a first-stage remove, and theorizing a second-stage distancing. While much attention has been paid to temporal distancing from trauma, perhaps more consideration needs to be given to geography, for the transatlantic experience of most North American Jews calls for a dif-ferent understanding than the Euro-centred immediacy in The Holo-caust and the Text. M I C H A E L G R E E N S T E I N Gillian Whitlock. The Intimate Empire: Reading Women's Autobiography. London: Cassell, 2000. Pp. viii, 232. $26.95 pb. Recent trends in literary criticism of autobiography have moved toward an increasingly complex reading of the autobiographical subject, particularly the female subject. Questioning traditional con-cepts of autobiography as form and as reading practice, theorists in the 1970s such as Paul de Man, James Olney, and Philippe Lejeune examined relationships between the autobiographical narrating self and the written text. In the 1980s, critics Mary Mason ( i g 8 o ) , Domna Stanton (1984), Estelle Jelinek (1986), Sidonie Smith (1987), Sheri Benstock (1988) and Bella Brodzki and Celeste Schenk (1988) reread and reinterpreted women's writings and their place in the autobio-graphical canon to show how female gender affects the form of autobi-ography. Theorizing began to move beyond the impact of gender on autobiographical form to address the imbricated effects of race, cul-ture, class, and situation on the construction of the female autobiogra-pher's text, a project informed through work by Francoise Lionnet (1989), Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (1992), Marlene Kadar (1992), Helen Buss (1993), and Leigh Gilmore (1994). Enlarging on the work of previous theorists in The Intimate Empire: Reading Women's Autobiography, Gillian Whitlock particularizes the com-plex intercourses between gender, race, culture, and class when the 192 B O O K R E V I E W S autobiographical narrator is positioned in relation to a colonial or post-colonial discourse. Whitlock begins by establishing a metaphor for her readings of autobiography "in the pink." "In the pink" refers not only to the female gendered writing that is Whitlock's focus, but also to the peoples who are implicated in colonialism, mapped in pink on the ter-rain of the Empire. She draws her metaphor from an artifact of the 1 9 2 4 British Empire Exhibition, "Queen Mary's Doll's House," which houses a tiny map of the empire, "one inch square and covered with red leather, embossed in gold" (1). Still on display today at Windsor Castle, the map is liberally marked in pink with all the dominions of the Em-pire: Africa, the Caribbean, Canada, the Mediterranean, Australasia and the Far East. Grounding texts within the pink of the Empire's reach, Whitlock carefully contextualizes readings of women's autobio-graphic writing from 1 8 3 0 to the present "to examine how subjectivity has been produced, imagined, scripted and resisted both then, when much of the world seemed to be pink, and now, in its aftermath" ( 2 ) . Using "in the pink" as an "elaborate conceit" to bring together writ-ers "as diverse as Mary Prince and Susanna Moodie, Audre Lord and Doris Lessing, Mamphela Ramphele and Ruby Langford Ginibi, and space as disparate as Upper Canada and post-apartheid South Africa" ( 2 ) , The Intimate Empire reads colonial spaces, texts, and voices that were not "uniformly, evenly, 'in the pink'" ( 2 ) . Instead of applying a critical perspective that expects a uniform or continual story from one end of a woman's life to another, Whitlock reads for complex and contradictory narratives between women's lives and even within a single woman's life. Whitlock reads for "intimacy," that is, the relations and rogue connec-tions between different female subjects and the "leakage between what might seem to be secure gendered, national and racial identities" ( 3 ) . Leakage is an evocative image that captures Whitlock's ability to read the seepages between texts, among narrative layers of texts, between writers, and between text and reader. For example, the first chapter reads History, the slave narrative of Mary Prince, alongside the white settler narrative of Susanna Moodie. These two texts are linked, not solely through their proximity in time of writing or their gendered nar-rators, but through their very production and their simultaneous au-thorizing through and resistance to the colonial discourse. Mary Prince dictated her autobiographical narrative to her amanuensis Susanna Strickland, before she married, became Susanna Moodie, and left Eng-land for the life of a white, Canadian settler, a life she recorded in her well-known Roughing it in the Bush. Whitlock examines the processes of writing the self within a colonial discourse that produces Prince and Moodie as "volatile subjects," not the fixed and stable autobiographical subjects we may expect. The reading of women autobiographers as "volatile subjects" accents this book's project to demonstrate the uneven and mixed genealogies B O O K R E V I E W S 193 of colonial literature and the oppositional agendas that are evidenced through colonial and post-colonial autobiographies. The strength and appeal of Whitlock's text lie in its attention to the individual and bod-ied lives of women autobiographers, to the intimate details of their lives as they are interpellated by various historical, cultural, racial, and gendered forces. The Intimate Empire brings to the fore textual marginalia, the at times incompatible codes of race and gender written into women's texts, and cultural constructions of truth and authenticity in autobiography to demonstrate the changing status and readability of texts over time. As Whitlock skillfully weaves together the unexpected connections between writers, places, and texts, she provides enough historical, literary, and cultural detail to reach the reader who is not intimately familiar with the texts under discussion or the range of autobiographic, narrative and post-colonial theory underlying her ar-gument. At the same time, her close attention to the details of the auto-biographer's texts, lives, and narratorial positioning satisfies readers who specialize in disciplines of autobiography and postcolonialism while introducing them to some lesser-known texts and different ways of reading more familiar texts. The reader, stresses Whitlock, is an "important element" in The Inti-mate Empire, autobiographic writing is oriented to capture and capti-vate, not the author, but the reader. Although Whitlock's readings are thorough and complex, making more evident the hidden discourses of truth, identity, and power that run through women's colonial and postcolonial autobiographies, this is the one area in which she, surprisingly, confounds the reader's expectations. Announcing the im-portance of the reader in her Introduction, Whitlock returns to the strategic importance of autobiographic writing as a means to reclaim history by presenting previously "invisible" narratives of oppression and to stress the significance of the reader's part in the creation of autobio-graphical subjects, particularly the black autobiographical subject: "in contemporary autobiography, as in the past, black women become autobiographic subjects through complex inter-racial relations which are negotiated in and around the text, and which must be engaged with in the process of critical writing" (160). Paying attention to the critical production and reception of texts like The History of Mary Prince wd The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole, Whitlock further contextualizes the author's writing self in Ellen Kuzwayo's Call me Woman and Emma Mashinini's Strikes Have Followed me All of my Lifeby careful attention to her text, the production of her text, and her imagined readers. Noting Whitlock's comment that "Moments when the construction of the auto-biography through inter-racial collaboration is brought into view are strategic" (162) the reader wonders at Whitlock's lack of comment on her own positioning as reader, critic, and writer of these other women's autobiographies. 194 BOOK REVIEWS Presenting a grounded, detailed, and very thorough reading of a wide range of diverse texts, written from many differing perspectives, cultural vantages, and (post)colonial positions, this text is of immense interest and use to a range of scholars engaged not only in autobio-graphical fields but also interdisciplinary fields. W O R K S C I T E D Benstock, Shari, ed. The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women \ Autobiographical Writings. London: Routledge, 1988. Brodzki, Bella and Celeste Schenk, eds. Life/Lines: Theorizing Women's Autobiogra-phy. Foreword Germaine Bree. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988. Buss, Helen. Mapping Ourselves: Canadian Women's Autobiography in English. Montreal: Queen's UP, 1993. De Man, Paul. "Autobiography as De-Facement." Modem LanguageSotes94 (1970): 9 » 9 " 3 a Gilmore, Leigh. Autobiographies: A Feminist Theory of Women's Self-Representation. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1994. Jelinke, Estelle, ed. The Tradition of Women's Autobiography: From Antiquity to the Present. Boston: Twayne, 198(1. Kadar, Marlene, ed. Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice. Toronto: University of Toronto P, 1991. Lejeune, Philippe. On Autobiography. Ed. Paul John Eakin, trans. Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota P, 1989. Lionnet, Francoise. Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989. Mason, Mary. "The Other Voice: Autobiographies of Women Writers." Ed. James Olnev. Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1980. Olney, James. Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1980. Smith, Sidonie. A Poetics of Women's Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions of Self-Representation. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. De/Colonizing the Subject: the Politics of Gender in Women's Autobiography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota P, 1992. Stanton, Domna, ed. The Female Autograph: Theory and Practice of Autobiography from the Tenth to the Twentieth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago P, 1904. Whitlock, Gillian. The Intimate Empire: Reading Women's Autobiography. London: Cassell, 2000. T A R A H Y L A N D - R U S S E L L 

Gillian Whitlock. The Intimate Empire: Reading Women's Autobiography.

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Gillian Whitlock. The Intimate Empire: Reading Women's Autobiography.

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